dgoodwin's blog

As usual I got anxious and upgraded to Fedora 9 (beta) a couple weeks ago. This normally causes a few headaches, almost always involving the nvidia binary graphics drivers. (as the kernels seem to come too fast for the Livna repositories to keep up, although there appears to be some neat things in the works for auto-compiling kernel modules in F9) However I should have done some reading beforehand this time around because as it turns out Fedora 9 is currently using a pre-release of xorg 1.5 with some incompatible changes, and nvidia doesn't release drivers for un-released versions of xorg. From everything I've read it appears it just won't work unless you're willing to downgrade xorg and everything that comes with it.

The nv driver looks like rubbish with my hardware and won't get me up to the 1600x1200 resolution I'm used to so I did some experimenting with the nouveau. With a slight xorg.conf tweak I was able to get my full resolution but no 3d effects. Not a huge problem as I don't even use them normally, but I noticed a pretty brutal performance bug creeping up after a few hours of heavy X use. (6 second workspace changes, huge cpu spikes, etc) Filed a bug on the problem and got some good debugging suggestions, one of which actually clears the problem up (for awhile) without forcing you to restart X. (switching VT's and back)

Regardless I was missing that binary driver's performance and decided to install the Ubuntu Hardy Heron beta on my spare partition to see what they've been up too. I was a pretty happy Ubuntu user before getting hired at Red Hat almost a year and a half ago, but I switched to Fedora to get a feel for RPM based systems once the job began to look promising. Having run Debian/Ubuntu for about 8 years I was a bit of a reluctant convert and griped about the usual yum/rpm things, but quite simply I have been anything but lacking on my Fedora desktop this past year.

So having spent a good deal of time in Ubuntu the past few weeks, the thing I'm most surprised by is how little I have to say about it. Yes the install was easy and yes I had support for the binary nvidia driver and proprietary audio/video formats with very nice and informative prompts, but we're seriously talking about behavior you can replicate with Fedora without even hitting the command line in about 5 minutes. It seems to boot up a little quicker but regular desktop performance with both distros is just awesome. apt still rocks but I've come to realize that yum does a fine job, and slightly slower software installs really don't phase me in the least. Synaptic was always nice in Debian but I believe Fedora 9 has introduced PackageKit as the default graphical package manager and I really quite like this, both for what it is now and what I expect it will be. (very vibrant project) Ubuntu continues to look pretty good although largely the same, I'd give the clear edge for appearance to Fedora but everything's themed so in the end who really cares. The Ubuntu beta was drastically more crash happy on x86_64 than F9 was but I can't really blame either side for this in the beta stage.

That's really all that came to mind. Mostly the experiment just taught me that technically speaking, I can do everything I want to *very* easily with both distros, but I've gradually become more comfortable with Fedora. Over the last year I've gotten a glimpse into the people, infrastructure, and company that makes Fedora tick and I like what I see. I enjoyed this Fedora is the New Ubuntu post today and it sums things up pretty good. Things are happening in Fedora, big things that appear there first and elsewhere much later. Even with such aggressive development and integration, it's still all delivered on a platform that's remarkably stable and user friendly. Granted Canonical has nowhere near the resources Red Hat does to throw back into community contributions, and perhaps their contribution is just bringing Linux to so many people in such a well polished package. Red Hat however does have those resources, and they're putting them to good use. I have to agree that while Ubuntu is an excellent distribution, there is something to be said for Fedora's fostering a community of contributors rather than consumers.

Maybe it's Fedora and maybe it's just the influence of the people I work with, but it's the first distribution I felt inclined to get involved with and it wasn't hard to do. I always assumed that if I stopped working for Red Hat I'd be a Ubuntu user again within a week. I no longer think that's the case.

In my never ending quest for the perfect Linux desktop I upgraded my main system from Fedore Core 6 to Fedora 7 test 3 late last week. Went pretty smooth after downloading the test 3 dvd and booting off it to do the upgrade, one major hiccup where grub didn't install properly and I couldn't boot the system. A quick boot into rescue mode and manual reinstall of grub did the trick. After that I had something like 900 packages to update, and mirrors weren't properly synced so a handful of missing packages held up the whole upgrade. It took me a few days to realize I could switch my yum repositories to the official Fedora site, in the meantime the system was kind of unstable so I installed a Ubuntu Feisty beta onto my secondary partition for something to use in the meantime and to get a feel for the other major front runner in my choice for a desktop OS.

I got my first Linux distribution online from my dorm room in the fall of 1999. Since that night Linux has meant a lot, an endless source of entertainment, a liberating tool for learning during my computer science degree, and a big factor in bringing me to my current position of employment. I've toyed with Red Hat, Debian, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and most recently Fedora. This post is a little background on those travels and why I'm starting to think about Debian once again. If I had children I'd subject them to this long boring story with no point instead, but I don't.

A few years back I was prone to spells of obsessively installing and re-installing various Unix-based operating systems on my desktop at all hours of the night, trying to pick one that I was completely satisfied with. This could go on for a few days, sometimes switching back and forth between distros multiple times a night. Eventually I decided it was too much of a waste of time and vowed to just pick the solution that let me work with the least amount of hassle. After stints with Debian, Red Hat, Gentoo, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, I eventually found Ubuntu a couple years ago.