I had some trouble installing Google Chrome within firefox. It downloaded the .rpm file to /var/temp, but was unable to install it with gPackageKit due to "insufficient permissions". If you have this error, or just want an easier way to install Google Chrome, here is how:
Dependencies
I had an issue as well with my package manager not automatically finding one of the dependencies, but this problem could have been on my end. To be safe, install the "lsb" package from your package manager.
The Command
This one-stop-shop command (as root) will Download and install the x86 version of Google Chrome.
wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm && rpm -i google-crhome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm Of course, both of these commands assume that you have read the license agreement here: http://pastebin.com/ExXM86Y1
Congratulations, you are now the proud owner of a Google Chrome browser.
This week Fedora 18 went stable (and actually trimmed a good 3.2 GiB off of the beta .iso, topping in at 942 MiB, which is easily burnable to a DVD disk or most bootable USB drives. Now, Fedora is a pretty low-key operating system when compared with, say, Ubuntu, so it didn't cause the large-scale celebrations you'd expect to see from a major release. Trust me when I say that by the end of the review you will know just how major of a release Fedora 18 is.
A bit about Fedora
In case you aren't already in the loop, Fedora is Linux operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Changes are made to Fedora before they're made to Red Hat to make sure no breakages will occur, since Red Hat is mostly a server Operating System. This means that Fedora can (and has/is) experiencing breakages due to the youth of code that appears in its base. It's bleeding edge and rolling release. Install once and done, then you have access to all of the latest upstream packages. Think: A user-friendly .rpm version of Arch Linux. If you want a stable .rpm distro like RHEL, look to CentOS. Don't get it wrong; Fedora is extremely secure (thanks to Suse's Selinux), but it's just not as stable as its mother distribution.
The code and sponsoring that Fedora inherits from Red Hat give it an edge. It's one of the few Linux distributions backed by a large company (one with higher stock prices than Microsoft, even), which gives it a definite edge over its competition. Even with this backing, it doesn't go closed-garden (ala Canonical's approach) and still has a positive sense of community among the developers.
The Review --Huge Improvement
Fedora 17 was an incremental increase over Fedora 16. Very little was improved, and it felt like all that had been done was some user experience fixing and the package freeze. Fedora 17 doesn't deserve to be in the same ballpark as Fedora 18. Fedora 18 was an enormous improvement, and an obvious display of effort from all parties involved (especially Gnome and the Fedora core development team). Here are some reasons why:
Gnome related Paraphrasing Linus Torvalds, "Gnome 3 is a nightmare". If only he had tried Gnome 3.6.2before that statement. It has animations (like Cinnamon) on by default, a working extension system, and features to maximize the screen space used by windows (like removing Window decorations on vertically maximized windows). It also has a new lock screen that tablet and touch users alike will find useful, and desktop and laptop users may find amusing. The buttons are even noticeably more aesthetically pleasing.
In actual usability, Gnome now supports dragging windows into the "expo" to move across workspaces, dragging icons into workspaces to deploy the application, and pretty much anything else you would ever want via extensions (http://www.extensions.gnome.org/). It's worth adding that the Gnome applications have added features, like EXIF data examination in pictures via Eye of Gnome, and a new virtual machine application called Gnome Boxes (a Qemu frontend).
Fedora Related
It would be unfair to talk about Fedora without mentioning the work that the Fedora developers have put into the operating system. The installer, Anaconda (which previously left a bit to be desired compared to Ubuntu) has had a visual and feature Facelift, supporting partial encryption and advanced partitioning. I was displeased with the layout of some of the buttons on the installer. You might have to hunt around for a button on the "root password" section (which, by the way, is in a weird optional part of the installer) in order to save your changes.
"Software" is now the graphical frontend to Yum, and it has had some added features like updating the status of the yum lock graphically, so when it's not working you now know why. I did have a problem with an omnipresent Yum lock that I had to remove after installation, but upon further research it seems that this and a GPG error both have patches nominated to fix them, so they're mostly irrelevant. Yum has a pretty CLI frontend too, with light curses displays and sane summarizations. Also, Yum now supports tab completion of packages.
Quick Facts
Firefox - 17
Gnome - 3.6.2
No Gimp
.iso is 942 MiB large
As of 1-17-12 the initial yum update is 270 MiB downloaded, 7 MiB disk space used on Gnome.
Video
Opinions
The best part of a review is the opinionated part. The part where feelings are scarred and lines drawn. Here are my opinions about Fedora 18 and Gnome 3.6.2.
The installer needs work, but it's much more user friendly (especially aesthetically) than it was beforehand.
