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Fedora Core 2 Dud or Dodo?
darth_silliarse writes "Linux.com have posted an interesting review Fedora Core 2, which includes reference to the now famous Windows/Fedora Core 2 dual booting "feature". My favorite quote "Unfortunately, all of FC2's admirable qualities cannot save it from its congenital defects. These range from annoyances such as broken audio drivers to the abomination known as Gnome 2.6, and are serious enough to make the Fedora Project's second litter of pups unsuitable for any use other than as laboratory animals." Quite a indictment don't you think? My fav distro is SuSE but I'm interested to hear others views about this review..."
It's the best desktop EVAR.
This is silly. FC2 works fine.
See post by Mr. Firewall (174989) on 2004.05.28 11:48 (#82188)
A slight correction from the author
"After it was too late to change this review, the Abiword and Quanta packages magically showed up in my package manager! I don't know why I couldn't find them when I looked for them, but they ARE included.
So the only thing still missing from my list of missing packages above is Audacity. My bad."
search google for sfdisk site:redhat.com fedora takes you to the 1st result:
2 004-May/msg00908.html
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/
maybe the topic poster should learn to read a little before going "fedora sucks, i can't dual boot"
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
The criticisms of Fedora are of course accurate, but it is not true to say that any Linux distribution has got it perfect just yet. I've used practically all of them, and although I agree with the poster that SuSE is up there with the best, even it has its problems with misconfigurations or odd-behaviour. The fact seems to remain that distros cannot afford to spend a significant amount of money on testing on different hardware.
Why people like to rag on fedora 2 for this bug, i have no clue. This bug exists in Mandrake 10, Suse 9.1, and i'm sure any other 2.6 / grub distribution. See this story.
It work here very well. Maybe he should help out to try to solve his problem instead of writing inflammatory articles.
The "limitations" of 2.6 are not that at all. It is an interesting difference in the way it operates. It may not be *the* big step forward, but it is at least a small step forward. I think it may need a few more refinements before it really hits what it may be aiming for.
Never had that problem with Gentoo. Moved all my machines to Gentoo and never looked back.
SUSE is also put together well; it also manages updates fine. I recommend that to all my friends. (Unless they have exotic hardware, in which case they are more interested in Gentoo's performance)
I wonder how many RedHat users switched to other distros since FC1?
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
The File Open dialog box
Those of us who administer systems need a fast, easy way to edit configuration files. We know where most of those files live, and can usually type them in to the File Open dialog a lot faster than we can get to them via the browsing tool. But my favorite tool, gedit, is no longer suitable for that purpose, because, as you can see from the screen shot at right, there is no longer any way to type a filename into the File Open dialog!
REAL MEN use VI from console to edit configuration files! Only wimps use gedit to do that!
Why? Doesn't keep the linux community from writing inflammatory articles about Windows. Of which, a lot of you guys seem to laud.
:P
Anyways, Gentoo is better than Fedora
I am normally a gentoo user but slapped Fedora core 2 on an XP machine for fun. It seems to be plenty stable enough on a standard Dell and the sound appears to be working fine when I used it.
The main problems I have had are the lack of MP3 support out of the box, and no default inclusion of niceties like flash, nvidia drivers, and java (I know they are not open source but a quick-download utility to get them separately would be nice). Even some OSS software like K3B is not included by default even though I chose KDE packages at install time.
On the good side, it was stupidly simple to setup (I love gentoo but bootstrapping has never been fun and an SATA system I setup required some prestedigitation to get running) the up2date utility is simple to use and has that nifty icon tray to alert you when there are new updates. It has all the standard development utilities in relatively recent versions and while I am not a regular Gnome user the desktop seems quite polished with good fonts default out of the box.
In summation, it certainly ain't perfect, but I haven't found any real problems to complain about either. While I'll stick to Gentoo on machines that I want to develop on, Fedora seems fine for a workstation that is easy to maintain.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
because of spacial naut?
please, all the linux zealots constantly say how they like choice, well you have a choice with how naut lays it out for you.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Try the integrated CD burner software in Fedora Core 2. I tried with 3 different machines and 3 different burners. I tried each burner in each machine with no success.
Windows XP can handle this trivial process with ease....why not FC2?
-ted
I have long been a user of the Debian distro. Its a fine server distro. It has always been rock solid. My only complaint is the painfully long release cycle where some packages are more than a year behind the lastest version when they are first released. I suppose this contributes to the solid behavior, but it can be frustrating wait a year or more for a new package feature.
How does Gentoo do in this area? Can a person get Samba 3 without waiting years or running a Debian distro labelled 'unstable' ?
----
Those who can do, those who can't sue.
Those who can do. Those who can't sue.
Yesterday I went to Microcenter to get SuSE Professional 9.1. Unfortunatelly, they didn't had a single box on the shelf. So I asked them why they don't have SuSE Professional 9.1 on the shelf. They told me that all boxes were sold out within the first week.
I think SuSE is becoming the Linux desktop of choice.
All I can say is Fedora Core 2 is a giant step UP on my new AMD64 box. Dual boots perfectly (I upgraded from the rag they called Core 1 for x86_64). And, unlike its predecesor, its 32 bit mode actually works. NFS mounts to my OS X laptop work (under core 1 it would often overwrite files with files of no lenght and never flush the buffer).
Of course I use KDE so the Gnome 2.6 stuff is not an issue.
Today is a gift. Save the receipt.
Um. Puhleeze. Anyone with a clue about decent security practicies would open a vein and bleed out before running any X programs for system configuration. That's just common sense.
If he could run gedit as root, then he must have been running X as root which speakes volumes about his lack of care for security.
*Disclaimer* I an NOT a Fedora fan, I don't use fedora. And oh, yes, VI/VIM rules!
Linux is unix training wheels, while BSD *is* unix.
I have been using FC1 on my laptop ever since it's release, and I do think it's a great distribution. I'm also a Gentoo/Debian user, and FC1 really reached my expectations. When I saw the official release of FC2, I downloaded it right away and installed it. As a result, I rolled back to FC1. FC2 sure does have a lot of improvements and uses the most recent development (X.org, KDE 3.2, Gnome 2.6, 2.6 kernel, ...), but I think they aimed a little too high. Those changes should have been made gradually and tested massively.
From the things I could not get to work (that used to work): touch pad (really, can't tap to click), XFCE4 (incompatible with xorg?), wlan card (linuxant drivers).
I sure am disapointed by this release, but I will try FC3 when it releases anyway, because it does have potential. It's probably only a matter of time before the incompatibility issues are solved.
Qui ne va pas à la chasse n'a pas de gibier
PHP Queb
with Olivia Newton John and lots of disco roller skating!
Yes, I like Gnome too, but I have LOTS of strange tastes.
Ever mixed root beer and orange juice? Really good.
I had:
* sound probelms -- horrid noise, each time sound played
* yum problems -- probably repository overload on the day after FC2 was available
* couldn't find many packages -- see below
* general KDE flakiness -- zero screen savers available
* annoyances -- could not find a way to get it to 'default' anyone's login into KDE (manual change required, each time)
Even though I'd selected "Everything", many, many packages were not included. I searched high and low for gcc -- yes, gcc. No sign of any compiler.
So I re-installed by 1) Manually selecting "everything", but 2) leaving out Gnome desktop, altogether.
Everything I've checked now works. KDE of course is the default. Sound works just fine. All packages are where they should be -- found gcc, et al.
Now it's a real joy to run FC2. Just get a copy of Synaptic and load all the "wrong-license, pattent-issues" packages. BTW, this all occurred on my Averatec 3150H. The only remaining annoyance is the touch-pad mouse doesn't click-on-tap like it did with FC1. No problem, here, though, I plugged in a USB mouse and it just worked, scroll-wheel and all!
Why would you want compatibility with extermal packages if your entire business target segment is the corporate market?
The owls are not what they seem
I use only RedHat, Fedora Core is great, never had ANY trouble dual booting with W2K. I have beta tested FC2 and found nothing that you are reporting. If you don't like it, stick with Gentoo or what ever else you use.
Fedora Core 1 was essentially RHL 9.1. RHL 9 was the height of stability (that crown goes to RHL 7.3), but FC1 was basically bug fixes for RHL 9, and produced a good, solid distro.
.0 release, so give it a break.
FC2 is is the first "mainstream" Linux 2.6 distro, but even the other distros that went 2.6 show similar problems (the XP booting issue isn't a distro issue but a kernel issue, and the problem was created by MS, not Linus).
In the RHL timeline, this is the rough equivalent of 10.0, though in terms of new tech, it is probably the equivalent of RHL 5.0 (which broke everything, but forced the world to move on from all that legacy kruft that distros were accumulating).
FC2 is the first step out of the shadow of legacy for this distro. Everything under the hood is shiny and new - and yes, it has bugs. It's a
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you
to achieve the same result istead of opening the file within gedit he could simply type in a terminal
gedit
I don't like these reviewers who shit tout court negative opinions only because there is ONE new feature that doesn't fit properly into his GUI accustomations
just my cento lire (I'm not yet accustomed to euros
Personally I am a devoted Slackware user but right now I am migrating my mom to Fedora Core2.
It's a nice system with not much overhead in the default install. You have to tweak it a bit but you can have a solid platform wich is easy to use for all daily office tasks such as browsing, printing letters and so on.
RedHats Bluecurve theme doesn't match my taste but it works great for mom and dad since it's clean and descriptive. It's also an up to date system with Kernel 2.6.5 and Gnome 2.6.
Like it or not but spatial filenavigation is the ONLY way my mom is able to keep her stuff together. She was totally lost with Windows Explorer.
One has to keep in mind that Fedora is a pretty young project, too and that there was apparently some trouble in the community communication with RedHat. The booting issue is a real pita but let's not forget that it is actually a WinXP problem. This won't make anyone more happy if he lost his Windows partition, I know but it's still the truth. So let's not be too harsh with Fedora!
As other posters have pointed out, the dual boot problem is not specific to Fedora, but for some mysterious reason everyone is insistent on picking on Fedora.
Much of it is factually wrong:
He doesn't even check his own system before claiming that Quanta and Abiword are not present. His evolution troll is so bad that the editor felt the need to add a note -- Correction: The author didn't look closely enough. Evolution has handled cryptographic signatures and message encryption correctly for a long while now.
Notice how almost all his "Fedora sucks" items are acually cribs about the component software! Like OO.o, gnome, evolution, and Gimp. If this idiot doesn't like these software how the f*** is it fedora's fault?!
His gnome troll is the worst of all. This is one piece of Free Software that dares to innovate on the desktop, and every release gets flamed to death by fools who have never used it at all. I won't bother with a point by point rebuttal, that's already been done in Open Letter to Nicholas Petreley - Crack Pipes for Everyone!.
The author is just trolling for publicity, just like our friend Ken Brown of the AdTI. What I don't understand is why /. falls for it.
The author says you shouldn't even bother installing gnome because of spatial nautilus. You can turn spatial nautilus off. It's one thing to say you don't like a feature, it's another to say you shouldn't install something because of a feature you can turn off. The author talks system administrators being hampered by the new file selector. If he is such a haxor why doesn't he just disable spatial nautilus with a simple gconf tweak? Not to mention fedora has a browse filesystem icon in the panel by default which does not use spatial. Anyway, I'm sick of reviews like these, not because they're critical of fedora, which I don't even use, but because they're so superficial. This "review" would be more aptly named "first impressions" or an installation report. We need more discussion about distros beyond what versions of gnome they are using. Talk about documentation, community, and how hard it is to troubleshoot problems in general.
Most of the text I've read in the past on linux.com is a wash -- too heavy on the histrionics and not enough on the facts. Because of this I usually avoid linux.com like the plague for facts. Furthermore it's not my first choice for finding out accurate information about distros.
;-) )
(Heh, Slashdot is way more factual
FYI, I have been using FC2 for about a week now. I'm a KDE / fluxbox user so I have no opinion on Gnome. After starting from scratch (previously was using Red Hat 9), my poor 200 Mhz / 128 Mb RAM PC is working much better. Everything else I have installed (Java 1.4, RealPlayer, MP3 support for XMMS, prboom, Timidity and so on) has been fine, no issues.
--- You are in a little twisty maze of comments, all different.
- X11 (got it to work by editing scripts)
- CD-RW drive
- Mouse (it works again after manual configuration)
- USB digital camera
- printers
- email (mutt/imap)
- sound
All this stuff worked correcly before the upgrade. However, MATLAB still works! The upgrade feature (at least) is totally screwed up. I think this machine is going to get Gentooed very soon now. To be fair, the system seems to be reasonably stable and also quite responsive (unlike RH 9). Not as responsive as my other systems using kernel 2.6 and Gentoo/Mandrake,though.Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
If even his CmdrTaco-nes squeezes the thumb screws on RedHat's community effort, Fedora,
then something must be going on. Or even worse essential efforts are not happening at Fedora's.
Lets find out, i would say.
Robert
I used FC1 as my workstation at work since January 1st and just installed FC2 on the 22nd. Like the author, I did a clean install. However, unlike the author, I was able to get around some of the limitations, like MP3 playing and nVidia drivers, realtively quickly.
However, one issue that I do have with FC2 is with my Intellimouse Explorer USB. It doesn't matter which application I am in, but I cannot use the wheel to scroll up. The application starts to scroll, but then the context menu appears and randomly selects an item off that menu. Try as I might, I still haven't found a resolution to this issue.
The review does not do justice with FC2. I didn't have any special problems with FC2, and except for the mp3 support in xmms, almost everything worked perfectly out of the box. But even with the problems mentioned in the review, I think FC2's good qualities compensate for the problems.
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/rules; ln -s xorg.lst xfree86.lst". I really do wish some official fix to this will be out soon.
Gnome 2.6 rocks, and I say this after working with KDE for the past 4 years. I don't think I'll be going back to KDE soon. However, the most notable bug in KDE was the fact that you can not define other keyboard layouts than english. this is due to the switch between XFree and Xorg, and is solved by doing "cd
As for dual booting an xp partition - I had no probelm with that at all. although booting my RH9 partition took a little tweaking in grub.conf.
The best experience I had was with the sound drivers. FC2 recognized *ALL 3* sound cards i have installed on my machine, even my rather exotic 8 channel studio card, which RH9 never managed to do anything with.
After almost two weeks with FC2, I didn't feel any need to go back to RH9, which I still have installed, as FC feels more stable and fast.
