(Headline intentionally spiced up slightly…) After reading the release notes from the Fedora Core 6 Pre-Release, I just had to download and install it:

The Compiz window manager provides better visual feedback and a variety of desktop effects by using the AIGLX framework. More information is available from the Fedora Rendering Project.

Unlike OpenSuSE 10.2 Alpha 4, Fedora at least had the decency to provide a DVD .iso, which was fairly easy to download once I got bittorrent up and running.

Fedora LogoThe installation went fairly smoothly — on the second try. When I partitioned the 80 GB hard drive of my new computer last week, I intentionally left 6 GB unused because I knew I would eventually like to try installing other flavors of Linux than Ubuntu. However, because I made a mistake and left those 6 GB outside of an extended partition and already had four primary partitions, the empty space was not usable. Instead of notifying me of this, Fedora’s installer Anaconda crashed and forced me to restart the computer. After removing Ubuntu and resizing the extended partition (after all, I had only used Ubuntu on this computer for one week and already broken it with Beryl), the installation proceeded without any hickups.

intro-computer.pngTo make sure I wouldn’t run into any other problems, I chose the default options for everything. The only modification I did was unchecking the “sshd” option for the firewall, because I know I’m never going to want to log in to my laptop remotely using ssh. After waiting for all packages to install, the system rebooted and I was presented with a final walkthrough of some initial settings. Unfortunately, because of a (known) bug, the keyboard was not working during this walkthrough, so I had to skip the step of creating a user and instead restart and log in as root. For the record, I tried hitting Ctrl+Alt+F1 to switch to a terminal and manually add a user before logging in, but for some reason, no terminal would appear. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+F7 got me back to gdm thankfully. The first thing I did as root was to create a normal user, log out and log in again with the new user account instead.

OK, so that was basically my alibi for what I am now going to say to you, my patient reader: Having sticked to the default options, proceeded with the installation and properly logged in to Gnome with a regular user account, I was left in the freezing cold with no desktop effects whatsoever!

The Release Notes has the solution:

To enable the fancy desktop effects, follow these steps:

  1. System > Preferences > More > Desktop Effects
  2. Log out
  3. Log back in. compiz should be enabled now.

Great! Except for one minor problem: There is no System > Preferences > More > Desktop Effects! So I’m still stuck with a regular Gnome desktop using the boring metacity as window manager. Does anyone know what’s wrong?

I’m going to keep Fedora for a while, to get some new impressions after using Ubuntu for two years straight. I will publish another post later, covering my impressions of the distro today compared to the Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10).