Fedora 7 Moonshine – first impressions

I tested a release candidate of the new Fedora 7, code name Moonshine. As already pointed out, most big changes were under the hood and are not really visible to the user.

Fedora 7 comes along with a pretty impressive set of changes – however, the average user will not see most of them. Especially if he upgrades a highly personalized system like mine and additional runs KDE which traditionally does not get so many improvements in Fedora.

However, some things were notable: First of all several packages are update. The kernel is now tickless and you can start using PowerTop to check for evil processes. Also, my knetworkmanager features a new overview actually displaying the IP and other current information. However, support for additional network types like the new version of NetworkManager provides is not yet included. KDE 3.5.7 is not (yet) included, but k3b is provided in version 1.0. Also, Firefox finally is shipped in version 2.0, as is Thunderbird.
Another notable thing was the fact that I didn’t had to install the ipw2200 firmware: it comes with the distribution now. Very neat.

Also, as promised the device nodes of the IDE drives changed – now all my partitions have /dev/sdX nodes. I had to alter one or two scripts to deal with that, but it also showed me how useful labels are.

Of course, one of the largest changes, the merge of Extras and Core is invisible (despite the missing “core” in the name). First of all because the repository directories are still not opened yet and second because this has no direct effect to the average user. Strange, somehow, because quite a lot of effort went into this change.

And, another big change, the integration of the newest GNOME version, is something I can’t say much about since I hardly use GNOME ever. But you might want to read more about the new version here.

All over all, from the user point of view an evolutionary but very useful step to a new version of Fedora.