At Work with Linux: Fedora 16 KDE as a VM

Nothing out of the ordinary. After installing regular Fedora 16 with Gnome 3 I created a new VMware VM installation of Fedora 16, except this time I selected the KDE desktop environment. The version of KDE that ships with Fedora 16 is 4.7.4.

The installation proceeded without any incidents, all the updates came down from the internets and installed just fine, including the latest Firefox release, version 10. What's interesting is how performant Firefox 10 is compared with older Firefox releases, especially when executing in a virtual machine.

One key reason for installing Fedora 16 with KDE was to replace OpenSUSE 12. The lab is comfortable with Fedora (we are, after all, a RHEL site as well, paying for Redhat support). I was pleasantly surprised to see that Marble 1.2.2 ships with the KDE desktop. I searched for it via KDE's panel and found it after a few keystrokes. It looks and runs the same as the version that ships with OpenSUSE 12. I can now continue my KML experiments with Marble.

One more comment about KDE: Install it, use it, live with it. It's done. Good job, KDE developers.

Comments

  1. Sounds intriguing - thanks for the tip!

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  2. Now I just wonder why the bathymetry in your screenshot looks different from a normal Marble installation. :-)

    Torsten

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  3. Stock installation. I made no changes to the desktop except to add an analog clock to the desktop over the bathysphere.

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  4. Thanks. Well Marble looks still good but as a Marble developer I wondered what has caused this change of colors. I guess I need to take a closer look at Fedora 16 ;-)

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  5. Ok, we just figured it out: Fedora 16 seems to be using Qt 4.8. At this point this is not a good idea since KDE 4.8 was only thoroughly tested against Qt 4.7.

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  6. Yep, we're using Qt 4.8 and we didn't spot this issue, if you'll be able to debug it, ping me, I'll update our packages.

    Thanks

    Btw. nice to see Fedora featured, thanks a lot!

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  7. You're welcome. I have Fedora 14 Gnome on my notebook (Dell Latitude D630) primarily as an Android development platform. Everything Just Works on it, including wireless and native nVidia video. I've also got a Bluetooth/USB dongle plugged into it for hacking with Wiimotes and Sony controllers. I have Android and Fedora links over Category Cloud if you're interested. Right now, for me, I find Fedora is the best distribution for experimentation and engineering.

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