[Hampshire] Fedora 7 Review

Fedora 7 became available on the 31st May so for the Debian & Ubuntu
affictionados in the LUG here are some of my thoughts about the latest &
greatest release.

First off, I upgraded my MAC Mini (PPC) from FC6 to F7
Note the 'Core' has gone.
The upgrade was better than FC5 to FC6.
The 1600x1200 was not initially recognised properly. Xorg 7.2 would only
indicate that it was capable of 1680x1050 not the real size. I updated
the Xorg.conf to set the HSync range properly. The defaults were too
low. I have filed a bugzilla on this. Once this was corrected, I got the
display working correctly.
The WLAN had been problematical with FC6. I had a config setup but it
would not always load the Broadcomm Firmware on startup. The mostly
re-written WLAN Stack in F7 seems to have fixed that totally. IT works OOTB.
Everything else on this albeit limited system works fine.

Then I moved onto my DELL 8600 Laptop.
What can I say, everything was found and works OOTB. Even the WLAN and
Bluetooth. The 1920x1200 was found and configured correctly in the
initial configuration. This was a first. Even the latest Ubuntu release
does not do this.

Finally, I put it on one of my homegrown servers. This is a Core Duo
1.8Ghz with 4GB Ram and only SATA disks.
This was a new install not an upgrade like the other two.
Once again, everything worked. One problem that this system had suffered
with numerous Linux Distros was that the On-board LAN Interface was
always eth1 not eth0. There is another LAN adapter which was usually
found and configured as ETH0. ON this release, this is reversed and
mirrors how Windows finds then and how I want them configured.
This system has fairly decent Nvidia graphics card so I loaded the
driver from Livna and installed it. I had attached my other big display
to it (1680x1050) and the results were really impressive. I configured
Compiz and was very impressed by the smoothness of the whole graphics
display.
Finally, in this system, I removed the second LAN adapter and replaced
it with an old WLAN adapter. After the reboot, it took all of two
minutes to configure it and most of that time was entering the Key
correctly into the config file.

Overall, my experiences with F7 have been very positive indeed. It is
looking very polished.
I have not tried any DVD or MP3 playback yet. I need to get the right
codes installed first but this is very far from being a priority.

Stephen D