Comment by leif | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leif | Hacker News Reader

I am now a Productive Member Of Society, which means two things: I have a macbook air (from my job), and I have little free time. In the past, seeing a release like this would mean picking the least-used partition on my computer, doing a full install, and using it for a week before deciding what I had before was better, or not doing that.

This time around, here was my experience:

1. Download the ISO

2. Open up VMWare (oh shit, there's a new version! oh shit, you have to pay again...forget it)

3. Make a new VM, boot the ISO

4. GNOME 3 won't work. Hmm, well I probably need VMWare Tools installed.

5. Try to install VMWare Tools. CD tray's locked. Guess I have to do a full install first.

6. Do the install (defaults everywhere).

7. Reboot into system. GNOME 3 won't work, of course.

8. Click "Install VMWare Tools". A window pops up with a tar.gz. That's silly, okay, extract it, see a folder with a perl script called "something install something".

9. Open a terminal, sudo perl whatever-installer.pl.

10. Hit enter a bunch of times. I have to run some config script, would I like it launched for me? Sure.

11. Can't install, I need make and gcc. WTF?

12. sudo yum install make gcc. Nope, the package manager's locked.

13. Where's update manager? Maybe I can kill it. Nope, that opened it, ok, 35 updates. It just got released, what the hell? Okay don't do that yet.

14. How about Add/Remove Programs? Hmm, there's a Programming category. Click it. Window goes gray.

15. Flip over to a web browser. Browse for a bit. Send an email.

16. Back to Fedora. Still gray.

17. Close window, delete VM, delete ISO, remove from torrents. My ratio's only 18%. Oh well.

18. Write stupid comment on HN.

19. Dinner time.

I, too, am a Productive Member of Society which means two things: I gave back the terrible Macbook my employer provided and seamlessly and painlessly upgraded from Fedora 15 to Fedora 16 earlier today. Here was my experience:

1. Run preupgrade

2. Reboot

3. Load up xmonad without issue

4. Ask a couple low-level upgrade-related questions in #fedora; get answers in a couple seconds

5. Get back to work

I'm really failing to see what point you're trying to make with your comment, aside from noting that your old version of VMWare Fusion doesn't play very nicely with this Fedora release and that installing VMWare Tools on Linux is a pain in the ass (something I would never dispute, but then running the real thing absolves you of the need to run a VM).

I'm sorry about your experience, but as far as mine is concerned this is another swell Fedora release. Thanks, everybody!

As a productive member of society myself (wtf? The implication here is rather insulting is it not?) I also appreciated Fedora's upgrade situation this time around.

1. Run preupgrade.

2. Reboot.

3. Load up Awesome WM (installed from a 3rd party repo months ago) without issue.

4. Load up Opera (which I installed months ago straight from Opera, again with no Fedora involvement) without issue.

5. Go to youtube and start playing some music with Adobe Flash (you get the pattern...) without issue.

6. Continue working.

I too, do not understand the GP's criticism.

Mainly: why are make and gcc not installed?

I'm going to guess because you installed from the live media. The full install media lets you pick what sorts of things you want to be installed as I recall.

If having to do `yum groupinstall "Development Tools"` yourself is your biggest complaint, I'd say Fedora is doing pretty damn well.

My experiences have been completely opposite. Didn't GNOME 3 just silently go into fallback mode? I've been running Fedora 16 beta VM's for many weeks (on VMware and VirtualBox running on a Linux host).

It does go silently into fallback mode and it looks awful (IMHO). If I remember correctly, so does non-fallback mode though.

My problem is mostly with the fact that make and gcc are not installed on a Linux system by default, and that the software installer just hangs and offers no explanation.

Not to belabor this, but if during installation you choose "Graphical Desktop" (or are using a LiveCD) then dev tools like gcc, make etc. are not installed. (Choose "Software Development" instead and they would be.)

Sorry to hear that the installer hung though! I have not experienced that, and I'm on my 20th Fedora 16 install.

It does (or should) go to fallback mode however Big Kernel Lock (BKL) was removed on kernels >= 2.6.37 and VMWare Tools won't install so your joy would have been short lived. I Googled around and tried a couple of patches but none of them gave me any joy. Apparently you can downrev your kernel and get it to work but that seems counter productive. So for the time being I am stuck with Fedora 14 (which is end of lifed in December).

The issue has existed for some time and was one of the reasons my trial of Fedora 15 was short lived (Gnome 3 and no Dropbox being the others) but I thought VMWare would have fixed it by now...

Unfortunately, gnome-shell doesn't work well in VMs due to the fact that it requires 3D acceleration. AFAIK, virtualbox is the only platform that supports 3D emulation but I can't speak to how well it works because I haven't tried it myself.

However, software rendering support has been recently added to rawhide (which will become Fedora 17 in about 6 months). If you're interested in seeing gnome-shell in a VM, you may want to give Fedora 17 a try when it is released.

Don't they have a live CD to try from? That seems like the right approach for someone who is very busy, rather than hours of yak-shaving

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