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And if so, what do you think of it? I just installed my first distribution of it successfully, attempting to dual boot it with Windows. I have to load it from the boot menu, but it works well enough for me since it won't be my main OS. I just wondered what some people on here thought of it. Any distribution of Linux, really. I chose Fedora, personally. I like it well enough so far, I just wish it had an 'App Store' like Ubuntu and Mint do. But from what I hear that may be coming in the near future. I ended up deciding to put another OS on my machine because of a few reasons;

1.) A backup OS in case my Windows install craps itself.

2.) More secure.

3.) More user control & customization.

4.) A new learning experience for me.

I'm not disappointed, and the install wasn't too hard considering I've never done it before. I loaded it off of a USB flash drive I had laying around. I just couldn't get it to take 250GB of my 2nd HDD for whatever reason, so it took the whole 1TB. I'll see if I can change that with Partition Magic or something later on. The only real problem I have with Fedora is that installing stuff is kind of hard, and out of the box it's not compatible with anything, more or less. I had to try 4 different media players before I found one that supported MPEG4/AAC music formats (iTunes), and how to download the plugins for it. The one I'm using now is called 'Audacious'. Flash for Fedora exists, but from what I understand it's not the latest version, and Adobe may not be developing for Linux anymore, so some videos I might have to switch back to Windows for.

I like the way it looks though, runs pretty quick, interface works a lot like MacOS without all the proprietary crap, and it's free. I didn't even have to install any hardware drivers, oddly enough. Not for sound, video, even my 3rd party wireless card. I was shocked. I'll see about posting some screen shots in the next day or so. For now, here are a few example screenshots:

fedora-18-finally-arrives.png

cheese.png

 

gimp.png

 

libre-impress.png

 

clock.png

Edited by unr3al

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Fedora does have an "app store". Every program in it is free. It's called a repository.

That's actually one of my favorite things about Linux systems - it's insanely easy to install software from packages. You don't need to deal with everyone's individual installers; it's a unified interface.

Personally, I've never been huge on Fedora (I don't particularly like yum; I prefer how apt-get works); then again, most of my experience is on computers which I didn't control the distro of (and ran Ubuntu).

I definitely love the customization. With one basic OS, I have used: command-line (both bash and zsh), GNOME, KDE, LXDE, and XFCE. A single OS, with 5 completely different display environments. That's just cool.

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And if so, what do you think of it? I just installed my first distribution of it successfully, attempting to dual boot it with Windows. I have to load it from the boot menu, but it works well enough for me since it won't be my main OS. I just wondered what some people on here thought of it. Any distribution of Linux, really. I chose Fedora, personally. I like it well enough so far, I just wish it had an 'App Store' like Ubuntu and Mint do. But from what I hear that may be coming in the near future.

 

Yeah I use it, and I love it. My favorite one is Fedora too, I created a lightweight deviation of it, "Viperr". I made versions 1 & 2, since v3 the maintainer is a friend of mine.

About "app store", as cp702 said, there is one, not like the one in Ubuntu, yes it will come later, but there is what we call a software manager, which is a graphical tool to explore the repository.

In fact, there are several software managers, the one in default Gnome Fedora, the one in KDE, and some others.

 

I used some other distros, I was known to be a freaky distro-hopper lol. Ubuntu, Debian, Crunchbang, Slackware, Arch, Fedora, Mandriva, Manjaro, a lot of other little distros, etc...

I have to say that, because of gaming, I mainly use W7 now, but I still have some distros on my other computers and I use them for everyday tasks.

 

 

I just couldn't get it to take 250GB of my 2nd HDD for whatever reason, so it took the whole 1TB. I'll see if I can change that with Partition Magic or something later on. The only real problem I have with Fedora is that installing stuff is kind of hard, and out of the box it's not compatible with anything, more or less. I had to try 4 different media players before I found one that supported MPEG4/AAC music formats (iTunes), and how to download the plugins for it. The one I'm using now is called 'Audacious'. Flash for Fedora exists, but from what I understand it's not the latest version, and Adobe may not be developing for Linux anymore, so some videos I might have to switch back to Windows for.

 

Yes you should partition your HDD with Windows7 tool or a Gparted Live CD. Be careful before doing that and make backups of your datas.

Can you explain what is hard about installing stuff ? Real question, not sarcasm, I ask because maybe I can help ^^

 

About multimedia codecs, enable the RPM Fusion repository (see documentation about doing this correctly), you'll not have any problem with them after that.

