I have returned...

…and I have finished my army duties. I have already began working on my next project.

I must admit I also enjoy my Fedora Installation. It seems to perform pretty well, although on Macs there are some quirks. Fedora cannot be installed on external hard disk drives (or at least it can, but it’s difficult), and the user must be very careful to not install akmods and kmods that do not compute well with the kernel the user uses. I have been forced to reboot to command line mode and uninstall some kernel headers or recompile the appropriate ones at least three times.

On my Macbook pro, I had to install the alsa drivers, akmod-nvidia and be very careful of what to update and when. However, on my desktop iMac 2006 which includes an ATI X1600 Mobility card, everything seemed to work out of the box, apart from the wireless, which needed the akmod-wl package to be installed. Compiz is fully functional, the graphics drivers are also fully functional.

However, when I installed the latest akmod package for the graphics drivers my system was unbootable, and I had to reboot into command line mode, manually connect to the internet and uninstall any xorg and kmods I had installed in order to make my system bootable again.

Apart from these quirks, Fedora is fully functional, and I have recently installed KDE and it also works fine. However, I cannot recommend it to the novice user yet. For everyone that is interested into using a Linux distribution, I recommend installing Ubuntu first, learn the way things work in general, and then move on to Fedora, as it provides superior and simpler user interface, and is also safer and more consistent.

Stay tuned for updates. They are bound to happen more frequently, now that I have returned from the army.