I installed KDE on my Fedora 10 installation yesterday.

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 recently made the change from Mandriva One 2009 to Fedora 10. Oh what a difference!

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!