I’ve been flying under the Internet radar for some time. A lot has happened since the last time that I was actively blogging. That was back in…oh… 2005 was the peak, I guess. At the time, my blog was hosted on Wordpress 1.5 over on derek.ditch.name. You can still see some remants of it over at the Wayback Machine.

But I digress…

This post is about my migration to Fedora. I have long since avoided all RPM-based distros due primarily to RPM dependency-hell. Well, Fedora/Redhat has actually implemented a package manager these days, called yum. Yum has pretty much eliminated this issue. I determined it was worth taking a looksee.

[TOC]

My History with Ubuntu

Ubuntu and I go way back..pretty much to the beginning. I started using Ubuntu in the Warty Warthog release (4.10). I requested a hard copy disk of the installation to play with.

Really, our relationship goes back even further. I started messing seriously with Linux as my primary operating system in 2000 with Debian 2.2. I could barely get X to run on my laptop at the time, but by God, I was running Linux.

Time to Move On

The beginning of the turning point for me, was likely the release of KDE 4. I like Qt. This is likely a result of my being a C++ developer. I say C++, but really I develop in many languages. C++ is just the language that I was taught at school. It is also the primary language that is used in the research projects that I participate in. I attempted to learn Qt back in the Qt 3 days, but I was horrified. It was basically just a bunch of hacks. One could argue that Qt 4 is no different, but actual C++ code is used for much of the interaction instead of the solely macro-based signal-slot mechanism. That’s a long way to get around that, I liked KDE4 when it was released.

The problem with this affinity, is that Kubuntu, the KDE brother to Ubuntu is a second-class citizen. For most Ubuntu releases, I would install the Gnome version and then the KDE version. The KDE version was always less polished and things just plain wouldn’t work. On my Thinkpad, for instance, the media keys would work very nicely in Gnome, but in KDE they wouldn’t work at all and required significant work to get them working in the same ballpark as Gnome.

Now, some of this was due to the immaturity of KDE at the time. But a lot wasn’t. I usually just accepted this, but it had a bad taste in my mouth.

A New Hope

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of security work, mostly in the Information Assurance realm. A great resource for hardening operating systems (and other software/hardware) are the [Security Guides] published by the NSA. Now for Linux, the only guide they have is for RedHat Enterprise Linux 5. The reason they support RedHat are obvious:

• RedHat has been around as an enterprise platform for a long time.
• Official development platform of NSA SELinux
• The platform aims to be somewhat hardened out of the box.

The last point is my perception and not necessarily statement of fact. Since I am merely a student and not looking to pay for enterprise-grade support, I took a look at the Fedora Project, RedHat’s bleeding edge, community-driven playground. I liked that Fedora had SELinux policies for just about everything and has that same security-hardened focus of RHEL.

I first downloaded the KDE variant and installed it. I was quite pleased at its level of polish. Then, just to see what I was missing out on (if anything), I installed the Gnome variant, which is the official spin of Fedora. Surprisingly, it was about the same level of as the KDE spin. After digging into more documentation, I found future plans for Gnome 3.

Then I started reading about Gnome 3 and the sweet Gnome Shell. I liked what I saw. I found that the Gnome Shell was packaged in the Fedora yum repositories and installed it. For a desktop, it’s quite slick indeed. I think there’s some room for improvement, but it’s a very usable, modern desktop with the same level of maturity and integration of Gnome 2. The pleasantness of Gnome is just that: the maturity. This is probably due to the fact that enterprise-grade companies have adopted Gnome as the official platform and added to it in terms of accessibility and human interface guidelines.

[NSA]: National Security Agency [RHEL]: RedHat Enterprise Linux

Wrap it Up

So…this was all a long way to get around to my logic for looking at Fedora and being pleased with what I found. After some tweaking, I made yum not suck so much. Mainly, I turned on caching so that I didn’t have to download a new index every damn time that I want to query the package manager.