so far i’ve been pretty happy with using fedora as my primary OS for my laptop. it sure has come a long way since the days that i first used it. trying to find the right tools for linux for everyday use has not been as hard as i had thought. i have been able to successfully download images from my camera with no problems. i don’t think that i can really use linux as my primary OS for processing photos, but in a pinch, it seems to work ok.

the thing is that i installed fedora 10 just days before the fedora 11 launch. i’ve always been nervous with installing new releases of fedora, but i have been chastised heavily about believing the propaganda that fedora is an unstable distribution. apparently fedora has come a long way since the days of FC1-3. man, those distros just hurt.

i’m also a believer of the packaging system. so far pretty much everything that i wanted has been found in some RPM so i’m pretty happy about the maintenance of the machine.

the big thing now is upgrading from fedora core 10 to 11. it seems like so long as your system is up to date, the process actually isn’t that hard. you run a command “preupgrade” and it appears to download everything that you need to run the install. i’m running it now and it looks like it is download FC11 right now. that’s sort of a long download for me, i need to find a faster internet connection.

the machine is still usable though, so that’s great. firefox works great in linux as does vmware. i’ve been using wine for a couple of applications so i don’t incur the overhead costs of vmware, but even in a pinch, vmware still performs reasonably.