Fedora core 6 installed...
The GNU/Linux system on my home computer had become quite a mess after seven years of use. It was originally Redhat 5.0, and I had not properly upgraded it ever since, but had instead upgraded most packages to their Redhat 9 counterparts and compiled some newer stuff myself. The messy mixture was usable, but it always took a lot of effort to install anything new on it, and there were also a lot of historical baggage, like, running everything as root and very limited use of unicode (Chinese filenames were encoded with GB2312). The good thing about linux (or indeed, any large software system) is that you don't absolutely have to upgrade the whole system to use a certain new feature--there is always an option of compiling by yourself. It is also a bad thing, as the system diverges more and more from a "normal" system after that, so upgrading becomes harder and harder.
So yesterday I decided that enough is enough, and did a fresh install of Fedora core 6 on a new partition. As usual, it takes quite a lot of time to make a freshly installed system comfortable to use, but anyway it is now mostly done.
Basic impression: The distribution contains plenty of nice features. The fonts look good (not that good when I set the language to Chinese--but the sweet thing is that I can input Chinese just fine in English mode, thanks to SCIM), the default Pinyin input method is the best I have seen on a linux system (though I have to manually recompile the package to use ShuangPin...), the unicode support is quite good, the display driver is acceptable (no bugs such as bad gamma correction or crash during VT switching, yet), and finally I can suspend my desktop computer using the software suspend feature (ACPI suspend did not work well before).
But there are plenty of rough edges as well, in scim-pinyin, gftp, vte, yum-updatesd, dosfsck, etc. The most serious problem is that the installer installed only the xen-based kernel by default (which is already wrong IMHO--I don't want to pay the 40MB-or-so memory penalty if I'm not using virtual machines), and somehow the graphics driver does not work in xen (another bug), so until I figured that problem out I couldn't even finish the installation. Of course, all these have been fixed, but this takes time, and it is definitely not friendly to new users.
So yesterday I decided that enough is enough, and did a fresh install of Fedora core 6 on a new partition. As usual, it takes quite a lot of time to make a freshly installed system comfortable to use, but anyway it is now mostly done.
Basic impression: The distribution contains plenty of nice features. The fonts look good (not that good when I set the language to Chinese--but the sweet thing is that I can input Chinese just fine in English mode, thanks to SCIM), the default Pinyin input method is the best I have seen on a linux system (though I have to manually recompile the package to use ShuangPin...), the unicode support is quite good, the display driver is acceptable (no bugs such as bad gamma correction or crash during VT switching, yet), and finally I can suspend my desktop computer using the software suspend feature (ACPI suspend did not work well before).
But there are plenty of rough edges as well, in scim-pinyin, gftp, vte, yum-updatesd, dosfsck, etc. The most serious problem is that the installer installed only the xen-based kernel by default (which is already wrong IMHO--I don't want to pay the 40MB-or-so memory penalty if I'm not using virtual machines), and somehow the graphics driver does not work in xen (another bug), so until I figured that problem out I couldn't even finish the installation. Of course, all these have been fixed, but this takes time, and it is definitely not friendly to new users.