Fedora Core 2: Making it Work

Joe Barr writes "Linux.com is running a followup article by Ken Barber to his initial review of Fedora 2. This time he explains how to tame the GNOME and Fedora 2 problems he noted the first time around and get them both in working shape.."

Comments

Very Cool

[XeRXeS-TCN]

That is the best way to do things imo. Don't just complain about the problems that you encounter, like it's some sort of major flaw in the system, which discourages people from adopting it. Instead, work through your problems, and let people know that there are ways around the issues that you encountered. Every system has problems, but it is reassuring to people to know that many/most/all can be fixed, and that there are resources available to help.

Kudos to Ken Barber for writing this follow-up.

Re:Very Cool

[mccalli]

Instead, work through your problems, and let people know that there are ways around the issues that you encountered.

Most particularly, make sure you let the maintainers of the relevant package know your problems and also the solution if you found one. That way, the next iteration of the system might well have these problems sorted.

I've been taking that approach in a number of projects I submit feedback to, not all of them open source, and it seems to work well.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Very Cool

[linsys]

I totally agree.

I know that if it wasn't for people posting simple things like "You need xmms-mp3" in FC2 I would have never guessed that on my own...

Since we are the open source community (well most of us) it does NO good to just complain about a problem , if there is a bug report it, if an app needs some crazy setup let the community know..

Another problem I see is that people will encounter a problem complain about it for weeks on a newgroup, mailing list etc... fix it and NEVER post what the solution was for other users...

This is a great article covering some of the main "FEATURES" we will call them of FC2..

Re:Very Cool

[FiniteLoop]

also you can install gstreamer-plugins-extra. All the packages are available on freshrpms.net

Re:Very Cool

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

Don't just complain about the problems that you encounter, like it's some sort of major flaw in the system, which discourages people from adopting it.

But if the "default" install is messed up to the point where someone's going to have to boot back to Windows to get to the Internet to dig through numerous Google searches to just have to boot back to FC to start working on basic issues, isn't the adoption of "Linux" already blown? If the people that work on Fedora are "expecting" Joe Sixpack to use it, but the person can't even play an mp3 without "yum xmms-mp3" (not that that is hard, but how would Joe Sixpack even know how to do that without booting back to Windows and running a bunch of searches)?

I propose your logic is 100% backwards. Yes, it's REALLY DAMN NICE that the info is "out there", but should someone have to resort to digging through all that just to get their machine simply working when 90 bucks at the local Target later, they have a operational XP system? (assuming that they had a blank machine, of course, which they most likley did not)

Re:Very Cool

[the_crowbar]

Do you honestly expect Joe Sixpack to install Linux? I think the problem is not that we need to make Linux installable by Joe Sixpack, but rather that we need to get OEMs to install and configure Linux.

Have you ever met a "normal" user who could install Windows? Most installs of Windows are done by OEMs or from a specially tailored OEM install disc. If users had a special install of Linux that included support for all of their OEM hardware do you think they could install it?

I think a more widespread adoption of Linux will start with business. You will have IT depts that start using it and eventually replacing Windows with it. Once the more technically inclined start to use it at work they try it at home. There will be problems, but who cares? As more people start to use Linux the answers to their questions will be posted to forums, discussion sites, usenet, whatever. The same way that Windows help has become so common.

One last question: Why is there an impression that Windows is easier to install/fix than Linux?

My opinion is that most users know how to speak "Microsoft". i.e. They know how to formulate questions that are worded in the common language used to describe the Windows environment. Back when I worked on a HelpDesk and fixed 100% Windows machines I was able to quickly locate answers to my technical questions. Forward 6 years to today: I still occassionally fix Windows PCs, but the majority of my work is on Linux. I can fix problems in Linux because I know how to speak the "Linux" language. I can do a Google search and get productive results because I know how to search for Linux specific answers.(I know Google has a Linux Specific search, but s/Linux/MacOS X/ and the point still stands)

In conclusion, I don't think we need to make Linux so easy to install that Joe Sixpack can do it (he can already _use_ Linux), I think we need business to start adopting it. The masses will follow.

Cheers,
the_crowbar

Re:Very Cool

[mick88]

I don't know of any distro that claims to be granny-proof, and FC is no exception.

However...
Most of the common problems with Fedora aren't bad enough to require a boot back into windows. I think if you took a survey you'd find that most people, out of the box, can get keyboard, video, mouse, network and sound.

In my opinion, that's good enough to get started.

I am a hobbyist/enthusiast and have enjoyed the challenge of figuring out how to get USB scanners/printers, firewire, wireless networking etc. to function properly on my FC box.

I admit, I got my ass kicked when I tried to get Debian running and doing all those same things. That was a problem (found myself booting into RH to google for debian answers). But I just don't see that many people who can't get RH/FC working well enough. Just my 2 cents.

Re:Very Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

If we assume they had a blank machine, then the $90 XP isn't an option for them. You'd need a box with Win98/ME/2K already installed for that to work. Otherwise, it's the $199 XP "Home" edition that's their only legal option.

Re:Very Cool

[holy_smoke]

I must disagree with your basic argument. Unfortunately this line of thought doesn't help. The truth is that we realy DO want Joe-Sixpack to have an easy install experience. The business users are, in fact, just Joe-Sixpack while at work. If its not easy to install/configure at home, why would we expect that somehow magically that a business folks would enjoy it any more?

In addition, Joe-Sixpack represents a grass-roots level potential for evangalizing and adopting Linux. This will, in turn, blossom into a growing "buzz" that will infiltrate the business place.

I am a home user, albeit a level or above the Joe-Sixpack level, and I have to admit that Linux (Suse is my flavor of choice) is ALMOST good enough for me to port over. It is ONLY the increasing strides in the ease of install and configuration, combined with the increasing improvement in hardware support that keep me clinging to the hope that someday I can be Microsoft free.

It pains me to hear arguments like you mentioned where "uzers don't matter". We do.

Re:Very Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

90 bucks? There must be plenty of people who would install fedora for 90 bucks. Note that this would also get you what you'd pay thousands more for in application software if you install XP.

Re:Very Cool

[Redlegsys]

Hey, Im Joe SixPack and I installed FC2 :mad:

Re:Very Cool

[geomon]

Have you ever met a "normal" user who could install Windows?

Nope. As the parent poster points out, most users get their OS installed at the time of purchase. Less than 1% of the non-research staff at a national laboratory in the US installs their own OS.

That means that probably a smaller percentage than that install their own OS at home. I get quite a few requests from colleagues to help rebuild their home machines (and I get nice presents at Xmas time as a result).

Re:Very Cool

[cheese_wallet]

"Have you ever met a "normal" user who could install Windows?"

Pretty good point. However "normal" users install applications all the time, and that is where linux still breaks.

Re:Very Cool

[the_crowbar]

I am not saying that I do not want Joe Sixpack to be able to install Linux, just that once the corporate desktop is running Linux Joe Sixpack will be as well.

I also question your idea that business users are Joe Sixpacks at work. In a business environment it is the responsibility of the IT dept to handle computer related issues. At home Joe Sixpack must make those decisions (and deal with the consequnces) for himself.

I think that once business moves the home market will follow. Do you think Dell, HP, eMachines, etc want to support Linux for business and Windows for home? I feel that IBM/Wintel=work Mac=school thoughts are what pushed MS to where they are today. Once we get Linux=work mentality around I think the same thing will happen again.

Cheers,
the_crowbar

Re:Very Cool

[the_crowbar]

Congratulations! Please don't think I do not want you to run Linux; it is just that I think the focus should be on business.

Cheers,
the_crowbar

Re:Very Cool

[the_crowbar]

Application installs can be a little rough on Linux. :) Again though, corporate desktops will be handled by the IT dept. Home users can install most things in their home directory. Most system wide applications will be installed during install so that should not be that much of a problem. The biggest hurdle I see is training users not to run as root all the time. Running as root makes things easier on the user (the reason Windows does this). Maybe these recent virus incidents will open the average home users eyes to at least consider security.

Cheers,
the_crowbar

Re:Very Cool

[thaWhat]

even when I made a really stupid mistake (resolve.conf, not resolv.conf) I posted it. Anyone could make such a mistake...

Getting it to work?

[blanks]

"This time he explains how to tame the GNOME and Fedora 2 problems he noted the first time around and get them both in working shape"

Am I the only person who dosen't want to "get them working" and just want them to work out of the box?

Re:Getting it to work?

[nwbvt]

It does seem like that would be the expectation for a distro billed to be easy for newbies.

Re:Getting it to work?

[thenextpresident]

Yeah, but it's not as easy as you think. Heck, even Microsoft can't do this with Windows. About the only company that does this is Apple.

Re:Getting it to work?

[next1]

Am I the only person who dosen't want to "get them working" and just want them to work out of the box?

understandable, and no i'm sure you're not.

but really, if you find these problems with fedora then the answer (at least for mean time) is simply to install a different distro instead.

i very much doubt you would have any significant issues installing mandrake 10 community/official for example.

