The Fedora Core 6 disaster
I’ve been using Fedora Core for a while now on my laptop, and also on several computers at home and work. In the past I’ve tested Fedora many times, but only Fedora Core 5 was good enough compared to other major Linux distros that I thought it deserved to be run as a primary OS (mostly due to the GNOME 2.14 desktop, which despite still some annoyances matured enough to actually be a useful desktop). I’ve been running with rawhide – Fedora Core’s development branch for a few months now and I really liked the direction that Fedora was taking and I expected Fedora Core 6 to be even better then Fedora Core 5 – even though the latest GNOME, 2.16, isn’t so much different from 2.14 (as 2.14 was from 2.12) it does fix most of the problems that were still present at the previous version, but more so Fedora have introduced a lot of really interesting technology under the hood, from getting hardware to work better and easier, through kernel 2.6.18 the inclusion of Xen and other interesting tools such as the Sabayon user profile editor, to modern desktop compositing with AIGLX.
So when a friend asked me to help him install Fedora Core on his new laptop – a Lenovo 3000 N100 – I suggested he tries the Fedora Core 6 pre-release: 6 is scheduled to be released sometimes next week, and though he can’t wait till then due to external time constraints, I though that this late in the game there’s no reason the current rawhide snapshot shouldn’t be almost as good as the full release – I have a lot of experience with pre-release distributions – Mandriva and SuSE for example – and in my experience, as the products nears its release date (especially this close), there usually aren’t any major issues preventing a competent user who knows what he’s doing to install and use the product as a primary OS. So I was completely unprepared for what followed next.