queue sinister music

by davidnielsen

I just returned from the 7 hour install party my LUG threw today, I had promised to turn some heads with the new Fedora Core 5 and the new GNOME 2.14 but alas 5 mins after I confirmed the appointment the honorable Jesse Keating told me the Fedora release would slip. So all day I’ve been showing off our new technology using Development and people where generally very impressed with our progress. Suffice to say I was very down by the fact that I couldn’t take DVDs and CDs to hand out of our latest release but the bulk of the interested parties promised to download the release Monday and give it a try – in return they get free tech support.

Beagle, people who hasn’t heard of it before were extremely impressed with this piece of technology – to show how fast the entire system runs I demoed it on my 500MHz Celeron laptop and I must admit this part of the tech demo turned more heads than I expected. People seemed very impressed with the Nautilus integration and the integration into the menu.

The question I got asked most about Fedora Core is “will my wireless network just work”, not having access to such technology I was unable to say for sure, but I assume since it worked in various other distributions it should just work or work with very little effort – someone might have a fun afternoon listing known working laptop models and wireless chipsets, such a list would be great to point people to.

People also seemed very impressed with the fact that suspend just worked out of the box on my laptop.

Overall I didn’t draw any negative comments aside from some Ubuntu users, who wanted to know why they should run Fedora and wanted me to demo “cool stuff”. The sad fact is that some of the “cool stuff” that I really like in Fedora is not demoable in an easy way, I like the fact that security is taken seriously, I like the amount of proactive security and I won’t accept any less than what Fedora deploys – not because I’m a very interesting target but the concept of protecting users is important to me – this view clashed rather badly with Ubuntu’ development cycle, having asked for just some degree of proactive security to be implemented since the very first development cycle.. we all know the result of my quest.. nothing of the sort has taken place. For me proactive security and the mindset around this is the reason why someone should run Fedora – Fedora works to protect my freedom, it’s secure and it works out of the box. This is sadly very hard to demo or expected behaviour.. I’m left without forfillment and a need to know how to sell this aspect of Fedora to people.