Re:Getting it to work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice, that "getting it working" primarily were about selecting his preferences instead of the system preferences. KDE instead of Gnome, "Windows explorer"-mode instead of spatial.

In this sense, Windows doesn't "work out of the box" for me either. It needs just as much selecting my preferences instead of the system ones as any Linux system does. Like changing the stupid explorer.exe to open new windows when I double-click on an icon, instead of overwriting the current one. Like changing the colors, damn I hate that blue screen.

Re:Getting it to work?

[next1]

that's very true as well.

sure it doesn't take you long to install a new system, but i'm usually tweaking things for days/weeks after a fresh install.

Re:Getting it to work?

[FlyGirl]

About the only company that does this is Apple

Yeah, but to be fair, it's comparitivly easy to get software to work out of the box when you pretty much control all the hardware as well.

Not to say that that isn't a valid business plan, just wanted to be sure we're not attacking the fedora people compared to the apple people for failing to succeed at what is clearly a more difficult job.

Re:Getting it to work?

[Anonymous Coward]

That used to be MS argument about Windows flaws. "We don't control the hardware". Well, how about Pocket PC? MS controls the hardware spec and their software still sucks!

Re:Getting it to work?

[jav1231]

Especially since Fedora is the bone thrown to those of us who used to pay RH for a desktop distro! So much for being "behind the product." But then again, it's not really "product" is it? So who really cares if it works? RH calls it "bleeding edge" obfiscating them of any real liability for a working distro. "Hey, we told you it's development. Want a working distro? Buy our Enterprise-because-the-little-end-user-doesn't-hav e-deep-enough-pockets Workstation Edition."

Re:Getting it to work?

[jcwinnie]

Yes, I made the same erroneous assumption, then greatly compounded my error by seeking help in #fedora on irc.freenode.net, a "community" to avoid if one is unaccustom to snakepits.

Re:Getting it to work?

[merdark]

Except that many of the problems with fedora (eg mp3 support) have nothing to do with the hardware.

There is 'suppport hardware out of the box' which is hard. But then there is 'work out of the box given supported hardware'. Linux in general, along with fedora, is terrible at this. There are projects attempting to solve these issues, but none are usable yet.

Re:Getting it to work?

[Red Alastor]

Mine worked out of the box. The only thing I had to Google for is the "spatial manager" but this design is from the Gnome team, not Fedora's.

Re:Getting it to work?

[thenextpresident]

I completely agree, and in fact, that highlights my point. Apple has been able to do this, but only because they control the hardware.

The fact that Microsoft can't do this makes what Fedora has accomplished all the more amazing.

Relativity

[Daengbo]

I liked this part:

Getting FC2 to a state of usability in a home or office environment requires a great deal more labor than I believe should be required. However, my complaints were put into perspective last week when I visited a classroom to start getting it ready for summer term. I walked in on a cursing, overworked desktop support tech who was griping loudly about the inordinate time it takes to install and patch Windows on a roomful of computers -- in an organization that will not pay for disk imaging software or an in-house Windows Update server. "You don't need Microsoft Office installed on these, I hope?" he asked through a fog of sweat and frustration. I acknowledged that I did not. Then he wanted to know if I needed HP printer drivers installed, with a cynical groan about how it would "only take a few more hours." I used to supervise people who support Windows on the desktop. I had forgotten how bad Windows really is. Suddenly my gripes about Fedora seemed petty

Re:Relativity

[transient]

in an organization that will not pay for disk imaging software or an in-house Windows Update server

His complaints should be directed at this organization, not Windows. Switching operating systems will not fix their support tech's apparent inability to present a cogent argument to his budget people.

Re:Relativity

[blane.bramble]

His complaints should be directed at this organization, not Windows. Switching operating systems will not fix their support tech's apparent inability to present a cogent argument to his budget people.

Except many companies would much rather their tech support go around in circles doing repetitive boring tasks (hey, they already pay your salary, right?) then spend money on something that is not seen as strictly necessary (it only saves the tech supports time, after all...). That's if you even have a seperate budget for IT, there are still many places that don't and so ALL expenditure needs individual justication.

Re:Relativity

[AKAImBatman]

I'm thinking that a Linux boot disk + 'dd' + a CDRW drive would do wonders for their tech support problems. Of course, it only helps if they have one or two types of computers. If all the computers are different, then I'd suggest they start looking at some of Microsoft's (yuck) Zero Install tools.

Re:Relativity

[jaylee7877]

The guy could of used g4u and saved himself a lot of time. It's a open source ghost like program. It doesn't do partition resizing yet but for lab installs of 20 identical machines it works great. But like others have said, he really needs to push the admin into giving him some sort of budget for imaging... sheesh

Re:Relativity

[slash-tard]

Anyone can manage a network poorly.

The in house windows update server should be free. Microsoft doesnt charge for it, its not very resource intensive and works pretty well.

Disk Imaging is not just a Windows problem, regarless of OS I would want a standard image in any environment I worked in.

MS Office can easily be scripted to install off of a network share.

Printer drivers should be setup on the print server, then the client just selects the server and printer and they are set.

Windows has a lot of flaws but bashing it for this poor management on these simple problems is stupid. It would be like someone bashing linux because you couldnt script changes to multiple machines (duh, shell script).

Not all windows admins are cram school dummies, just like not all linux admins are leet hackers who know everything.

Re:Relativity

[Dravik]

A cogent argument rarely has any effect on budget people. My utility company wouldn't spend $5,000 to buy UPS devices when they were losing 25 grand per system crash with 2 to 3 crashes per year. All because the 5 grand was capital investment and they didn't care what was coming out of somebody else's(O&M) budget.

Re:Relativity

[ultranova]

Buying a single SCO Linux license: $699 and termination of redistribution rights for GPL'd software due to participation in a GPL violation.

Administering a classroom of Windows machines: your sanity.

Posting a quoted paragraph from the article with four (4) words of your own and getting modded +5 informative: priceless.

The problem being?

[lachlan76]

So....If I understand the article right, to make Fedora Core 2 good, you need to install packages, change some gettings for gnome, and adjust the sound properties? If you use Linux, you have to expect that you'll need to add programs, and change settings, just the same as windows.

Re:The problem being?

[moorg]

So....If I understand the article right, to make Fedora Core 2 good, you need to install packages, change some gettings for gnome, and adjust the sound properties?

As long you don't quit on the spatial mode Nautilus as quickly as the author you don't need to make any changes.

Personally, I always rearrange the GNOME panels from the default Red Hat/Fedora layout to the default GNOME layout (Applications, System menu on the top panel). But that's my preference, and certainly not something I should shake a stick at the Red Hat/Fedora guys.

Perhaps the author would enjoy reading The Spatial Way then debate the merits rather than pull a "my desktop doesn't look they way it used it, it must be broke".

Re:The problem being?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the author would enjoy reading The Spatial Way then debate the merits rather than pull a "my desktop doesn't look they way it used it, it must be broke".

Perhaps the Gnome developers should stopp pulling a "you don't like the settings I overrode your preferences with, that must be cause you're an idiot".

I understand spatial Nautilus. I just don't like it. As a Red Hat employee, I have a lot of contact with customers who mostly don't like it either. I find the attitute of the Gnome devs appalling - how dare they override my preferences without telling me?

Glad this situation will be fixed in EL 4.

PS - This is my own opinion, not my employers.

Re:The problem being?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the author would enjoy reading The Spatial Way


Yeah, because if you're using more than 3 directories, and any of them has more than 7 files, you're doing something wrong. Honestly, What kind of a fuckstick actually has a real world Java project with 7 files? (that question was rhetorical).

I can't believe these cocksucking GNOME devs believe that a cute Icon View is actually usable.

wow, quite a statement

[BigGerman]

" the best way to mitigate the myriad problems in GNOME 2.6 is to include KDE in your install"
Article with a built-in troll!

Re:wow, quite a statement

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, KDE should be a temporary solution. Gnome is much cleaner. KDE is for ricers.

Re:wow, quite a statement

[chegosaurus]

It's not a troll if it's true. Is it?

I just don't get GNOME these days. Every release seems to be slower, buggier and with less features than the one before. I don't know how deep Sun's involvement is, but it segfaults so much on Solaris that a less charitable person might call it unusable. KDE, on the other hand, is rock solid.

What happened to you GNOME? YOU USED TO BE COOL!

Re:wow, quite a statement

[ajs]

Indeed, but I'm starting to see the wisdom in this. Keeping KDE around is good for the user, but it's also good for Gnome. KDE came first, and from day one has always pushed Gnome to BE and to BE BETTER.

I like Gnome a lot, but I really hope KDE sticks around for the forseeable future.

Re:wow, quite a statement

[YankeeInExile]

I think it was a pretty low-level barb at the GNOME community from someone who prefers the "other" religion. And his quote, "I find myself far more productive in KDE than in GNOME these days." makes me think that he might actually move back and forth between the two camps based on the current feature-to-wart ratio.

