Prologue: One of our members asked me about getting his computer working with Fedora on the second Hard Drive without disturbing the WindowsXP that occupied the primary drive or boot drive. His request had a part 2 in that he wanted to upgrade his existing Fedora 12 which was un-bootable but still installed on Drive 2. So my part was to do a test installation on one of my computers where I setup the first hard drive with WindowsXP installed, occupying the entire drive and then a second "blank" hard drive on which I would install Fedora 12 to and then do an upgrade.
The Fedora 12 install to the 2nd hard drive and have it dual boot off the master boot record on the 1st hard drive or Primary HD was fairly straight forward with the only stumbling point being telling the Fedora Installer to install to the second hard drive but boot from the first drive. Fedora asked me if this was what I wanted because it wasn't "normal" in Fedora's thinking since it "thought" that the norm is to boot from the drive you install to.
After installing Fedora 12, I tried two ways to do a "in-place" upgrade to Fedora 13, both of which required that I do a full update of the Fedora 12 install. Since this was a fresh install of 12, that took a while as a lot of packages had to be updated plus a kernel update.
My first attempt at upgrading was a live upgrade using the Fedora preupgrade utility. That failed because the boot partition, by default in Fedora 12, is only 200 MB and the install images require more than the 200 MB available. This is a known issue somewhat but I thought I might get away with it since this was "new install" and had only one kernel update.
My second attempt was to use the DVD to do an upgrade when prompted. Two attempts of doing this would fail catastropically, requiring a restart of the installer.
My only option now was to do a "fresh install" of Fedora 13 from DVD and this was not a pleasurable experience. First off, they had redone the installer, much different than 12, and the "easy" choice of telling the installer to boot from the primary drive was GONE! Also GONE was also the option to install all the "patterns" of desktop, development and webserver with 3 simple check marks that was available with the Fedora 12 installer.
To get the choice to boot from the primary drive while installing to the second drive, I found I had to check both the primary and secondary drives for "installation" and move forward; should not have had to do that because I only wanted to install to the second hard drive and no where was it indicated that I needed to select the primary drive for installation so that I would be able to choose it later in the install process as the boot drive. As I moved forward with the install, I was able to designate the primary drive as the boot drive and the second drive for installing Fedora 13.
The other deficiency of being able to select multiple installation profiles required that I only select one (desktop) and then customize the package installation by manually going through all the package groups, selecting the various packages that I wanted in have installed in addition to the "default" desktop which was time consuming. After that, the installation proceeded normally and everything worked, my WindowsXP partition untouched by the Fedora 13 install.
I am not convinced that Fedora 13 was ready for release when it came out on May 25th. The first update after installation was 871 MB (almost as much as the full update to a fresh install of Fedora 12), and the update consisted of 7 new packages and 424 packages upgrades. Top that off with a second day of use update was another 64 MB of updates and quite a few packages.
Other usability issues: Fedora seems to live in repository hades. The first yum update failed to to repository errors. A second run worked. Creating the "Perfect Desktop' as defined on several websites was not easy due to amount of command line stuff you have to do as root and then to complicate things, rpmfusion (one of the non-fedora repositories) was having problems. Had to wait a day to get before that repo was reachable. The Wine implementation is nothing short of "ugly" as no icons (just names) are provided for any of the applications on the wine menu nor are the applications or tools in any kind of a menu structure like they are on Ubuntu. Wine doesn't play well with SELinux which I had left enabled but in "permissive" state so things would work (Note: SELinux is installed by default in "enforcing" mode which does break certain applications and it is recommended that you either change it to permissive or disable it all together). None of the add-ons like winetricks, wine-doors, and PlayOnLinux are available in the software installer, even after adding all the extra repos. Wasn't able to try wine-doors as that website is currently down, "very, very broken with no time to fix" according to the owner. so no downloads are available. Winetricks was only marginally useful; I had it install IE 6 but IE 6 was no where to be found on the menus. MDAC25 would not install as all. This all worked fine on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04. The PlayOnLinux appear to have installed properly.
Another place that Fedora 13 came up short was in the playing of DVD's. I tried playing a DVD in the Movie Player which recognized the DVD and showed it play mode but no video was to be seen and the play timer sat on zero. Then I played the DVD using VLC and that worked except if I tried to enlarge the video display area on the desktop, it would enlarge okay but a short time later would "revert" to the default size.
Other potential issues is restricted drivers although it seemed to handle my PNY GeForce Nividia based video card and produced a very nice high resolution display on my 22" wide screen monitor.
Fedora 13 is one for techies in my estimation and not recommended for the desktop user, primarily due to the "tricks" that have to be performed both during the installation and after the initial install to get to a fully implemented desktop. Also, there is the "bleeding" edge nature of the Fedora 13 and potential for updates breaking your desktop.
06/26/2010 - One evidence of broken updates is empathy and evolution, both of which are installed by default even in the minimal LiveCD installation. Searching the forums only finds that it "...It'll be fixed in a few days" The work around is to run yum --skip-broken -y update but you will be left with the little bug update icon showing that updates area available for empathy and evolution, that won't install, at least for now.
06/27/2010 - Minor issue, couldn't play MP3's in Rhythmbox. Resolution is to install gstreamer-plugins-ugly (I used the command yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-ugly). Current version is gstreamer-plugins-ugly-0.10.14-1.fc13.i686. Note, you must have rpmfusion repository enabled. Instructions for enabling rpmfusion.org can be found at http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-fedora-13-i686-gnome-p3 along with other instructions on configuring the Perfect Desktop On Fedora 13.