I am still booting with the Fedora live CD on my Macbook Pro, everything else now works. I used the rpmfusion free and nonfree depository and upgraded, installed kmod-wl for Wifi, installed Adobe Flash with rpm on linuxdownloads.adobe.com, unmuted the sound with Alsamixer, and installed google chrome through Google's repository. I also updated the fonts and hinting settings, this is a must for Fedora.
So I hope that I just need to burn a rEFIt CD to 'fix' the partition table, otherwise I'll keep on booting from the Live CD since it doesn't really seem useful to spend at least a thousand Euros on a new laptop.
Fedora 16 is nice. I've been using redhat product since RedHat 3 and later went on using Fedora Core distributions. So I am kind of used to three day install and debug tracks. Since I did this in less than a day, stuff really progressed since those days.
What I can't get used to is that I once started on a laptop with a whopping 64MB of memory, everything worked great, and to me -except for eye candy- no functionality has been added since then. Of course, I am a rabid vi/gcc/make/bash user who only needs a set of virtual desktops and terminals to program, but why in heaven's name does Fedora now need 1GB to work?
Ah well, Fedora looks great. The virtual desktops need some getting used though. I came from a 2x3 virtual desktop layout, moved on to 1x4 horizontal layout due to the 'cube' virtual desktop candy of Gnome, and now get a default of a Xx1 vertical layout. So it becomes up-down, instead of left-right, scrolling through the desktops, and I don't know whether my old manner was just more intuitive, or I just got accustomed to the other order. (I just noticed that the menu doesn't scroll along, which is great, since now one scrolls work spaces and not virtual desktops.)
Having a black menu on top certainly looks great, and I think is more natural since the menu should be in the background most of the time. The new activities manner of selecting applications also needs some getting used to. What I think would make the new user experience really great: I want different shortcuts, but more importantly I want applications to open in a new work space maximized. And I think an idea to try out would be to have the activities menu open by default on the first work space, so one can just get around with the keys, and have no clutter left.
Ah, well. I'll see whether I can get my old set of Toon-like icons installed, probably make a bunch of new ones, and will just get on with programming, again.
(I also noticed another thing. My TV works with an ADSL modem attached to a box which gets its content with a normal Ethernet cable. So, everything works with TCP/IP anyway. Why can't I just install a player and stream the content to the laptop without that box? Or maybe I can?)
