I have to confess, much to my chagrin, that my FC5 experience has been less than satisfying. I will admit right up front that it is my own fault --- I had the audacity to inherit an IBM Thinkpad (A31P) and a Dell Workstation with an nVidia card. From a Fedora perspective, that is two strikes ... First, the Thinkpad. After countless hours with various FAQs and using the livna repo for Radeon support, I'm almost ready to give up trying to get a dual head experience, or the ability to use Xine on the 21" external monitor. I configure the laptop screen as a generic 1600x1200 LCD and a Samsung Syncmaster 213T as the second monitor. X subsequently complains that no device is found on reboot. It pains me greatly to move backwards, returning to FC4, which, probably because I played footloose and fancy free with lots of repos, worked fine from a multi-head and full graphics support perspective, but, mea culpa, I don't have the bandwidth to solve this problem on my own with FC5. With the release of Suse 10.1 ... that is tempting indeed ... but I fear I might be trading one set of annoying problems for another. The nVidia experience, while also frustrating, has been more successful in that dual head runs so I will likely stick with FC5 on that system. But it wasn't pretty getting there. I have this vision, this dream, that one day I will be able to install a Linux distro and everything will just work. All the software I want to run will run. Web sites will happily feed video images to my screen without rudely informing me that I can't have it my way, that you can only have it Bill's way. Remote apps, like VNC, will just work without apologizing for using non-standard windows operations (FullScreen). I won't have to scan lists (mail and otherwise) to make sure that the rather expensive hardware I'm using makes the cut. And then ... when I upgrade ... everything still works, only better. Starting with Redhat 7.3, I figured a few years and my dream would be realized. Maybe Fedora Core 10, but it is still very far off with FC5. Maybe Suse .... Hmmm. -pmr
