Europa and Fedora 8

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After the last post where I pointed out Fedora 8's inability to boot into a graphics desktop on my two notebooks, I took the CD back and booted F8 on europa. As you can see below it boots and runs just fine.

In fact, F8 booted up with a screen resolution of 1920 by 1440, which was too small for me to read. So I shrank the resolution to my normal 1600 by 1200. An attempt to enable Compiz failed, and being unfamiliar with Fedora these days, I didn't bother to find a way to dig a little deeper as to why.

Notable is the distribution treated the Sapphire ATI X1950 Pro as a 'generic' device, but with enough information to provide the highest resolution with 24-bit color.

In spite of its success at booting on europa I have no desire to replace openSUSE 10.3 with it, in spite of the rough edges around openSUSE 10.3. If I replace SUSE, it'll be with version 10.2, or possibly with SLED 10 SP1. And since rhea is running just fine with Ubuntu 7.10, I'll leave well enough alone there as well.

Surprises
  1. Fedora now recognizes and mounts NTFS partitions. Up to and including Fedora Core 5, I had to rebuild the kernel with NTFS support for this to work.
  2. Performance. Ignoring the pause when an application is being loaded from the CD, F8 is surprisingly snappy.
  3. GCC version. It looks like F8 ships with gcc 4.1.2; at least that's what the kernel was built with, which indicates that's the version that ships with the system. The only distribution that seems to ship with gcc 4.2.1 is openSUSE 10.3. I'm not calling this a problem or a mark against F8, but I am very curious as to why, especially in light of Linus' comments with regards to gcc.

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