The installation is simple, just click, click and click. After installed, GNOME is slightly different than I have on Fedora 9. It seems to have many Ubuntu custom programs. Many of setting windows are not the same. Almost everything works as expected for my Dell Inspiron 6400.

I got two notices immediately, when I just booted this newly installed system. One is the new packages, the other is something about Restricted Driver, which is the ATI driver in my case. One thing I don’t understand is that in my environment, I must make a PPPoE dial before the computer can connect to Internet. I have no idea how the software updates come from, maybe that’s prefix update? Anyway, I brought up NetworkManager window, it’s really different than Fedora’s. Of course, it’s easy to set up one configuration for my environment. Later, the updater says about 100 more packages need to be updated. It’s usual for that degree of number of packages. One thing amazed me, which is the download speed, I know the server is in Taiwan as I am. Dozen of mega bytes, only take less a minute to download and install.

I copied my previous configurations from backups, then I launched Firefox. Just like what I had before. I realized that I haven’t install Flash Player, searched flash in package manager and installed. Refresh the page, I have Flash now. The second thing amazed me is the microphone works. I didn’t have microphone working in flash on Fedora 9. I checked up with htop, 700 MB memory usage, that’s another thing amazed me. This might be a bloated distribution, I thought Fedora is the most bloated one.

I then played around the main menu, I found out few items weren’t shown by default, but those were not important, either. I tried to run glxgears but there wasn’t a such program, and I couldn’t turn on Desktop Effects. I think that was using open source Radeon driver. When I was using Fedora 9, it’s already capable to enable Desktop Effects with the open source driver. I also have enabled DRI on CLFS with open source driver. However, I need ATI’s driver to enable the Desktop Effects.

Later, I tried Skype and I met a small problem. It’s about 32bit lib. It’s solved, although not the direct way. I installed the static package. I also compiled wdaemon for my Wacom tablet.

Few days later, Flash crashes really often. I decided to remove and install latest one from Adobe, directly. I unpacked it and move to libflashplayer.so~/.mozilla/plugins, then run nspluginwrapper -i ~/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so. Now, it seems to work more normally.

I also noticed that Bluetooth preference dialog crashes when I tried to add my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. I need to repeat the connecting process few times, until I get them connected.

Basically, I like Fedora more than Ubuntu. I thought Ubuntu is quite easy to solve a problem by a new Linux user, but it wasn’t. When you encounter a problem, for newbie, you have to search or to post for getting help if you really know nothing about Linux. But it’s a good Linux distribution.