The user experience is mind-blowing. Fedora is trying hard to cater to the end-user while not sacrificing any of the 4 essential freedoms, even where it would make life far easier.
Resources and Security are as good as always, and better with CPU cycles.
Gnome has surprisingly good defaults, and nice home-brewed applications.
Fedora 18 is a truly stunning Operating System, but it has such a large bug I was dumfounded to find that it was a real problem and not something that I had done to bork yum. .rpms cannot be validated, and thus cannot be installed. There is a simple solution to get around this.
Options
Use only yum's remote capabilities. This is an unattractive option since a lot of times software is not available in a repository (especially if it's hobbyist packaged).
Add the --nogpgcheck flag to yum, making the full command "sudo yum --nogpgcheck install package". This will disable checking altogether, which is what you want before the patch (which has already been submitted as of 1-16-12) is accepted and pushed.
About Recent Posts (blog related)
I'm sorry for the short "stubby" posts about Fedora tonight. I have had limited time to write this up, but I felt that it was critical. I got so fed up with it I nearly reinstalled Ubuntu. More workarounds to come.
This is going to be a very terse post because of how critical it is. Flash is essential to the life of any computer user that is heavily media-centric, and not having it around could cause problems for Fedora's prolonged installation. Unfortunately, the clucks at Fedora thought that shipping a broken GPG checking system was acceptable, so this can be a lot harder than it has to be. These steps and commands will allow you to install Flash (and any other software) in Fedora 18.
The steps
su -c 'yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-18.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-18.noarch.rpm'
A while back I wrote Comparison of Operating Systems, but it turned into more of a tutorial than anything. It only compared Windows and Ubuntu Linux, my current OS. So now I am going to compare Fedora 15, Opensuse 11.4, and Ubuntu 11.4. Let's start with Fedora.
Fedora is a free Linux OS sponsored by Red Hat, the creators of Red Hat enterprise Linux. The fifteenth release (the most recent at the time of writing) includes the Gnome 3 desktop environment in it's fullest form. It has some Gnome features that you can't get from the unstable repository currently available on Ubuntu. It starts off with just a close button, but that can be easily fixed using the Gnome tweak tool. As an Operating System it didn't seem to vary much than how Ubuntu acted when I had Gnome 3 on it. It did have one serious graphical issue. I was doing some 3D graphics at the time using Google Sketchup 8 through Wine and it wouldn't boot in fedora. I did some Googling and sifting through the forums and found that Fedora had some unofficial Nvidia drivers instead of the ones found through Administration>Additional Drivers in Ubuntu. After manually installing these drivers all hell broke loose on the Operating System. It simply wouldn't boot after installing the drivers. This is a known problem and it wasn't something that I had messed up installing them. If you do 3D art or anything else that requires good graphics (Heavy desktop effects, gaming, and 3D just to name a few) then Fedora isn't for any Nvidia user. Otherwise it was a very nice and friendly operating system.
The next Operating System is Arch linux. Looks pretty similar to an OS X and Windows mixtogether, right? Incredibly wrong. When, (and if you are able to) install Arch Linux you have no GUI whatsoever. You need to manually download and configure an X11 Window manager and a desktop environment to get a GUI. However, this makes Arch an extremely lightweight OS when you first download it. Arch is a platform on which you can build upon whatever software you wish. Arch Linux comes with a package manager called Pacman, which many people find to be a step up from apt and it is. Pacman can even give suggestions to what packages you may be looking for if you make a spelling mistake in your query.
Arch can be seen as a canvas where the artist can paint whatever they wish.
The last Operating System in our comparison today is Ubuntu 11.04. Ubuntu started off as a fork from Debian, the Universal Operating System. At first all it aimed to do was improve on Debian's slow update times, but it turned into something else. Now Ubuntu is the distribution of choice for newcomers to the Linux kernel. It is where users aspiring to move beyond it come to learn, and it is where people who want a highly customizable OS come to stay. Because of Debian's popularity, and now Ubuntu's, anything available to Linux is usually available to Ubuntu in the form of a .deb file, which requires 0 source building. I could start complaining about Unity again, but I have already done that and it isn't what this post is about. The installation is made easy with the Live CD, so there is virutally no command line to have to worry about during installation.
The decision...
Even though Ubuntu, Fedora, and Opensuse are great Operating Systems I have to make Arch the winner of this comparison. Arch just gives you the very basics and lets you decide what part of an Operating System you need. Do I use arch? No. Do I think it is a great idea of a Linux enthusiast to use Arch? Yes.
