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OSNews Rates Fedora Core 1 Mild Disappointment
JigSaw writes "OSNews has reviewed the Fedora Core 1 Linux distro, but the author personally found lots of usability problems and bugs with the distro, making Fedora Core a trying experience. The writer puts the blame on poor QA of Fedora Core 1 done by its community, since Red Hat has shifted focus to Enterprise, with Fedora serving merely as a testbed for them."
I have been with RedHat since 5.1, and so the question becomes: Debian or Suse?
I need a very stable predictable platform, so maybe Debian, now it has a better intaller for a non-ubergeek like me, is the way to go.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
... I mean how many distributions are perfect, the first time around. RHN is available up until April, which gives them a bit of time to sot things out, if they're expecting a big migration from RH to fedora...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Having used Fedora (for roughly 3 minutes before fleeing); I must say it is completely unimpressive. Perhaps I haven't kept up with redhat as much as I should have, but I expected it to be a bit more intuitive.
As a slack user I wasn't expecting the world, hell, I wasn't even expecting North America... but I wanted a little more than the Canadian province of Ontario.
The article finds me in agreement. Fedora is just too buggy for my taste. I tried it a few days ago and I also saw some of the bugs presented in the article (like the app installer not recognizing its own RPMs for the fedora CDs most notably).
Oh, well, back to Debian...
Desktop linux is now unimportant to Redhat, so we should expect any efforts from them in that market to be dismal, at best.
They have moved on from their customer base, so its time for us to move on to something else that has a longer term future on the desktop, be it Debian, Slackware, even *BSD..
( just sort of suprised it happened THIS fast.. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The community of dedicated bug reporters/developers has largely shifted to Debian. Most users of RH/Fedora don't want to file a bug report when they find one. They want it to be fixed long before they ever have the chance to find it. I know a lot of people who use RH, and none of them are inclined to file bug reports. The bulk of technical Debian users run unstable, and submit bug reports as often as they encounter problems. I think the reality of the situation is that the strength of the community isn't in RedHat any longer.
Those from the #fedora IRC channel on irc.freenode.net have started an unofficial FAQ.
I highly suggest browsing through the various issues others have had, before you decide to upgrade from RH or try a fresh install.
fedora.artoo.net.
It's something from RedHat. RedHat has had problems since the dark ages with x.0 releases, which is what Fedora basically is.
I'm having code compile issues because of the new linking setup myself. Code the compiled perfectly under RHL 9 blows up on FC1.... Can't say I didn't expect this to be a problem free migration. Reminds me of when RH first kicked out the glib updates... Code all over the place blew up left and right until everything else started updating.
Although is not RedHat Linux 10, its pretty good for a v1.0 ... 1.1 or 2 should be pretty kick ass.. at least I hope..
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
Eugina is an anti-Linux troll, and a MacOS/BeOS Fangirl. Around 50% of her "articles" always critisize Linux but praises MacOS/BeOS like a Zealot. Ever notice that the "Report Abuse" button dosen't exist on her posts? Don't read OSNews, you WILL get burned by her trolling.
Is it really that big of a surprise? Did you think they would get it perfect the first time it comes out? The question is whether the Redhat lovers of the world will fix it up or just buy Suse?
Nobody is working on it anymore. Without Red Hat's active support, forget about it. Everybody's switched to working on other Linux distros. Fedora is going to die out, and Red Hat Enterprise edition is going to die soon after that because the Red Hat people won't have any testers and people writing code for free for them.
Why were you trying to compile things when using a binary distribution?
Another thumbs down from Eugenia Loli-Queru. This from the person who gave a sorta-review of Suse based on screen shots. Give me a break. Sorry for the flames but I stopped reading OSNews long ago because of her half assed ramblings. Let Ars or something get ahold of Fedora and then I'll know Im getting a well thought out review... good or bad. Next...
Have a Happy.
Well. Good thing you finally told me. Here I've been running Linux on my desktop for years, thinking it worked. Silly me.
I have never had any trouble finding pre-compiled binaries for gaim. Not when I was running SuSE, not now that I'm running Mandrake.
But no, I was wrong. You, with your two hours of NetHack, you have brought me to the light. It's back to Windows for me. Thank you, oh gods of astroturf.
My interpretation? Not having software installed != usability issues. Last time I checked, Windows didn't come with a compiler installed either... and to run AIM, you had to install pre-compiled binaries. But Linux must be unusable if your demo CD doesn't have everything you ever wanted to use pre-installed.
Doofus. Seriously. Your logic sucks ass. Think before you troll^W^W^W^W^W post, OK?
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
> since Red Hat has shifted focus to Enterprise, with Fedora serving merely as a testbed for them.
That was kinda my impression of RH9, for that matter.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is why people like me were bitching about Red hat's shift in focus.
Sure, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be all but bulletproof and stable, but what about those of us who aren't using linux to displace Solaris or NT Servers?
What about those of us who want to do a little Gimping or serve our home LANs? At the risk of drawing the fire of the distro zealots, this is the precise reason why I switched to Mandrake at about the same time as RHAT's IPO.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I was underwhelmed by Fedora as well. I'm pretty technically inclined, but I am a complete Linux newbie. I have an old machine that I ressurected solely to toy around with Linux and expand my horizons, as it were, so I figured that Fedora would be decent, seeing as it's based on the market leader. It had a pretty-looking install, but that's where I stop giving praise.
I'm looking forward to a nifty Linux distro that's easy to use and that I can sink my teeth into without having to jump through hoops. It deserves to be on the desktop. I don't see it happening with this shot of Fedora though, uninformed my opinion my be. I'll be following it and seeing if they'll be making my life easier.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
recompile using the mozilla nss and nspr libraries (there was a post on the gaim mailing list about how to do that) which is much easier to get to work.
Now, if anybody could find out how to compile galeon 1.2.x with Mozilla 1.4 or, better, 1.5 I'm all ears, I've tried the CVS version and no dice (and no, I'm not moving to Galeon 2, which is FAR less useable than galeon 1.2, I'm wondering if the developers actually -use- the thing)
-- the cake is a lie
Applications indeed start pretty fast and especially some third party statically-linked apps (e.g. Lost Marble's Moho or Blender) load immediately. I have never seen Moho load so fast, not even on BeOS (which was its original platform).
:)
Really putting that distro through the paces huh...
-dameron
I am using Fedora right now to write this comment. While some of the bugs mentioned in the article are valid points, I have no problems with multimedia playback, using yum and rpm.livna.org to download mplayer, xine and xmms-mp3 was quite painless. Perhaps the author should have subscribed to the fedora mailing list before he tried the distro. The RPM problem has been fixed, installation of ATI 3D drivers was painless.
I just want to give a big THANK YOU to the whole Fedora team. The release had its problems but I am happy with my setup!
Uh... yeah right, so this is my signature.
"Well. Good thing you finally told me. Here I've been running Linux on my desktop for years, thinking it worked. Silly me."
Don't brush off criticism like that. Whether he's trolling or not, this "no no it works just fine!" attitude is one of the reasons I don't want to switch to Linux. I don't like being treated like a lying asshole because I have a problem with a solution that's disgustingly obvious to everybody who's climbed the Linux learning curve.
"Derp de derp."
apt-get install gaim
emerge gaim
urpmi gaim
pkg_add -rv gaim
etc...
learn how to use the very basic tools before complaining that you can't get the damn thing done. you don't need to compile gaim to get it to work on windows, and you don't need to compile it on unix.
2 years ago i was exactly in your situation. 1 month later i finally realised how fool i was. in 1 month time probably you will realise it too.
But I wish there were more people writing distro reviews. OSNews seems to be one of the few sources that get any play on here, ( heck, they may be one of the few sources full stop ), and it would be nice if we could get some variety of opinion / requirements / analysis from a variety of different viewpoints.
The gaming, productivity and utility software industries have hundreds of review sites spanning all over the web, and while I recognise that individual distro releases rarely represent as big a market impact to Joe Public as, say, the latest iD game, it would be nice to see a bit more heterogeny.
Just another thought - these reviews all seem to have to rush themselves, and rarely have time to evaluate long term issues or strengths that arise after a bit of persistant use ~ an example has been the recent rave reviews in the print media of Panther, which I adore, but had several showstopper bugs in .0 which nobody seemed to pick up on until they starting munching on user preferences for breakfast.
YLFIp.s. Worst run on sentance ever.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
i installed fedora late sunday night and have had good luck with it so far. It seems to be a nice operating system and i got all the applications I wanted to run going in a few hours. Even got Wanda the Gnome fish to work with some help from the Fedora chat room at www.freenode.net. Thanks for a good 1st run all you guys at fedora
The author has had more than a few of her OS reviews posted on /. and honestly, even the better ones can be described as 'mildly' received.
All you need to do is find a furry tooth Linux geek and eat his brain, thus gaining his ability to put up with install instructions that include the phrase "fix compiler errors".
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
This "review" is fundamentally flawed, because I have no idea where in the release notes or Fedora FAQs it states to do what she did to this box, this reads like a whine-fest because Red Hat did not fix her favorite bugs:
.71 to .72 right after you install your distribution, then Fedora probably is not for you. Or you could wait until updated RPMs hit the official repositories instead of grabbing Joe Bob's RPM build and wondering why your installation exploded.
a) So, the first thing she does is install a third party RPM and then wonders why it blows up in her face? How about the RPMs that came with the distribution? So, the install is brand new already broken in a VMWare installation.
b) Why is she using apt and synaptic? They don't even come with Fedora.
c) The RPM from Sun installs the JVM in all the Mozilla browser's (I didn't install KDE so I can't speak for Konqueror) and even integrates into the GNOME menu.
d) The well known limitations of Fedora's multimedia capabilities plague every linux distribution. It's not Fedora's fault that US laws suck. It's as easy to add multimedia in Fedora as it is in debian, you add one non-free source and you're done.
Here's a hint, if you're the kind of person that worries about moving from gaim
I doubt this will affect Red Hat, the company, in any way. It will very insignificantly affect Red Hat, the Linux development team. This is, as is said, just a test bed.
Look at Lindows, it took 3 previous incarnations to get to a version that was even worth paying anything for, version 4.0(that's still arguable).
What I'm saying here, is that let's just give Fedora a little bit of time, and it'll definitely mature, because Red Hat knows what they're doing.
Hmm, well, they're already starting to flame you so instead of jumping on that bandwagon I'll try and be more usefull as I write this from my Gentoo Linux desktop system *cough*.
:).
Many of your complaints don't seem to affect Knoppix which is a live cd distro that includes KDE and gaim and gcc as well. If you want to go the other way, well, I believe they make a version of nethack that will run on windows
Oh and I think RedHat was plenty ready for desktops. I just don't think they would have made money there. If they want to go enterprise thats fine by me as, well, I'll still use other distros.
If she would have read Gaim's page, she would have learned that gaim needs mozilla's NSS and NSPR to get ssl support for the msn plugin.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Who the fuck cares what Eugenia and her 'OSNEWS full of bias' shit crapsite rates it.
I'd hardly call getting Wanda the Gnome fish a chat-room task. If you had trouble getting that working, there's something seriously wrong with Fedora.
Well I guess you would know better than anyone else whether or not your parent is a troll, but really... isn't a troll a mythical creature? Of course, I once thought midgets weren't real... that they were clever camera tricks first developed for the then famous "Willy Wonka" movie that, when I was four years old, I found to be both creepy and frightening.
But let's assume that trolls are still classified as mythical creatures and that you are aware of this fact. I can only assume that you are attempting to insult your parent which I find is rather disrespectful, though paradoxical in a way since if you parent was good, you would have been taught better than to call your parent a troll. Further, you are insulting yourself at the same time as your parent often defines your expectations of life and in a real sense, your identity.
Oh wait... you mean the message was written to spur a negative reaction from the readership. Oh, I get it now...
My understanding is that IBM currently recommends either SuSE or Redhat for its Linux customers, depending on where the customer is based. Given that lots of "big" customers have small offices in the boondocks, what are they going to recommend?
Small site typically equates to "we want it cheap, we want it reliable and we want it now. Even though we're part of a big company, head office says we have to keep our costs very low. If we don't we shut up shop". Once you add up lots of small sites, they actually carry a bit of clout in a large organization; you'd better be able to deliver a solution that fits their needs if you want to retain that customer. Quite often, a small site exists solely to service one big customer; global HQ wants to keep that small site happy.
Non-enterprise RedHat fit the bill perfectly for small sites, but SuSE might be too expensive given the lack of a download-only release. I'd assume IBM was hoping Fedora might be a good substitute for non-enterprise RedHat, but if not, which way will they turn?
I never believe a word posted on OSNews. The bad reviews of Fedora are only to be expected... you see, Red Hat has a number of enemies who have been waiting for the chance to slit its throat.
So, as you can see... Fedora could be the finest Linux distro ever released, and it would still be a "disappointment" to these people.
I'm pretty technically inclined, but I am a complete Linux newbie
This distro isn't for you.
You couldn't get anything to work right with linux, and yet you like Nethack? Thats insane. Linux is much easier to figure out than nethack.
First, AOL's Linux version of AIM bites. Its unavoidable --- you have to understand which apps are popular for what. Its the same in Windows, its just that you already have experience with it, so you know that you should use Winzip or whatever.
Second, why were you trying to compile? SuSE has binaries of gaim. Just start up YaST, go to the installer, and install the gaim program.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I think you are trolling, but...
This is what I do when I install a linux distro:
(a) install *everything* -- disk space is not a big issue, and most services are typically not on by default
(b) whenever I need something new that I didn't do with linux (e.g. linux exploring Windows neighbourhood -- like Windows' "network places"), I do a quick search on google groups, get some answer in a minute, look at the menus, and it's almost always there
(c) most of the important software is avaliable pre-packaged from many places (simple search on google for the relevant package very often results in a quick solution)
I've been waiting, and excited, about Fedora from the time I first heard about the project. An avid RedHat fan since 7.2, I was looking to Fedora to be a similar functioning distro, with more current default packages, and the same level of stability I'd come to expect with Red Hat. It isn't. I ran into the same problems with Flash and resolving dependencies from the CDROM. The menus and taskbar paused and came up jerky, and the overall distro seemed far from polished. I respect that the author spent enough time with it to discover even more problems. I gave up far earlier. I loved Red Hat 9. I swore by it. Now, for the first time since I started using Linux, I find myself looking at what's the best distro for me. I'm disappointed that by saying "we're focusing on the enterprise" they really meant "we're abandoning our current user base". I hate to say it, but on the projects I work on in the future, I think I'll be abandoning Red Hat. Can't wait to see what Novell/Suse will come up with together.
