First, in other news:
I feel kind of like it is an ongoing theme, but I have been working a lot lately. My workload has expanded to include a number of other tasks, which basically take time away from my primary functions, and as such I have not been doing much of the things that I like to do (coding).
Such is life, I guess.
Also, I've updated my Linux page with the distros that I am currently using.
Anyhow to get back on-topic, at home my mother-in-law just got an iPad2 and gifted us with her old netbook--an Acer AspireOne. I'm a big fan of the Acers, and have a few: an aspireOne revo nettop, and a couple of eeePC 900a's.
This netbook is of a bigger size than the eeePC's that we have, which is good considering that I hate to type on them because the keys are so small and close together. It crowds up my identi.ca stream with gibberish :-p
I had heard good things about the Fedora 15 alpha release, so I downloaded the iso which uses the Gnome3 (aka Gnome Shell) as the default desktop. I "burned" it onto a USB stick, and booted this Aspire one up with it.
Right off the bat, the live environment was obviously very different but seemed to be working well. I had never had the experience of using Gnome 3, and this particular version was in Alpha, I think. I installed to disk, and of course the Anaconda installer did its job well and all went smoothly.
After the install, there was a MASSIVE amount of updates: nearly 400MB worth!
Once the updates were completed, the desktop looked much better since many things were updated--Gnome3 was now beta, which was great. Since then, I think now it is in official release so things have changed around a bit but all for the better.
This got me thinking about how much I like Fedora, and how I tend to keep coming back to it. I do prefer apt-get over yum still, but yum can definitely get the job done.
I feel like Fedora has a "desktop experience" which is very nice. I really liked Arch before, but it is kind of time-intensive as far as setup and maintenance (not all the time, but enough so). Fedora is a nice package already laid out.
I also like Debian a lot, and was using /testing with LXDE (my DE of choice, usually), but fedora just feels...nicer. Debian with Crunchbang, however, that is VERY clean and nice--great distro if you like Openbox.
But I like Fedora and keep coming back to it, so I figured maybe I should try to be a contributor.
One of the cool things about Fedora is how they try to give everyone a chance to be involved in the project if they wish to be.
I decided being an Ambassador would be a good starting point, so I created my wiki page and started my application process. This is currently on-going, but I am pretty excited about it--I like telling people about everything that Linux (/GNU) can do these days, and Fedora is a great implementation.
I was getting tired of my Debian install on my T42 and was wanting to try out something different. I have a list on my linux page of things I would like to try, but I started out with the Fedora15 alpha again.
This time, it did not go as well--on this machine Gnome3 would only operate in fallback mode which was pretty disappointing. I removed Fedora and installed Crunchbang. I am typing this from a shell in my Crunchbang install, and it is as great as ever. I pointed my sources.list to the testing repos and I am good to go. I may hop around some more, but I'll stick with this for a period of time. Crunchbang is one of my go-tos.
Since getting the AspireOne, I no longer use the eeePC so I decided to let the kids use it (which they had been doing anyway). After browsing around for Linux distros for kids, I decided to go with Qimo, which installed easily and the kids have used it a little.
My oldest is 3 yrs old, so they may still be a little young to get much use out of it.
I do have to say, though, my 2 yr old son can beat my score on Angry Birds! Pretty impressive, but there is a chance that I am not very good at the game...
Tags: #linux #distrohop #fedora #gnome #crunchbang
