[smc-discuss] Review of Fedora 10 beta

[Santhosh Thottingal]

A nice review of  Fedora 10 beta by Manilal

http://libregeek.blogspot.com/2008/10/quick-glance-at-fedora-10-beta.html


"
Note: This article is not a comprehensive review of all the features  
in Fedora 10 beta.

The Fedora 10 beta or more precisely Fedora 9.92 was released on 30th  
September 2008. I decided to give it a try using Xen virtualization in  
Fedora 9, as I don't want to install a "bleeding edge" distro in my  
desktop. But unfortunately, Fedora 9 has an issue with Xen  
Virtualization and the only work around was to get it installed  
through qemu. The documentation at the Fedora wiki is enough to get it  
started.

However, I had a bad luck with with CD-ROM image, except that I was  
able to run anaconda. The first thing I noticed is the Malayalam  
strings in anaconda interface was not properly displayed. I discussed  
this matter in the IRC channel of SMC, and filed a bug in Redhat  
Bugzilla. I was also struck with another bug when I tried to disable  
the installation media and use only the Rawhide repository. The good  
news is that Fedora developers responded quickly to the two bug  
reports. Since I didn't bothered to download minimal set of the CD-ROM  
images, I decided to proceed with netinstall image available at Fedora  
download server.

A fresh installation attempt using the netinstall image was  
problematic. But after several failed attempts I could connect to the  
fedora mirrors and start the installation. The installation took more  
than 4 hours. All the packages where downloaded from Internet and qemu  
environment was also slow. At the end anaconda hanged with the message  
"installing kernel-2.6.xx... ". I just closed the qemu window and boot  
the newly installed system using the following command:

# qemu fedora.qcow -boot c -net nic -net user -m 512 -localtime -no-kqemu

The graphical boot loader, rhgb has been replaced by Plymouth and if  
you press ESC key, then you can view the entire boot messages. After  
several minutes of wait, I was able to login to the new Fedora 10  
desktop. may be the virtualized environment degraded the performance  
of the desktop.

As soon as I logged in, the first major change I noticed is the new  
Echo-Icon theme. The icon set is great and gave the desktop an elegant  
look and feel.


Malayalam Support

I was curious about the Malayalam rendering and language support.  
Fortunately, Malayalam rendering was perfect with the patches from SMC  
and the new Malayalam font, Meera developed by SMC itself. Mozilla  
Firefox 3 and OpenOffice.org 3.0 rendered Malayalam perfectly.  
However, in OpenOffice there were some issues with some complex  
conjucts. But I won't think that these are used frequently in  
Malayalam content.

The font size problem which was a major issue in the prior release was  
resolved and it's really cool to see Malayalam on the desktop without  
any rendering errors.

Fedora also has 7 other unicode Malayalam fonts - smc-anjalioldlipi,  
smc-kalyani(previously MalOtf), smc-rachana, smc-raghumalayalam,  
smc-dhyuthi, samyak-malayalam and lohit-malayalam. However, I'm not  
sure whether the issues with lohit-malayalam is resolved.

The input method configuration is also very easy. The im-chooser  
application guided me to configure all the required input methods in  
different languages. There are 4 Input schemes for Malayalam -  
inscript, itrans, mozhi and swanalekha.

I think Fedora 10 may be the first GNU/Linux distribution with  
complete Malayalam rendering and input methods.

Other Applications

Fedora 10 comes loaded with GNOME-2.24 which provides many robust  
desktop applications. The prominent change is the inclusion of Empathy  
instant messenger which supports gtalk(voice and video), yahoo and  
several other IM protocols.

I was also curious about the webkit powered Epiphany. But the webkit  
switch was not complete and the version 2.24 still uses the Gecko  
engine. Visit here for more details.

This release also has better webcam support through the GNOME  
application called Cheese.

There is also some menu re-arrangements in the new desktop. The  
Dictionary application have been moved to the Office section, earlier  
it was included in the Accessories section.

To summarize, I believe that Fedora 10 is a distribution which is  
worth waiting for. Here is the schedule. The stable release is planned  
for November 2008.
"


--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് - എന്റെ കമ്പ്യൂട്ടറിനു് എന്റെ ഭാഷ 
സംരംഭം: https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/smc
വെബ്‌സൈറ്റ് : http://smc.org.in  IRC ചാനല്‍ : #smc-project @ freenode
പിരിഞ്ഞു പോകാന്‍: smc-discuss-unsubscribe at googlegroups.com
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---