And yes Adobe won't make any new Flash plugin versions for Linux, but they are still maintaining the existing one about security.

You have some alternatives like Gnash, but they are shitty lol. Anyway, fortunately the Linux Flash plugin works quite well on Firefox, and Chrome has his own plugin, "Pepper".

 

 

 

I like the way it looks though, runs pretty quick, interface works a lot like MacOS without all the proprietary crap, and it's free. I didn't even have to install any hardware drivers, oddly enough. Not for sound, video, even my 3rd party wireless card.

 

Interface is heavily customizable, on Gnome it's a bit more difficult because they say they want it simple even for a 90yr grandma, so we have to install some hack tools to customize Gnome.

But other DesktopEnvironments or WindowManagers are incredibly flexible.

 

Depending of your GPU, you should install the proprietary driver (use the akmod version from RPM Fusion, akmod, not kmod, it's important !) you'll have better performances, and you'll save energy, because the free drivers may not be well optimized.

Edited by DarthWound
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I've *used* a lot of distros, as well (lots of Arch desktop use, plus Fedora and OpenBSD [i didn't use either of those through GUI, though]).

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1.) Yeah I use it, and I love it. My favorite one is Fedora too, I created a lightweight deviation of it, "Viperr". I made versions 1 & 2, since v3 the maintainer is a friend of mine.

About "app store", as cp702 said, there is one, not like the one in Ubuntu, yes it will come later, but there is what we call a software manager, which is a graphical tool to explore the repository.

In fact, there are several software managers, the one in default Gnome Fedora, the one in KDE, and some others.

 

 

 

 

2.) Yes you should partition your HDD with Windows7 tool or a Gparted Live CD. Be careful before doing that and make backups of your datas.

Can you explain what is hard about installing stuff ? Real question, not sarcasm, I ask because maybe I can help ^^

 

 

 

 

 

3.) About multimedia codecs, enable the RPM Fusion repository (see documentation about doing this correctly), you'll not have any problem with them after that.

 

 

 

 

4.) You have some alternatives like Gnash, but they are shitty lol. Anyway, fortunately the Linux Flash plugin works quite well on Firefox, and Chrome has his own plugin, "Pepper".

 

 

 

 

5.) Depending of your GPU, you should install the proprietary driver (use the akmod version from RPM Fusion, akmod, not kmod, it's important !) you'll have better performances, and you'll save energy, because the free drivers may not be well optimized.

 

Thanks for the response, guys. I had a few Q's or general repsonses for you over the course of your reply DarthWound, so I thought I'd break them down.

1.) From what I Googled, you have to use the little Terminal thingy, and you use the 'yum' commands to get stuff installed. I have no idea where it's actually getting the software from. The software "finder" that Fedora comes with in my opinion is worthless. Search results of software that would peak my interest yeild nothing. YumExtender was an app I downloaded that seemed to help a little. It makes downloading software a bit easier than using the Terminal. I've grown up on .exe files and setup wizards since I was in my single digits age group, so while I have a few basic Windows Command Prompt comamnds memorized, I can't say I use the thing regularly, so coming to a distribution of Linux that relies so heavily on the terminal is a daunting task since I have to look up how to do everything on Google. Thank god it came with Firefox standard or I would have been really screwed. I've considered switching to Mint or Ubuntu since they both have app stores and are supposedly friendlier to newbies, but I'll give this one a shot for a little while.

2.) I'm using Windows 8, and while I haven't gone deeply into the HDD properties menu, I'm afraid Windows may try to format the whole drive to NTFS, thereby killing my Fedora install. Never heard of GParted before. Is it any good & what does it cost? Luckily Fedora is on a second hard drive, apart from my C:/ drive which I will unplug for safety when dealing with a re-format outside of Windows. I currently use my BIOS's boot menu (F12 key) to get into Fedora when I start up the PC. Regarding installing stuff, it's like I was saying in point #1; I never grew up using command prompts, and even if I did I don't exactly have a handbook here of the Linux YUM "language" and what it means. I'm sure with enough practice I'll have a basic understanding. The one command I have memorized so far is "su --login" to give yourself root access for certain installs. YUMExtender has helped me to install codecs for programs that support them. I did in fact download RPM fusion Free & Non-Free and that didn't help any of the media programs I had play MPEG4/AAC files. MP3's would play okay, but nothing else. Audacity and some associated plugins I found through YUMExtender did the trick though. Now I just have to learn how the program works (building a library) since it's not as intuitive as iTunes or Google Music. So far I've just been playing one track at a time since I haven't had much time to play with it.