I wouldn't recommend FC2 to newbies, though - those needed tweaks that took me a couple of minutes, would render FC2 useless for Newbie Joe. But then again - AFAIK this isn't a distro for newbies. I use it as a development workstation, and for this purpose it's great.
FD2 doesn't come with a boot floppy image. My Linux box doesn't support boot from CD, so I couldn't even install it. That seems silly.
http://nsahoo-otherside.blogspot.com/2004/05/fedor a-core-2.html
You might wanna check this out aswell. FC2 was nothing short of a complete dissappointment. Mandrake 10 gave a much better experience.
http://nsahoo-otherside.blogspot.com/2004/05/mandr ake-10.html
Okay, I am almost a complete newb to Linux. I started out on Mandrake, but got fed up with it because kernel 2.4.19 and XF86 4.3.0 wouldn't run well on my old PII 266. I took a break for a while, and when I got my laptop, I was able to wipe my old WinME machine and put Fedora Core 1 on it. I had ZERO problems. I still have yet to get DRI working, but that's because I haven't had a lot of time to screw around with it and because it has a Radeon 7500 PCI in it. I had more problems with RH9 on my laptop than any other operating system I've use on any computer. Drivers weren't working, sound was nonexistent. I put Fedora Core 2 on it about two weeks ago. I'm not affected by the apparent dual boot bug, as I'm running FC2 and XP pro dual booted. FC2 is so much more streamlined and nicer-looking than RH9 and FC1 could have ever been. I don't see why people don't like it, other than the obvious spatial window management option in Gnome 2.6. I happen to like Gnome, and I think it's a quality Window Manager (better than KDE, imo *dodges flamethrowers*).
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
The dual-boot bug is the main reason I'm not even going to try Fedora. I mean geez, dual-booting has been a piece-o-cake for distros for years now, and Fedora is from what is supposed to be the premeir Linux distro group. If they can't get the dual-booting right, what else have they fUx0r3d up?
I guess we now have to treat Fedora releases like we treat MS releases... wait for the first service pack.
...that Fedora Core 2 is the only one with the XP dual-boot problem that got noticed? It's not a problem with Fedora Core, it's not the fault of the Fedora team, it's a fault to do with the kernel (yeah, yeah, I know it's "strictly Microsoft's doing", but with Windows the dominant OS, whether they like it or not Linux distros should make sure they can work around it's quirks - lots of people will want to use a Windows/Linux dual-boot when they first dip their toes into the pool of non-MS operating systems, just so they can test-run a Linux distro while their familiar Windows desktop is just a reboot away, and to them, this will seem like Linux's fault - their box worked till they put this new alien OS on it, and now it doesn't, so they will blame the new OS).
Every article under the sun seems to be slagging Fedora for this problem when it's not even their fault. I guess that's just what comes with being the 'MS of Linux distros' - everyone's looking for an excuse to have a pop at them when their OS can't magically hop over problems caused by something it has no control over.
Personally I've found the new Fedora to be useful (despite a few quirks that people have mentioned already in the thread) and I've yet to see a reason to switch distros - I just wish people would stop bashing Fedora for what is, in fact, a kernel problem (or a Windows problem, it's up to you - just so the zealots don't lynch me).
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
By keeping fedora buggy, RedHat is trying to show corporate customers that Free (as in beer) operating systems just won't cut it, so they can gouge them with high-priced licensing fees for their enterprise linux.
Fedora sucks, because it isn't in RH's benefit to make it anywhere near a quality product.
Once it has served the purpose, it will be put out to pasture, and RH will ship out a press release about "many other choices for hobbyists"
...it's a work in progress. Of course, it could be argued that all of Linux-dom is a work-in-progress as well. So that makes the statement rather silly I suppose.
But posting a review of an on-going project and damning it is somewhat inappropriate if only because it is unconstructive.
If it were a review of a closed-source commercial project, it is more understandable as these projects aren't truly considered on-going since each version of a given product is usually considered stand-alone with the exception of bug fixes. It is rare that a product review would alter its features or interface or any major detail. So damning such a project is considered to be in the interest of the consumer who might otherwise be unaware of problems that might affect him after spending a bunch of money.
On the other hand, money could be changed to consumption of time for the users of open-source projects and so I suppose even a damning review might be of service to the OSS user.
What's my point of writing this? I dunno...
The file-open dialog should be removed anyway.
It would be a good step ahead for the spatial browser (which I like a lot).
Fedora Core 2 was my first sucessful venture into Linux. I have tried several distros before, and none of them gave me the out of the box expirence I needed. I installed Fedora on a Old Sony laptop that even the version of windows that came preinstalled didn't support well. Fedora found all the hardware and configured it correctly. It even found and properly setup a printer that I have had trouble with for years on windows (apparently the first version of my printer had problems that were never addressed my Cannon and later models fixed it). In any case, everything works great and I'm impressed. I have installed Fedora on 2 more computers sence, with no problems. I even learned enough to install a usable slackware system on my everyday laptop. Between Slackware and Fedora, I like Fedora better, but because of an odd situation, of haveing no boot option except the hard drive, slack was the only option. I'm glad I tried it for comparision anyway. Finally, Fedora really had a better selection of software on the installation CDs, but with all those CDs it ought to.
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
I was not effected by the dual boot bug (it's apparently only older systems).
The sound card problem is a generic bug in ALSA that is very visible since FC2 switched to ALSA as the default sound system. It apparently effects lots of low-end sound cards that ALSA hasn't had to deal with.
This is my opinion, of course, but the fact their installer, for example, has been so inflexible for so long and always second-guessing the user that who outside of corporate red tape would use Red Hat for anything? I've worked with computers for over a decade and still have to use fdisk to figure out a dual-boot setup under Red Hat, and sometimes their installer still thinks it knows better (oops, there goes Windows...again). When they say to back up before the install, they mean it.
Give me Slackware, Debian, etc. any day before Red Hat/Fedora. Red Hat really was a big deal in the 1990's, but, now, I've moved on.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
I've been using Redhat nearly exclusivly since 4.2 (switched from Slackware). Redhat 7.3 was the best, hands down. I gladly used it for desktops, servers, everything. Then RH 8 was released. Suddenly RPM would randomly corrupt itself, sometimes unrecoverably. Other random stability problems cropped up. RH 9 was "slightly" better, but not anywhere as good as 7.3. Fedora Core 1 was worse, Fedora Core 2 is a nightmare. I hate to call it quits but frankly Redhat has been nothing but a disappointment since 7.3. I'm looking at Debian (gentoo is really nice, but I need stability and quality control is something that is severly lacking there), SuSE (nice, but priced almost worse than Windows), and *BSD (not as much third party software, but that doesn't effect me much)
Redhat sadly is going to have to go. I do have two Enterprise Linux boxes which are performing admirably, but little glitches are still sometimes showing up with updates. How did redhat fall so far since 7.3?
Finkployd
I have been using Fedora Core 1 since its release as a webserver(apache) and email server(qmail) with no problems, very stable. I upgraded to Fedora Core 2 last week and it went smoothly. I have not had to reboot or had a crash to date, my only complaint is that the uptodate utility is slow and you think it has frozen but give a little bit and it finishes its job. This distro has done what I needed it to without any complaints.
"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts." -Albert Einstein
Karma? There's a serial modder out there.
What does dude have against hitting Ctrl+L? I admit it's a little more awkward than the old way, but only a little. The other usability payoffs are MASSIVE (like the ability to add your own custom locations)
I use apt4rpm in conjunction with several repositories, which as of recently include Fedora Core 2. It's worked *great* on our server so far, with little or no migration trauma as I upgrade from the FC1 packages I've been working with. I work with non-X11 web servers, so I haven't tried Gnome or dual-booting or any of that fancy desktop stuff; once it's installed, it goes into a rack and becomes headless.
I stopped reading it at "It is hard to resist the temptation to ask whether this is really a bug or just a security feature, and why anyone would want to run Windows anyway." The reviewer obviously has a bug up his ass about Microsoft and is making his opinions clear. After that statement, I'm supposed to trust the author to be fair and impartial in the rest of the article? It's clear that the author has an agenda and is pushing it in the guise of a product review. I think the reviewer needs to go back and take Journalism 101 again if he wants to be taken seriously.
I'd complain about the article's journalistic standards if it had any.
Like so many "reviews"; the topic article is simply one man's diatribe about how a specific product doesn't meet his individual needs. The writer spends more time complaining about Gnome 2.6 than anything else -- and many of those complaints are "taste" issues, based on personal preference, not technical merits.
The beauty of free software is choice . Why trash a product because of personal prejudices, when you can simply try something else? Or, in the case of the reviewer, actually learn how things work, so you can change things to your liking. I run Gnome on one of my workstations; I strongly dislike the spatial browser -- but rather than complain, I changed a setting, and now it works the way I want! Sure, KDE can be "eye candy" heavy at times -- but I turn features off, or, better yet, install a lighter GUI like XFCE on system that don't need the bells and whistle. All this review tells me is that the reviewer is incapable of learning, growing, or changing.
I don't use Fedora, though I have used Red Hat in the past. The choice of distro is very personal and application-specific. I do software development and scientific research; I want bleeding edge and fast performance, so I'm running Gentoo. My wife's laptop, on the other hand, has Mandrake and Windows on it. My servers run Debian.
Freedom is about choice.
All about me
I have to wonder about this; to me red-hat's decision to drop its own distro was monumentally stupid. The reason people knew and used Redhat in the workplace was because they knew about it from using it during the run-up to the Linux Revolution. By dropping their distro, they also lose (IMO) a lot of clout in the industry by no longer being a big player. And even though Fedora Core is no longer called "red-hat" everyone knows where it came from, and the fact that it sucks balls without Redhat's QA pretty much makes people associate FC's languid performance with that of it's creator, Redhat the company.
I mean, imagine if Sun Microsystems gave up on Java. They don't make that much money off of it (they make some money by licensing it for Cell phones and the like), but if they did that, I think a lot of people would write them off as dead. Or if Microsoft gave up on Internet Explorer.
And despite what marketers hoped, as Fedora Core continues to suck, so will people's opinions about Redhat.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
When Disneyland opened up, nothing worked. All the rides broke down, there was really very little experience going on except a friendly staff and a bunch of Restaurants. It wasn't really the Happiest Place On Earth right off the bat.
FC2 has been out for almost 2 weeks. Considering a major migration to the 2.6 kernel, which still has a host of compatibility issues with a bunch of programs (particularily sound drivers, what with there being a move from OSS to ALSA). I'd say give it a little bit of time. Yeah, the test versions are supposed to iron out these kinks, but in this world, I don't think that the beta test really gets underway until the official release comes out.
The fixes will come. apt and yum repositories will get better. The dual boot problem will get fixed.
Quit your bellyaching and have a little bit of patience. If you really have a problem, I recommend that you either start contributing to the project (It _IS_ open source, you know) or you march right into Red Hat's office and demand your $0 back.
Karma: Non-Heinous
I tried to set up Fedore 2 on one of my older machines (a 400Mhz system) a few weeks ago - no dice and X kept crashing all the time after a few hours of active use. I'm not sure if it was my box, but it's happily running RH 9.0 at this point. Besides all the problems I also hated the fact that it never asked me for he boot level. There was no way to select level 3 from the get-go and a novice trying to get to a pure commandline interface would experience problems. I also hear a lot of complaints from my group of colleagues - looks like a lot of them are switching to other distros. Anyway, I'll keep RH 9 running and will give Fedora another shot next time I set up a box - those problems better be fixed though...
Yes, Ximian Evolution and Mozilla are totally wonderful. The system itself is rock solid and fast. But... Disks still don't mount automatically on the desktop. Cameras, printers, etc don't work out of the box. The interface is inconsistent and Windows-like (though better than Windows). There are few usable commercial applications. Font handling is nonexistent. Font rendering is terrible. How can it be so hard to make Linux work as smoothly as Mac OS X? It took them three years years of hard work, but Apple made Nextstep/Openstep, FreeBSD and MACH work like magic with only a few hundred programmers. Why can't IBM, Novell, Sun, Red Hat and other scooperate and really make Linux usable? They should get together and just do it! Unify Linux under a common brand, a common interface, a universal way of installing software and so on. Just give us the stuff now! Maybe they ought to call Steve Jobs' guys at Apple and ask them to do it?
How hard would it be to warn the user that there's not enough contrast between the background and foregroung color for text to be readable? At the very least, the system could warn the user if they are the same color.
I also tried Fedora Core 2.
o raCoreGetti ngStarted/
I have experienced only one major problem. The nvidia driver from nvidia.com did not work.
The other problems are bound to the free nature of FC2. So there is no MP3 or Video Codec support. There is also no ntfs kernel driver. But with a little searching all those packets are available from independent sources.
The folowing article was very helpfull:
http://www.johnmunsch.com/articles/Fed
And btw. I really like the new gnome 2.6. Spatial nautilus is quite different from the old one but I think it is worth adapting to.
I used to use Red Hat back in the 5.* and 6.* days, but switched to Debian after that time. Debian has been very good to me, as I love apt.
;)
However, for my work desktop, I wanted good stability and some new features, without spending alot of time. So, as stable was getting old, and testing kept breaking my desktop printing the past month, I decided to try Fedora Core 2. I first installed Windows XP, and then just stuck the FC2 disk in and let it rip. I had a very easy setup for not using Red Hat in many years. I've had no problems with Grub, and it boots into Windows or FC2. I used Yum, though slower than Apt, to sucessfully get Flash and Xboard (got to have my chess club games, errr, on my work breaks
Still, I will say that when Debian finally gets the current testing to stable, I will go back for my workstation. The Debian installer in testing was wonderful, and I preferred it to FC2. And nothing compares to Apt. And yes, I know there are repositories for Fedora for Apt, perhaps I will mess around with that in between chess games, err, work.
I agree with him on gedit, the older version was better, much easier to use.
I agree on not having an easy way to edit the main menu, that is the sucks.
I agree on not having all the apps AVAILABLE on a menu someplace, how the HECK is a noob supposed to know what's on there, yet alone try it out or use it? What, there's some rule you have to be psychic? Is it too much to have a list, with an entire paragraph describing WHAT such and such an app is and what it does? One steenking human readable paragraph, just one at a minimum, connected to each app on a menu that had everything on it. That would be *nice*, real nice.
