Let me start off by saying that my experience thus far (over the last 24 hours) with Fedora 12 – Constantine has been the complete opposite from Tyler’s. For the most part, at any rate. While I, too attempted to do a preupgrade (from terminal) to Constantine and had it fail due to an insufficiently sized /boot partition – the 200 MB that it suggests on install is simply not enough – my clean install attempt went smooth as silk.
After backing everything important (user folder) up to my server, which over gigabit ethernet took all of 12 minutes, I popped the Fedora 12 x86_64 DVD into my drive and restarted.  Installation and drive partitioning was easy, as was customizing my installation repositories to include Fedora 12 x86_64 and Fedora 12 x86_64 updates – this has saved me a lot of headaches now, I’m sure. I also decided this time around to add KDE at boot time, just to see if this would simplify my problems with that environment; more on that in a later post, I’m sure.
As of right now I’m running a stable – though desktop effects-less – Gnome environment. Boot time over Fedora 11 has significantly improved, and the boot animation is a great improvement over the scrolling bar from Fedora 11. In addition, off the bat my computer automatically supported native resolution (no-go without drivers in Fedora 11) and screen brightness changing (same story there in Leonidas).
One other thing that GREATLY excites me – folder mounting of my Windows Home Server shares has increased in speed tenfold. It’s almost instant now, much like it would be in Windows – fantastic!
Though frustrated by the idea of having to re-configure Wine and vpnc (that took me FOREVER!), and waiting for nVidia or a kmod driver to come out that supports my GeForce 8600M GS for enabling desktop effects and my beloved Gnome DO, I’m pleasantly surprised by my experience thus far.
More to come soon!
Until Fedora support my Nvidia card I have no intention of installing it.
After all the latest Mandriva, Ubuntu, Opensuse all support it.
As does my favourite system Arch linux – Which has the same version of Xserver, etc as Fedora 12..
Fedora almost certainly supports your NVIDIA card perfectly well using the open source ‘nouveau’ driver (though it doesn’t have 3D acceleration yet; this is not the same thing as not ‘supporting’ it). If you’re talking about using a third-party proprietary driver, Fedora itself does not support, never has supported, and never will support such drivers. If you really want to use proprietary software on Fedora, there are third party projects (RPM Fusion) which provide such. It is already possible to use the NVIDIA proprietary driver on Fedora 12, with the assistance of RPM Fusion. Please refer to http://rpmfusion.org/Howto/nVidia#head-205aab6f190d363e3915c0fa2e0681fc392aaeb6 .
@morgan
Dana – please see my reply to Morgan if you really want the proprietary driver. On vpnc, are you aware that NetworkManager has a vpnc support plugin? It works rather well, in my experience. Install ‘NetworkManager-vpnc’ package and then left-click NetworkManager applet in the panel, go to ‘VPN Connections’, click ‘Configure VPN…’
more detailed reference for installing the NVIDIA driver – http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-nvidia.html#f12 .
Adam,
Thanks for all of the driver-related information that you’ve provided us with. While I’m not running Fedora, I’d be interested to know if there’s a page somewhere that details which drivers should be used with specific hardware chipsets. If I’m reading your posts correctly, you’ve mentioned at least three different ones that are available. Is there any place where we can find out which drivers are written to support our chipsets?
jon f: well, I’ve only referred to two drivers in my comments here, the free driver for NVIDIA hardware (nouveau) and the proprietary one (generally called nvidia). Basically you get the free one out of the box on Fedora and it’s probably best to keep using it if it works for you and you don’t need any of the features specific to the proprietary driver, which are 3D acceleration, VDPAU video playback acceleration, and I think some power-saving features.
If you do want some of the features only the proprietary driver has so far, then follow my instructions to install it.
There are three branches of the proprietary driver; two compatibility branches are maintained for older adapters. NVIDIA keeps the documentation on which driver version to use for which chipsets. IIRC, the ‘current’ branch works with anything from the GeForce 6xxx series onwards.