[PLUG] Fedora 10 released! :)

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky znmeb at cesmail.net
Wed Nov 26 09:44:22 UTC 2008


Matt McKenzie wrote:
> Well if you like SuSE and Gentoo and Debian more power to ya.
> 
> I think though to be fair and give Fedora an honest evaluation on *your*
> actual hardware you should give it a go with a LiveCD (or Live USB) instead
> of just running it in VMWare and giving up on it.
> 
> Care to elaborate on what didn't impress you with Fedora, that you see
> present in OpenSuSE or Gentoo?

It's mostly that there don't seem to be *more* packages in Fedora 10 
than there are in OpenSuSE 11.0 / 11.1. The short history is that I have 
two machines, a 4 GB Athlon64 X2 desktop running Gentoo and an ancient 
Compaq Presario dual-booted XP and some random version of Linux. The 
laptop used to be Gentoo, but I left it powered off for a couple of 
months and by the time I brought it back up, I was looking at days of 
compiles in a 512 MB 1.6 GHz machine to make it current.

So I started testing binary distros on it. First Etch and then I settled 
on Fedora 9. It ran Fedora 9 for a while, but I had some problems with 
LCD projectors and my wireless USB gizmo didn't work. When openSUSE 11.0 
came out, I tried it, and the wireless worked out of the box. So the 
laptop was on openSUSE 11.0 until 11.1 beta 4 came out, at which point I 
switched. It's stable and I don't plan to change it until at least 
mid-December.

The desktop is still on Gentoo, but I am strongly considering moving it 
to a binary distro as well. Again, nothing is going to happen until 
mid-December, but in the end I will probably rebuild both the laptop and 
the desktop to the same OS, either openSUSE 11.1 or Debian Lenny. Ubuntu 
is not a candidate.

> Note I am a Fedora Ambassador so I may be a little biased, but I have used
> and continue to use other distros (Ubuntu and Debian, along with Fedora,
> currently).  I've been a RedHat/Fedora user a lot longer than Ambassador
> though.

I used to be a Gentoo advocate, as most of the denizens of this list 
know. There's nothing wrong with Gentoo once you get it all set up, but 
they've let their release engineering process essentially collapse, so 
the installer is just as bad as it was a year ago, they cancelled 2008.1 
and the 2008.0 LiveCD didn't even boot on my laptop.

My Gentoo desktop is about as solid as you can expect for someone who 
runs "testing" level with a couple of overlays. But there's a lot of 
software out there that's not in Portage but is in Debian. And having 
two different distros on the desktop and the laptop isn't an ideal way 
to live. So I am guessing when all is said and done, both machines will 
be running Lenny, with R and Ruby built from source rather than from the 
  Debian packages.

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
ruby-perspectives.blogspot.com/

"A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." -- 
Alfréd Rényi via Paul Erdős


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