I don't have a problem with sound, sound worked right off the bat automagically, and "fixing" xmms is as easy as uncommenting the mpeg placeholder plugin, and downloading and installing the xmms-mp3 plugin, now I got shoutcast streams for my favorite ranting radio. I assume the broadband speeds music channels work as well.
video, again, no problems seeing this monitor using some old 2 meg video card. i guess I don't see a need to drop hundred or two hundred dollars to star at the same screen, and I don't do video games, so that's that. If the latest "turbovidia" whosis don't work, I really don't care. And if it's because "turbovidia, inc" won't release linux drivers, WHY would you WANT to financially support that company anyway? $%&^K 'em! why support dickhead companies with your loot? To play GAMES? Life is way too interesting to "play games", go play "real life" instead.
rhythm box, never used it. xmms rules. why mess with success? I looked at it, ehh. maybe it works, no idea. xmms is nice and small and works.
Open office I don't use, so I skipped installing it, and it was choking on it anyway. There's half a dozen more do dads/text editors to type up crap with there left over, all of them work just fine. Maybe business really needs all that crap, but I simply can't imagine how business "got along" before office this or office that. I think it's 3/4ths "office busy work" to justify more white collar workers meselfs. Don't need it. We need more widget builders, we got way too many widget organizers, managers, bosses, clerks, accountants, lawyers and "personal assistants". More real work, less "busy-ness" please. that's what worked in the past when we really were making some loot and building a middle class. WORKERS, not "busy-ness"men. Fixation on "office" crap is just that, an unnatural fixation. You don't need most of it.
xpdf displays acrobat documents OK, I've used it already. I never create any PDF, so there ya go
mozilla 1.6 is a great browser, tastes great, less filling, no probs there.
Still too many things turned on by default, a little nmap action and some new firewall rules took care of that. Well, maybe I don't know, that's why I have a stand alone "beta box" I'm on. if anything happens, poof, erase, try it again. fedora is BETA. Even a release is BETA. that is what it is designed for. FREE beta ware. It's great for that. That is a bitch I got though,back to firewalls, there needs to be a much better firewall included with some written in non-geek howtos for noobs (moi for sure) and whatnot. The default "firewall-on" leaves some stuff still open, near as I can see anyway. ya, ya, I should get a router and stuff...
Dual boot with windows? Why, what for? I don't play video games, and if I did I'd buy one of them game console things. get the right tool for the right job. And if I "needed" windows for work, I'd think about that again, especially if "da boss" insisted on it, because that proves he already makes bad business decisions and will continue to do so, so your job might be in higher jeopardy..
%^)
kde versus gnome versus some voodoo leet window installer thing. No idea, I've tried kde several times, half the apps would segfault or not even turn on. I have been underwhelmed with it. I understand for some people it's the slickest thing since 6 packs to go, but for me it's always been near-horr
I installed Core 2 on an AMD 1800+ dual processor machine and on an AMD_64 machine. While my experience has been slightly different on each machine, neither one has been bad.
Everything installed as expected and works as expected. I have not been able to get my NVidia card to work in 3D mode, but my ATI card was detected and set up correctly by Core 2.
One of my machines had to be in Japanese. Core 2 performed this installation without a hitch (which is a lot more than I can say for SuSE 9.1. It failed miserably).
I don't normally like RPM based distributions, but Core 2 has been fine so far.
I realize that there are some bugs people have run into, but everything has worked great for me on my machines. SuSE 9.1 was a disaster on both of my machines (old packages, Japanese installation fails to find any packages to install, sound didn't work, several programs core dumped on me, etc.) so maybe after that experience, anything that worked would look good.
Finally, I like Gnome 2.6 quite well, and after using the new spatial nautilus for a week or so, I think I like it that way better.
The testing on laptops was terrible. I had a lot of problems getting the synaptics touchpad to work properly, but eventually I got it to work like it should. There were also some strange problems with compiling the linux-wlan module, but they were solved after re-installing the kernel source. I also had a couple minor problems with the changeover from XFree86 to Xorg (naming problems), and ACPI loading where APM should have (both are competing power management standards).
Everything is fixed now, and FC2 even solved two annoying problems I had with FC1. Those being namely a nasty sound playing the first time a sound played, and the whole machine locking up every time I took out my wireless PCMCIA card. I will say that FC2 isn't for a beginner linux user as they'd probbably never be able to solve all the problems I had to.
The minor 2.6 kernel incompatibilities still are being shaken out a bit, but if you're willing to read through bugzilla a bit you should be able to fix all the problems and come out with a nicer system.
AccountKiller
Windows/Fedora Core 2 dual booting "feature" - This does not affect only Fedora, and it took about 3 minutes to fix on my pc.
My favorite quote - How can you be happy about the review making not only Fedora but linux in general look bad.
broken audio drivers - I am yet to see a distro that has 100% working audio drivers.
abomination known as Gnome 2.6 - If you dont like it that is what other desktops like KDE are for.
I'm interested to hear others views about this review... - This review sucks. It may have some good points, but there is nothing in Fedora Core 2 that cant be avoided or fixed.
I have been using Fedora Core 2 on my main system in everyday use.
i sh
Gnome:
Gnome is just coming into it's own. In another year it will probably own the Linux desktop. This is what people are responding to. It's stable. I have one gripe, that the menus are locked items are locked--as root as well. The "On top" option is a GUI godsend.
Window managers:
I want rounded corners and shadows on everything! no sharp pointy things--ouch! they are supposed to represent a button that you would want to press in real life.
Theme:
Legible and easy to read, but if I had my druthers, I would want to Gnome stock to have the same stock icon set as Firefox.
Aps: The software Linux software selection is pretty good.
I like and use often (thanks)
Openoffice
Thunderbird
Firefox
Bluef
Gimp (Hey, we still need previews on the transformations)
Ltris
Xine
GFTP
Mahjonng (Want tiles to cause shadows : )
Gonvert
Gthumb
Rhythembox
Synaptic
Though, I am not aware of ANY GIU music editing software that I can record, and arrange midi and waves on, like Sonar or Cubase, or so many others on Windows or Mac. If there was Cubase SX for Linux, I would buy it. I have been to CCRMA, have you found what I am looking for? Editing music is one thing where I just don't want to think too much to do. One of my guitar teachers put it best, 'It should be like fucking." It is somethig that I don't want to do from the command line.
Spatial:
The spatial thing if fine, but we need to be able to add items in the "places" menu, this will make it much more usable for me.
Yum/Yuk:
Synaptic and Apt should replace Yum and Up2date. I told everone they were not going to get it working before Core 2 release. I believe that Redhat is steering us wrong here, because there still is no working Gui for Yum. I have never seen Yum work as fast as Apt. I have never seen up2date run well for installing one small thing with no depends. up2date will not allow you to install any non RH approved packages. You can edit the yum.config, but it seems that they don't really want you to do that, becasue that would take away their business model for this disrto.
Kernal Nivida 4K stacks:
If it does give lower latency, fine. I personally think if is the only thing that doesn't run well, then it seems that Java needs work. I still don't have working Nvidia drivers, but they are working on it. As fustrating as this is, I can't be bothered to compile a new kernal when updated drivers might be out in a week or two.
Vi and Emacs:
I will end this once and for all. Dump them both and write one new modern editor that uses modern key combos and modern organizations. These things seem really old, and I am not working from a real xteminal keyboard. Keep the power. This friendly rift is just the kind of thing that Bill Gates wants. The holy war is over--they both are old and cantankerous. Your not in college any more--write a new text editor that suits everyone's configuring needs. I often use gedit, but I want something that runs in a text window too.
Kernal:
This is going to get me in some trouble, but here goes. The one thing, the only thing I can't stand about Linux is, I have to modify or rebuild the kernal for any and every occasion. I do not want to mess with the kernal on a daily basis. I need to get work done with this computer. My heart was beating through my chest the last time I was even adding kernal moduals.
Tar:
I think by backup set will exceed tar soon in a year or two--it's 4.7GB now!
Hate GUIs?
The command line is fine, but if you should be able to install/deinstall software from a GUI as well. Otherwise people aren't going to be able to maintain this system. I find that it is more work to maintain this system than Windows 2000, but otherwise it runs monstly the same as far as effort is concerned.
Make's rule: You should be able to do anything from the command line that you can do from the GUI.
Sher's rule: You should be able to do anything from the GUI that you can do from the command line.
Thanks for reading and have a nice day : )
BrendaEM
but why don't they just release a fix, or have they done it already? i haven't seen it mentioned in any reviews etc, and I know Mandrake 10.0 had this problem but they fixed it before the official release. what's the big deal if they simply release a bug, NOW, or does the bug affect you long before you even get to boot into fedora or something?
Personally, I'm getting sick and tired of rant pieces which pass theirselves off as a proper review. The reviewer uses a lot of harsh adjectives to describe the product they're reviewing even before he presents his arguments painting an ugly color of the product even before he gets to the gist.
/etc/sysconfig. I like the use of Python (a great scripting language which works well with modifying text files like config files). It's got the latest and greatest features which make sense for me. And these new features don't mean unstable, either.
He calls Gnome 2.6 and "abomination" and calls FC2 "Fedora Project's second litter of pups unsuitable for any use other than as laboratory animals" without even clarifying why or who his intended audience are. Not to mention his use of puppies in use a lab animals is sickening.
Fedora Core 2, as is Gnome 2.6, has an intended audience. These are first-time users of Linux in Enterprise settings. The aim is to present desktop computing in an easy-to-use fashion without a steep learning curve. Fedora does this well by presenting only the most commonly needed features. Does this mean Fedora or Gnome 2.6 are featureless? Not at all. Most of these features are just underneath the surface, something any geek or tech would be able to find out by RTFM or asking around.
Take his example of the new FileChooser: he says one can't type the file name, but one can just by pressing l, similar to how it is with almost all browsers. You can even do tab-completion with it.
Or take the case of Nautilus spatial browser. I think using it as default is genius! New users don't have folders 5 kilometers deep nor $HOME directories 4 kilometers wide. Most users will just want a place to store documents, pictures and audio/video files. When the time comes that they need to see the folder hierarchy, they can switch to explorer view.
The reviewer's problem is he has a bias for some other distribution and against Fedora (or possibly RedHat), in particular, and continues to paint his review accordingly. Let's leave shoddy journalism like that to Ken Brown.
Then there's the problem of breaking dual-booting when using WinXP. This problem isn't particular to Fedora and, in fact, the Fedora community have already come up with solutions to said problem.
Another issue is Fedora breaking things by introducing technology. Unfortunately, new technology can and most often do break old stuff. If it weren't for RedHat, the widespread use of gcc 2.95 and gcc 3 would've taken months longer.
NVidia is aware of the changes made to the Fedora kernel and are even now in the process of developing new video drivers. Fedora kernel hackers do things for a reason. If people insist on criticizing their choices, at the very least have some technical arguments to back up your case. They (FC devs) don't do things to make life harder for people, you know.
For enterprise users, I think FC2 is a great candidate. It's stable (for all 5 of the different platforms I've put it on including HP Vectras and eVectras which are common in enterprises), feature-complete and simple and easy enough to learn. For technical people (like me), I have to say I like it! I like the way configs are stored in
# do this once - presuming your using IA32 hardware
/usr/src/linux ; make xconfig ; make bzImage ; make modules ; make modules_install ; mv /boot/main /boot/failsafe ; cp /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/main ; lilo ; init 6" > /usr/sbin/recompile_kernel ; chmod +x /usr/sbin/recompile_kernel
/etc/lilo.conf to point to /boot/main and /boot/failsafe, and run
echo "cd
# then append
# recompile_kernel whenever you want to recompile the kernel
Isn't Fedora just a showcase of new technology? People are treating it like it should be more stable than it actually is. Instead of complaining, and writing negative reviews, wouldn't contributing to Fedora, and providing constructive reviews be better for Fedora, and for the Linux community?
By the way, I have had no problems with Fedora. Sound worked without any tweaking, and it will boot to XP using grub without a hitch. I suspect I will have problems though. It's expected.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is a dupe, the topic is boring, the facts weren't checked. WE GET IT!!
Hey forget about FC2 and it's problems
:)
Mandrake 10 is out! And it Rulez!
Having learned first-hand what RH's development cycle is like, this no longer surprises me.
This is not a troll. I've seen their dev process. It leaves much to be desired, to say the least; unfortunately, I shouldn't say much more than that.
" It work here very well. Maybe he should help out to try to solve his problem instead of writing inflammatory articles."
Your experience isn't necessarily indicative of all or even *most* people's experiences with FC2. I mean, I've been running Windows 95A, 98SE or 2000 Pro continuously since 1995 with a ton of peripherals and software without any viruses, worms, corrupt registries or other problems besides the occassionally rare crash (especially since 2KPro). By your logic, I should blast everyone on Slashdot who says inflammatory things about Windows, but I don't since it's clear that my experiences aren't others'.
I installed FC2 on my laptop with the setup for a dual boot with windows xp. I was really trying to make the switch over to linux. I feel it was rushed because bugs (I mean that loosely as to not start a flame war and to prevent the "well you're just stupid!" replies) were not fixed. On one machine, alright it's old but no other distro has a problem with it, it wouldn't even install where as FCrc2 would. I don't know why it wouldn't, the installer simply said it couldn't be installed. I'm making an assumption here but maybe it was because something was broken from FCrc2 and instead of fixing it, they just removed the hardware support entirely.
:) ).
Anyway, on my laptop I didn't have the boot problem, but it did mess up my partitions and I had to fix that with other tools which was a little nerve racking because I thought I might lose data. Firewire didn't work and required loading the kernel module and I didn't know how to do that and I think most newbies wouldn't either. The interface was pretty ugly as they make kde and gnome look the same with the ugly gnome theme they gave it. But that's a small thing and not really a complaint, just an annoyance. Also, the 4k stack issue with nvidia was a pain, but I think nvidia is to blame on that one. All these hiccups I wish I knew about before I installed it. I guess I didn't read the release notes as well as I should have, but I think those are big issues and shouldn't have been buried in the long release notes.
So what did I do? I switched over to mandrake 10 and the past couple of days have been better. For reasons that were my fault the first time, but unknown to me the second time, I have reinstalled it twice in a span of about a week or so, but I'm determined to get it going so I don't care. I've only gone into windows to get an email address these past few days. I've never been this comfortable with linux this much on any other distro, so I think that says something good about mandrake.
To me, it seemed they rushed fedora. I've always felt that a strong point with linux has been they don't rush things like microsoft does. However, with respect to fedora, I think they were more focused on the release date than releasing a stable and robust product even after two release canidates.
