I have tested Fedora 11 alpha, beta and now preview releases on few of my laptops and I’m really impressed by how Fedora 11 works once it is installed.
 
The problems I’ve encountered are those within the installation part – it seems like anaconda installer has become much worse than it was in Fedora 10 and in previous versions.
 
I watched how OpenSuse and Ubuntu teams have really polished their installers and hoped that Fedora 10 or 11 would have some more polish in GUI because if you just look at OpenSuse or Ubuntu screenshots you will see how outdated Fedora’s anaconda installer looks in comparison to them. I agree that in Fedora 10 there was no feature that lacked (except installer failed on Asus eee 701 laptops) but I really hoped that GUI would get a fresh look also, it really needs one general overhaul, especially in partitioning part of the installer. The inner working of anaconda previous to Fedora 11 was in top shape so that is why I was so surprised how bad anaconda is performing in Fedora 11 Preview release!
 
The only way to install Fedora 11 is to leave the default settings while in partitioning part of the installer. If you try ANY option with existing partitions on the hard drive, it will just crash the installer! I didn’t find any way how to create custom partitions in anaconda installer, delete partition or delete the whole disk without installer crashing on me. Are you looking how to create custom LVM partitions? Forget it. Encryption? No way. If you have hard drive with no partitions the chances are 50:50 for your installer not to crash, and again, you can’t erase the hard drive without installer crashing :(
 
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Enlightenment desktop looks very interesting and claims to use very little resources but that it also gives you a lot of bling. That got me hooked immediately. To install and tryout Enlightenment on Fedora you only need to install one package: enlightenment.
 
Next time you get to your login screen and click on username in bottom part of login screen you can choose different desktop interface.
 
I really liked Enlightenment and it really has light resource requirements and it looks gorgeous. There are lots of light desktop environments but they all look too spartan even for Fedora Leonidas (pun intended) or for my taste ;)
 
There are two mayor issues that prevent me from using Enlightenment as my everyday desktop. First is the lack of support for NetworkManager. In order to connect to wired or wireless networks I had to use command line, so users that don’t know how to use cli to setup network can’t use Enlightenment at all. Second one is no usb hotplug manager for usb memory sticks.
 
If somehow these two features can be made to work on Fedora then we would have one great desktop for low powered machines. I know about LXDE, Openbox, XFCE and others but IMHO Enlightenment is a better looking and therefore more likable lightweight desktop.
 
What is your favorite lightweight desktop? Why do you prefer it? Have you used Enlightenment? What do you think about Enlightenment desktop?
 

 

 
Bryan from Linux Action Show podcast made a presentation at LinuxFest Northwest called Why Desktop Linux Sucks and What We can Do About It
 
I don’t agree with all of his statements, like ones that Linux needs only one package format, but I agree with most other things he says. He (on purpose?) didn’t mention Google Summer of Code as a way of sponsoring projects, which is also strange. Please look for yourself and share your comments.
 
UPDATE;
I found this blog post that goes into more detail why one package system wouldn’t help things.

 
Christopher said www.mugshot.org it is Redhat’s neglected gold mine, and I agree.
 
Wikipedia says that from April 4th, 2009 until May 11th the Mugshot website was down and displayed the following message: “Mugshot is currently not running.” As of May 12th mugshot.org redirects to redhat.com.
 
So what has happened with www.mugshot.org ?
 

 
If you use some WordPress theme that doesn’t have “previous entries”, “old entries” or “previous page” in the footer of your blog then there is a really easy way to tweak this and add this functionality.
 
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Have you tested new Firefox 3.5? It has a new feature built-in that should protect users from bad or hacked web sites. If you go to Preferences you will see option called “block reported attack sites”. It looks like this feature is giving all your web surfing info to Google!
 
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First what is OpenVAS? OpenVAS stands for Open Vulnerability Assessment System and is a network security scanner. Have you heard of OpenVAS? Have you heard of Nessus? Well in short OpenVAS is open source fork of closed source Nessus.
 
In Fedora repos you will find last non-priprietary version of Nessus (v 2.2.11) that is over three years old. Newer versions of Nessus (v3) are completely closed source and proprietary so I hope Fedora soon drops Nessus and adds OpenVAS in main repository.
 
First hurdle was to get OpenVAS running on Fedora 10 is to install it because there are no OpenVAS packages in Fedora repos currently :(
 
You can go hardcore and compile it by hand or a bit milder way using atomic repository. After following instructions on how to enable atomic repository just do these yum install it:
su -
yum install openvas-client.
yum install openvas-plugins
yum install openvas-server
 
After that you need to update OpenVAS feeds:
openvas-nvt-sync
 
Create certificates:
openvas-mkcert
 
create OpenVAS user
openvas-adduser
 
Now you can start OpenVAS server:
openvasd
 
Now you can start OpenVAS-Client in other console window:
OpenVAS-Client
 
And when that you have server and client running just click on connect button in OpenVAS-Client and enter username and password that you used when you created OpenVAS user.
 
Happy scanning!
 

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