A new installation of Fedora 14 was performed some days ago allowing to fresh up my heavy duty machine at work. Of course this does not come without any troubles but, thankfully, all have been solved quicker than expected.
The first and more serious problem was to install the necessary drivers for the graphics (an nVidia GeForce 9400 GT). By following thoroughly all the steps given in this howto-configure-kmode-nvidia link the problem was solved successfully without any further delays (thank to Paolo B. to point me that link!). A quick check if everything is working ok is to test (type in terminal) ‘glxgears’. If the rotating gears are there and the output is more than 2000fps then the graphics run correctly (thanks to Thodoris B. for this tip!).
Next step, to organize a little bit the desktop … Yum-install the gconf-editor and then I (personally dislike these icons) removed the computer, trash and home icons from Desktop. From gconf-editor select apps>nautilus>desktop and untick the boxes named *_icon_visible.
Next step was to activate the compiz 3d graphics and add Cairo-Dock, along with some plug-ins which provide all the (cool) stuff that somebody (or at least me) needs. With that I found the panels useless so I removed them completely through gconf-editor again, by selecting desktop>gnome>session>required_components and removing the value “gnome-panel” from panel (it can be restored by putting this value again back).
Now I am enjoying my new fresh and cool machine !