Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Going back to Fedora Core

My recent Fedora Core 9 can be said successful. I still like Gentoo so much. But, in the work place, running gentoo may risk me to stay longer in the office. My choice of alternative is "Fedora Core 9".
I began this with Ubuntu 7.04 which was the left over from the previous. And switched to Kubuntu 8.04 with KDE4 three or four months later. Disappointed so much and tried Fedora Core 9. Thought about Open Suse, but FC was the next.

I tried Fedora Core just once about two years ago for a couple months. I guess it was FC6 or FC7. I switched to Gentoo when RedHat 9 became Fedora Core. So basically, I left RedHat world long time. I don't even remember how it was.

In short, Fedora Core changed a lot from where I stopped using. The biggest advantage of FC9 is very considerate default. Different from Ubuntu policy (literally enabling everything regardless of system resource for ease of use), FC focused more on lower level stability such as kernel API compatibility across the versions. Hibernate works very nice. Good for laptop. So, in kernel level, Fedora Core opens flexibility more, and it is stable more.
But don't get wrong with X11 crashes. That's not due to unstable kernel. That's because the gap between distro's open end and user failure to provide suitable driver. I believe this has been and will be the endless fight for Linux kernel and X11 driver.

Friday, June 13, 2008

KDE4: Gentoo, Kubuntu, and Fedora Core 9

I am okay with KDE4. There are still some quarks in KDE4, but generally I like how it is now. I can't explain detail of KDE4 in each distribution. In short, I dropped Kubuntu for KDE4. I agree that Ubuntu linux is doing a great work, but with KDE4, they need to catch up.

With Gentoo, things are smooth. Sure!! I pay huge compile time for this. In my work place, things are moving in fast phase. So, having gentoo isn't quite suitable. I chose Kubuntu when I had a chance to refresh my work desktop. Kubuntu KDE4 was pretty disappointing. One of most annoying example is that I couldn't move widgets in panel. Right click did not even offer "Move" option which I remembered it was there on Gentoo. So, I had to find another time to refresh my desktop. My desktop didn't find time to kick out Kubuntu, yet. I could flush and rebuild my laptop during the last weekend with Fedora Core 9. Still some issues, but much better than Kubuntu.

When I get a chance, I will compare rpm vs. deb. In short, deb is more convinent, but rpm is more flexible. dpkg(deb package) mainly uses package based dependancy and extends out to file based integrity check if it needs to. RPM, on the other hand, takes file based, but yum wraps these into package level and group level ( collection of packages ).