Mind over Matters: Rumbles of my mind.. Echo in this blog..

I have had opensuse 10.3 installed on my system for a while and for some reason i had messed it up beyond care for repair and hence i was waiting for the next release of opensuse to be released so that i can install it on my system.

Meanwhile, when i was at the toshiba service center to get my laptop serviced, i saw a customer use fedora 8 for his laptop OS. This got me interested and since fedora 9 just got released, i downloaded it and installed it on my laptop today.

Let me re-emphasize that i am the kind of guy who just likes to have the operating system "just work" rather than having to go to the command line to get each and every application working. I am not too much of a geek anymore and anyways dont have that kind of a time to deal with these things.Open suse and ubuntu to a certain extent fits my kind of customers really well.

 Fedora linux does look nice and jazzy from the outside with all the cool and latest updated softwares. But IMHO, some of the latest software has made the whole distribution a bit hard to use.

The installation process was very smooth. It identified my earlier opensuse installation and prompted me to overwrite that portion of the hard disk which i gladly obliged to. I selected softwares that i needed and within a couple of hours, i had fedora up and running on my laptop along with xp.

The first thing i wanted to do was to install the "non-free" drivers for my laptop. This included some movie playing software like "vlc" and of course nividia drivers. I went to the rpm.livna.org and installed the rpm for yum updater from livna website.

Next, i went to add/remove programs section and started going through the list of packages i wanted to install. The first thing that struck me.. There were no check boxes to select multiple packages and install. Weird.. I was logged in as root right then and then i selected a particular package to install and pressed "Install" button. Nothing happened.. Since i was using an graphical interface, i didnt know what happened. I tried this for a long time and then frustrated, i went to the command line interface and started installing stuff by using the yum command from there.

A little while later, i managed to login into a non-root account and again started the add-remove programs section and retried the same thing again. This time i had some success in the sense that i could install the single package that i selected for installation. But, a progressbar which explained the progress of the download or the progress of the install was not there.. So, i just had to blindly wait till a particular package was installed.

Just a few minutes before i managed to get the synaptic package manager (which ubuntu has as default) through yum and now things are much better.

The next major gripe for me is the absence of a suitable nvidia driver for fedora 9. This release of fedora apparently has some sort of a non-final release of Xorg incorporated and understandably nvidia does not support that sort of releases. I had not installed kernel-source package when i installed fedora and so when i first downloaded a stable nvidia driver from the nvidia site, it complained about the absence of the source and stopped the installation. After downloading and installing the source, it later complained that the latest release of the driver was not compatible with the particular version of kernel.. DUMPED! NO 3-D!

I googled around a bit and later came up with a beta version of the nvidia drivers from the nvidia site and installation instructions from this weblog. I right now have the 2D portion of my GUI working but no 3D. Hopefully it gets fixed someday.

I also tried to get the dualhead monitor functionality which had a nice GUI portion to it working, but without any success..

Next, i tried changing the theme for kde. There were some nice themes available but whenever i tried to change to one of them, my X server crashed. No idea why that happened. Also, suddenly the start menu disappeared and i got fed up.. so i removed the ".kde" directory in my home directory and started out fresh.

So far things have been great. I have been able to surf the web and use netbeans without much of a problem. But the moment i try to customize something, the x window system hangs and abuses me badly for trying to do something.

I am right now waiting for the next version of opensuse which will be released in a month or so.  From their site, the screen shots look awesome. Theer is no shortage of eye-candy similar to fedora9. But hopefully, those guys will be a bit more sensible and have a version of Xorg over there which nvidia supports.