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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..."
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.
Because, like most other things on the planet (and off?), different folks like different stuff. While _you_ might just love Gnome 2.6, _I_ might prefer KDE, and Dave across the street mowing his lawn might prefer Xfce or Fluxbox.
That's what's nice about this Linux thing most folks around here start using it for in the first place - you have a choice.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
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.
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
With all the croft and bloated crap that gets thrown in your face after a fresh install, it gets harder and harder to just run FVWM2, however.
resigned
Well it's not that big of a deal if you're a Linux geek, but for a poor innocent person trying to switch away from Windows it could be enough to turn them off of Linux for a long time. I was hoping Fedora Core 2 would turn out to be a great distro for Linux noobs - free, easy to set up, and easy to use - but with the number of bugs I've been hearing about I think we'll have to wait for Fedora Core 3.
Right, the topic poster should change it to"fedora sucks, because in order to dual boot, I have to first manually figure out what the partition geometry is, and tell the fedora installer explicitly what this number is, otherwise it will screw up the partition table, which I'm told by most geeks is, in general, a very, very bad thing to happen and usually leads to unrecoverable data loss".
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
for dualboot use it would maybe suck ...
i don't see a direct connection between dual boot and business use
could you enlighten me????
stop supporting microsoft with pirating their software!!!!!
Really why do they call it severe then?
Although this bug is severe, it is recoverable and no data should be lost.
Just because there is some hacky workaround does not mitigate that fact that a major distro released a poorly tested product with a highly visible and data threatening bug. If this bug passed then the natural thought is 'what else is wrong with it'. When people see issues like this they will immediately be more sceptical of the quality.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
Maybe Fedora shouldn't have shipped with such a big bug that they had known about and decided was not important.
Whether or not the article author knew how to fix the problem isn't terribly relevant. If someone is making their first shot at installing a Linux distro in hopes of eventually moving away from Windows, and the first thing it does is hose their MBR, they're not going to be happy campers.
BTW, if you're going to use Google results to make a point, it helps to use search terms that don't require you to already know the solution and the website it's on to find... the solution.
It is really weird to see someone who claims to represent a class of people who administer systems (ooooh aaaaah oooooh!) carping and whining about a File Open dialog.
Real men configure systems in vi on serial consoles or in ssh sessions. There ain't no File Open dialogue on a headless box. I suppose with X there can be, of course....
resigned
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
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
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.
Fedora does suck; this is not an acceptable error for a release to have -- a devel release candidate, sure -- but not a full release.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
How can it ever be too late to change something that is to be published on the Web? Something about having to reset the hot metal on the presses? Surely not.
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
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
We all know why. Fedora was billed as a replacement for RedHat. Luckily I have a site license for Enterprise, so I don't have to beta test Fedora.
Let's talk about what you've said here today. You assert that the removal of the filename textbox from the File Open dialog is a "feature." Yeah, I guess it's really confusing. Therefore, when ever anyone needs to use it, they can just type the ultra-intuitive Ctrl-L! Good choice, guys!
But if you don't want to do that, you can always use the CLI, so look, you still have choices!
This is absolutely absurd. GNOME should provide a seamless GUI to run on top of X and a UNIX-like kernel. This means not having to using a command prompt for ANYTHING. After all, GNOME is mainstream; if your goal is to just have a pretty environment, you don't need GNOME, you just need a bunch of xterms open in some lightweight window manager.
But that's not your average user's goal; your average user wants to be able to get his job done without using terminals or memorizing keyboard shortcuts that have no mouse alternatives. Thus, it's a major step backward when useful functionality, like a filename box, is removed from a standard dialog. Because that's just one more stupid usability issue that makes GNOME a pain to use. Workarounds are not the answer.
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
FC1 didn't have a problem with it, other distros don't have this problem, so what changed? FC2 is released and all of a sudden, data gets destroyed points to FC2 as the problem. Just because Windows creates a slightly different table then other systems doesn't mean its wrong, broken or has a bug, FC2 arbitrarily destroying it on the other hand is wrong and it is broken and it is a major bug for those who want to dual boot.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
" 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
While it may be strictly true that Windows may do weird things to the partition table, I'd still call this a bug, and a big one in Fedora. Other Linux distros do not screw up dual booting. It does not matter if they are working around a windows defect or not, they work, redhat used to work, Fedora does not work.
When there is a spec and windows doesn't conform to it, Windows is wrong not different. When fedora fixes it, it fixes not destroys it. If windows still can't read it, windows is wrong, not different.
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
You're right, and brake failure in cars never leads to injury or death. It's usually the impact with the concrete wall that causes injury or death. I go to boot my MS partition and the boot mgr tells me the partition is screwed up, no can do. You're right, no data loss, the average user has simply lost their ability to access, permanently. I say permanently because your average user (no previous Linux experience) isn't going to have the wherewithal to browse forums, dig into vendor support sites and decipher known-problem articles. They're gonna say "Oh, cr4p!" Maybe they have a geek friend who can bail them out. Lacking that, the data's lost. 'Course they can always go to their latest backup... "Backup?" Never say never.
