[Discuss] More Fedora upgrading

[John Blomfield]

The final stage in my upgrade saga has been to install Fedora 8 on my 
laptop.  In past versions, 6 and earlier, I missed 7, getting connected 
wirelessly with my ASUS Z71A has been a bit of a challenge.  But then 
the ipw2200 drive was included in the kernel which made things easier 
but you still had to download firmware and install that separately.  
Even then it was far from stable.  Then came NetworkManager and 
knetworkmanager which made connecting less of a chore than the command 
line.  With Fedora 8 all that has gone away there is one package that 
does it all and once installed its rock solid!  NetworkManager and 
knetworkmanager are still used but I notice knetworkmanager is now using 
some version of keyring to manage the passwords not kwalletmanager.

When I tried Ubuntu I was interested to note that sftp was automatically 
installed in Nautilus that allowed easy access to the file systems on my 
other network computers.  At first I was not thrilled because of the 
potential security risks (not that its a concern on my network) but it 
does provide easier access than NFS which I normally have used.  Sftp 
was very useful for recovering my backed-up version of /home when 
rebuilding my laptop.  As I mentioned in my earlier email one has to be 
selective with the hidden configuration files otherwise you can make 
your newly installed OS inoperative.  Sftp is a perfect tool for 
selecting the hidden files that you want, having first rsync-ed the 
/home data.  rsync is still the preferred method for the backups however 
although in principle you could use sftp.  Setting up sftp under Fedora 
8 KDE is a little different in that KDE uses its own protocol for 
browsing and displaying an sftp icon in konqeror. lisa has to be 
installed and running as a service for this to work in addition to the 
usual, ssd and firewall settings (let me know if anyone wants the details).

I have not been able to display the sftp icons in Nautilus when running 
Gnome desktop in Fedora 8.  It does not seem to do this "out of the box" 
as Ubuntu does which is strange since Gnome is Fedora's default desktop 
not KDE.  However, you can still sftp manually and popup a Nautilus file 
listing of a network computer. There must be some package that I have to 
install and start but I can't find out what it is - any ideas which 
package does the network sftp browsing in Nautilus and produces an icon??

John Blomfield