Neither GNOME nor KDE are perfect. You pick the featureset that coincides with your personal philosophy or needs or free help-desk fount.

For years, when Unix newbies asked me, "What should I run, *BSD, or Linux, or ... " I would always answer the same: "Find a nearby knowledgable friend, and run what s/he is running. The ability to get advice from someone who has done it is orders of magnitude more significant than the fine details of OS internals.

Re:wow, quite a statement

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just that, but he bitches about changing the default desktop.

How hard exactly is "switchdesk kde".

I mean I was a 1st time Redhat/Fedora user (coming from mandrake) and I found that in under 30 seconds using man -k.

Re:wow, quite a statement

[HermanAB]

No, that is not a troll. If you want to have an easy to use Linux system, then with Fedora, you have to select the 'Install Everything' option. With Mandrake, you have to select all available desktop managers and games, network client and network server options.

The reason for that, is that you then get all the libraries on your machine, making future installs much easier.

It is also important that you plug everything you got into the machine before you begin. If you want USB support, then you have to plug some USB device in before you start the installation.

All of that is pretty obvious to old hands...

Re:wow, quite a statement

[pyros]

Wow, you're totally wrong. All three available systems (system-config-packages, yum, and apt) resolve dependencies, so installing 'Everything' just to make sure you have all the libs you might need is complete overkill and a waste of space. If you can't convince yourself, then you could just manually select every lib, and leave out all the stuff you don't need on a home desktop (like all the rwho, rdate, rdist, rsh, rlogin, ypbind, NFS server, etc). If you don't have any Qt/KDE libs installed, and use any of the three mentioned installation systems, you could just, for example, run `apt-get install quanta` and it will install all the Qt/KDE libs for you.

Regarding the "plug everything in first" command, I haven't seen that hold true in a while. I haven't had anything connected to the USB bus on my laptops the last few times I've installed RH/FC, and plugging in a USB mouse later on always works (in fact I can hotplug it and have both the external mouse and the touchpad working simultaneously, with full wheel support and everything). Plugging in a PCMCIA WiFi NIC always seems to cause boot problems after the install because it tries to bring it up but it can't because the PCMCIA stuff hasn't been loaded yet. What difference do you think it would make anyway? The installer uses Kudzu for hardware detection, which is what is used every time the computer boots (unless you manually disable the service, in which case it's your own fault that hardware detection doesn't work after install).

Re:wow, quite a statement

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a troll if it's true. Is it?

It might be true with FC2, but I've not had any problems with Slackware 10 having Gnome and KDE loaded simultaneously.

I just don't get GNOME these days. Every release seems to be slower, buggier and with less features than the one before. I don't know how deep Sun's involvement is, but it segfaults so much on Solaris that a less charitable person might call it unusable. KDE, on the other hand, is rock solid.

It really makes you wonder about the quality of the port. I've had no problems on the Intel side of the house so far. As far as execution speed goes, Gnome 2.6 has not been a problem, but I admittedly have a monster of a box on which to run it.

For the most part it seems as though one must be EITHER a KDE person or a Gnome person. Personally KDE drives me nuts, and the only reason I keep any of it on my drive is that I love k3b and its DVD writer support. To each their own.

Re:wow, quite a statement

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference comes in when compiling programs from source. It sure helps a lot if you already have a huge whack of libraries installed.

Space on a modern hard disk is not a problem.

USB trouble is still a very real issue. I resolve that by plugging both my printer parallel and USB cables in - then install.

Install everything still beats the individual install uption hands down. Remember I'm talking of tricks to reduce headaches, not saving disk space.

Re:wow, quite a statement

[pyros]

The difference comes in when compiling programs from source. It sure helps a lot if you already have a huge whack of libraries installed.

It would still make more sense to individually pick all the '-devel' packages in that case. Picking the 'Everything' install puts on a metric ton of server software with the services turned on. That is a really dumb idea. Regardless of the cost of disk space, having 2 GB installed instead of the 1 GB you need is still a waste of disk space, it's just not an expensive waste.

Re:wow, quite a statement

[Anonymous Coward]

Au contraire chegosaurus, the best trolls are true. Presentation and selection are key. Lying is just messy.

Re:wow, quite a statement

[bogado]

All services are defaulted to be turned off, with the exeption of sshd, as far as I know.

for fedora developers

[millahtime]

Am I the only person who dosen't want to "get them working" and just want them to work out of the box?

maybe the best way is for the fedora developers to take nhote of this and fix it. he is even telling them how.

Up2date

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

FC2's up2date utility is vastly improved from prior versions, and no extra configuration is required to begin using it.

Well he's right about one thing. Up2date dosen't need any extra configuration as it does not in fact work, at all. It just connects and crashes. Bad Newbie!! It's back to the command prompt for you!

Re:Up2date

[Lehk228]

ehehe I also noticed the gui updater crashes *every* time.... just use apt and/or yum like a normal person

Re:Up2date

[zogger]

run up2date from the command line. Whenever you see the "throbbing icon" switch to an exclamation point from a check mark, go to a console, su to root, type up2date -u then mash enter then go about your business,. it works great then. I agree the graphical version sucketh, but the cli version works perfectly fine. For new stuff, I added some repositories to my apt sources, use synaptic front end to check them out every few days,pick out whatever new and shiny I might want, then go back to command line to run apt as well. And I do NOT know why the gui versions are buggy, but they are, but the cli version always work on my old coal burner box and dial up connection. I just last night tried out the GUI front end for yum from cobind based on a link I saw on another thread, it's still sitting here with a blank window that is unreadable. it apparently started downloading stuff I picked last night, but it won't display to tell me what really happened, it's doing the same thing that up2date gui used to do to me, just not finish rendering it's window. So, back to cli for me with yum.

Re:Up2date

[pyros]

Did either of you search bugzilla.redhat.com or file bug reports? The up2date tools work quite well for quite a large number of people.

Re:Up2date

[Pros_n_Cons]

I wonder if you waited long. The only problem I've had with up2date since FC2 is if I minimize it and bring it back up later, the window will be blank until a graphic changes (like the progress bar moves) then the text returns. It looks like a crash but it does its thing behind the scenes. The gui is too slow for me anyway, I don't like clicking next all the time so i just "up2date --update" and be done with it. If you have it set to skip packages (like kernel) then you'll need to issue -f like "up2date -f --update" which will grab every update reguardless of what you have set to skip. I've been doing things this way for a couple years.

Re:Up2date

[juhaz]

If you're running it non-interactively from command line anyway, why bother with up2date at all, instead of yum?

Re:Up2date

[Pros_n_Cons]

Because yum is slower to get updates from fedora.redhat.com mirrors. I got an update for the latest kernel about an hour after release but didn't see the yum headers get downloaded until early the next day.

Re:Up2date

[cfkdaddy]

I would personally go out and get red carpet going. Same thing, and a pretty slick front end. And if you dont work for a company that has a license, you can get slicked back at http://open-carpet.org for about the same thing.

The idea of ease of use seems to be floating through this post. Here is my take. Microsoft has become the default standard of useability for the IT community as it relates to end users. I dont like it, most people reading this won't, but thats the way it is. To tell someone who is new to linux "Just go to the command line and its so much faster" is about the most counter-intuitive thing they have ever heard.

However, I agree with another earlier post. What will drive Linux will be businesses adopting Linux, and then people bringing it home.

"Where are all the icons?" will be replaced with "Wow, Linux is actually pretty cool and most of the time it is very stable and usable."

Anyway, since the point of the thread seems to be whether or not Fedora is going to be cool or not, let me suggest something else. SuSE 9.1. Its free as long as you can download some .ISO files. You can also get the preview version where you just boot off a CD and check it out.

Novell is doing a great job with this. Why dick around with Red Hat when you have all this sweet stuff from SuSE? They are still providing desktop support, they are not giving the finger to the community that got them where they are.

Go SuSE, screw Red Hat. Like I want their stupid "bleeding edge" crap.

Re:Up2date

[alerante]

Sometimes up2date will crash because it is waiting for - ev - er for updates from the main Red Hat server, which, like most default-configuration servers, gets pummeled with requests. It is a better idea to use the mirrors, which are often much faster and more reliable.

GNOME / KDE flamewar

[scarolan]

Not to start a Gnome / KDE flamewar here but we have twelve users on linux workstations and they all do just fine in the custom Gnome environment provided with FC2. They all came from using Windows and there was not a steep learning curve at all. I personally find the nautilus spacial browsing really annoying though, and even moreso that the only way to turn it off is to dig way down in the gconf editor.

Re:GNOME / KDE flamewar

[Plug]

Or, issue the one line fix:

gconftool-2 --type boolean -s /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser true

That could even go in someone's .profile on a networked setup, so there would be no further administrative overhead.

On the topic of out of the box

[emo boy]

I would like a partition manager built-in like Mandrake and Suse. Is that too much to ask?