Look, RedHat is not Linux. There are plenty of other
linux distributions out there. I have been running
Slackware since 1995, and I have never been able to
understand all the hoopla about RedHat.
If Fedora sucks, maybe this will get a few people to
go try some of the other distros out there. There
are better distros than RedHat for just about
every purpose.
Shoot, whaddya think, all the people running DebIan
and Slackware are just idiots? Maybe you bought a
little RedHat FUD, eh?
This distro isn't for you.
Well, it's good to see you've reached the same conclusion that I did, but it's sort of stating the obvious, no?
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Eugenia is obviously interested in banging the same old drum again and again ..... some of these points were made to her the last time she reviewed RH9 and RH8 and yet she appears incapable of learning that RH is _not_ going to come with MP3 support until the IP situation is sorted.
... Debian is my primary OS in case anyone is wondering).
She was also told that she should use official RPMs and yet she continues to ignore thsi.
I used to look at OSNews occasionally, but I think I just won't bother as it's irritation without information.
(Oh yeah
Good job Fedora Core.
Even worse she acts like a nazi on OSNEWS. Forces her shit up on others. Not just that, she now started to post blog entries from some morons.
I would suggest you try Mandrake 9.2. It is by far the best linux distro I've ever used. It is extremely powerful (software installation is made easy by urpmi and urpmi-based tools, similar to apt-get), and it can run de facto "industry-standard" RedHat software with ease (since it was originally based on RedHat). And, as of the latest version (I've been using it for a couple of releases on my desktop system) it is quite user-friendly. The 9.x releases have been good, but 9.2 truly is excellent in the usability department IMHO.
Honestly, off-topic or no, and sarcasm aside, I think that's one of the bigger problems with getting Linux to the desktop user: people like the fellow in the grandparent post, riding their high horses in ivory towers.
Eugenia is really a cancer on OSNEWS. So much unqualified shit.
It's strange to me how everyone is jumping on RedHat about Fedora. First how RedHat "abandoned the community" when they EOL'ed RedHat Linux, and how crying betrayal because what amounts to the 1.0 release of a new distribution has a few bugs? Take a breath, folks!
Fedora represents a shift to a new development model which is more community centric; of COURSE there are going to be problems with the 1.0 release. Is that a reason to bag the whole thing and declare it dead? Please!
I'm running Fedora 1.0 on a couple of machines. While there are a couple of quirks, I'd say that overall it's a fine distribution, and an improvement from RH 9.0. I'm certainly going to give it more than a week before I condemn the whole project! Meantime I'm going to reflect on the fact, that people seem to like to forget, that the whole OSS community owes a debt of gratitude to RedHat. RedHat has consistently failed to live up to conspiracy theories about "betraying the community".
Has she ever given any RedHat product a good review? I'll bet that a lifelong Mac user gives Windows bad reviews too.
After RedHat giving me the shaft, I've been trying out various distros (Slackware, Debian, Fedora, Mandrake) for the past month, and Mandrake seems very good - Debian kernel, libraries and ports too old, and SuSE doesn't have free ISO's to burn CD to try out (yes I have been buying RedHat since 5.x). Mandrake is the first distro to recognize everything in my system without manual configuration of mouse, xfree86, CD writer. only rough spot thus far is changing permissions on /proc/bus/ to world read-execute and /proc/bus/usb so that normal user can use USB camera.
At home, I moved off of a Redhat 9 that broke my USB keyboard to Suse. I like Suse at home. Web surfing is better than it ever was under Redhat, and it makes a point of getting fonts right.
However, for the office workstation, I went for RH WS. Why? I like the blue curve interface, and I like the promised performance improvements. Further, Suse seems a little bit behind on security (passwords of 8 characters and a more limited character set).
I would have liked it if RH had maintained a decent, not super expensive, consumer edition. That's how I got into Linux. Perhaps RH thinks that demand will now come from the corporate sector and then push into the home sector again. They're cutting costs. Will the resulting market be big enough to sustain the current cost structure?
And become a KDE distro. Redhat has stalled the desktop market by using gnome (don't argue, Gnome IS worse than KDE until they dump gconf and that file dialog). Then, with a real desktop environment to use, People will actually be able to use Fedora.
See, Fedora is pimped out with all the latest stuff... but underneath the covers the system is cheap and sleazy.
I tried updating my RH9 with Fedora, and it totally trashed Mozilla. I go type in something in the URL... and Mozilla vanished!
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
> I'm pretty technically inclined, but I am a complete Linux newbie.
Fedora (and RH) were never made for such people. Try Mandrake.
I used StarOffice on OS/2 and Windows back when a native OS/2 version was current. Yet I didn't like OpenOffice 1.0 much. It would blink out quite often on my machine -- reinstalls and repairs notwithstanding. But I'm seriously bonding with OpenOffice 1.1.
Looks like Fedora is offering a similar experience. Here are hopes for a better 1.1.
I agree with everything you said - redhat is not ready for the desktop, in my experience. RPMs are a nightmare to find and install, and compiling is really bad on redhat.
A friend got me turned on the Debian a few months ago, and now I'm a true linux convert - I run Debian and even have WINE for things I can't live without like War3 and Photoshop.
Debian makes installing almost entirely painless - you just type "apt-get install packagename" and that's it. Such a joy - it figures out your dependencies and everything.
The only beef I have with Debian is the install process, but even that's ok.
If you'd like some help, just shoot me an email or something.
$45 per U Colocation Special
You are an enterprise willing to cough up several hundred dollars per Linux load.
You are a nerd who is dumb enough to take Fedora, QA it for them, and (hopefuly) provide them with fixes for whatever problems you discover.
This isn't Open Source give and take, its Open Source exploitation. As soon as Fedora starts to look somwhat stable, thanks to the hard work of the people who fix it, it will get replaced with the next release which will contain yet more code that RH is hoping you will fix for them. The nice stable code will then find its way into the enterprise releases - which you will have to buy if you want to reap the rewards of the hard work by the OS community.
Mandrake was #2 on my list, but I was a bit taken aback by the LG-CD fiasco, so I decided against it. It will be on a junk machine though, so I shouldn't be worried, I suppose.
:)
Thanks for the helpful advice.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Fess up. This AC post was you wasn't it?
There _are_ ISO's of RHEL floating around, you know...Nobody has to settle for Fedora.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (Taroon) ISO images here."
BTW, please stop sucking immediately, Red Hat. Seriously. You're starting to piss me off.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
you site "a lot people you know" who dont file reports as conclusive proof of your assertion, but thats weak. where are the numbers, friend. i know lots of people, in person and on mailing lists i frequent who are jumping to use fedora *and* file bug reports whenever they can.
Here are some sites with screenshots of Fedora:
t ml
http://www.dark-hill.co.uk/fedora/
http://anyweb.kicks-ass.net/linux/fedora/index1.h
Keep your eyes to the sky.
So I started out w/RH 9. Then a few months back, was keeping pretty up on the Rawhide releases. Then, a few weeks ago, I started running the NPTL kernels and the latest XFree release.
I don't like the gui services boot - which I know can be disabled. The only other honking issue I've run into is external FireWire drive support. Apparently there have been some issues with that lately, altho, it worked perfectly in 9.
I prob won't move to Fedora just yet until I read some better things about it. But my hybrid - while a pain to get installed right - seems to work well. I've got pretty recent releases of GTK2, Gnome, Moz, Gaim, Open Office and other apps. They all seem to work well. But, like I said, maybe it's the hybrid nature I took updating things.
I've used Linux exclusively since 1998, and I'm on the verge of giving up on it. There, I said it.
I'm tired of the trying ordeal it is to upgrade Linux distributions. For the most part I've stuck with Red Hat, which is known as a fairly stable release. Yet every time I upgrade from one release to another, at least a dozen applications are broken.
I especially remember my attempt to go from RH7.3 to RH9. There were a number of things wrong, but the most important was that my sound driver didn't work. I found various patches, and recompiled the kernel about ten times. At last it sort of worked, but somehow it stopped recognizing my USB mouse! Combined with everything else, I abandoned it and went back to 7.3. That's a weekend of my life I will never get back.
Most recently I upgraded to Fedora, this past weekend. I had Crossover and Real Player for Linux configured just fine before, but now neither will work. Annoying. Furthermore, the distribution "upgraded" to tetex-2.0.2, which contains a number of poorly documented changes in style behaviours. It took me a morning to figure out why; in the end I just used an old style file to make it work like before.
All I want is for it to just work. I don't want to suddenly find out that a driver is broken, or search around for six hours on Google to find a solution to some irritating problem with a package I use regularly. Until this happens Linux will not be ready for the desktop.
Linux has pissed me off for probably the last time. My next machine will almost certainly run OS X.
Honestly, just installed Fedora Core 1.0 on a Dell GX260; it went more smoothly out of the box (so to say) than any other distro I've thrown on the thing. Been using yum to keep it up to date, and haven't had a problem yet...
With the recent FUD campaign, it would seem MS may be referencing Fedora when it says it is prepared to lay the smack down Linux security issues
Remember, this article is a User Review only.
An extensive security audit should be made immediately to help bolster the distro.
I'd bet MS has downloaded the sources and is completing it's own security audit of Fedora with the intent to hoist it on a petard.
I have been holding off on deploying a couple of Redhat servers for a client. The support lifecycle really made me think twice about deployment with Redhat 9. How do I tell the client that it'll be good until April 2004?
So I tried Fedora 1 (waited for 1, Not the RCs). As soon as I noticed some of the controls which require root access and just failed to launch because it didn't prompt for root password, I concluded Fedora IS NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME.
Why give Linux a blackeye with a product (Fedora 1) in which fundamental things that used to work in the previous version (redhat 9) now don't?
So I went Debian. I hate to admit it, but I tried Knoppix 3.3, liked it and did the HD install. Everything worked. It takes a bit of adjustment since I am more used to Redhat, but there just isn't any alternative (in Redhat).
Knoppix 3.3, it is ready for the desktop and prime time, too bad Redhat isn't (it used to be).
Who will guard the guards?
I've got Fedora Core 1 running at home, and soon will be upgrading the RH9 machine at work. Java and Eclipse seem to work fine (which is the major requirement for me). Fedora appears to me to be exactly what I would have expected from a "Red Hat 10" distribution.
/etc/hosts file, and as a result all my GConf stuff (I think) got corrupted to the point that Gnome couldn't start without displaying a few error messages every time. I added the entry manually, and would up having to delete all the gnome/gconf config data in my user account to make Gnome happy again. This issue ought to be easily enough resolved, and I'll be reporting it as a bug.
Now for my three issues:
#1. GTK/Gnome file selector *still* sucks. We all already knew that, and yes it's going to be fixed in the next GTK. But I wish RH had seen fit to do what the folks at Ximian did, and at least pretty up the existing one and make it somewhat usable. Those "Home" "Desktop" and "Documents" quick access buttons in the XD2 version make things much nicer.
#2. No menu editing. Again, it's a Gnome problem, and is due to be fixed in the next Gnome (2.6), I believe. Unfortunately I just read a mailing list posting indicating that they while they were fixing the menu architecture, they weren't all that concerned with providing editing capability. I'm not certain I understand what's going on here though, as I wish RH would just support the same menu-editing functionality found in Ximian Desktop 2. It's not great, but at least it's possible.
#3. Using the RedHat network configurator, I changed the hostname of the machine from localhost to something a little more personalized. It failed to add the new hostname to the
Other than that though, it's very nice. As far as I can tell, it's an all around improvement over RH9. I can't wait till these last few rough edges get smoothed out.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
I haven't used the SuSE LiveEval, but I don't see how you would need to compile a program like gAIM. gAIM is one of the standard instant messaging programs and all distributions in some way provide a convenient way for installing it. In SuSE's case, that would be through an RPM. It's like with Windows - you wouldn't go try and find the source to AOL's Instant Messanger, you'd go grab the installer for your operating system on the internet. Same thing with SuSE and most "desktop Linux" distributinos. The whole process is much less complicated than you are making it.
It wouldn't be anonymous otherwise, but don't make fun of run-on sentences, or people who use too many commas, and have multiple incomplete thoughts in one place, it's sort of rude, don't you think?
Finding usability flaws in a linux distribution is like microwaving a kitten. Not very difficult, but it takes a lot of heart to do it.
Let's not focus on how much software sucks, but on what we can each individually do to make it better for all concerned.
Actually no, Mandrake does not follow the standards for things like the filesystem. Mandrake rpms will not usually install properly on redhat and redhat on mandrake... some 3rd party rpms will but not all.
You'll have alot more trouble finding an apt repository for Mandrake as well. If you actually read through the book that comes with it and attempt to follow along step by step you'll soon find many things don't work as described, everything from packages that aren't in the default install to commandline switches/flags that are incorrect or don't exist. 90% of the howto documentation out there that applies to redhat stuff (which is a VERY significant portion of all documentation onthe web that is not maintained at the offical sources) DOES NOT apply as is in such a manner it can be followed by someone who does not already know the material or know which outside sources to go to for the correct info.
Lots of things won't work out of the box, the hardware detection is HORRIBLE, the installer is primative. Oh yeah, and the control applets are user friendly, but only because they offer so few options that 90% of users will never be able to get what they want working correctly.
Other than that, Mandrake kicks ass! Seriously RH9 was thrice the beginner distro that Mandrake ever was!
I count this more of a troll than what it's replying to.
Strike 1: Pre-compiled binaries. Two words which mean nothing to the average windows user.
Strike 2: Well. Good thing you finally told me. Here I've been running Linux on my desktop for years, thinking it worked. Silly me. etc. An asshole atittude instead of trying to offer the least bit help. Most people who've seeked assistance on an IRC channel is used to this.
Strike 3: Last time I checked, Windows didn't come with a compiler...M/i> For average Windows functioning, no compiler is needed. However for many basic operations in *nix, one is needed. Many programs are not distributed in binary, including drivers which are often required before the OS can even go online. Without a compiler being provided by the distro, the situation becomes irritating.
Strike 4: Doofus Insulting the potential *nix user. That's right, wonder for years about why no one switches, then when someone tries, insult them.
