bjoernvold.com

I am giving Fedora 18 a spin because I have plans to check out revisor (I'll get back to that). So far every one seems to think that Fedora 18 is ...crap.
But the installer is OK I think. I had to manually delete my existing partitions to make space for Fedora 18 and that seemed unnecessary. Choosing to use all the space and just make this automatic was not there afaict.

But it seemed to be secure and not eager to overwrite potentially important stuff so that is OK.

Also the provide root password procedure was somewhat different but not impossible - just strange. And then I rebooted and got the phase2 config where I basically created my user and clicked. No problem.
So then I was ready to log in to a fully functional Gnome 3 (that is not often said about Gnome 3 so I guess that is a compliment ) OpenSuse 12.3 complains and goes directly in fallback mode - not so with Fedora 18

I open my terminal and start with installing sudo and nano - I always do that.

And it installs nicely - I am always pleasantly surprised by yum because it is so logical - well according to my logic anyway. With Yum I always reason and think "that must be the command for ..." and it always is!
So Yum understands me - better than my wife I continue with adding myself to the sudoers like this:

And in the file that is opened I find:

An place:

directly under it. Then I save and exit and do an update:

There are a 1000 updates so it toke a while but here I am with a Fedora 18 that seems to work just fine.

I went to https://extensions.gnome.org - the site that makes Gnome3 "almost usable" and clicked on the Places extension - and it worked like a charm!
Gnome shell prompted me to install it and there it was. That is not always the case and I have had my fair share of problems in this department with Gnome updates making all the extensions I had installed obsolete. That is bound to happen since Gnome comes first and then the extension guys have to work fast to keep up....

Anyway here it all worked - this time.

So I made my Fedora 18 pretty usable and I had absolutely no problems with it. Fedora 18 is NOT crap IMHO. It will get the work done -just fine.

Hrmph I spoke to soon...
I cannot launch revisor It prompts for the root password and then ...nothing.
In the terminal it complains about

Anaconda-runtime is installed but it must be somewhere else. Typical case of Murphys law there
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=649815
Going for the workaround........
...
Which did not do anything for me. Ok I guess this ends the test. So in my case I did actually not get the work done And that bug has been around forever without a fix - so I cannot understand why that software is still in the repos.
The bug was reported for Fedora 14 and has been there ever since. Since Fedora 14 has reached EOL the bug was closed as WONTFIX. But the program that is known not to work stays in the repos for Fedora 16 17 and 18
I think the quality record of RedHat just got seriously damaged - at least in my mind. I really wanted to try out revisor because it looks like an extremely good piece of software.

I guess it will be Susestudio then......Or maybe remastersys

maybe remastersys

That looks pretty easy to use, if you're using Debian/Ubuntu. I see the developer mentions Mandriva's makelivecd, which I haven't used. Maybe it's useful for traveling or the independently wealthy to play with while enjoying sunsets from the veranda at the top of the world.

Sounds good but I am freezing my but off and still shoveling snow - so Sunny California is way more posh....
See that tree in the middle of the pic? That is a one h walk and then I only have 4 h left before I get to the store for some food. Naturally I walk barefooted in 1 m snow....
And remastersys seems to work just fine so far. It makes sense that a Desktop oriented distro like Ubuntu maintains that kind of software better than a server distro.