Fedora 17 'Beefy Miracle' Explored!

FREEDOM. FRIENDS. FEAUTURES. FIRST. is the philosophy of Fedora Project and they have stayed true to it with their latest and highly anticipated Fedora 17 'Beefy Miracle'.

Fedora 17 ships with the latest Gnome-Shell 3.4.1 and it is fast. As with this release Gnome-Shell will work on most hardware through software rendering so everybody can enjoy and use it. Speed is nothing without stability and Fedora 17 is quite good in that department as I have had only few crashes that were application specific and overall the system feels solid.

Fedora 17 is features packed and I would recommend that you check the Features List to get the lowdown on them.
In addition to the main Desktop Edition(Gnome), Fedora 17 is also available with KDE/Xfce/LXDE spins and all the ISO's are under 700MB.

Firefox 12.0 is your default web browser, Evolution is your mail client, Empathy is your instant messaging client, Transmission take care of of your Torrent downloading. Rhythmbox is your audio player, Movie Player(Totem) for your Videos, Brasero as your Disc Burner and Cheese for your Web cam stuff. There is no office suite by default but you can easily install the one you want from the Add/Remove Software.

If(like me) you don't fancy the Add/Remove Software then first install Yumex as it is fast, provides you the option to update your system, installing/removing packages, managing repositories, shows your Yum history and more. You can easily install yumex from the Add/Remove Software or with the following command “beesu yum -y install yumex”.

Chromium is not in the repositories so if you want it you will have to download the Chrome Rpm from here and install it(right click on the file and select Software Install).

The nice thing about Fedora 17 with the latest Gnome-Shell is that the whole system feels highly integrated. The Online Accounts gives you the option of connecting your Google, Facebook and Windows Live accounts to your system.

I had connected my Google accounts and then the system automatically configured Empathy, Evolution and Documents with that account.

Documents provides you documents from your Documents folder and your connected online accounts like it accessed files my Google Drive when I had my Google account connected and it does all that while looking super sleek. 

It also allows you to search and classify them, watch them in full screen, print it directly from there and open them in the respective default software for them. The documents in the Documents application are also show up in your Desktop Search.

Fedora offers you the pure Gnome-Shell and FREE Software experience so Flash and similar non-free codecs/software isn't present in the repositories, you have no extensions running, Right Click on the desktop will not work, there is only the close button on the title bar, the “move to trash” shortcut is Ctrl+Delete instead of just Delete and Adwaita is your default theme.

Your mileage in the Defaults dept. may vary depending on whether you are a person who likes a clean/minimalist experience or whether you like a highly tweaked/out of the box experience. I for one liked the minimalist experience as it offers you the chance to shape the system in the way you want and I found Nautilus looking quite classy with Adwaita & Gnome icons.

There are easy workaround available for the defaults mentioned above. 
The first thing that you would want to do is install the “gnome-tweak-tool”. To enable right click on the desktop, launch Advanced Settings and turn on “Have file manager handle the desktop” from Desktop. To enable maximise, minimise on the title bar, select “All” in “Arrangement of buttons on the title bar” from Shell. To install extensions go to the https://extensions.gnome.org/ and install what all you like.


To get flash and other nonfree codecs/software one has to add the Rpm Fusion repositories and then install that stuff from it but an application AutoPlus makes it much simpler. Run the following command ” su -c 'yum -y --nogpgcheck install http://dnmouse.org/autoplus-1.4-5.noarch.rpm' “ in terminal and you will have autoplus installed. 

Launch autoplus and install what all you need.

To revert “Move to Trash” to the Delete key, run the following command “gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface can-change-accels true”. Now select a file or folder in Nautilus, then hover the "Move to trash" menu item in Nautilus (under "Edit") and press the DELETE key twice.

Then run the following command in terminal “gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface can-change-accels false”
Check this article if you want to see the video of how it is to be done.

