Fedora is the premiere showcase for GNOME 3. As usual in GNOME, system panel is at the top of the screen. It was
default in most GNOME2-based distributions, and it is the only available
option in GNOME3. This panel has button Activities on the left to call
up menu, set of icons on the right and clocks in the middle.
Default wallpaper in
Fedora 16 has motives from Jules Verne's
20000 Leagues Under the Sea.
As usual in GNOME3, there's
no option to change wallpaper by right
click on desktop (need to go to setting or you can open a picture and select 'set as desktop wallpaper' from file menu).
All configuration of GNOME3 is in System Settings panel. Of course, the
configuration includes option to change background image. There are
about 15 desktop wallpapers available. Most of them came from GNOME, not
Fedora's team.
Same System Settings panel contains Region and Language tool, where
keyboard layouts can be configured. It was an easy task, similar to
GNOME3 on Ubuntu. Strange, isn't it? Hehe!
Click on the Activities menu in the left top corner of the screen brings
in the list of currently running applications. There is an option to
see installed applications. They can be either viewed as whole list or
filtered by groups, which effectively brings you something like
classical menu. This is the same as in GNOME3 on Ubuntu 11.10, and probably most other GNOME3 implementations.
As you can see, there are not so many applications available out of the
box. That is likely the reason why CD image is only 600 Mb. From my
perspective, I would prefer to have more applications available by
default. CD capacity is 700 Mb, so 100 Mb could be easily allocated to
some useful tools like simple graphic editor, office suite or something
like this.
Another part of
Fedora 16 menu which I would like to talk about is Add/Remove software. It is cockpit for applications management. By default only
Fedora 16 repositories are
active here. The tool itself is quite good. It is easy to find
applications you need. And it is not overloaded with stuff like "you
would also like...", like Ubuntu's recent invention.
What is available in default repositories? Just a quick check. As I have
already mentioned, all major productivity suites are there. VLC is not
in default repositiory. Skype is not either. Qutim is there.
Absence of some packages is probably not a big deal since
Fedora
uses RPM package manager, and many applications are available in this
format. Of course, it is nice to have all applications listed in the
repository, but sometimes it is no possible technically.
Even though both Ubuntu 11.10 and Fedora 16 have same version of GNOME3 available, there are some differences which I noticed. Application switcher (Alt-Tab) in Fedora 16
groups and hides instances of the same application, which is not
convenient. You first need to move Alt-Tab focus to necessary group, and
then use arrow down to open list of available instances. Then arrows
left-right allow to choose the window you need. From my perspective,
Ubuntu's implemenation of GNOME3 works better in this case - all available windows are shown automatically.
Nautilus is default file manager in
Fedora 16. It has
an option to browse local network. Unfortunately, it did not work on my
network. That's why I had to do mounting of my external network drive
from terminal. This operation requires administrative privileges, in
other words rights to
sudo. Liveuser (user which is default in Live session) is not part of
sudoers file. That's why I had to switch to
su - mode first. After that, mounting was pretty much question of typing the usual command
mount -t cifs... It means that Samba and smbfs are part of default distribution.
The only thing which spoiled my experience of network partition mounting
was crash of some kernel package when I started browsing remote
partition. It tried to report bug to kerneloops.org, but for whatever
reason
Fedora failed to connect to server, even though other applications were able to work in the Internet properly.
Another mounting excercise was successfully accomplished in Nautilus
itself. It was for local Windows (NTFS) partition which was mounted
straight away without any issue.
Russian characters were shown correctly in both cases, either in network and local NTFS partitions.
Unfortunately, successful mounting of partitions did not allow me to play music in
Fedora 16.
Attempt to open MP3 file from network gave zero result. No message, no
playback. Just like I did not select file at all. Same file from local
Home folder gave me more information. It was an error "Cannot start
playback (null)" with only opition to close it. Not very helpful, I
should say. Of course, there's solution, but it is not so obvious.
Flash is not installed by default in
Fedora 16 either.
My attempt to install it was quite interesting. I got a window with
options to open or save the file, and no one of options worked from that
window. I could not close window at all! That was bug in Firefox, I
suppose. But actual installation process was easy enough when I clicked
the file in the list of downloaded items.
