UPDATE(November15th2007): in this article I am not saying that yum is out of date only the gui for the package manager.

Here is a review of Fedora 8 code named ‘Werewolf ‘!

I downloaded the DVD version of Fedora 8. In this guide I will give tips about the installation, customization, and for you that have nvidia graphics cards you will get to know how the installation went for that.

The installation went well, though it did take 45 minutes to install all of the development, regular and some other packages. In total there were 1089 packages to download and to install. It all went fine and was almost as fast as the 35 minute CentOS which had less packages to install. Since it only takes 45 minutes I was able to work on some non computer work.
Customization, hmmm, the customization is ok while you work, though its gets worse over time. The so called “changing background” that changes according to the time of the day, well lets just say this, it didn’t change at all. I went through a bunch of customizations. I changed the window themes, the color of the themes, and the folder themes also. Overall the themes were just not as appealing as I thought they should have been. I have been using the new Fedora 8 for more then 5 days. Fedora 8 was also on my laptop which was powered on for 48 hours while I was updating it, changing how it looked, and writing this review also.

So far I believe that I can say that it is an OK distro to try again if you have already tried it, though there is not as much innovation going on as in Ubuntu. If I was working on the Fedora team I would try to put a better package manager since it looks way out of date.

If there was any new innovation it should be seen within the next few releases of Fedora and Redhat.

Well now we’re on to the Nvidia graphics card driver installation. The Nvidia graphics driver is really just like CentOS, I just need to figure out how to stop the xserver. So far I would say that with other Distros like Ubuntu, I could just with a click of a button install the graphics driver with the restricted manager. Though I am not that experienced with Fedora, or CentOS, or even OpenSuSE, I can say that I would probably figure it out over time.

Overall I would give this release of Fedora a 3/5 smilies 😀 😀 😀 which is good enough to use for people who are not wanting to use a variety of Linux distributions and just wanted to stay with something less difficult to use.

Pros: Easy to use, works like a charm,

Cons: out of date package manager, does not let you use ‘sudo’ without using ‘su’ first.

I will review Fedora 9 when it comes out though I do hope it has some more innovations that come along with it, especially a better package manager, and a restricted manager.