Is Fedora 19 stable enough to put on a laptop. Many of you have seen
the Asus laptop I have had at a few of the install fests. Well NewEgg
has them on sale for a very good price (sub $400 with s/h) so I picked
up 2 more. One for myself and one for my wife. I was thinking of
putting Fedora 19 on them instead of running the risk of an upgrade
error between 18 - 19.

I know 18 works for the most part very very very well on that laptop.
The issue as of a few days ago is all of the sudden the GUI (gnome) has
stopped recognizing my Logitec Trackball (wireless). dmesg sees it and
properly identifies the mouse, but Gnome refuses to work with it. Now I
can use any other kind of USB mouse and they work just fine. It was
working on Wed. then on Thr after a small yum update, it stopped
responding on all 3 available kernels so this has nothing to do with the
kernel and everything to do with Gnome.

also to verify that it was not that specific mouse, but the type, i used
one of my other trackballs with the same result. i have 4 or 5 of them
around the house its all we use.

i am planning on being at the install fest on Aug 3rd as they laptops
should arrive early this week.

for those that are interested, here is the laptop we are getting. Sadly
the price has jumped about $50 on this model:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834230927

Works great on my new $300 Gateway from Best Buy. Series 7 chipset so runs faster and cooler than my old dual core pentium laptop at same frequency. Battery life is nuts with the LED LCD too, something like 4 1/2 hours. You'll have to sacrifice the pre-installed Windows 8 though, which wasn't a tragedy for me as I needed MP4 video and Microsoft crippled their Media Playe to force users to upgrade. Just remember to disable secure boot in the BIOS first and then everything goes smoothly. If you want to dual boot Win8 you'll need to install a regular/full (non-preinstalled) version later.

yeah win8 is not worth it. when i picked this up for my daughter back in Christmas it had win7. i left it on there for her to play with. within a day she came to me and said "Daddy, put linux on here i dont like windows"... made me smile .

how are the 3rd party repos working under 19 like rpmfusion and what not?

I use Fedora 19 all day, every day on my desktop and laptop computers and find it to run perfectly. (Cinnamon on both.)

I used FedUp to upgrade both machines from F18 and it worked without a hitch.

I am extremely happy with Fedora these days.

good news. do you use rpmfusion repo or just the pure fedora?

I use RPMFusion. I also use FedoraUtils. There is useful, quick stuff there (VLC, Chrome, etc.), though I admit it feels a bit 'dirty' sometimes

excellent. im looking forward to getting F19 onto these laptops.

I thought about this a bit more, and I realized that I have had a few hiccups with third party repos. Dropbox, for example, still does not have a FC19 repo (I edited dropbox.repo to point to the FC18 directory for the time being). A couple of other pieces of software (literally two) I've tried to play with did not have a FC19 repo, though nothing important--at all--and I said to myself: "If it was that interesting, I'll remember to check back in a week or so." For example, there was a Darktable alternative I wanted to play with that was having issues installing related to an FC18-targeted RPM, but I'll keep my eye on it... and if I forget: No big deal.

All in all, besides the Dropbox semi-problem, I haven't encountered any repo-related issues that made me frustrated with Fedora 19's adoption (or lack thereof) by third parties.

You'll need to go to ATrpms for the DVD decryption stuff (libdvdcss) but RPMFusion has everything else so no need to add both repos to yum. http://packages.atrpms.net/dist/f19/

I'd stay away from the Russian repo tho.

1 members found this post helpful.

Fedora 19 works very well in my case as well. I have tested FedUp upgrading with rpmfusion and it worked very well.

As for libdvdcss, I think livna repo would also be suitable. http://rpm.livna.org/

Yes, this appears to be what Fedora Utils uses when 'enabling DVD playback'.

thanks again all for the head up.

From: http://rpm.livna.org/
but it's probably the same file if you really want to use an old repo.

EDIT: it wouldn't hurt to learn the basics of Red Hat's package manager anyway... if you manually download from ATrpm you'll need to install using rpm -ivh <package> (use tab completion too.)

libdvdcss is one package not included in rpmfusion when the merge occured. But, that lib file is still available in livna.

Rest of the text from the same paragraph

That's why you need to get it from ATrpms.. feel free to keep arguing about it though.