People, try to remember that the alternative environment is so mindblowing that problems which appear easy to you are brick walls to others.
I'm using Fedora right now. Once I did a fresh installation I've had no problems. Found my hardware, very stable, much faster than RH9 and so far everything I've added has worked fine. It is kind of a pain getting all the mulitmedia stuff, I would gladly pay Redhat if they included that.
uptime
19:38:16 up 3 days, 54 min, 3 users, load average: 0.02, 0.04, 0.04
I would suggest giving it a shot. If you do find a problem, file a bug report.
Gentoo>Debian>RedHat
RH is for people who don't know better.
just rants without substance.
I've been having better luck than most with Fedora, it seems, and have in fact gotten more to work with it than any other distro I've tried so far (two separate Mandrake installs both broke beyond the point of repair for me, and Red Hat 8 and 9 both worked fairly well but not quite as well as Fedora). Honestly, when I see people whining about dependencies as in the linked article, I wonder why the hell they're insisting on living in the stone ages as they are. One of the major new features of Fedora is that up2date now supports apt and yum (yes, both), and I have no idea why you wouldn't use *at least* up2date, and preferably something even better.
Personally, I use Synaptic with apt, which is something a lot of people don't even seem to realize works on Fedora (at least judging by the reaction on the #fedora irc channel the other day when I mentioned it). As happy as I've been with it I wouldn't use anything else, including Fedora's own "add/remove" function. If something's not listed in Synaptic, it ain't gonna work. If it is listed, it will (or at least, there's no real reason it wouldn't). Simple as that. Click the package and install it - no dependency problems, no worries.
I honestly think for Linux to get beyond niche status people are going to need to quit having to worry about stuff like tarballs and dependencies. The fact is you *don't* have to worry about this stuff, so why would you *choose* to worry about it and give yourself all sorts of unnecessary headaches in the process? I have had zero problems installing anything on Fedora so far, and have no complaints about performance.
I will say Fedora is missing support for some key packages, including Wine (the one I really would like to run and can't). But I didn't go wasting my time downloading it and trying to install it - it's not in my Synaptic list, so I just don't bother. I will keep looking for it there, though, and I know it'll show up eventually. It's about time Linux users started using their time more wisely, and modern dependency resolvers/downloaders/installers like apt-get and yum will help you avoid almost all of the problems listed in the original article here (which are problems you'd face on almost every distribution, depending on what packages you try to install).
I mean, I don't think I've really seen her give a glowing review to anything.
Besides, who made her *the* expert.
Bah.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
I had a typo in a closing tag. Time to turn on preview methinks.
Fedora is a mess to say the truth.
It's clusterfucked with different toolkits that the normal user do not know about.
GTK1, GNOME1,
QT3, KDE3,
GTK2, GNOME2,
OOo (with own toolkit),
Mozilla (with own toolkit).
If this is quality Software then I don't know. There is no unified standard for going with one Toolkit/Desktop. Why does Fedora need to mess all applications (I know it's possible and I know that their aim is to mix the best of the best). But honestly the resource wasted is incredible. KDE has all the applications already, there is no need to mix all the apps use one Desktop that simply works.
Benefits:
- No theme hassle.
- No button re-ordering madness,
- No configuration system madness,
- No mime and other unexpected madness.
I know the dumb excuse that everything is being dealth with on freedesktop.org is simply not valid. Making GNOME become such a hacked Desktop on Fedora has no benefits as much as doing KDE massacre. With their current philosophy they could even run BlackBox, XFCE4 or anything else and have their individual apps running on it.
If you want GNOME then use and go GNOME only,
If you want KDE then use and go KDE only.
A mixture of this is just plain idiotic.
Apt for Redhat (and fedora) is available.
As for compiling... almost every package I've compiled (a lot) (except GIS GRASS, which isn't exactly popular) was compiled with:
./configure
make
su root
make install
That said, I'm considering switching to deb for some of my machines now that I've learned the joy of apt-get (when I tried deb before I only knew about dselect)
OMG! It's the dreaded "IT WORKS 4 ME, D00D!" arguement.
You're right, you are a master(de)bator.
Seriously. Your logic sucks! Think before you procreate! DOoofus. OK?!!!1111
You probably havn't tried Linux for a while. Nowdays things usually work directly. This is why the poor quality of Fedora is news worth mentioning.
I tried to install it on my old IBM Thinkpad 600 and it failed to automacically recognize both my sound card, my screen, and my network card. All of them was identified perfectly in Fedora predecessers RH 7.2, 7.3, 8 and 9.
Now I finally got it to work, but it requred some tinkering that a newbie p but robably wouldn't have figured out how to do. In all fairness, it was not harder than installing winNT4 that it came with. But just the same a big step backwards for Linux.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
It's a valuable lesson of why to use the official kernel and not one with a bunch of random patches.
Most distributions have this problem. I don't know why even supposedly "stable" distros have nonstandard kernel patches. It just happened to bite Mandrake in a hardware-damaging way. Random crashing can easily cost more than a CDROM drive.
umm RH9 is intended to be a desktop distro, that means made for a linux newbie. It's also easier to setup and use than Mandrake since either way your going to have to tweak, but Mandrake breaks the standard in every respect from kernel name (so until recently modules like nvidia's driver wouldn't work easily) to the filesystem layout. Because of this pretty well all documentation on the web WON'T work in a step by step fashion.
Besides that, redhat always did have a more intuitive (in the sense of you fill in the blanks, click apply and it ACTUALLY WORKS, and said blanks are relatively easy to find) desktop.
Mandrake's hardware detection is also poor compared to the actual redhat release. This is the biggest reason I would never hand a friend a Mandrake CD and tell him to have at it. Linux is a MAJOR pain in the ass if even one piece of hardware doesn't setup out of the box. With redhat that happens 90% of the time. With Mandrake is happens maybe 20% of the time 25% if you've researched and made sure your hardware works with linux... with redhat I generally don't look, I can install on a random pc with reasonable confidence the hardware will work. Of course any other distribution tends to have this problem as well.
Okay, so most /.ers do care about bugs, but Joe Six-pack doesn't seem to.
You want a desktop distro that can compete in the home OS market, for Joe Six-pack's dollar?
Well, more important than the bugs are two things:
1) The zero-oversight installer. M$ has it, users aren't going to migrate to something that starts by asking them questions they don't know how to answer.
2) The lead-Joe-by-the-nose on-line help system. This is the bigger stumbling block. What is needed is to emulate the Windows help system (about the only thing in Windows I think is worth emulation) right down to guiding the user step by step through the process.
Of the three issues, well bugs will get fixed, and quick, OSS has established that pretty well. The zero-oversight installer gets better and better with each successive try at it. It's that help system baby, not only is it a massive undertaking, it is anethma to most of OpSrc dev people. Or at least that is the most likely explanation for the state of documentation in most OpSrc projects.
I personally think OpSrc is poorly equipped to handle that task. Dev people tend to gloss over core concepts in their docs, because they are core concepts. That is a luxury you cannot expect when coding for Joe Six-pack. If folk really want Joe Six-pack using Linux at home, they're going to have to make it easy not only for Joe to install Linux, but trivial for him to learn to use it afterwards...
The single hardest task in there? Probably all those lines starting with "In Microsoft Windows..."
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
.. I must respond ........ :)
.. and you want to try out WinXP on your computer.. There is no LiveEval version .. so you have to backup everything in your previous setup, install a copy of the new OS, sit through atleast an hour long OS install (if not longer) + download and find all of the apps to finish out the install (easily another hour if you have done it before) just to try it out..
So lemme get this straight.. you grab a SuSE LiveEval CD and are able to boot up, use it, play a game, toy around with the interface and decide within two hours that Linux is not right for you and are able to boot back to your previous OS without any distruption.
I am surprised that Windows people don't find this simply amazing. Seriously. Lets say you were running umm.. Win98 or W2k
Don't like it? Hehehe.. good luck getting back to your previous system.
In anycase, there are a lot of people that try out Linux and do not really seem to have a REASON to switch over. As a result (as in your case) there was absolutely NO effort to try and find out what differences there are between the two systems. You expected to boot into Linux and have essentially a Windows knock-off.
Needless to say, it takes much more than 2 hours to really understand a new system and start to really appreciate its unique features (and yes, a KDE based FOSS OS/distro has a LOT of great features) but for most people, there is a lack of acknowledgement on how long it truly took them to master their current OS due to the simple fact that MOST started out on some Windows variant and gathered knowledge over a long period of time.
A small disclaimer: I haven't yet upgraded by RH9 boxes to FC1, so I might end up reaching the same conclusion, but I can already see a bunch of red flags in that "review".
The box I'm typing on now began its life running Red Hat 4.2. It's been upgraded countless number of times, and it's now on Red Hat 9. And it's rock-stable solid. And the reason that it's stable, and functional, is precisely because what I've been doing, for the last six years, was the exact opposite of what this "review"er did.
Notice that she began having problems when she tried to hack together an upgrade to some application. Lesson number one when running Red Hat: do not install any software yourself. Always use rpm, which checks in, keeps track of, and maintains, all the inter-library and inter-application dependencies. Once you begin flinging random libraries and applications into the system, some of which may or may not overwrite existing libraries or files, you're well on your merry way to Linux's equivalent of Windows DLL hell, when you've got ten versions of the same basic library installed in fifteen different directories, and you now have absolutely no clue whatsoever what you end up running when you start a given application. Which randomly crashes, I wonder why?
By the way, the same also applies to other Linux distros too, I'm sure. They all use some kind of a package management system, be it rpm or apt. The same principle applies in either case.
My box is very solid even though I have plenty of custom software installed which I've compiled and built myself. But the key difference is that all the software was installed by rpm. Rach time I upgraded to a new distribution release, the installer correctly detected that I have an application that has a dependency on an older version of the library. The installer then proceeds to load a compatibility library, in addition to the new, incompatible version of the library. After upgrading, I then recompile all my custom software and install the new RPMs, whenever I have some free time. Everything still works in the meantime, because all the dependencies are correctly satisfied.
Eventually, I get around to cleaning out my box, seeing which compatibility libraries can be removed. When I try to remove them, inevitable RPM complains because I forgot to recompile some application that still depends on the old library. After doing that, and when nothing no longer needs it, it gets removed by rpm without a peep.
I also see that the reviewer grabbed some random third-party RPM from some dark alley (strike 1). Unsurprisingly, rpm refused to install it due to missing dependencies (strike 2). The reviewer tried to fix the situation by, once again, grabbing a bunch of third party libraries, and installing them manually (strike 3). End result: a big, recursive mess (strike 4).
I wonder why?
Sheesh, what exactly are the qualification to be an "OS reviewer", these days???
Anybody using a 3COM 905C-TX card will probably run into this. Let this be a warning to you: disable Kudzu first chance you get. Otherwise the card'll get buggered up and you'll have trouble booting. If you DO manage to boot, you'll never get the card running properly while Kudzu is still active.
Disabling Kudzu service solved the problem. Apparently I'm only one of dozens who has encountered this. The same issue does not appear in any of the half-dozen versions of Linux I've tried before on that particular machine.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
And It seems about as good as Lycoris..
A little bit TOO Dumbed down.. buggy in spots..
*shrug* I'm going back to old reliable GENTOO...
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
It looks like redhat-config-network is not running with root permissions. There is no icon on the panel for the root password caching app.
When I setup flash on one of my systems here I had no trouble. Just downloaded it, ran the install, and it just worked.
I don't think Fedora will remove Gnome from Fedora, or even make it non-default, but being a community distro, their KDE support should get better. I've found that community distros (Debian, RedHat), have some of the best versions of KDE. That's quite ironic considering all of the time SuSE, Mandrake, Lycoris, Lindows, Xandros, Connectiva, TurboLinux, et al. spend on polishing KDE. Hopefully Fedora will join suite.
I'm a fairly unsophisticated Linux user, and I recently finished trying out all of the major distributions. I ended up sticking with Fedora 1.
The author complains about not being able to install Flash, but I had no problem whatsoever. I did exactly what Macromedia told me to do (despite the fact that I didn't think it would work) and neither Fedora nor Firebird had any problems with it.
But like the author, I haven't gotten Samba to work. (Well, file access anyway--printer access is just fine.) I had no trouble getting it to work under RH9, but I can't get it to work under Fedora. That at least suggests that the problem isn't entirely me.
"My girlfriend's got sodium laureth sulfate hair."
But nobody asks you, since nobody really cares about pimple-faced preteen rich white trash's opinion.
The author was VERY kind to Fedora with his review - his final ratings were
Installation: 8.5/10
Hardware Support: 8/10
Ease of use: 6/10
Features: 7/10
Credibility: 6/10 (stability, bugs, security)
Speed: 7.5/10 (throughput, UI responsiveness, latency)
Overall: 7.16
With all the problems he had (literally TONS) and the fact that NO windows user would have put up with half of the issues (read: trouble installing apps and non-existant dependencies) and just gone "Yeah look why Linux sucks" I would have given it a 3/10 on use and a 4/10 on credibility.
I'm sure Fedora will be flamed for quite some time now and I hope they learn their lesson and QA - QA - QA form now on and - Don't release a half-assed product - release the software when it's "done" not when "it's ok"
Ave Molech Setting
It's good that they are putting all their resources into the enterprise segment, specializing in servers mainly. This is where Linux needs to be. Spreading Linux (meaning resources, the people working with it) too thin at this point, between servers and desktops, is the wrong choice currently. We are in a battle with Microsoft mainly. Microsoft is the undisputed king of desktops. We need to keep making Linux the choice for server and back-office type applications as this is it's strongest position right now and the one place it really can compete with Microsoft.
Microsoft has, in essence, infinite money to put into anything it wants. It currently wants the server market, badly. If they can control this then they will can make communications propriety and fulfill their dreams of world domination, thus have a total monopoly over the desktop and server as they can make them integrate seamlessly and become the sole designer of all applications that require the server-client model and beyond.
Linux currently has a fabulous market share within servers and the fight must continue to make these numbers higher. Spending all the time and resources on desktop issues, such as ease of use just is not the fight to be in right now. It's a fight that really, at the moment or any time soon, cannot be won. The fight for servers can be won.
