bjoernvold.com

Posted: **25 Aug 2013, 13:34**

Time to check out Fedora 19 then. After all it is the most important distro out there together with Debian.

Installation
I picked install to harddisk.
Chose my language and clicked on setting the keyboard according to my language. For some reason checking the keyboard did not bite on the first attempt so I had to do it a few times.

Then I got to a page where I had to set up my partitioning.
Since auto-partitioning was already pre-selected I thought hitting enter would be enough – but no Fedora 19 did complain about not enough space to install Fedora.
<---

It turns out that Fedora was reading the space left on the already existing partition so I had to delete the existing partitions.
Fedora did let me do that but I don't know if I that is particulary userfriendly.
Then again it is a good thing that Fedora does respect exisitng partitions and does not automatically format them.
But that is what most people would expect when they read that they can accept the auto-partioning.

Anyway after having deleted my existing partitions I could continue.

Then while the progressbar for the installation is running I get the messages that root and user are not defined.
I did create the root password and the user – while that instalation was appearantly running – and that went well – even if it was a bit confusing.

This installation prosess was not as ellegant as the Mint installer – in fact I belive there is room for quite some improvement.

But it is not that hard to install Fedora 19 if you put your head to use.

Time to test this then:
I fired it up and there comes Gnome3 (shell) – it works as intended even in my Virtualbox
Then a video of how to use Fedora/Gnome3 autostarts.

There is music and a clean cut graphical easy to understand «Getting started» introduction – nice!

If you are not familiar with Gnome3 this will definetly help you out.

I guess Gnome 3 is easy enough to use – I just find it to be so...limited.

So I start to write down my impressions and when I get back to my Fedora 19 install there is this Gnome screensaver with a big clock and my user is marked as locked on the top left.

I click my user – and nothing happens!

The strange thing is that the sound and network icons on the top right do respond when I click them.

So -berserk style - i get angry and hit my enter key a lot of times et voila there is the Gdm login prompt so I can log in/unlock my computer again.

As one would expect from Fedora; Java and flash do not work out of the box. There are good reasons for this explained in the Fedora philosopy/policy.

By now I get the update button and I have 462 updates awaiting on my fresh Fedora 19 install.
I hit enter – and away we go – no problem.

Sudo sems to be installed by default and I have always felt that yum «understands me» I find that it fits perfectly to my strange sense of logic.

To get flash according to the wiki:

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sudo yum install http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm -y

and

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sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux
sudo yum install flash-plugin -y

I go to the about:plugins in the browser bar – and there is no trace of shockwave flash, but on top of that page there is a link called mozilla.com/plugincheck so I hit it:

It tells me that Firefox has turned off the outdated flash version for security reasons, and offers me a link to the latest edition.
Naturally I click the link and pick the YUM version from the adobe flash site – and get the message that it is already installed.

So a real catch 22 there – no flash in Fedora 19 then....

Time to check out java then: I install IcedTea – and that works.

So Fedora 19 is a good distro that has gotten a lot of critisism for its installer – it is not that bad so some of it is undeserved.

It looks good – if you like Gnome 3 – and it , works just fine.

BUT – as fashionable as it might be to be against flash – most peope still need it in a browser.
Html5 is not that common yet.

It might be fixable with a tripple sommersault – but most people want an OS that is the mean not the target.
It must «work».

Other than that Fedora 19 - Schrödingers Cat – is a good distro.

I am a bit surprised about the choice of Gnome3 though. Fedora is all about freedom and choice – and compared to KDE; Gnome is going the other way – limiting choices.

Posted: **26 Aug 2013, 15:24**

Since Fedora is RedHat I thought I should try some cutting edge stuff.
RedHat is good on servers so I thought I should try to install the nginx (pronounced engine-x) server. It looks awfully complicated in the various descriptions - so I decided not to read them :-D

Nginx is supposed to be very good and the top sites of the world seem to run it these days - like Git and Wordpress

It should be fast and "simple" and able to handle loads of traffic - fast!
Here is a test made by Linux Journal that compares it to the standard Apache server:

I ran a simple test against Nginx v0.5.22 and Apache v2.2.8 using ab (Apache's benchmarking tool). During the tests, I monitored the system with vmstat and top. The results indicate that Nginx outperforms Apache when serving static content. Both servers performed best with a concurrency of 100. Apache used four worker processes (threaded mode), 30% CPU and 17MB of memory to serve 6,500 requests per second. Nginx used one worker, 15% CPU and 1MB of memory to serve 11,500 requests per second.

So I installed it like this:

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su -c 'yum -y install nginx'

I could not find the nginx.conf file so I simply decided to start the stuff with:

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sudo systemctl enable nginx

and

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sudo systemctl start nginx

No need to complicate things further so I optimistically opened my browser and typed localhost
And guess what? - That server was up and running!

So now I know where the config file is and where the server pages are located and can take it from there.

This really was simple

Posted: **31 Aug 2013, 00:13**

What about Fedora 19 in general? Am finding it hard these days to get awfully excited about Fedora.

Posted: **31 Aug 2013, 03:28**

Well as you can see I am not awfully exited. But I do not go along with some of the criticism Fedora 19 has got.
It is a decent distro - but no wow effect here.

In general I support Fedora because it is kind of a flagship for open source. But I don't use it.

Posted: **12 Oct 2013, 14:34**

Often when a distro comes out we give them a review and then we move on.
I have left Fedora 19 alone since the install and did the first update today since the install. It is a sign of quality if you can leave a distro alone for a very long time and then update it without problems.

So

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sudo yum update

it is then.
There were 299 updates and it all seemed to go smoothly - but on update 298 xul runner it simply stopped.
No message - it just stays there and does not finish.

There is space enough in the VM - so some kind of message should be given IMHO.
I interrupted it with CTRL+Z and naturally that locked the update file so I re-booted to have another go.

This time all the files were updated and xul runner was downloaded an updated. In total 587 files were updated and eventually verified.

Update completed.

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