Intro
Although I still consider myself a Linux n00b I love to tinker and get my geek fix whenever there’s a new distro to play with and having not had any other hardware to test on recently I will be giving a quick rundown on how Fedora 16 feels out of the box on the Asus 1215n.
To begin I downloaded the Gnome i686 distro via torrent and then using ElementaryOS (my current main OS on this machine) I used the Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator to make the LiveUSB with the torrent iso. Or tried to… it seems this program only lets you install Ubuntu-based distros.
Linux n00b FAIL
Tried again with unetbootin and after being prompted to install 7zip I opened the app and created the LiveUSB with just a few clicks.
Out-of-the-Box Functionality / hardware compatibility
Something I have grown to love about Ubuntu (being a n00b as I said) is that at the point of install you can choose to enable restricted, proprietary sources which allow out-of-the-box functionality for Broadcom wireless adapters and mp3 codecs – effectively all the stuff Linux desktops would commonly for a hassle-free setup for the average user. This is especially helpful when on laptops as WiFi is taken for granted to “just work” on mobile devices. Even with LiveUSBs the propreitory drivers etc let you work with WiFi just as you are testing things.
With the Fedora 16 LiveUSB booted I found that the ethernet hardware (the wired networking port) worked fine but the WiFi did not.So I could unleash myself from the router and continue writing this article in WordPress directly from F16 I decided to install the driver according to this guide. Seemed to work a treat and I was wireless once again.
For n00bs, knowing that this isn’t out-of-the-box functional but *is* v.v.simple to get working (at least on my hardware) is a major plus. Fedora is no more scary that Ubuntu
Look & Feel
F16 is running Gnome 3.2.1 as it’s Graphical User Interface (GUI) or Desktop Environment. Gnome has been updated to v.3 just recently (in Sept I think) and although v.2 was well established and much loved by Linux fans the same could not be said for v.3
What I think happened is that expectations exceeded reality when people came to play with the new interface. It was a little buggy (as most new things are) and die-hard fans of v.2 could not compare like-for-like and therefore saw it’s shortcomings as overshadowing any pro points. For me the interface was intuitive and looked great.
The top panel has an button labelled Activites that opens the Launcher & “Dash” or “Lenses”. These last two are terms for how the applications are now listed, managed and opened. The corners of Gnome desktops have previously been configurable to do things like run Expose that shows you all your running applications. In Gnome v.3 this is standard when moving the mouse to the top-left corner of the desktop and effectively does the same thing as pressing the Activities button.
Unfortunately dispite the good looks Gnome’s applications seemed very buggy – Evolution, Bluetooth & the Dash/Lenses all crashed or were seriously screwing up in regular operation. Although I invested the time to use the inbuilt Automatic Bug Reporting Tool it seemed not to report and not
to be very “automatic”. At one point it mentioned needing to download over 1000Mb of files until I could report the bug correctly. I would have been happier if the ABRT had just offered a single tick box that asked if I wanted to report the error.
Conclusion
I would have seriously considered swapping from Elementary OS back to Fedora (last primary Fedora OS I had was F13) but due to the buggy nature of Gnome v.3 at this point (I swear I want to love it so much!) it’s just not ready for me. Instead I’ll wait for the new DE created by the eOS team which will be part of Luna (their next release) based on Ubuntu 12.04 and released in the second half of next year – 2012. Until then I am going to continue with eOS and monitor Fedora’s Gnome v.3 progression as the new releases are made.


