First Fedora Impressions

Sat, Nov 8, 2003 with tags linux

I just installed fedora on my laptop and it wasn’t as painless as advertised. Initially I had thought that I could just do a simple upgrade from my old RedHat 9 installation, but I ran into some serious snags. The install procedure progressed just fine and took about 45 minutes or so. Then I tried to log in, but GDM crashed, well it didn’t crash in the proper way. Ordinarily when GDM crashes it will try different choosers until one works. This time it was complaining about some icon problems with the blue curve theme and would just freeze.

“No problem,” I thought to myself. I can just run init 3 to take the system down to runlevel three and a do a startx. Unfortunately, this was a no go as apparently my gnome-session was all messed up now. This is probably because I used an external repository to give my system GNOME 2.4 shortly after it came out. I tried to finagle with stuff to get it work, but nothing was happening. In the end I decided to back up my files (which was interesting given the number of ripped CD’s on here) and reinstall completely.

First impressions of Fedora are pretty nice. The modifications to the blue curve artwork are welcome. The graphical bootup screen is also kinda nifty. Makes it have a bit more eye candy to show to other newbies. The default desktop is almost identical to the RedHat 9 desktop. It was quick to reimport most of my settings. Overall things seem zippier, probably as a result of the distribution being optimized for Pentium Pro class machines. Now I have to weigh whether or not I want to try finding an APT repository to stay up to date or if I just want to try it manually. Sigh…I love apt.

Some interesting packaging versions to note. It does ship with Samba 3.0, so I’ll probably take some time to learn that and see what’s new there. However, it doesn’t ship with Python 2.3. I think some of this might be because all the redhat config tools are setup to run with python 2.2 only. I didn’t think that 2.3 broke code compatability, but I suppose that it could have.

One very nice thing, and a large part of the reason why I upgraded is because of the support for cpufreq. This is something that I previously had problems with on my laptop. For a thinkpad A31, run modprobe speedstep-ich, then as root you can type echo -n “0%0%100%powersave” > /proc/cpufreq to tell the system to go into powersave mode or echo -n “0%0%100%performance” > /proc/cpufreq to tell the system to go into full performance mode. I haven’t figured out a way to have the computer do this automagically when the power is unplugged yet, but I hope to hack something together soon. This will be helpful for when I’m at the rfid privacy conference next week.