On a side note, I've taken that old machine that wouldn't run FC2, loaded mandrake on it, and now I'm installing gentoo from a stage 1 on it. It's still bootstrapping and I'll know in..oh..a few days if it goes well.
This post isn't meant to start a flame war or entice fedora advocates to tell me what an idiot I am because I couldn't get it to work. At this point in the history of linux and especially red hat, I expect a little more. Thankfully, I've recieved that from other distros including mandrake, knoppix, and suse (and hopefully gentoo
Why do I use Gentoo? For the simple fact that I kept bumping into RPMs that needed to be recompiled. Heck, if I'm going to recompile RPMs, I might as well just go for the source, where I can tell it I don't certain features (like OSS support, etc.). Gentoo also taught me a lot more about my system, since you do have to know more to get it going. If you think that you can just "emerge world", sadly, sometimes, it does not work.
As for the eMachines comment, well, if termos wants to "whip it out", let's just compare workstations...I've got a dual P4 2.8 GHz with 4GB RAM, an SATA array with 500 GB of hard drive space, 2 ATI 9800 (one AGP, one PCI) with 2 21" LCDs and 1 20" LCD, an Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro (just installed), running 2.6.6 with mm patches. Gentoo handles it just fine, and I guarantee it blows past any off-the-shelf RPM distro. Why? Because I upgraded it from SuSE; it's considerably faster, and I've never looked back.
So, please don't talk about what you may not really use or know. To each his own. That's the real value of Open Source.
...tizzyd
This is an example of the "problem" with Linux (and the perpetually beta software packaged with it) going mainstream.
......" or similar.
In the *old* days. When a Linux user had a problem with a program in a linux distro he/she fixed it, and sent a patch so that others could benefit from the fix. This resulted in these systems contiually getting better (the opposite of OS rot windows users are so familiar with).
Now that non developers are increasingly using these distros, there is a lot more complaining but, not an associated amount of fixing going on.
People seem to forget that the majority of the development on any of these distros is done for free (read Joe/Jane developer working in his/her free time). The professional developers working for RedHat, Mandrake, etc... are mostly building config tools.
The result of this, the developers who actually build the apps get more and more abuse, without a cooresponding amount of help. We've already seen many developers drop out of projects for this reason.
I would suggest the author and others who feel as he to think about this. If you want to make linux better without (actually doing it) writing code, encourage the developers. Let them know about things that don't work so well. If you want a new feature, try offering a bribe. Say, "I'll mail some beer to whoever implements
Just my 2 cents.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
Forgot the url Upgrade to FC2 without floppy or CDROM http://www.fedorazine.com/content/view/188/38/
First problem was that it totally botched configuring the boot manager. It took out my RH9 entries from grub.conf, but failed to add any entries for FC2. My guess is that it was confused by an entry I had for a test 2.6.0 kernel I had compiled to play with when contemplating just updating RH9 to 2.6 myself.
I don't recall all the other specific problems I had, but basically I spent all day tracking down and fixing little things that didn't work, after I fixed the bad grub.conf.
The most annoying is that it does not install the policy stuff. This causes RPM to give an error about some missing file every time you install an RPM. This error seemed to confuse up2date, because that hung every time it went to install RPMs. Yum was also broken. I had Yum installed from Fedora Legacy, and apparently that is a later version than the one in FC2, so FC2 does not update it, but it does update some libraries that Yum depends on to versions that Yum doesn't like. So, you have to "rpm -e yum" by hand, and then install Yum from the FC2 disc to get a working Yum.
After doing that I tried to use yum to bring things up to date, and that failed because of a dependency problem with php-manual. php-manual depends on a specif version of php, and so yum could not update that version of php. Again, I suspect that this came from Fedora Legacy.
I also gave FC2 a try at home, as a fresh install on my second disk. It handled most of my hardware, except for my soundcard. I have an Asus P4PE with onboard sound. It is supposedly supported by ALSA, but no sound plays.
There were a few other minor problems, but none of the total hell from the RH9 upgrade test. Still, I am pretty unimpressed by the state of disorganization of the overall Fedora project. For example, there's no obvious mention of Fedora Legacy on Redhat's Fedora site. The Fedora.us site contains a bunch of useful information also not on the Redhat site.
So, I figured that if I am going to have to install from scratch (which I can do--I've got good backups of all my data), I might as well take a look at SuSE. I bought 9.1. So far, my test installs have gone OK, except for one major problem: it doesn't work under VMWare! As soon as the kernel starts loading during install, the keyboard goes away. I was going to try it with a USB keyboard to see if that made a difference, but I can't even get VMWare to boot when I have USB 1.x support in my RH9 system. (RH9 has serious USB problems. It works great mostly with USB2 devices (although occasionally I've had to reboot to get a disk to show up as a /dev/sdX device, even though it is showing up on lsusb)), but sometimes fails to load the USB 1.x modules, so they need to be loaded manually. However, when I do that, things that use USB get very slow to load).
However, tests on my second disk worked fairly well with SuSE, with two problems.
First, it has the same soundcard problem FC2 does. I thought it might be a 2.6 kernel problem, but Knoppix with 2.6 finds it fine and plays sound. Doing some experimenting, I have determined that the snd-intel8x0 module simply does not work right. However, the i810-audio module works (which is what Knoppix uses). So, all I have to do is let SuSE configure my soundcard, and then change the module loading stuff from snd-intel8x0 to i810-audio. (That didn't work on FC2 because the kernel shipped with FC2 doesn't include that module. I have to rebuild the kernel to enable OSS...another strike against FC2, since I want to be able to use the kernel from the distro). (Another thing they didn't configure into FC2 is Firewire. Enough computers nowadays include that that I don't understand how they cannot include modular Firewire support).
The only other SuSE problem I saw in my tests was X configuration. Even though they have an entry for my monitor (Gateway
FC2 does not boot on some late-revision Asus P4P800SE boards (a very common board). Things just reboot after the grub screen.
There are patched CD images out there (since the install CD boots using said problematic kernel), and you can work around the problem on already-installed systems (if you upgraded by just using apt/yum) by using the SMP kernel instead of the uniprocessor one.
May we never see th
Sorry to jump so late into the conversation, but I am extremely impressed with Fedora Core 2. It's by far the smoothest and most well-integrated linux distro I've used.
The fonts look great. The mime handlers are set up right so I get sensible options to handle files that I download from a web browser. Thunderbird comes integrated with gpg.
Nautilus is just bizarrely fast - and I rather like the spatial thing. Spatial nautilus is terrible for just browsing a filesystem, but for doing real work like moving files around it's great. (And if you want to just browse, select "Browse filesystem.") I can type smb://wherever from the "run" dialog and have it browse windows servers. Great stuff.
And in general, Gnome 2.0 is very nice looking and user-friendly. It opens my files fine, it has software to to just about everything I use a computer for. For the first time ever, a newly installed distro has the feel of a computer that a real expert worked on, installing all the interesting plugins, getting stuff properly integrated, doing the little tweaks that I always had to do myself (Or more likely never bothered to do and just put up with minor inconveniences).
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I want a distro that I can install and just use. The only real customization I've had to do was manually install gdesklets and beep-media-player and get lm_sensors working. (The latter failed because my sensors aren't supported under 2.6 kernels yet.)
With yum, between the main repository and freshrpms, I have just about anything I might want to install.
Compared to my gentoo-using friends, I feel almost guilty about how easy it is to use, as if I was a Windows user or something.
It's just a fine distro, in my opinion. It reflects the hard work of a lot of generous people, and this review is unreasonably mean-spirited.
I was a RH - then Mandrake - junkie from 1998 until 2003. Then I tried SuSE and found it to be a very nice distro, and it became my desktop distro of choice. I had only minimal exposure to Debian/potato. I just upgraded my server to the testing/sarge distro, and have to wonder why any experienced user would live with the many issues I encountered in the above distros, including utilities that didn't work, poorly tested packages, and unresolveable system slowdowns. All of the above distros are very nice if you have little or no experience with gnu/linux, but I can't tell you how impressed I am with debian. It still has a lot of legs left in it, and kde has advanced to the point where many of the Mandrake Control Center/YaST tools are redundant. The only extra package I installed for convenience was synaptic. I have also replaced my desktop with debian. debian testing, and unstable for that matter, seems more stable than Mandrake or FC (I haven't tried FC2 or SuSE 9.1 so can't comment on them). And to the writer of the article, enough of the gnome 2.6 bashing. We all get the point - a lot of people don't like it, but it is a matter of choice isn't it? And a lot of the nautilus issues have been worked out, such as browsing SMB shares. Lighten up Francis!
What the hell is the author's problem with Gnome 2.6? So far, it's worked very well for me and my co-workers. Fedora Core 2 has now become our distro of choice at work (and we have really put it to the test).
And the author's use of animals in his examples is VERY disturbing! The author needs to remove Linux from his machines and reinstall Windoze. Personally, I don't want the author in our community.
Not very creditable, in my book!
OK...lets run this play by slowly.
.........simply change!
Redhat shuts down support for their full distro of Red Hat.
Then Red Hat declares Enterprise Red Hat or some
such: is to be the flagship product; is promptly priced out of reach of the average user; and it is announced that most support will be of the 'paid' variety.
Then Red Hat declares a 'second' line of software called 'Fedora' will be its comsumer product. SECOND LINE MEANS SECOND RATE.
Then Red Hat announces changes to its licensing model like they wanted to become a kind of 'nice SCO'. They really sound like they no longer like linux but prefer a form of Unix with a different licensing model than the GNU license.
To me this is a jerking of the welcome mat. Red Hat no longer wants us little folk in its fold. If it longer wants us, why should we hang around? Is it because we think that Red Hat is closer to the RPM standard? Think again. Having ominousely moved to become more like SCO/Windows (really one company as Paul Allen the half owner of Microsoft
owns controlling interest in SCO as well), what would keep them from moving further?
Better to change to a more linux friendly and better updated model than continue to use a a nonw second rate product from a company that appreciates us no longer. To stay with Red Hat out of a misplaced sense of loyalty would be a great mistake. Their are other distros out there
that would be happy to have us.....like Debian and Slackware and Red Flag and Mandrake and more others than I can think of off hand. They deserve a chance to be appreciated for their loyalty to their customers and to the principle of freedom in software.
Like the motto on SuSE's website says.....
and hey, SuSE 9.1 does work networks better out of the box but it falls down on understanding USB.......but since ver 9.0 it does know joysticks now. That ought to worry the gnomes of Redmond to no end.
The default kernel allows for installation onto SATA based workstations and servers. This in the past was such a problem, especially with Silicon Image based controllers, which required proprietary drivers and specific kernels. The sata_sil support isn't the most stable in 2.6 but better than 2.4.
NVidia users will need to compile a new kernel w/o the 4K stack size but other than that the distro is not that bad.
Users complaining about gnome or kde need to spend less time looking at their GUI and pitch in on making Open Source software better by either helping w/ the QA process or even submitting patches.
I just upgraded my FC1 installation to FC2. What I'm noticing is how many things have been improved but not to the point where I can say that I've used no better desktop systems. Unfortunately the problems I notice exist in virtually every GNU/Linux distribution, so they don't all have to do with FC2 per se. A little about me: I am a programmer and quite familiar with the benefits of having software freedom. I understand a lot of the underlying technical issues for making an OS that "just works". As I grow older I no longer care about following the details. My attention turns toward bigger picture items now, like how can I easily make backups of my documents, how can I easily uninstall software, how can I easily move from one application to its competitor.
I am becoming a firm believer in clean installs rather than upgrades because upgrades so often just don't work. No operaing system provides everything you need, so people routinely install third-party software and even on MacOS X (which is touted as being far simpler and far more unified, hence far better for the desktop user) I have not yet known anyone to be able to avoid problems with system upgrades. Clean installs also offer people a chance to do something they too often never do: make backups.
Some of the major issues I've come across: touch-click trackpad support is gone (where you can touch the trackpad twice in succession as an alternative way of clicking the left mouse button). I never knew how much I missed it until I tried a friend's Apple iBook running MacOS X which does not have it and has no readily apparent way to turn this on. I thought this feature would be there in FC2 final release (it wasn't there in prereleases) and it apparently isn't there. I've been told that this is a Linux kernal feature so if I want the feature back I would have to become out of sync with kernel upgrades supplied by the Fedora Core project and lose the ability to easily upgrade my kernel via FC's up2date. I don't care how easy it is to recompile a kernel once you've gotten the swing of it, I've got much more important issues on my plate and, while I appreciate the software freedom aspect of the Linux kernal, I value my time; I value being able to get on with what I use a computer to do. I'm looking to make things easier on myself, not introduce more maintenance.
The sound system in GNU/Linux is still not unified and smoothly working. I still can't be sure that I can simultaneously play bzflag while listening to some Ogg Vorbis files (or a streamed downloaded) with XMMS or Rhythmbox. On other systems (like later versions of NeXTSTEP and most if not all versions of MacOS X), sound is easy to use and simultaneous sound sources work right out of the box. This is one area of desktop usage where I am content to dissuade letting a thousand flowers bloom (in terms of what is shipped to the end-user) because I would prefer instead to have a single simple (no-setup-needed, it just works right out of the box) sound system. But I don't know (or care to learn) the technical details which prevent this from working smoothly. I figure that this is something that should be provided by any distribution. Recording sound is also a mess: the GNOME sound recorder program still crashes in such a way that no Bug Buddy is brought up to help me easily submit a crash report to the developers and there are way too many sliders on the sound volume panel to know what I want to do without having to learn grotty details about something I should be able to just use. I doubt this situation would remain acceptable if measured against its competition on other operating systems.
I understand that some users want e-mail and calendar integration, so Evolution looks like an attractive program. I think more users want trainable spam filtering and I don't see where Evolution 1.4 (the version of Evolution I got with FC2) provides trainable spam filtering. So Evolution is a non-starter for me. I'll take Mozilla mail or Thunderbird over Evolution because I don't co
Digital Citizen
just put your Mom on any distro properly set up using KDE, start Star Office for her and tell her
it is windows excell and she will never know the difference!
..At least, for me it is. I performed an in-place upgrade of my RedHat 9 firewall/web/mail box a couple weeks ago and, except for converting existing mail from Berkeley to Cyrus-IMAPd, exerything happened automatically and seamlessly. My web server, Postfix mail setup, SSH, and firewall rules were perfectly preserved, much to my delight.
:-)!
