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Fedora 7 Test 4

First Impressions

May 6, 2007 — Now that Fedora 7 Test 4 has been out for a couple of week, I decided it was time to publish my first impressions about it. So, I downloaded the dvd ISO and burnt it on to a disk. I ran sha1sum verified that it was correct based on the published sum and proceeded to install it on the hard drive on the second bay of my computer. This bay is useful for just this purpose to test out beta software. The download was uneventful considering that I was not doing so the day it was released which was April 26, 2007 (see the release schedule in the resource section). The whole download all 3GB of it took about an hour on my connection. Depending on your internet connection, your mileage may vary.

I popped the dvd into the drive and proceed to reboot. Note that on this computer, you can switch the drive boot order and so, I set it to boot from the dvd and set the first disk to the test drive. It booted fine and found all the requisite hardware without me having to do any manual loading. I must say that anaconda seems like a very mature installer and not so sure whether it is necessary to test it any further or even any need to tweak it any further.

So, after booting up, Anaconda presented the familiar screen to install Fedora 7. Though I must say the graphics have changed completely. Gone are the (what I considered ugly) slithering pipes, replaced with soaring balloons. May want to fly away in them over the cloud tops. So, I started the installation at around noon. I selected the language and then the drive to install it on.

The first thing you notice is that the IDE drives are no longer named hda, hdb etc., but sda, sdb etc. It presented a menu with both my hard drives checked to be erased and create a default layout. I quickly made sure that my other drive (now called sdb) is unchecked and proceeded to create my own layout since I didn't want my home partition even on the test drive to be erased. I needed the software there as we shall see soon.

So, I set it to reformat the boot partition and the / partitions. I asked it mount the last partition on /home and leave it as is (see screenshots). I went through the rest of the screens to select the network connection to activate at boot time — I didn't want any — since anaconda is unable to locate my wireless network as it is a broadcom card. I then selected my timezone, told it that my hardware clock used UTC. I did not want the default selection of "office & Productivity" preferring to do my own customization. I went through the various screens of picking gnome desktop and then finally I was ready to do the installation. The time now was 12:25 PM. The installer started to resolve all dependencies.

The dependencies took about 6 minutes to resolve. Of course this will depend on how fast your computer is and how many packages you decided to select during customization. In my case it was about 1331 packages it needed to install. So, the actual installation of packages started at about 12:37 PM. The time in between was to complete all the transactions. Having done this, I let is do the installation. I must say that the installation was very fast. At 1:00 PM, it told me that it was all done, I should eject the dvd and reboot. So, the whole installation process till first boot was 35 minutes. I must say that was very fast.

I was now ready for first boot. I am impressed so far. I rebooted and I see that even the graphics boot menu has found my widescreen monitor and adjusted accordingly to a screen of 1680x1050 resolution screen. Nice!

First Boot

The moment of truth. The system booted correctly unlike the issues we had during Fedora Core 6 test 3. No more infinite loops. You are presented with the various menus. You are presented with the GPL. Then we set the date and time; You make sure that you sound card has been identified correctly. Then you have security and Selinux. I turn off Selinux and it tells me about dire consequences etc. As you know, Fedora does not discover configure my weireless card and so we don't have an internet connection at this time.

The system boots up and we are presented with a beautiful wallpaper of the same soaring balloons. I must congratulate the designers since I think that this is a beautiful wallpaper. One sticky point, it was all stretched. Considering that the radeon driver correctly identified the video resolution, I would have expected that the wallpaper would be selected correctly. It is a minor issue as I changed the wallpaper since one is available for the resolution of this computer. There that is done. Now it looks just right (see screenshot). You are presented with a nice clean interface like in previous versions of Fedora. I have to say I like it so far and hopefully there will be no change to this aspect of Fedora 7 when the final version comes out at the end of May.

So, for the installer, installation, the first boot, it feels like a solid performer. I would have definitely given it a 5 start rating except for the minor issue with the wallpaper. So, I think I will give it a 4 1/2 stars so far.

In the next installation let's talk about using the test 4 after using it. So, I mentioned in the installation of a new kernel, we will instal the wireless drivers and of course the latest ATI drivers to get 3D and be able to use Google Earth etc.

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