As you may have heard recently, Debian has a problem with Firefox due to the fact that the artwork is not released under a free license. This is an extension of problems they’ve had with GNU’s documentation and the clause that allows some parts to remain uneditable. So Debian has forked Firefox into IceWeasel. The engine and core program are the same, only the artwork is different.

This has caused a lot of name-calling back and forth between the two camps. Mark Shuttleworth, who’s Ubuntu is based in Debian, posted a reconcilatory post today whereby he called on both sides to respectfully disagree.

Fedora Core 6 comes with Gaim 2.0 Beta 4. Above you can see it together with the new Fedora Core 6 DNA-style background.

As you can see, things have changed quite a bit in the appearance of Gaim. The largest change to the GUI involves the availability which is now set by a bar at the bottom of the GUI. The biggest complaint I have with this setup is that there isn’t an easy way to set one account as away while another is available.

All I had to add, apart from what I mentioned yesterday was:

Load “extmod” to the Module section of xorg.conf.

Although others have derided it, I think it is an AWESOME addition to Fedora. It really brings the desktop to the eye candy level of Mac’s OSX. A lot of the eye candy is also extremely functional! I wanted to save this post for a video showing the compiz stuff (it doesn’t really work to show screenshots), but I haven’t been having the best of luck with that. I’ll try again in the next couple of days along with my review.

I’m almost ready to do my first review of FC6. However, I’m still working on getting all the neat AIGLX effects working. After all, that was almost the whole point of upgrading. So far I’ve installed the Compiz package, which gave the the System -> Preferences -> Desktop Effects menu. That didn’t work, so I hit the IRC servers. I was told the latest livna nvidia driver doesn’t support it, but the version in the testing repo should support it. So I’m going to be trying that soon. I also had to add Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “True” to my xorg.conf. I haven’t setup the dual head again yet, but that should be a snap in comparison.

The new version of Fedora is installed. So far, only the X server didn’t work right. It didn’t feel like supporting my dual head setup, so I’ll have to investigate that over the next few days. Other than that, it appears to have installed just fine. By the way, it didn’t take until now to be finished. It finished around 11 last night, but I didn’t want to reboot because I didn’t want to deal with any debugging until today.

The actual installation process began at 2110, so it took about 10 minutes for the dependencies. This part now tends the be the longest part. At times, it even seems to be frozen - at least that’s my experience for all prior upgrades/installs. We’ll see how this one fares.

The new DNA theme is beautiful. I have dua head setup and the second screen is showing garbage as when a Nintendo cartridge was broken.

I selected an upgrade install and to update the boot loader configuration. At 2100, it begins checking dependencies in packages……

And, since I downloaded it on my Windows box, the torrent will keep allowing others to download the Zod goodness. I am now beginning the install at 2057.

Fedora Core 6 was 15 minutes late….at least, the anouncement on Linuxtoday.com is 15 minutes after 1400 GMT, although it may just be that Linuxtoday.com didn’t make the anouncement on time. So what’s up with Zod? Well, after naming Fedora after rivers and French cities, it is now named after some weird space alien-sounding name. I’m not sure what Zod is, but I recently read that they consider part of the fun to be to guess how the name relates to the name of the previous release.

The wait is over for Fedora Core 6 will be releasing today, 24 Oct, at 1400 GMT or 0900 EST. Get on those bittorrents so that I can torrent off of you when I get to work. Hopefully, the Livna repositories will get those nvidia drivers working quickly.