Fedora 7 Impressions

No, I’m not going to mimic a distribution (don’t look so disappointed, you’re not missing anything!)

I’ve historically backed off installing new and shiny versions of pretty much anything, however the lure of a unified Fedora with everything (including some of my submissions – try to guess which ones!) was too much.

So I slotted the F7 x86_64 “Prime” spin onto my workstation (the machine I’m posting this from) and crossed my fingers:

It’s been fairly painless so far – installation went cleanly – only my FC6 packages remained (and only a handful at that) and after a bit of tweaking I’m quite comfortable with it.

I’m happy that Firefox 2 is included, that the whole experience feels snappier, the new artwork is good quality and it all Just Works.

Mostly.

There are some caveats

– Read the release notes BEFORE you boot the CD/DVD. Especially about the use of filesystem labels. Doing so will make life easier especially if you still have /dev/hdX partitions about (remember it’s all libata now! – /dev/sdX)

– Get rid of the DejaVu fonts for now – I’ve had Firefox, yumex and even the Mugshot applet fall over due to these suckers not being nice to Pango/gdk etc. resulting in our friend the SIGSEGV paying them a visit. All good once they’re (DejaVu) gone.

– If you have an nvidia card and using Livna’s packages, make sure the upgrade hasn’t vaped the ModulePath directives in xorg.conf, you’ll need them back.

Pop these in and you should be gold:

ModulePath “/usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/nvidia”
ModulePath “/usr/lib/xorg/modules”

– Don’t assume that the Prime spin (which I got via torrent) will have all the packages you need for a standard upgrade. My advice is to get the CD/DVD, install, log in and do a “package-cleanup –leaves” (get rid of libs you no longer need) and possibly an “–orphan” too so old crap gets removed (no longer in any configured repos)

A “yum update” should then see you sorted and ready to play.

By the way – who the heck decided on the Pidgin icon? It looks like a refugee from a ORLY owl thread on a forum somewhere… ?

As for my own packages – I’m still grabbing the i386 F7 DVD. As it’s all unified it’s going to be fun building a local repo for package builds – updates is going to be HUGE, I know it. I’ll need a fatter pipe! (which I’m planning anyway)

Now that Revisor is part of the spin, I might even have a go at doing my own, slotting in some of my own packages in to suit. We’ll see.