yum install @kde-desktop

God damn it’s refreshing! I got really bored of the dullness of Gnome and just decided to get rid of it! I had forgotten how great KDE 4.1 really is. It just looks so different and simply better!

I managed to completely screw up my computer in the process though! After I changed I decided to mess about with my graphics settings and try and get out of bloody Vesa. But unfortunately there are no Fedora drivers for my Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] card and I will inevitably have to use Vesa mode… Ah well I’ll just have to put up with my you tube videos skipping ’till Fedora 11! Anyway I screwed up the graphics and had to boot to init 3 and do a display reconfig;

system-config-display --reconfig

Once I was up and running again I got to work doing what KDErs do best; customisation. I found this cool desktop app called KDE Twitter. It allows me to tweet from my desktop! Pretty cool. Oh and the pride and joy of my new desktop; kooldock! It really is cool. It’s basically the same thing as the Mac OSX dock except as with KDE, better and more customisable. Installation is simple:

yum install kooldock

You can also set it to start the program as soon as you start the computer. Although it is a joy watching those icons bounce up and down this saves you having to run it manually every time! Go to System > System Settings > Autostart and add kooldock to the programs list.

Fedora and KDE both go very well together and it was well worth the change from dull Gnome. Here’s a screenshot:

Fedora KDE

I sat there for like two hours trying to remember the password and eventually realised that it wasn’t going to happen. Then I began to think of alternative methods of getting in. I had one advantage over people who are actually trying to hack into the computer – I knew the root/super user password. This proved to be the thing that saved me in the end! But unfortunately Fedora, with good reason, does not allow root login through GUI so the task is made harder again.

After looking online for solutions to no avail I began to recall my Fedora installation. You see when I installed the OS initially it rejected my graphics card and would not boot into GUI. Then it dawned on me – If I could get into that state again (init 3) I could log in as root from there, start the GUI and eventually reset my password. But how the heck to do that!

It’s easy really once you make it clear in your head what your about to do. We’ll start from the beginning:

• Turn on your computer.
• Keep pressing the “p” key until something happens.
• If you have a grub password enter it at this point.
• You should see a list of kernels. Select which one you want to boot with (usually the first one) and press the “e” key.
• Go to the line that begins with “kernel /vmlinuz**” and press the “e” key again.
• At the end of that line add this text (without the quotes): “init 3″
• Press enter.
• Press the “b” key.
• You should now be in a command line interface. Login in as root (su -) and then type “startx”.
• You will now boot into the GUI logged in as root. Go to System > Administration > Users and Groups
• Edit your user details.
• Restart and login as normal!

It took me a while to figure out how to do this but it worked out alright in the end. Hope that this posts helps other people in the same situation – I wish someone had spelled this out for me!

Firstly I went for Fedora 10. It’s really not as difficult as I thought it would be! Just yum install liveusb-creator then go to Applications > System Tools > liveusb-creator. This will bring up a nice program to make the proccess easy. And yes it is cross browser compatible! Well at least it works on XP, i’m not sure about Vista or Mac. There is one major disadvantage to the installer – it only lets your distro take up 2GB. I’m not sure why though. Anyway it’s as simple as select your device, your iso, your size and then just press the Create button! One bonus is that there is no need to change the file system, ie. you can still see the files through Windows. When your finished just reboot > go to multi boot menu > select USB > bang and you will see the friendly Fedora splash screen!

I was a little deterred by the small size of the Fedora installation so I decided to try something different. Dream Linux seemed like a good direction to go in. It is really all a Dream, and I like the Mac-like dock, that’s what really sold it for me. Initially I went for an on-the-edge version – DL 3.5 Candidate 5. After a long night of trying to figure out why it wouldn’t work I googled the error and found out that there is a bug in this candidate that prevents any Pen DL installations from being successful! One day and one long download later I started from scratch on DL 3.2 (a very safe and stable version I must say!). It’s relatively easy to create a USB distro with DL as well. Just select the Pen DL installer (should be on the desktop) and choose the relevant options. One disadvantage here is that you must use a Linux file system, I chose ext3, which means that you cannot look at the stick contents on Windows. I tried partitioning after the install but it would not let me! Anyway why would you want to look at your stick from Windows if you can just look at you whole computer!

