Review: Fedora 18 "Spherical Cow" GNOME

Although I have reviewed a number of Fedora remixes, I haven't reviewed proper Fedora since the very first review/comparison test I posted on this blog over 3 years ago. There are, however, a few reasons for me to be trying this out today.

GNOME 3/Shell Activities

Fedora is typically more for Linux users with intermediate levels of experience and comfort with Linux, as well as for developers and administrators who want to see what is coming in RHEL/CentOS. That said, it can sometimes make a good consumer-grade desktop distribution as well, as long as it is done right; that's why there are so many remixes of it out there. But that doesn't explain why this review exists. I am trying Fedora today because I have not checked out GNOME 3/Shell in a while. I am also trying it because the Anaconda installer is supposed to have been thoroughly revamped. But mostly, I am trying it out because as a physics student, the codename tickled me enough to give it another look. (For those who don't know, a popular joke about physics problems takes such modeling to its logical extreme by applying it to a cow milking: "Imagine that this cow is spherical and radiates milk isotropically...".)

I tried the live session through a live USB system made with MultiSystem. As the revamped installer is a new feature, I tried the installation as well through a 64-bit Linux Mint 13 LTS "Maya" Xfce live USB system made with MultiSystem as well. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

Review: Fuduntu 2012.1

I'm back! Thankfully it looks like too many people know about how bad the SOPA and PIPA bills are to not take action, and it looks like sponsors of those bills are dropping like European honeybees. Now let's get back to the main post.

I've reviewed Fuduntu a couple times before. There's a new release out, so I'm reviewing it now.

Fuduntu used to be based on Fedora, but then several months ago the lead developer announced that it would fork and maintain an independent codebase. This would serve two purposes: one would be to provide stable rolling releases, and the other would be to maintain GNOME 2 as long as possible. Indeed, Fuduntu uses not MATE, but good old GNOME 2.32.

I tested the live session using a live USB made with MultiSystem. I tested the installation in VirtualBox inside a Xubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" MultiSystem-made live USB host with 1024 MB of RAM allocated to the guest OS. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

Review: Scientific Linux 6.0 "Carbon"

Main Screen

I really wanted to do this review a while ago, but I couldn't because when I wanted to do it then, MultiSystem didn't recognize the then-newly-released Scientific Linux 6.0 live CD ISO file. Since then, there have been quite a few updates to MultiSystem, and this time I could make a Scientific Linux 6.0 live USB with MultiSystem.

So what is Scientific Linux? It's basically Red Hat Enterprise Linux, minus Red Hat branding (with Scientific Linux branding instead), plus repositories containing extra mathematical, scientific, and engineering software, plus some extra niceties. It was developed for Fermilab and CERN, so it's not really meant to be a home desktop distribution per se, but I did read a few reviews of Scientific Linux 5.X commenting favorably on its abilities in such environments, so I wanted to see if that would be true of version 6.0 as well. Plus, I have never tried more office/server-oriented relatives of Fedora, so this would be a new experience for me too.

As mentioned earlier, my main mode of testing was through a live USB made with MultiSystem. I also tested the installation in VirtualBox within the live USB session. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

Review: Sabayon 6 KDE

Sabayon needs no introduction here, considering I've reviewed 4 previous versions of it here. So why am I reviewing Sabayon 6 KDE?

Main Screen + Kickoff Menu

Well, the Sabayon developers have a laundry list of improvements for this new major release of Sabayon. The most significant, if you ask me, is the claim of huge improvements in speed and functionality to Sabayon's GUI package manager Entropy. Aside from that, the included and available programs are newer, and there are many other bug fixes and speed improvements to go around.

I tested Sabayon 6 KDE in a live USB made with UnetBootin. I tested the installation procedure in VirtualBox within the live USB system with 1024 MB of RAM allocated to the guest OS. Follow the jump to see what the latest release of Sabayon is like.

