We can’t disagree. Openness and sharing is what Linux is all about. Fedora doesn’t have a spin for netbooks. There is a Special Interest Group for “Fedora Mini”, which was originally intended for netbooks, but has the expanded focus of other devices.
A lot of the work in a mini distribution is reducing dependencies. While hard drive space makes extra program installation not as much of a problem, current trends toward speed, efficiency, and bandwidth limiting suggest that we should be looking at this. For example, Fedora installs Bluetooth services on a system regardless of whether or not there is a bluetooth adapter installed. It installs smart card authentication on everything. And the default option during an installation is to configure software packages after installation, not before.
Michael seemed to have a lot of trouble with Fedora on Netbooks. We did not with our little MSI Wind. Initially, there were no drivers for the wireless card, but we were able to compile them. Then, because we don’t like unstable drivers, even if they did work, we swapped the stock card for an Intel one with great Linux support.
We’ve tried Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and it does offer a lightweight environment and a good launcher. But there are good launchers available of similar design available for Fedora. The lightweight LXDE environment is available through Fedora, as is XFCE, which in its latest version has a more traditional GUI design than its predecessors.
The fact is that we must agree and disagree. What Fedora lacks is a good lightweight spin. Which is a shame. Fedora has all the tools to be lightweight with personal tweaking.
There are things in the works though. The Fedora LXDE spin is set to be offered as part of Fedora 12, and an XFCE spin which has been offered for several iterations of Fedora.
What we would like to see, and perhaps we should suggest it, is increasing the number of default setup profiles in the default DVD installation, or allowing a custom profile to be loaded in. Currently, the Kickstart process, which is designed mostly to automate administrator installations for multiple systems, allows for this, but we’d like to see a Fedora supported initiative in this direction. A minimalist server profile, a minimalist desktop profile, etc.
Ubuntu offers a Desktop and a Server LiveCD as its primary installation media. We like the fact Fedora offers both this and a DVD where the most popular softwares can be installed on multiple systems without repeated downloads. We just think that the default installation needs to be streamlined, or offer the options to be streamlined without having to hack together a customer version of Fedora or download multiple different LiveCDs. We, as we said, could do this using Kickstart, but we’d like it if Fedora took the lead on it as well.
That said, the full version of Fedora 11 works wonderfully on our netbook, and while we’ve tried Ubuntu Netbook Remix on an Eee…we’ll stick with what we are familiar with.
