Korora 18: A screenshot tour

The Distro Deluge that I wrote about a few weeks ago is continuing, with the release of Korora 18 last week and Debian 7.0.

For those who might not be familiar with it, Korora is based on Fedora, but with lots and lots (and lots) of additional packages included in the base installation. That makes it a particularly interesting distribution.

There are four ISO images available, for Gnome 3 and KDE desktops in 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

The images are large (1.6GB for Gnome, 2.2GB for KDE), but they are still hybrid ISO images, so you can dd them to a USB stick, or burn them to DVD media. They support both "normal" BIOS and UEFI BIOS, and Secure Boot.

On UEFI systems, there is one small quirk I've noticed: The directory where the EFI boot files are installed is still called "fedora", so in the unlikely event that you are installing Korora on a system where Fedora is already installed (or the other way around), they will overwrite each other unless you do something to prevent that.

The installation procedure is identical to installing Fedora 18, using anaconda, so check my previous post about installing Fedora 18 for complete details and screenshots of that.

Because of the large amount of software that is installed, the process takes about an hour, which is considerably longer than most other distributions. According to the release announcement, there were no significant problems reported with the last beta images, so the release images are in fact the same ones, simply renamed for the final version.

This has one side effect that you need to keep in mind: They really need the latest updates.

As soon as you have booted the installed system, the first thing to do is configure the network, and then get all the latest updates. There will be more than 600 updates to install, which will probably take another hour or so, but they are definitely worth it.

I installed the Gnome 3 version on my Acer Aspire One 725, which has an AMD C-70 dual-core CPU, Radeon HD 7290 graphics with 1,366x768 resolution on an 11.6-inch display, Realtek wired network, and Broacom 4313 wireless network adapter.

There were absolutely no problems with the installation; all of the hardware was recognized and configured automatically, and worked flawlessly.

The screenshot above shows the Gnome 3 applications menu, which gives a first glimpse of the variety of software that is included pre-installed in the Korora 18 distribution.

I installed the KDE version on my Acer Aspire One 522, which has an AMD C-60 CPU, Radeon HD 6290 graphics, and 1,024x600 resolution with a 10.1-inch screen, and Atheros wired and wireless network adapters.

This was where I saw the first major difference in using the Gnome and KDE distributions. Even though I had loaded the Gnome version on a more powerful system, the performance of the KDE version on this netbook was noticeably better.

The screenshot above shows the default KDE desktop. While there is certainly no problem with its performance on this system, I prefer the KDE netbook desktop on this kind of system. So I go to System Settings > Workspace Behaviour > Workspace > Workspace Type and choose "Netbook" from the drop-down list.

This is the KDE netbook Page One screen, which contains an easily customizable array of news, weather, and other social/information feeds.

The Korora KDE Multimedia menu. There are a variety of audio and video players here, as well as CD/DVD burning and general multimedia editing tools. Highlights include:

• Audacity 2.0

• Miro 5.0.4

• VLC 2.0.6.

The Korora KDE Internet menu. In addition to the usual array of KDE utilities, there is Firefox, Choqok, Linphone, and Steam.

The Korora KDE Graphics menu. No surprise, my personal favorite here is digikam 3.1.0 and the kipi tools, but there are a lot more; the most notable are GIMP (2.8.4) and Inkscape (0.48.4).

The Korora KDE Office menu. The obvious highlight here is the Libre Office suite (3.6.6), along with the KDE utilities such as Korganizer, Ktimetracker, Kalarm, and such.