yum upgrade to Fedora 12 (and mini-review)

By EricMesa

- 4 minutes read - 664 words

So I was unable to preupgrade to Fedora 12, even after the latest update.  So I did a yum upgrade since I’ve known that to work in the past.  As always, I followed the instructions here.  It was very fast this time around compared to past upgrades.  It only took 2 hours 40 minutes.  I ended up needing to tell yum to ignore problems because of a weird package that it wanted to install, but couldn’t.  But then installed anyway.  I’m not sure what’s up with that.  The specific package was abrt.  And then when I went to install it afterwards, it said it was already installed.  Go figure!  So far there’s only one thing that annoys me since upgrading.  All my taskbar icons are much more spread out.  I tried to push them together, but I think this is as close as they get.  See the images below for a comparison.

[caption id=“attachment_2968” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Fedora 11 Taskbar”] Fedora 11 Taskbar[/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_2969” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Fedora 12 Taskbar”] Fedora 12 Taskbar[/caption]

I also ended up with just two workspaces.  That was easy to bring back.  Also, the icon set didn’t change and that’s a bummer.  But then again, since we’re going to Gnome Shell with the next Gnome anyway, we won’t even have taskbars.  Another interesting change was that System no longer has “About Gnome” and “About Fedora”.  It jsut has “About this Comptuer” which gives slightly different info.  Another thing I forgot - I didn’t get the pretty opening despite the fact that it said nVidia cards were now supported.

I went into the Theming menu and learned that Fedora had changed to a lighter shade of Blue.  It also appears they went back to more standard-looking icons.  See comparison below:

[caption id=“attachment_2970” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Fedora 11 Theme”] Fedora 11 Theme[/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_2971” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Fedora 12 Theme”] Fedora 12 Theme[/caption]

My biggest reason for upgrading was to get the latest gPodder client, so let’s see how that has changed.  Visually it hasn’t really changed at all.  I had reported a bug in how it handled a certain NPR feed.  I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see if it’s fixed as they said it was.  However, while launching Evolution and gPodder I saw that we inherited the really slick-looking update notifications from Ubuntu.  I know that visuals shouldn’t matter that much, but with how nice that looked, it made me proud to be using Linux if someone were to look over my shoulder.  Here are two examples:

[caption id=“attachment_2973” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Fedora 12 notifications from Evolution”] Fedora 12 notifications[/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_2974” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Fedora 12 notifications from gPodder”] Fedora 12 notifications 2[/caption]

We also got these nice looking rounded corners on the tool tips:

[caption id=“attachment_2976” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Rounded corners!”] rounded corners![/caption]

I loaded up my communications programs:  X-Chat Gnome, Pidgin, and Gwibber.  Didn’t notice any differences.  I was disappointed that Gwibber 2.0 wasn’t included, but I guess it came out after the freeze.  That’s another change I was hoping to get from the upgrade.  Finally, I opened up Liferea.  No obvious changes there.  I decided to hop over to KDE since it had been upgrade to 4.3.  Oh my goodness.  It sucks!  I don’t know if it was SELinux or what, but it was so slow as to be unusable.  Every click took forever.  The whole desktop crashed.  Then again, KDE has always been buggy in Fedora.  I also jumped over to Xfce and it seemed to be nice.  I was so into Xfce for a while, but right now it seemed a bit spartan compared to Gnome.  One thing I DID like about Xfce (that KDE has and Gnome doesn’t) is the ability to set a different desktop background for each of my monitors.

Overall, it appears to be a decent upgrade.  Most things appear the same and a few things have changed.  This is good - it’s how a mature desktop should be.  Upgrades here and there, but no more radical changes.  (Although, with Gnome 3.0 - we’ll be in an upheaval)