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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 believe a colleague has had some success installing core 2 on a Sony Vaio laptop - this is about the hightest recommendation for *any* distro ,-}
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Fedora Core 2 Review
.6 and Slackware 9 with the 2.6 kernel, I was interested in seeing how the Fedora team did with this release.
Category
Linux Distributions (O/S)
Distribution name
Fedora
Version
Core 2
Manufacturer name
Fedora Project
Provided by
Fedora Project
Price
Free
Review by
Rich
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
Installation
Installation was a breeze. I like that Fedora provides the opportunity to test your discs. This is an idea Mandrake would be wise to copy. It is frustrating to get to disc 3 of an installation only to find that it didn't burn properly. I give the distribution credit for making this easy.
The install was fast. It installed 3.5 gigabytes in about 20 minutes. They myth that Linux is hard to install is not true for most modern distros. Hardware detection was great, my usb mouse and keyboard worked immediately. My onboard Nforce ethernet controller wasn't recognized like it was with SuSE, but I didn't expect it to be. My normal ethernet card was recognized and setup with no problem.
The System
My first impression was that it looks like RedHat 9. I don't care for the default icon set or the menu layout. The fonts look great, but that has become my expectation. There isn't a reason for ugly fonts anymore, so to trumpet the fact they look good feels silly. The panel is filled with Openoffice.org icons but missing a terminal icon. The boot splash screen is very attractive, if that is your thing.
The odd thing about Fedora is that it seems to be aimed at novice users but is inconsistent. We are given the choices Web Browser, Email, Music Player and Audio Player, but left with Kopete, Kget, Emacs and so forth. Either your user knows what Kopete is or they don't. If you are simplifying the menu, do it across the board or don't do it at all. This inconsistency extends to the system itself. It is pretty and newbie friendly at first, but if you need basic functionality such as mp3 playback you must hand edit the yum configuration file. Up2date freezes, but the command line program yum works well.
This leads me to my biggest problem with Fedora. On one hand, it is a great introduction to Linux. It installs easily, works well and is attractive. On the other hand, it plays right into the hands of Linux's biggest critics, which is the mistaken notion that it is unfinished and most things don't work. You are given a browser with no plugins, so if you jump online excitedly with your new system, there are a lot of things that won't work. You load your favorite mp3s, then find out you cannot play them. God forbid you have a dvd drive. You notice the red exclamation point telling you there are updates available, but up2date freezes leaving you unable to get them. I know there are fairly simple solutions to these complaints, but the fact remains that not everyone who tries Fedora will know how to do it. They will just feel disappointed by a system that lets them down, deciding that this Linux thing is not ready for prime time. A program that would set up unofficial repositories with a few clicks would take care of this, along with some prominent documentation telling you how to get the things you need. I could not find any real documentation at the Fedora site, except for RedHat 9. This may be due to my lack of time to search for it, but if it exists, it should be clear where it is at.
Despite my complaints, there are things I like. The system is very responsive. Programs load quickly. With the exception of up2date, Fedora is stable. The splash screens look great. The look and feel, while not my cup of tea, is consistent throughout the applications.
Package Management
This is a nightmare. Add/Remove Applications provides me with the original
Seems like there is still no safe solution for this bug.
Some people report that they lost all their data by installing it.
I really can't understand how they released it with such bug.
I really like it alot, so far no problems. The only thing I don't like about a fedora box is that I have to hunt around for weeks to get the necessary multimedia stuff in it. It ships with full blown mozilla, that will be gotten rid of here shortly in favor of firefox. Great distro but alot of post install work to make it into a usable desktop.
Got Code?
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.
I've been using it since tuesday, and my biggest complaint is CIPE being dropped, and the gui setup not being updated for the new IPSec tools.
;)
IMHO, they should have kept cipe ( depreciated maybe, removed next release ), but added the new userland tools and gui for the ipsec stuff in the kernel. Give people some wiggle room, for those of us using vpns.
Of course, it'd also be nice if they included support for pptp out of box...but I digress.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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..."
Hell.. go for it. Anyone looking for ISOs of FC2? Free to the first couple hundred..
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I've upgraded to boxes so far, one from Fedora Core 1 and the other from Red Hat 9. Both have had issues.
On the RH9 -> FC2 upgrade (4-year-old Compaq Deskpro), there was an issue with the grub.conf file that prevented the system from booting. Fortunately, I had burned the rescue CD and was able to go in and fix it. Lesson learned: make sure you have a bootable disk available! This looked like a major issue at first glance, but turned out to be fairly minor.
On the FC1 -> FC2 upgrade (Dell Inspiron 5100), the actual upgrade went quite smoothly. However, I've been unable to build drivers for my Agere-based Proxim wireless card under the 2.6 kernel. After wrestling with it for several hours, I've decided to throw in the towel and buy a Prism-based card.
In both cases, I've seen an error message pop up when first logging in to an X session. It appears to be a remnant of the Xfree86 install that wasn't removed or completely replaced by the new X.org stuff.
In all, not too bad, but there's still room for improvement....
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!
so why has no one come up with a solution for this problem. now i'm a huge linux zealot and use FC1 (will upgrade as soon as the slashdot effect is gone from the download sites) so this isn't bashing. but it just amazes me that i've yet to come across a distro that, out of the box, has a browser with all the bells and whistles! and let's face it - the average jane wants all the bells and whistles! so enlighten me - why is this so hard? thank you, peace, good night.
nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
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
My impression overall was very good. I hadn't installed a desktop Linux distro in a year or so, and Fedora was light years ahead of what I expected.
