I'm Using Fedora 14

That was quick; it took about twenty-five minutes to install Fedora 14 from scratch; less than half the time it took me to back up my home directory. Most of the stuff works; some doesn't.



The first tricky bit came when I wanted to keep my /home directory; for this I had to specify a custom partition, and specify that it not be formatted. Easy enough. After that, the only change I made to the default install was to specify the language support. The Irishman in me bristled at installing English(UK), but I'm well used to that at this stage. However, there were two other languages; Gaelic and Irish. 'Gaelic' normally means Irish for those outside the country, so I was quite surprised to see that Irish had its own entry. Maybe Gaelic means Scots Gaelic. Or Ulster Scots. Or something. In any case, I installed both, but I'll leave 'em alone for the moment.

Once the new system was up and running, a few hurdles had to be overcome...

Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT
Once again, I start out with the open source drivers, and once again they're not doing the job. If I want to look at stuff on the TV, looks like I'll have to use Nvidia's own drivers. Once fusion is installed, though, a simple yum install kmod-nvidia should take care of that.

Empathy
Won't log into MSN. As priorities go, though, this is somewhere near the bottom as I no longer need it.

SELinux
Confuses the hell out of me. There used to be a 'turn me off' option, but now I have to go through some baffling wizardy screens. I just picked one that looked promising, and clicked on 'next' a bunch of times. Only time will tell if I've gotten it right. I can do this via messing with /etc/selinux , but ideally it'd be possible to do this via the gui.
As it's not, I changed /etc/selinux/config so that it contains
SELINUX=disabled

Software Update
As soon as the update icon appeared, I clicked and was told that I couldn't run the update because of signature problems. Running yum update from the command line, though, seems to have cleared up that problem.

External Drives
All the external drives where owned by user 501, whoever he may be. On each drive, I had to run chown before I could use it.

Firefox
Damn. No tabmix plus. I really, really, really want this; it's handy in more ways than I can count. Hope they come up with a fix soon.
Also, the flash plugin won't install. I've never gotten this to work by clicking on the 'install missing plugin' button. Ever. Looks like I'll be adding adobe's repo again.

RPM Fusion
I can't live without mplayer, and fusion doesn't seem to be accessible via the gui. Looks like I'll have to do it manually. If this is fedora's way of trying to get me to use the awfulness that is totem, it's failed. I hate totem.
Installing the repo via firefox failed miserably, too. I had to do it via the command line using the command on http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration.


System Tools
Once again, Applications/System Tools has two options - Catalog Installer and Package Installer - that do nothing except pop up a message saying, essentially, "don't do that."

But there are positives, too.

Most of the hardware worked out of the box. This is a damn sight better than I've ever accomplished on (for example) windows. I haven't looked at the TV card yet, and the nvidia card'll have to be taken care of.

I can, at last, remove evolution without getting rid of half of the gnome installation.

Overall, I'm happy enough with the install, as it seems most of the glitches can be overcome. Certainly nothing died, and I haven't lost anything.