3.) Did that (I think) didn't seem to work. But at least I have one player that does what I need. Now I'm curious about how to un-install software (my unnecessary media players), which I'll probably have to Google for. lol

4.) I've noticed some crackling of sound every now and then, especially if you play a Flash video while Audacity is playing an MPEG4/AAC file. That could be a lack of sound drivers, though. Who knows. Is "Pepper" built in or do I need to go install it using YUM somehow?

5.) Performance I'm not so concerned about since I don't plan on running games of any sort, but exactly how much energy are we talking about? I'm on a desktop so I'm not on a battery of any sort.

Thanks for your reply.

 

Edited by unr3al

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I'm not DarthWound, and my knowledge is more general than Fedora-specific, but I'll give these a shot.

1.) From what I Googled, you have to use the little Terminal thingy, and you use the 'yum' commands to get stuff installed. I have no idea where it's actually getting the software from.

Software is downloaded from repositories, which are basically collections of packages. The default repositories run on Red Hat servers (Red Hat is the company behind Fedora; in general, for Linux systems, the default repositories are run by whoever makes that distribution). However, anyone who wants can have their own repository, with their own packages. You can control which repositories yum uses: generally, you'll mostly stick to the defaults, but you can add new ones if they have something you want. Not all packages make it into the official repositories, or the official ones might have an out-of-date version of a package.

When I say repositories are run by whoever makes the distribution: Not only do they generally run the actual servers, but they also decide what packages go in the repository and what don't (they also decide what packages are in the default install and what packages are not). Anyone who wants to can make a package and send it to them to ask to include it; obviously, they don't include *all* of them.

Alternatively, you can download actual package files (RPMs, for Fedora) from, say, a website, and install them directly (i.e. not from the repository).

The software "finder" that Fedora comes with in my opinion is worthless. Search results of software that would peak my interest yeild nothing. YumExtender was an app I downloaded that seemed to help a little. It makes downloading software a bit easier than using the Terminal.

A lot of this stuff is tied to the terminal. It's easiest to install a package if you know its name: tools are most often optimized to install specific software, not to help you find general software. If you want to install a mail program, it's often easiest to find the program through eternal means, and *then* install it with the package manages.

I've grown up on .exe files and setup wizards since I was in my single digits age group, so while I have a few basic Windows Command Prompt comamnds memorized, I can't say I use the thing regularly, so coming to a distribution of Linux that relies so heavily on the terminal is a daunting task since I have to look up how to do everything on Google. Thank god it came with Firefox standard or I would have been really screwed. I've considered switching to Mint or Ubuntu since they both have app stores and are supposedly friendlier to newbies, but I'll give this one a shot for a little while.

Mint and Ubuntu do have a reputation for user-friendliness. I have heard that it's basically possible to use Linux systems with almost no use of a terminal; since I happen to be relatively adept at using a terminal, I often drop back to it. In general, using the terminal can be easier if you really *know* what you're doing; graphical interfaces are easier if you are still learning, and while you adjust. When I was learning to use the terminal, I made heavy use of Google (still do, when there's something I don't know how to do).

2.) I'm using Windows 8, and while I haven't gone deeply into the HDD properties menu, I'm afraid Windows may try to format the whole drive to NTFS, thereby killing my Fedora install. Never heard of GParted before. Is it any good & what does it cost?

I've never heard of Windows automatically reformatting a hard drive without prompting. It might prompt you if it detects it as a removable drive, but I've dual-booted (on partitions, not an external/separate drive) with Win7 and it doesn't say a thing about the other partition. It knows it's there, but it can't begin to read it, and it's fine with that.

GParted is the standard graphical partition editor. It is nice and powerful; it does talk about things like "aligning partitions", but I don't think this is a huge issue for you (and that's the most confusing message I remember from it). You shouldn't need a partition editor often, anyway.

I will say this: When messing around with partitions, if you are resizing them, it's best to do that while booting the computer from a livedisk [meaning the system runs from a CD, without needing to install anything to the hard drive]. You can get a Gparted livedisk, which you just pop in, reboot, select "boot from CD", and you have GParted (the issue with that livedisk in particular is that if you need a web browser, the one it has is many years old).

GParted is free, like almost everything you'll use on Linux systems.

Luckily Fedora is on a second hard drive, apart from my C:/ drive which I will unplug for safety when dealing with a re-format outside of Windows. I currently use my BIOS's boot menu (F12 key) to get into Fedora when I start up the PC.

