Archive for January 24th, 2009

I really like Fedora

I wont say that I love it, like I do Debian Lenny, but there are some parts about it that i like more than Debian.

1) It is more bleeding edge(sort of) by that i mean that it has many more update packages than debian lenny, those packages are available in Sid though.

2) My rt2860 802.11N Wireless Card installed easily

I just added the rpmfusion repo and typed

yum install kmod-2860

This driver is supported on the 2.6.27 kernel that fedora has, Lenny has the 2.6.26 driver and I needed to create a patch so it would work on Lenny, and it still lowered the strength from 300 mb/s to 54 mb/s.

3) Fedora 10 has KDE4, and this version, although still not the greatest, is still very usable for me. The odd program will crash every couple of days or so but nothing i can’t do without, and it seems very snappy to me.

However, there is one thing that is very very bad about Fedora 10

There is not ATI driver support for Fedora 10, this means that the propietary driver will not work correctly so you cannot enable 3D effects and xgl doesn’t work.

I spent a few days looking for a way to install the ATI driver, and i thought i found one

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=155503&page=1&pp=10

I tried this and i thought i had it, the ATI catalyst control center installed and the video card was detected, but xgl did not work. Howver this way has a good reputation for x86 systems and i have a x86_64. Maybe if you try it on a x86 it will work *shrugs shoulders*.

I can see that fedora 10 is a really good system, but ever since Fedora 8, the ATI driver has been unsupported. I would happily move to this system and still use KDE4, as it worked well here and KDE4.2 comes out in a few days.

I (and I believe most people out there agree with me) like having the newest stable technology, and at least at the moment because of the lenny freeze, Fedora has more up to date software than Debian(even SID). It surprised me that things that hadn’t even yet been able to make it to SID, were included in Fedora stable, and worked great!.

But, until they decide to support ATI drivers, i dont think i will be ready to move to it. After i finish typing this i am going to boot into Lenny and install the 2.6.28 kernel. Hopefully when lenny is released Debian will  catch up to and pass Fedora again, which i think is very likely to happen.