Lately I’ve been bashing the new release of Fedora Core 9. In the past, I was really excited about the new window manager: KDE4. The screenshots looked great; what I saw was the polished, clean, and extensible environment that I’d been waiting for.
The lack of support on the nVidia really pissed me off, considering I had to dig around on the web just to get a half-assed workaround (read: hack) to get either of my Fedora 9 installations to be even usable as a workstation again.
So anyway, that was then, and this is 1:01AM a few weeks later. I still haven’t undone the hack that is keeping me afloat at work; I’m just simply tired of having to do hacks just to get a working system. No matter how much fun it is to constantly figure stuff out, I’m out of energy.
Tonight I decided to install Fedora Core 9 on my laptop, a Dell XPS M140. It has been running Windows XP MCE since my dad bought it a few years back, and the Winblows installation has been dead slow for about a month now. Yesterday, I got 1.2 FPS in World of Warcraft. WTF.
A friend at work was as excited about Fedora Core 9 as I was, and happened to burn a few extra copies for those interested. I took one, and last night I decided to pop it in and cut another tie from Micro$hit. Guess what? IT WOULDN’T BOOT. Awesome. Not a big deal, right? Just download and burn it yourself. K.
Now we get to the fun part. I cleaned up 3.3GB of space on my laptop hard drive to download the Fedora Core 9 i386 DVD. Fine, downloaded pretty quick through a torrent. I don’t know what in the name of God is wrong with my DVD burner, but I created about 3 coasters using CDBurnerXP and Fireburner before giving up on trying to burn it.
Next step: try a bootable flash drive using the LiveUSB tool floating around out there (here). Well this was a failure, as I couldn’t find my USB stick. I ended up installing it on a 1GB Secure Digital card (yes, like the ones that go in your digital cameras), but that was a failure as I couldn’t boot from it. Doh! And apparently the LiveUSB tool doesn’t like USB external hard drives, so that was out of the picture, too.
Finally I figured “Hey, I’ve already downloaded the LiveCD, why not try and burn it to a regular CD?” Sure enough that worked fine (with a cracked copy of Fireburner).
So now the infuriating part. I was starting to feel that sense of liberation when I saw the KDE login status box appear. All the icons are nice and shiny. And KDE4, though spartan, seemed pretty responsive and useful.
First task at hand: launch Firefox and report the great news that everyone worked like a charm! FAIL
Apparently Fedora Core has come through 9 releases without figuring out how to recognize a fucking Dell 2200 Internal Wireless card by default. Granted, this is the LiveCD, but NEITHER of my network cards were recognized, NOT EVEN THE WIRED CONNECTION. At this point the only thing zipping through my mind are random parts of expletives strung together into a meaningless blurb of frustration.
Well, maybe it’s just because it’s the LiveCD version. Let’s install it to the hard drive, I say. Terrible idea! But, another design flaw allowed me to not make that mistake.
The wonderful “Install to Hard Drive” icon, common in LiveCDs, was conveniently missing from the desktop. Instead, it was stashed away in the main menu under “Favorites”. It’s such a GD favorite that when you click it, NOTHING HAPPENS. For fuck’s sake! What the hell is going on with this distro?
So I’m back to Winblows for the moment. Downloading Ubuntu 8.04. I hate to switch distros, especially to Ubuntu, but hey … I’d like a working desktop without having to wait for Fedora Core 10.
Fuck you, Fedora Project.
I usually don’t swear so much but I’m pretty pissed.