Got Moonshine? - Fedora 7
With the “spins” and the “Moonshine“, one is a little heady. Fedora 7 has been out for a while now and there are tons of reviews and opinions about it. I decided to upgrade my notebook to Fedora 7 as I was still on Fedora Core 5. For some reason, I have been missing releases in between and somehow landed up with the odd number releases. I did initially install FC1, FC2 and FC3, but from FC3 I went to FC5 and from FC5 to F7. I must say in some ways it was a painless upgrade for me since I actually had a spare hard disk of a higher capacity (80GB, notebook came with 60GB) so all I did was to swap out the old disk, install afresh and plugin my old disk as a USB drive and copy my data and stuff back.
The reason I said it was relatively painless, is that most things worked out-of-the-box, but some are yet to work for me. The first few days I had trouble getting the machine to shutdown, no matter what I did (init 0, poweroff, shutdown -h now, kpowersave/klaptop) the machine would just hang rather than shut down. It seemed to just get stuck at “Shutting down postfix…” but that was not the problem. I have a feeling the problem was more to do with NetworkManager and the Avahi Daemon but I can’t be certain of that. I am glad that I can shutdown now, but my suspend to RAM and suspend to disk, which were working flawlessly in FC5 no longer work. Suspend to RAM is rapid, its suspends just fine, it just never comes out of it! Suspend to Disk, seems to start of with a bang but eventually gives up. My feeling is that is has something to do with Kpowersave. Using KLaptop I have managed a suspend to disk and a resume successfully but its not been very consistent.
Two other issues, my Palm no longer syncs with Jpilot or any other app, and for some strange reason even though it is setup to start at login, KWifiManager refuses to start up on its own. Of course, once I click on it, it works just great! Remembers, all my networks and no need for me to fiddle to get things going.
The good parts, it looks real snazzy. With or without desktop effects. It seems stable (no crashes so far), fast and works well. I tried Beryl and it makes the desktop quite funky. Can get a little irritating and is not advisable after a heavy meal! I got Firefox 2.0 (which I had in FC5 as well) and Thunderbird 2.0 (which I am not so sure about) and Pidgin instead of GAIM. Overall, for a Fedora user, I’d say go do it!
A few quick links to get you started, apart from the main download:
Fedora 7 Tips & Tricks
Personal Fedora 7 Installation Guide
Enjoy!
Cheers…Kishore
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… unless you’re a filthy flgrx user, in which case keep waiting until ATI throws us a bone - in the form of an fglrx that works with F7. Looks like more FC5 for me
Taj, I have an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600, but am not using the yet to exist fglrx. Maybe, when it does exist you can show me what it does!
Cheers…Kishore
Or if you are an intel wireless user, in which case too the new kernel barfs. Sata seems to have issues as well.
Somehow all this reminds me of RH 7 and the 7.1
t3rmin4t0r, I did see a few “ipw2200: Firmware error detected. Restarting.” every now and then. But you’re right, am awaiting updates. Have gotten all of them so far.
Cheers…Kishore