Setting my Fedora on fire.

New motherboard is installed. So far everything seems to be working great apart from Fedora. I decided to try Fedora 22 and I’m not really impressed with it, nor am I impressed with the direction the Distro has taken. Their website friggen sucks these days.

They’ve taken to streamlining everything. I like downloading one ISO and being able to pick and choose what I want to install within the installation, and being that I used Fedora between my desktop and game server I liked having just one disc. Now they’re putting people into groups like “workstation”, “server” and “cloud”. And apparently the hip thing these days is to install from a live CD rather than just run anaconda directly…

In Fedora 20 and backward you could choose which main desktop environment you wanted to install, now you’re forced into GNOME unless you burn a spin. I don’t mind GNOME on tablet interfaces but for the desktop it just flat out sucks. The first thing I did was install xfce and uninstall GNOME… only to have Linux shut down, restart and enter linux at the terminal level. Amazed and pissed at the same time I tried to launch X only to find it had been uninstalled along with GNOME. I couldn’t help but laugh. Usually when you uninstall something that would cause something like this to happen you’re met with SOME KIND of warning. But no. Even though I had xfce installed after the fact it would rather flip me the bird and leave me at the terminal.

I was going to reinstall GNOME and X via Yum but decided that I’d rather throw this DVD in the trash and opted to go back into Windows and burn a spin with xfce on it. I still had to use a live CD but at least I was rid of an ugly tablet interface I would never use.

So I finally made it through the install. The first thing I did was run all the necessary updates. I was disheartened to learn that Mumble was no longer in the repositories as of Fedora 21 for some stupid reason, but at the same time it wasn’t like I never compiled a program before. So I decided to save that task for later and went straight to installing seamonkey, then downloading my GPU drivers.

I opened my terminal and ran super user so that I could do the install, and I couldn’t because I was missing two dependencies. gcc was uninstalled and so was kernel headers. How could you not include these? I mean I like lean OS’s, but c’mon… gcc, kernel headers and module packs are a must.

It had just enough for me, and what it didn’t have I could eventually find with experimentation and research. It wasn’t like Ubuntu where it included a bunch of stuff I would never use.

Anyway… I installed the dependencies and gave it another shot, it still kept telling me that it couldn’t find the kernel headers.

fglrx installation requires that the system have kernel headers. /lib/modules/4.0.8-300.fc22.x86_64/build/include/linux/version.h cannot be found on this system.

I decided to follow the pathing and got stuck at “build” which for whatever reason was a dead symbolic link.

I’ve given up for now and have been doing a little bit of research. But I have a feeling that I might have to retire Fedora regardless. I’ve liked it since early Red Hat, and I’m one to roll with changes… but this streamlining and lack of choice isn’t something I particularly care for. You can’t just put me into one of three boxes.

Here’s another thing I don’t get. Why is it that in this day and age of fast internet we have these minimalistic installations? I find it funny that in the early days of the internet you had to download what was a giant distro that gave you choices over what you wanted installed, and now here we are with high speed internet connections, with these minimalistic installations… Something… seems off.