In the end I stuck with Dream linux for a few small reasons, it gives you a choice on each boot between xfce and Gnome, it lets you “add modules” or programs to your USB which will remain forever, and it lets you use as much space on the disk as you want! One thing I don’t get about either of the installations is that while you are using your pen distro you cannot access the files that are actually on the computer that your using – at least I don’t know how to do it anyway. This does seem a bit stupid because whats the point in bringing a stick to use on another computer if you can’t look at files from that computer! It is possible on live DVDs, why not live USBs? I can’t stress enough, if you are going to do this yourself get a decent memory stick! The one I went for works seamlessly, there is no apparent difference between booting from it and booting from a hard disk. I should also mention that your stick will only work on computers that support booting from USB, but most modern computers do anyway.

Conclusion: Break out of the system, use a portable distro and shock innocent Windows users!

Mandriva was the first Linux OS that I ever used and I suppose it appealed to me because of it being a very user

friendly distro. Actually when I first stumbled upon it I was extatic. I was stuned with KDE 4.1 and its amazing ability to allow you to customise everything. But eventually I realised that I didn’t want to customise everything and that some things are better left to the distro designers! Mandriva, for me, was kind of a bridge into the Linux world. I learned a hell of a lot while using it and I am now quite familiar with the Konsole and all it’s various

commands. But after a while I did feel like I wanted more, more Linux that is – and less Windows. Because at the end of the day Mandriva is designed for Windows users and in my opinion it is a bit Windows like.

Anyway I better start talking about Fedora. I went of to a faulty start with this distro. I had previously tried Fedora 9 on my laptop but it rejected my graphics card and I decided to wait for the release of Fedora 10. I know it has been released for a couple of months at this stage but I was waiting for a packaged release. I got this last week in the Linux Format magazine. Unfortunately Fedora 10 also rejected my graphics card. But not to worry the local Linux guru was happy to help! Once I got the graphics sorted I had free reign!

The CD I got with the Linux Format magazine had everything! I distinctly remember in Mandriva having to download ever

ything that you would expect to have with a distro, packages that a hell of a lot of programs depend on, such as glibc. Not the case this time though thank god because my internet connection would probably get stressed and stop working or something…. The CD gave me a pre-installed web server! Brilliant because frankly I could not have been arsed learning how to set up Apache vhosts again! It also came with a wide range of extra programs such as GIMP 2.6 (I tried to get this for Mandriva but urpmi was still stuck on 2.4!), Transmission Bit Torrent (usefull for downloading music) and rythmbox music player. I was surprised at the fact that it didn’t include Konqueror – I thought that all distros did. It could be a KDE program.

Another choice that I had to face was KDE or GNOME? As I earlier emphasised Mandriva One 2009 came with KDE 4.1, which was the first stable release of KDE 4, and Mandriva was the first distro to be released with it. It certainly had a lot to live up to after KDE 3, not that I would know – it’s a bit before my time! I had enjoyed KDE and I wanted to take it with me when I made the switch to Fedora. But i still haven’t actually got round to setting it up and for the moment I am stuck with GNOME 2.24. That is not a bad thing though because it is ever so slowly growing on me. I am at the point now where I think that I might just not bother setting up KDE…

So Fedora 10. All round it’s impressive. The last release I toyed with was Fedora 8 and it has certainly changed for the better since then! The new graphically animated boot proccess is much better than the old jumpy thing and the desktop photo of a blue star is very interesting. For those of you that reject it’s animated state you are wrong! I spent ten minutes yesterday staring at that screen and I am certain that it moves! However slightly and smoothly, it does move!. Thats about it. Fedora 10 gets top marks by me, great distro! Hopefully the team can keep up with their twice a year releases because I for one can’t wait ’till Fedora 11.

Oh and be expecting some Fedora Magik in the form of USB!