First time on Fedora Live CD

I have been using Fedora GNU/Linux since it's first release and have worked on almost all versions of Fedora. But I never got a chance to test or use the Live CD version of Fedora. It is this post(appeared in fedora-india mailing list) that tempted me to download and install the Live CD version of Fedora.

The booting procedure was straight forward and plymouth(the graphical boot loader for Fedora) is really fast. It's much faster when compared with Ubuntu boot proces, but the desktop preparation process took more time than Ubuntu.

For testing purpose I used the Malayalam interface. It's really cool to see the traditional Malayalam font(Meera) on the desktop interface.The default input scheme, SCIM, supports four input methods - inscript, itrans, mozhi and swanalekha. Here is a screenshot

The Fedora Live CD contains almost all of the popular applications such as Mozilla Firefox, Pidgin Instant Messenger, Transmission BitTorrent Client, Totem Movie Player, RhythmBox Music Player, GIMP, Gthumb, Gedit, SCIM, etc.. But it's really disappointing that OpenOffice.org is not included in the Live CD version, instead Abiword is included. Abiword is a great word processor, but it's not at all a complete office suite.

Live CDs are commonly used by end users who only requires a web browser, instant messenger or an Office suite. It may be nice if the Fedora community takes steps to include OpenOffice in the Live CDs so that it can gain more popularity among end users.

റെഡ്മണ്ട് ഭൂവില്‍

എന്തൊക്കെ തമാശകളാണ് കാണേണ്ടി വരുന്നത്. സാമൂഹ്യ അടിത്തറയുള്ള സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയറുകള്‍ക്ക് ഉപയോക്തൃ സമൂഹങ്ങള്‍ (users group) ഉണ്ടാകുന്നത് സ്വാഭാവികമാണു്. അതിന്റെ ഉപയോഗവും വികസന രീതിയും അതു ആവശ്യപ്പെടുകയും ചെയ്യുന്നു. എന്നാല്‍, ഒരു കുത്തക കമ്പനിക്കും(സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയറിനു അല്ല) കേരളത്തില്‍ യൂസേഴ്സ് ഗ്രൂപ്പ ഉണ്ടായിരിക്കുന്നു. കെ-മഗ്(k-mug) എന്ന പേരില്‍ 2001 മുതല്‍ കേരളത്തില്‍ നിലവിലുണ്ടായിരുന്ന വിവിധ ഗ്രൂപ്പുകളുടെ ലയനം കഴിഞ്ഞ മാസം കോഴിക്കോട്ടു നടന്നു. കൂടുതല്‍ വിവരങ്ങള്‍ ഇവിടെ.

കെ-മഗിന്റെ ഉത്ഘാടനം നിര്‍വഹിച്ചത് കേരളത്തില്‍ സോഷ്യലിസ്റ്റ് ആശയങ്ങള്‍ ഘോരഘോരം പ്രസംഗിക്കുന്ന, ശ്രീ എം.പി വീരേന്ദ്രകുമാര്‍ എം.പി യാണെന്നതു ഏറ്റവും വലിയ വിരോധഭാസമായി. സോഷ്യലിസവും മുതലാളിത്തവും തമ്മിലുള്ള അഭേദ്യമായ ബന്ധത്തിന്റെ പേരിലായിരിക്കും അദ്ദേഹം ഇതിനു കൂട്ടു നിന്നത് എന്നു വിചാരിക്കുന്നു. സ്വതന്ത്ര സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയറിനെ സിപിഐ(എം) പരസ്യമായി അനുകൂലിക്കുന്നു എന്നു ശ്രീ. സീതാറാം എച്ചൂരി പ്രസ്താവിച്ച (ഇവിടെ നോക്കൂ) സ്ഥിതിക്ക് സഖാക്കളായ ബഹുമാനപ്പെട്ട മേയര്‍ ശ്രീ. എം ഭാസ്കരനും, കോഴിക്കോട് എംഎല്‍എ ശ്രീ. പ്രദീപ്കുമാറും മൈക്രോസോഫ്റ്റിന്റെ(അഥവ കെ-മഗിന്റെ) കോഴി ബിരിയാണി തിന്നാന്‍ പോയത് നാണക്കേട് തന്നെയാണു്. മാത്രമല്ല, ഇടതുപക്ഷം അംഗീകരിച്ച സംസ്ഥാന ഐടി നയരേഖയുടെ ലംഘനവും.

