lazlow's Journal: The Horrors of Fedora 10 install

This is the single hardest post I've ever written. My distro of choice since Redhat 5.2 is gone from my computer. It's been replaced by Kubuntu. I down loaded the latest Fedora 10 64-bit DVD and went through the installation as normal. I ALWAYS do a fresh install on everything, except my home directory, which is in a separate partition.

I use the KDE4 gui because I really don't like Gnome. That's where my problems begin. I finish the install, and try to log in to KDE as a regular user the screen goes blank. The gears churn for a couple of seconds and the login screen returns. I'm like OK let's try it again, the same thing happen. I can log in as root, but not a normal user. I change the password, and reinstalled several times over the next 5 days.

I, at one point, installed Gnome, to see if I could log in normally. It WORKED! I could also, login on the command line and then execute startx to get to KDE as a regular user. This leads me to believe that Redhat/Fedora is trying to under mine KDE on their systems to render them unusable. In Fedora 9 they don't have enough time to get the KDE wireless working, soooo, we were stuck with the gnome version and they have now pasted on the gnome login to make things worse. They still had not fix it in 10.

My second complaint of Fedora 10, besides feeling like a redheaded bastard step child, is that as soon as, I opened Firefox I had less than 5 minutes before the screen would lockup. I ended up using Konqueror to track down answers to my problems. I even downloaded Centos 5.2 in hopes to install KDE4. That was a major project and the howto needs to be rewritten. The installer has some of the older Fedora bugs where it relabels an existing partition label by adding a "1" so / would be turned into /1. That's enough to piss off any admin.

I finally got so pissed off and so frustrated that I start looking at debian again. Started researching Ubuntu and Kubuntu and found out that the major reason to down load the DVD was for the language packs, plus I could get every program that I'm like to use online. I downloaded the Kubuntu install CD.

I've used Suse until the Microsoft deal. The day Novell did the press release, I stripped Suse off my laptop. I tried Gentoo on a Mac G3 laptop, Kubuntu a long time ago, and settled on Fedora 7 for my laptop then.

I was not prepared for how easy it to get my Broadcom wireless working, or my ATI graphics adapter working. A screen popped up and said some hard requiring proprietary drivers have been found. Do you want to activated them? Clicked the button and said "Hell YES!"

I plugged in my printer today, Kubuntu set it up. I didn't have to play with Cups,or do anything else to my machine besides plug in a usb cable. The card reader works without me having to edit any /etc files. If the Ubuntu server is this painless Redhat will have some real problems.