The developers and contributers to Linux and Linux applications should be doing everything we can to make Linux the de-facto standard on the server. It would be foolish to not recognize our great fortune with our position in the server market. This is why I think Redhat is not only making a wise business move, but also one that will help Linux in general.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
I used Redhat 7.3-9 and each release would skip playing mp3s/oggs under a light load (Mozilla, Mozilla Mail, couple of terminals w/ ssh) on a 1gig PIII laptop w/ 512 of RAM.
By sharp contrast, Mandrake does not skip under much heavier loads. Also, not based on a scientific test or anything but Mandrake FEELS faster. I look forward to trying out the 2.6 kernel that came w/ my 9.2 boxed set today.
This guy is way out there
Troll. That's called a troll. You must be new around here ...
What a load of crap. I'm using Fedora Core 1 now, and have just successfully setup pptpd tunneling with mppe support in the kernel, gaim works fine out of the box. Mozilla v. 1.4 apparently can't crash, Webmin works wonderfully, Samba 3.0 is serving as PDC for 6 other workstations. xine and mplayer installed with yum in a few minutes.
Exactly what am I doing wrong here? Did I miss the secret FC1 broken distro the author got? I even installed it cross country on my brothers new Dell workstation via VNC in an hour, and got him installing his favorite FSF/OS apps via yum in a few minutes.
I have a few nits: ext3 filesystem support is loaded as a module, as well as much of the encryption and SCSI support, which was all significantly sped up by rebuilding them into the kernel for my server, but it's much more solid than RH 8 or 9 were upon release.
I'd give it 4.5 stars out of 5, and a big thanks to the Fedora crew.
So I've learned to take anything that OSNews writes with a grain of salt, their articles aren't exactly up to any sort of journalistic integrity standards. So that probably biased me from the start.
I've been running Fedora Core 1 on my Thinkpad A31 laptop since last Thursday and I'm quite pleased. There were some hiccups because the upgrade from RH9 crashed hard, mainly because I had two many external RPMS installed (had previously upgraded to gnome 2.4 on RH9). So, after moving some data, I did a fresh install and it appears to work just fine.
Some of the great highlights of the distro:
Sleep on the Thinkpads work. I don't have to do the funky virtual terminal dance after my monitor goes off.
Speedstep stuff is part of the distro. This is also nice to not see my battery get sucked to nothing when I unplug it.
The wireless support is improved. Redhat-config-network works quite well for switching profiles between home and school.
Although it doesn't ship with stuff like MPlayer and a good MP3 player, rpm.livna.org has YUM and APT repositories to fix this no problem.
The revisions to blue curve are quite nice, it gives it a nicer look that isn't so sterile.
Supposed the NPTL backport improves Java app performance. Ecplise seems zippier, but it could be delusion. Actually, most everything seems a bit zippier, probably because the OS is no longer compiled for 386s.
Flash installed without a problem, no idea what Eugenia is complaining about.
Java works just fine in the browser too. Maybe she didn't read any of the documentation that came with her Whizbang GeneroBrowser 0.1rc2 or whatever she uses.
The issue is that Fedora isn't meant to be bleeding edge and she is thinking that it is. If you want bleeding edge use Gentoo. Personally I can deal with a nice middle ground between Debian and Gentoo and Fedora fits that nicely.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
Um, so, the Samba VFS modules (via Konquer and Nautilus) suck big time. That's why we have CIFS FS and SMB FS. They work very well. That's what you should use.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
One of the few things that is actually better in Fedora than in previous Redhat products is that you can use apt and yum archives as sources for the redhat up2date tool.
The distro also ships with yum by default. Like with apt-get this simplyfies package and depandency finding a lot. If you prefer apt-get that is avilable too, but the functionality is very similar.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
*shrug* I dunno. I started my Linuxing on Redhat, and though it had a learning curve, I've found it quite easy to use. I just upgraded to Fedora yesterday (from RH7.3), and I've yet to have a complaint.
Here you go, try this.r as/RPMS /i386/
http://lisas.de/~nils/redhat/rawhide/1/ext
-S
Red Hat will no longer be the market leader as they've managed to knock Red Hat Linux Standard, now known as Fedora, back a few years in usability and stability. If Bruce Perens can get the support he's asking for, then a suitable alternative may be Debian.
= 9J =
The only beef I have with Debian is the install process, but even that's ok.
;) Yes, I know I can automate it but I'm not blatting down identical images all the time, so automating it isn't necessarily beneficial to me.
And a new installer system in the works, to address this much-debated issue.
My only prob with Debian's current installer has been that there's been that much useful software to install, it becomes either:
a) really tempting to install things you don't need that just sound interesting
b) a chore, spending inordinate amounts of time trying to find the things you *do* need (though thankfully dselect has search funtionality built in, handy when you know the debian package names
Matt
Ummm, why would you try and use apt repositories? Mandrake comes with urpmi (its own version of apt) just goto http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/ and its all configured for you.
Hardware detection is based on redhat's kudzu and is very similar in my experience, i.e. works reasonable well.
The installation is really slick I think, nice easy graphical installer, you can just click yes to everything if you want the easy way, but you can tweak everything if you want an advanced install.
What's your point? The guy runs a LiveEval CD for two hours, can't get 2 pieces of software that aren't burned on the CD to work, and realizes that Linux Isn't Ready For The Desktop? This is criticism?
.rpm, type in your root password, run the program. You want help? Ask me for help. Telling me that it doesn't work based on a CD that doesn't include it is not asking for help. Saying "How do I get GAIM running on SuSE LiveEval," is asking for help. "Uh, I ran NetHack for two hours. Linux isn't ready for the desktop" is not.
I'm not calling him a lying asshole. I called him a doofus.
And, dude, I'm sorry. Gaim does work just fine. Click on the
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
If you don't mind having to really learn linux, try gentoo. The do it yourself natrue of gentoo keeps you free from most of these sort of problems.
Same here, RH since 5.1, and still just as happy with Redhat 10. Fedora just came in the mail today, and it actually makes my Gateway laptop look good!
Not sure how you test stability, I for one do my own testing on my own hardware. I am not going to make decisions based on the first review from an editor with dubious technical expertise.
"I served for 2 years at BeNews, serving the BeOS and its community (this is all past now, but still full of great memories), and before that I was contributing as a news editor for a well known Gaming news site for about 8 months and I also co-held a fan site (LandOfEden) in the early development days of Lionhead's Black'n'White game." Fan site editor and contributing news editor does not make one a technical guru, I'll do my own tests, thank you!
I had Debian/Knoppix3.3 loaded on the second partiton of the laptop since I am using the Knoppix3.3 live-CD to teach a Linux class at the local Comunity College. I switched the LT from RH9 to Knopppix to keep the confusion level down when I went through the menus. The typical windows user has panic attacks when faced with a new desktop paradigm, and if I were to have a Menu that didn't have the exact same options in the exact same order, the class would degenerate into chaos.
From short few hour experience with Fedora, it has earned keeper status as the main OS on the laptop and should be sitting happily on the server and my desktop box this weekend. I plan on doing a normal test install with rollback options, the same thing I would do with any OS - free or commercial, Open or proprietary!
I'll just teach Linux from the live CD, I guess my ego can stand having a teaching platform that is "as slow" as the student's machines.
Southern California Linux Expo on November 22nd at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California. Other exhibitors include Real Networks, Novell, and Pogo Linux. Some of the speakers include Seth Nickell, Chris Dibona, Patrick Mochel and John Terpstra. Full and student tickets are still available for this event as well as free exhibition only passes using the FREE promotional code.
I dont know what that guy was smoking but please let me have some.
My laptop has been a PITA with Mandrake 9 and 9.1 SuSE 8.2 and Redhat 8x and 9..
Install Fedora
ACPI works
Mouse works and it's shutoff button above it.
Broadcom 54G wireless works with Linuxant's driver
I couldnt be happier with this setup.
Now my only concern is one email on the list about patches for security will not be high priority and if you want quick patches to purchase RH WS or ES..
We'll I'm not using it for work just personal. And frankly redhat should still provide fedora patches especially security ones ASAP. Otherwise it will give MS more fuel for their security FUD.
now to order a pizza from the couch via my linux laptop!
For the record, some guys on the gentoo forums have been using fedore and they love it. I wish it had a livecd so i could play with it.
fedora is not just redhat, its a community effort now. get yer facts straight ya useless bag a skin. yer wasting my bandwidth with yer drivel
From someone that runs both, you are quite simply lying. I run both because I need to stay familiar with all the major distributions. All of my clients have preferred Mandrake over Red Hat when given a choice between the two.
Mandrake's filesystem layout is exactly like Red Hat. Why in the world would you use apt-for-rpm when you could use the tried and tested urpmi that is native to Mandrake? As of 9.2, there are more packages for Mandrake than Debian. Do a search for Easy Urpmi on google and you will see. As the other posted said, you are either lying or uninformed.
...whatever supposed usability problems Fedora has, there's some great new technology behind it.
For example: they've got a new and shiny version of the glibc & NPTL. This threading support is worlds better than anything I've seen in other distributions or most other operating systems. I wrote a small test for C++-safe thread cancellation support. It failed on pretty much every system I tried. Only Fedora Core 1 and Tru64 passed. This is a behavior more hinted at than mandated by the pthread standard at this point, but realistically, no one would ever use thread cancellation in a C++ program if it didn't work the way it does in Fedora.
There are lots of architectural improvements like that always thrown into a new RedHat release, and I think Fedora will be no different. It leads to their problems with x.0 releases, but I think it's worth it.
In my mind, Fedora Core 1 is RedHat 10 - the name + the community. It even upgraded from my RedHat 9 installation. That's a dead give-away.
Strike 3: Last time I checked, Windows didn't come with a compiler..
.NET Framework runtime, then it comes with a C# and VB.NET compiler. Longhorn will ship with the Framework pre-installed, then everyone running Windows will have a compiler. This, of course, will be a heyday for virus writers.
If you install the
I, for one, wouldn't consider someone with a problem to be lying or an asshole. I've had plenty of problems with linux, and have clawed my way up the learning curve slowly but surely, and I still don't consider myself to have everything `working'.
But all things considered, I'm happy with my current setup. I don't use XP for anything except to boot up if I need to call my ISP for support (they don't know how to help you if you're using linux). But that's just me.
(Warning: Gentoo plug)To be honest, I didn't have a distro that really did 90% of what I wanted until I tried Gentoo. It's a little arcane to begin with, but their documentation *rocks* and I think I learned more in the three days it took me to set up my system :) than I had in the five or six months I had messed around with redhat.
I don't know, I guess I'm just saying that trolls or zealots with screwed up attitudes shouldn't prevent you from switching to linux. Someone switches to linux (I'm thinking desktop) when they can make it do what they want it to, and not before.... IMHO.
philcrissman.com.
Except that this is a news/discussion forum not a help forum. Sure even in help forums some people get itchy about "basic" questions but there will always be someone willing to point you in the right direction.
--Murray Barton
Anyone else in the same situation could try the SRPM in the meantime.
R PM S/galeon-1.3.10-1.src.rpm
http://lisas.de/~nils/redhat/rawhide/1/extras/S
Although you want the 1.2 and not 1.3
-S
This particular dead horse gets dug up way too often for it to be even moderately funny. Debian Stable may be old, but it's exactly that, with backports whenever security flaws are found. Excellent choice for production servers that absolutely have to stay up 24/7/365.
For people who use Debian on workstations, Testing or Unstable are much better choices, since they are kept nicely up to date. Testing contains the proven packages from unstable, which in turn isn't at all unstable except for the occasional dependency instability.
Good thing you don't have a DELL with the LG CD drive, or you would be whining about how 9.2 killed your machine.
If you have to be a 0-day upgrader, you take your chances!
Just how did RedHat give you the shaft by asking to be paid for their support? You still get the OS for free. I don't understand the leach mentality of the underside of OSS. Give something back, or STFU! Leaches like you are the reason why windows maintains its dominance in the marketplace.
Let me preface this insightful comment with a flame. I hate Red Hat Linux. I think it really sucks. As a long time UNIX user, I think it's bloated, clunky, and garbage.
That said, I take anything written by Eugenia with a grain of salt. I find that she is overly picky about things, and places too much importance on things that I think the average user would consider trivial.
THAT said, she's technically competent, and I enjoy reading her articles...just don't take her opinions to heart too much.
BSD won't go anywhere becuase all their games suck. The emulated roms on windows work better than some of the games that exist on BSD. No, I take that back, the emulated roms to 20 year old systems that exist on windows are better than ALL of the games on BSD. The only thing BSD is good for is a server for Windows games (which BSD can't even play right.) Until BSD gets better games, BSD will never get anywhere. Maybe a better installer might help too. And better configuration tools. And ease of use could definitely be improved...
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Weird, another craptastic "review" from Eugenia. A quick look around the intarweb and she would have found this little gem. It answers several of her gripes, including the Flash and Rhythmbox problems she ran into. She's also using apt when yum is set up out of the box and works pretty well. If she had stuck to yum there would have been far fewer problems with her install.
It is classic Eugenia fare. I really wish the slashdot editors would stop posting her damnable reviews whenever they're submitted. Her reviews consist equally of false information and cheerleading for her geek underdog of the hour. Some weeks it is Windows, others it is some unknown and unused Linux distro, and most of the time there's a quip added about Be.
Please post informed reviews rather than overhyped trolling.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I started out on SuSE LiveEval, I wanted to use AIM. Linux AIM didn't work right, gAIM wouldn't compile since I didn't have GCC, and GCC Binaries were 144 megs large.
...
Well, it doesn't sound as if you ever tried to give Linux a go - two hours mucking about with a bootable CD distro won't tell you anything about Linux.
If you really want to try Linux, make a 5 Gig partition and install a proper distro onto that - Redhat or Mandrake would probably be the most friendly to a newbie. Play around with it for a week or two, and then see what you think
Both Gnome and KDE have some rough edges. What's needed is not dropping Gnome or KDE. Instead we need to make the choise between the two be a choise for developers and not for users.
That is, let Gnome be skinnable to look like KDE, and KDE skinnable to look like Gnome. Then make sure that drag & drop etc work well between the two environments. By doing this the users would have a large set of applications that worked well and looked good together on the end user desktop.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Think before you troll^W^W^W^W^W post, OK?
I think you mean ^H^H^H^H^H there, buddy. Ironic, isn't it?
By trade, she's a GUI designer...so she's a bit of a GUNazi...but that's just her. Also, RedHat yanked the carpet out from everyone. If this "replacement" isn't up to snuff, why should she bother babying it? If it's not AS GOOD AS RedHat, then why bother with it?
