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I started running FVWM-Crystal on Ubuntu 6.10. Tired of the KDE/Gnome wars? Looking for something different? FVWM Crystal is absolutely beautiful, lightweight and fast. If it were a quarterback, it would be Micheal Vick to Gnome’s Joey Harrington. I was going to review it, but in my research I found a fantastic review that I cannot beat. It covers it all. Here it is:

Read the review at Polishlinux.org.

Since that review covered everything, eliminating the need for another, I decided to get back to my Fedora Core 6 review. I just couldn’t get excited about it, no fault to Fedora. Does the world really need the 67th review of Fedora 6? I couldn’t convince myself it did. Instead, I will give a micro-review.

• Installation was painless. It took 20 minutes and went exactly like a modern distro install should.
• Option to add repositories during install is new and a nice addition.
• I liked the new graphics. I am tired of the icons. Me and every other reviewer on earth.
• 55 updates greeted my install. They took forever. This was 2 weeks after the release.
• The package manager acted flakey. Yumex (an alternative graphical installer) crashed often. Yum on the command line worked well.
• Post Novell’s announcement, I appreciated the Free as in Freedom stance of Fedora.
• That said, I installed the Nvidia beta drivers, MP3 codecs, etc… from freshrpms.net. It was as easy as doing it as any other distro. No problems.
• I found out there is an alternate KDE for Fedora, I installed that. More on that soon, it is a whole article.
• I still do not care for Fedora’s administrative packages. I couldn’t find them using KDE. It is probably my fault, but it should be easy.
• Compiz and the 3D desktop did not work well for me at all. For lack of a better term, it seemed half-assed.

Overall, Fedora has done a very nice job. Graphical package management still is flakey after all these years. It is fine from the command line. If you are a new user and looking for an easy distribution, I can easily recommend it. Personally, I just could not get into it. It seems to lack something that I cannot define other than “excitement”. I constantly found myself going back to Ubuntu. When I do figure it out I will give it a short write up.

Finally:

If you use Beryl and are excited with it, I would like to encourage you to donate to the team. They are doing a great job. I am having fun using the eye-candy. I find it hard to work outside of the 3D environment now, something I completely did not expect. Here is a link to the thread that has donation information.

Beryl Donations.

New content is slower to come than I thought. I am focused on reviews and interviews at the moment. I am trying to integrate a forum into the site. I thank all of you that visit this site. If there is anything you would like to see here, drop me a line.

I am working on upcoming content, stay tuned…

I decided to give Fedora 6 a run. RedHat is seeming like the underdog lately, with Oracle undercutting them. The Novell and Microsoft unholy alliance looks to be a shot right at RedHat. I will review it after I have run it for a while. In the meantime, here are some helpful links if you are running Fedora 6 (Zod).

A personal Fedora 6 Install guide. Pay attention to the IPv6 section if your web browsing seems very slow. The directions fixed it for me.

KDE for Fedora. I see people complain constantly about the state of KDE on Fedora. UnleashKDE seems to be a response to those complaints.

Want Firefox 2.0? This solution worked for me, I keeps FF 1.5 and installs 2.0 so they co-exist.

Why can’t I play mp3’s out of the box?! Here is a thoughtful answer.

Rallying the troops. Warren Tagomi responds on his personal blog about recent events.

So far, 24 hours in, my experience with Fedora 6 is positive. I would rank it under Mandriva One and tied with Ubuntu 6.10. That is a far cry from how I have felt before.

How do you feel about Fedora, in light of recent events?

I am not the biggest fan of Fedora, but their latest is out. Apparently the servers are down, so here is a link to the torrents:

Fedora torrents 

I have been pretty sick for the last week, will have some updates to the site very soon.

Thanks.