Me, Ahmed Soliman

A few days ago I got a brand new Fedora 8 on a DVD iso and I was too excited to have a setup on my laptop. In fact I didn’t install Fedora 7 because I always felt that it doesn’t have much to add, wasn’t that stable too and it had one famous problem regarding firewire and video capturing.

starting from the installation, it was smooth and sexy, I’ve added the additional repository and chose alot of my preferred packages.

After Installation it was pretty sleek on GNOME and pretty UGLY! on KDE!, it seems that fedora developers insist convincing me of using GNOME so I said I’ll go for GNOME for awhile and see.

Compiz was great and smooth, it doesn’t have much effects as I hate it I like the shadows and the cube, nothing more. but the thing I really miss is the Beryl Configuration, Compiz and Compiz-Fusion doesn’t have any advanced configuration program that controls the effects as far as I’ve seen on fedora 8, so I couldn’t get things to work correctly as I wanted on KDE. when I run compiz-manager on KDE I get wobbly windows – Which is sexy but not effective – and I couldn’t disable it! so I decided not to use compiz on KDE.

Back to GNOME, it has really extra improved and it was going to convince me until I got to the yet-so-poor file manager “nautilus”, it doesn’t have “tabs” — ooops — I used to use those tabs alot on konqueror and some times I had 8 tabs opened at the same time, but the network browsing and sharing in GNOME was awesome.

The Second problem I’ve faced with GNOME is that I don’t know much “nice” software as replacements for what I got to use on KDE — knowing that I could run KDE applications on GNOME, but I prefer using the whole desktop suite instead of mixing things up — so I started searching for a CD/DVD burning software like “k3b” and I found “gnome-baker” it was nice but not pretty as k3b. and I couldn’t find RSS reader like “akregator”. But I liked this version of pidgin alot and to be honest, I’m using it now, but I think I’ll switch back to “Kopete” sooner or later.

Finally after this GNOME test drive I got the feeling that GNOME is fast and simple, it really matches a business man that doesn’t look for a too sexy desktop. But I’m not .

So, switching back to KDE — the default ugly interface — and I had to play around for a little while to customize the look to match my older desktop, I didn’t install “kbfx” yet but much of my preferences are now setup. I have used NuVO 0.7.1 Iconset and a nice background from kde-look.org and some SuperKaramba themes that added some life to the desktop, “macfoxII” as a firefox theme, installed my commonly used firefox extensions. and decided to switch ti KMail instead of thunderbird and I’m happy with it till now as it’s well integrated with KDE.

I noticed that knetworkmanager is now looks like gnome network manager applet and after a while I discovered that it’s the same applet, and I was way too happy with this – now all gnome applets run smoothly and safely on KDE – this is really good news because on fedora 8 the bluetooth framework was greatly improved and gnome has an awesome applet that made me pretty happy, because now I can control my desktop with my mobile and use the bluetooth headset as the computer headset on linux easily. So I could run this applet on KDE by running “bluetooth-applet”.

and If you want to see the gnome desktop, here you are…

The another interesting feature is PulseAudio, ew!. It’s yet the most creative feature in Fedora 8 for me so far, it allows for a smooth multiple audio streams to be played simultaneously with independent volume control for each audio stream, and you can hot plug a new sound card and redirect specific audio streams “live!” on the new sound card. you can terminate a sound stream if you want too. you can control the volume by “pavucontrol” and see the volume meter “pavumeter” and of course you can access those programs from the K Menu.

Conclusion

I’m very happy with this Fedora release and the new Gnome is very promising and it’s extremely easy to use without separating the user from going deep into the system if he likes to. It has multiple “spins” (flavors) and you can create your own custom spin with a nice tool. for me it’s very stable till now and it has solved my DVD burner I/O problems completely and it saved power “GREATLY”. it stays running on my 12-Cell battery for 5:30 hours! Thanks for “powertop” from Intel for its utility and great thanks for the tickless kernel.