Fedora

So I had a rather unfortunate event over the past two weeks. Upgraded my kernel – no matching kernel sources, boot up, dkms dies, fsck dies and my file system table gets trashed in the process. Fun.

/Thankfully/ I had just gotten around to installing rsync on my server and had run a few backups by that time so I didn’t loose much that was important. I just had the issue of no linux system and I honestly can’t be bothered to wipe this machine and re-install all four operating systems because I don’t really have the time to. So I’ve been trying things out in VirtualBox on Vista (which I haven’t booted into for about 4 months now). Suprisingly, it’s quite stable if I don’t mess with it and are careful about what you do, although I have noticed in the two weeks I’ve been using it performance has degraded somewhat.

Anyways, openSUSE isn’t really heading in a direction that suits me anymore – no plymouth, no KMS, no DRI2 are geared up for 11.2 and fighting some of the stuff that comes with it is starting to become a pain. If you don’t want to mess around too much though, openSUSE is a great distro – I recommend it over Ubuntu, it’s just my interests have changed.

I noticed that most of the awesome X Devs like Peter Hutterer and Kristian Hoegsberg (and let’s not forget Linus Himself!) are using Fedora, and I’ve heard it’s geared towards developers (being bleeding edge and all) – and I guess I’m not ready to delve into the DIY distro territory of Gentoo and Arch.

I’ve always craved this GDM setup – simple and functional. If I recall correctly, openSUSE has it now too.

I also want to try to move back to KDE as well because it has some pretty cool things coming up for it. Although, I’m finding it difficult somewhat.

Fedora also has nice support for other DE’s as well like XFCE and LXDE which I am also considering. (Although XFCE lacks support for gvfs…)

Surprisingly Compiz works under VirtualBox while running under Windows which is quite a testament to how far both open source software but also Virtualization software has come today. It runs at quite a decent framerate (120fps), there is support for ARB_fragment_program and it quite usable. The only glitch I’ve noticed so far is opacity related where blending does not occur properly. Oh well.

In the Compiz 0.9 development department I’ve been silently working on the Thumbnail plugin. It’s actually been quite a job considering the way it works and I’m also adding a few well deserved features like setting a thumbnail region hint (Sadly no EMWH spec for this yet, so I am doing it both for KDE and genericly), so that you can peek windows you have hovered the thumbnail over. Also, I should probably write an Aero Snaps-eqsue plugin so that Windows 7 doesn’t have anything on us on day one :P.

I’ll probably re-install my system in about 2 weeks during school break and during that time I should be able to do some compiz related work.

-Sm