Running 7 as a desktop

In the interest of preparing for the el7 release, I’ve decided to attempt to migrate my primary machine to the el7 beta. For the most part this seems like it will be a reasonably easy transition, though admittedly I play with fedora frequently so the gnome2 to gnome3 transition is something I’ve already handled. If you find that you absolutely must have the wobbly windows, and desktop cube effects which are available in el6 then you’re in luck. All you have to do is transition from gnome to KDE, where these features are alive and well.

Apart from the gnome adjustment, there are a few things that I use regularly which just aren’t in the beta. Nearly all of these packages can rebuild cleanly for el7, using mock and the f19 srpms. For me these packages were transmission, pidgin-otr, thunderbird and its assorted plugins. The ‘fedora’ chrome packages google offers work flawlessly as well.

I was even able to get skype working in the el7 beta reasonably easily. The fact that skype is 32bit only complicated things slightly, as I had to borrow qt-mobility.i686 and qtwebkit.i686 from fedora to deal with the install dependencies. Once the i686 sig build of el7 is ready for additional packages, this rpm abuse shouldn’t be needed any longer.

I’ve been asked already about posting the rpms that I’ve built for the 7 beta, but I don’t want to do this. I don’t have an interest in maintaining them long-term, and I’m certain they’ll end up in epel or another repository shortly.

Continue reading...

---