If they're both internal hard drives, it certainly shouldn't cause any issues. The standard way to dual-boot has both systems on separate partitions of the same drive; neither Windows (7, at least) nor Linux cares if you have other OSs on other drives/partitions.

Regarding installing stuff, it's like I was saying in point #1; I never grew up using command prompts, and even if I did I don't exactly have a handbook here of the Linux YUM "language" and what it means. I'm sure with enough practice I'll have a basic understanding. The one command I have memorized so far is "su --login" to give yourself root access for certain installs.

First, 'su -' is exactly the same (and is quicker to type).

Second, there's an issue with learning using "su": In general, it is a really, really bad idea to run as root for general purposes. Instead, what you should do is only become root for individual commands. The most common way to do this is to type 'sudo *yourcommand*'. You then type your own password when prompted. It's not that it's necessarily better, it's that it reinforces better practices.

5.) Performance I'm not so concerned about since I don't plan on running games of any sort, but exactly how much energy are we talking about? I'm on a desktop so I'm not on a battery of any sort.

Linux is generally less energy-hungry than Windows.

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Thanks for the response, guys. I had a few Q's or general repsonses for you over the course of your reply DarthWound, so I thought I'd break them down.

1.) From what I Googled, you have to use the little Terminal thingy, and you use the 'yum' commands to get stuff installed. I have no idea where it's actually getting the software from. The software "finder" that Fedora comes with in my opinion is worthless. Search results of software that would peak my interest yeild nothing. YumExtender was an app I downloaded that seemed to help a little. It makes downloading software a bit easier than using the Terminal. I've grown up on .exe files and setup wizards since I was in my single digits age group, so while I have a few basic Windows Command Prompt comamnds memorized, I can't say I use the thing regularly, so coming to a distribution of Linux that relies so heavily on the terminal is a daunting task since I have to look up how to do everything on Google. Thank god it came with Firefox standard or I would have been really screwed. I've considered switching to Mint or Ubuntu since they both have app stores and are supposedly friendlier to newbies, but I'll give this one a shot for a little while.

2.) I'm using Windows 8, and while I haven't gone deeply into the HDD properties menu, I'm afraid Windows may try to format the whole drive to NTFS, thereby killing my Fedora install. Never heard of GParted before. Is it any good & what does it cost? Luckily Fedora is on a second hard drive, apart from my C:/ drive which I will unplug for safety when dealing with a re-format outside of Windows. I currently use my BIOS's boot menu (F12 key) to get into Fedora when I start up the PC. Regarding installing stuff, it's like I was saying in point #1; I never grew up using command prompts, and even if I did I don't exactly have a handbook here of the Linux YUM "language" and what it means. I'm sure with enough practice I'll have a basic understanding. The one command I have memorized so far is "su --login" to give yourself root access for certain installs. YUMExtender has helped me to install codecs for programs that support them. I did in fact download RPM fusion Free & Non-Free and that didn't help any of the media programs I had play MPEG4/AAC files. MP3's would play okay, but nothing else. Audacity and some associated plugins I found through YUMExtender did the trick though. Now I just have to learn how the program works (building a library) since it's not as intuitive as iTunes or Google Music. So far I've just been playing one track at a time since I haven't had much time to play with it.

3.) Did that (I think) didn't seem to work. But at least I have one player that does what I need. Now I'm curious about how to un-install software (my unnecessary media players), which I'll probably have to Google for. lol

4.) I've noticed some crackling of sound every now and then, especially if you play a Flash video while Audacity is playing an MPEG4/AAC file. That could be a lack of sound drivers, though. Who knows. Is "Pepper" built in or do I need to go install it using YUM somehow?

5.) Performance I'm not so concerned about since I don't plan on running games of any sort, but exactly how much energy are we talking about? I'm on a desktop so I'm not on a battery of any sort.

Thanks for your reply.

 

 

I'll try to be complete and understable, but english is not my mother-tongue and I just woke up lol, so forgive me :D

 

1)

First I'll try to explain about repositories. There are several repositories, or mirrors if you prefer. It's a database of packages on a server. Packages are compiled softwares, maintained by the packagers. It's the same, more or less, for every distribution, not only Fedora. The packager pick the source or build it, then he makes a package, which is the software, compiled for Fedora, that you have with Yum.