She reviews a lot of AltOSes at her site. Like I said above, her demo machines aren't secret, or goofy in any way...they were built with hardware picked specifically to run BeOS after all! She expect to pop the disk in the machine and go. That's the standard for something "professional" She grills most things she reviews like this, but these are REALLY SIMPLE things for the most part...they should be done right if you want people to use your distro!
She is mindful of the politics involved with OSS too. She's more than willing to Hype anything...far more than
My disappointment started when I tried to upgrade Gaim 0.71 to 0.72. The third party Shrike RPM wouldn't work because of pspell dependancy problems. Downloading pspell and compiling it manually wouldn't work either as libpspell-modules were nowhere to be found in the newly compiled archive. So I decided to download the source of Gaim and compile it myself. All went fine with Gaim's compilation except the MSN plugin wouldn't load because gnuTLS that provides SSL to Gaim was not installed. I got to gnuTLS' FTP site downloaded the source, only to ask me for libcrypt. Downloaded the source of libcrypt, only to ask me for the source of GnuPG. I downloaded the gnupg, compiled fine, went back to libcrypt, only to bail out badly with severe compiling errors. This is a simple user scenario that should have not happened, no matter whose fault really is. Now think what a newbie user coming from Windows-land would think about this whole --literally-- usability fiasco.
/usr/lib/mozilla and /usr/lib/mozilla-1.4.1, no joy).
Above is obviously one of the hindering points of Linux for any user and it's not a distro centric problem. Try installing updated php RPM's on RH 9 and stock Apache and you'll catch hell also.
If the user tried to use the yum or apt programs to install a updated version if available then the problems may have been avoided. And perhaps it's a application issue also.
oh hoho
I wanted to install the Macromedia Flash plugin and I first downloaded the tar.gz version which installs its two files via a bash script. Problem was, the script wouldn't run correctly. It would tell me over and over again that the directory I was trying to install is not valid (I tried both the existing
Now I dont know how many times I've updated or installed the flash player on any number of systems but RTFM you need to know the location of your mozilla or firebird installation in order to complete the install. Another invalid arguement against Fedora this is plainly user error and not a Fedora issue once again.
hmm one possible valid point
It asked me for the 3rd CD, I put it in, and then the installer bailed out. Fedora would not even install its own RPMs from its own db/CD. This is a well known bug from the second Fedora beta and I am very, very surprised that it is in the final too.
Okay did this person verify their media during install? Otherwise yes it might be a valid but but you dont have to resort to any rpm's to install flash. In fact you want the latest version from Macromedia.
And no, it doesn't end here. Just as a test, I went to the main "Add/Remove Apps" utility and told it to install the X11-vim application. Same problem, as you can see from our screenshots.
It should end here.. yum install vim-X11 will install the application in less than 30 seconds and did not have to satisfy any dependencies.. this was with a stock workstation install. I'm almost to the point of being insulting.. and I still havent ordered my pizza yet so I'm getting hungry so lets finish this.
Browsing through the rest of the review the author obsesses on what are application problems once again and not the distro.
No distro can have dvd playback and stil be free becuase of licensing and is one of the things that had to be removed from fedora before redhat agreed to merge with it and support it.
Security is once again a valid concern due to the fact of higher up's telling us not to expect timely patches and if we want them to buy WS or ES RHLE which IMO is bull.
Not trying to bash the reviewer but they need to learn to do proper reviews which means not blaming the distro for user error and such and take the time to do it right. IE how does it stack up to RH 9 or SuSE 9 and such.
Pizza time!
scripsit Unregistered:
If you don't mind really having to learn Linux, try Linux from Scratch. Then switch to Debian ;)
Seriously, when you do it that way, you'll understand your system a whole hell of a lot more than you ever thought you could. For real work, though, let Debian's security people keep on top of the patches...
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
I am using it right now. It has huge performance improvements over Redhat 9 because of NPTL. The desktop is far more responsive. No more latency issues! It was easy to install, and it is easy to maintain too if you use apt for rpm with some 3rd party repositories.
Pardon my attitude. People who ask questions get answers. People who spout bullshit get shit in return.
The guy said he couldn't install binaries on a LiveEval CD. Said he played NetHack for two hours, and went back to Windows.
At what point did he ask for help? None. He told me (us) flat out that Linux wasn't ready for the desktop because - wait for it - he couldn't run software that wasn't included on the CD. I offered a contradictory example, the one I knew best.
Ball 1: Guy's on Slashdot. Says he's a subscriber. Looks for a compiler. Seems reasonable to assume that he knows what "pre-compiled binary" means. Let's call this point rather poor.
Ball 2: Well, OK. On the corner. Perhaps I allowed his obvious trolling to push my buttons. Nonetheless, he didn't ask for help. Therefore, he didn't get it. He made a wide, sweeping blanket statement which was rooted in his ignorance (not a pejorative, it's true) and very little fact. I got annoyed.
Ball 3: In the dirt. GAIM binaries are all over the place. Even for SuSE. No compiler needed. I could maybe agree with "SuSE LiveEval isn't ready for the desktop," but one distro missing a package he wants does not mean Linux isn't.
Ball 4: same as ball 2. He's not a potential user. He's much happier where he is. Fine. I insulted a doofus, by calling him a doofus. Not because he wants to run Windows, that's fine with me - but because he acted like a doofus.
Don't like my attitude? OK. What did YOU do to help the guy? Nothing. Because he doesn't want help, he wants to stir up those dirty Lunix hippies. Which he did. YHBT - and not by me.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
Eugh. The reviewer gets his hands on a distro with out of the box yum and apt support, and then has troubles because he's trying to build an application from unpackages source? He could have done a `yum install gaim' `apt-get install gaim' or `up2date -i gaim' and fetched all the right dependencies.
Or grabbed the source package and rebuilt it with his customizations.
"Now think what a newbie user coming from Windows-land would think about this whole --literally-- usability fiasco."
They wouldn't think anything, cause they wouldn't compile their software, much less do it in the same half assed way the reviewer did. They might complain that yum needs a good GUI frontend through, or up2date needs a better one. Which would be fair, as opposed to this review.
They'd also read the documentation that comes with VMWare and realize that VMWare's Samba server can indeed interfere with an existing Samba server. That isn't a Fedora problem, its a `I didn't real the VMWare documentation'.
There's packages of every multimedia app available at the FreshRPMs repository network. We don't need his xxms-mp3, we especially don't need it as an unpackaged tarball.
He has some valid points: the OSS driver for those yamaha sound cards does indeed suck. ALSA is a much better idea and its time Fedora / Red Hat included it by default. Packages are available on Freshrpms though.
Mike
Uh, yeah. It is. Busted. Good call. Somebody tell Alanis.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
What fedora is anyway.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
I don't understand why slowly redhat is being badmouthed, slowly at first but there is an increasing amount of news pointing to redhat being not suitable for Linux users because now it is not completely 'free'. One by one articles are coming out pointing out the above and turning people away from RH. Now, instead of being critical some of the article to actually doing something about the things written, the author has done their part but others might follow suit!
You always point your finger at the bad guy, but what if the bad guy points his finger at you?
**, and modern dependency resolvers/downloaders/installers like apt-get **
modern?? apt is so 1995
works great tho.
umm RH9 is intended to be a desktop distro, that means made for a linux newbie.
>>>>>>>>>>
No it doesn't. RedHat, generally is meant for the corporate desktop. That means that a professional IT staff is on hand to maintain the computer. The end-user doesn't need to do anything with it.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Look, this is just one troll feeding off another troll's (OSNews') hot air. Have Fedora on my laptop (only PC I could spare) and it's a 3150H Averatec, at that! Conclusion?
;-) and no dependencies to worry about. My Canon A70 just worked right out of the chute through USB, etc.
Fedora just rocks!
Here's a hint for newbs: Install EVERYTHING. Yes, I know, it's over 5Gb, but who cares, these days? You will not have anything missing
Next step, go get Synaptic
Frankly I have great hopes for Fedora. I had a growing number of misgivings about RedHat and their current direction; I think freeing up a group that's more geek-oriented and less PHB-oriented is the right move.
I find that FC1 is not yet ready for the masses, but I arrive at that conclusion from a different angle than Eugenia Loli-Queru's--I'm using nothing on the system but what was supplied to me on the FC1 discs. I have no interest in doing things I can't do with non-free software (and a lot of things I can do with free software don't interest me either). I don't care about Flash or Java, and I'd rather play Ogg Vorbis files/webcasts than MP3s. I'm testing this on a 840.015MHz Pentium III (according to /proc/cpuinfo) with 768MB RAM.
Unfortunately, FC1 is still not something I can fully recommend to my friends who aren't so technical. I don't think it was a good idea to release the OS with the Add/Remove Software panel program not working and the RPM database being flaky. I keep bumping into problems with these two aspects of the system when I try to fix something in a way that can be easily removed or upgraded via RPM.
Some things I wished were a part of the default install for a workstation user include an OCR program (GOCR, for instance). I think OCR support is important and I'm not wedded to any particular OCR program, but GOCR (or JOCR) seems to be compatibly licensed and offer easy-to-use CLI access. With more users and more programmers, GOCR will become a better program for OCRing. The Add/Remove Software panel problem and the RPM database problem Loli-Queru mentioned make installing additional packages more difficult than they should be.
Other parts of FC1 I find mildly annoying, but not showstoppers: the up2date registration screen seems pointless to me now that it appears you don't need to register to get FC1 updates from the default location. I'm not sure why I was asked to supply an extant RHN ID or create a new one. To the uninitiated user, this could come off as peculiar to the point of wondering if their system is legitimate (at least until they see that updates are available to them). Focusing unfocused windows by clicking on their titlebar seems to make the window stick the mouse (and the cursor turn to the plus pointer). This was unexpected and not pleasant; because of this behavior I inadvertantly move windows a lot.
Unlike Loli-Queru, I would not have expected other packages to work seamlessly with FC1 out of the box (as Loli-Queru expected Flash to work). I figure those packages will come along as more people use the system.
One thing that could make bug reporting easier is if there were simpler categories in which to report errors. Novices are unlikely to know that something odd on the display (like the visual noise I get when moving windows around) is an XFree86 issue as opposed to a Linux kernal issue or a GNOME issue. To get helpful commentary from users, I think it would help to not have to know all the layers of a typical GNU/Linux installation. But this means more people crawling through bug databases reassigning bugs to the proper place. I'm not sure how to best handle the problem, but I think making bug database entry simpler and easier to do ad hoc is a step in the right direction.
Overall, it's an interesting system and I plan to give FC some more tries before I decide to go with another distribution. I'll continue to use RH9 or Debian as my day-to-day GNU/Linux distribution until FC3 or FC4 is out.
Happy hacking.
Digital Citizen
scripsit iggymanz:
Gnome 2.4 hit Debian on 14 October. The timestamps on the 2.4.0 sources at ftp.gnome.org are 10 September. I wouldn't call that particularly pokey, particularly for ten or so architectures. Hell, if I were rolling my own on my old desktop I'd still be waiting for it to compile... ;)
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
I ignored the run-ons, commas, and fragments as standard for /. posting. The bizarre mixed metaphors in both
posts are a giveaway though.
Debian makes installing almost entirely painless - you just type "apt-get install packagename"
"up2date packagename" is probably to hard to figure out? It does just that. And the list of possible packages is not limited anyway by redhat network or the likes, as up2date is using apt-get in the background in fedora.
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
Actually. We don't care why you don't want to switch, just like you don't care why it works for us. That's just great, isn't it? Now go away.
I have been waiting on the same grub/boot/raid bug since redhat 7.1 (IIRC) and it is STILL in redhat 9... I haven't checked Fedora, and to be honest I can't be bothered.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
setup pptpd tunneling, mppe support, PDC, modules vs. kernels, SCSI?
.exe file and expect it to install. Most MS users would be lost if MS popped up a window saying "cant install you need to have this version of gcc"
Thinking strictly as a desktop user and not one that understands the difference between modules and kernels etc. I would be very confused by your post.
Most MS desktop users would have no idea what you are talking about. They want to surf the web, IM, get email, file and print....
They do not know that you could do all of the things you can do and if you showed them their brains would start to overload.
IMO the avg home user wants something that works out of the box, they want to be able to click on an
That of course opens all sorts of security issues that in my experience most home users are just clueless about. "My friend sent me this email he would not infect me like that" for example.
While I feel any *nix is a more robust/secure product then anything MS has put out. I still don't see it ready for the avg home joe.
I for one think Red Hat made a great move by focusing on the server side. IMO that is where Linux is best suited at this time.
I also hope and wish another distro will come along and focus on the desktop side to make things "easy" for the avg person.
Until there is a version of "Linux server" (more complex but more powerful) for the admins and a version of "Linux home" (less complex less powerful) for the end users, I do not think any distro of Linux will ever make it to the desktop in large enough numbers to take on MS despite all of the advantages it provides.
"We don't care why you don't want to switch,"
Bullshit. You guys always make a BFD about some organization switching to Linux, you also complain when Gov'ts choose Windows.
"just like you don't care why it works for us."
Bullshit again. Why would I even give Linux a go in the first place if I wasn't attracted to the benefits ya'all babble on about? It's not because I want to be part of the cool club here at Slashdot.
"That's just great, isn't it? Now go away. "
I will not. I want Linux to be better. I'd like to get away from Microsoft if I can safely make the change. But if the problems that people complain about (i.e. needing updated libraries for newer software) aren't addressed by the community, then how can Linux expand it's userbase?
You can't have it both ways. You can't have a niche little-known OS and then turn around and say "Why are they even using Windows anyway?"
"Derp de derp."
Thank you.
If Fedora was merely the first release of a (forked) RedHat spinoff distribution with no direct connection to Red Hat whatsoever then Fedora would be considered quite a good version 1.
Instead, Red Hat cannot shake its badge from Fedora, so high expectations are given for (what the layman would term) the "New Rad Hat Distro". High expectations lead to disappointment, and so Red Hat is blamed (directly or indirectly) for Fedora's many flaws (of various degree) found in version 1.
Who is it really up to maintain a distribution which is set to take a large portion of the desktop market? Who should bring up Red Hat's baby?
The reason you don't want to switch is the attitude of others? Or is it you who doesn't want to break from a comfort zone that you have with your current OS....
