jamesjpn.net Adventures in Japan

I upgraded to Fedora 13 beta from the middle of April. Except for a couple of issues that I considered to be yet bugs in the beta version, I consider Fedora 13 to be the best Fedora Linux yet. Nevertheless, I thought to give Ubuntu 10.4 another chance before Fedora 13 goes gold on May 18. I realized later that Ubuntu 10.4 was still in beta testing when I wrote about it on March 18.

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I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, version 10.4, and installed it as a virtual machine with VMWare on my Fedora 12 pc. I also ran it as a live CD from boot. I’m still not convinced that Ubuntu is better than Fedora for me. Ubuntu is missing two GUIs (software with a graphic user interface) I use all the time in Fedora. There is

• no firewall GUI
• no services GUI

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I installed a beta version of the new Gnome Shell desktop environment on my Fedora Linux PC, and it seems to be very cool indeed! And it’s free, not only free in in the meaning of “freedom” but even free as in “free lunch.”

Gnome is the standard desktop graphical environment for many Linux distributions, including Fedora, the Linux distribution I’ve been using on my PC since February 2005. Another popular Linux desktop environment is KDE. Some people like it better than Gnome, because it looks a bit more like Windows®, but I found KDE buggy and unstable, at least it was 5 years ago, and stuck with Gnome. There are even more desktop environments besides these two.

The first screenshot shows my normal Gnome desktop using a top bar to show open applications, and a bottom toolbar showing the standard Gnome toolbar. The wallpaper contains a not so subliminal message.

By default the Gnome toolbars are on the opposite sides, but like to change them because it’s more what I was used to when I worked in Windows®. Click any of the pictures to see an enlargement.

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November 2: Fedora Linux version 12 is due to come out on November 18, but I couldn’t wait to try it out and installed the yet beta version.

Improvements from Fedora 11 that I’ve noticed:

• The default video driver recognized my dual monitor setup and automatically gave me the correct screen resolution and spanning monitors.
• Gnome seems to run faster. Terminal now comes up instantaneously.
• Many of the applications appear to load faster.
• Pulse audio now works as it should without quirks. In Fedora 10-11 I could not use other audio applications when Firefox was accessing a flash media file.
• Mplayer plays my MP3 files without the irksome shuddering sound it used to have during the first couple seconds when playing the file. This was a problem in Fedora 10 and 11 but now seems fixed.
• Bluefish HTML editor doesn’t crash anymore when I do a spell check as it used to do in Fedora 10 and 11
• The new version of Dansguardian Internet content filter now runs. I couldn’t get the latest version to work in Fedora 11. Dansguardian has improved with options to weed out unwanted pop-ups and advertisements. Using the Fedora Linux – Firefox – Dansguardian combination gives me the safest browsing imaginable! Eat your heart out, Windows 7!

The downsides of upgrading to Fedora 12 beta:

• In the beginning Firefox crashed a couple of times. It seems to be stable now after a week.
• I can’t yet install the Nvidia video driver. But this only means I can’t run applications that take a lot of video power such as Google Earth. Video files play perfectly fine.
• Wine doesn’t run anymore. I have to wait for a Wine upgrade to fix a conflict with Pulse audio.

All of the above are fixed now after Fedora 12 came out with the final release, and also thanks to the good advice on Fedora Forum. I found a fix for Wine by installing the 64 bit version with the command:

yum install wine.i686 -y