Fedora 9 was released earlier this week to great fanfare. There were the usual spate of 'ain't-it-wonderful' articles, extolling the virtues of this latest release (you know, the kind of pap I used to write about openSUSE and Ubuntu). So I said to myself said I, "I'll just download the Fedora 9 Gnome and KDE live CDs and see how they install." And so, I did.

Preparation

The target installation system was rhea. Rhea was currently running Mandriva 2008.1. Rhea has been a mess for some time. It has two old drives in it (27 Gig and 40Gig), and originally came with Microsoft Windows ME installed. Over time that first drive was chopped up into five partitions; two FAT32, two ext3, and swap. So this time I decided to remove everything and consolidate the space into a root partition (/), home (/home), and swap. Worked out pretty well in the past on my other system, europa, so I had no reason to suspect it wouldn't work here. And it has worked out pretty well, at least for the released distributions.

Installation

I've gone to the trouble to install both Fedora 9 Gnome and KDE. I wanted to try both with the goal of working with KDE for the most part. Both versions installed without incident, and the Gnome version, using Gnome 2.22, looks quite good and works quite well, for the most part. I did run some issues that I checked to see if they also existed on the KDE installation. Some did, and some did not.

More Here