The Fedora 18 installer does not allow single package installations, instead it prefers to install by package groups. You can also install groups after completing installation. This is especially useful since you can only select one Desktop Environment at installation. Alternatively, to have faster installations, select as few groups as possible and then only install the ones you need later. This is just a quick note on how yum can install by groups instead of by individual packages.

Fedora 18 was released this week and I finally got around to installing it today. To be honest, on either my laptop or desktop I have not really used Fedora much since Fedora 14. I have been incredibly happy with CentOS for over a year and a half now, and I (begrudgingly) accepted Windows 7 on my laptop. Today’s installation of Fedora 18 made me question my use of time. I switched jobs exactly 2 years ago and found myself in the precarious position of having little to no spare time.

I’m migrating away from Fedora as my desktop operating system. I’ve been testing CentOS 6 which was released recently and I feel I would be much more efficient using it instead of Fedora. I still have quite a few quirks to resolve, but I have no doubt I’ll find the solutions. I bought a new desktop some time ago with the intention of running virtualization, so I plan to still test and use Fedora time to time, but I can no longer keep up with the rate of change.

Wow! That’s a lot of F’s! Courtesy of Tom ‘spot’ Calloway, install Firefox 4 on Fedora 14 (or Fedora 13): # su -c 'wget -P /etc/yum.repos.d/ http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/firefox4/fedora-firefox4.repo' # su -c 'yum install firefox4' To run: # firefox4 & In Gnome: System > Preferences > Preferred Applications Change ‘Web Browser’ to Custom, and for Command: firefox4 %s To remove Firefox 3.6: # su -c 'yum remove firefox' ref: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox_4

(Note: For the purpose of this post CentOS is equivalent to RHEL) It has been about 2 and 1/2 years since I built a dedicated server and chose CentOS instead of Fedora. Since I installed CentOS 5.1 I have used the upgrade process 4 times with no problems bringing me to version 5.5 with practically no re-installation, re-configuration or troubleshooting upgrade issues. This is the goal of enterprise linux. A long term stable solution with no major changes to preserve compatibility with every piece of software that was provided since it was released (in this case April 2007).