This Old Blog

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 experiment...

OpenSUSE 12.1 64-bit with Marble Virtual Globe 1.2.2 One reason OpenSUSE is installed is as a platform for Marble Virtual Globe. Marble comes fully installed with OpenSUSE 12.1. I've been working to have it interpret Google Earth KML that another application in the lab generates so that Marble can be an alternative to Google Earth (but not replace Google Earth). Google Earth, Nasa's World Wind , and Marble Virtual Globe are the three primary earth visualization tools we are interested in. In addition I finally installed Google Chrome on this system. That turned out to be more of a trial than I was expecting. It started when I downloaded the Google Chrome RPM for Fedora/OpenSUSE. I tried to install the RPM immediately after I downloaded it, but installation failed because OpenSUSE 12.1 wasn't LSB 4 or later compliant. I then turned to the repositories. From the repositories you can either install Chromium or Chrome. Chromium stands at beta version 17, while stable C...