Free Fedora, Frustration & Fury.

It had been a smooth ride for a long time with Opensuse 10.3. After experiencing the best that the linux community has to offer, I had become confident of finding my way around most day to day issues.

The issue with the Canon 2900 laserjet printer was the starting point for the search for a compatible distro. As a self created rule, this is the only reason to want to try another distro. It is important to not keep changing distros as soon as they are released since this fragments the user base. Also it is possible to incorporate newer kernels (which support newer hardware) without getting the newer distro entirely. This is something I haven't tried yet, though.

My search obviously took the familiar path - Opensuse 11.1. Unfortunately, like the 10.3 version, 11.1 too couldn't print a page, though no errors are reported during the installation or the printing. Just no page comes out!

The next step was Fedora 10. Thanks to the folks at zyxware.com, it is quite easy to get the full fledged DVD at one's doorstep for a nominal cost. In fact, I ordered the Fedora 10 DVD just to average out the shipping costs on shipping the Opensuse 11.1. DVD.

The Fedora experience is a nightmare. The frustrations that I faced as a newbie in the Linux world all came back to me, thanks to fedora. It could be because Opensuse is an excellent distro that Fedora looks uncouth, unpolished and unkempt in comparison. Everything about the distro, from the first page and menu to it's inability to get the resolution right fills one with fury.

Initially seeing the CGA menu I thought, well there is no need to invest resources to make the menu flashy, since it doesn't matter post installation. But, the resources were not invested elsewhere, probably because there were no resources to invest at all!
Part of the blame will need to be laid on the doorstep of KDE 4. An interface that is so retrograde functionally. But, Opensuse offers even KDE3 as an option, Fedora does not. I couldn't see an option to install Wine as well. Post installation, all attempts to get the screen resolution corrected was frustrated - there seems to be no xorg.conf file in /etc/X11 and running Xorg -configure also fails. And there seems to be no GUI way of getting X reconfigured, only the set resolutions are available as options. In contast the Opensuse 11.1 installation process, and installed environment seems heavenly.

Fedora was removed in a fraction of the time it took to install. It was too frustrating to deal with the mind numbing obtuseness that pervades the interface.

But, considering that people have reported success with getting the 2900 running under Fedora, it may be a bitterest pill I have to swallow.