The only slight gripe is that I had to manually find and run the mail conversion scripts so that I can see my mail in IMAP again, since Cyrus-IMAPd uses its own format separate from the former UW-IMAPd.
I'm much happier with Cyrus-IMAPd than I was with UW-IMAPd, and I was even able to get IMAPs and SMTPs up and running with instructions that I found on Google. I'm actually considering Fedora Core 2 as an upgrade path to the ye olde Exchange 5.5 on NT4 at work, since it runs so well at home.
Fedora Core 2 Kerberized and SASLized pretty much everything, making it much easier to set up secure services than it was in previous RedHat versions (though, I haven't tried Fedora Core 1, nor will I probably ever). No more need to recompile everything to get TLS, SSL and other things in IMAP, SMTP, HTTP, and other services
After much time with a debian installtion, I thought I would try Fedora Core 2 because my friend described it to me as "awesome". After a very smooth installtion (including setting up dual boot - I did it myself after reading the bad reports) things started to go a bit pear shaped. For a start the setup for my lcd screen didnt work, the refresh rate was running at 75 instead of 60, quick changed using the graphical "Change Resolution", and yeap, changed the resolution and the screen looked normal. After a few reboots, my screen now either starts up in 60 or 75 hz mode seemingly at random. My friend also has a problem where his mouse stops to work after a few minutes and he has to tab his way through to the keyboard settins to refresh his mouse.
Next problem, due to SELinux every boot has an audit(...) line which takes about 2-3 minutes, a pain in the bum for a desktop setup.
Furthermore, things just seem crap, a pain in the arse getting NVIDIA setup due to the renowned 4k stacks problem, needing a kernel recompile to get the nvidia drives installed.
All of these little things just make me think Core 2 was rushed to include the 2.6 kernel, and it just doesnt seem very polished.
Back to debian sarge.
"Pushing little children, with their fully automatics, they like to push the weak around"
I am running Fedora Core 2 on my Inspiron 8600.
- Wireless support absolutely sucks, even for the SMC EliteConnect card which is fairly standard in the meantime. I am using hostap which works great but it is a pain to install. Wireless support in FC2 and in the kernel definitely needs to improve if people are supposed to run it on their notebooks. I know a number of people who would like to run Linux on their notebooks but are hesitant because they keep hearing how bad the wireless support is. It is the #1 reason for people not to use Linux on their notebooks.
- WUXGA(1920x1200) resolution is not properly supported by the FC2 installer so I had to edit xorg.conf.
- Sound(ALSA) works fine but I had to edit modules.conf.
- Nvidia still has not released the driver they have promised to work "out of the box" with the 2.6 kernel so I am waiting for that.
- everything else seems to work perfectly fine. The 2.6 kernel and Gnome 2.6 are huge improvements and I have to say I am very impressed by both.
Overall FC2 is a pretty good distro already and with improved wireless support and a few bug fixes it rocks. Admittedly, Gentoo is a very strong contender but until it comes with an integrated userfriendly(not geek friendly but newbie friendly) installer it is not of interest to most people. Several people have tried their luck on a graphical Gentoo installer e.g. http://gentoo.vidalinux.com/?q=node/view/35 and http://pen2.sclab.clarkson.edu but if a real code god comes along and writes a good and intuitive graphical installer Gentoo has the potential to become more popular and better than FC2.
Reading Ken Barber's "review" of Fedora Core 2, what strikes me most is his sense of entitlement. What I mean by that, is that he seems to feel that he has a right to expect certain things of FC2 (or any disto, for that matter) and that he has a right to be angry (is that too strong a word?) if they are not fulfilled. And he's not alone in that. I read the Fedora list, and I am amazed by the anger in some (few, fortunately) of the posts -- the XT dual boot problem, for example.
Not to be a Polyanna, but every time I sit down at my Fedora Core 2 / Gnome 2.6 system, I am amazed at how well it works, and how thousands of excellent developers all over the world have contributed, alowing me to receive -- at no cost -- software that would cost thousands of US$ in any other environment.
As a person who switched to FC1 two months ago (from Suse9), and then to FC2 immediately after it was released, I carefully read the whole thread... and here is what I think: .0 distro... so say "thanks" to all the people who have been working hard to roll it out and help them to correct bugs. THAT would be a helpful activity
* Both sides are very eager to produce arguments such as "Gnome is useless" or "my system does not boot at all". That is on one side, the other one simple states "it's the best system I used" or "you are an idiot yourself". To sum up, there are as many people who are satisfied with FC2 as there are people who don't like it. Sounds like a normal distribution to me
* yes, there seems to be an issue with dual-booting and another cryptic error with "not enough memeory" during the install process. But it seems to affect machines in such an unpredictable manner (I personally installed FC2 on 4 machines, 2 of them dual-boot)... and I never encountered any of these issues. So, before raising havoc about it, the problem should be investigated, and not just fed to the hungry Slashdot crowd as the "news of the day".
* Fedora Core2 has a specific aim... install it and start working. As a private opinion, it accomplishes this aim beautifully. Just install it, and 40 minutes later you can start typing & printing. IT HAS NEVER BEEN DESIGNED FOR PEOPLE WHO PRAY TO VI OR BELIEVE IN A COMMAND SHELL TO BE THE WORLD'S BEST GUI. It's a rather specific distro. Think about it.
* As mentionned by somebody, it's a
http://www.automatiq.se
FC2 has had a problem with most ASUS mobos from day one. One final and three test releases later it still won't load on most ASUS boxes. I liked FC1 although I thought it lost some ground on RH9. I had high hopes for FC2, but since I can't even load it I can only assume that it sucks. Didn't realize how passe ASUS was these days. Perhaps I should contact Red Hat to find out what mobo to use.
They should change their focus from RH9-feature/bloat-laden to a "lean" working environment, where each package doesn't depend upon 20 others.
Elegant simplicity with fast and easy configuration. You don't need (Py-)Gnome for that. Plain GTK/X is sufficient.
BUT!!! No other distro I have ever tried has this problem!!!
Creative Demolition
Ctrl + L will open the filename box, with autocomplete and all.
It's useless. Let's see...nowhere in the dialog box does it say to use ctrl-L to open a text box (I've played around with gedit before, out of curiosity, and I didn't know this keystroke until I read it in this thread). Ctrl-L also means extra typing, and you can't access the rest of the open dialog while the ctrl-L box is open.
Of course, the ctrl-L box is the only way to go to a directory without having to click your way through the filesystem (an extremely slow task) or type part of a file's name and have the file selected, which makes the two most important features of a file open dialog useless.
Here are some other horrible ``features'' of the Gnome 2.6 file selector, which are mostly inherited from the previous one:
No way to create your own filter. You're stuck with the ones that come with the app.
The file listing is purely vertical, which wastes space and makes navigation a pain (and what's up with the modification dates?). The above complaint about no filter creation only makes this worse. Conversely, the preset location panel is way too big, also wasting space.
I'm sure I'll think of more things I hate about this file dialog after I post this, but I think this is enough...for now.
I'll also add that I'll not be happy until the Gnome devs just decide to completely ape KDE's file selector. I love using KDE's file selector, and IMO, it's what every other file selector should base itself on.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
What about the coveted SMB (small & Mid Business) users who have a limited (if existent) IT budget and have to dual boot for compatibility. They will not even consider a conversion if data loss is possible. They need the security and virus free properties of Linux but cannot afford data loss and a bloated install full of apps that they fear may be abused by employees. They want a browser, word processor, spreadsheet, and fewer not more problems than windoze.
...reading article...seeing screenshot...
You aren't.
When someone in KDE mentions usability or suggests some usability improvements, they get nothing but abuse. I often wonder why, since they are established developers and usually have good ideas. Now I see why. Gnome 'usablility improvements' have redefined the meaning. A 'usability expert' or 'usability study' has come to mean removing necessary functionality to meet some idealistic world view.
Maybe in KDE we need to define a new term to distance ourselves from the abominations going on in Gnome.
Suggestions anyone?
Derek
I'm not sure why everyone seems fit to pick on Fedora Core 2 alone... when other distros share many of the same problems. I'm not a Mandrake user but I know a few people who are... and everyone I've talked to who tried Mandrake 10 switched back to the 9 series because they had noticable differences in hardware compatibility. I'm not trying to pick on Mandrake here but it seems to me that the 2.6.x kernel simply isn't finished. I'm not trying to bad mouth the kernel developers... but it is a fact that Linus has not started a 2.7.x devel tree... and that even now the kernel developers are making major changes to important subsystems... in what is supposedly a production kernel.
I'm confident that in a couple of months, once the 2.6.x kernel has been weened from the developers... and all of the issues get worked out at the distribution level... it'll be a clear winner.
On the flipside of the coin, I've installed FC2 on about a dozen machines and have actually found that some hardware that didn't work in any previous distribution release, now works great in FC2. For me, FC2 works quite well on a variety of hardware and I am confident that as some of the minor issues are resolved, it will just get better and better.
I don't know if this is just a mis-perception, but I feel that the Fedora Core team is taking even bolder steps to mainstream Linux than Red Hat was... and Red Hat has always been aggressive in promoting new software technologies. I see this as a good thing. Without that pushing, Linux would not continue to improve and mature at the impressive rate it has enjoyed thus far.
Using Fedora Core 1 and now FC2, I can actually start to see the not too distant future where Linux has a good fighting chance at, dare I say it serioulsy?... the DESKTOP MARKET!
While it is true that FC2 isn't perfect, no new major release (new kernel, new releases of the desktop environs, etc) is born perfect... and it is unrealistic to think any will or even should. Regardless of the amount of people submitting bugs during the test-releases, in the real world an initial production release is just the next step in shaking out the bugs. It is that way even with Microsoft and Apple... even if they don't want to admit it. The difference is that our community is more open about the bugs and as a result, most of them get fixed and fixed faster.
In summary, quit picking on the fruits of Red Hat simply because you have some resentment about their change in marketing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and their success in the marketplace. If you want to debate those, do so directly. I don't expect everyone to love them, but give them the fair shake you give everyone else... and have realistic expectations. Long live Linux.
Scott Dowdle
www.MontanaLinux.Org
What about the coveted SMB users? Of course data loss is not something anyone would want. I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Are saying that FC2 has a problem causing data loss? Or that it doesn't and is one of the reasons that FC2 would be good for SMBs.
If it's the former, I am not aware of this problem. Not even the now-infamous dual-boot problem with WinXP has caused an dataloss.
If it's the latter, I'd have to agree. I've used FC1 for over a year now (and RHL before that) and FC2 since it was released and I've never had any problems resulting in dataloss. I should mention that I use it on different platforms including branded names like HP and custommade boxes using Athlon processors and Asus mobos. I also use FC2 for different purposes: as a webserver (with somewhat heavy usage), PostgreSQL database server, software development platform (C and Java development), computation linguistics workhorse, and gaming rig (Neverwinter Nights, UT2K4, Quake 3, etc.) It's great for SMBs if only for the no dataloss track record I've had with it.
A: Backup. Which they should be doing anyway, but probably aren't doing.
B: Research the dual boot issues and install when default packages are fixed.
C: Customize the install - leave the sink and dog-polisher out.
Remember, FC is, at it's best, a testbed. Period. It's target audience are us geeks - not enterprise users or even newbies. The technologies that get worked out thru us geeks submitting bug reports and get stabalized will get included in RH's supported commercial products.
Want a good dedicated "desktop" Linux? Use Mandrake or something.
Want a good freeby Linux with perhaps a few quirks (most if not all very workable) and very much like your oh-so-familiar RH? Use FC. Submit bug reports for the added warm fuzzy feeling...
But whatever you do, please don't contribute to the adolescent "reviews" like the latest rash of crap our misguided Linux news-sites have had the mistake to publish. Reading those reviews is like reading the idiotic whining and complaining so common here on Slashdot.
That's quite an facile editorial but you can't expect better from normal users. My screenshot looks better than yours. Evolution is better than KMail, GNOME looks more polished than KDE and so on. I do use XChat, Abiword, Rhythmbox.... ...usually you get stuff like these from normal users. And this is ok since you can't blame them for stuff they simply don't know about or don't have a slighest knowledge about.
Such editorials are hard to take serious since they are build up on basicly NO deeper knowledge of the matter. Most people I met so far are full of prejudices and seek for excuses or explaination why they prefer the one over the other while in reality they have no slightest clue on what parameters they compare the things.
If people do like the gance ICONS over the functionality then it's quite ok but that's absolutely NO framework to do such comparisons.
I do come from the GNOME architecture and spent the last 5 years on it. I also spent a lot of time (nearly 1 year now if I sum everything up) on KDE 3.x architecture including the latest KDE 3.2 (please note I still do use GNOME and I am up to CVS 2.6 release myself).
Although calling myself a GNOME vetaran I am also not shy to criticise GNOME and I do this in the public as well. Ok I got told from a couple of people if I don't like GNOME that I simply should switch and so on. But these are usually people who have a tunnelview and do not want to see or understand the problems around GNOME.
Speaking as a developer with nearly 23years of programming skills on my back I can tell you that GNOME may look polished on the first view but on the second view it isn't.
Technically GNOME is quite a messy architecture with a lot of unfinished, half polished and half working stuff inside. Given here are examples like broken gnome-vfs, half implementations of things (GStreamer still half implemented into GNOME (if you can call it an implementation at all)) rapid changes of things that make it hard for developers to catch up and a never ending bughunting. While it is questionable if some stuff can simply be fixed with patches while it's more required to publicly talk about the Framework itself.
Sure GNOME will become better but the time developers spent fixing all the stuff is the time that speaks for KDE to really improve it with needed features. We here on GNOME are only walking in the circle but don't have a real progress in true usability (not that farce people talk to one person and then to the next). Real usability here is using the features provided by the architecture that is when I as scientists want to do UML stuff that I seriously find an application written for that framework that can do it. When I eye over to the KDE architecture then as strange it sounds I do find more of these needed tools than I can find on GNOME. This can be continued in many areas where I find more scientific Software to do my work and Software that works reliable and not crash or misbehave or behave unexpected.
Comparing Nautilus with Konqueror is pure nonsense, comparing GNOME with KDE is even bigger nonsense. If we get a team of developers on a Table and discuss all the crap we find between KDE and GNOME then I can tell from own experience that the answer is clearly that GNOME will fail horrible here.
We still have many issues on GNOME which are Framework related. We now got the new Fileselector but yet they still act differently in each app. Some still have the old Fileselector, some the new Fileselector, some appearance of new Fileselectors are differently than in other apps that use the new Fileselector code and so on. When people talk about polish and consistency, then I like to ask what kind of consistency and polish is this ? We still have a couple of different ways to open Window in GNOME.
