Last month, my girlfriend gave me a Linux Troubleshooting book so that I could troubleshoot my current Linux system. The book is focused on Red Hat’s Fedora Core distribution and I my current Linux system runs Novel’s openSUSE (a minor difference).
Since I don’t use Fedora Core 6 (FC6), I decided to wipe clean my Windows Vista machine and install Fedora on it so that I could better utilize my Linux book.
Installation:
The installation process is intuitive and straight forward. With this installation, I decided to accept all the defaults which means that you get Gnome as your desktop environment. With just a few clicks I was done!
Looks:
Fedora Core 6 looks awesome and feels solid. I like the Gnome interface, primarily because it is streamlined. The desktop is very minimal with only a few essential icons.
Next Steps:
FC6 comes bundled with Open Office 2.0, Gimp, Evolution and Firefox 1.5 and much much more. My next obvious task is to install Firefox 2.0 along with some themes and plug-ins. So far, I am very excited to work with this Linux distro. The Fedora Core line of products is known for being on the bleeding edge of technology. This should be fun, and if it doesn’t work out, I can always go back to Windows Vista.
Mario Seijo
web designer
www.openElements.info
Mario Seijo is a web designer and creative director for a Seattle-based web design studio, 
Now that you have the initial Fedora 6 installed, do use the automated tools to get the updates.
I would suggest wholeheartedly that you install yumex. To do it
su
password
yum install yumex
Thereafter, use yumex.
Firefox 2.0 is not going to be installed by default with FC6. But you will get 1.5.0.9 . This is done to insure a reliable crash resistant system. 1.5.0.9 has all the security updates. Version 2 will be out in the spring with FC7.
Then, if you are comfortable about installing multi-media software, I would visit
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc6.html
and follow his instructions for getting multimedia installed.
Using that web site and with minimal changes, I play every piece of music thrown at the system, all you-tunes stuff, etc etc etc.
Evolution is my email client, Open Office for Office stuff, and whatever else I need from the Fedora Extras site.
In my defense, you seem to like the Fedora better than the SUSE . (secretly I knew this would be the case and thats why I got the book.)
I would be interested to see if this is an operating system that someone with less drive to learn the ins and outs of Linux would be able to use.
Leslie, thanks for sending the link and your tip about using yum.
I installed the Firefox 1.5 updates via yum and also switched from Gnome to the KDE desktop interface. After installing KDE, I discovered Kyum (a rich UI). So for those that don’t want to type commands into a terminal window, Kyum is the answer.
onto more multimedia…
Mario Seijo
web designer
http://www.openElements.info