{"id":1749,"date":"2011-05-01T20:10:02","date_gmt":"2011-05-02T02:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1749"},"modified":"2011-05-01T20:43:53","modified_gmt":"2011-05-02T02:43:53","slug":"fedora-spin-kde-desktop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1749","title":{"rendered":"Fedora Spin: KDE Desktop"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sometime back I ran into a concept called <a href=\"http:\/\/spins.fedoraproject.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Fedora Spins<\/a>, which are customized Fedora installs with different desktops (KDE, LXDE, XFCE) or a slant in some direction like security, graphics, or games. I downloaded the <a href=\"http:\/\/spins.fedoraproject.org\/kde\/\" target=\"_blank\">KDE Spin<\/a> ISO earlier today, burned it to CD, and this evening (having burned out on ebooks) took it for a&#8230;ride. I had 300 GB of free space on my Linux box, so there was no reason not to, and I&#8217;d like to get a little better at the KDE Plasma desktop.<\/p>\n<p>Some reactions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Fedora partitioner is very good. I did a manual partition operation, and created a new 60 GB partition for Fedora, and a 12 GB swap partition. It helps to know a little bit about partitioners generally, but overall it was intuitive and gave me no trouble.<\/li>\n<li>For some reason, Fedora installs grub with grub&#8217;s <strong>hiddenmenu<\/strong> option enabled. (It&#8217;s conceivable that I accidentally chose that somehow, but I don&#8217;t recall being asked.) This means that at boot time, grub&#8217;s menu isn&#8217;t displayed, and the system boots directly into Fedora. (The system already has Ubuntu Lucid and Windows XP on it.) You can get the boot menu by pressing F10 during grub&#8217;s timeout period, but otherwise you aren&#8217;t presented with an OS menu at all.<\/li>\n<li>Fedora recognized the existence of my XP partition, but didn&#8217;t know what it was. In grub&#8217;s menu, XP is therefore listed as &#8220;Other.&#8221; However, if you select it, grub boots it just fine.<\/li>\n<li>Fedora has a GUI bootloader configuration utility that allows selection of the timeout value and the default OS. However, <em>the utility&#8217;s sole window does not have a Save or Apply button<\/em>. You can make changes, but closing the utility throws them away. Wow. <a href=\"http:\/\/fedoraforum.org\/forum\/showthread.php?t=258132\" target=\"_blank\">This is a bug, and not a brand-new one<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Unlike Ubuntu, Fedora does not automatically add the initial user account to the sudoers list. So try to do anything rootish like editing grub&#8217;s config file gives you that inane message &#8220;jduntemann is not in the sudoers list. This incident will be reported.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Adding yourself to the sudoers list is seriously unintuive, but the best way is probably to use the <strong>visudo<\/strong> command, which opens a vi edit window with the sudoers list ready to change. Add USERNAME ALL=(ALL) ALL to the end of the file and save; it&#8217;s done. <a href=\"http:\/\/rubypond.com\/blog\/adding-yourself-to-the-sudoers-file\" target=\"_blank\">Details here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Fixing grub requires editing the grub.conf file and commenting out the <strong>hiddenmenu<\/strong> option. While I was there, I also changed the description of the XP partition from &#8220;Other&#8221; to &#8220;Windows XP.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>A 2.8 GHz Dell SX280 does not have sufficient graphics chops to run Plasma&#8217;s desktop effects. I wanted to see just how slow they were, but within seconds of enabling desktop effects, Fedora disabled them again. I knew that the SX280 wouldn&#8217;t run them well from my online research (it&#8217;s one reason I&#8217;m getting a more powerful Linux box shortly) but I didn&#8217;t know the system would simply refuse to run the effects against my wishes. Interestingly, Ubuntu&#8217;s GNOME desktop effects subsystem works on the same machine.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Overall, getting to a usable configuration with Fedora is a lot more screwing around than with Ubuntu. But once done, it works well. More as I experience it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometime back I ran into a concept called Fedora Spins, which are customized Fedora installs with different desktops (KDE, LXDE, XFCE) or a slant in some direction like security, graphics, or games. I downloaded the KDE Spin ISO earlier today, burned it to CD, and this evening (having burned out on ebooks) took it for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[59,14],"class_list":["post-1749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-linux","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1749"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1750,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1749\/revisions\/1750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}