Ideally this hardware database would include things like the binary nvidia and ati drivers, but since there are licensing issues it seems unlikely. I'll never understand why they don't want people redistributing their binary drivers. What do they have to lose from it? It would just cause more people to actually use their drivers. Do they not want people using their drivers or something?
Obviously Redhat and Knoppix among others already have such a hardware autodetecter, but they were all coded from scratch and they're all distro specific. If someone created a distro neutral decentralized hardware autodetecter and this autodetecter was used by every distro, manual Linux hardware configuration would be a thing of the past.
Even if you installed new hardware after the installation, it would be as simple as running a command like And knowing distros like redhat, there'd be a graphical tool to do that. There's nothing stopping a system like this from existing in Linux. It just seems no one with the skill wants to code it up. Linux coders focus on unimportant things like bloating KDE with features and overzealously making GNOME's defaults easy to use. Who cares? People can't even run your Desktop Env if they're goddamn hardware doesn't work.
Learn a lesson from Mac OS X. I installed OSX on a formatted hard drive a few days ago and not a single piece of hardware had to be manually configured. It was ALL done for me. I know it's a bad comparison because Mac only works on very select hardware, but there's nothing stopping *nix from creating this hardware database and becoming the Mac OS X of the x86 world.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Actually this is EXACTLY the behavior I've seen from "poor innocent people" (or, users). And let's face it, there's no good reason to allow people to set up a dual-boot environment from your install CD if there might be problems.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Why people like to rag on fedora 2 for this bug, i have no clue.
You noticed the GNOME-bashing too? They go together. Red Hat is the target of huge amounts of bile from KDE zealots, because they work on GNOME. They also get it from Debian loons too, for being the biggest linux distro, and doubly so for being a community project that doesn't spend years arguing over trivia before finally releasing stone-age packages.
Fedora is a crackingly good distro... easily one of the best, and it is a significant driving force being large-scale badly-needed changes in the Linux distro world. Ignore the zealots fuckheads.
..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
Have you tried Mandrake's Galaxy? Same idea, but I feel it's far less gaudy.
Chris
Um, that would be because every computer that is capable of running Mac OS X came from a single company, the same one that put out the OS. You could just as easily say the same thing about Sun.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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
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
I don't understand people that write the kind a code that 'fixes' something that they don't own.
Actually it is probably not even fixing anything. It reads the partition table, which contains redundant information (the format always was redundant). It reads the 32 bit start and size fields, which are the only fields you can really trust. The CHS fields have always been wrong in one way or another since some time in the 90s because they did not support more than 504MB. So with a correct and no longer redundant representation of the partitions, it is ready to make whatever modifications it needs to do to the Linux partitions. At this point it doesn't change the Windows partitions at all. Finally it writes the partition table back to disk using the CHS geometry told by the kernel.
You say it is a defacto standard, but you don't understand how much people have been abusing this defacto standard for the last 10 years. Using different geometry in the BIOS API and on the IDE bus was the first mistake. That API was already broken anyway, because it was designed for floppydisks only, and support for more than 256 cylinders was one of ugliest hacks I have ever seen. It should have been redesigned when they started shipping PCs with harddisks. And please stop blaming Linux for the consequences of bad decissions made years before the first Linux version was written.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
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 ?
> If someone is making their first shot at installing a Linux distro...
Then it is YOUR job as a Linux geek to steer that friend to a newbie friendly distro. Fedora isn't one, it is a cutting edge research and development distro. Don't be confused by the fact it has pretty eyecandy because they are cooking that for eventual rolling into RHEL. It would be just as daft as giving a newb Debian, Gentoo, Slackware or OpenBSD. Instead give them Mandrake, or one of the other newbie friendly distros.
But beware, ALL of the 2.6 kernel based distros are currently dealing with the dual boot problem. Fedora gets the abuse heaped upon them because a) a lot more people seem to be running it and b) every week slashdot seems to hold a 'hate redhat day' event.
Democrat delenda est
Funny. Windows installs get away with it.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
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.
for dualboot use it would maybe suck ...
i don't see a direct connection between dual boot and business use
could you enlighten me????
To paraphrase Steve Ballmer: Developers. Developers developers developers developers developers developers!
No, but seriously, developers often do multi boot for various reasons, not he least of which being that they are testing things they have written for multiple platforms. Yes emulation is another possibility, but still. And system administrators often dual boot since whereas they can do most of their work in Linux there are still corporate apps written in Java by brain dead mofos who use windows and make their apps only work in IE with MSJVM. So they work in Linux, then boot to Windows to apply for vacation time or fill out their project timesheets or some such things :).
Agreed. I actively avoid all all Redhat releases now. The advertising+bug/functionality ratio is just too high compared to SuSE+Mandrake. Redhat appears to have become a bureaucratic company with poor quality control and dominated by marketing 'droids. Not as bad as Microsoft but heading in that direction.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
And Fedora Core 2 comes with GTK 2.4, deprecating GTK_COMBO and a host of other widgets. With glade generating code that directly references private internal data structure of said widgets, assuming of course that they'll never change, makes fixing such applications even more problematic.
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Silence is consent.