Re:On the topic of out of the box

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes because Fedora is unsupportable crap, plain and simple. If you want a distro that works use RHEL or one of the others like Mandrake or SuSE. Fedora is for ex-RedHat Desktop users living in denial that RedHat took their desktop out behind the barn and put a bullet in it's noggin.

Re:On the topic of out of the box

[pyros]

I would like a partition manager built-in like Mandrake and Suse. Is that too much to ask?

Yes, because NTFS has patents on it which restrict Red Hat from including any legal open source tools to do NTFS resizing (at least in the U.S.A.).

awesome timing

[BitchAss]

I literally *just* finished installing FC2 on my lappy. I'm running 'apt-get dist-upgrade' right now :)

I'm pretty happy for the most part - it's more responsive than FC1 - the menus are very snappy. I'm having a weird problem - none of my mail clients will check an IMAP account - weird, non?

Re:awesome timing

[Ignignot]

I have a post from a few weeks ago that is almost exactly the same as this. I'm not saying you copied me, instead I'm saying I've been there, brand spankin new Fedora Core installed. After awhile I ended up with all kinds of package problems. Can't install this, wrong version of that. I don't think Fedora Core is stable enough or mainstream enough to have wide support of its bleeding edgeness. So on Friday, I decided enough was enough, and installed gentoo. Yes, emerge kde took over 2 days to finish, but at least I don't have to deal with the poor package management that FC2 has. :( Maybe I was just using it wrong, but there is no easy way to find which repositories are correct. Gentoo sets that all up right off.

Re:awesome timing

[Boiotos]

I'm having a weird problem - none of my mail clients will check an IMAP account - weird, non?

A complete guess, but could your firewalling rules be blocking the port on which IMAP runs? That's the sort of thing that gets changed with a new distro. You could try running 'nmap -sT localhost' or netstat while the client should be connected.

Re:awesome timing

[BitchAss]

That was really helpful - thank you.

Apparently unchecking the 'Firewall me' button in the setup doesn't turn off firewalling - silly Fedora Core.

Re:awesome timing

[sharkey]

I literally *just* finished installing FC2 on my lappy. I'm running 'apt-get dist-upgrade' right now

You seem like a pretty happy chappy.
If FC2 ain't too crappy, you can install your pappy's lappy.
Excuse me, it's time for my nappy.

Unimpressed by Fedora 2

[suso]

I was rather unimpressed with Fedora and felt justified in my switch to Gentoo when encountering this horrible bug with fedora and parted upon installing it on my wife's machine. The first time I've ever had Linux futz up a Windows installation. How could they be so careless.

Re:Unimpressed by Fedora 2

[falkryn]

And here's the fix:

http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/

Not mentioned here also might be setting your drives in BIOS to use LBA, instead of Auto, which rather makes sense anyhow.

After having SUSE 9.1 miff up my windows partition for me (yet another reason to sour that distro in my taste), installing Fedora Core 2, just a few minutes ago, no problems here. that is, in combination with following the steps above.

Re:Unimpressed by Fedora 2

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems a bit of a troll to me, but there other similiar compliants for other problems...

That issue is not isolated to FC2, other distros with kernel 2.6 have also suffered from that problem. (Comment #27 in your link shows this)

FC2 cops so much crap, most likely because it is most people's first look at a 2.6 kernel distro.
(And an early version at that)

IMHO the jump from FC1 to FC2 was too big, for the amount of testing that happened. You can't expect to make large changes _and_ have an accelerated testing schedule.

Re:Unimpressed by Fedora 2

[suso]

Maybe it was a problem with other distros, but people testing Fedora before releasing it should have done the dual boot and windows test. Since most people using Fedora and RedHat distros are running a dual boot machine.

There comes a time when distrobution makers have to realize that they are partly responsible for the image (perceivance of quality) of OSS to the public.

Re:Unimpressed by Fedora 2

[Pros_n_Cons]

You do know there was a fix for that parted bug right? not only can you avoid it entirely on install but you can also recover the data if you already borked the tables. type 'windows fedora recover parted' (without quotes) in google. The first hit tells you how, Thats what I did a few months ago and it worked fine.

Re:Unimpressed by Fedora 2

[SiChemist]

Since most people using Fedora and RedHat distros are running a dual boot machine.[sic]

Why on earth do you say that? It totally contradicts my experience. Most of the RH/Fedora installs at my place of employ are servers (ftp,http,postgres) or workstation installs (running numerical models). Do you have good information that most people are dual-booting or is it just that you assume everyone else is because you are? Some of us don't need Windows for anything.

Re:Unimpressed by Fedora 2

[Anonymous Coward]

They did. The bug was found in test2 or test3, and they NEVER FIXED IT.

Re:Unimpressed by Fedora 2

[TheMysteriousFuture]

for the archives this is the first google hit http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/

quote of the article

[next1]

And with all of the work, it's still a lot less annoying than keeping a Windows system running

classic.

Re:quote of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

What's tough about 'keeping a Windows system running'?

Not trolling, just curious. I've had XP installed for six months with no problems... not one crash come to think of it. No virus attacks or the like - I regularly check Windows Update.

neat

[falkryn]

Nifty timing, since I just finished installing Core 2 on my box a few minutes ago. Not much in the article that informed me as such though.

I seem to notice an emerging pattern with Fedora releases though. RCs, avoid them all, they won't work properly, unless you really do want to do bug testing (not a bad thing). Final releases, avoid them too, at least for about a month or so. Let the updates filter in, and then you should be good. Plus, that gives a good amount of time for the 3rd party apt/yum repositories to starting filling up, which they seem to be doing rather nicely lately (though of course not on a par with debian, but good none the less).

Re:neat

[Bertie]

RCs are broken? Releases are broken too? Need the updates just to get a usable system? Sounds to me like they're taking the whole just-like-Windows thing too far...

Re:neat

[Anonymous Coward]

Redhat was always that way too. With the old numbering system you really didn't want to run any earlier than X.2 in production (for X=4 through 7). However, if it weren't for RH pushing out the early buggy-code to tons of users we still wouldn't have a usable free distribution. If everyone takes the advice to wait until someone else finds and fixes the bugs, nobody will ever actually do it. Even if you hate all the bugs they've shipped, you have to give RH/fedora most of the credit for the ones that have been fixed over the last several years. If it weren't for them we'd still be thinking of free software as a yearly bug-filled release of gcc and an occasional emacs update like it was before they shipped their first CD.

Absoluteness

[Chemisor]

"X is good because Y is no better" is really not much of an argument. People should really stop using it and create absolutes instead, which are good no matter how bad or good the competition happens to be.

Re:Absoluteness

[Anonymous Coward]

All software sucks. All hardware sucks. All OSes suck. The only relevent questions are "How much does this product suck?" and "Does it suck more or less than this other product?"

In this instance, Fedora Core 2 sucks but it sucks less than Windows.

Re:Absoluteness

[SirPrize]

As is mentioned on the Mutt homepage:

"All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less." -me, circa 1995

Fedora 2 - Slow DNS problem

[fforw]

After installing Fedora Core 2 I had the problem that DNS queries out of Mozilla e.g. were rather slow (several seconds) while

nslookup www.google.de

seemed to work okay.

the solution to this problem was that FC2 enables IPv6 by default which led to the noticable delay. After adding:

alias net-pf-10 off

to /etc/modprobe.conf to switch off IPv6 everything was fine.

Re:Fedora 2 - Slow DNS problem

[I_redwolf]

Sounds like a dns server problem, IPv6 shouldn't make lookups slower. You should probably also stop using nslookup.

Re:Fedora 2 - Slow DNS problem

[hey]

I am not sure IPv6 can explain show DNS but for nearly everyone disabling it is a reasonable idea.
At least until your ISP gives you a IPv6 option. It just makes sense to disable stuff that isn't needed - saves memory, simplifies, better security, etc.

Re:Fedora 2 - Slow DNS problem

[molarmass192]

FYI SuSE 9.1 users, ipv6 is also enabled by default. Follow the parent poster's recs if you want to disable it.

Re:Fedora 2 - Slow DNS problem

[fforw]

Sounds like a dns server problem, IPv6 shouldn't make lookups slower. You should probably also stop using nslookup.

I don't think it's my provider's DNS server (I tried different DNS servers ). I suspect my cheap DSL router to be the cause. ( I only used nslookup for testing purposes. )

Re:Fedora 2 - Slow DNS problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I encountered the same problem. My finding

1. I am using a cheap ADSL Ethernet/bridge router with DHCP and NAT activated by default.

2. For Fedora Core 2 default DHCP, I have frequent problems getting DHCP to get address properly from the ADSL Router

3. On the same box, when I try FreeBSD with default DHCP, similar problem in getting TCP/IP address properly and the system appear hung for a long time.

However, when I reinstall them, and decided to give them static TCP/IP Address, then both seem back to normal. Remember to set the default router to the ADSL Router (in my case), and also set the /etc/resolv.conf name resolver configuration to point to ADSL (if ADSL router has DNS proxy) or to your ISP DNS Server address, (NAT will automatically translate the request properly to outside world)

In summary, it seems to be how the FC2 TCP/IP networking interact with ADSL Router. I supposed it is more of compatibility issues. I suspect a branded/supported big vendors' ADSL Router may not have this problem.

