Finally Upgraded To Fedora Core 6
It has been 79 days since Fedora Core 6 was released. I finally got a chance to upgrade my work station from FC5 to FC6.
As in the past, I downloaded the FC6 x86_64 DVD using Bittorrent, and started my "try upgrade first, if that doesn't work, do a fresh install."
The upgrade worked. It took about 2 hours for all the new packages to be installed from the DVD to the hard drive. And then it took a full day to pull down all the accumulated updates using "yum update" from the Fedora mirrors. As in the past, I relied upon the Fedora Core 6 Tips & Tricks website to get the multimedia stuff installed.
Improvements that I've noticed include:
- The Istanbul Desktop Session Recorder is improved tremendously. Last time I tried it, it was very primitie. The version in FC6 feels a lot smoother, and did not use a huge amount of memory or CPU as the FC5 version did.
- I just noticed the Cups-PDF printer driver that allows one to print anything to a PDF file. (This might be already present in FC5.)
- The GL-accelerated desktop effects are cool. My windows wobble when moved, and my workspaces are on a cube (that rotate in 3D) now. It also has something similar to the Mac OS X Expose.
- The Gobby collaboration editor looks like it should be useful. It supports distributed file editing with chat.
- I switched to 32-bit Firefox just to get Flash working. I can watch videos on YouTube now.
- And as you can see in the screenshot below, Qemu still works.
