rob was here.

At work, I recently installed the latest version of the Fedora Core operating system (FC5) which came out monday. Here's a quick run through of what my work station looks like now, and how I'm finding it.

There wern't a lot of new additions to the core of the operating system, per se. For the most part most of the advances were in the performance department, as well as features added to existing programs.

Below is my desktop. Fedora came with all of my favourite daily-use programs ready to use out-of-the-box.. Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice - they're all there, and up-to-date to the latest stable build.




Here's me having an *important* discussion with a friend.. at least it started off that way. Gaim, the messenger client I'm using there supports jabber (google talk), msn, and several other major chat networks all in the one interface. It's neat. You'll also notice a bash shell and openoffice going on there in the background.




I've switched to Eclipse recently for all my java developing needs. Changing IDE's can be daunting, as you grow on one and others just seem foreign. However, I'm finally getting the bumps ironed out and it's turning out to be a really decent framework. Fedora comes with their own special build of Eclipse, which they built with the GNU Java Compiler (instead of the Sun one). They do this because Fedora is built out of completely free software (free as in freedom) and hence uses no propietary tools. I manually installed both Sun's and IBM's java development kits this week, to basically experiment with them. Here is a shot of the Fedora branded Eclipse loading up.



One of the nicest additions to Fedora 5 is a cleaner package manager. It's well organized and lets you visually hunt around for packages and programs to install or remove. And of course, yum is still alive and kicking, and works really well. There are already some updates available to core apps on the yum repository.



Overall, It's a good continutation from Fedora core 4, and a solid operating system (even as a desktop for non developers).. I highly recommend it if you want to enter the world of linux.. heck, i recommend it even if you don't.