I have been very pleased so far with Fedora 7. Firstly, it is just common sense that both core and extras have been merged. During the early days of Fedora, it was labelled as Fedora Core and thta was never a pleasant thing for me. Why “core”? Why not something else? Why keep some code away as Extras? I understand all the reasons for it, but that is now all history. We have a unified view of everything. Kudos to the Fedora team!

With that said, why is F7 amazing? Well, I just completed an upgrade of a fairly old laptop that was running Fedora Core 6. That laptop – a Dell Inspiron 3800 with 256M and a 448MHz CPU – was a workhorse for me back in the IQMind days. It does not have wireless builtin, has only 1 USB port and not much else. I had retired that machine – because of key-repeat problems – until late last year when my younger son wanted to play with it. I dusted it off, salvaged a 20GB drive and put FC6. It worked well with a Cisco Aironet wifi card. Now with F7, I thought I should just go ahead and update it. I was contemplating a fresh install, but decided instead to take the upgrade path. So, using the F7 DVD, I went ahead and updated it. When it was all said and done, the machine just worked. The settings, plugins for the browsers were left in tact on the most part – except for Java[1]. Alas, Sun has not made it convenient to have it distributed[2].

But to me the biggest plus point with F7 is that suspend works! I have never succeeded with that on any of my Dells, and with F7 on this fairly ancient machine, it just worked.

Fedoras off to all involved. A job worth doing is a job that is done well.

[1]http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JavaFAQ
[2]http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/05/31/howto-sun-java-on-fedora-7/