All in all Fedora 17 provides you Pure Gnome-Shell experience, is stable and fast, comes with latest FREE Software and development tools and is backed by the great Fedora project community.
You can download it from here.
If you have any comments/questions/suggestions please feel free to contact me via the comments section, Google+ or twitter. Also if you like what you have read, do share it with others.

Fuduntu 2012.2 Explored!

Most of you will get the connection between two popular distributions that lead to the name Fuduntu but I will mention it anyways. Fuduntu began as a distribution that wanted to give its users the base of Fedora but with user friendly approach of Ubuntu. Fuduntu was originally based on Fedora 14 but they forked themselves when Fedora 14 reached the end of its life cycle and became Independent and a Rolling Release distro .That will be the history lesson for today and we come to the latest Fuduntu 2012.2 which was released last month.

 

Gnome 2 is Fuduntu's Desktop Environment and they are committed to providing Gnome 2 to its users for as long as it will be humanly possible. Gnome 2 in combination with the superb Avant Window Navigator that takes care of your task management and application launchers gives you an aesthetically pleasing user experience that is highly productive.

The Fuduntu 2012.2 ISO both 32-bit and 64-bit are 900MB+ but with that you get a nice selection of software and media codecs that enables you in playing your media files out of the box.

Chromium is you default web browser, Pidgin for your instant messaging, Dropbox for your cloud related services, Tomboy Notes for your note taking, Shotwell Photo Manager, Banshee Media Player, VLC media player and more.

The favourite of many(including me) Nautilus Elementary is your File Manager in Fuduntu and it goes without saying that it looks plus works beautifully.

In Office you only have Google Docs which is basically a launcher wrapped in Chromium that takes you to Google Docs/Drive. Note that you can easily install the latest LibreOffice 3.5.3.2 from the Add/Remove Software(Gnome Package Manager).

The Gnome Package Manager works Okay but I would highly recommend installing Yum Extender(Yumex) which is an excellent choice for a GUI package manager and far more functional in my opinion.

It is fast, provides you the option to update your system, installing/removing packages, managing repositories, shows your Yum history and more.

You can easily install yumex from the Add/Remove Software or with the following command “beesu yum -y install yumex”.

One thing that I generally face on Fedora and it was no different on Fuduntu is that after a fresh installation, running Software Update takes ages. In case you also face this or just want to do it faster, use the following commands in terminal :- “yum list updates” which display the list of the updated software and “beesu yum update” to download and install all updates.

Fuduntu has been highly stable in my usage with the only exception being Audacious which for some reason doesn't wants to play audio files but I installed DeaDBeeF and everything is fine. Note that Banshee also plays audio files and there is no problem in Fudunutu related to audio playback, it is only that I like lightweight audio players and Audacious is my first choice when it comes to them.

Fuduntu's Desktop effects worked out of the box for me and it was pleasant surprise to see the Desktop Cube back in action.

 Also the Expo is set to get activated when you move your cursor to the top-right and which makes switching between windows seamless and intuitive.

As I have mentioned above Fuduntu is an independent distribution, which means they manage the software packages themselves, which gives them the freedom to provide the latest software quickly to their users. For example GIMP,Chromium,LibreOffice and most software are at the latest in the Fuduntu-Stable repository and you can always enable Fuduntu-Testing or Fuduntu-Unstable to get more bleeding edge software. Sadly this also means that some software may not be present in the repositories, like Mumble is not in the repos.

This is the only downer but definitely not a deal breaker as I have clearly developed a liking for Fuduntu and it is on my recommended distros list from now on.

The Beautiful Setup of Fuduntu plus its speed and the rolling release model makes it an excellent distribution that I will highly recommend to anybody who is looking for a distro with these qualities. 

You can download Fuduntu 2012.2 from here. 

If you have any comments/questions/suggestions please feel free to contact me via the comments section, Google+ or twitter. Also if you like what you have read, do share it with others.