Hello, everyone, I installed the Fedora 12 Xfce Spin yesterday and would like to take a moment to say "Thanks!" for everyone's efforts putting it together. After some initial glitches (see below), I managed to install it to my hard drive and am posting from it right now. It has been stable thus far, and it sure is fast. I'm looking forward to using it more. I will try to stick as closely as possible to the apps you've pre-selected (although I installed OpenOffice.org and TeX Live because I need them). I've only recently discovered Xfce; I've experimented with it as a secondary desktop environment in Linux Mint 8 and Pardus 2009.1 as well as playing with the Live CD of Dreamlinux 3.5. So I'm not competent to judge how the F12 Xfce Spin compares technically with those others. I will say that I like the look of your implementation -- it's clean and polished, without being flashy. (Dreamlinux is pretty but it seems to be trendy to imitate the Mac OS X interface. I appreciate that Fedora is willing to buck that trend). Although I'm new to your Xfce Spin, I'm not a first-time Fedora user. I had a good run with Fedora 9 Sulphur (the GNOME version) and I used it until it reached its EOL. At that point I started distro-hopping and have been away from Fedora for a while. But I found myself missing the Fedora Forums and the bright people who know how to fix Fedora when Something Breaks. Below I'd like to attach some feedback on the Live CD's performance. I sent an e-mail to Christoph and he suggested that I provide more details concering how it ran on my hardware (since he didn't experience these problems firsthand). I took notes this evening and wrote them up. I know this isn't very technical but I hope it will be of help to you. (Please don't interpret this as a complaint, because that isn't my intention). My hardware is fairly good, so I'm puzzled as to why the Live CD's performance was so sluggish ... I don't know if it's all the abrt daemon's fault or not (or if there's something weird about my hardware). As a non-programmer, I'm fortunate to have a choice among so many good Linux distros. Of course this wouldn't be possible without so many talented and dedicated Linux developers -- like you -- who are willing to freely share their time and knowledge. I tip my hat (I won't make bad pun of saying "my Fedora" :-( ) to all of you. With best wishes, =david McAllen, Texas, USA ========== Background a. The .iso was downloaded on my Mint 8 partition via BitTorrent (Transmission) and its checksum was verified. b. The .iso was burned to CD-R using Brasero at 8x speed (the slowest speed available on my optical drive). c. Each CD-R was also checked with the "Verify and Boot" option of the Live CD. They both passed. d. The performance was nearly identical for both CDs. ---------- Results of Live CD Performance 1. HP CD-R 52x 700 MB Time from beginning of boot (after the auto countdown finished) until GDM login screen: 10:40 (10 min. 40 sec.) Saw the Fedora 'f' logo fill in completely at: 8:00 Saw cursor appear with spinning blue circle at: 9:45 Boot messages [yellow warning triangle] read: Everything was 'OK' except for the abrtd message: "Starting abrt daemon: abrtd : Failed to start: timeout waiting for child [FAILED]" This CD had a kernel crash ("kernel oops") the very first time it was booted. I tried to use the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool to report the problem--I'm not sure if it worked. No kernel crashes occurred with subsequent uses. ----- 2. TDK CD-R 52x 700 MB Time from beginning of boot (after the auto countdown finished) until GDM login screen: 10:30 (10 min. 30 sec.) Saw the Fedora 'f' logo fill in completely at: 8:00 Saw cursor appear with spinning blue circle at: 9:30 Boot messages [yellow warning triangle] read: Everything was 'OK' except for the abrtd message: "Starting abrt daemon: abrtd : Failed to start: timeout waiting for child [FAILED]" (I didn't experience any kernel crashes with this TDK CD). ----- 3. Comparison with installed HD performance (on partition /sda12): Time from GRUB menu until GDM login screen: 0:26 (26 seconds) ---------- System Specs AMD Athlon II X2 240 (Regor) 2.8 GHz, 4 GB RAM, Seagate Barracuda 320 GB HD, Nvidia GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 integrated GPU, Samsung SH-S222L DVD-RW