October 10, 2007 — I decided to give Fedora 8 test 3 a spin to explore and test what is new and how it stacks up to Fedora 7. By and large I would say that there are definite improvements and there are still some disappointments which may be fixed by the time F8 goes production. This version is the feature freeze version and from now till its release, there will only be bug fixes as is mentioned in the announcement from Jeremy Katz (see resources).
So, I downloaded the DVD image from one of the mirrors mentioned in the release note. It was surprisingly easy to download considering that I did the download on October 4 evening. Perhaps people are waiting for the final version or are content with Live CD which has also been released. I burnt the image onto a DVD which is quite easy to do from Nautilus; you right-click on the ISO file and burn to disk. Linux has come a long way from the days when you had to use obscure command lines and sacrifice a rubber chicken.
As with previous versions of Fedora, installation is really a breeze. I think the Fedora community really has to be commended in getting installation to such advanced stage that it should be very easy for a relative newcomer to Linux to be able to install it without too much technical knowledge. You can virtually let it make all the decisions for you and let it fly.
However, (you knew there was a however), in my case, I had to make a few decision considering the following facts: 1. This laptop has 2 hard drives, truly wonderful if you are testing out software and loading beta operating system (OS). You can also swap out hard drives very easily. So, if you have Windows on one of the drives and are afraid that it will get hosed, just swap it out. It is literally 3 screws. Anyway, I chose to install F8 on the second hard drive, but I wanted to have a home partition as well. So, I elected to have my own configuration in terms of where I wanted to load F8. Anyway, once I did the partitioning, I let it continue the installation. See the screenshots. I also elected to install the desktop, development software and webservers. I did not want to be bothered with having to worry about customization at this stage and also go hunting for kernel headers to install ndiswrapper for my wireless card. It took 12 minutes to make all the selections and take pictures in between. Then the installer told me that it was ready to install. My selection had picked 1425 packages in all. The installation started at 2:38 PM. I was getting ready to sit for awhile to get it all installed. The installation ended at 3:14 PM. Now that was fast for installing everything! Note that your mileage will vary depending on your memory, processor speed, etc.So, please use these as ballpark figures.
I was now ready to reboot. Fedora ejected the disk and was ready to reboot.You immediately notice that there has been a change in the artwork. With this release F8 continues with the tradition of the "blue theme" that started with Fedora Core 6. We see the opening screen and in F8, you no longer get the helpful messages about what is being loaded. You can see the details or hide the details.
The Welcome screen takes you through the first few steps, like licence information, firewall setting, SELinux, etc. You can pretty much breeze through the whole thing, except SELinux. I always disable it though it is not possible to get rid of it. One interesting distinction is that the sound card detection is no longer part of the first boot. Once you create a new user, go ahead and do that now or you can always addusers later as well. Now the system will reboot for some of the settings to take effect. This is fine and the system rebooted showing you the familiar GRUB screen but with the new artwork. See resources.
The first thing you notice as stated above is that the theme is quite different from Fedora 7. No more balloons taking you away over the mountains. You are back to an abstract background with blue merging into a purple haze with a rising white cloud. Pretty nice. the interface is nice and clean. The theme is quite pleasant. The blue color permeates through the whole system. The borders are almost translucent and slightly raised to give it a 3d effect to the window in focus. The off-focus windows have a grayish border and are also raised and have a 3d effect. You can now change fonts from the same applet in the systems menu: System --> Preference --> Look and feel --> Appearance. All the theme related changes are consolidated in this applet where you can change the background, font and the interface - see screenshot.
You can also change your picture etc. all from the system menu. You can as usual, assign all kinds of keyboard shortcuts, again from the System menu, go to Preference --> Personal --> keyboard Shortcuts. Note that if you try to select a default printer without installing a printer, it does not take you to the "install print" dialog box but gives you an empty list. I wish this simple usability feature could have been added. You can also do a whole lot of administrative tasks from here as well. However, if you are not logged in as root, you will be asked for root password which makes a lot of sense.
There are also a lot of changes with this version. You now get Gnome Desktop version 2.20. Most of the changes though are under the hood since there are only superficial differences from the desktop in F7. Also, the kernel version is 2.6.23. There is also a new version of X11 Release 1.3. More about this later.
