Honestly, I've never been a big Red Hat fan and Anaconda discriminating against my hard drives didn't help. So, Fedora being delivered in a livecd format gives Tuxmachines a welcomed opportunity to test it. 

The Livecd

The livecd boots up to a nice looking customized grub screen with only two choices consisting of booting Fedora or loading it into ram first. One can press <Tab> to edit the boot parameters if needed. Fedora's livecd takes quite a while to boot here and one can see SELinux being implemented and lots of services.

The graphics were detected really well on my HP laptop, but on my desktop I had to do a bit of coaxing, as my dual monitor setup confused it (as commonly happens with livecds). I had to edit the sparse /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in order to talk X into working.

Once booted into the gnome 2.18 (2.17.91), one first notices this lovely wallpaper primarily in darker blue hues featuring several hot-air balloons flying above some clouds in a skyscape and the fedora logo. This is one of the better looking default gnome setups I've seen and the fonts look really great on both my desktop and notebook.

The System

The menu is a bit sparse. There weren't many application choices and some of those were inoperative. Fedora 7 livecd features Abiword for word processing, but it failed to open here. Instead a ghost window opens and a bug report popup soon follows.

Other office applications include elements of evolution for Tasks and Calendar and gnumeric for spreadsheet work. Graphics includes The Gimp, gThumb, Inkscape and F-Spot photo manager. F-Spot crashes too. For internet tasks one has Firefox, Evolution, Gaim, and a blogger client. The vpn app wouldn't open. There were quite a few smaller 2d games included like Blackjack, Klondike, Mahjongg, Nibbles and Sudoku.

3D PPRacer is also included. Multimedia consists of Rhythmbox music player, a cd player and Totem movie player. The cd player opened one of those ghost windows and since Fedora couldn't see any of my higher partition numbers, I didn't get to test the movie player. Some accessories include an archive manager, gedit, a calculator, character map and an online dictionary.

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