Re:Fedora 2 - Slow DNS problem

[ceswiedler]

I noticed this too...thanks for the info, I'll try it out tonight. It's really been bugging me.

Re:Fedora 2 - Slow DNS problem

[ceswiedler]

It's not an IPv6 issue directly, but disabling IPv6 fixes it. It's an interaction between glibc and Firefox which results in a lot of reverse-lookups. Disabling IPv6 is a workaround which happens to get Firefox to revert to older behavior which avoids the problem. See this.

Re:Fedora 2 - Slow DNS problem

[leroy152]

I saw this on one of the fedora mailing lists, the reason that ipv6 support makes mozilla so slow, is that when ipv6 is available, the function moz uses to do name resolving returns every alias/entry, so for something like www.yahoo.com, you'd get every single IP address that is tied to that domain (which is a few), when ipv6 is disabled, moz falls back to the old function, and things work as usual.

This isn't unique to Fedora, I've observed this at work with Mandrake 10 Official, unfortunately, the fix you mention didn't work for me.

KDE advocacy

[Alioth]

I note how he says 'switch to KDE'. Since RedHat 8's 'Bluecurve', I've always preferred KDE - the 'Bluecurve' theme seemed to work really well with it (and at the time, KDE had some vital features that Gnome didn't - for example, it gave you feedback when an application was launching: I tried my Dad with the default RH 8.0 Gnome install and he'd double-click large apps a dozen times and get many instances because Gnome didn't have the little application loading feedback that KDE has).

I don't know whether Gnome still lacks this UI feedback, but if it does I'm not surprised that little touches like that made the article writer use KDE instead. And of course, Konqueror is an excellent browser.

Re:KDE advocacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome still has this problem with launch feedback. I think apps that adhere to the freedesktop.org specifications give you feedback, the problem is, that most apps don't. Btw., the truely amazing thing is that even some apps that come with gnome don't.

Though there may be a right way to do it and I can understand the reasoning behind wanting all apps to do it the right way, I still think that gnome should give lauch feedback for all apps, as this is obviously possible, as kde shows. And for Christs Sake, even xfcec4 has it.

Re:KDE advocacy

[Telex4]

Well, yes, I think it's nice that both GNOME and KDE have got to the point where now the only reason one can give for a choice one way or the other is going to be along the lines of "it feels nicer" or "I prefer the icons" or "it has this one minor feature I really like".

Having played with GNOME on a fresh Debian set-up over the past week, I still prefer KDE, though only because I prefer the feel of it, and I've got my KIOSlaves working nicely for working on remote systems.

Re:KDE advocacy

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME has it as of 2.2 I think (but I could be wrong on the version number).

Installing FC2

[Zorilla]

One day, I was drooling over the screenshots of Bluecurve from Fedora Core 2 and finally decided to install it. After using Mandrake 10.0 (and currently SuSE 9.1), it seems I still can't get used to the extremely fragmented set of config tools that come with GNOME and the system.

I swear, there's three different menus synonymous with "preferences". Not that you could reorganize the menu to make more sense to you, it won't let you change it. I hope the system-config tools adopt a layout such as YaST and hope GNOME gets their act together and come up with some kind of control center application to replace the fifty bajillion different small config tools.

It's nice to see that the NVIDIA drivers are 4kstacks compatible. When I installed FC2, I had to use some custom kernel RPM from Joe Blow that used 8k stacks. ...I couldn't adjust tone controls on my emu10k1 sound card...

I think the straw that broke the camel's back in making me get rid of FC2 was that it powered both my hard drives off when doing a warm reboot, which basically means the disks spin down, the computer restarts and the disks spin right back up again. I couldn't find a single entry on a Google search on the topic. I even mucked through the rc scripts myself.

At least it looked good....

Re:Installing FC2

[Anonymous Coward]

Not being able to edit the menus is Fedora's fault in case you didn't know. You can still "edit" them by playing in /usr/share/applications a bit. This was my biggest gripe with FC2's GNOME setup. The control center problem is annoying. If you want a control center for GNOME, type gnome-control-center --use-shell. I just made a MacOSX System Prefs like app. Took five minutes.

Re:Installing FC2

[Anonymous Coward]

The not being able to change menus bug (except via editing files) is a bug with KDE on FC2 too.

broadband arrogance...

[Chemisor]

> I'm running 'apt-get dist-upgrade' right now :)

I wish people would stop gloating over their broadband connections...

Re:broadband arrogance...

[BitchAss]

Hey - I'm at work. I'm moving into dial-up country in 3 weeks.

Re:broadband arrogance...

[falkryn]

that's funny. Like I mentioned in another post, I just finished installing on my home box about an hour ago or so. Like you however, I'm doing it at work. My 56k dialup just can't compete with what they have here.

(in case your not using it, check out dag wieer's apt repository, very nice, and it cross links with others such as freshrpms.)

What _is_ the Fedora Core?

[BlindSpy]

What is the Fedora Core made up of? I'm a Gentoo user and I'm trying to understand what is involved in other distro's and what would make it not work with Gnome.

Re:What _is_ the Fedora Core?

[junklight]

Bit late but Fedora is a fairly leading edge distro - similar to the old red hat but 2.6 kernel, pretty recent versions of most packages.

I use FC2 on our project desktops 'cos its quick to install and gentoo on our servers 'cos it gives me much greater control.

VMware client

[Burb]

I'm not overly impressed by FC2, if only because I tried to install it as a VMWare 3.2 client operating system, and WMWare completely died. So naturally I'm blaming FC2 :)
However if anyone has a fix for this....?

Re:VMware client

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not specific to FC2 its a kernel 2.6 problem.

I've version 4.0 and while it runs, it does so in stop motion. There is a newer version of vmware available for download that fixes this issue.

Re:VMware client

[Zorilla]

Yes, 2.6 is very slow under VMWare (even in version 4.5), but the problem I ran into trying to run it was that FC2 selected a 16 bit color depth by default when VMWare won't accept anything but what matches the host desktop, which in my case was 24 bit (even if you're using 32 bit color). After editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf to make it run in 24 bit color, it started right up, as did the purty boot screen which also uses the same settings.

Re:VMware client

[Burb]

Thanks

Re:VMware client

[Anonymous Coward]

no problem.

If you have trouble getting the X server to start in the installer and post install you can fix it by passing vdso=0 to the installer and add it to grub.conf ( I just add it to the grub.conf options as part of the install process )

MP3 support

[Mr_Silver]

I understand the reasons they do it, I respect the reasons they do it -- but in all honesty, I think it's a pretty silly idea to make users jump through hoops so they can listen to their MP3's.

We complain about Microsoft bundling stuff within Windows -- but it's got to the point where a user expects a certain number of applications to come with the Operating System and I would consider MP3 support to be one of them.

Sure, I know it's a no-brainer to install it afterwards but if Fedora's goal is to encourage mass market adoption, then they should consider that an individuals first impression counts - even more so when something they take for granted isn't there from the beginning.

Re:MP3 support

[Extrema Type]

If I am not mistaken, OGG support is default on installation. RedHat isn't afrait of the RIIA, only of the MP3 patent holders.

Re:MP3 support

[Zorilla]

Red Hat 8.0 was the very first time I used Linux, and the fact that they didn't even preconfigure XMMS to play back MP3s left a bad impression. However, I was a Google search away from fixing the problem.

Of course, SuSE (my current Linux OS) has its own issues. Its video playback is crippled for some reason and I was only able to get xine to play more than just MPEGs through some third party xinelib package I found. CSS decoding is also not there, but I haven't bothered with that yet. I watch DVDs on an actual player appliance.

Re:MP3 support

[Anonymous Coward]

If I am not mistaken, OGG support is default on installation.

Which is useful if you're one of the 0.01% of the population that use OGG.

Re:MP3 support

[crivens]

http://www.lycoris.org may be the answer (once the next version is released this month.)

Re:MP3 support

[Pros_n_Cons]

I understand the reasons they do it

Then why complain? Windows users up until windowsXP (or was it 2k?) had to actually get on the internet and get winzip. And to this day people still have to download software they want like codecs! oh the humanity! Making poor users type words in search engines. I would rather have users jump though the hoop of typing yum install xmms-mp3 than one day read the slashdot thread "fedora has been sued by company who made recent deal with MS".
For all the hundreds of applications Fedora comes with by default that MS doesn't provide by default can't we allow them to not include about 4 or 5 things?

Re:MP3 support

[HuguesT]

You can't legally have a company redistributing an MP3 player without paying a license fee to Fraunhoffer Institute. If Fedora is to remain free-as-in-beer there is just no way this is going to happen.

Please install your own MP3 decoding library at your own risk or use Ogg instead. End of story.

