A first look at Fedora 10

Recently Fedora 10 beta was released. I took the opportunity to update my rather old Fedora 8 to a more shiny and new system – with KDE > KDE 3.5.

Fedora 10 Beta was released more than a week ago. Among other things it features:

• New NetworkManager with connection sharing
• Improved printer handling
• Remote virtualization and easier virt storage
• Sectool, an auditing and security testing framework
• RPM 4.6, the first big RPM change in several years

Especially the first and the third part are pretty important to me since prefer to have networking “made easy” and also plan to get more experience regarding virtual machines. However, for me all the other goodies from Fedora 9 are also new since I never came around using Fedora 9 after some very bad experiences. So I decided to take the beta and give it a try with all goodies together: KDE 4.1, encrypted main partitions, kvm, new NetworkManager, PackageKit, etc.

And so far I must say I’m very pleased. The system pretty much works and KDE 4.1.x is really amazing. Of course, there are still quite some glitches, but after all, Fedora 10 is still in development, and many glitches seem to be X related and and my Nvidia card with the binary drivers is certainly a good candidate to be the source of some problems.

Some glitches

The main glitch in the system is the same reason why I haven’t yet filled bug reports against the glitches: I have no realiable browser. Firefox is crashing all the time with segmentation faults (unusable for more than maybe two minutes, but very hard to exactly reproduce), Konqueror sometimes seems to kill the DNS/internet connection somehow (!), and Arora often takes seconds to start actually loading a page – and additionally cannot log me in to my wordpress.com account. The fact that the NetworkManager applet (Gnome one) dies occasionally isn’t helping.
Another problem right at the start was that the GDM login manager somehow didn’t realize that I switched the keyboard layout to German. It took me quite some time to figure that out. Also, if I deactivate quiet boot and rhgb (and I always do that) the password dialog for my encrypted file system is lost in the kernel output.

The good things

Besides these annoying glitches (well, Beta is Beta) the system is stable – and promising: I’m looking forward to test the network connection sharing, which seems to be nicely integrated with the rest of the system. Also, the encryption is of course very important – and since Luks is used it would make sense to provide a GUI to easily add and remove other keys for the decryption. Last but not least KDE 4.1 is important for me – maybe the most important reaon of all. Even with Nvidia drivers it is working surprisingly well, but more about that later.

Conclusion

To summarize, Fedora 10 is shaping up quite nicely, and the Beta already runs much better for me than the Fedora 9 release. However, I wouldn’t advise normal users to start using Fedora 10 because it is still in heavy development – too much is still changing at the moment. I for example got an update right before the weekend which made it impossible to run the binary Nvidia driver on the system and had strange side effects when I connected an external monitor – sad if you want to watch DVD in the evening and show off KDE 4’s bling the next morning.