Last week I installed FC6 test 2 on my laptop. I did an upgrade (using CDs) from my FC5 install.

The install itself went very well. Anaconda weirdly showed strange characters while in text mode, but this was ignorable.

FC6 is shipping a new Eclipse — 3.2. This works pretty well; I found a bug or two and reported them, but nothing too serious. So far I haven’t explored many of the new features, but I did notice that I can now background “cvs diff” operations. I’ve been wanting that for a while…

The notification area on the panel is now properly translucent. For some reason its opacity really bothered me, and this is one of the few Gnome bugs I CCd myself on.

I installed yum-updatesd so that I could run puplet. So far it seems nice, though I have to say I preferred the old RHN icon (I’m probably the only person who liked that :-). But, icons always change; I’m very happy to have the functionality. I’m not too good at remembering to periodically “yum update”, you see.

In somewhat related news, I’ve been trying the Gnome sticky notes applet for managing my to-do list. We’ll see how that works out; over the years I’ve tried many different programs in this space, with little success.

Overall FC6t2 looks quite good to me. I’m constantly amazed that this whole process (not Fedora, but the entire free software setup) produces good results — and yet it does, year after year.