After installing Fedora 19 on my laptop, I found a few things look strange and rather new. Yeah, I was still in trusty Centy (RHEL) 4-5-6 era. Well, as far as work concern, right? As for laptop and home use, I could opt to some other distro like Mint. But Fedora is a sneak peek of future RHEL especially coming up release 7 which will be based on Fedora 19. So, it is always good to heads up with it. Here are some quick notes.
Significant changes
- Gnome 3 desktop – which focus more on touch interface
- Traditional SysV initd has replaced with systemd. Processes are controlling with
systemctl, SysV init scripts are still supported, inclusion of/rundirectory (now auto-mount USB drives are at/run/media) - Grub has replaced with version 2. Grub boot loader configuration are through
grub2-mkconfig. - Introduced YumGroupsAsObjects but reportedly broken on F19 and the workaround is to fall back to old way called ‘compat’ mode. Make sure to do this:
yum-config-manager --save --setopt=group_command=compat
Goody GNOME 3 shell extensions on Fedora
So, Linus was right. I went ahead with these Gnome 3 shell extensions to get back Genome 2 look and feel.
Since Gnome shell extension web is up there, Gnome tweak tool is not really essential now but good to have it installed.
yum install gnome-tweak-tool
Some other good Gnome shell extensions that I found are Dash to Dock and from this developer, gcampax. Actually, Gnome 3 UI/UX resemble a lot to Mac. I mean those exposé and dock as at the center of the UX.
Alternate desktop environment
Sure enough. Fedora has many desktop environments avaliable. If the disk space is not an issue then we can install all! I kind of like Mate desktop which resemble a good old Gnome 2 look and feel…
yum groupinstall "MATE Desktop" "Cinnamon Desktop" "Xfce Desktop" "LXDE Desktop" "KDE Plasma Workspaces" "Sugar Desktop Environment"
MATE Desktop spin
Yes, to avoid all the hassle and headache with Gnome3, just get the MATE Desktop live spin instead. Bonus with Compiz, the famous wobbly window and desktop effects!
http://spins.fedoraproject.org/mate-compiz/
Codecs to watch video, H.264, etc..
Another thing I have to do is to install codecs from RPM Fusion repo. Arch linux also has documentation about codecs.
Better font rendering
This is something similar to Windows ClearType enhancement. Follow the How to change Fedora’s font rendering to get an Ubuntu-like result or https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_Configuration. Or follow my gist.
