Configurating Fedora

I've been taking my time with configuring the linux box mainly 'cause I'm lazy and partly because the only monitor it's connected to is Tu's monitor so I have to wait when she's not using it. Once everything is configured, I can just remotely do things but for now I have to use the monitor to configure the GUI so Tu can also use the machine to browse.

After getting yum to pull the latest updates and turning off unwanted services, I thought I was ready. I booted it up and it automatically goes into the X (which I do not like) and frankly it looks pretty crappy. Although it identified the LCD monitor and that the video card is a NVidia card, what was booted up was a fuzzy, shaky screen. The resolution that the install chose was not the native resolution of the LCD monitor and the positioning was off. I had to look around to find out how to change the resolution (again there were no documentation of any value that I could find) and a couple of times it didn't seem like it registered my changes. Trying to figure out how to change the refresh rate was also annoying since it was a different app in another group. Organization and documentation is definitely a problem with Fedora Core.

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, but the distribution needs some work. It tries to be too much like windows instead of being better then windows. I tend to use Linux in text mode more then GUI mode. Text mode can be more powerful and everything can be done without the overhead of running a GUI. However, with little documentation, sometimes going to the GUI tool is a better (only?) choice until one has a lot more time to research the web and read other people's notes. Another advantage of text mode is performance and I can't help but feel that the system is sluggish.

I turned off most of the services (i believe I did since I used fedora's services tool to disable), but even though I thought I said don't use the redhat update agent, I still get the annoying blinking red bubble. Clicking on the tool to set the monitor resolution was also a pain. I'd run it and then.... nothing. Did it die? No, after awhile, 3-4 windows would pop up since thinking that it died, I chose the same tool again and a few minutes later they all popped up. Again, annoying. Maybe the Gnome desktop is just slow?

Tonight I'll take a look at some of the error messages I noticed about the system having no dma or something like that and hopefully configure X correctly.