Upgrading my day to day operating system from Fedora Core 4 to Core 5 went pretty much as advertised. The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture was wrongly back in root mode only again, got the sound fixed working for me as user like last time, but like last time I have no idea why it does work.
Same issues with SELinux and Apache server as previous Fedora version, a simple chown on the user folders back to Apache and that’s all good, something that needs to be done along with a new hosts file entry anytime a new account is set up, no big deal setting in SELinux fixes it for good. Have Webmin installed, should grab the bash file from that so I can automate it, one of these days…
What has improved is the X Windowing system. It was lightning fast before compared to Win98 or WinXP, and we’re talking smoking fast here, about as close as one could possibly get to instant window activation without magic, blink and you’ll miss the window opening or closing. One can slow things down using animations, something I never cared for because I love that desktop speed, so except for the Command Line Interface didn’t use transparent windows much either, yet.
This is a slow system, only a Celeron processor and 512MB on board for RAM so it’s not much good for XP let alone the new Windows Vista, but the latest XOrg windowing system is friggen awesome on it, and everything is transparent now too. Still using the Mac screen saver for a desktop, love those blue swishes but have forgone desktop widgets; even though they are rather nice looking in their glassy eyed way… prefer everything crammed into a transparent taskbar at the bottom instead.
I did keep the glassy eyed Windows Vista icons with their glowing decorations, Microsoft did a nice rip-off from Mac and made them less cute-sy looking while making them “Aero” glass, it is a very classy looking OS coming out from Windows after Xmas and they should sell lots of them to those in the market for some new high powered hardware. Also kept were the shadows and menu transparencies, and the Linux font smoothing is still the best there is bar none.
The update itself takes about the same amount of time as an XP upgrade, (5 CD’s, but with that you get a complete C++ dev environment, 3 web servers, multiple databases, editors and thousands of other software titles included); it’s longer than a fresh install as everything has to be read, stored, and then written over or erased with the new configuration, a spare evening took care of that and some time fiddling the next day for the sound and Apache. All the documents in the home folder along with Firefox and email settings etc. were preserved, no problems there but was good to be forced to do a back-up for just in case anyways. No doubt the rotating cube desktops will run fine now, going to get around to installing that and wait for new hardware to do something like Looking Glass, and be happy with being years ahead of Windows Vista for now.