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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..."
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?
This bug was in Mandrakelinux 10.0 Community snapshot, but was resolved for the official release. See this comment
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
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.
Yes, Samba 3 is already available - they have a sort of "stable" tree and "unstable" too. The "unstable" is usually "ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"" - that'll get you the bleeding edge stuff instead of the more "stable" stuff. :)
:-)
I have Samba 3.0.2 on a box here and it's been working great.
In fact, in my first "desktop Linux experience" since Caldera eDesktop 2.4, I installed Gentoo & KDE. Just "emerge kde" and then go to sleep. ON a reasonably fast machine, it didn't take too long.
My sound card Just Worked. nvidia-drivers? Worked. I followed the "Desktop Guide" on www.gentoo.org (under "Other Docs") and everything went quite well.
Dual-booting with Grub is possible, but I just got a KVM and put Windows on a seperate machine. Kind of hard to get to your Samba server when you've rebooted it to use Windows.
I have no desire to try Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise, SuSE (I used to be a SuSE guy, too) or anything else. I have been very happy with Gentoo. If I went anywhere, it'd probably be to OpenBSD/FreeBSD.
But Gentoo is here to stay in these parts..
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!
What? You can most certainly run a program as root on an X session that is runnning as another user.
All you need is for root to have the magic cookie of your session.
% man xauth
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
Nor does this bug happen for EVERY dual boot installation of Fedora Core 2 either. It is a small percentage of cases (too small to ignore, true), so people shouldn't think that every time you try to dual boot with FC2 you're going to bork your partition table.
REAL men know that they can hit Ctrl-L to pop up a filename input box.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Grub does much, much more than just provide graphical eye candy. The usefulness of having a bootloader command line on which you can type an entirely new boot entry or edit an existing one is something you cannot fully appreciate until your system isn't booting, you're upgrading your kernel, etc.
It's one of those things where, when you first hear it, you think: "But, why would I ever actually want to do that? I can recover from that same situation with LILO if I do this-and-this-and-this." Try it once, however, and you'll be amazed you were ever satisfied without 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
Except for the obviously more difficult installation
The install help from gentoo's website is the BEST walkthrough i have ever read. They make the install a breeze.
Feel free to read past comment 21 on the mandrake bug 7959.
Further comments from users in the same bur report indicate that this bug still exists in the official mandrake release. Perhaps this is a most subtle bug, that both fedora and mandrake believed
they had found a workaround for.
And it you really want to understand whats going on, i encourage you to go searching the parted mailinglists over the last 4 months or so, for a discussion as to where the problem actually lies.
-jef
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 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.
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
I have separate partitions which when changing distro, or reinstalling, I can simply mount as /,/usr,/home, etc. It's basically the equivalent of having a C: and a D: drive in Windows using partitions.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
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!!
You can type a file name into the new file selector.
Ctrl + L will open the filename box, with autocomplete and all.
Some people just don't know how to read. Someone who writes for linux.com should keep up on this stuff. He's not an everyday user (I guess).
I know some other people mentioned this, but I just want to add that using Control-L also allows you to open URLs. Just now I did Control-L "http://www.google.com/" and got the full HTML source, complete with syntax highlighting.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
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
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 gree completely! Gnome 2.6 has worked very well for myself and my co-workers. FC2 is now our distro of choice at work (and trust me, we've really put it to the test). We use it for everything, from getting email, to daily work chores, and for running all of our security tools.
The has no credibility, in my book!
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.
Hi, joe GNOME developer here. The problem with the file dialog not opening dotfiles correctly is a known bug, not a desing decision, and was fixed in GTK 2.4.1. Unfortunately this package didn't make it into Fedora 2, but you can pull the update from Fedora Rawhide and it will not require a whole new GNOME as a dependency chain.
Might need the gedit 2.6.1 package as well, since gedit does some mods to the stock file dialog. Ciao, don't be bitter now.
You can have X programs on a headless machine without running X on it. The X program displays on the machine that connects to it. I'll grant that having X clients on a server is questionable.
Mandrake 10 was officially released about two days ago? FC2 was released a week and half ago... I'm not sure where you get your perception of time, but it's a bit confused.
Bzzzt! Mandrake 10.0 Official was released to MandrakeClub members on April 14, far before Fedora Core 2.
Also, Mandrake 10.0 Community was released on March 4. And yes, the Community Edition most certainly counts--if you didn't count it, then you'd have to not count Fedora Core, as it's the Community Edition of RHEL.
Let's not forget other distros. SuSE 9.1, with Kernel 2.6, came out in Europe on April 23, and in the rest of the world on May 6. Gentoo has also had 2.6 for a long time, though it's labelled gentoo-dev-sources, so it probably can't be considered the default.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
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
NPTL, GCC development, glibc maintenance, SELinux, 4k stacks, Freedesktop.org, kernel development (arjan v, alan cox, etc...), first to include the X.org X server etc. You can say a lot of things about Red Hat but not being a driving force is not one of them. No other distro contributes as much core development as they do.
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.
The gnome 2.6 one also handles remote files. In fact one thing I am really really glad to see finally supported properly is WebDAV and https:// webdav too. It makes a lot of remote working much much easier.
All we need now is a decent webdav server that handles userids properly.
Well, you're in luck. I'm running GNOME 2.6.1 and when right clicking on the file list in the selector there is an entry to "show hidden files". It's not in 2.6.0 though.
So far, my test installs have gone OK, except for one major problem: it doesn't work under VMWare!
It works fine if you pass vdso=0 to the installer and add it to grub.conf.
I've installed FC2 on a Sony VAIO PCG-GRX600P that has a built-in Synaptics touchpad. I too was annoyed by the lack of tap-click on the touchpad, but a bit of google research revealed that this is a kernel 2.6 issue. You can enable tap-click support by adding "psmouse.proto=imps" to the kernel boot parameters in /boot/grub/grub.conf file for the kernel you are running.
4 c9 b6bdfb96fb3f15fb6d70a980919&showtopic=71428
Here's an article that goes into a bit more detail on the subject:
http://www.linuxforum.com/forums/index.php?s=91
I normally ignore ACs, but in your case, I'll make an exception.
There have been several debates on this issue on the GCC mailing list; I, and many other numerical users, require -ffast-math for our work. The GCC documentation over-states the issues, in our opinion.
Without the -ffast-math switch, GCC won't emit processor instructions for certain floating point calculations. Without -ffast-math, trig and log functions will be emulated in software. What's the point of having fancy floating-point in your processor if you don't use it?Now, you can have differences between results on systems that implement different floating-point hardware; if you need deterministic results to the last bit, you probably want to avoid hardware floating-point and go with software routines.
As for accuracy: Testing with industry-standard benchmarks -- such as William Kahan's PARANOIA -- show that using -ffast-math produces more accurate results on some platforms.
Numerical programs do not produce "wrong outputs" when using -ffast-math, nor does that option cause "crashes." You are spreading FUD.
All about me