Fedora 19 - Of Schroedingers Cat and Mixed Blessings

Fedora is one of those distributions I try from time to time but that ultimately fail to stay around, usually when it comes to the upgrade process. I last used Fedora 14, after brushes with 12 and 10, the KDE spin of which got slower with every point update to the desktop but whose LXDE spin actually got used for quite a few months. So let's see how Fedora 19 pans out, featuring GNOME Shell 3.8.2, and how/if that has improved since I last tried the Shell when it was freshly released on the unsuspecting public.

Installing Fedora 19

For the release of Fedora 18 the installation tool was completely overhauled, which also resulted in a different layout to the former Anaconda installer.  As with every subsequent release more bugs are  squashed it may eventually mature, in the meantime unintuitive and inconsistent layout prevails, coupled with the odd crash. Here I walk you through the installation of Fedora 19 from Live image. You may also want to look at the official installation guide but it's missing the section on encrypting drives.

Three Spins You May Not Have Heard Of

Always on the lookout for something interesting I found three more esoteric spins of major distributions and set out to give them a quick test run.
This was helped by a streak of bad luck recently which resulted in me suddenly having two partitions available.

Quick Look at Fedora-inspired Fusion Linux 14 - Mini Review

It seems like the same few blogs review the same distributions, but I've got a good excuse. Fedora 14 KDE finally got the better of me, it felt slow and everything generally took ages to open up, the menu was worse than the old days of Windows fade in menus (remember those?) and I removed it from my drive. I suppose this really is the last chance I gave it, KDE 4 is just not for me. Not to say that Gnome is, but at least it's more responsive.

How to add Broadcom 43xx wireless to Fedora 14

This one is easy, I've never had to do so little fiddling and searching:

Go to http://rpmfusion.org/ and add both the free and the non-free repositories unless the latter one is against your philosophical stance.

You can do this via graphical setup, installing a small rpm file that will set this up for you, or at the command line where you can basically just copy the commands into your terminal (you have to become root for this).

Update your repositories and install all updates prior to proceeding.

Search for broadcom-wl, install the package and reboot.

Voila, there you are. Enter network credentials into NetworkManager or Wicd if you prefer that and you're online. It's never been easier.

And here you can find the respective page on the fedora community website, with links to more wireless solutions.

KDE 4: The KDE SC in Kubuntu and Fedora

Although not one of my main desktop environments any longer, I have been keeping track of KDE development now and then and feel it has improved a great deal. Ever since the 4.4 releases it actually seems stable and light enough to use and while not all features and functions present in KDE 3.5 may have been replicated (at least Kwikdisk and Kdiskfree are back), the 4.4 series has marked the point where KDE has finally become usable again. I have to admit, it looks good too. I actually enjoy booting into the new KDE.