- GTK-Application-Window,
- BonoboUI Window,
- GnomeUI Window,
Then a lot of stuff inside GNOME are hardcoded UI's, some are using *.glade files (not to mention that GLADE the interface buil
My personal impression, summed up in one word: Patchwork.
I really appreciate the seamless consistency of KDE. It really annoys me to work in the inconsistent environment that is Gnome. I don't have time to fight the environment to make it look/feel the way I need it to (i.e. consistent).
For example, if you have clients -- say a CPA firm -- and they express how sick they are of Microsoft, and would you recommend an alternative (when this first happened to me, I tried to pinch myself and wake up, then picked my jaw off the floor). Now imagine what you're going to recommend: Gnome? No way in hell. Not when KDE offers magnitudes greater user-friendliness (read: consistency). Come on, be honest.
Gnome is written by geeks, for geeks. A lot would have to change for that to not be true. Even Novell, who purchased Ximian, aren't touching the SuSE formula (i.e. KDE is still the default).
I recently decided to migrate my girlfriend to a more user friendly linux distro. She had been using Gentoo for quite a while, but it was left up to me to do all the manual configurations, software updates, and installs. I wanted to give her something that she could use herself until she became more familar with the inner workings of linux....thus began my inadvertant testing of 3 major linux distros and one minor one.
First I tried mandrake. It had the repetation of being the most user friendly and I was told that the more recent releases had solved many of the instabilities that I had seen when I first tried it years ago. The install went flawlessly all hardware autodetected and drivers installed. I was simply tickled to death. But that did not last long, mandrake proved to be completely unstable and would hard lock several times a day. Also some "essential" programs for her would crash at the drop of a hat. K3b for example crashed everytime mp3's were dragged into the conversion window. Before it's mentioned all the hardware, ram, etc. was completely tested and perfectly ok. So mandrae flunked royally.
Next I tried Suse having heard many good things about it. Suse was the worst of the distros I tested. On the first install I fell victem to some weird, but not completely uncommon bug that resulted in modules compiled against a different version kernel than the kernel installed being used. Due to how slow the network install is this was a major PITA. Hardware detection was pitiful as well. It set my video card up with vesa drivers any attempt to change the driver to the proper one resulted in a hard lockup. Also sound did not work properly and my integrated NIC (every other distro possessed the module for it) was not supported by the install requiring that I pull a NIC out of another box and put use that instead. Furthermore, Suse has it's own way of doing things, so my knowledge of standard linux configuration was virtually useless.
Being fed up with the "user friendly" distros I was going to opt for a lesser known distro called Arch Linux which would take some amount of setting up, but had a binary package management based on apt that would make the installation quicker than reinstalling Gentoo. Installation was fine, most hardware was fine, standard use of config files....seemed promising. But the sound simply wouldn't work. Oddly enough Arts worked fine and all KDE system sounds worked, but not one media player would cooperate. No matter whether I used arts or tried to tap directly into alsa. Since this was Arch's only drawback, I spent quite a bit ot time trying to debug the setup but eventially admitted defeat. The weirdest thing was that it was somewhat sporadic. I would get it working, but at reboot it would fail again....or even just suddenly give out. A desktop with no sound simply isn't acceptible, so I moved on.
My last attempt was going to be Fedora Core 2. At this point I was irritated enough so that I was very close to just installing XP. Afterall I knew it would work and would probably only crash once a week or so...sort of a middle ground from the previous distros I'd tried. The reason Fedora was my last attempt was because I had tried it years before and it left such a sour taste in my mouth (dependency hell) that I had refused to even consider it up to this point. In short I had very low expectations. However, all devices were detected correctly during a painless and trouble free install. it had a clean interface and most importantly, everything *just worked*. The addition of Apt-get, synaptic, et al. Completely cured the dependancy troubles I had seen previously. Overall besides a few minor annoyances such as lack of default mp3 support and nvidia lagging with a full dri driver for the vid card, it was simply refreshing.
So I recognize that everyones experiences can vary. I don't claim that Fedora Core 2 is perfect for everyones particular setup, but for me it was not just a nice fit...it was the ONLY distro that fit at all.
On a side note, before
Where's the tree view?
How do I make it stop opening new windows every time I click on something? It's worse than popups.
Why won't it display previews on network volumes? It's one thing not to show them, but it continually pops up an error box saying something like "This feature encountered an error starting up and cannot be used"
The PDF viewer crashed on the first PDF I tried to open in FC2. It then offers to send a bug report for me (GOOD IDEA). Then I have to *walk through this asinine bug buddy program* just to find out that the pdf viewer ISN'T on the list of things I can submit bugs for (it must have no bugs). I considered sending in the bug as something else (like the battery icon, which it defaulted to) but I figured if they weren't fixing the bugs in the bug reporting software, I doubt they would fix the bug in the pdf viewer.
The funny thing is that about four or five years ago, I remember reading everything I could about GNOME and getting very excited. The technologies they were discussing at the time seemed very promising, and I could see a very powerful desktop emerging for UNIX. While I hadn't tried it, I was simultaneously excited about the possibilities and worried about the "dependancy hell" that a lot of people seemed to mention, so I didn't touch GNOME for a long time. Instead, I continued to use simple window managers like FVWM-2 and IceWM, among a few others. It seemed it would be overkill to install an entire desktop like GNOME, though I did use KDE (back in version 1-point-something) on my ol' SuSE box, and it was a nice system.
One day, I was playing with the ports system on FreeBSD and I decided to install GNOME, just to see once and for all what it was about. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of using FreeBSD and its ports system, it automatically downloads, makes, and installs all dependencies for any port you select. For GNOME, it had to pull practically the entire Internet into my box, and after hours of downloading and verifying signatures, and more hours of building the programs, it essentially took my quick FreeBSD box, which didn't have much cruft installed on it, and turned it into the most bloated mess I had ever seen. Files were strewn about all over the place. It's as if GNOME takes over your entire system. Not to mention that it couldn't even finish building GNOME properly. All kinds of weird errors popped up throughout the make process.
I blew all that GNOME stuff off, and decided that perhaps it was the port maintainer's fault, so I downloaded some tarballs to build it myself. That turned out to be a nightmare. I spent probably an entire weekend trying to figure out the hierarchy of all these files, and ended up throwing my hands up in disgust. I had never had this much trouble in compiling something, and that's coming from someone who prefers to compile everything himself and then making a custom package out of it for easy installation in the future. (In other words, this is in no way the port maintainer's fault... it's the GNOME organization's fault for building such a convoluted mess.)
After this experience, I came to the conclusion that GNOME might seem like a nice desktop when it's running, but that with such a shoddy technical design underneath, it couldn't possibly be good for my computer or for my health. KDE was much better built than this mess! For the longest time after that, my .sig here on /. read something to the effect that, "IceWM. Because friends don't let friends install GNOME." I received a lot of flames for this, but after that experience, I haven't touched GNOME with a nine mile pole.
Oh yeah, and with each new version of GNOME, I did read a little about it, hoping that things would change for the better, only to see that its design keeps getting worse. That's too bad. It seemed really promising back in the day.
fedora core 2 dual boots just fine for me, but that doesnt mean the bug doesnt exist in all these distributions. its pure anti-redhat FUD from slashdot to keep trying to pin this on fedora when its *all* major linux ditros.
I guess if you're running a server or using Fedora as your primary system, I could see how someone may run into problems. However, for Linux newbies like myself - Fedora is simple with plenty of online resources that other distros lack. Every single "problem" that I encountered in Fedora was fixed by a simple Google search and following other users' suggestions.
Plus, for inexperienced users, it still has the familiarity of Red Hat and an incredibly easy base installation. Those of us who only mildly play with Linux aren't comparing Fedora to every other Linux distro out there. Yes, I know Gentoo is supposed to be phenomenal, but a casual user like myself doesn't have the time or the patience for a week-long install process.
I personally found myself comparing Fedora to Windows, and in that department - Fedora has been much sturdier and efficient for my basic needs.
Then, of course, there's the classic question that helps keep me calm whenever I encounter a Linux problem: how much can I really demand of an entirely free OS? I've spend hundreds of dollars on microsoft products that were entirely inefficient - so when windows messes up my wallet says I have a right to be mad. If a linux distro goes sour, I just shrug my shoulders because all I've lost is one burnable CD.
Fedora's not perfect, but feel free to try and name a Linux distro that is yet. And keep in mind that every user isn't "l33t", so you have to look at the big picture and realize that perfection is relative. Personally, I'd love to have an OS with little buttons on the toolbar that said "beer" and "naked lady" - and when I pressed them, well - happiness would come forth into my room.
this is slashdot, how dare you speak rationally about anything redhat related!?!? remember, redhat is the MS of the linux world! get your talling points straight!
pretty much all taco does is troll redhat/gnome ... doesnt matter how pointless and biased an "article" is, if it slams redhat or gnome he's put it on the front page.
Seems to me that release 2 needs some more work. Can't figure out how to burn DVD's (though it worked fine with release 1), and can't use it with MS Virtual PC.
Dual-Boot Bug? I've been running Fedora Core 2 since it was released. I did a custom install so I could set the partitions and mount points myself and I can boot into Windows just fine; I have yet to run into that dual-boot bug.
Broken Audio? I had to install an extra module so XMMS would play MP3s, but they don't include that for copyright reasons and as such i wouldn't qualify it as "broken". Oh yeah: Rhythmbox is still a piece of crap, though.
Gnome 2.6 an abomination? As for GNOME 2.6, I like it: One setting change using Gconf changed the one-window-per-folder into an explorer-style browser (MUCH better!). Heck, the new save and open dialogs practically make the upgrade worth it alone.
Sounds like the reviewer just sort of had it in for FC2. I'm using it and I'm quite happy.
Freedesktop.org is doing a lot of work on a proper hardware abstraction layer to sit about the OS's and provide the services the GUI layer needs (Gnome, KDE, whoever).
The problem with hardware databases is the issues are frequently combinatorial. So you get bugs like
"PS/2 port with xyz touchpad and the IRQ is shared"
or
"Specific VIA mainboard and >1Gb of RAM and certain PCI devices"
or
"SCSI card A vanishes but only with this BIOS option and this other card present"
and thats the tip of the iceberg.
It isnt "10 mac configurations versus 10,000 PCs" its more like n^lots.
There are other things that make it more complicated - for example installing the Nvidia binary drivers might make you an accessory to a copyright license and patent violation (remember IBM has granted the RCU and other patents for *GPL* use....). There are probably ways to deal with that and keep lawyers happy.
As far as the programs go, kudzu is built on top of pretty portable detection libraries that should be entirely reusable. A lot of the detection has also moved into general upstream kernel handling now that modules has PCI identifier tables. That means the intelligence for a lot of PCI driver loading is now outside vendor tools and extensible.
I'm all for a bottom end free-software cross vendor library to do the work.
...I switched two boxes away from FC2 to Debian testing. One had been running RHL since 7.2 and up. One server, one server/desktop. The long and short of it? I much prefer KDE over Gnome, apt-get over up2date, and well... pretty much every other choice they made.
Debian could use a nicer GUI installer, but mostly just a few less LAME questions from packages. Like, why the hell do I need to get asked whether it should stop PCMCIA services during updates when I don't have PCMCIA? The first time I *need* it, just pop the question with a "Always do this" checkbox. Or on what port it should connect to my non-existant Palm, deal with it IF I want to use the package to synch to a Palm. Not before. Debian should slap package managers like that around a bit.
Other than that, I find the system very efficient. Adding a couple lines to my sources.list (one for more recent KDevelop builds, one for mplayer/codecs) and things work just great. I'm definately not changing back. It's definately the least-hassle distro I've had, having tried RHL/FC, Mandrake and Debian.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It seems that the 2.6 kernel has this problem that prevents it from correctly detecting the disk geometry. I installed FC2 on a drive with no partitions on it, without windows and GRUB wasn't installed properly -- basically my install was lost. Only after reading about the workaround (to boot with my drive geometry as an argument to the kernel) I managed to install properly. The problem is that the only way I have to find out the proper numbers is to boot some distro with a 2.4 kernel.
I also tried booting from a Gentoo livecd, and I noticed that with the 2.4 kernel the geometry is detected properly, but with the 2.6 kernel it's not.
This and the dual boot bug really show that FC2 should've been based on a 2.4 kernel as 2.6 is clearly not ready. Of course with RedHat using Fedora users as guinea pigs for testing features for RHEL it's not surprising that an immature kernel was chosen.
Real men know they can just drag and drop the file fron nautilus onto the editor. It's amazing what you learn by watching users 8)
There seem to be two things in Gnome 2.6 that annoy people - the spacial mode in nautilus (which is configurable anyway) and the file selector. I'd dearly like to see the whole file selector business go away and be replaced by a nautilus window of the right kind of files in the right location (where location is relevant)
After all why should someone have to learn *two* ways to select files ?
due to the fact that no firewire support is available in fc2 kernel is just plain stupid...i know the firewire modules cause fc2 to do some crazy things but come on, straighten out all of the major issues first...fc2 should have not been released...fc1 kicked major a$$...
I'm using Fedora Core 2 and there is no thunderbird package included. Where did you get this from?
Honest question here: why do y'all dislike GNOME so much, and prefer KDE?
I used KDE for a couple of months. I only recently tried GNOME, and I prefer it much more than KDE. The main reason is that KDE seemed to be way too customizable; it was a pain going through the many panels of the many settings windows and figuring out what was where and how to configure it. GNOME seems to be a lot more consistent, and doesn't bother providing ways to customize things that I think are way too trivial to customize. (Who cares what percentage opacity I want on my popup menus? The person who designed the desktop environment should pick one for me that looks good!)
They're still text files. Why should I be limited to using a command-line editor on them just because they happen to start with a dot?
Disclaimer: I love Linux, I love open source. They are beautiful concepts, they are beautiful ideas. I setup Linux systems everywhere I can and use Linux myself. I've setup experienced users, new users, servers, etc. I've written open source applications. Believe me, I'm not an anti-Linux guy in any sense.
Disclaimer2: Insert disclaimer 1 again here. Some of the suggestions and things I'm going to mention are implemented in windows. I do NOT want Linux to be just like windows. Simply because some features are in windows which make it more user friendly isn't a knock on linux... which has numerous features that make it superior to windows. There are areas in which windows is ahead of the game, mostly because of the outlook I'm trying to throw off with this disclaimer. These are good ideas and implemented in some fashion in most gui's not just windows. They aren't windows behavior, they are features we are missing and ignoring out of stubbornness, lets fix it.
