In life, you rarely get a second chance at first impression. However, with operating system upgrades you do get a second chance at first impression---when the "upgrade" goes badly and you have to wipe it for a clean install.
That's what happened to me these past 3 days. My upgrade essentially didn't work: Evolution was dog slow. Switching from X to a console virual window was broken. The logout dialog wouldn't show up. And attempts to kill X with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace would hang the whole thing, forcing me to press the Reset button. The desktop look is a mixture of preserved FC2 and half setup FC3, with a thin panel bar at the top with nothing but the calendar applet and a think panel bar at the bottom holding the old FC2 menus.
So I did a clean install. It's only marginally harder than an upgrade. I have to supply the hostname, IP address, gateway, DNS servers, etc. I also have to match disk partitions with mount points. Fortunately, FC3 seems able to figure out the old mount points of each partition and make that the first choice in the combo box. I can preserve the old data or reformat on a per partition bases. So I preserved the /home, /opt, and /usr/local partitions.
The full install is much better than the upgrade. Evolution is very fast now. I already mentioned that I liked the builtin spam block. I just discovered that I can print an email to a PDF file now, although I don't know how useful such a PDF file is.
All of my X related issues are gone except one, my screen repainting is still slow. But I can switch to a console window by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1 now.
The main menu went back to the top left corner now. I believe this is how Ximian GNOME want it. The only complaint I have against this setup is that the pager, at the lower right corner, is too far away from the menu. One common use case for the pager is to move to a empty workspace and start a new application from the menu. Now I have to move my mouse from one corner of the screen to another corner to accomplish it.
Doing a fresh install also means that I have to reget everything that does not come with the CDs. I find this link indispensible. I followed the steps outlined in it, and within minutes, I had my XMMS MP3 working. I also had Real Player and a DVD player installed.
The up2date and yum utilities still work as they always have worked. They split the monolithic yum.conf file into separate configuration files in the /etc/yum.repo.d directory. The new yum is also a lot faster than the old one.
I have sorted out the Java situation on Fedora Core 3: since the Sun JDK is not part of the distribution, Java support is provided by the gcc-java, libgcj, libgcj-devel packages. These packages provide the java, javac and other JDK like commands that eventually execute the compiler or the JIT engine in GCJ. Since GCJ does not have have a complete JDK compatible class library, this approach is not as powerful as the true Sun JDK.
The way around it is to install the Sun JDK and make sure to put its bin directory (/opt/jdk1.5.0/bin) in front of /usr/bin in the PATH environment variable. The GCJ commands can still be used in their native form: gcj, gcjh, gij, fastjar, grmic, grmiregistry. See my OCI JNB article for a fast introduction to the wonders of GCJ.
The CD burner in Fedora Core 3 is still as broken as it was in Fedora Core 2.
The gqview command is gone. I have to find another way to view image files. I could always use Gimp, but I really prefer something lighter weight.
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