:wq
I am surprised that Windows people don't find this simply amazing. Seriously. Lets say you were running umm.. Win98 or W2k .. and you want to try out WinXP on your computer.. There is no LiveEval version .. so you have to backup everything in your previous setup, install a copy of the new OS, sit through atleast an hour long OS install (if not longer) + download and find all of the apps to finish out the install (easily another hour if you have done it before) just to try it out..
Actually there is WinPE - but that's none to easy to get hold of at the moment.
troll
Fedora might be nice if I could actually install it. The install fails on some package or another every time for me.
So far very happy with Core 1 (yarrow) release. I'm still a die hard Slackware user, but after using Fedora and Mandrake (mostly for fun and as gaming boxes) I'm impressed with Fedora and it's out of the "ISO" setup.
It's a shame, but remember that this is effectively a n.0 distribution, which are generally not the most stable of releases. Does no-one else remember Mandrake 9.0? More than that, given how drastically the development model has changed between Red Hat's last offering and Fedora this may as well be a 1.0 release, and we all know how stable they are...
;-))
Give the developers and community a bit of time to settle in to the new development model and work out the problems and I'm sure it'll be no worse than any other distribution. (But no better than debian
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
> I am surprised that Windows people don't find this simply amazing
You could do this on Macs like 15 years ago. Who cares. It's not rocket science.
> and you want to try out WinXP on your computer..
Microsoft makes 99% of their money off OEM sales. I suspect that selling end users on upgrades isn't worth the bother. Besides it's wouldn't tell you if YOUR apps run any better.
On the subject of filesystem "standards": Mandrake has always followed the RedHat "lump-everything-under-/usr" "standard" :).
On the RPM issue, I meant third-party, NOT system RPMs. RedHat's system rpms don't really work because it seems Mandrake has gone to a much saner Debian-style naming system for their packages, which basically makes urpmi (an apt equivalent) work better. Besides that, they are different distributions: you can't really expect many system-level rpms to be interchangeable. Any third party RPMs I've tried for Mandrake work (this includes things like Mozilla binaries, Sun's Java, codeweavers wine (long ago), and some other things I can't recall). I'm sure there are third-party rpms out there that don't work, too; but I haven't found any that don't also have source packages.
You say I'd have a lot more trouble finding an apt repository? That doesn't really matter; Mandrake comes with urpmi and their own large repository; which works just as well (or better; it's officially supported!). There are also other URPMI sources for Mandrake that provide anything else you'd probably want, this site will help you configure them easily, and pclinuxonline.com has a list of around 6 of them. No need to use apt, it's got urpmi!
As for docs, I haven't used them extensively but what I have had to use seemed up-to-date (though honestly I can't really make an informed opinion about this). I have always found the configuration panel to present a useful amount of options; it would be overkill to go much further than they did (and in some cases I think it could be simplified).
As for hardware detection, what exactly didn't it detect for you? (This is an honest question). Anyone I have heard talk about it says it has great detection, and indeed it worked perfectly on both my desktop and laptop.
I have used RedHat on and off between Mandrake (RedHat used to be my distro of choice). RedHat always seemed to be a little behind in terms of its software selection and user-friendliness (which was why I switched in the end). What was the latest version of Mandrake you have tried?
As a final PS: You seem to be getting pretty worked up over this. Did Mandrake do something to you? Relax, really; it's just a distribution :)
I resemble that remark, and I resent it, since I shower daily! I just don't give a fuck about corporate dress codes and the barbaric shaving ritual! Have a nice day, A CLEAN Linux Hippy! ( and old enough to be a real hippy) DOB 05/20/51
"The reason you don't want to switch is the attitude of others? Or is it you who doesn't want to break from a comfort zone that you have with your current OS.... "
A little bit of both, actually. Part of the problem is that the transition from Windows to Linux is a rough one, and community assistance would be needed. If people are going to act like the problems don't exist, then how do I know I won't be left hanging? Secondly, part of the interest of Linux is "what new stuff will appear tomorrow?" Well, if the community doesn't see the point in supporting 'babies' or 'newbs', then how much of a future can it really have?
Yes, I am comfortable with my OS. It works for me. I don't have stability problems. All my hardware works, and I can go out, buy new hardware and know it works. Software and games are both quite abundant. Windows 2000 has it's drawbacks, nobody's arguing that. However, I would lose some stuff if I went to Linux. The question is, would it be worth it. If all it does is get me into a fight with zealots who expect more of me than they really should, then no it's not worth it at all.
"Derp de derp."
I downloaded the Fedora ISOs two days ago; I though "well, my company is evaluating buying RedHat ES for their servers and maybe I can still use Fedora on my personal computer or my laptop, so I can see what is comming" so I gave it a shot.
;)
Here is what I found:
First the good things:
- The installer is much better and gives you the option to upgrade from RedHat 9 to fedora.
- The Video configuration is much more responsive. It got some problems with my NVidia drivers, but it managed to start again without much effort (though the acelerated drivers were deactivaded).
- The OS is much responsive. The Java apps ran faster and i was able to run more things at the same time using the same equipment (Its an old 800Mhz 512MB of ram Dell desktop machine).
Now the bad things:
- I had to reinstall the OS without upgrading; Upgrading broke my printer support (though it got fixed after the reinstall). Also my old GNOME desktop configuration broke. If you can, install from scratch (I have my home directory on a different partition so it wasn't that bad).
- GCVS doesn't work with Fedora. There is a nasty compilation error that prevents it from compile.
- Mozilla is pretty unstable. It crashed today at least four times.
- Firewall builder has some compilation problems.
Luckily I'm the type of user that doesn't need the RedHat support for trivial problems, so their support is not appealing to me (I can survive buyin the WS edition for $179). But now with RedHat saying that they will not support RedHat on the desktop (use Microsoft Windows they say) makes me wonder how good will be WS for application development without an appropiate desktop support (how good or bad the GUI support like GNOME or KDE will be there?).
I'm used to browse the web, chat and read email from Linux; At my work I don't use Windows at all (got OpenOffice, evolution, Jedit and Vi to do all the stuff I require). It is sad to install a Windows license to later log on your Linux server to do development or to administer it.
Don't get me wrong here; I've been a supporter of RedHat in the past (bought their CDs, become a RedHat Certified Engineer), but what incentive I have to report bugs / contribute code / support a 'beta' distribution like Fedora if I'm not going to receive security updates (they state that kind of support is not guaranteed and if the broken app doesn't get a patch then it is removed from the distro).
RedHat needs to come with more information about WS on the desktop, a better support structure for Fedora (security patches, quality control) or their user base will probably move to another distro (why support two flavors of Linux, lets say RedHat and Suse / Debian when they offer support for the desktop and the server).
I wish Mac OS X boxes were cheaper, probably that's an option to consider
Jose Vicente Nunez Zuleta RHCE, SJCD, SJCP
http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/
Can't get 'em all. Noted for future reference.
The actually veracity of the review notwithstanding - did the Slashdot editor actually read the article?
Slashdot editors routinely branch Microsoft corrupt because they always twist and spin things that are negative towards Microsoft... yet Slashdot does the exact same when something gets reported that make Linux look bad.
How can you say that the reviewer was "mildly" disappointed with Fedora? They obviously did not like it because they said there is no way they would use it on their own system!
Slashdot: take the high road and report EVERYTHING unbiased, and that means BOTH the good and bad articles on Linux. If you are going to lambaste Microsoft for spinning, they why are you engaged in the exact same practices???
Talk about hypocritical.
From the article:
.71 to .72, or mp3 or video playback, or getting "Flash" to work in our browsers.
For the rest of us whose time is money, we will keep using Mac OS X or Windows XP
For those of us whose time really is money, we don't spend time worrying about upgrading Gaim from
I'm not a troll, I have legitimate concerns. I didn't just boot up for two hours into a LiveEval, I downloaded and tried SIX DIFFERENT DISTROS on my other box.
.tar.gz precompiled which wouldn't install and I don't even remember the problem with gAIM. I'm pretty sure it was the gcc missing though. I also installed OpenOffice 1.0.1 (Had the CD lying around). It didn't install correctly. Everytime I loaded it up and told it I was registered already, it crashed. Finally, frustrated, I installed Win2k and went back to working on my box. The SuSE story mentioned previously was on my good box, running WinXP.
These included:
Gentoo Linux. I couldn't get it setup because of some errors in install.
Debian Linux. The install didn't detect my video card (It's an Intel810 integrated).
Slackware Linux. It installed fine, but startx wouldn't load XWindows (I'm pretty sure because my card wasn't detected)
SuSE. LiveEval version, worked perfectly except for the aforementioned problems
Mandrake 7.0. I had this lying around. Did not detect my video card.
RedHat 7.2. I also had this lying around. Was the only distro to actually get through the install and work.
So RedHat is installed on my dad's box that I was reformatting to install Win2k on later in the day. Good, right? It didn't detect my networking settings, and DHCP didn't work. I couldn't get online, and needless to say, a computer without the internet is as useful as a toaster.
Next, I installed SuSE. It detected my ethernet and DHCP worked fine. Everything ran like a charm. I tried for the longest time to get either gAIM or aim.com's linux version running. AIM.com offered a
I'm not a computer newbie. I code C. I code java. I code PHP. I code VB. I know how stuff works and why it works. I have Windows memorized like the back of my hand, probably better. Linux should NOT have been a difficult task, but it was. I wanted to use Linux so I could say I knew how, that was my only motivation. I finally realized that it just wasn't worth that.
Yes, it is true that you do lose some functionality with the switch to linux. Gaming is a big one for me. This is why I dual boot.... Well there are a few other reasons I do this. As for the hardware issue, though not a totally diminished problem, it is a fading one (well, I'll just ignore the laptop issues). My big reason for using Linux is the knowledge I've gained in doing so. With Windows, about as far into the system you can get is the registry. Learning how to set up and properly configure the servers already incorporated into Linux was a huge (and fun) learning experience. Getting in and changing configurations in files, while at first scary, is actually something I look forward to. I never had to argue, either. I did use the hell out of several message boards and google. Anyways, the point is that I think by using Linux it is a great learning experience. I'm using FC1 as my main desktop right now, even though I do need windows for some work related issues. Well, I need it for using Macromedia Fireworks and Dreamweaver too.
:wq
...you are a pathetic cunt-bag. go fist your mom.
I think her husband is impotent or something. A good ride would get her senses back. She acts like a 30 years old one that never had a sexual relationship before.
Wasn't Fedora supposed to be kind of the next release of RedHat that wasn't a release of RedHat? If that, it should have at least the stability of RedHat Shrike, shouldn't it?
Corporate mysteries never cease to amaze me.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
From the article;
I believe that Fedora's installer is both easy to use and powerful and succeeds in satisfying both power and casual users
I tried the installation, and was extremely disappointed to find that you couldn't individually select packages - only 'groups'.
Even when I unselected some 'groups', packages from that group still found their way into the installation.
I then installed RedHat Enterprise3 ES, only to find you can no longer individually select packages in this version either!
redhat comes with an 'add/remove applications' gui... i would like to see the sytem not rely on having a cd present, but rather use rpms and download them online... It is a very attractice program, with nice categories for different apps, and i would like to see it extended.
nt
up2date AFIK does not allow you to install new packages or upgrade old ones past major versions. Also, I'm pretty sure that it doesn't do very good dependency checking.
$45 per U Colocation Special
Man, you are one those MSFT weenies that wouldn't know how to handle the controls of a real computer deployment if he had to save his life doing it. You also never just shut the fuck up. Your continued, hackneyed repetitive use of the word "Bullshit" all the time means you are practically incapable of critical thinking and can convince yourself you are right at anytime it proves convenient. Nice.
If you're interested in Linux, my advice would be to set up a second computer for Linux. You could either remote access it, use a KVM, or use something like Synergy to access it.
If you setup dual boot and just try to completely switch over, it probably won't happen too easilly. You may find it a pain to have to keep rebooting just to use Linux.
Though I've used UNIX/Linux intermittently for about 8 or 9 years, Windows has been my primary OS for most of that time. This didn't change until about a year ago. First thing I did was assemble a brand new PC that was a little better than the hardware in my Win2k PC, but pretty much equal. I installed Debian by using Libranet.
With two sets of monitor/keyboard/mouse, and one monitor smaller than the other, it was a pain, and I was always swapping monitor cables and moving around keyboards. So I spent the money and got a nice 4-port KVM. It was worth the $130 I paid for it, it has made my PC setup so much more friendlier, and has made it possible to switch most of my tasks over to Linux.
I'm not 100% Linux, but I don't see what the problem is with using both Linux and Windows. Linux I use for most of my tasks: any kind of internet-related task (browsing/e-mail/IM/file transfer/etc), coding/hacking, servers, documents of all kinds, etc.
Windows I use for various multimedia purposes. Audio recording, listening to music, watching video/movies, burning CD's, watching TV. I pretty much use my Windows PC like an appliance. Sure, I could do most of this in Linux (though not audio recording, at least not yet), but I haven't had the time to figure all that out, and I don't want to move all the hardware out of that machine. I find all the multimedia stuff in Linux to be buggy, incomplete, or just a huge ordeal to setup. Yes, I'm aware of XMMS, mplayer, Audacity, gatos, etc. Yes, I know where to get debs for mplayer, but these didn't magically make everything work, there are still a lot of video files that won't play. I'm going to have to do more research to figure all this out.
Win2k is a KVM button-press away for me, but I actually find myself using Linux most of the time. I could easilly replace my Windows machine with a Mac running OS X. In fact, once I've got some money to burn, I'll buy a Mac (probably next year sometime). I'll still keep Win2k around, even if I do this.
Why limit myself to one OS? I like to have it all. Thanks for listening to my ramblings. Good luck using whatever operating systems you use.
I don't think anyone wants to use Linux as a desktop. That might be the prevailing line of shit on Slashdot, but not in real life.
Linux is not UNIX, nor is it a sufficient substitute. That being said, Windows 2000/2003 isn't a sufficient substitute, either. There is no way a Fortune 500-sized company is going to put its ass on the line running Windows 2000/2003. Certain PHBs may have forced a token server here and there and probably forced the Ops/MIS guys to provide Exchange, but no one does the real work on that platform. Retards point to web pages being served by IIS, but I'm thinking the storage and backend has almost no probability of being on a Windows box in a big shop.
