Usually, by this time of the year, I have installed the Winter version of Fedora. Since it is not official released, I'm totally bummed. I would have the geeks equivilant of cabin fever if there was not other stuff to do while I wait.
This season, it would be Fedora 18 donned "Spherical Cow". But hey! I did download the beta version to try on Virtual Box. And, so far, I like the installer. And that's about it. Can't really test it because Fedora, as well as other Linux distributions, really enjoys having it's hands on a really real box and not just a virtual one.
So, for the end user, I'm really waiting for the real thing. In the mean time, I found something new. A group of smart computer people got together and made an end-user friendly Fedora spin called Kororra Linux
Kororra is supposed to be a cleaned up, more user friend version of Fedora. It comes in version 16 and 17 and soon 18 for whenever Fedora 18 is officially released. It installs just the same as its parent distro, but is supposed to be more stable and easy to use. It's nearest conceptual contemporary would be Linux Mint. Haven't had a chance to put it through my hoops, maybe because I just like the real thing.
Another thing I've been doing while waiting for F18 is to try Mint 14 Mate. Can't even get it to install on VB. Not sure what's up, it just won't install. Probably would rather have a real machine which I'm not willing to give up yet or go out and purchase.
I also messed around with Centos for the purpose of exploring Apache for a web server. That was fun and I learned a lot. Now I'm looking for a real server to get that one running.
Which leads me to Craigs List. There's a really nice server listed locally and I just might go out and get it. It is the right size, the right speed and the right age for a home web/file/game/email server. Just need a few hundred bucks to get it.
Oh, what else have I been doing? Pretty much just killing time 'til Fedora 18 comes out. Rumor has it that the old fuddyduddies at MS have Red Hat tied up in knots over the new hardware requirements for computers planning on coming preloaded with W8. What a bummer. Isn't there anyone in the U.S. who can make a computer that MS would have to bow down to?? Or better yet, is there anyone who can make hardware that would block MS? I mean really.!! MS requires HW manufacturers to bow to them. Why can't someone simply make harware that would only run everything but MS?
All this coming from a simple end-user. Can't solve the world's problems in this blog. Maybe next time. Oh, just to slap MS around this Christmas why not by some stuff from System 76 . They load Linux on their machines. How good is that? Huh? How good is that?