I have used Ubuntu exclusively for almost 2 years now. In that time I have very rarely had contact with other distros. The only exception being spending about half an hour in Fedora 8 or 9, quite liking it and never getting round to making a partition to dual boot between it and Ubuntu. But with the release of both Fedora 10 and VMWare 6.5, what better time is there to check out the latest release from the Fedora team?

I grabbed the Live CD ISO from the Fedora site, which auto-located the nearest mirror to me and it downloaded pretty quickly. The installation process was incredibly simple. The LiveCD booted straight into a graphical interface, where you could setup things like Language and Keyboard layout. This is a refreshing change from Ubuntu, where you are dumped into a “grub” style keyboard interface to setup keyboard/language by pressing funny key combinations and using ugly text menus. Once I had changed my keyboard/language from US to UK I was presented with a nice (very blue) GNOME desktop. An “Install to hard drive” shortcut was neatly placed on the desktop to get the installation properly started. The actual installer (called Anaconda) is very like Ubuntu’s Ubiquity. It goes through most of the same steps, in roughly the same order (and does the same job). Partitioning was a breeze and it even included an “Encrypt my hard drive” check-box, which was a cool little feature.At the end of the main installation process, it told me to reboot, without giving me a reboot button or telling me how to reboot. It’s just a little cosmetic issue, but it could be quite confusing for new users, who don’t have a clue how the GNOME interface works.

On first boot I was presented with a “Setup Agent”.