My experiance with Fedora 11.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Despite my dissatisfaction with Redhat 9 five years ago, I decided to give Redhat another go and so far I've been pleasantly surprised.

I opted for the installable live CD option as I don't have a DVD burner and don't like the idea of downloading and burning loads of CDs. The disadvantage of using the light install that it only comes with a basic set of software installed: no OpenOffice, WINE or Inkscape. The good news is that all the aforementioned packages were very easy to install.

If hasn't been without its issues:

Some updates initially failed to install but this to fixed itself after about a week.

Acquiring codes for the Movie player was a pain, the suggested fix involved installing the RPM Fusion repository so the required codecs could be located and installed automatically. Unfortunately this didn't work initially: RPM fusion installed but the codecs failed to install. The solution was to install VLC media player which played most but not all of my files. Eventually the codecs problem fixed itself which implies it was a bug.

I've had problems with SELinux: it wouldn't let DOSEmu run which I managed to fix it correctly and it whines at WINE and occasionally causes it to crash.

Installing the Cannon LBP-660 printer driver was a pain because the basic distro didn't come with gcc installed so I needed to install it first.

The sound volume was too low, with the volume control set to maximum, but I managed to fix this by adjusting the alsamixer settings using the terminal.

The minor issue of my graphics card not having an accelerated driver still persists but it's not too much of a big deal as I don't play any games, it's only noticeable when using Inkscape and OpenOffice Draw. After having to boot Windows in safe mode, which uses an unaccelerated driver and was much slower, it makes me realise it's not that bad.

I'm pretty happy because most of the issues I've had have either fixed themselves or I've managed to fix myself after Googling.

[Lead Head]

Doesn't sound to bad now. The last version of Fedora I used was Fedora 4 many years ago, and back then it was a down right pain to use.

Also, who made your graphics card? There a few websites out there, and AMD/Ati as well as nVidia have fairly decent *nix driver support these days.

[Aloone_Jonez]

It's an old on-board S3 Graphics ProSavageDDR which uses system memory and is adjustable from 8MB to 32MB.

The computer is pretty old, 256MB of RAM, single core 1.8GHz AMD processor and a 60GB IDE hard drive.

[Lead Head]

 Yeesh, S3? Doubt you'll find any kind of driver for that

[worker201]

Doesn't sound to bad now. The last version of Fedora I used was Fedora 4 many years ago, and back then it was a down right pain to use.

Maybe recent improvements have made you lazy.  I used Fedora 3-7 everyday and found it to be a wonderful operating system.  It didn't like my scanner, and it booted me into twm for some unknown reason once, but it was otherwise an excellent experience.

[Aloone_Jonez]

It works with all of my hardware apart from the graphics card issue.

Even the Epson Stylus CX3600 printer/scanner works perfectly, yes it both scans and prints under Linux.

I've ordered another 256MB RAM module off eBay (

[Aloone_Jonez]

The RAM came today and I've just installed it.

It's not made much difference to the overall performance of the computer but I'm sure I'll notice it when I need to load several large applications.

[Lead Head]

What kind of processor is that?

[Aloone_Jonez]

AMD, I think.

I don't do that much with my compute, having Firefox open with six tabs and editing a picture with The GIMP still doesn't use much more than 256MB of RAM.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I found this today and was going to post it in response to Refalm's thread that got lost with the corrupt backup.

This should solve all the problems with missing software on Fedora: Flash, Skype and codecs.
http://easylifeproject.org/

I haven't tried it myself but I will do when/if I need to reinstall.

[Refalm]

I found this today and was going to post it in response to Refalm's thread that got lost with the corrupt backup.

This should solve all the problems with missing software on Fedora: Flash, Skype and codecs.
http://easylifeproject.org/

I haven't tried it myself but I will do when/if I need to reinstall.

Nice 
That was what I was looking for. I'm very glad the got the right idea of what is missing from the strictly open source Fedora. Especially the nVidia drivers are welcome for gamers, 3D modellers and designers.
And of course the h264, divx, mp3 codecs and Adobe Flash that have become essential software.

[Lead Head]

Really thinking about giving this a try now..

[Aloone_Jonez]

I strongly recommend joining the Fedora forum but beware that the rules are much tighter than here, the administrator didn't like me posting a picture of Bush eating a baby. ;D

It's a pretty good forum andf you'll be fine if you don't talk politics, religion, swear or insult people. The administrator seems pretty reasonable and will PM you, if he deletes one of your posts.
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/index.php

I've now upgraded to Fedora 12, which seemed to go well apart from an issue with it now removing the old FC11 Virtual Box kernel module which stopped me from updating the kernel or VB, until I finally figured out and fixed it by removing the VB FC11 kernel module.

There doesn't seem to be much difference between FC12 and FC11 but it's probably worth upgrading for the continued support. Next time I think I might give it a month or so before upgrading to the next version, in the hope the upgrade will be easier.