Korora 24



The Korora distribution is based on Fedora and provides users with several desktop editions. Each edition of Korora ships with multimedia support and with several third-party repositories enabled. This gives Korora access to a wider range of software with its default configuration.



The latest release of Korora, version 24, is based on Fedora 24 and includes the same changes and technology as its parent. The Korora release is available in four flavours (Cinnamon, GNOME, MATE and Xfce). A fifth edition featuring KDE's Plasma desktop is planned, but was not available when I began this review. The new release media is available for the 64-bit x86 architecture exclusively, however existing Korora 23 users who run 32-bit systems can perform live upgrades to Korora 24. The Pharlap driver manager has been removed from this release.



I decided to try the MATE edition of Korora 24 which is available as a 2GB download. The live media boots to the MATE desktop. At the top of the display we find the Applications, Places and System menus along with the system tray. Down the left side we find a quick-launch bar and there is a task switcher at the bottom of the screen. On the desktop is a single icon for launching the system installer. Shortly after the desktop loads, a welcome screen appears. The welcome screen offers us quick access to various resources, including a document on finding additional software and community support. The welcome screen provides us with a list of new features available in Korora 24 (such as version 6 of the GNU Compiler Collection). Other buttons on the welcome screen launch the system installer and open a web browser to the project's support forum.



Korora uses the same graphical system installer Fedora uses. We begin by selecting our preferred language from a list. Then we are brought to a hub screen where we can access various configuration modules. These modules, which we can run in any order, help us set our keyboard's layout, partition the hard disk and set up networking. I find the installer's partitioning screen oddly awkward to use, the controls are not clear and the partition manager has some odd quirks. For example, the only way I have found to get it to use up the available space on a disk is to leave the size field of a new partition blank. At any rate, we next move on to a second hub screen where we are asked to create a password for the root account. We can optionally set up a regular user account on this second hub page while the installer copies its file in the background. When the installer is finished we can return to Korora's live desktop environment and continue to explore until we are ready to reboot and try our new copy of the distribution.





Korora 24 -- Using the on-screen keyboard

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Our locally installed copy of Korora boots to a graphical login screen decorated with the project's logo. From there we can sign into our user account, bringing us back to the MATE desktop. The first time we login, the welcome screen appears, giving us access to the distribution's documentation and support resources. Earlier I mentioned the general two-panel (and a launch bar) layout of the MATE edition. I would also like the share the observation that Korora uses a changing background, giving us a variety of wallpapers. The distribution uses a high contrast theme with round icons, which I find fairly pleasant. However, there were aspects to the default theme I found troublesome. For example, some application windows could be resized from the bottom corners of the window while other applications had to be resized from the top corners of the window. This meant I regularly switched back and forth between resizing methods and there did not seem to be any easy way to tell which applications used which behaviour. I also found the default theme made it difficult to tell when a button or widget had been selected by a keyboard action. This made navigating applications using the keyboard unusually challenging.



Digging through Korora's application menu we find the Firefox web browser (without Adobe's Flash plugin), the Thunderbird e-mail client, the HexChat IRC software, the Liferea RSS feed reader, the Pidgin messaging software and the Ekiga softphone. LibreOffice is available as are the FBReader e-book reader and the Atril document viewer. The Darktable and Shotwell photo managers are included along with the GNU Image Manipulation Program, the Inkscape application and a scanning tool. The Asunder audio CD ripper is available along with the Audacious audio player, the Audacity audio editor and the Handbrake media transcoder. I found a copy of the Pitivi video editing software, the VLC multimedia player and the Xfburn disc burning software. Attempting to play video files would cause the VLC player to launch and successfully play the given video. However, when I tried to play audio files the Audacious player would launch and report it was missing the necessary codecs. Opening the same audio files with VLC would cause the audio files to play. Exploring the application menu further we find the Caja file manager, the GParted disk partitioning tool, a system monitor and a policy generator for SELInux. Korora ships with an on screen keyboard, an ownCloud desktop client, a text editor, calculator and archive manager. In the background we find Java, the GNU Compiler Collection and systemd version 229. Network Manager is available to help us get on-line. Korora ships with version 4.6.3 of the Linux kernel.





