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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?
Why people like to rag on fedora 2 for this bug, i have no clue. This bug exists in Mandrake 10, Suse 9.1, and i'm sure any other 2.6 / grub distribution. See this story.
The File Open dialog box
Those of us who administer systems need a fast, easy way to edit configuration files. We know where most of those files live, and can usually type them in to the File Open dialog a lot faster than we can get to them via the browsing tool. But my favorite tool, gedit, is no longer suitable for that purpose, because, as you can see from the screen shot at right, there is no longer any way to type a filename into the File Open dialog!
REAL MEN use VI from console to edit configuration files! Only wimps use gedit to do that!
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.
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 was a RH - then Mandrake - junkie from 1998 until 2003. Then I tried SuSE and found it to be a very nice distro, and it became my desktop distro of choice. I had only minimal exposure to Debian/potato. I just upgraded my server to the testing/sarge distro, and have to wonder why any experienced user would live with the many issues I encountered in the above distros, including utilities that didn't work, poorly tested packages, and unresolveable system slowdowns. All of the above distros are very nice if you have little or no experience with gnu/linux, but I can't tell you how impressed I am with debian. It still has a lot of legs left in it, and kde has advanced to the point where many of the Mandrake Control Center/YaST tools are redundant. The only extra package I installed for convenience was synaptic. I have also replaced my desktop with debian. debian testing, and unstable for that matter, seems more stable than Mandrake or FC (I haven't tried FC2 or SuSE 9.1 so can't comment on them). And to the writer of the article, enough of the gnome 2.6 bashing. We all get the point - a lot of people don't like it, but it is a matter of choice isn't it? And a lot of the nautilus issues have been worked out, such as browsing SMB shares. Lighten up Francis!
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.
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
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.
Personally, had it not been for Mandrake I'd still be using Windows. But Mandrake made the transition very easy (an essential part was detecting and mounting my NTFS partitions automatically, as my music was on one and working without music is a bore). Now after a year I don't even dual boot anymore.
With this experience I could probably now switch rather easily to a better respected distribution among Slashdot crowd (Debian and Gentoo seem to be the distributions of choice here), but the thing is, I don't want to. While I do enjoy working with my computer, I don't enjoy working on my computer, that is spending too much time configuring things. Granted if I'd use my box as a server I'd want to do it. But I don't, it's a desktop plus a developement platform for small LAMP/JSP work. And for this purpose it excels. (pun not intended ;-) If all you need to do is for example get Apache (with mod_perl/mod_php) and MySQL up and running, it's a matter of couple urpmi's (via CLI or GUI) and clicking a few buttons in MDK Control Center to get the services running (and naturally making sure your firewall is properly set). And you're done! Granted, I haven't tried Debian or Gentoo but I have a feeling this isn't quite as simple with them (please do correct me if I'm mistaken).
Another issue at least for me is those mentioned "wrong license" packages. While I do understand that for example mp3 support may be (is, even) a legal issue, it doesn't change the fact that most of my music is in the format. When I tried RH9 it really wasn't difficult at all to get Synaptic running and install mp3 support for xmms - however, in my oh so humble opinion, it's annoying and wastes my time. And PLF repositories for Mandrake are godsend, if you need software that's legal status isn't quite clear (not to say pirated though).
So yes, I at least am very happy with Mandrake. And yes, I'm very glad (and not even a bit offended) that it was reccommended to me (not in Slashdot, though). Diversity (even with distributions) is a good thing, right?
I share your feelings on Mandrake. I started my linux experience with Redhat 5.2 but found Mandrake (with KDE) a better / easier experience altogether. I didn't have to fight my sound and video card configurations to get them working, etc. Fast forward several years and Mandrake 10 whomps on FC2 in many respects. It is a more complete distro, features many intelligent conveniences (such as Numlock ON kernel module - why hasn't anyone else put that in their distro?).
I have tried Debian (horrendously dated - even SID), gentoo (arcane and too time consuming) and I KEEP ON GOING BACK TO MANDRAKE. I wanted to love FC2...believe me. I ran FC1 and thought it was okay, but not as good as Mandrake 9.2
I tried FC2test3 for several weeks and FC2 final for a couple and just flat gave up. I run Mandrake 10 official now on an HP zd7188cl laptop and on a custom-built Athlon desktop. I LOVE IT! Everything I need works great. Once I figured out how to optimize my urpmi server configs and get the reliable package repositories in place, upgrading for security fixes and adding new software is a snap! (I do it using the command line urpmi app which is just as easy as apt-get). The only thing I wish Mandrake would do is make the package manager gui apps unified (not one to remove and one to install - that's ridiculous) and make it as user-friendly as Synaptic is.
One of the biggest frustrations I had was trying to get Crossover Office 3 running properly under FC2. I have it under Mandrake 10 with absoulutely perfect and very responsive performance. Not so under FC2, with many many issues. And yes, I spent lots of time on the valiant work-around efforts documented by the Codeweavers team. They even scripted in disable functions for problematic aspects of FC2, but it didn't really work.
Long story short, you can try other distros, but you'll always keep on coming back home. I thought it would be cool to give gentoo a shot and I hated it. Similar idea but much better execution is Arch Linux. That is worth your time! Try arch and you may love it. Even in beta it is remarkably stable.
I _am_ going to give Suse 9.1 serious consideration for business use - and if I love it, for my desktop at home. BUT, it will really have to live up to the hype to move me off of Mandrake now that 10.0 official is out.
Another thing about Mandrake and "slashdotter distros" - Mandrake can be used for the most complex of server environments and yet out of the box is the best desktop experience around with minimal fuss. THAT is what makes Mandrake different from "handholder" desktop distros like Linspire and Lycoris that are for the casual user that doesn't want to know the CLI exists.
PS > Bluecurve is FUGlY!