Fedora 18 has finally appeared in its final form after many delays. Largely responsible: a new Anaconda installer that has seen much criticism, mostly from users who like complicated manual partitioning. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I've always liked Ananconda. As far as I know, it's the only installer that can create any number of encrypted partitions -- in or out of LVM (logical volume management) -- and allow me to unlock them with a single passphrase typed once during boot. It also appears to be the only installer that can create a fully encrypted LVM installation while allowing another operating system -- like Windows -- to remain on the same disk.

What I'm trying to say is if the Debian installer would do these two things, I'd be a happy, happy camper.

Back to Fedora 18, aka "Spherical Cow." (I do like funny distro names more than serious Fedora names or stupid Ubuntu animal ones.) F18 offers a whole bunch of desktop environments in relatively (to very) new versions: GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, KDE and now MATE and Cinnamon. No Unity. A pity, perhaps. Or not.

I downloaded the network-install ISO, from which I could theoretically install any one of these environments.

I also downloaded a live image of Fedora 18 with Xfce 4.10. For the past many months, I've been using Xfce 4.8 rather heavily in Debian Wheezy. Debian Wheezy is never, ever going to get Xfce 4.10, even via Backports, as far as I know. Not that there's all that much difference between 4.8 and 4.10.

Read the rest of this post

I picked this up entirely by accident:

A few years ago, if you were running a graphical desktop under the X Window System in Linux and wanted or needed to kill the X server, you typed ctrl-alt-backspace.

When that "went away," I thought that was it.

But that's not it. You can do the same thing that ctrl-alt-backspace did with:

alt-PrintScreen-k

The "PrintScreen" is your print-screen key. Mine is labeled PrtSc.

So if you want to kill your X session from the keyboard, go right ahead.