Coming here and musing about switching is idiotic because switching is not possible. A Myriad of operating environments have arisen to solve a large number of different problems. As far as I can tell, Linux exists so that people can pretend they got a real UNIX out of the deal and didn't have to pay a cent.
It all comes down to just use what you like, and don't talk about it. Technical and financial decisions are best made without an opinion. Don't ask, don't tell. You seem to be on some sort of Win32 jihad because you like it to do something in particular. No one cares. No one really thinks Linux is going to be better relative to the old commercial UNIX versions on big iron. But people will try and capitalize on this ridiculous notion Linux can be everything to everyone.
This lobbying and zealotry is really just a blip, a social disease. As this stuff continues to be commoditized we'll see less and less of it. No one rants and raves about which brand of fork people should be using to eat or are appalled at the use chop sticks.
You're getting better. Kudos. Still a long ways to go until you're actually any good at trolling.
"Derp de derp."
Red Hat Linux 9 = Halted XI (9), run!
That's an interesting idea, thank you. Just saw a KVM for like $40 the other day, and I have a spare PC floating around...
:)
Hmm.. Ya know, I may do exactly that.
Again, thank you.
"Derp de derp."
Honestly, off-topic or no, and sarcasm aside, I think that's one of the bigger problems with getting Linux to the desktop user: people like the fellow in the grandparent post, riding their high horses in ivory towers.
Honestly, off-topic or no, and sarcasm aside, I think that's one of the bigger problems with getting computers to the average joe: people like the fellow in the great grandparent post, riding their high horses in ivory towers.
Again, thank you. :)
:)
Again, Fuck You.
A 'desktop system' is more than the sum of it's parts - its the hardware, all the fiddly hardware settings and choices, the quality of the power supply, cooling, RAM selection, noise emmision, the operating system, layers of software libs, application software, supplied documentation, vendor support, and finally, the tip-of-the-iceberg persentation layer for the actual user.
Its no wonder Joe Avg has a hard time, and its plainly a miracle that Joe Avg can build this himself in the first place. It would be equivalent to Joe Avg buying a bunch of bits and peices and building himself a new car, in the spare room, all in the space of a weekend.
I think what you are saying is that Joe Avg should be able to go down to the local computer store, and buy a complete 'Linux Desktop' system that is guaranteed to work, and is supported by the vendor. In a way, this is what Apple have done with the Unix based Mac, but there are more and more computer vendors going down this path.
Fedora Core is a good attempt at providing a base operating system that can then be quickly customised as a server or desktop system - if you know what you are doing. Its a quick, easy, and painless install but still pretty Lowest-Common-Demoninator. Fedora/RedHat is not aimed at the home user - its aimed at system builders who want a nice generic base to start from,
I have a couple of servers running production FC1, and there are NO problems. I suspect that the reviewer got an incomplete ISO download, or failed to verify the CD / checksum.
If you want a "LinuxHome" edition - Have a look at ArkLinux, its an early release, but is exactly what you are asking for.
For a more business oriented desktop - OfficeOptimizedLinux (www.sol-linux.com) produces a great 1-CD distribution that quickly turns a peice of raw metal into a linux based WordProcessor/Email/IM/Spreadsheet/DivX player.
Anyway, let me pitch you a question
If there was a commercial website that offered a Linux machine that was
Would you buy one ?
"You want help? Ask me for help. Telling me that it doesn't work based on a CD that doesn't include it is not asking for help."
You are absolutely right. He should have presented himself better. That doesn't mean you couldn't have been more polite. Basically, you risked baiting him into an argument trying to deny a problem that he's witnessing doesn't exist. See my point?
"Derp de derp."
It's true that OSNews publishes a lot of reviews that are short and not very in-depth. As another person mentioned it's mostly due to the fact that people want to read about what's new, and so that means reviews need to be written in one or two days, tops. Also, when the reviews are written by volunteers, as they all are, they won't all be masterpieces of literature. So why don't you write your own review. OSNews has a liberal submission policy. Go to the site, click on "Submit News" and send us a review, editorial, or newsbit. We'd love to publish it.
David Adams
Publisher, OSNews
...which seems more likely, given the tone of your posts.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I've been using Linux since 1997... nothing you've said rings true to anything I've experienced. Whether large-scale research computers or massive high-availability servers in critical business infrastructure, Linux is there today, right now in fact.
I'll buy that Linux is not a dominant player on the desktop, but the idea that Linux isn't kicking in heads in the server environment just doesn't hold up. The only hardware on which Linux doesn't have a solid edge is speciality kit like high-end Sun and IBM equipment which really is not representative of the general market anyway. What's more, IBM is closing that gap on their equipment right now.
I contend that for large businesses, migration costs and support are the real limiting factors in switching to Linux. It's certainly not for technical reasons. Solaris and AIX have some features that do not appear in Linux, but generally, they are there to support the hardware. Since commodity hardware is cheap, people have been selling off their over-priced kit, dropping their expensive, recurring service contracts, and lowering their overall TCO. Need examples? Check Redhat, Suse, and IBM's press releases.
Anybody paying for a Posix-compliant operating system nowadays is wasting their money. They should be spending it on support contracts since that's what they really need - assurance.
-Hope
Bullshit.
See my point?
No.
did the Slashdot editor actually read the article?
How can you say that the reviewer was "mildly" disappointed with Fedora?
That's funny.. the actual title of the article in question on OSNews is.. "Fedora Core 1 is a Mild Disappointment".
Did you actually read the article?
Knoppix: Debian for wusses. I hard-disk installed it on my Thinkpad 600E and it might be a little rough around the edges, but mostly It Just Works(tm). knx-hdinstall in the Root Shell. Just do it. I am torn now between my liking for Mandrake 9.x and this new reality of apt-get as my software genie. There's much I need to tune on here, but this is going to force me to LEARN LINUX rather than just be crying to my guru buddies in Santa Barbara. Mandrake with its plug-and-play simplicity spoiled me. I still would advise Mandrake for the absolute n00b, but when it's time to take off the training wheels this is the way to go.
Knoppix rocks. If you can boot the live Knoppix filesystem with the disk, you can install Debian and be happy.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
up2date will install new software just fine. As far as upgrading old software over major version hurdles, I have no idea. It's never been an issue, so I doubt it's a problem. Counter-examples would be helpful. The dependency checking is spot-on. You can install gimp, and the entire Gnome and X subsystems using 'up2date gimp'. It fetches all the packages and installs them, just like apt-get. The real trick is determining the package names, something that rpmfind and google are useful for. dselect is handy for debs, but I prefer Synaptic anyway.
Let's see.. in this article, she says:
Red Hat's Linux is still one of my favorite distributions because of one main reason: compatibility with Linux software.
But less than two months ago, in an earlier OSNews article, she said:
Slackware is my new favorite operating system along with FreeBSD, Windows Server 2003 and Mac OS X.
Hmm, no Red Hat in sight. And she even said:
I have tried more than 10+ different Linux distributions in the past 4 years but I never stuck with any. Red Hat/Mandrake/SuSE are too bloated and slow with complex internal structures (however Red Hat evolves faster of the three).
Wow, when's she going to make up her mind?
My own personal gripe/opinion is that this has always been about the desktop, not the server. That having it be a great, enterprise class server OS was just gravy on its way to being a killer desktop. My personal fantasy was that the server income would finance desktop development because that was really ground zero in the war for hearts and minds. I thought Redhat understood this. I was wrong about Redhat, but I think Redhat has made a big mistake with so much apparent emphasis on the enterprise.
-- IV
http://www.LinuxMedNews.com Revolutionizing Medical Education and Practice.
The other problem with that thing is that it doesn't tell you which CDs you'll need in advance. It was nice of them to add this feature to the install when you are selecting packages, but it would be better if it was also shown here. Reason being, it will install the local RPMS first, and then if you don't have the CDs, you wind up in a somewhat annoying position.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
A CEO which tells its audience RedHat Linux or Fedora is not viable for the PC desktop should be fired in a splitsecond. The fact he's still there is even worse.
Oh sure, Skulicz has to tell some nice things to his investors. The thing that scares me the most is that apparently a large chunk from RedHat's Investors Cash must be coming from people who want Windows on the desktop PC's. I really wonder who these investors might be.
The only conclusion i can come up with, after reading this : Microsoft Loses to Linux in Thailand Struggle is that certain people want to prevent at all costs that a normal priced Linux Desktop Distro, of decent quality, hits the stores for say $50,= to $90,= , which includes the current KillerApp for Linux : OpenOffice 1.1
Robert
Well, rather Gnome crashes all the time. I partly agree with Linux not being ready for desktops. It's not usable enough for the masses. It is for me, anyhow. Yesterday for instance I was drawin an induction motor in QCad.
Eugenia doesn't know jack, or Linux for that matter either. Fedora Core 1 is easily (and I really do mean easily) the best Linux distro I've ever used on the desktop. I've switched both my home and work PC's to it and have had exactly 0 (that's zero) problems with it. The install went faster than any other Linux install I've ever done. It boots slightly faster than RH9, and it's got all kinds of eye candy. Not to mention all of the latest stuff. The only gripe I have, and it's not a big one is that it didn't have wine installed by default (I had to compile it myself), which I need so I can run Lotus Notes at work. I give FC1 six big thumbs up (I figured that since it's installed on three of my machines I'd get an extra set of hands for each machine).
They often didn't read it too. I filed a bug and a workaround as well. Then the RH guy gave me the same workaround, but in other words!
Then I think: look if you only send a mail and be done with it, discourage bug reporting in the first place.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
It's Eugenia Lilo-Query.
Oh no!
I dont know what that guy was smoking but please let me have some.
;-)
Dude...It was a woman doing the review... that was the problem
> Here's a hint, if you're the kind of .71 to .72 right after you
> person that worries about moving from
> gaim
> install your distribution, then Fedora
> probably is not for you. Or you could
> wait until updated RPMs hit the
> official repositories instead of
> grabbing Joe Bob's RPM build and
> wondering why your installation
> exploded.
Just run Windows, and your installation won't explode when you install third party software.
Somehow I really doubt that. Sure maybe a few people you know have switched to Debian but your assertion that the "community" has shifted to Debian is laughable. I've been seeing plenty of FUD from Debian users these days since Fedora came out. Lots of talk about how every should jump ship and support Debian. Lots of fake posts about people saying "screw Red Hat I'm moving to Debian!". All very touching, and all overblown.
"I think the reality of the situation is that the strength of the community isn't in RedHat any longer"
So your saying suddenly in the last month the distro with the largest number of users have all switched elsewhere? Doubtful. Red Hat and now Fedora will continue to be the de-facto leader in Linux for quite some time. Sorry to disappoint you.
It will be nice when all of the FUD dies down.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Ironically, a Linux installation takes longer than a Windows installation. All of my Windows installations since Windows 98 SE, done with custom setup, have finished in thirty minutes or less. Of course, this does *not* count applying patches.
I agree that the "no apps installed, I got bored and left" excuse was just that. Windows doesn't come with much more without going out and downloading something. However, I would like to say that my most recent experience with Yellow Dog Linux for the Mac (no, not Fedora, but I'm talking about Linux vs. Windows), was an altogether pleasant one.
The only thing that sucked was its inability to detect my monitor or video card correctly, despite the fact that they were both very standard (a Sharp LCD and an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro.) I was able to manually do so, but I'm not the norm. This kind of slip-up will kill it for the average user, which is why Linux people need to get on the ball and fix that sort of thing if they really want to see switchers sticking around.
If, on the other hand, you really don't care if people view Linux as the system of choice or not, then feel free to mock them for the fact that they're put off by basic things not working correctly. After all, not working right straight out of the box is a sure sign of a superior OS, right?
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Red Hat (Fedora Core) has just released the first security update for FC1.
n ux /core/updates/1/i386/
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/li
The update is for epic.
Yes, Red Hat (Fedora Core) will be providing security updates as they always have. It's the same as it was for RHL.
It seemed to me when she started complaining about it detecting the wrong IP (not sure why she wanted it to detect the that she hasn't tried the system running on a 'naked cpu' and was instead using VMWare to test it.
;])
Samba 3 still doesn't work for me via Konqueror
or Nautilus (smb-client command line tool kind
of works better), because it insists on
connecting on my VMWare's virtual IP address
of 10.0.0.19 instead of my XP's real 10.0.0.10
IP on my home network (even when I do
"smb://10.0.0.10").
Not mentioning what type of network adapter in vmware she was using, at a guess it could be related to NAT somewhere doing something. (Vague enough?
And when she mentioned the non-responsiveness and audio problems that seemed to point to her running it inside VMWare too. Emulating a sound card takes resources, and the documentation with vmware mentions that there can under some situations be problems with the quality.
But earlier she mentioned it detected her graphics card and monitor fine.
This doesn't happen (at least for me) with a GeForce4/something or other, and Generic Plug and Play monitor... something to do with vmware using a virtual card. (maybe she wasn't using vmware?)
Then it says 'There is not a chance that I would use Fedora as my main OS at this point.' Ok... does that mean she installed it on a separate machine to your normal one, or she was using vmware?
My point?
If you are going to write a review of an operating system, it is helpful to give an overview of the hardware you are testing it on, and if you are testing it under VMWare (or in conjunction with VMWare) specify that, along with the configuration you used.
VMWare doesn't (at least with the last version I have seen, so I may be wrong) have any video accelleration support, which, for some strange reason, may make programs seem less responsive...
It can make a huge difference running an OS under it.
ps:
If you are running Windows, hosting a VMWare client OS and have trouble with poor quality multimedia in linux, you might want to consider running the multimedia stuff in the host?
If you are running linux hosting a VMWare client OS and are having trouble with multimedia in linux, why are you trying to do that?! Run it in the host!
VMWare is a useful tool, but if definately wasn't designed for multimedia stuff.
They're new -and looking to add mirrors.
They seem to be focused on testing and integration - with caveats and solutions for problem dependancies.
You're running Debian stable, because you prefer the stable Debian tree. It runs great, there is just one problem: the software is a little bit outdated compared to other distributions. That's where backports come in. Backports are recompiled packages from testing and unstable, so they will run without new libraries (wherever it's possible) on a stable Debian distribution.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The parent poster sounds a lot like a friend of mine who moved out-of-state. He would frequently get fed up with Windows, install Linux, bork it up then reformat and switch back to windows. Lather, rinse, repeat. Sure, he had experience in Windows because he knew how to point and click his way around. He didn't like reading docs and thought he could just wing his way through Linux like he could in Windows.
