I’ve been a FreeBSD user since the days of FreeBSD 1.1.5.1. I cut my teeth old older BSD systems, and the desire to have a similar system for my home machine made it the obvious choice. I also prefer the ideology of the BSD licensing scheme more than the GPL, but that’s a different rant.

Still, I haven’t installed any different operating systems lately, and I’ve been intrigued by the possibility of running MythTV, so I decided to install RedHat on my old FV24 box. This box hasn’t been powered on since I got my Mini-ITX system going, so I booted it up, checked to make sure that nothing valuable was installed on it (there wasn’t), and then set off to download the RedHat distribution.

Except that Redhat isn’t really Redhat anymore. The free version to download is now called Fedora Core. Hmmm. Things have changed a bit. I went ahead and downloaded the four CDs full of stuff (took less than two hours, courtesy of improved download speeds from Comcast) and booted.

I must admit: their installation is dead slick. I can install FreeBSD in my sleep, but Fedora is even easier. Just a couple of clicks to reformat my drive, a couple more to select the distribution, and voila, a nice desktop version of X installed and booting. I was shocked at how quickly it went. Easier than FreeBSD, easier than Windows, just plain easy.

I picked the Desktop profile, which installed relatively few servers (I am keeping FreeBSD for all that stuff anyway) but did include good stuff like Mozilla, OpenOffice, CD burners and players, and a bunch of games. They look great, they work, the menus are all wired up, and it was completely natural. Much kudos.

The only problem that I have isn’t really a fault of Fedora: it’s a problem with software licensing. They have chosen not to include items which have patents or other licensing problems hanging over them. This includes (somewhat tragically) mp3 decoders and the ever problematic DVD playing software like xine or mplayer. I need media players that work on my system, and it’s kind of annoying that further works needs to be done to get them. I don’t blame Fedora/Redhat, that’s just another annoyance of software patents.

Luckily, I stumbled accross this discussion of things a new Fedora user should do to customize his system right after install. I’ll let you know how it goes tonight when I can give it a try.

Overall though, Fedora seems very nice, at least at the 24 hour point. I’ll have to try it some more. My plans to make a MythTV receiver are on temporary hold though, I don’t have an extra video capture card at the moment (perhaps an Hauppauge PVR-350 is in my future, it would be nice to have a card with real MPEG2 encoding). Till then, I obviously need to gain some more Linux experience, and my little Shuttle cube should be a good way to experiment with it.