Best variant of Fedora for a Virtual Machine...?

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Tuesday, 14. August 2012. 13.17.58 And Kemp wrote:
> To practice prior to my exam I would like to be able to enter commands
> at the command line: obtaining (separate) terminal windows using KDE
> comes across as clunky (I usually use Ubuntu - sorry!). Whilst
> <CNTRL><ALT><F2> to enter a full terminal screen is straightforward,
> it's not helpful (to me at least) in terms of being able to switch
> between panes (I generally like a lot of them for things like man pages,
> different directories, etc.). Konqueror, Konsole and all other thinks,
> "K" start off as being chipper but after a day, not so much...  Access
> via the main menu is now becoming more than tiresome.

Konsole is the preferred terminal emulator in KDE. You can reach it via the 
"F"-menu -> System -> Konsole, or as a first option to a context-menu of the 
desktop (just right-click somewhere on the desktop), or by putting a launcher 
onto the panel or the desktop (unlock widgets, find Konsole in the menu, right-
click, choose "add to panel" or "add to desktop" or whatever...). You can go 
to systemsettings and assign your favorite shortcut-key combination to start 
Konsole via the keyboard.

Once started, you can open a various number of tabs with different sessions 
inside, and easily switch from one to the other. Konsole itself is very 
configurable both visually and functionally, just go to its "settings" menu and 
choose "configure current profile".

Ditto for Konqueror and other stuff you might need. In general, KDE is waaay 
more configurable than Gnome, as far as GUI is concerned.
 
> I've trawled through the documentation as best I can (all I want is a
> couple of meaningful shortcut icons on a desktop - hardly a mammoth
> operation to my mind) in terms of, "getting started" but creating icons
> comes across as an insurmountable problem (That whole, "create shortcut
> on desktop" option just doesn't work on my installation .  The shortcut
> appears: does it run when clicked? Does it cuckoo...).

I hope that you are aware that "icons on a desktop" is considered to be a Bad 
Idea (tm) that comes from the Windows world and eventually clutters an 
otherwise useful desktop space.

In KDE there is the "folder view" widget (you can even put many of them on the 
desktop), configurable to show the icons from a specific folder (the ~/Desktop 
by default, IIRC). In addition, if you really really really want to put icons 
on the desktop (as opposed to the folder view widget), you can:

1. unlock widgets
2. right-click on the desktop to open the context menu
3. choose "Desktop settings"
4. change the "layout" option from "desktop" to "folder view".

That way the whole desktop will behave as one big folder view widget. 
Regarding step 4., there are some other interesting choices, you might try 
them out.

> Simple things
> like mounting the CD drive from a command line can be summarized,
> according to my impression of Google forum replies, as, "RTFM!
> RTFM!...  It's automatic (the only thing missing here is, 'You
> idiot')!".  [Note: It's *NOT* automatic; nor is in any manual I could
> locate: one has to create a device folder (at least, that's how I fixed
> the problem in the end, having tried (and failed) to adopt the "Fedora
> way", assuming there is such a thing!)]

By default, you should have a "device notifier" widget installed in the systray 
of the panel (or you can put one on the desktop...). Once the CD is in the 
drive, the device notifier should pop up and ask you what do you want to do 
with the CD (open it in file manager, view photos, listen to music, etc.). If 
the CD contains regular data, it should be already mounted by now, in 
/media/whatever directory. In the device notifier there is also an "eject" 
button that basically unmounts/ejects your CD. This all also works with USB 
flash drives etc.