Now before I begin, I’ve been holding off from installing Fedora 13 since I have been waiting for an update to Ahmad Abdel-Yaman’s custom Fedora Netbook Kernel. I’ll talk about that a bit later on in the review. Anyway, lets begin:

My Experience

So I’ve been using Fedora 13 on my Netbook as a main Operating System for a while now. Once again, I installed Fedora via USB Booting the live image, though this time I believed I used the offical Fedora Live USB Creator since I find that Fedora hass a few issues with Ubootnetin. I had no real issue with the process of creating a live USB with the problem, but it is worth noting that it’s 28MB compared to Jolicloud’s USB Creator which is only 7MB. (Jolicloud is a cloud OS based off of Ubuntu) So the creator itself is a little bloated, in my opinion.

Anyway the installation is fairly straight forward, it’s got a nice clean GUI and you just go through each step such as selecting your language, keyboard layout, location and partition layout etc. After that installation process has finished you will be then greeted with a “First time usage” screen, here you’ll be able to set up user accounts like your root user, time and date and you even have the choice to send off a profile of what computer hardware you are using. This is useful for the devdelopers at the Fedora Project since it gives them a good indication what hardware is still widely being used.

After that you have finally finished setting up your Fedora OS. The screenshot below is a screenshot of my current fedora desktop on my Eeepc, I’ve customised it to my liking by giving it a cool Android wallpaper and changed the panel images so it gives it a nice transparent appearance.

The Pro

The one thing I love about Fedora on a Netbook is the fan’s contribution improving the experience of Fedora on a Netbook, specially a fan called Ahmad Abdel-Yaman. He is the developer of a custom kernel for Fedora that is designed for Netbooks. His Kernel has been useful for Fedora Netbook users for the past 3 or so releases of Fedora.

This custom Kernel for Netbooks remove uneccesary files from the offical Netbook Kerenel so it reduces the actual size of the Kerenel as well as drastically improving boot times. On his website that can be found here, states that Fedora 13 with the stock kerenel takes about 27 Seconds to boot on his Eee Pc 901 and the reported size of the stock kerenel is 20MB.With his Netbook Kerenel it takes about 18 Seconds to boot and only takes up 7.2MB so as you can see it’s made quite a difference.

The programs that come installed on Fedora are fairly interesting even though there isn’t a lot of them. One program I found useful was the Twitter Client called Pino. this is similar to Ubuntu 10.04′s Twitter Client that is pre-installed called Gwibber.

One program that I was surpised to find on here was a Project Management program for Gantt etc, it has a much easier/cleaner layout than compared to Microsoft Project 2002 which I have used for a subject at my college for Project Management.

The Cons

This is another solid Linux distribution that I find hard to find any major flaws with. The only issue I have really found when using Fedora is these annoying error messages that take up quite a lot of screen space, especially on a netbook. I think there are a few hacks around to disable the service, but it’s just not worth the fuss since it only happens now and then.

Conclusion

Like I said previously this is yet another great solid Linux distribution, even though that Fedora 13 was delayed twice it was definately worth the wait!

I’m going to give Fedora 13… 5 E’s out of 5.

EEEEE

That’s it for now, I hope you’ve enjoyed the return of my “Me and my Eee” project. So what’s next? Well I’m going to run down the top 10 programs for a Windows Netbook, how to optimize a Windows Netbook and also I’ve recently discovered Peppermint OS which sounds very exciting so I’m going to give that a wiz.