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Fedora Core 2 Review
An anonymous reader writes "Linuxlookup.com staff member Rich Hughes posted his thoughts on the latest Fedora release with this Core 2 Review. "Fedora Core 2 is the newest release from The Distro Formerly Known As RedHat. Updates include the 2.6 kernel, KDE 3.2, Gnome 2.6, X.org replacing Xfree86 and numerous package updates. Having played around with SuSE 9.1, Arch .6 and Slackware 9 with the 2.6 kernel, I was interested in seeing how the Fedora team did with this release.""
I enjoyed Fedora Core 1 for the most part. Updating things was a lot easier with all the registration (or at least the most part) for up2date gone.
I'm pleased with all the new toys in 2.6, and look forward to messing around with them.
FC has finally won me over following half a decade of Debian zealotry (much of that spent maintaining several packages and participating in the Debian development cycle). Twice a year, FC provides a fairly stable release that I can share with friends, and allows me to track the latest software releases without destabilizing my system as Debian unstable (and even testing) used to. I think Fedora has really hit the sweet spot by releasing a stable platform every 6 months and then making it easy for users to keep their applications up-to-date (with apt-rpm) without being forced into upgrades of glibc or other core libraries at the same time.
That, and the fact that FC is actually _more_ free than Debian following the prompt removal of all MP3 and similar tained code leaves me asking:
What more could you want from a distro? The latest FC2 installer was particularly stunning, making LVM2 setup trivial for the first time. This is really what Debian should have been.
What's that Arch distribution the guy is talking about ?
He says you can get any package easy in the Article. I'm intrigued.
Anybody ever used it?
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
Updates include the 2.6 kernel, KDE 3.2, Gnome 2.6, X.org replacing Xfree86 and numerous package updates.
I haven't had a chance to try X.org yet, how does it compare performance-wise with "good old" [snicker] XFree86?
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
I'd started d/ling FC2 last night, but the deluge kept me from completing. Sounds like FC2 is pretty much the same thing with updated programs.
I've been installing linux for years and I always get some problem that prevents me from using it. I'm running this on a dell inspiron 8200 with a firewire drive connected up to a pcmcia card. All I want to do is play some damn mp3s on this damn thing. Apparently they disabled firewire in the final fc2 because it "doesn't work." What the hell? I think this is a very important feature and if this got out I wonder what else they left out. I don't mean to sound like a troll, but I've been doing this all day and I just want it to work! Two kernel recompiles and doing a bunch of useless crap in the forums didn't help at all.
Well, I'm back in windows where it works out of the box. This isn't meant to be a cry for help for someone to tell me what to do since half the replies would be "well it works for me so linux rocks" and I don't need to hear that now.
DAMMIT!
Except that it's not a first effort. I've been a redhat fan since 4.something. We still use it at work and I use it at home. I intend to stick with fedora and have no plans to jump ship. That may change if future releases follow the quality of this one. I fell afoul of the partition table issue with core1 which caused me two evenings of hair pulling prior to figuring out a way to save things. That plus a couple of hours of win updates to repair the win xp installation. A very minor part of that process was to force the boot loader to be lilo and not grub. Small thing but it was material to saving everything imo. The announcement the other day noted this partition table issue still existed. Not to be put off by the issue I mentally resolved how I got around it last time and how I'd approach it this time. Off we go.... I certainly avoided grub but geeeze the 'upgrade' to lilo meant I couldn't boot Core2! The upgrade process 'upgraded' /boot/message to be nonexistant so the machine would only boot to the default win xp. It's a very minor issue and it was easily resolved but I am blown away that Core2 comes with two means in which to make your system not usuable.
Similarly I tried the upgrade on a test machine here in the office just this morning. I was ready for /boot/message this time on top of everything else... But would it boot? Heck no! The misreading of the partition table resulted in it dying when it tried to reboot after the upgrade (from rh9) since it now thought the previously acceptable boot partition had too high a cylinder number.
I'm trying a complete install as I type... Fingers crossed but only time will tell.
As I said I intend to stick with redhat/fedora for the forseeable future but if this type of scenario is repeated on future releases then I will be off to greener pastures. I went with linux to avoid quality issues with M$ products (whether you agree or not). I won't stick with this distro if the quality goes down hill. Every dog gets one bite and this is redhat's
The answer is: mostly. I'm guessing that my cons, below, are pretty niche, and that most desktop users will really be able to use it the same way as Windows.
I just installed it on older notebook. The good:
* Found most of the hardware easily - sound, video, ethernet, etc.
* Trivially easy, but slow, install. Could have been my hardware.
* Boots right into X with almost no user intervention after install, and the you're in a nice Bluecurve GUI. Trivially easy to change desktop environments/windows managers.
* Runs fast - very useable on a PIII-500.
* Excellent support for ACPI out of the box - better, in fact, than Win2000. I'm getting longer battery life on Linux than on Win2k for the first time.
* Yum is a good, tho not great, package management system. Might be having issues due to my FC newbie status, but it doesn't seem to measure up to portage or the BSD ports system. But getting/installing software is easier than Windows for sure.
Cons:
* The install doesn't ask for a domain or hostname, which is odd. So the machine boots as "local.localdomain". They need to fix this.
* PCMCIA support is BROKEN - for some reason, the yenta_socket module (for a very common PCMCIA support chip) does not load. There is a manual workaround which isn't horrible, but annoying.
