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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..."
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.
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
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
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
It's a hard pill to swallow when you're a developer: you want to get your shiniest version out there. But these people have yet to learn the hard way some of the rules of successful software development:
- don't break something that currently works;
- don't replace a working feature or application with an untested one;
- don't make software that runs only on the latest hardware, unless doing so is a specific target;
- do fix bugs first, and worry about everything else afterwards.
danrees is quite right to say no distro has it perfect. RH used to be very good, but 8/9/FC have run away with the idea that they have to have the latest and flashiest everything, regardless of whether it works or not.All the current users want is the equivalent of RH9 with the bugs fixed. That may be asking a lot in some cases, especially 3d party packages like The Ghastly Mess Formerly Known As Perl, which (in the distro-supplied version) crashes and burns apps using the UTF-8 locale, or the braindead networking behavior in KDE's desktop.
Unless the bugs get fixed before work starts on a new release, we're going to lose some potentially important adherents. C'mon guys, if you can't test it because you don't have the hardware, take it out and don't use it.
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.
I don't think that the reviewer should have knocked FC2 for the fundamental design flaws of GNOME 2.6. They are/will be there in any distro that uses GNOME 2.6.
.bash_profile.
.bash_profile is selected now, even though you can't see it? I hit "Open" in the main requester.
The reviewer mentioned the new file requester. That is retarded. Let me copy-and-paste a post I made on this topic over at FedoraForum.org:
Some googling (certainly not the included GNOME "documentation") let me know that hitting Ctrl-L while in a file requester will pop up a text entry gadget, with tab completion.
Ain't that obvious and user friendly? I can feel my productivity soar through the roof!
NOT THAT IT F-ING WORKS OR ANYTHING!
1. Today, I'd sure like to edit
2. Start gedit.
3. Choose to open a file.
4. As per the tradition of usability downward spiralling, I can't see any files beginning with a period. Being a GNOME user, I'm considered too stupid to be allowed to see things like that. There's no (apparent or documented) way to change this. Ooooh, a purdy little house icon!
5. Oh yeah, the intuitive Ctrl-L. I get a text entry gadget, type ".ba", I get a drop-down list of pattern matches and choose ".bash_profile". Great, this feature (choosing a file) should of course be in the main file requester.
6. I click on "Open".
7. Of course nothing opens when I click "Open". That would probably go smack in the face of the GNOME2 Human Interface Guidelines. The text entry box disappears, and my "Home" directory is reloaded in the main requester list.
8. Maybe
9. Nothing happens.
10. I click "Cancel", curse the f-ing idiocy that seems to rule GNOME development today, and decide to take a look at how far KDE has come these days. Ooooh, a purdy little house icon!
(Seriously, I'm getting tired of this. GNOME is getting slicker and faster all the time, but these steps forwards are always followed by twice the number of steps backwards.)
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
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.
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."
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
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!
..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
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
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
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
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.