The graphical tool, I think that in english his name in the "menu" is "Add/Remove Software", can be worth if you know what you search. But, yes, Terminal is, imho, way more useful, but maybe it's because I know what to do with it. Don't hesitate to look at the documentations, and there are a lot of websites explaining everything, a bit like the books "... for dummies" :p

There are some websites that are letting you explore the repos, like pkgs.org, or an official Fedora one but I forget his name/url...

Bonus : you can search alternatives to Windows apps here.

About what cp702 said : "you can download actual package files from, say, a website, and install them directly", it's true, but it's often not recommended, because of security and conflict issues that may happen. Of course sometimes it works without a problem. Just be advised that it can provide issues. Try to always use official or trusted repositories.

If a package is old, use Bohdi website to make a ticket or request.

 

2)

Gparted is free and well-reputed, don't worry about that.

About commands, as I said, read some documentations, for end-users the commands to remember are just a few, and they are more-or-less the same for every distro.

And about su/sudo, in Fedora sudo isn't well configured by default, but anyway I don't like it, because of its behavior, I see Sudo as a security hole for non-experimented users.

About RPMfusion, you'll have to install the codecs from that repo, just installing the repo won't help ^^

Default GNOME Fedora provides Rhythmbox, it's a bit like iTunes (a bit). You have Audacious, Clementine, etc... there are a lot of tools. And you have the excellent Amarok, but it's a KDE component.

 

3)

Uninstalling software :

- graphical tool : go to the section which display your installed softwares (or maybe a filter to tick, sorry I use some different specific tools or terminal).

- terminal : su -c yum remove packagename

You can look at this : http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_Guide_-_Managing_Software

 

4)

Pepper is directly integrated in Chrome (but only Chrome, it's a Google+Adobe "product").

 

5)

As cp702 said, GNU/Linux distros are less energy-hungry than Windows, but I was talking about GPU, sometimes without proprietary driver the GPU can be always running at 100% with a nice big fan noise and an increased electricity consumption.

 

---

 

To conclude, I like Fedora for some reasons : fresh up-to-date packages, flexibility, "philosophy" behind it. Ubuntu is great for beginners, but Fedora is not that complicated, it just needs a bit of learning.

Test several distros (VirtualBox may help ^^) and use what you like ! And don't care about distros flamewars, trolls don't help.

Edited by DarthWound
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I've never heard of Windows automatically reformatting a hard drive without prompting. It might prompt you if it detects it as a removable drive, but I've dual-booted (on partitions, not an external/separate drive) with Win7 and it doesn't say a thing about the other partition. It knows it's there, but it can't begin to read it, and it's fine with that.

That's not quite what I meant. When I right click the drive itself, Windows says that it doesn't recognize the partition format (because it's not FAT32 or NTFS) and asks if I would like to format it. Ideally, I'd like to format 750GB of it into NTFS and give 250GB to any Linux distribution I use. That being said, I haven't gone past that at all. I didn't look at any options I might have for formatting, but I know other tools like Partition Magic may give me more options. That being said, if I decide to partition things, will it f*ck up my install? Do I need to defrag my HDD first, and how is that done in linux? Command terminal again I take it?

And regarding the whole 'root' thing, I don't use it unless a command I run comes back at me and says "You need to be a root user to do this". But it's the one command I have memorized, anyway. lol

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That's odd; on my computer, the Linux partition doesn't show up at all. I'm actually going to leave that question mostly to DarthWound, as I'm not sure how Fedora sets up partitions by default (some distros have just one partition; some have 9) or if it uses MBR or GPT [which is a technical thing about how the partitions are stored; however: will you boot Windows from this disk, or just use it for data?]. However, general stuff:

Repartition can mess up data, but it shouldn't. Back up anything you don't want to lose, but if you just installed Fedora, it shouldn't be a huge issue to reinstall. Change the partitions while booting from a livecd, not on a live system (you shouldn't do it from Windows's default utility; to resize a partition, you should use a tool that recognizes that filesystem, which Windows's partition manager does not). Tip: When you do resize partitions, try to shrink from the end. If you move the beginning of the partition, you have to move all the data; if you shrink it, you don't.

Once the partitions are set up, you can do whatever you want to the NTFS-designated one from Windows without worrying about it affecting Linux.

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Windows is on a C drive where about half of 1TB is taken up, maybe a bit more. Fedora is on a physically separate D drive where there is absolutely no data of any kind. Initially during setup I gave it 250GB of space. Setup failed, I then tried again and gave it the whole drive, worked like a charm. But I know for sure I won't use Linux enough to merit all of that space being taken up. And if I plan on gaming with this PC for 3 more years, I'll need that for other games eventually.

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