Ill give you another problem

[TheRealMindChild]

... how about Fdora Core 2's boot disk image is 6MB... how the HELL am I going to fit that on a floppy?

I bet I pulled in a few "Floppy's are useless" goers... I have a couple of PPro machines that neither have USB or can boot from a cdrom. Thanks.

Re:Ill give you another problem

[ThisNukes4u]

The solution is slackware.

Re:Ill give you another problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Boot from a floppy with a CD driver on it?

Re:Ill give you another problem

[zogger]

do you have any extra old sub gigabyte hard drives kicking around? Them nice old slow reliable ones? Maybe you can put the boot image there, and just add another hardrive to those machines. I'm running a PP 200 but mine boots from CD, so it wasn't a problem installing, other than using text based installer, which wasn't a problem as it does the same stuff as the graphical, just faster and better on much older machines.

Re:Ill give you another problem

[HuguesT]

Does Slackware have a 2.6.x kernel that fits on a floppy? With all the required drivers? I'm curious.

Scanner troubles in FC2

[Jeedo]

One thing that was very annoying for me in FC2 was getting the sane scanner interface working. I eventually found out that the interface for my type of scanner (canon iirc) was the only driver commented out in the autoload of a list of about 15-20 drivers being loaded. I discovered this by pure chance and it's these kind of things that made the system not work out-of-the-box on numerous occations.

Article is a troll; move on.

[mapnjd]

What an awful article "Here's how I installed KDE on Fedora Core 2 (Duh) and a couple of other things".

I'm using Fedora Core 2 on three machines with GNOME and I can't see the problem. Sure Mandrake 10 has a nicer GNOME menu structure, but that's it - it has no other improvements over FC2.

I'm using a few extra repositories but I don't write an article on linux.com about it. (I just googled for other people's less egotistal and more useful advice). Because it is a piece of cake.

There is nothing of any use or interest in this article and to state that the author "had to do a lot of work" is ridiculous: what was it half an hour or an hour?

+1 mentions gentoo

[chegosaurus]

Come on mods, you know you want to!

Desktop readyness?

[IamTheRealMike]

More like, how to get FC2 to the state this particular individual prefers it. Certainly some of the stuff in there is little more than personal taste and is definitely not a reflection on Fedora or Gnome.

I quite like spatial mode, for instance. I actually use graphical file managers now. Before with non-spatial Nautilus and Konqueror, I thought they were cute but never actually used them. The command line was far faster.

Re:Desktop readyness?

[nonmaskable]

I quite like spatial mode

Me too - the first thing from Gnome that I've ever liked. It's even better than my memories of the MacOS 8.6 finder (Spatial Nautilus' inspiration, I assume).

From what I have read elsewhere and this article, I suspect that anyone imprinted on the MS explorer browser-style navigation will hate it and find it hard to use with the deeply nested directory structure they are used to.

review? what review?

[doktorstop]

First and foremost, I am totally in favour of review, comparisons or anything that gives an insight into the different distros, compares them of just plain discusses them. With this said, does any half-page with a couple of screenshots deserves to be called a "review" and being widely advertized on Slashdot? Dont's think so. The author took the time to install FC" (great!), had a couple of problems (dont we all), did not even test anything else than Gnome and made this into an article? Now give me a break! Mentionning NVidia drivers was nice... a couple of allegetly missing programs - great! And ... that is all? I teach 7,8 and 9 grade students... any of them could write something like that, and to be fair, they wouldnt get more than "good" for this. For an article in LinuxMagasine.. this is a disgrace. "This time he explains how to tame the GNOME and Fedora 2 problems he noted the first time around and get them both in working shape.." (from Slashdot)... where are the explanations? Ask ten "Joe SixPacks" to install FC2 and run it for half-a-day.. you will get a noce combination of non professional users opinions... summarise the discussion going on on FC2 newsgroups.. you will get a long list of problems, complains and solutions.. but, for God's sake, don't just post a page of non-interesting, plain stupid "experiences" and call this a review! "

system bell problems

[pomakis]

I upgraded to Fedora Core 2 just yesterday (from Core 1), and encountered and resolved some of the known problems (such as IPV6 being enabled by default, etc.). However, there's another problem that I haven't managed to resolve yet. My system bell no longer works. If anybody else has encountered this and knows the solution, please let me know! I'd appreciate it very much. FYI, I'm using fvwm as a window manager, so KDE-specific solutions such as "Control Panel --> Sounds --> ..." are useless to me.

(Oh, and "xset q" shows "bell percent: 50 bell pitch: 400 bell duration: 100", so that's not the problem)

Re:system bell problems

[Queuetue]

Add "pcspkr" to /etc/modules.conf. It's a2.6 thing, not necessarily a fedora one - the pc speaker is now a loadable module.

Re:system bell problems

[pomakis]

Thank you!

is it really for newbies?

[zogger]

I more think of fedora as a distro more for advanced or intermediate hobbyists than for newbies. It's close to being ready out of the box for joe everybody, but not quite there yet, and even then, if they follow their roadmap, will always have testing/unstable aspects to it, done on purpose. It's for people who don't mind and want to be beta testers, people in the linux enthusiast community. It's supposed to be one step ahead of the official redhat "stable" version, and even the redhat stable version is just now being touted officially as suitable for a corporate desktop with professional IT admins on staff, not for the home user, not yet anyway. I use fedora, and I know I'll have to tweak some stuff when I get it and install it. It's still pretty dang good though, I haven't run into any show stoppers yet with it,any that really concern me anyway, and I'd consider myself only barely above newbie status, especially on the command line and being able to diagnose and repair/modify things. Media playback for all the formats gives me the most grief. Fixing the MP3 "problem" was easy, geting other propietary media formats to work cleanly is another issue entirely. I don't have a lot of USB or wireless, etc, so I can't comment there.

Re:is it really for newbies?

[nwbvt]

Maybe not, but if you ask someone for a good entry-level distro they will most likely respond with something along the lines of Mandrake or Red Had/Fedora. Maybe we should find a new desktop to recommend.

Re:is it really for newbies?

[pgrst]

I agree with the parent. Here's my experience with Fedora:

I ssould start out by saying that although I am not a computer newbie I am a linux newbie. I'm not illiterate (advanced degrees in economics and education). I have done a little bit of programming and can quite happily manage my windows box.

I downloaded the ISOs burned them to CD. no problems so far. Reboot the machine and install from CD. During the install, the screen goes blank but I can still here the hd chugging away. I figure it must be a graphics issue. Boot back into windows, google for a likely solution.

Reinstall Fedora with the text only command (i cannot remember the specific commands). Fedora installs but when the computer reboots, screen again goes blank.

Back to windows and google. Discover it's likely a driver problem and i need to configure Fedora to start in a standard vesa mode.

Back to Fedora, cannot figure out how to get to text mode.

Back to windows and google.

Figure out text mode. Next problem how do I start a text editor? (what editor?)

Back to windows and google.

Figure things out, manage to login and use gnome. but now i can only use 640x480, anything else gives me a blank screen. Additionally I have no sound support whatsoever (but I can access the net).

Google for solutions, try lots of things.

Give Up. (and I'm not going to discuss my difficulties in installing software - where is it, what directory, what does bin, etc, usr, mean?)

Use Fdisk, reformat hard drive, reinstall windows xp.

btw, I don't have some crazy pc setup, I have a Compaq that I bought from CircuitCity.

That was the first and probably last time I will try linux.

I realize that Redhat have the 'power users + hobbyists only' disclaimer on the Fedora website, but I could not beleive how difficult it was to install and setup linux.

unfortunately, I don't think my experience is atypical. If all distributions are this bad I doubt linux will be overtaking ms on the desktop. ever.

One thing that I have learned is that programmers need to realize that just because something seems 'easy' to those already familiar with it, it does not follow that it will be easy for newbies. If anything, linux distributions don't need to be as easy to use as windos/mac , they need to be MUCH EASIER in order to compensate for the learning curve that acts as a very significant barrier to entry.

Re:is it really for newbies?

[Issue9mm]

That's easy enough... Suse.

Easiest Linux install I've ever done.

-9mm-

Re:is it really for newbies?

[Cavedragon]

C'mon... that's just flame bait.

A cheap "easiest install ever" post is useless- no idea what level user you are, what version, what kind of hardware... etc. Those are all factors in ease of install and use. I don't think installing an OS is for ANY newbie, unless it's in a guided environment.

In the last month, on the same machine, I've tried RH9, FC1, SuSE Personal 9.1 (twice), Mandrake 10.0 Official, Slackware 10, Knoppix 3.4 Live CD, and ultimately FC2 twice- full install, reformatted and then did a personal workstation install.

I've been using computers since I had to program in BASIC, and when I was first looking at Linux, I took a basic community college course aimed at Red Hat 7.

Every distro I've tried has had shortcomings. SuSE had issues with my NVidia audio... which was reported as AC'97. There were some sneering links through Google that indicated that this could be resolved by recompiling my kernel following instructions either at NVidia or various other places. Since recompiling the kernel defeats the purpose of a simple install experience, I bailed. That was the first time. The second time, it seemed to install fine, but couldn't write to some config files for KDE, and wouldn't boot into runlevel 5 on the first boot. I didn't want to figure it out, so that install failed.

