Fedora 12: Usage review

With Fedora 13 Alphas being released it seems like as good a time as any to plonk down some of my thoughts on Fedora 12.

• Gnome Shell preview is really awesome.  I like it, it works, and I'm excited to see what else might be in store.  Hopefully a few keyboard shortcuts for flipping desktops.
• NetworkManager continues to make the user networking experience good.  At this point it's about as reliable and useful as my Mac.
• Video/Media codec support still sucks.  This is not Fedora's fault, it sucks on Mac too.  Codecs just plain suck.  Point in case?  I installed mythfrontend during a demo at MilwaukeeLUG and it broke Totem's ability to play an Ogg file.  After a few logouts and some more installs is started to work.  Then broke again.  Folks, this is why Flash video is successful.  HTML5 video may standardize on a few codecs but I'm not terribly sure that will help.  This has been a problem for close to a decade and I'm sometimes shocked it's still an issue. 
• Firefox is still slower than Firefox on my Mac.
• For the most part, things just work.

A big thinks to the Fedora developers and community for making great stuff.

Livna -> RPMFusion migration

Thorsten Leemhuis writes to remind us about the loss of the Livna mailing lists and the continuing migration of the Livna repos for Fedora to the RPMFusion repos announces a few months ago.

If you're a Livna, FreshRPMS, or Dribble user (and if you have an nvida card, ati card, mp3, or dvd around, you most probably are) you should probably start taking heed of the changes.

Install Fest at Milwaukee LUG!

Advance warning that the Milwaukee Area LUG is having an Install Fest on Sept. 13th. More info can be found in the wiki. I'm going to try to be there with my laptop and a copy of liveusb-creator to make some USB Fedora keys for folks who want them as well as lend a hand.

If I have extra time, I'll try to setup DHCP on my laptop to run as an option server to present PXE'able images for various installers. This will require a bunch of downloading across my poor little cable-modem to get said images, so that might not happen, unless of course I travel to $hq and can co-opt their link.

If you're in Milwaukee, drop by and say "Hi" or bring a machine to install Linux on!