Everyday Fedora
On first boot, Fedora pops open a wizard to ask a few final questions. You'll be given a chance to enable a software firewall--very nice indeed, and Ubuntu could learn something here. You'll also (finally) create your user account and password, and confirm your sound settings.
You'll also get a chance to review the system's SELinux settings. SELinux is a security feature originally developed by the NSA, and you can choose to disable it or leave its default settings in place. I chose the latter and never heard a peep from SELinux; but if you find (as some people do) that SELinux gets in your way, you can easily disable it via the System, Administration menu on the Fedora desktop.
When you finally reach the Fedora log-in screen for the first time, it may feel like fairy-tale land, what with the billowing clouds and the hot-air balloons on display. This theme, which always makes me think Peter Pan, is also waiting for you on your desktop once you've logged in, along with the standard Gnome setup of one panel across the top of the screen and another along the bottom. In Fedora's case, the top panel is for launching programs, switching users (a very nice feature, right where it belongs, too), setting the volume, selecting a wireless network, and interacting with the Gnome equivalents of what Windows users call system tray icons.
The bottom panel provides a taskbar, a Show Desktop button, a virtual workspace switcher, and a Trash applet. Ubuntu Linux introduced the Trash applet to the Gnome world out of necessity, there being no Trash icon on the Ubuntu desktop. Fedora places its Computer, Home folder, and Trash icons on the desktop, so why also a Trash applet in the bottom panel? I couldn't say.
Click any of those icons to start exploring your system, and you get Nautilus, the Gnome file manager, in "spatial mode," in which a new window pops up for every folder you visit. I love this behavior (perhaps because I cut my GUI teeth on old Macintoshes, which also behaved this way) but many folks don't; in fact, Ubuntu turns it off by default, and you can do the same via System, Preferences, Personal File Management. Seek out the 'Always open in browser windows' option on the Behavior tab.
OpenOffice.org was not installed on my test system; I imagine that this is because I went with the smaller CD-based installer. Thus did Fedora's package management tools get their first test. I selected Applications, Add/Remove Software; a dialog box came up, saying I needed to enter my root password to run 'pirut'. Uh, okay. Then I got a friendly window (friendly, yes, informative, not so much--and yowza, why are those fonts so big?) named Package Manager, and I could easily select OpenOffice.org for installation.
The Package Manager downloaded and installed the office suite without a hitch, although, oddly, the new entries in the Applications menu had generic labels like 'Word Processor' and 'Spreadsheet'.
In fact, this foolishness is scattered throughout the Applications menu. Pidgin, the venerable IM client that was until recently known as Gaim, is listed simply as 'Instant Messenger'. The GIMP, on the other hand, is not listed as 'Image Editor', but as 'The GIMP'. Firefox has it both ways, appearing as 'Firefox Web Browser'.
Members of the Gnome community have disagreed for years about how these listings should appear; Fedora demonstrates that the debate rages on. (Ubuntu, on the other hand, has chosen a side in the fight and has mostly standardized its menu entries, providing the name of the application as well as a hint to its purpose, similar to the Firefox entry in Fedora.)
I used the Package Manager to download several other favorite Linux apps, and everything was fine until I booted the machine on my second day of testing. After a while, I saw a text screen that read: 'The display server has been shut down about 6 times in the last 90 seconds. It is likely that something bad is going on. Waiting for 2 minutes before trying again on display :0.'
Now then. I'm a longtime Linux user, so I understood what this message was telling me. But a newbie would have no chance at all. What is a display server? What do you mean, 'something bad is going on'? Oh crap, have I been hacked? Of course not, but this message isn't going to put a novice's mind at ease. It's exactly the sort of message people use to make the point that Linux isn't ready for the masses yet.
At any rate, I knew what the message meant, but I knew how to fix the problem only on systems built in the Debian style--Ubuntu, for example. Troubleshooting this particular problem on a Red Hat-ish Linux is different, and I wasn't up to speed. Google wasn't turning up answers for me, either; in fact, I was blown away by the fact that as I searched, even when I specified "Fedora 7" in my queries, I kept getting results for Ubuntu users, a clear sign of Ubuntu's popularity.
Ultimately I gave up (embarrassing to admit, but these things happen when you write on deadline) and tried to reinstall Fedora. That didn't go well, either. When I booted up the Live CD and ran the installer, it reported, 'The partition table on device sda was unreadable'--sda being the device name for the first hard drive, as far as Fedora is concerned. It then gave me the option of initializing the entire drive, blowing away all partitions, including the Windows one. Sigh. The Fedora installer was the last application to touch the partition table; how did it manage to render it unreadable? I couldn't say.
I finally got myself up and running again (the details are boring and irrelevant) for a bit more poking around. I found that I could easily access shared resources on the network here at PC World HQ, but I didn't seem to have a way to connect to printers attached to Windows servers, nor could I find a way to share folders from my Fedora desktop on the network. Perhaps it's just that I know the Ubuntu way of doing things and am looking in the wrong places, but, feeling pretty confident that I covered all the bases, I chalk this up to a matter of focus. Fedora seems geared toward environments where all the machines are running Fedora (or at least some flavor of Linux); Ubuntu seems more ready to be at home in whatever environment you drop it into.
Lastly, let me address the topic of "batteries." As I've mentioned many times before, most Linuxes--especially the ones you download for free--don't come with support for proprietary formats built in. Proprietary formats include DVDs, Flash content on the Web, MP3 audio files, and more. Fedora supports none of these formats out of the box; to add support, you end up doing some legwork that is similar to what you'd do with other distributions.
I'm not aware of any Fedora equivalent of Automatix (the automated battery installer for Ubuntu); you're probably going to spend some time on the command line getting this work done. Like everything else I've noted here, this arrangement is a result of Fedora's focus: Fedora is very Free Software-centric--far more so than Ubuntu, which ships with some proprietary components (including 3D graphics drivers) that Fedora steadfastly eschews on principle.
Fedora is solid, and the people who use it and hack on it love it, and I don't think these people are crazy in the slightest. I do think, however, that Ubuntu, because of its different focus, ends up being a more inviting environment for Linux newcomers. With that thought, I'll end this column (which wasn't supposed to be about Ubuntu but ended up kinda being about Ubuntu) with a promise: Next month, Free Agent will have no Linux at all. How's that for a tease? Until then, stay as Free as you can.
Matthew Newton is PC World's QA Engineer and unofficial Linux guru. Which of Linux's Big Three desktop environments is your favorite? What secrets have you uncovered? What's your biggest Linux gripe? Speak Freely in the Comments section below!
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