Review: Kororaa 14 "Nemo"

Main Screen + GNOME Main Menu

This review has been a long time coming. I actually wanted to include Kororaa in my comparison of Fusion and Fuduntu, but the final release of Kororaa only came a few days ago, and I felt it wouldn't be fair to compare two final products to a beta release of a distribution.

So what is Kororaa? Based on my previous statement, it would be pretty easy to guess that it's a Fedora remix. But it's actually a little more complicated than that. You see, Kororaa actually started life as an easy-to-use Gentoo derivative; it was basically Sabayon before (or maybe just around the same time as) Sabayon existed, and regular readers of this blog know from my numerous reviews of Sabayon that it is a Gentoo derivative that's supposed to be easy-to-use and that just works. After about 2 years, however, Kororaa went dormant, due, if I understand this correctly, to the developer not having enough time or resources to properly maintain a Gentoo derivative. He then found Fedora, and since then Kororaa has been a Fedora remix. Furthermore, while I believe that Gentoo-based Kororaa focused solely on KDE, Fedora-based Kororaa has both KDE and GNOME releases, both of which I will be testing in this post.

I tested these editions of Kororaa via a live USB system created with UnetBootin. I tested the installation procedure of the KDE edition via VirtualBox within the live session with 1024 MB of RAM allocated to the guest OS. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

Bad Experiences are Forever

This is a sort of follow-up and is opposite to the previous post. There are a couple things that I had bad experiences with that I should probably try out again; these things have probably left worse impressions on me emotionally than rationally.
First is Toyota. Toyota has had a rough couple years, starting with issues of premature rusting in its trucks' frames and leading up to the "unintended acceleration" fiasco. Through it all, it's managed to become #1 in sales, but this too has come at the cost of its quality; now, the parts it uses especially in the interiors of its cars are flimsier and aren't assembled with the same attention to detail as before. My family owned a 1988 Toyota Corolla, and it ran beautifully until 2004; it was solidly built, and the attention to detail was striking. Now, no more. That said, the unintended acceleration fiasco (which pushed my skepticism of Toyota over the edge) is finished and its new cars are pretty solidly built and competitive, so I really shouldn't instinctively turn me away from all Toyota products (though I'd still rather wait a few years before recommending their products to anyone again).
Next, Fedora. I tried the Fedora 11 "Leonidas" GNOME live CD about a year ago, and I loved it. I really liked the fact that it, unlike Linux Mint 7 "Gloria", detected all of my hardware out-of-the-box (including my graphics card and monitor at its native 2048 by 1536 resolution). So I decided to install it. That was a terrible idea: not only did it fail to install properly, it also managed to mess up my existing Linux Mint 7 partition at the same time. I tried again, and it still didn't work. I then decided to hold off until the next release. Version 12 "Constantine" was worse; no live CD or live USB I created (the usual way) would boot. That's when I gave up on Fedora. That said, just about a week ago, I and a friend of mine (who is a Red Hat/Fedora guru) installed Fedora 14 "Laughlin" GNOME on a mutual friend's laptop (which was suffering from a slow and malware-ridden installation of Microsoft Windows 7). The installation itself worked flawlessly, and aside from multimedia codecs (which was easily fixed through the handy program Autoten), everything worked out-of-the-box — Skype (i.e. webcam and mic), printing (and scanning), desktop effects, etc. Given this, I really shouldn't hesitate, yet I still do. Maybe it'll happen when Fedora does actually support NVidia's Optimus technology.
Finally come laptop touchpads. Wait, no — those are ergonomically inferior to external mice. Whoops! (Heh heh.)
So what are your thoughts on this? Do you also dislike things more emotionally than rationally? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Reflection: Sabayon 5.2 KDE

I said in my review of Sabayon 5.2 KDE that I was so pleased with the speed and features of the OS that I would install it. I did read some online forum posts on Sabayon 5.2 being a nice live DVD OS but not good for installation, but I figured that this person just had a bad day. I decided to give installation and full use a shot.
The former went smoothly. The latter went untested for reasons that you can read after the jump.