As you may already know Fedora 9 was officially released yesterday to a mass of waiting people. Ok I have no idea how many people were actually waiting for it but I am going to assume it was a lot. Some of my readers might know that I am a Fedora user, it’s an awesome distro and it works great with NVRaid. Although I have to admit that Fedora 9 did disappoint me a little. Not because it is lacking new stuff, it has beta/prerelease things in it, but because right after I logged in I noticed some bugs.
The Fedora install process is super simple, as it should be. All you have to do is answer questions and fill in usernames and passwords. Now, if you wanted, you can configure what packages to be installed. I customize them at this time, not later. It even detected my Linux partitions on my NVRaid setup automatically saving me a lot of time and a massive headache. That is one area where I personally choose fedora over other distro’s *cough ubuntu cough*.
After logging in and using KDE I experienced some issues. From what I understand Fedora 9 is using KDE 4.03, which is not the latest release so these issues maybe fixed in 4.04. My issues started when trying to change the size of the bottom panel. When the size of the panel was changed graphic problems crept up, it seemed it was something to do with redrawing. The icons on the panel wouldn’t scale correctly forcing me to log out and log in again. The F that is in the bottom left corner (by default) had some scaling issues just like the rest of the icons. It would “bend” around the screen so the bottom of the icon would show up on the top of my screen. Because of this whenever it was clicked to bring up the application launcher the launcher would come from the top of the screen where it should have come from the bottom.
My computer has a Creative X-FI card, WORST CARD FOR LINUX EVER. I have needed OpenSoundSystem to get it to work, but that is another article completely. ALSA does not work with this card, same with the other audio library’s that come with fedora. Now the next annoying thing with KDE in Fedora 9, whenever I would switch “virtual desktops” or “spaces”, whatever you call it, the notification box would come up and tell me that the sound systems wouldn’t work. If I would switch them really quickly a bunch of boxes would start to show up.
From my limited time using Gnome I experienced no issues and it seemed to run smoother than KDE. I would have to recommend people use Gnome until KDE 4 matures.
Fedora 9 comes with Xserver 1.5 and Xorg 7.3 so don’t expect to run any 3d applications just yet. The latest Nvidia drivers only work with 2d as Xserver 1.5 is brand new. I am not sure about ATI drivers since my desktop doesn’t have one of their cards. The development version of kmod-nvidia in the livna repo doesn’t currently work, thats not their fault though. Hopefully everything will get working pretty soon since it would be nice to have 3d support.
Overall my thoughts on Fedora 9 are still positive because I know these little annoying bugs are going to get fixed quickly. I would have to not recommend using KDE just yet, might as well install KDE and Gnome and use which ever you like. If you play games in Fedora you may want to stick to your current version for a bit while video drivers get updated.
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