He claimed he was trying to learn Linux for much the same reason as the parent poster, so he could say he was familiar with it. To borrow and modify a line from Mortal Kombat, "That cannot be your only reason for installing Linux, or you will FAIL!" Linux is fundamentally different than Windows. I ran into the same annoyances when I first tried Macs. "This is different than Windows, therefore it sucks."
Whether you're learning a new OS or a new platform, you have to realize it may work a lot different than what you're familiar with and you'll probably have to RTFM a lot. There's plenty of documentation for Linux and if you're genuinely interested, you can learn all about it. If that requires too much of an investment of your time, just accept the fact that you can't be a master of everything. I don't know much about gardening, myself. I'm not about to think I can tell people I've got a green thumb because I dug a hole and dropped in a shrub.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Just the other day I installed redhat 9 on my system, then apt-get and did a dist-upgrade. It worked flawlessly. The gnome interface is now quite solid. It Just Works. The keyredbinding is easy and works. It's swift on my reasonably modest laptop. Admittedly I haven't tried samba yet, but I had no problems creating the symblink to get java working in the web browser.
Believe with me, my saplings.
I am no american
I'm an idiot. I admit that now. I'm not a Linux expert.
Yet I got Fedora up and running on my machine without much trouble. Why, unlike the reviewer of this article, I actually READ the documentation.
I also have it running with the Linux-feared ATI 9800 pro. I have java running fine, same with flash.
I really don't know what the reviewers problem is, but I think she needs to read more and learn a little bit more about computers.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Specially because I only use Debian.
well i installed it today and it runs just fine on my setup. of course thers a lack of some packages right now but its like that with any brand new distro relese. like the lack of flash and java rpms in mozilla. im shure within a few weeks we will be flodded with packags. anyways mp3s played just fine using the mps packages for Fedora from freshrpms. but then again redhat not including mp3 isnt anything new no matter what they name there free distro lol. so i agree with the rest of you that reviewer had no clue what she was doing.
That's right! You and your george dubya are much to refined.
Bush, dick, and colon. Says alot...
F#ck the desktop... how does it run as a server.. that is all that matters to me.
#2. No menu editing. Again, it's a Gnome problem, and is due to be fixed in the next Gnome (2.6), I believe. Unfortunately I just read a mailing list posting indicating that they while they were fixing the menu architecture, they weren't all that concerned with providing editing capability. I'm not certain I understand what's going on here though, as I wish RH would just support the same menu-editing functionality found in Ximian Desktop 2. It's not great, but at least it's possible.
:)
Not very user friendly, but it works
Actually Gnome 2.4 does - just not very good. Point nautilus at applications:/// and voila After making changes, issue a killall gnome-panel to restart the panel and there are the changes
Just remember that the RedHat software is mostly still GPL'd. The vast majority of it is still freely copyable. As an "IT manager" (I don't like that title that because of all the legacy baggage, but it explains things well enough) of a firm running a heterogeneous environment dominated by Linux we are looking at going to AS/ES/WS. We'll likely buy a copy of WS to eval the desktops and compute farm systems. Then if all is well, we'll buy a copy of AS to handle the "server" functions. So far, I don't see that we need any of the RD propietary solutions badly enough to pay their insane (for us) per seat prices. So we'll pull those RPMs and roll the rest out.
Either that or use another distribution. 8^/
Uptime is key for us. And I'm happy to pay for uptime. But not at prices right out of MS's book.
No. Me either. You assume that his blanket statement that Linux isn't ready for the desktop was really a cleverly camouflaged cry for help. I don't buy it. I saw a troll.
You wanna yell at me for discouraging people who try Linux? Fine. I encourage that. But this wasn't it.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
I agree that hardware tends to be an issue for most people. It is not uncommon for someone to use a piece of hardware that is simply not supported or at best, not very well (My Canon printer & scanner are like that)
.. early 1997 I believe. I don't think it is very difficult to acknowledge that it is superior to Win95/Win3.11 given the fact that Microsoft is now using it as the basis of their current and future versions of Windows.
I believe the issue ends up being what "Linux people" are responsible for this? It seems like the manufacturers should be the ones ultimately responsible. If they can't afford (or are unwilling) to develop drivers in house, then it would be great if they would work with the community by providing specifications and other documentation to help.
It is possible to build a "Linux compatible" computer system. There are OEMs that are developing drivers, providing specifications and generally are good to the open source community.
After all, not working right straight out of the box is a sure sign of a superior OS, right?
Hehe.. I remember back when I original used NT 4.0
In anycase, hardware that ran just fine under Win95 would simply NOT work in WinNT. I was working at a company that wanted to migrate over for the security/stability and given the amount of hardware that wasn't supported, it was decided to do a slow migration (new systems and hardware compatible systems were NT and the remaining Win95 boxes were phased out).
My point? Just because an OEM does not write a driver for an OS does NOT mean it is either inferior or superior to an OS that the OEM wrote the driver for. Its this type of generalization ("oh it doesn't support XYZ card so the entire system must be inferior!") that really annoys me.
Fedora just doesn't feel as solid as RH9. Oh well whatdiyagunnado :) It is free after all.
#1. GTK/Gnome file selector *still* sucks. We all already knew that, and yes it's going to be fixed in the next GTK. But I wish RH had seen fit to do what the folks at Ximian did, and at least pretty up the existing one and make it somewhat usable. Those "Home" "Desktop" and "Documents" quick access buttons in the XD2 version make things much nicer.
/etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules
/etc/X11/desktop-menus/applications.menu applications.vfolder-info
Agreed. Someone will probably provide an extra rpm that does this at some point, but it'd be nice to have out-of-the-box.
I wish RH would just support the same menu-editing functionality found in Ximian Desktop 2. It's not great, but at least it's possible.
I'm not sure what kind of menu-editing functionality XD2 provides, but you can enable menu-ediding in RH/Fedora Nautilus with following steps:
cd
cp default-modules.conf default-modules.conf-no-menu-editing
cp default-modules.conf.with-menu-editing default-modules.conf
And perhaps this as well for invidual users:
cd ~/.gnome2/vfolders
cp
After that you can just drag'n'drop icons in applications://, etc.
If you want a theory as to why OS News bags on Red Hat, consider their leadership. OS News is owned by David Adams (check the whois record for osnews.com). David Adams also founded a little company called Akopia (you may find that their whois record looks oddly familiar), you may remember Akopia from when Red Hat bought, and subsequently ass-raped the company that created Interchange, leaving people such as Dave with not much more than box full of Red Hat stock options that they can exercise at the low, low price of about $80 a share.
But that's what you're going to be up against with the average user. Trust me, as a Mac user, I've been fighting the same annoying generalizations for years.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Thanks! I remember seeing something about that before, but couldn't find it when I need it.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
Sure third party rpms work if you get the SRPMS, but we are talking about new users here. SRPMS are not even close to being in their realm anymore than installing RPMS at the CLI is or adding a new lib path.
In many cases the only thing standing between Mandrake and redhat is the names of their packages, since 99% of rpms require at least one or two system rpms THEY DON'T WORK. Everybody and their dog builds their rpms for redhat, nobody bothers with mandrake or the other distro's out there. Since rpm doesn't care if the actual content of the rpm it depends on is installed, and craps out saying the rpm isn't there... that qualifies as doesn't work. In some cases you can force, but you should NEVER have to force an rpm.
As for hardware detection, on my own system it detects just fine, along with any close to redhat distro. But then I have a system I've built to be compatible with linux. It's when installing for friends that there have been issues. As an example, a friend of mine has a pretty simple setup, dual display using an nvidia geforce2 and an ati radeon 8500 I believe it was. For internet he uses a linksys usb nic hooked up to his cable modem which uses regular old dhcp. I was walking him through the setup, he has an ASUS board but not sure what model off the top of my head. Basically nothing special, he shouldn't have had any problems with basic hardware detection and getting up to the gui with one display at least.
After a default install, his nic was not detected (good old redhat kudzu picks up this nic effortlessly.) the setup picked up on his radeon video card and monitor, exactly the right models, but X?? Nope, no X at all. Crapped out with the font warning. restarted XFS, attempted to startx, crapped out again gripping about the radeon 8500. Downloaded the ATI driver and attempted to install it, alas it crapped out failing to detect the system had x libs and wouldn't install with nodeps or forced.
Redhat on this same configuration booted up to the gui on the default install with internet working out of the box. Sound worked out of the box. Every piece of hardware worked out the box. The only thing we had to do was install the nvidia and ati drivers and setup his dual display. Installed apt from freshrpms, added two more respositories (which gives you MOST of the useful "third-party rpms" as well as the system rpms) and synaptic.
My only grip is the mixed case in the repositories, it's every bit as horrid as the vast quanitities of idiots out there who use mixed case in variable and function names.
I'm not really saying Mandrakes hardware detection sucks per say, just that it sucks compared with redhat. Redhat Linux has the best hardware detection of any IBM-PC operating system I've ever seen. 90% of the time literally every piece of hardware works out of the box.. when it doesn't like any linux distro it's a major pain in the arse to get working.
I can't really comment much on the hardware detection stuff. In my experience (and what other people seem to say on forums/etc), when you get into the "fringes" of linux hardware support, getting a distro that works on a given box seems to be more hit-and-miss. I've had systems on which RedHat failed to setup something properly, but Mandrake did it with ease (an integrated sound card is one thing I recall causing problems).
:)
In the RPM front, I still don't see this as a problem. Mandrake has a greater desktop software selection than RedHat to begin with (this isn't a subjective opinion, just take a look at their respective repositories) and addon sources like PLF make it basically complete as far as most "known" open source software is concerned. I've installed a number of binary RPMs made for RedHat on my system as well. In theory you might think there would be conflicts, but I haven't encountered any. I've been using Mandrake for quite some time, and I haven't had problems with RPMs -- and that is the trues test, for me. I used RedHat for years, and became proficient at solving RPM problems (even when using the tacked-on apt system there were conflicts). In Mandrake, now, I don't have to lift a finger.
And, if we're talking about end users, RedHat does not come with a useful package management system (Apt doesn't count; URPMI on the other hand comes with Mandrake and has a frontend). I don't have to deal with dependencies now that I've switched to Mandrake (no --force, no --nodeps, just "urpmi packagename" or "urpmi package.rpm" and it does the rest.) There's GUI urpmi stuff but I am used to my good ol' CLI
By PPC Linux in my journal entry I meant it generically and not distro-specifically. LinuxPPC has been basically deprecated from what I understand...in the dustbin with MKLinux.
My recommendations for newer (but pre-Old World) PPCs is Yellow Dog Linux, which relieves you of a lot of the fiddliness of installing Linux on a Mac, but is still somewhat more fiddly than, say, Linux on an x86. For those machines older than what is recommended for Yellow Dog, DebianPPC will do the trick. And of course, for a chosen few 68K Macs, there is also Debian68K.
Of course, NetBSD will run on just about any 68K or PPC Mac, but we all know that [sarcasm] *BSD is dying[/sarcasm] so...;-)
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Also, there's Apt Pinning. You can install a stable system, then upgrade the specific programs you use to their versions in sid (which is most often the newest available version of the program). And if they don't work, you can downgrade back to the stable versions.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Disclaimer: I use Gentoo at home on my PC and my son's. I use it at work on 2 servers (soon to be 10 as I convert from RH.) I use it at a customer to my Linux support business.
Gentoo, however, is not what you would call *easy* or *desktop ready*. Yeah, it can run just great as a desktop OS (I do it all the time.) But Joe Average would absolutely freak if faced with installing/maintaining it. I don't even install it on customer computers unless they have told me they want me to do all the support/maint for them (basically an outsourced admin.)
If you are not willing to spend the time learning about Linux and your hardware (and you will have to) then Gentoo is probably not for you. Running etc-update and merging config changes alone are far beyond most user's ability.
Personally I love Gentoo. I have not once been trapped in "dependancy hell" while using it. As a desktop, it is blowing RH9 away. Everything is WAY more responsive and just "feels" faster over all. I also have learned a lot after switching since it *forces* you to get even deeper into how Linux works. It's also great to be able to install on a live server without needing to take it down until everything is installed and ready to go.
Having said all that, I wouldn't call it desktop ready in the least. Instead, let's call it "geek desktop ready." The phrase "the three days it took me to set up my system" goes a long way in backing that up.
I guess what I was thinking when I wrote the post was the parent's sentiment of what was keeping him from switching over to linux. If someone wants to learn linux... well, I still don't think I'd suggest they start with Gentoo, but once they have their feet wet, if you follow the docs, you should be able to get it going. It does *force* you to learn (as would something like debian), which is why I brought it up.
Desktop ready.... no, I guess not. If we could come up with a system that responds and updates like Gentoo and installs like redhat, that would probably bite into some of the market, though.
Though I am currently emerging OOo-1.1.0-rc2, which just failed after about eight hours of compiling for inexplicable reasons. I'll just have to try again, and if that doesn't work, run to the forums.... Case in point why this may not be for newbies; but I like to learn :-)
philcrissman.com.
It's hard to imagine that a producer would take a valid command from the standard ATAPI-set (FLUSH) which a CD-rom can legally implement in one of two ways: Ignore it and do nothing (since "flushing" a read-only medium is fairly useless), or return an error.
The LG-drives do instead reimplement this command to mean "destructively overwrite your own firmware". That's fairly stupid, I'd give them a 9 on a 1-10 scale. Not that this helps you if you get hit by it, but the blame lies squarely with LG.
Looking at Loli-Queru's review of Yellow Dog's distribution of GNU/Linux (version 3.0.1) which includes an XMMS that can play MP3s (which probably qualifies in the US as patent infringement), I see that she finds it convenient and nice that XMMS plays MP3s without any additional software:
It seems to me she either wants to remain ignorant of powerful forces that shape the way in which people must do things (following the law, protesting bad laws) or she genuinely does not understand these forces. I think it's sad that she doesn't acknowledge how much "US laws suck" (to use your words) or what we could do to change the law so we don't have to contend with software patents anymore. She doesn't give any indication that Red Hat was making a strategic choice by not including MP3 software--they did not want to lose their business to a patent infringement lawsuit. More people need to tell users and citizens that stressing convenience over everything is part of the way we get into this mess, not the way we get out.
Digital Citizen
Nope - still not there yet.. keep trying!
See... now *that* is how to troll, sucker.