Fedora 12 - a quick review

Fedora 12 was officially released on Wednesday(Nov 18th) and I installed it on my office desktop today. The installation took less than 45 minutes(of which I spend 15 minutes to clean my two hard disks and select packages). Within 1 hour I was able to login to the fresh Fedora 12 desktop. As per the Fedora Project Wiki, there were lots of new features and changes. Some of them caused minor issues, but I was able to quickly overcome those and return to normal work within another 1 hour.

Here is a list of some quick changes in Fedora 12:

1. Gnote is the default note taking application.
2. Empathy is the default Instant Messenger.
3. Enhanced PackageKit for installing new software
4. The Download folder in the desktop is renamed to Downloads. (Of course the word Downloads makes more sense).

However, I had some issues with the new desktop. The most disturbing issue was about the screen resolution - I was able to get only a resolution of 800x600. The desktop had a Intel Original Motherboard and LG Flatron L1730S monitor. I have to install system-config-display from the yum repository to manually configure the display, but it didn't succeeded. After some quick search in Fedora Wiki, I tried the nomodeset option in boot parameters and I was able to get 1024x768.
Reference: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F12_bugs

The second issue was not that much important - missing menu icon for Epiphany Web Browser. This was not a big issue, but it will surely affect the look and feel of the desktop.

Last but not least, I took some screenshots while installing the OS, but unfortunately I couldn't find the images after logging to the desktop. I found a folder named anaconda-screenshots in /tmp, but it had only one screenshot of the 15 screenshots.

Overall, the desktop is really good and is performing very well. There are yet more features to be explored, and I will update this post as I progress.

Update 1:
The Epiphany icon problem was solved after updating the gnome-desktop package(gnome-desktop.x86_64 0:2.28.1-3.fc12)

Update 2:
The screen resolution issue was reported in redhat bugzilla and it is fixed:
See the bug here #538761