കോഴി ബിരിയാണി അസ്സലായി എന്നാണു് പങ്കെടുത്തവരുടെ സാക്ഷ്യപ്പെടുത്തല്‍.

"Lunch coupons were given during registration time and K-MUG served Kozhikode Chicken Biriyani and Vegetable Biriyani for the attendees. As per the feedback from participants, lunch was excellent... "

എന്തായാലും അടുത്ത വയലാര്‍ അവാര്‍ഡിനായി ഒരു പുസ്കകം കൂടി നമുക്ക് പ്രതീക്ഷിക്കാം - "റെഡ്മണ്ട് ഭൂവില്‍".

അവലംബം
http://pramode.net/2008/11/12/kerala-microsoft-users-group-launched
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/11/11/kerala-ms-user-group

A Quick Glance at Fedora 10 beta

Note: This article is not a comprehensive review of all the features in Fedora 10 beta.

The Fedora 10 beta or more precisely Fedora 9.92 was released on 30th September 2008. I decided to give it a try using Xen virtualization in Fedora 9, as I don't want to install a "bleeding edge" distro in my desktop. But unfortunately, Fedora 9 has an issue with Xen Virtualization and the only work around was to get it installed through qemu. The documentation at the Fedora wiki is enough to get it started.

However, I had a bad luck with with CD-ROM image, except that I was able to run anaconda. The first thing I noticed is the Malayalam strings in anaconda interface was not properly displayed. I discussed this matter in the IRC channel of SMC, and filed a bug in Redhat Bugzilla. I was also struck with another bug when I tried to disable the installation media and use only the Rawhide repository. The good news is that Fedora developers responded quickly to the two bug reports. Since I didn't bothered to download minimal set of the CD-ROM images, I decided to proceed with netinstall image available at Fedora download server.

A fresh installation attempt using the netinstall image was problematic. But after several failed attempts I could connect to the fedora mirrors and start the installation. The installation took more than 4 hours. All the packages where downloaded from Internet and qemu environment was also slow. At the end anaconda hanged with the message "installing kernel-2.6.xx... ". I just closed the qemu window and boot the newly installed system using the following command:

# qemu fedora.qcow -boot c -net nic -net user -m 512 -localtime -no-kqemu

The graphical boot loader, rhgb has been replaced by Plymouth and if you press ESC key, then you can view the entire boot messages. After several minutes of wait, I was able to login to the new Fedora 10 desktop. may be the virtualized environment degraded the performance of the desktop.

As soon as I logged in, the first major change I noticed is the new Echo-Icon theme. The icon set is great and gave the desktop an elegant look and feel.


Malayalam Support

I was curious about the Malayalam rendering and language support. Fortunately, Malayalam rendering was perfect with the patches from SMC and the new Malayalam font, Meera developed by SMC itself. Mozilla Firefox 3 and OpenOffice.org 3.0 rendered Malayalam perfectly. However, in OpenOffice there were some issues with some complex conjucts. But I won't think that these are used frequently in Malayalam content.

The font size problem which was a major issue in the prior release was resolved and it's really cool to see Malayalam on the desktop without any rendering errors.

Fedora also has 7 other unicode Malayalam fonts - smc-anjalioldlipi, smc-kalyani(previously MalOtf), smc-rachana, smc-raghumalayalam, smc-dhyuthi, samyak-malayalam and lohit-malayalam. However, I'm not sure whether the issues with lohit-malayalam is resolved.

The input method configuration is also very easy. The im-chooser application guided me to configure all the required input methods in different languages. There are 4 Input schemes for Malayalam - inscript, itrans, mozhi and swanalekha.

I think Fedora 10 may be the first GNU/Linux distribution with complete Malayalam rendering and input methods.

Other Applications

Fedora 10 comes loaded with GNOME-2.24 which provides many robust desktop applications. The prominent change is the inclusion of Empathy instant messenger which supports gtalk(voice and video), yahoo and several other IM protocols.

I was also curious about the webkit powered Epiphany. But the webkit switch was not complete and the version 2.24 still uses the Gecko engine. Visit here for more details.

This release also has better webcam support through the GNOME application called Cheese.

There is also some menu re-arrangements in the new desktop. The Dictionary application have been moved to the Office section, earlier it was included in the Accessories section.

To summarize, I believe that Fedora 10 is a distribution which is worth waiting for. Here is the schedule. The stable release is planned for November 2008.