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.