* Support for wireless is kind of hidden and a bit flakey.
* Support for Synaptics mouse is not there, no mouse taps on the pad by default. Easy to fix with a boot-time kernel argument.
Again, most of my bitches are either mobile/niche in nature. Folks with "standard" hardware should have very little in the way of issues.
Jonathan
Former Redhat user here just wanting to chime in after reading the FC2 review. My first run-in with RH was at 7.3, I believe. (distro discs bought at a Comdex a few years back) That was ok. I was rebelling against KDE's Windowsy look, opting for Gnome, so it didn't really matter to me what the default was.
/home and thus suffered complete obliteration.
/home directory.
I eventually climbed the evolutionary ladder onto RH9 thanks to a DSL line and a cd burner. I also switched over to KDE/Liquid for the "ooooh" effect. Life was grand. Then I found freshrpms.net which had stuff the distro wouldn't cover...like mp3 playback.
Then there was the fedora project, which had stuff freshrpms didn't have (blender), so I added them to the sources list. After a while, Fedora became the sanctioned public distro of RedHat.
Wanting the latest KDE (now from the kde-redhat folks), I think I made the mistake of apt-get upgrading one too many times with conflicting repositories. I managed to get it running at some point, even running the great k3b a few times. Eventually, an update borked the machine. Gnome files were deleted, X would fire up but there were errors preventing either KDE or Gnome from starting at all. Panic mode on!!!
Took out my RH9 cd's and reinstalled that. Thank (insert preferred deity here || self) for backups. I had always been dumb enough to accept the default partitioning which didn't separate
After RH9 installed, I got networking to run, went to the mandrake site, downloaded 10 CE, and installed it. mp3s worked straight after install. Networking didn't, though, and that sucked, but managed to get through it. An RPM from the PLF settled the whole DVD thing.
In the end, I got KDE, most of the apps I need, and the great pointy-clicky way of installing those old MS Fonts from the Win98 days. I'm now more paranoid about using unofficial repositories. The Mandrake Upgrade shoots me over to contribs which is scary as it is, but I try to watch what I upgrade anyway. And the default mdk way of partitioning isolates the
Overall, I like mandrake. It's easy to install, easy to use, purtty, and though laborious to update at times, it's darn good. And my old copy of UT runs faster than it did with the ol' RH9...though I assume any new distro will have that effect.
From the review, it seems FC2 suffers from the same things that eventually caused me to switch.
Although I could not find information on the main sites either, I found the following documentation very useful as I was really impressed with Fedora Core 2 and got everything I needed to work by following these tips!
A Fedora How To for Multimedia
An RPM repository that fedora.redhat.com and fedora.us could not release!
I had grub hammer a Gentoo install before. Spend 2-3 days compiling and then have the bootloader screw it up. Needless to say I was not happy about that. I now refuse to use anything other than LILO;)
But as to your problem, try using a recovery CD and either fixing grub or installing LILO. Slackware CD 1, Gentoo CD 1, Knoppix, and ilk all do their job very well.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Having had some trouble with Japanese printing on Mdk10 Community, I thought I'd give this a try on a IBM T30 laptop with Mdk 9.2 just previously installed on it.
I did a fresh install of Fedora2, but even during install ran into a dumb fault that it took me two attempts to realize was *that bad*. The T30 has its own way to hibernate where it uses a special typed partition to store RAM contents on disk, but the Fedora2 installer insisted on calling it a swap partition with no other options, and then barfing just before starting to install, ie. after everything had been setup and made ready toi start the installation.
The only option there was to reboot: Ok or OK?
Mdk and others will leave partition types alone if they don't knows them, why can't Fedora?
And why am I allowed to go all the way to the end of setup of the installation and then only be given the option to reboot and loose it all?
And why does it take so friggin long time to install? The time estimater said around the beginning it would take 50min, but it eventually took >2.5h to just copy the files over. Even at the end the estimated 2min takes 5minutes, so something hasn't the right factors in it.
After installation my mainpoints were to get an HP printer working from OpenOffice and Mozilla with Danish and Japanese and hopefully an old parport Plustek scanner set up wit SANE as well, as I could see from the SANE site that it was well supported.
Wanting the default language to be English, but needing the odd time to print documents and webpages with Danish and Japanese I tested that, and that went fine, except that I can't type Danish characters from a Danish keyboard in OpenOffice. In KOffice, Abiword and the odd xterm I can do it just fine, and copy'n'paste them over to OO and print from there works fine too, but no matter how much I attempted to adjust OO to use Danish, it wouldn't accept Danish characters from the keyboard.
It turned out that if I set the LANG env variable to nothing it would work.
It won't let me add the Plustek scanner though, and xsane just won't detect it, even if I make its config files the only scanner available on the system.
The parport and config file are both set up according to the sane.plustek_pp man-pages, but the scanner doesn't seem to exist at all on this system.
I haven't figured out how to make it work, but at least Mdk10 had a wizard to help set up a scanner.
I am not sure if it is a 2.6 kernel related problem that needs some tuning.
I didn't try Fedora1, but Fedora2 is not as well made a distribution as eg. RH9 and earlier distributions were. It looks like bits and pieces have fallen off the edges during collecting them all, and even though they had such a long testing period.
Looking forward to other distributions with the 2.6 kernel in it.