Well, I just got done upgrading the linux partition of my laptop from fedora 15 to fedora 16 beta.
my specs:
hardware:
dell latitude d630
Core2 Duo 2.4ghz
2gb RAM
Nvidia quadro NVS 135M
intel WIFI
SW:
fedora 16 beta x64
gnome 3.2
Windows vista home premium (dual-boot)
My first thoguht is that one is reccomended to read the common bugs page first, as had I done that, I would have known not to try to do a direct upgrade. Instead, I tried that, and well, things got "interesting". After doing a lot of command-line booting and other things, I discovered that the RPMfusion repo for fedora 16 was missing the proprietary nvidia drivers, causing one of the many reasons for failure.
Anyway, after finding the bugs page and realizing what an ID10T I was, I quickly copied my documents, etc. to my external hard drive (being a college student, I have a lot of notes) and set about to burn a live gnome x64 cd and try again.
Well, after installing that, everything changed.
For one, I can for once say that ALL of my laptop's internal hardware (minus the 56k modem, which I could care less about) works to spec. Unlike F15, where nouvea wouldn't cut it in games like foobilliard and neverputt, nouvea in F16 is acceptable. Under foobillard, there was no noticeable lag. foobillard had some lag, but it was minimal at worst. Thus, the lack of the prop. drivers in RPMfusion is less of an issue. In addition, this hopefully will also elimate the "screen tearing" issue that I had in F15 (makes taking notes a real b***).
Another nice thing, not so much a fedora thing exactly, is adobe FINALLY has made flash for x64 linux a binary file. no more fuddling with copying a plugin file as root to make firefox and chrome happy whenever flash was needed.
Also, the stock wallpaper is one of the more "creative" ones I have seen... F14 had a good one, F15 was IMHO a cheesy knockoff of the gnome wallpaper, but the new one isn't too shabby. Still, copied from my last install, I changed to my favorite linux wallpaper.
Another strong point is the inclusion of grub2. FINALLY, the devs at fedora finally got this mainstream... grub legacy was really, really getting to look aged in comparison.
I also liked that they now have a centralized online account manager. Right now, it only has google support, but I was able to in a few easy steps setup evolution (email) and emapthy (chat) all in one move. granted, I still had to manually add my yahoo chat info into emapthy, but the only thing I use the yahoo account for anymore is chatting, so it is much less of an issue.
My favorite new feature is Gnome 3.2. It kept what I liked about gnome 3.0 but fixes a lot of the bugs. My only beef is that the power manager settings no longer seems to have an option to set the behavior of my power button, as I would like for it to display a shut-down menu (shut down, restart, cancel), not put my laptop in standby.
Overall, for a beta release, it seems surprisingly polished... I am very happy with my upgrade!
Anybody else try out F16?
my specs:
hardware:
dell latitude d630
Core2 Duo 2.4ghz
2gb RAM
Nvidia quadro NVS 135M
intel WIFI
SW:
fedora 16 beta x64
gnome 3.2
Windows vista home premium (dual-boot)
My first thoguht is that one is reccomended to read the common bugs page first, as had I done that, I would have known not to try to do a direct upgrade. Instead, I tried that, and well, things got "interesting". After doing a lot of command-line booting and other things, I discovered that the RPMfusion repo for fedora 16 was missing the proprietary nvidia drivers, causing one of the many reasons for failure.
Anyway, after finding the bugs page and realizing what an ID10T I was, I quickly copied my documents, etc. to my external hard drive (being a college student, I have a lot of notes) and set about to burn a live gnome x64 cd and try again.
Well, after installing that, everything changed.
For one, I can for once say that ALL of my laptop's internal hardware (minus the 56k modem, which I could care less about) works to spec. Unlike F15, where nouvea wouldn't cut it in games like foobilliard and neverputt, nouvea in F16 is acceptable. Under foobillard, there was no noticeable lag. foobillard had some lag, but it was minimal at worst. Thus, the lack of the prop. drivers in RPMfusion is less of an issue. In addition, this hopefully will also elimate the "screen tearing" issue that I had in F15 (makes taking notes a real b***).
Another nice thing, not so much a fedora thing exactly, is adobe FINALLY has made flash for x64 linux a binary file. no more fuddling with copying a plugin file as root to make firefox and chrome happy whenever flash was needed.
Also, the stock wallpaper is one of the more "creative" ones I have seen... F14 had a good one, F15 was IMHO a cheesy knockoff of the gnome wallpaper, but the new one isn't too shabby. Still, copied from my last install, I changed to my favorite linux wallpaper.
Another strong point is the inclusion of grub2. FINALLY, the devs at fedora finally got this mainstream... grub legacy was really, really getting to look aged in comparison.
I also liked that they now have a centralized online account manager. Right now, it only has google support, but I was able to in a few easy steps setup evolution (email) and emapthy (chat) all in one move. granted, I still had to manually add my yahoo chat info into emapthy, but the only thing I use the yahoo account for anymore is chatting, so it is much less of an issue.
My favorite new feature is Gnome 3.2. It kept what I liked about gnome 3.0 but fixes a lot of the bugs. My only beef is that the power manager settings no longer seems to have an option to set the behavior of my power button, as I would like for it to display a shut-down menu (shut down, restart, cancel), not put my laptop in standby.
Overall, for a beta release, it seems surprisingly polished... I am very happy with my upgrade!
Anybody else try out F16?
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