First impressions of Fedora Cambridge

Yesterday I decided to download and install Fedora 10, also known as Fedora Cambridge. Fedora is based on Red Hat Linux, which was divided few years ago into two systems: Red Hat (commercial, for money) and Fedora (open-source, free). I was always used to Debian based systems, firstly Debian Sarge, than Ubuntu and Xubuntu. I decided to try Fedora and give it a shot.

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The design of Fedora is so precious. Even the installer looks neat. Some people think that installation of Linux is only for experts and geeks, but it's not true anymore. I bet that a hen would handle it if you put some grain around the enter button. Fedora Cambridge also includes functions to encrypt your storage, which were improved.





Plymouth is a new graphical boot process which fires up Fedora in about 15 seconds. Unfortunately I'm not lucky and I can't enjoy the graphics, but if you have AMD/ATI graphic card you will see this (youtube link) every time you boot. I have to manage with four colors loader. Moreover what is not typical, plymouth starts the X server on the first virtual server (ctrl+alt+f1).

After the system is booted, you are introduced by a friendly melody. The default Solar wallpaper and theme are just fine. I also turned on the desktop effects. If you know Vista Aero, this looks very similar. Generally Fedora 10 is really well designed and friendly.



There is still a problem with playing movies whose codecs aren't free. Those xvid/mp4/wmv video etc. and also audio mp3 formats aren't supported by default. But this can be solved quite easily, you need to download "bad" and "ugly" codecs. Go to the "add/remove application" and look for "gstreamer-plugins" than find those bad and ugly and your videos should work fine.



Moving your mouse to the top right corner causes this organization of windows so you can select which one you want. I like this idea and I find it very useful mainly if you have more windows opened.



OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the default office package in Fedora 10. The Writer application seems pretty good.



The new GIMP 2.6 is a good alternative of Photoshop. The new feature causes minimizing all gimp's dialogs together.



I absolutely recommend you to try Fedora 10 or even set it as your main OS. Fedora 9 was full of bugs but Fedora 10 tries to by a powerful system for your machine and it tries really well.