Korora 24 -- Getting news updates with Liferea

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I ran Korora in a VirtualBox virtual machine and on a desktop computer. Korora worked well on the physical desktop machine. The system was responsive and my hardware was properly detected. The distribution worked fairly well in the VirtualBox environment too, but by default could not handle displaying the desktop using my screen's full resolution. VirtualBox guest modules can be found in the default set of software repositories and installing them allowed the distribution to make full use of my display. In either environment Korora tended to use about 370MB of memory when logged into the MATE desktop. Korora was generally stable during my experiment. The system locked up just once while I was trying to logout, forcing a hard reboot.



After using Korora for a while I realized I had not been notified of any new software updates. I opened the distribution's software manager, Yum Extender, which acts as a front-end to the DNF package manager. Yum Extender provides us with tools to perform searches for packages and we can see lists of installed packages and software available for download. Packages are listed in simple text format with the name of each package and a description. We can check a box next to a package to mark it for installation or removal. Yum Extender can also enable/disable repositories with recognized repositories including Google, VirtualBox and RPMFusion.





Korora 24 -- Managing packages with Yum Extender

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Yum Extender tends to be a bit on the slow side, taking a long time to refresh its repository information. Though I do think the current release operates faster than past versions of the software manager. I also found it odd Yum Extender displays both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of packages on a 64-bit system, greatly padding the number of packages available.



The first day I was running Korora there were 164 updates available, totalling 369MB in size. I tried to install these new packages using Yum Extender and the software manager failed, reporting it could not proceed due to dependency issues. I immediately switched to a virtual terminal and tried to install the waiting updates with the DNF command line program. DNF was able to successfully download and install all available updates. As using DNF was faster and more reliable, I tended to stick with using the command line program for managing software. The one issue with DNF I ran into was it kept asking me to confirm it could import security keys for third-party repositories. This in itself is not bad, but DNF should probably recognize the keys to the default repositories without bothering the user with key management.



Korora's MATE edition ships with a control panel which provides many modules for managing the desktop and underlying operating system. There are modules for changing the desktop's appearance, working with user accounts, configuring the firewall and managing background services. We can find modules to select which applications should run when we sign in, configure our preferred applications, set up the screensaver and manage printers. Korora's firewall utility supports working with different zones, which means we can create one set of firewall rules for home, another for work and a third for public spaces. The different zones mean we can block network traffic depending on our location, a nice feature to have when working on a portable device.





Korora 24 -- Adjusting system settings

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The modules included in the control panel worked well for me. There is a great deal of power and flexibility to be had. Most of the modules do a good job of supplying a lot of options while still being fairly straight forward to use. I did find the control panel would sometimes use a lot of my CPU cycles, bringing my desktop to a crawl. This happened rarely, but when it did the panel's process would eat all available CPU resources, even when no configuration modules were open. Killing the process or logging out appeared to be the only solution.



Conclusions



I find it difficult to talk about Korora without comparing the distribution to its parent, Fedora. Modern versions of Fedora tend to be relatively minimal for a desktop distribution. With Fedora's Workstation edition, we are given the desktop, some essentials and adding the specific tools we want is left to the user. This often involves tracking down third-party software repositories and spending a few minutes to a few hours installing the applications we plan to use. Fedora errs on the side of caution when it comes to software licensing and is careful not to package non-free or patent encumbered software. This limits multimedia support on Fedora.



Korora essentially takes Fedora Workstation and tries to set it up with the media support, applications and third-party repositories people are likely to want. This makes Korora a larger download (2.0GB vs 1.4GB for Fedora), but it means we have many of the applications we will probably want immediately following the installation. We also have lots of neatly organized configuration tools by default with Korora and that is a feature I appreciate. Personally, I like Korora's approach to including more software. Even without the extra software installed for us, I think Korora would be worth the extra download size just for having several third-party repositories configured for us.



Apart from the default software and repositories, Korora stays very close to its parent. At its heart Korora is still Fedora, so almost all of the differences boil down to what is set up for us out of the box.



Looking at Korora by itself, ignoring its parentage for a moment, I think the distribution is a fairly solid desktop operating system. Korora ships with fairly modern packages and users have access to a lot of software through Korora's many default repositories. The system was responsive and I like Korora's default theme. The MATE edition is relatively light on memory and the distribution worked well with my hardware. I have said before one of Korora's few weaknesses is package management. Yum Extender is not a bad software front-end, but it is a bit slow and it had trouble installing the first wave of upgrades post-installation. These problems can be worked around by using the command line DNF package manager. I did run into a few glitches while using Korora, but nothing that consistently gave me trouble, so all-in-all, I was happy with my experiences this week. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications: Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU

Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive

Memory: 6GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card

Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card