Installation, printing, sound, video, network, mouse, all worked perfectly with no tweaking.
My digital camera would register as /dev/sda1 when I plug it in, though I have to mount it myself, and my webcam (Logitech QuickCam Messenger) doesn't work at all.
Installing Java and Flash wasn't hard, and Thunderbird / Firefox was trivial.
The desktop looks very nice, and shortcuts, panels, menus, preferences were all intuitive.
Utilities like the music player and CD ripper are well done.
Great work by the Gnome and Fedora teams!
Will it install on my P-P-P-Powerbook?
Here a Sig There a Sig Everywhere a Sig Sig...
all the subscription touting /.ers get a sneak preview, so if you want to avoid slashdotted links you'd better get a subscription.
If everyone subscribed you would be in the same position. Someone has to not subscribe or this won't work. I volunteer.
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!
You might get a better/quicker response posting your question to the fedora-list rather than /.
I've always had good experiences getting my issues resolved via the list...
Place sig here.
Arch Linux. It's an i686, 2.6 kernel, devfs, KDE 3.2.2, GNOME 2.6 using binary distro (similar to Debian except even more lightweight and up-to-date).
I use it all the time. My primary machine is still Debian but all my other machines and servers are running Arch. It requires a bit more setup work than Debian.
I like it because it is extremely lightweight but has an excellent packaging system (pacman). The packaging system (and all those packages) are pretty much the only reason I've stuck with Debian all these years and Arch is the first to come along that comes close (Gentoo is OK, but compiling is a waste of time). Although it doesn't have anywhere near the number of packages as Debian, I can see it growing rapidly.
An example of the sane thinking behind Arch: There is no "/usr/doc" directory. I always use manpages or go online to find documentation. I've never understood why so many distros include all that documentation. I mean you rarely use it (mostly just for setup), why make it take up disk space? Everything is online nowadays and manpages are easy/handy.
Also, the install is fairly raw (which is a good thing). It just works and is simple. They need to fix some stuff with regards to swapfile setup (like if you don't want a swap partition) but otherwise it is fairly easy. You almost don't even need the installer (just the boot CD). Too many distros go off with their crazy complex and broken installers that end up leaving you frustrated (*cough* Debian *cough*).
The ratio of people to cake is too big
I really like it alot, so far no problems. The only thing I don't like about a fedora box is that I have to hunt around for weeks to get the necessary multimedia stuff in it.
a /linux/$rel easever/$basearch/freshrpms
I found this info quite by chance after moving from RHN to yum after installing Fedora core. I've posted this before, but here it is again:
Add these lines to your yum.conf (watch out for the slashcode extra spaces in the baseurl line):
[freshrpms]
name=Fedora Linux $releasever - $basearch - freshrpms
baseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedor
And for all your patent-encumbered multimedia needs, you just need do:
% yum install mplayer
% yum install xine
% yum install [whatever else you want]
and it'll resolve all dependencies and keep you away from rpm-hell but still within RH's rpm goodness.
NOTE - freshrpms haven't got Feodra Core 2 rpms yet - give them time!
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.
I installed FC2 test3 and played with it, and FC2 final. Installed on my Toshiba 1135 laptop like a charm (dual boot). The GUI applets never have a problem configuring my wireless card. After setting the /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources file to a good source (I like duke.edu) the updates work just fine.
Red Hat sure does make a desktop look pretty. But in configuring it this way, you also lose things:
* FC1 and FC2 have disabled the Gnome menu system. The RH bugzilla says it's because the Gnome code is buggy. The real reason has to do with how RH replaces menuing file system with their own that works across KDE and Gnome.
* You install RPMs at risk. On FC2 test3 I installed smb4k from a FC1 rpm. Lost my entire Gnome menu structure on restart. Oops!
* You install ordinary RPMS, etc. (such as Fire****) and the menus and other L&F don't match what RH installed. You might not even get it into the menus (What? You can't edit the Gnome menus to add Fire****? Too bad...).
* You don't get the experience promised in the user manual. For example, Gnome 2.6 help files say that in getting to SMB shares you go to the Network panel and click on "Add SMB". Red Hat has removed that.
* Actually, SMB connectivity is my main problem with FC. It will see your Windows network, allow you to see the computers on the net, but if you try to see shared folders it tells you that all folders on the target are unreachable. I can sometimes access a folder if I build a Location, setting the smb address and getting the right combination of username (with a \\domain?), password and maybe group (maybe not). Working blind.
It doesn't have to be that way. Load smb4k on other distros (SuSE, MEPIS, Knoppix, Mandrake). It almost *leaps* to let you see the shares. Access is a breeze. Install the same app on FC and it says smbmount (smbclient? smbload? I forget) needs more setuid rights. Just more obstacles. And I'm not totally sure on the security implications of giving those rights.
BTW, I turned off the firewall in case RH was having problems with SMB. Just for testing. No effect on the solution.
I'm coming to realize that various distributions are creating *brands* of Linux desktops. You get used to the menu structures and come to prefer them. But you get locked into branded RPMS (no more RPM compatibility, as tenuous as that was before). Or locked into certain package sources, such as Xandros with its customized GUI applets. God help you if the company goes under.
I'm currently inclined to base my laptop on the MEPIS distro, as it points at ordinary, and numerous, Debian mirrors.
YMMV, but that is my experience.
slapt-get --upgrade