Downloaded the KDE Live version - did not look at the "type/version" carefully, which lead to a little bit of "circus" I had to do. I had downloaded a "ext4" version (also looks like I got a i686).
Understand that Fedora does not allow you to have /boot on a ext4 partition. But the liveCD I have does not support installation on a a ext3 partition! This situation is new to me.
Here is what I had to do for getting my installation:
a) Delete the existing partition.
b) Create a partition for /boot (ext3)
c) Create a partition for / (ext4)
The "copying to disk" part of installation was real quick, took little more than 5 minutes.
Hoping for not needing to do any wireless setup, disconnected my lan cable and fired up the live CD. Right after booting, I clicked on the "disconnected" computer icon in the system tray and was able to provide my wireless key and connect to the internet immediately! Very impressive! I was unsuccessful in getting this USB dongle to work with Debian (but it works with OpenSUSE, with a little work and with Mandriva, without any effort)
The liveCD did not seem to like to shutdown. After ejecting the CD, it started complaining something about /sbin/shutdown ..... did not jot down the exact error message :( Ctrl+Alt+Del kept repeating the same message. I forced the push button reset to poweroff.
The music on boot, is familiar, not sure if it belongs to KDE4.
Kpackageit, came right up and "informed" me that there are 2 enhancements, 59 updates and 1 bug fix - WHAT??? It is just a day since the release and there are already 62 updates???? Anyways, I just let it do its job and now it is all done.
Here I noticed one thing. While the Kpackageit was running, my terminal (konsole) had become unbelievably slow.
I have to refresh my yum commands! It has been a while since I have used fedora. I guess fedora 8 was the last one I tried. Somehow I started disliking fedora since then. But fedora 11 brings me back!
Just had to do a
yum install firefox thunderbird gvim
Fedora 11 came with python 2.6, perl 5.10, gvim 7.2, pretty much what other distros come with. Now I got firefox 3.5b4, Thunderbird 3b2 - not what other distros give you!
Not very straight as I had expected, to get idle (and bonus tcl 8.5!)
yum install python-tools
Little bit of googling (does binging help??) and got vlc with the following commands
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
yum install vlc
I do not have openoffice as of yet (I guess just "yum install openoffice.org-core" should do it). But I just tried to open kspread, and it opened up in split of a second.
There is no wait time (timeout 0) on the grub. Was this made to "speed up" the boot time? The actual boot time is not anything greatly different from other distros (they say <20 secs??). Though I did not time it, I did not feel any difference between mandriva 2009.1 and fedora 11.
The screen is impressive, the icons are cool.
Few observations:
a) After selecting to boot (I pressed enter while it was counting down from 10 to 0) on the live CD, there was no sign of anything going on for few seconds. Right when I was about to press the "reset" switch on my PC, I started seeing some movement.
b) This Wierd baloon like looking thing at the center of the screen. Happens to be the fedora logo without the "f" in the center, and a single light blue color!
c) The waves that float right below fedora logo, beautiful!
This happens to be one of my longest posts. The reason is partly because I am so impressed with fedora 11. Before trying fedora 11, my best experience of KDE4 was with Mandriva.
