As you already know, Fedora 13 is out! 😛 This time I decided to care a little more about what I do and what I don’t like after a fresh installation and write them down. Today was the first day that I was experiencing Fedora 13 (while I’ve checked Fedora 13 Beta and Test candidate briefly), so the list is not so long. Also, I do not talk about features which are highlighted enough in other places like Fedora 13 Feature List.
* Installation:
I really liked the look and feel of the installer. Like always, I should deselect the “system clock uses UTC” option during the installation. I think almost everybody using a dual boot system is forced to do it, as I always recommend everybody to do so; because I’ve seen frequently that some new users are wondering why their clock is screwed when they switch between Windows and Fedora. Now, I’m thinking if I should report it as a bug…
Another change is in the initial package selection page where you can select only one category rather than selecting multiple categories. I usually need office applications, internet applications and certainly the development applications. So I decided to go with the Software Development selection. Surprisingly in the package selection customization page I saw that many sections are not selected (e.g. Office), I wonder if they are brought in by a dependency but it’s not nice too come up with a system without any office or multimedia applications installed.
And as always, fedora eclipse is not selected by default too (so you won’t get any IDEs if you do not opt to customize package set). I don’t like it at all!
The final note about the installer: finally it correctly recognized my Windows partition rather than my recovery partition 😛
* Art work: I really like the new artwork! While there is still a long way to go…
* Package Management:
PackageKit now disables a repo if it cannot access it rather than trying to connect to it forever or just stopping with an error message. It seems that it is going to become a real option for me! However, if you are offline right after installation, you can’t get the list of installed packages at all (because the package manager does not have the group data). I would expect to see all installed packages in the “Others” group, but there were no success. The only way I could get some info was by doing a search. Maybe a search with blank string would result in the complete list of installed packages, but I didn’t try that.Another problem is that if you change your gnome’s proxy settings, you should logoff and loggin so that the package manager will use the new settings. The user doesn’t care about backend/frontend stuff, it is not reasonable to be forced to do a logoff/login just because of a change in proxy settings…
* KDevelop 4:
One of the great things which have landed on time in Fedora 13 was the release of the first version of KDevelop 4. It is a complete rewrite of KDevelop (AFAIK) which took a long time and finally arrived recently. Unlike the previous version, this version comes with advanced C++ editing/parsing capabilities. While it still lacks some features, it provides a set of really interesting features. Long ago I switched from KDevelop to Eclipse, but I feel that I should evaluate KDevelop and some other IDEs (CodeBlocks, NetBeans, Anjuta, …) again to see if anyone can really beat Eclipse. Anyway, check the latest version of KDevelop to see if you like it!
Also, yum is apparently much faster in Fedora 13. I feel that it is more responsive and does the job faster. Very happy to see that!
OK, That’s enough for now!
Hedayat's Blog 
Fedora can’t cover all the user preferences in the world. At least it gives you options to select what you want. I had no problem selecting “Graphical Desktop” and “Customize Now” to add Eclipse later.
Regarding UTC, I don’t dual boot so if they keep the checkbox unchecked after your bug report, should I file a bug too ? 🙂
So far I think Fedora is a very polished release. Really enjoying it.
But if you select “Software Development”, don’t you except do get Eclipse installed without further customization?! Personally, I think installing an IDE for a software developer is reasonable.
And about UTC, why you would like to have your system clock use UTC rather than local time?!
Notice that I’m a Fedora user for a long time and I do enjoy it a lot; but if everybody think that Fedora is all done, then there will be no more progress in Fedora! If you can improve usability without any regressions, you should do it instead of arguing why the current situation is OK.
It would be nice to see all the complaints linking to a bug report so that it reaches the appropriate people who might not been reading such blog posts
Yes, I’m planing to look to see if similar reports exist and report missing ones soon.
Speaking about dual boot, the bug is from Windows [XP] system because of inability to support UTC, only GMT is.
Anyway, what’s wrong with NOT using UTC for system clock by default?!
the problem with having a system clock that doesn’t use Utc is that twice a year someone has to move it forwards and backwards by an hour.
If you have two os, they fight over this. Of course now that we have ntp, this is less of a problem.
But for a beginner, it is much more simpler than changing the clock every time he starts the other OS. More advanced users will check the option at install time. I think this is preferred to the current situation which requires more problems for beginners.
Logically, the checkbox should depend on whether Windows is also installed. To be fair, for a beginner, the entire install process would be daunting.
Does the Anaconda installer even support resizing ntfs and setting up grub for windows? It does a bunch of weird stuff with sans and fibre channel storage. It is certainly much more complicated than modern versions of windows…
That’s fair (being unchecked when Windows/any other is installed) and I think anaconda can do it (at least it can detect that there is another operating system). Good suggestion (I’ll include it in the bug report).
About supporting ntfs resizing and setting up grub for Windows, yes it does! 🙂
It’s nice to have advanced features in the installer, but following this (as far as possible) will greatly help beginners: If you (the user) do not understand something, just don’t touch it! The installer should provide advanced features for those who touch something! This is the case with the weird stuff about advanced storage configuration.
congratulation for Parsidora releasing!
Kian Kiani
🙂 Thank you very much