Fedora Core 2 Release 2

[threeringedmoon]

Originally published at Five Acres with a View. You can comment here or there.

This week, I upgrade my Linux box to Fedora Core 2 Test Release 2. This is a beta release, and the attitude in the documentaton at the website is definitely one of “don’t try this at home, kids.”

I’ve seen better versions of beta software in my time, but also far worse. Immediately, I ran into the bug that some people are encountering where the boot CDROM didn’t boot from my drive. I found a fix for that in Bugzilla (the trouble reporting system for Fedora) and after that things went fairly well. The nastiest bug I have encountered so far is a problem with 3D screensavers. This bug freezes up the window manager, and the only way I have found to recover is to cycle power. (The workaround for this is to refrain from using 3D screensavers, and not even previewing them in the screensaver manager.)

Fedora Core 2 introduces the 2.6 Linux kernal, which is a major operating system upgrade. The Gnome desktop software has a major upgrade as well. It has been an interesting transition, and although I wish it had been a little smoother, I don’t regret making it.