A large part of yesterday (far too large) was spent installing and configuring Fedora 7 on my workstation box.

Some of the stuff I encountered had me just about frothing at the mouth with frustration, not because I didn't understand it or didn't know what I was trying to do, but because I was being stymied by artificial barriers created in the name of making it "simpler".

As I've already said elsewhere, if I wanted my box dumbed down to look and acts like MS-Windows it'd be so much easier just to run that POS. It took me a good 8-10 hours to kill most of the really stupid stuff.

If we're going to learn lessons from other OSes why don't we learn the right ones? Didn't the MS-Windows folks already get seriously burned by servers that were enabled by default? Having Samba sharing /home and enabled by default is pure evil.

Having the X configuration happen automatically is good, but having it stuck in lowest common denominator settings as a result is not. I won't even go into how much I hate the blunt tipped plastic kiddy scissors UI presented by Gnome... No amount of eye candy excuses pointless catch-22 "you can't get there from here" brain damage.

Oh, and since when is allowing you to customize the packages to be installed and then completely ignoring any additions helpful? Let me tell you, that had me seeing red...

Thank all the forces of order and reason for the Fedora 7 Tips and Tricks pages.

Alright, I'd better stop before the raving gets too bad...

I used Fedora for a while but after Fedora Core 4 I gave up and now use Ubuntu. I don't know if you've tried it, but it is far slicker than Fedora.

I use Fedora 7on my main deskop mainly to get some variety. I had my system up and running after about 3 hours and the problems I encountered were mostly from configuring my dual monitory setup with the nvidia drivers. Once I got that loading the correct libraries, installing everything else (mythfrontend, vmware, audio and video...) was easily done. This might help also,

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I downloaded Fedora7 but havn't giving it a try yet. To busy this weekend may be next.

One distro I have tried recently that worked well for me is SAM Linux. I set it up on a older system with a PIII 1ghz cpu with 512Mb and a Nvidia6200. With beryl running there is some great eye candy and allot of the apps are ready to go out of the box.

Amazing how well this distro works with such modest hardware.

it's based on PCLinuxOS

Here is a link if you want to read more
http://sam.hipsurfer.com/news.php

From that page:

This is exactly the flawed assumption in the direction Fedora has been going that triggered the rant. I don't want an MS-Windows system, I especially don't want an annoying imitation of one.

I want a Unix workstation, one where copy and paste is done strictly from the mouse and doesn't involve extraneous keyboard actions. Where an expert can make settings that they know are correct without having to battle dumbed down system utilities to a standstill first. Where I'm in control of the network services which are run and the system doesn't keep trying to turn on servers I don't want. Where when I create a user account and give it the home directory name, but tell it not to "create it" (because it already exists and I don't want it to overwrite my existing dot files), it doesn't forget to put the name in /etc/passwd as a result....

vi?

(sorry tjc, I feel your pain, I just couldn't resist! )

Well for the /etc/password thing I did resort to "vipw".

On the other hand there are any number of things in a current generation Linux system which come from places like "/etc/default", "/etc/sysconfig", "/etc/yum", ... and other places which tend to revert changes made to the "old fashioned" config files the next time you make a seemly unrelated configuration change.

OT, but how do you do that?

highlight text then middle click where you want to paste it.

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Hi,


Or if you only have Two buttons, left & right click together. Have to do that with my laptop all the time.

Mike

I currently use PCLinuxOS 2007 on two of my desktops at home. I run Mepis 6.5 on a machine I play music on at work.

Thanks!