Fedora 9 includes the new package manager called Package Kit. It aims to be the package manager for your system, as it can install apts, slackware packages,rpms and many other file formats. I booted into it and noticed 2 things.
- The first, its incredibly slow - It took along time to download the updates i needed (Slower than downloading a normal file that size from the server) and it took along time to generate the meta data of plugins list.
- The second is that (in my opnion) the User Interface is horrible. Its hard to navigate to select the packages you want, When you select a package it takes a few more clicks to even see the dependencies it requires, whereas adept and synaptic show you right away.
I tried it, i can honestly say i gave it a good go, but its not for me. Since im new to the rpm system, i searched around for alternatives, i found one called Yum Extender (Yumex). Its easy to install, just yum install yumex or download it from the websit.
Ive recorded another video tutorial, this time on Fedora 9, showing how you can make your own screencasts/video tutorials on linux. I tell you how to (sorta) get your microphone working and use the recordmydesktop program.
I was lucky enough to get chosen to be one of the 25 alpha testers for the linux dropbox client. We were given the choice to download a precomiled .deb, or the source code. Since i use Fedora, i opted for the source code. I attempted to compile it and then i came across some dependency issues.There were 2-3 packages that i needed to find work arounds for, they weren’t in the default repositories and for one (i think) there wasn’t a package for it so i needed to compile it.
I eventually was able to compile it without any errors. It did need a system restart to take effect, but low and behold.
I was getting some problems with the latest Ubuntu release (ext3 didn’t agree with ubuntu) so i decided to try another distro. Ive always been an apt-get man so i wanted to try something different. I downoloaded the Fedora 9 DVD and popped it in the drive.
I couldn’t use the GUI installer as there was some conflict with my monitor, so i need to use the text based installer. Its no big hassle for me, ive used the text base installer on slackware and other distros. The anaconda installer is great, i selected the programs i wanted to install and install. All up the install only took around 20-25 minutes - very speedy considering i installed gnome, xfce, servers, dev tools and a number of other things. Once the installation had finished i rebooted.
Straight away i noticed that i didn’t have an X server. When you run Fedora for the first time, im pretty sure theres a little dialog that lets you make accounts etc.. unfortunately there was no text option for me and i got left with a command prompt. I was forced to login as root. I tried startx and it worked! I was in the GNOME desktop, i quickly…