Slackware didn't see any Linux partitions on the HD I selected, even though I was installing over previous installs. I couldn't make heads or tails out of the CLI formatting options, and when I finally did, and the install started, I was told by the installer that there wasn't a valid Slackware install image on the CD I was installing from. End of that attempt, leaving me with a blank-but-ext3 formatted HD.

Mandrake had to be burned to a second set of CD's, as there may have been issues with the quality or condition of the first set. The second set installed, but threw errors reading some install packages, and when it booted, I couldn't tell if things weren't working because those packages failed or some other inherent flaw in the OS. So that went out the window.

Knoppix... well, I didn't feel like figuring out how to install it to a hard drive. I'm sure it's not that hard, but the look and feel of the CD distro was offputting, as well. It's almost too "leet" to use.

The various flavors of RH, up to and including FC2 have given me the least grief, mostly just adding MP3 support and some others. I still can't print to my HP Laserjet1000 without switching to XP, even after downloading the firmware, extracting the critical file, and successfully uploading it to the printer.

I also can't get the Java virtual machine to work- in page Javascript is fine, but I paid for stat-tracking in my Yahoo fantasy baseball leagues, and the live updates are done in a Java applet that asks for the plugin everytime. That may be because I use Firefox instead of Mozilla and I just need to set my class path correctly, but, again, so much for "ease-of-use"!

All that being said, I also did an upgrade from 98->XP Pro for mom & dad, and that didn't go smoothly, either. A clean install, however, did go much more smoothly than any of my Linux installs, but I did have to replace their modem after, because under XP it would go offline after 2 minutes no matter which driver we used, and which numbers their ISP provided.

In any case, my Dad, the ultimate newbie (at 68!) wouldn't have been able to handle ANY of the roadblocks that installing ANY OS involves. He also believes that computers "should be as simple to use as a refrigerator door", which infuriates me. I don't think it's a linux vs windoze issue.

I do think that OEM support would help- if a Dell or Gateway or eMachines had Linux installed at the factory, all the application names made sense (how is Dad supposed to know that you burn CD's with K3B?), and it all worked right out of the box, my dad wouldn't care if you called the OS Myxtylplyzx, as long as he could get online, type (& print!) letters, and play Mah-jhongg and solitaire.

I appreciate all the help I've gotten from the Linux community over the years, but if installing, configuring, and using Linux was "easy", I wouldn't have needed most of it.

Cavedragon

Re:is it really for newbies?

[cubic6]

Someone, please mod this man up!

He's hit the nail right on the head. Until OEMs start shipping Linux pre-installed and pre-configured, the average distro install needs to be *much* easier. Redhat and Mandrake and SuSE have done a great job making fancy graphical installers for the mid-range user, but they still manage to fuck up the actual installation pretty often. Here are a couple of suggestions that I've accumuluated over several years of installing and using Linux:

1) If the user has to disable graphical setup, or if setup cannot *exactly* determine whether or not his video card is supported, setup must configure X to use VESA or VGA, and tell the user that they need to install drivers to make their display look better. It's *extremely* important that a setup program does not configure the system for graphical boot using an unusable graphics driver, as parent poster experienced. If the user needs to install drivers that the installer cannot include for legal reasons (Nforce, NV DRI), tell the user exactly how to install them and provide a url. Write that information to the log as specified in #4 also.

2) Don't install so much stuff by default. Prompt the user to select KDE or Gnome, and have a screenshot or 10 of each for the user to check out during setup. Maybe play a video or demonstration of each, if possible. Once this is selected, install the bare minimum of apps necessary. These apps would be things like a package manager and some slick configuration tools. Don't install things like the KDE Edutainment or Games packages. For KDE, the base system is probably sufficient. For Gnome, install Firefox and Thunderbird, or alternately Mozilla Suite. Each system should have only the basic system admin tools, browser, email, IM, media player, package manager, and a very small assortment of accessory-style tools. Emphasize to the user that they can install a large number of additional tools after basic installation. Remember, our goal is to get the user up and running with a minimum of hassle, so we don't want to overwhelm them right away.

3) The setup wizard should either configure sound during installation, or as part of a post-installation wizard. It should make it's best attempt to detect the active sound card and install drivers for it, then it should allow the user to play test sounds and music. If autodetection fails, present the user a list of models/drivers and let him choose one or choose to disable sound for the moment.

4) If at any point some hardware installation failed, make sure to notify the user *and* write a log somewhere. Tell the user where the log is, and provide a shortcut to view it. Don't make the user write down things for later, or use grep/find to look for some obscure log file. Tech support, if provided, should be able to tell the user how to fix the problem based on this log also.

5) The package manager. Please, make a package manager that's simple to use. If it looks anything like dselect, shoot the developer and start over. Subgroup by category, and make it easy to see a verbose description of what a package does. Include screenshots for anything possible. For command line apps, a sample output and browseable man pages would help. How many times have you installed some little command line app, then read the man page and saw that it wasn't what you wanted? I think it'd be extremely helpful to be able to read the documentation *before* you spend time installing. In the package description, say what needs to be done by the user post-install, so the user has an idea of how difficult something is to configure. Give the user the option to install software from the install CDs, or from the Web. Make it easy to use a third-party package repository if your method of distribution supports this.

6) Include well-authored themes. Specifically, make sure that each theme has a version for both KDE and Gnome. It'd be nice if you could hack the Gnome Theme Selector and KDE Theme Control Panel so there's an option to a

Re:is it really for newbies?

[thaWhat]

I agree, a computer should be as easy to use as a 'fridge door. Trouble this is one very complex 'fridge. the difficulty is in explaining that. If every computer was a 'fridge door' then (helpdesk heaven' every box would be the same - exeactly the same - which sort of defeats the individuality thing (see 1984 or THX1138)

Re:is it really for newbies?

[thaWhat]

What he said! my experience consists of R.H. 5,6 and 7, BSD, knoppix and (right now) gentoo. Linux assumes that you know what you are doing. It's a good thing that (pretty much) I do. Not all of us are that fortunate, or - indeed - care.

That dual boot problem

[gr8_phk]

I was about to install FC2 when I read about that. I can't lose my Windoze installation. I also never could figure out if it's a problem when installing FC2 on a second drive as opposed to a second partition on hda. I also got the impression this will affect all distros once they upgrade to the latest kernel.

MOD parent up!

[alex_tibbles]

netbook/pxe? good point tho. Windows 2000's boot disk is larger than a floppy and spans several. Perhaps you could figure out a way of spanning across 4 disks?

I have one beef with big distros these days

[zaqattack911]

It would be really nice if all of these 5cd linux distros agreed to make sure a "minimum" but useful install can be had if one were to only download the first bootable CD.

I'm not interested in downloading every single linux app that was ever conceived. Christ... look at knoppix! Pretty much has everything I need, on one CD. If I were to install linux for the purpose of being a production server, i'd be sure to download and compile everything from source anyways.

Love,
Zaq

Re:I have one beef with big distros these days

[Willis Wasabi]

I run 20-odd small to big production servers along with 2 other coworkers. Downloading and compiling everything from source would be insanity. (You know, like a Gentoo user! :)) We have other responsibilities. Patching all those systems when a security issue popped up? I would lose my mind. I'd much rather RHEL's backported patches so everything didn't change in functionality every week.

I guess they put the "most popular" packages on the lower numbered disks, but FC2 was the first time I didn't need the last disk (needed all the others though). It seems I always want some fairly unpopular packages...

Re:I have one beef with big distros these days

[HuguesT]

Fedora has a minimum install option, I haven't tried it but logic would dictate it would all fit on the first CD.

anyone with FC2 on Dell Poweredge 750?

[Anonymous Coward]

the base 2.6.5 kernel on the install CD works fine, any later kernels 2.6.6.-*, kernel panics and system does not boot..using SATA drives/controller..looked at bugzilla, there seems to be an open issue(bug id 123087 at bugzilla.redhat.com, but the fixes mentioned doesn't work(patch)..2.6.6. defnitely brakes SATA drives?? ...FC2 is killing me..have to boot and work in stock 2.6.5...358 kernel..

any pointers?? thanks

You have moved your mouse. Please reboot..

[fforw]

What's tough about 'keeping a Windows system running'?

Well.. the article refers to a usable Fedora System including Software for playing mp3s, Office etc.

Installing XP itself might be no hassle. But installing Service Packs, installing additional software and rebooting a gazillion times for that is.

Re:You have moved your mouse. Please reboot..

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny, the last clean xp install I did required three reboots to completely update everything. Also, if you're using Fedora, Do you count restarting the gui session as a reboot? It takes just as long for me as rebooting windows. Please start using new arguments.

Re:You have moved your mouse. Please reboot..

