Fedora 8 Test 3 (7.92)
Doh, just booted it under vmware, and it's dumb! I wonder what might be the rationale/use-case for this dumbness...
The default theme/artwork/colours (infinity and nodoka) are certainly the best compared to opensuse and ubuntu IMO.
But coming back to the dumb part: The thing boots and instead of giving you a menu it gives you a 45 second countdown saying "Fedora will boot...", you have to press some keys to get the menu before that. Dumb.
After the initial loading, it again gives you a login screen with a countdown saying "fedora user will log in..." so I had to type in the user "fedora" to log in sooner. Dumb again.
And to top off the dumbness with more dumbness, the "Live CD" just boots into a desktop with no menus or anything to "test drive" the OS, which defeats the purpose of being a Live CD. There are just a few icons like the home folder, trashcan and "Install to Hard Disk". Dumb yet again.
I've already waited almost 20 min just in case the desktop is being slow to load under vmware but I still don't see any menus to "try before you buy" this distro! Right-clicking just gives the standard "change your wallpaper" options...
I hope this dumbness goes away in the final release...
Will complete the install and post about it shortly, hopefully before the F1 qualifying starts at 1130.
update:
Clicking on "Install from disk" gives a memory error "could not fork, allocate memory failed" or something.
So I tried to increase my vmware memory to 512mb and it's giving some GNOME errors now...
LOL see ::: Planète Béranger ::: and ::: Planète Béranger :::
Looks like Fedora 8 is going to suck too... will have to revisit when the final release happens and see what other people post about this beta.
stop press:
okay, my bad, maybe f8t3 is not as dumb as i thot, maybe it was me setting vmware memory to 320mb and the live desktop has loaded fine!
A quick browse thru the menus and IMO Fedora 8 will fall nicely in between Ubuntu's clean-and-simple approach and openSUSE's power-user approach. It has a nice mix of apps, config applets like auth, selinux, desktop effects etc.
Will start the installation now and post the results later.
update:
It's damn slowww under vmware even after playing with the vm config settings such as virtual ram from 256 - 512mb. So I'll take the risk of installing it on my physical machine which has 512mb ram and post another update
installation:
booted off the CD to do a real install and it went smoother this time. fedora 8 is not as polished as ubuntu or opensuse, for example, the bootup/shotdown screens goes into text mode for a while.
starting the installation, providing the info and doing partitioning was easy. when the install started there was an error dialog that appeared 3-4 times about HAL failing to mount a partition or something, but the install continued.
the first reboot and you have some additional info to setup, like networking, root password, user account etc.
logged in for the first time, well its gnome and looks similar to ubuntu. there are a bunch of additional menu items like authentication options, selinux security etc which is good for office setups i guess. there is no openoffice instead there is abiword which support openoffice odf and microsoft formats and it loads faster, and gnumeric as the spreadsheet app. there is the "transmission" torrent client which is a bit better than ubuntu's default barebones client.
like i said the polish is not as good as ubuntu or opensuse, for example, the update notifier asks for root password before it even displays the info for available updates. and it doesnt tell you the file download sizes just the names and number of updates available.
the desktop effects menu item is one generation behind ubuntu and is the same as feisty's, i wasnt able to enable desktop effects because i didnt have nvidia driver installed.
so im downloading drivers directly off nvidia.com to try to see if desktop effects will work with fedora8/gnome
so in conclusion, in my opinion fedora 8 is not too bad for casual home users (ubuntu is better) and not too good either for power users (opensuse is better) who want GUI config control, its probably a good fit for corporate/office installs where you want gnome and selinux.