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Fedora 16, Gnome 3, Grub2

Within hours of receiving my new Lenovo T520 I had ripped the restore media and removed the 500gig drive to keep in case of an apocalypse, or something. With a new 750gig drive installed I executed the Lenovo restore to the new drive (installing Windows 7). Post-restore I had to remove the restore partition and resize the Windows partition. I shrunk it to leave 250Gig dedicated to Windows, leaving around 500Gig for Linux.

Initially I found many things about the new Fedora release unsettling. I didn't care for the Gnome 3 interface. As I went to attempt to customize my Grub I became more irritated. I still have a number of things to become comfortable with again, but within days I am digging the Gnome 3 interface (although I think a lot of work still needs to be done, I think I understand why it has went through significant changes and I believe those are good changes), Fedora 16 has some fundamental changes - and like Gnome, there is still some work to be done, but I believe they are taking things in a better direction. As for Grub2. I don't get it. I don't understand it, whatsoever. As far as I can deduce, the Grub fundamentally is quite similar to it's predecessor (if not identical), but what they have done baffles me. They have introduced so many layers of complexity to manage/customize Grub. Previously, you could manually update the "main config file" and you were moving forward. I'm currently stuck trying to do 2 very simple things: update the grub splash image (shown at the boot menu), remove the Windows "System" Partition from the list of bootable environments. I have ranted about this in another post... So, I'll move on.

I like the look-and-feel and I am optimistically awaiting future updates to add functionality and customization options to the desktop. Gnome 3 seems to have become completely extensible. Now you search for functionality you want and add the extension. Good stuff.

I'll need to further research how Linux appears to be going the way of Solaris and the SMF implementation. /etc/inittab is there, but appears to have been completely deprecated. chkconfig still existis and I'm sure you can manage your services that way.

KVM - I had installed VMware Workstation 8 (which was not seamless either) and I got to thinking that I should jump head-first into this and use KVM. So far the verdict is out. KVM has come a long ways, but it simply just does not have the polish that VMware does. I believe it will work, but there will be limitations and I will seemingly take a performance hit. I anticipate rethinking this and I will decide to use/test KVM elsewhere. :-(

Update: I was able to install a Windows 7 VM in Fedora using a OA DVD.  I was then able to validate the Windows Installation using the key on the case decal.

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