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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..."
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.
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.
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!
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
> 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