Disclaimer3: There are exceptions to everything. There are apps already which have portions or some of the ideas I'm laying on the table in them already.
1. Distro Installers
There are still distributions without Graphical installers and without hardware detection. Now there are plenty of reasons for having good text or curses based installers. Explain to me again what the benefits of NOT having a graphical installer are again?
There are a lot of poor hardware detection implementations out there, and we've all been burned by them. But I believe the open source community is powerful enough that bad implementations will either be dropped or fixed to the point that they are good implementations.
So explain to me again what the disadvantages are of a good hardware detection system that allows manual overrides in every instance but doesn't require them are again?
1. Application Installers
The same that is true for distros is also true for all applications. I hear you all crying this or that package management frameworks solves this problem. NO it doesn't. Package management is a great and useful piece of the puzzle.
But EVERY application should also have both a text mode and Gui installer. This installer should default to options for the most ignorant who want to "next next next finish" through an install and have moderate and advanced mode options (moderate allowing the user to choose things like static locations, various sensible configuration overrides. Advanced allowing setting of things like buffer settings, number of child processes, anything to do with pipes, and settings only developers and programmers will make sense of).
Personally I see the need for a general scriptable toolkit for making these installers that should be out there from the start. It would check to make sure there are packages for all the major distributions available as well as a source package. User downloads the installer, installer downloads the appropriate package for their distro. The installer gives an option of Internet or local directory containing the install files or this can be preset in the installer script.
Basically I mean an install shield wizard type of thing that auto detects if running from he cli or gui and is 100% statically linked for it's own libs.
Some type of central application for removing programs is also needed, this can just read the list from the package manager if needed but should have a simple wizard type uninstall.
Wizards are not the root of all evil, crappy wizards that don't allow flexibility are the root of all evil. It's an important distinction. I believe wizards are good idea that is generally poorly implemented. Neglecting one class and knowledge level of user or another.
3. Hardware detection after install.
That's right, your not done with hardware detection after the base install. Most distro's neglect this. For a lot of things which are automatically setup they act as if a system is static and doesn't change.
> No problems here. I am happy they included it in the distribution;
> it's fantastic interface for older pcs.
I'm running it on an Athlon64. Mostly because Nautilus is currently borked on AMD64 and besides, I don't really like the dumbed down interface of either GNOME or KDE.
Democrat delenda est
... used to be RedHat... Before it died.
the abomination known as Gnome 2.6
Is this article really slashdot material?
Stick with FC1, which I have no complaints about whatsoever.
I've been using RH since just before version 5 and as a desktop platform since '98, including FC1 and now FC2. ;) ;) ;)
;)
When I first tried out linux I was swapping between RH and Slackware and I couldn't really find too much of a difference, but this rpm thing looked like it had more potential in it than slack, so I settled on RH.
To begin with the distro was simple, the installer was pretty basic and the desktop was unutterably bad (I was escaping win98 after a disappointing abandonment of the ageing Amiga 1200) and I rarely used it outside of work servers.
Things were markedly improved by the arrival of the first Gnome desktop in RH, even though it was pretty rough and largely useless. I like that a lot of the ideas they were having about desktops back then are still in Gnome, but operating far far better now
I well remember the RPM dependency hell and getting to a point of being able to work around it for most things, the pain of glibc transitions, the 2.2-2.4 jump, rpm binaries that deadlock wildly and all the other little niggles that people jump on RH for. It is by no means perfect.
However, over the period of time I have been using it, RH has become significantly more useful and capable. It is still my platform of choice for server machines, even though I do find the RHEL/Fedora split quite frustrating as a sysadmin on a budget that wants something a little more reliable than a autorebuilt srpm, but without the 24x7 onsite hugging price tag. To be honest I'm half wondering if Bruce Perens' latest efforts at an Enterprise Debian might not be the long term best solution, but we will see. For now RH9+Progeny and RHEL3 are working well together for me and are both supported for a few years to come, so it's not too bad.
Anyway, to Fedora, specifically to Fedora Core 2. I was really quite excited by the plans RH announced for Fedora, it sounded like it was going to end up taking the massive advantage that Debian has, apt, and taking it on community project style. It would free the world from dependency hell by using the weight of the RH legacy and the various excellent third party RPM sites (fedora.us, livna, freshrpms, dag, etc.) to produce a RH like distro with a package list to rival Debian. I am disappointed they haven't really achieved that in any noticeable way, but I understand that changing Fedora from RH's internal Red Hat Linux efforts to a large, distributed development team has got to be hard. I hope they can get there, preferably before the third party sites tear each other apart (you guys! stop fucking with each others packages!).
I've been using FC2 since it was released, both as an upgrade from FC1 and as a fresh reinstall on a box previously running FC1. I like it. I really like it, I am very happy with the direction the Gnome/Freedesktop/XOrg types are pushing things, stuff like hotplug/fam/hal/dbus that is making the machine vastly more aware of itself, which I expect to see spreading beyond the desktop. There are things gone from gnome since the 1.x and 2.2/2.4 days that I miss and would like back, but there are way more things I'm glad to see gone. Spatial nautilus? Love it, I don't like that it opens a bazillion windows, but since they are very easy to kill, two thumbs up. The fact that everything stays exactly where you put it is even better. This *must* be implemented for metacity such that it handles windows with similar aplomb. I know people don't like the spatial concept, but they can turn it off and stop whining
It's nice to see distros making the 2.6 plunge, it's been a very easy transition from 2.4 I think, way easier than some of the previous major changes
So, given that RH Linux and now Fedora have been the platform for my work for the last 6 years, I think it's fair to say that I'm pretty happy with them, even though I did have to defect to Debian at home for the masses of software (but I'd skip back to a Fedora install if it could offer a similar bulk).
Keep going Fedora people, if you build it, they will come
Cheers,
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
Why bother with Fedora? It is obviously not going to be as stable as other distros because it isn't meant to be stable.
For bleeding edge, there are distros like Gentoo which can be quite stable when compared to Fedora. And no, packages don't HAVE to be source-based.
For those that want a Debian-based distro with newer packages than 3.0, then Mepis is available.
And for those that want a distro with solid RedHat compatibility, Centos 3.1 is available. Based on RedHat Advanced Server 3, this is probably the best RPM-based distro around for servers.
Suse and Mandrake are also around to satisfy those that want something other than the distros mentioned above.
Fedora? bah!
Checkout: http://www.distrowatch.com
"Honest question here: why do y'all dislike GNOME so much, and prefer KDE?"
Because it presents a choice, and that choice isn't KDE.
Actually the better question is: How many of the complainers were formerly GNOME users? or...
How many are former Windows users, liberated from the restrictions of the Windows desktop, who feel that the GNOME desktop takes them right back (aka the GConf is a registry comments).
"The main reason is that KDE seemed to be way too customizable; it was a pain going through the many panels of the many settings windows and figuring out what was where and how to configure it."
And yet people see something wrong with going to GConf and changing one flag to go from spatial, and file view.
--
"Sorry, but according to our tests, you are trying to post from an open HTTP proxy. Please close the proxy or ask your sysadmin or ISP to do so, because open proxies are used to spam web boards like this one."
I see you changed the message. We no longer have to login in order to make the message "go away".
However my setup hasn't changed, but your message making an apperance certainly has.
Small hint Michael. You have a virtual room full of technically literate geeks. If they want to "spam" your little forum they could do so, with or without your permission. Stop with the RIAA tactics, and start delivering a forum any geek would be proud of pointing complete strangers to.
The article author has an opinion backed by facts. One fact was wrong, but that doesn't ruin his argument.
A distro isn't a nice way to get 1000 packages on a CDROM, it is a complete software offering. SuSe goes a long way to make sure components work, and they tweak the hell out of the code, not just the kernel, to get things working. Fedora apprently doesn't put in that same amount of effort.
If fedora is half-assed as a complete user-ready distro, it is half-assed.
We use SuSe at work, and I use it at home. I have no windows boxes in my life. I have also been a loyal SuSe fan since 7.1
I have to say SuSe 9.1 is hosed. It was so bad I uninstalled it and went back to 9.0. It did not recognize my monitor/video card and resulted in a black-ed out X windows, at which point I couldn't use Sax nor Yast to fix it. It didn't come with basic packages like evolution, samba file system support in the kernel (which is critical for office use!). It was missing tons of things, and this is after I went in and had to hand-select a ton of packages.
Maybe they are trying to force people to buy their more expensive packages, but the new version of 9.1 professional sucks and makes me question SuSe and Novell's motives. I'll try 9.2 in 6 months, but if it is crap, I will switch to fedora or debian.
The "GNOME usability experts" distroyed whatever was good about Gnome when they started the 2.x series. All the nice tuning and customizing you could do are no longer there. It's now their way or not at all. It's the most crippled environment I've ever used. I'd rather use XP than Gnome 2.x. KDE has become much of what Gnome should have become. Oh well. A distro that depends on Gnome is doomed to fail.
Robert
I come from a DOS/Windows background. I've been forcing myself into Linux so my best pc has Fedora Core 2 installed and my ancient Windows PC is always off for the most part. I've had to deal with a variety of small problems but nothing damning.
:-/
"There are a few apps that should be included but are not, such as Abiword, Quanta (Web authoring) and Audacity (audio editing)."
Funny, since I installed FC2 on a clean hard disk and there they are, the first two at least. I chose the "everything" option during install, since my hard disk is bigger than 6gb.
The extent of my sound problems were that the headphone volume defaults to zero, and on my Dell (cheapest offering plus max ram+hd and no OS) there's only a headhone jack, and the speakers have amps.
The other problem I encountered was that the i845 drivers have a memory leak, so anything that uses opengl will eventually crash it. This is not a problem specific to any Linux distribution though.
I do dislike the unchangeable Nautilus defaults.
And the default cron setup could have been done better. It had my hard disk thrashing and cpu usage at 99% for about half an hour doing some whatis update, which I won't let it do again.
I was surprised to see that it did not come with Java. I learned all about installing Java by hand and also installed Eclipse and Netbeans while I was at it. Then had the fun of getting it to work with Mozilla. Just copying the plugin to the plugins directory will make Mozilla crash. You've gotta create a symbolic link to it. The Flash plugin was just a little easier to install.
SpamAssassin's spamd was installed and running by default (as a result of checking "everything"), but the default email program was not configured to use it. There were tons of other things running that it clearly didn't need, like bluetooth drivers, though removing them should be a trivial task.
Since Evolution was the recommended email client, it would have been nice to see Mozilla Firefox as the browser instead of the full Mozilla. So I got to install that and work out the details of getting it to run well, like making a shell script to check if it's already running before starting another, to avoid the dreaded profile selection dialog.
All the usual media software like mplayer and mp3 support weren't included, though I could understand the reasoning behind those decisions. Got to download and install mplayer. Don't need mp3 support. I rip my cd's to ogg.
The previous distribution I've installed on that system were Slackware 9.1, Suse 9.0, FC2test1, and Mandrake 9.1. Overall Fedora Core 2 has worked out well. It runs pretty well and if nothing else it's been an educational experience, something that would turn off any user who just wants it to work. With previous distributions, my Linux PC was mostly turned off despite it being much newer than my Windows PC. But since I installed Fedora Core 2, I've been relatively comfortable and productive under Linux and have only needed to turn on my Windows PC to copy files off of it. I guess the 13th try's a charm (that's about how many times I've tried to force myself into Linux).
I would probably still be on Windows if it wasn't for Caldera or Microsoft's "Get the Facts" campaign. Three cheers to Microsoft and SCO for accelerating Linux! Hip hip, hurray! Hip hip, hurray! Hip hip, hurray!...
every day is 'hate redhat day'.
It's the cool thing to do.
% mkdir
% ls -dF
I'm sure you already know.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
...
For enterprise users, I think FC2 is a great candidate.
Bzzzzzt. No Enterprise is going to use Fedora core. Enterprise distros are Redhat *Enterprise* Linux and SuSE. That's it. Enterprises are big $$$ and aren't wasting time with crappy free distributions.
I don't understand why Fedora has all these ultra zealots who think it is the one and only solution for everything linux?
If you take a step back and analyze what is going on (and Redhat is even saying this), you'd realize that Fedora is the testbed for Redhat Enterprise linux. Redhat is making the Fedora community test their Enterprise product. So you get a fairly leading edge distro and where there are potential bugs, they are put front and centre so they can be identified and squashed for their Enterprise product.
Fedora core user == Redhat Linux Enterprise beta tester
I share your feelings on Mandrake. I started my linux experience with Redhat 5.2 but found Mandrake (with KDE) a better / easier experience altogether. I didn't have to fight my sound and video card configurations to get them working, etc. Fast forward several years and Mandrake 10 whomps on FC2 in many respects. It is a more complete distro, features many intelligent conveniences (such as Numlock ON kernel module - why hasn't anyone else put that in their distro?).
I have tried Debian (horrendously dated - even SID), gentoo (arcane and too time consuming) and I KEEP ON GOING BACK TO MANDRAKE. I wanted to love FC2...believe me. I ran FC1 and thought it was okay, but not as good as Mandrake 9.2
I tried FC2test3 for several weeks and FC2 final for a couple and just flat gave up. I run Mandrake 10 official now on an HP zd7188cl laptop and on a custom-built Athlon desktop. I LOVE IT! Everything I need works great. Once I figured out how to optimize my urpmi server configs and get the reliable package repositories in place, upgrading for security fixes and adding new software is a snap! (I do it using the command line urpmi app which is just as easy as apt-get). The only thing I wish Mandrake would do is make the package manager gui apps unified (not one to remove and one to install - that's ridiculous) and make it as user-friendly as Synaptic is.
One of the biggest frustrations I had was trying to get Crossover Office 3 running properly under FC2. I have it under Mandrake 10 with absoulutely perfect and very responsive performance. Not so under FC2, with many many issues. And yes, I spent lots of time on the valiant work-around efforts documented by the Codeweavers team. They even scripted in disable functions for problematic aspects of FC2, but it didn't really work.
Long story short, you can try other distros, but you'll always keep on coming back home. I thought it would be cool to give gentoo a shot and I hated it. Similar idea but much better execution is Arch Linux. That is worth your time! Try arch and you may love it. Even in beta it is remarkably stable.
