Trying out Fedora
I decided it was about time to give another distro a spin. I’ve been using Ubuntu for a couple of years with no real issues, but I thought that it was only fair to try out something different. So, yesterday I cleared a bit of room on my laptop hard disk, downloaded and burnt F12 “Constantine” and fired up the live CD.
Everything seemed to go pretty well, so I went on with the install. It all went pretty smoothly, though the location selector is not quite as easy to use as the new(ish) Ubuntu one, so a bit of mouse precision was required.
I then rebooted, and added a user. And here I made something of a mistake. I thought that it’d be useful to share $HOME directories. Unfortunately, Ubuntu numbers UIDs from 1000, and Fedora from 500. This meant that Fedora helpfully “fixed” the ownership on my $HOME, leading to a few problems. I had a quick poke around the desktop, which looked pretty much stock GNOME, and rebooted to see if the Ubuntu entry added by the installer worked. Which it didn’t. Luckily, I was able to chroot into the Ubuntu partition and fix both of these problems, and I added a josh-fedora user to allow my home directory to remain sane.
From a bit of light usage yesterday, I noticed nothing either massively useful or massively annoying. It seems to be just another GNOME distro. One thing I did notice was that I had to install a separate package to get the System->Preferences->Windows dialog to make the focus follow the mouse, which seemed a bit odd. Otherwise, everything seems reasonably sensible.
I intend to start booting Fedora by default for a bit, to give it a fair go. I have failed so far, as I am writing this blog post from the Ubuntu installation. Hopefully, once I’ve set GRUB defaults, I should be able to just use Fedora, without any fiddling.
