BANGALORE, INDIA: Free and OpenSource, that's the term we always think of when it comes to Fedora (or Linux). This automatically means there will be no support for MP3, DVD, AVI and YouTube video as they will require non-open source plugins. Still you can enable Fedora 10 for playing these multimedia files format and enjoy your time. Comparing with the last release of Fedora, the current one comes with quite a few enhancements and hardware support. Initially we installed both GNOME 2.24 and KDE 4 to get a look and feel of both the desktops, and trust me they didnt disappoint at all.

Desktops
In Fedora 10 you get to choose from four different desktops. Apart from GNOME and KDE, one gets LXDE and Sugar. The LXDE desktop is a new project; it is light weight and fast specially meant for lower end computers, as it keeps the resource utilization low as compared to other desktops. The concept of 'Sugar Desktop' originally came from OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project. The OLPC project was started to provide low cost laptops to children in developing nations, and will be powered by stripped down version of Fedora Linux and Sugar interface. The goal of sugar interface is to provide easy, fast and social experience to users. In KDE 4.1, the Kwin desktop manager now provides support for desktop effects and compositing which you have to enable manually. But KDE Live does not have Compiz/Beryl. Well in GNOME you also find desktop effects which need to be manually enabled.

Multimedia Applications
By default you will not be able to play all the songs you have in your existing Windows collection; but yes you can play them after certain tweaks. The codec installation helper 'codenia' is replace by the Packagekit in Fedora 10. And hence whenever multimedia players such as Totem or Rhyembox try to play a multimedia file, whose plugin is not installed, it automatically searches the required plugins in its repository and installs them. Yes, you need to have Internet connection to your desktop or laptop, else it's of no use. We also tried installing VLC player which of course most of us want to. As usual this was not on Fedora 10's list, hence we installed the rpmfusion and then installed VLC through YUM. For installing the rpmfusion, we execute the following command:

Using Fedora 10
We installed it on an Intel Core2 Duo machine with 512 MB RAM and the installation was smooth, and similar to its earlier release. It very well detected all the hardware and everything worked fine. We also compared the installation time and booting time with its predecessor Fedora 9. For this we installed Fedora 9 on the same system on which Fedora 10 was installed, without changing any hardware. Surprisingly there was hardly any difference between the two. Both the distros took almost half an hour to install and took approximately same amount of time to boot. The installation was done with default package selection. But what's worth mentioning here is that the number of default packages to be installed in Fedora 9 was 928 whereas in Fedora 10 it was 1070.