I _am_ going to give Suse 9.1 serious consideration for business use - and if I love it, for my desktop at home. BUT, it will really have to live up to the hype to move me off of Mandrake now that 10.0 official is out.
Another thing about Mandrake and "slashdotter distros" - Mandrake can be used for the most complex of server environments and yet out of the box is the best desktop experience around with minimal fuss. THAT is what makes Mandrake different from "handholder" desktop distros like Linspire and Lycoris that are for the casual user that doesn't want to know the CLI exists.
PS > Bluecurve is FUGlY!
I'm not sure what you people are complaining about. I'm using FC2 right now, and I'm loving it.
GNOME 2.6 is great... the file selector is odd but I think it's an improvement over the old one, spatial nautilus is neato, and I didn't have any problems with the bootloader (though I don't have windows).
The combo of gnome 2.6 and kernel 2.6 makes the system a lot faster than it was with versions 2.4 of those programs...
Overall, I love it -- no problems here!
I read the review, it didn't seem newar as negative as the poster made it out to be. All in all, I find I don't mind the whole spatial thing, as it turns out I don't navigate very deep into any areas I might do any kind of file management/editing in. And the other posters are right, it's a lot faster. I don't dual boot, so no issues there, and my sound worked out of the box. All in all, I'm happy.
I'm a long time windows user who was thinking of migrating to linux. Fedora was going to be my choice of OS and I was going to install tomorrow. However given the level of general dissapointment in the Core, gnome and the 2.6 kernel in general, I think I'll wait until "service pack 1" or whatevers the lingo in the redhat dev sheds.
Beginners might be better with Xandros, I find SuSE quite acceptable (still waiting for 9.1 to arrive, I think my supplier has messed up...), but no distro has as yet properly tackled the installation and configuration issues. There again, neither has the Criminal Monopoly, it is an area where, with a bit of interest from some of the top developers, Linux could do better. But, I get the impression that it is not the very best developers who are attending to these issues.....
IMHO some serious action is needed, and quickly, before the Monopolist gets anywhere with Longhorn. IIRC Bruce Perens had something to say about this not so long ago, when he found a stupid configuration issue, but no-one seemed to listen, and what is even worse, serious bug reports to certain distros are simply ignored.
It is time to give less attention to leading-edge issues and more to basic quality and consistency, maybe treating the installation and configuration utilities as seriously as, for example, the kernel or GCC would be a step forward. But, I can see why people are not so interested in doing that, it is less exciting. That may be the one weakness of the Open Source development methodology, boring bits don't get finished properly. It may help to attract more people to become developers, if they can be shown that they can make a very real difference here.
But that would involve loading Nautilus, locating the right directory, locating the right file, and bringing the application window up. As opposed to just entering a path and filename.
I'm all for user-friendly, but user-friendly doesn't mean automatically removing options that basic users don't want, it just means make sure the basic users don't have to worry about them, while still making them easily available to those who do want them.
In all honesty, what would have been wrong with leaving the dialog as it is, but including a text-box with tab-complete on directories and files, for people who actually knew where the file was and what it was called?
And I'm still not clear on how Nautilus spatial mode differs from (for example) Windows Explorer, but that's a whole other thread...
But for the last time, its can affect anyone who partitions whilst using Linux kernel 2.6, not just Fedora, despite the fact its trendy to hate / misspell Red Hat around here.
1. Mandrake, Suse, etc also suffer from this. Not just Fedora. Slashdot's beloved Debian would too if it's installer used 2.6, but it doesn't.
2. It won't screw up your partition table, it'll write it out on a different format. Big difference. No unrecoverable data loss. If you don't tell the installer your disk geometry, then boot Linux and change the format of your partition table.
Ive done a number of Fedora installations now and some of them were dual boot, i had linux installed on these partitions already, therefore in most cases i was saved from the bug.
But honestly what planet are all these people from? Have they used the other distros? Fedora has obviously had some serious development work above and beyond what you find not only in vanilla sources but in most of the other distros as well. To say that this booting problem and not liking the spatial design of the new nautilus is enough to make Fedora core 2 a dud is just plain silly. The Gnome 2.6 will be in most distros soon enough and the booting bug is well... a bug. Every operating system including Windows and other linux distributions have the ability to trash your machine in certain hardware/installation circumstances or if you dont know what your doing.
The Fedora folks would have done well to test dual booting a little better before releasing but on the same token so called reviewers should plan to install on more than one machine and configuration before they slap a loser tag on a release.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
Of course some things are off, but that's to be expected. I experienced all of the same annoyances and more, mostly caused by GNOME b0rking. The only bit I don't understand is the author should understand this distro is pretty hot off the fryer, and it's not going to be extremely polished so criticisms in that regard are kind of silly. But he does have a point in that, Fedora and RedHat are generally centered around GNOME, and the fact that GNOME is kind of broken (especially when you update the gnomelibs with up2date) really takes away from the party.
Other than Nautilus' strange retro-throwback navigation, the Add/Remove packages app exhibiting odd behaviour, and up2date trashing all the config files, I was very impressed with how everything was set up. It's probably also one of the most responsive and fast distros I've ever used as well. If they're building on top of that, it'll be interesting to see it when it's more mature.
No, I'm saying that if you have problems you should at least make an attempt to solve it before bitching about the quality of the product.
FC2 is is the first "mainstream" Linux 2.6 distro, but even the other distros that went 2.6 show similar problems (the XP booting issue isn't a distro issue but a kernel issue, and the problem was created by MS, not Linus).
So, lessee....XP has been around longer than the 2.6 kernel...and somehow it's XP's fault for some weird bug in the 2.6 kernel tree and is causing these problems? I don't think so, Tim.
Have to second the Debian idea. I'm not a Debian troll by the way (maybe a zealot though ;-) I've used plenty of different distros in my Linux career. What's really got me back with Debian though now, is the beta installer they've been working on for Sarge, the thing is just sweet, takes most of the pain out of Debian. Add to that that Sarge has really become quite up to date, with the Debian sensitity to stability mixed in. (Woody really is way too old, and though sid seems to work for many, sarge doesn't lag far behind though with that extra good feeling of "it's tested I can feel safe").
Point in case, right now I'm writing this from a Debian sarge box, with 2.6 installed, Nvidia drivers working fine, no XP dual boot issues (I am running XP, on the same drive, using Grub, no problems and haven't heard of any other Debian users experiencing these woes. 2.6 runs great on this, which is a relief as I'd begun to think that perhaps Linux was starting to suck), partitioned with XFS, with good stable software which is not archaic date wise, gnome 2.4, xfree 4.3, kde 3.2, xfce4. etc...
As a final point, though this is totally subjective, for some odd reason using Debian makes me feel better about it all, on the social conscience level that is. Can't totally put my finger on it, but Debian GNU/Linux (nice how they use the term, though no I'm not a FSF fanatic) seems to be about the truest out there to the sometimes utopian ideals of community-centered, totally non-corporate, free as in free, and free, software, and all that, that makes Linux rather special.
Just my thoughts...
it seems to me that redhat has a bad habit of releasing early, at least in my limited expierence over the years.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
Move along, kids.
I still think the complete desktop experience should provide a hint of its multimedia capabilities. There aint no better stress tester for one's CPU (besides Unreal or Quake3) than to have both video and audio cranking at full blast.
Informative? In a pig's eye. The is exactly (and I do mean exactly) the same stuff that ooGalaxyoo posts here and over at OSNews. Moderators don't have to take my word for it. Simply grab a handful of his text and google on slashdot, and OSNews. You'll see it verbatim. Usually sitting at zero after everyone figures it out.
What I would love is if someone tears his little argument down, piece by piece. Disproving everything, and showing how much of a fraud (once and for all) that ooGalaxyoo is.
I use SuSE now as well like the poster because I have limited time to setup a workstation with the right fonts, utilities, 3d support, java, etc.
Even that I find buggy. The video players all turn black and white and a reboot is the only way to fix them... somtimes. XMMS crashes constantly too.
I have found the quality of linux distro's to be going down the tubes recently and Debian would be the only one I trust.
This is just my opinion of course so don't flame me (to the linux elite).
FreeBSD seems to be quite stable in terms of userland ports being tested.
http://saveie6.com/
it makes him a lieing bastard. he *knows* this isnt a "fedora bug", that it exists in all the major distros, but he persists to spread fud that its somehow a bug in fedora.
Well, just my 2c. I've been a RH user since 1997. For a long time they made the best, most well supported (by 3rd parties, their own support is crap, even when you've paid for it) distro around. About a week ago I decided to give Suse 9.1 a try, and I'm pleasantly impressed. For the first time everything seems well integrated and without the couple of dozens of quirks I'm used to tweaking myself in RH. What's more, I only used the command line for sys admin type tasks. I didn't mind at all, but mostly with RH you didn't really have a choice. Their GUI tools were just that bad and inflexible. However, now with Suse I find that Yast is so good I use it all the time, it is however a bit too slow.
well you all remember a few weeks back when that article came out critisizing gnome 2.6 for its backwards gui behavior. And some of you tried to defend it. Well looks like the folks at linux.com agreed with the author of that article since it has a link to that article in this review of fc2. Guess you defenders of gnome were wrong again.
My Gawd WTF...
Fresh Slackware 9.1 last 2.6 kernel last 3.2 KDE Elegant, simply, up-to-date, clean, everything in its place, any annoying n-plicated unworking wizards.
Having read every comment on bugzilla about Bug 115980 it sounds to me like the bug most likely is in Windows.
That is unbelievably asinine finger pointing, you should consider a career in poltitics. The simple truth is that FC2 fails to deliver on it's own feature of dual-boot support. At a minimum they should have made the user aware of potential problems at the beginning of installation. The workaround is simple and they should have taken the small effort to present it. Their failure to do even this small thing and to ignore the potential problem proves that major OSS projects can be just as f'd up as commercial software.
It seems very few people are able to reproduce the problem, which means it is not easy to track down.
Gotta call BS on that. Your own reference to bugzilla shows that (1) the problem was known to be a 2.6 problem since December (2) non-LBA systems were identified as having the problem weeks before FC2's release (3) CHS identified soon after that. You merely echo the FC2 dev's lame excuse of "didn't happen on our machines". Again echos of f'd up commercial attitudes that OSS is supposed to avoid. What's the point of all those volunteers running test releases if the developers just blow them off?
Yes, I'm irritated. Not because of the problem's existence. Not because of data loss, I didn't lose anything, I followed the problem and knew the workaround by the time FC2 was released. It's the unprofessional manner in which FC2 handled the issue. Again, they should have made a warning and the workaround available during install.
I know the guys want universal desktop acceptance, but maybe we are better off being what we are.
I don't like the software installer, please could I have kpackage or apt. Apt from freshrpms works but doesn't remove existing installed items.
My soundblaster live doesn't work on midi. Mayber alsa drivers will fix it.
Having said all that, its very useable and I am sure in time I will sort out the bugs.
My partition table is also corrupted, and parted throws up its hands and refuses to operate. With some tweaking, (putting the vfat partion next to ntfs) I got diskdruid to install it, but Debian worked cfdisk without the tweaking.
I am also not sure about merging the kde and gnome menus, I think they have their own character.
How come the KDE-supporters and -developers have started astroturfing against Gnome? Are they afraid of something?
Competitition is good. Accept it. It is supposed to make both parties better. At least that's what happening with one of them - Gnome.
Technical design-flaws? Sorry. That was so 1999.
Human Interface Guidelines? I *know* design. I *know* HIG. I may sound like a technocrat, but honestly: This is good for you.
Spatial Nautilus? It works like a charm for both me doing advanced work, and for my computer-illiterate family and friends whom I've introduced Gnome 2.6 for. We all love it.
Not tweakable? You don't know what you're talking about. Metacity is not tweakable, because it shouldn't be as default! If you want to tweak your desktop, how did you do it with enlightenment, windowmaker and fvwm in the old days? Nowadays you just install and use openbox or some similar ICCCM and EWMH compliant window-manager to tweak your desktop. They all work perfectly as a drop-in-replacement.
Gnome 2.6. It all just works!!
Disclaimer: I am not a Gnome developer. I am just an ordinary developer and user with long experience, and I am currently looking over and getting to know the innards of Gnome for use in a commercial project. Don't you just love the LGPL?
This is nothing new for RedHat.
RPM has been broken for years. It will regularly corrupt its own databases and then hang when trying to install packages, and its own rebuild options will hang too. The problem surfaced in RedHat 6, it's still there in Broken in FC1. Some releases are better than others; when I was running RedHat 7 it would crap on itself weekly, whereas FC1 mostly works in my experience.
RedHat knew about the problem well before RH7 and RH8, but have continued to make major releases with broken RPM anyway. Their answer is that the user should just drop to the command line, kill the hung processes, blow away the RPM databases and rebuild them.
Try explaining that to a newbie who just wants to install a piece of software he's downloaded.
Me, I got sick of going through the kill; rm -rf; rebuild process what seemed like practically every time I installed or upgraded something, so I moved my servers to Gentoo.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
To the moderators, as you probably know this spam posting comes up whenever one mentiones GNOME. -- This is the third time I've seen the above message on slashdot.
Is there any way to stop this?
Is there a way to track the moderators which push this SPAM to level 5 ("Interesting")?
Thomas
Mix it at a 50/50 ratio? Hmmmm...I'll have to try it.
People used to turn away in disgust when I told them that I put tuna in beef-flavored Rice-a-Roni.
WWW
Up till a week ago I used SuSE 9 Pro. Then I switched over to FC2. I am using a dual boot (XP Home/FC2) system on a Dell Inspiron laptop. I haven't had any problems with FC2 at all ! I even like it more then SuSE. Most reviews of FC2 on the net sounds quitte negative, but I don't agree. My dual boot works perfect, I have no problems witg Gnome whatsoever, up2date works fine, ... I really don't see the problem with FC2. It is time for some good reviews of this OS !
Let me just remind you that Fedora's main purpose is to test out new technology, which will eventually make it's way into RHEL.
If someone who has never used linux before wants to dual-boot XP and a linux, don't look to Fedora; look to something like mandrake.
Those who would like to learn more about the workings of nix, check out OS's like FreeBSD!
BA
For those who are trying to get their nvidia graphics cards to work properly with FC2 here is an email address where you can let them know what is on their customers minds.
linux-bugs@nvidia.com
Lets keep it polite please, abuse never gets the desired results.
Every wrong attempt discarded is a step forward - T. Edison