[fforw]

That's funny, the last clean xp install I did required three reboots to completely update everything. Also, if you're using Fedora, Do you count restarting the gui session as a reboot? It takes just as long for me as rebooting windows.

Installing fedora, even including all the changes the article suggests, requires 1 boot. No further reboot needed. No restart of X needed.

Please start using new arguments.

Just because you don't like them? The three reboots you need require that you know which applications/service packs can be installed in one boot because they don't depend on each other.

why fedore when there is debian?

[denisdekat]

I beg folks to forget about corporate versions of linux :( Debian is true, I wish folks would develop for it more seriously. Fedora is so half baked really :(

Re:why fedore when there is debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I was about to say the same thing. I respect Slackware and such, but in the end, it's always been Debian for me. Debian was my first distribution and it'll be my last. People talk about apt-get and all the great stuff Debian has, but this is free software -- all that stuff will get co-opted by other distros eventually. What seperates Debian and places it a notch above the rest is its commitment to freedom. It isn't just about bundling free software, it's about stuff like the DFSG and the Debian Social Contract.

Not to mention an emphasis on portability, quality, etc.

People who know choose Debian. It's god's honest truth.

What? You Were Expecting It to Work?

[jcwinnie]

There was a recent burst of bug reports about the Gnome Control Center under Fedora Core 2, to include this statement, which is absent from the Front Page of fedora.redhat.com:

Fedora Core is intended for enthusiasts, hobbiests and developers, and should not ever be used in a production environment. If you require a solution which is intended for production environment I recommend contacting Red Hat sales to inquire about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and a Red Hat Network subscription. Fedora Core is a development platform which is bleeding edge, and tracks technology advances. It is not ever intended to be used in business production environments.

Would it be more honest to include the above disclaimer at the Fedora site and when announcing any distribution of Fedora Core?

Re:What? You Were Expecting It to Work?

[ainsoph]

I find that especially interesting since while shopping for a dedicated server, 80% of the companies I saw used Fedora as the OS.

Maybe Redhat should make that a lot clearer.

ACPI problems

[jon3k]

The only problem I had with FC2 was ACPI ... sucking. I just don't think its far enough in development to get dropped into a major release like Core 2. I had to turn it off and go back to APM for the time being. I give the guys working on it a huge two thumbs up, and I commend them for their work on it. I think it just still has a way to go.

Flame away!

Re:ACPI problems

[HuguesT]

Kernel 2.6.x still has a number of outstanding issues, like ACPI and Firewire. If those are a concern stay with kernel 2.4.x based distros.

My experience with FC2

[DigitumDei]

Well having just installed FC2 myself and being a complete and utter n00b at linux, I have to say that as far as desktop readyness goes I was most impressed with FC2. The install wen't pretty much without a hitch, everything worked for my desktop purposes, and unlike any windows install, by the time the install was finished I had a full office suite. Incidentally I always have problems connecting my XP machines to the network properly (none huge, but enough that they don't connect first time), yet the linux box was connected and talking to the internet without me even setting anything up!

Now if I had been installing a machine for a secretary or office worker, I would have been essentially finished within 2 hours. Unfortunately this was to be my movie/music player, attached to my tv. Two weeks later I finally managed to watch a dvd without a glitch.

For a standard desktop install: FC2 - 1 XP - 0
For a multimedia box: FC2 - 0 XP - 1

Disclaimer, these are my experiences and obviously a different person with different hardware would most likely have a different outcome.

Re:My experience with FC2

[HuguesT]

Repeat after me: patents. Redhat doesn't want to get sued into oblivion for the sake of their free distribution. RedHat is the largest target in the Linux world should the patent holders decide to collect their due. Redhat doesn't have any choice.

You do know, don't you, that in order to play DVDs you are supposed to use a licensed piece of software, and unless the developers particularly want to dig themselves into a financial hole, they've got to charge for their own software.

So your comments would be fair for a distribution for which you would have to pay money, but FC2 is both Free and free, so you have to do your own multimedia software installation, and this is not going to change unless somehow the patent system gets a huge rap on their knuckles.

Re:My experience with FC2

[DigitumDei]

Well okay fine. Except the DVD player part was easy. Took me a few hours of research, and then installing xine with some plug ins.

Its the TV out of the video cards. And the massive hassle I, as an admitted linux newbie, went through to try get something like the TV out on my graphics card working. I made some mistakes while originally trying to get my radeon 7000 to work, by the time I had it displaying on the tv, my sound no longer worked (no I still have no idea what I changed). I ended up removing the radeon and installing a gf4 mx I owned into the box, and even then it took me a good few hours to figure out what config files to edit and change (NVidia's help with installing new drivers is wonderful though).

The problem is NOT patents! Even with XP I had to install power DVD before I could play DVD's. The difference being that it installed first time, and the drivers that came with XP did not have any problem enabling the TV out of any gfx card I own.

The point was FC2 does a great job of getting the machine installed and ready to be a work machine. But the difficulty involved in getting multimedia working, even before you get round to finding a dvd player, is daunting for someone who isn't tech savvy, or is just plain new to linux. Now the second box I do will probably take me no more than a few hours to get up and running. Definitely no where near the time it took me to get the first one running, but those people who still struggle to update drivers on an XP box??? They stand no chance, no chance at all.

And anyway, my comment is fair reguardless if I pay or not. With a media box, XP wins, there is no way that I would suggest linux over XP right now to anyone unless cost was the ONLY issue (I still am going to use the linux box, the challenge and low cost of a legal box makes it more than worth it for me)

Re:My experience with FC2

[HuguesT]

Hi, thanks for the reply. Your initial email implied that you were complaining of the lack of client software, not that your problem was drivers.

I've gone through all that too. Funnilly enough I also had a Radeon 7000 before switching to a gf4-mx.

The problem is still patents. The reason why TV out doesn't work easily with your Radeon is that ATI won't release the specs of the tv output chip. The reason for this is the copy-protection scheme: the stupid hardware trick that makes copying the TV output to a VCR impossible. With an open-source driver it would be trivial to turn off and ATI is afraid of the litigation.

Now that you've sweated through all these initial issues you may find that the multimedia scene in Linux is actually OK. Look up on mplayer and mencoder, avidemux for simple movie editing and all the sound editors. It's fairly easy to setup a PVR box with Linux tools only.

I do all my multimedia work under Linux and when I go back to XP I generally don't like it, for repetitive work it pays to script, and XP software is usually click click click to death. There are some nice GUI movie editors though.

Re:My experience with FC2

[DigitumDei]

Thanks for the info.

Right now this box doesn't have enough memory (128 megs, was enough for XP, not for the current gnome or KDE). Having used this exact box with XP pro, I can tell you that 128megs was more than enough to play any multimedia I wanted. Any encoding or cpu/memory intensive work happened on my desktop machine. Any suggestions for a good WM that is easy on the memory? Or should I just cough up the bucks for 512mb?

Linux does appear to be better, or at least more configurable as a multimedia box. It does however require a lot more computer knowledge, or at least ability.

Good article, but...

[cesarcardoso]

...it falls on the same old shitty complaining about GNOME 2.6 not being a Windows copycat. Damn, are people really believing that the Windows way to (not to) do stuff is the Only True Way (TM)?

acrobat

[Pros_n_Cons]

I haven't seen anyone mention this and I read all the modded up comments but this part of the article:

"For some reason, Adobe's official Acrobat Reader binaries have never worked in any version of Fedora, at least not for me or my students."

Has a fix, DaG's repository has acroread on it. He said he configured yum sources though he must have missed dag which for me has some of the best goodies. uncomment :
[dag]
name=Dag APT Repository
baseurl=http://dag.freshrpms.net/redhat/fc$release ver/en/$basearch/dag
http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/freshrpms/pub/dag/redhat/ fc$releasever/en/$basearch/dag

Then type 'yum install acroread'

Re:acrobat

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, mainly because Acrobat Reader is not free software. Since Fedora doesn't include non-free software (ie no Java, no MP3, etc), there is no Acrobat Reader. In any case, the acrobat reader is really just the binary in a package.

Furthermore, if you've noticed, Acrobat Reader segfaults if your LANG is UTF-8. Also, it will segfault if you try a Find in the PDF, but nothing is found (its OK if something is found). Not a pretty program either. There are better alternatives.

Re:acrobat

[doktorjayd]

after install, find acroread (/usr/local/bin/acroread)

its a shell script.

add 'LANG=C' somewhere near the top, and all should be well.

pity adobe cant get round to adding it in themselves.

Re:acrobat

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe's version works fine if you just set the LANG environment variable to something like "en_US". I use a trivial shell script to run acrobat:

#!/bin/sh
export LANG=en_US
exec acroread $*

Better solution

[tedgyz]

Just boot into run level 3 (command line only).

No more whining about which desktop is best.

Now you can whine about which shell is best.

Personally, I was overwhelmingly thrilled with FC2. I was especially thrilled when I learned up2date was working, and free! I am a happy RH7.2 user looking for an upgrade path. I have found it in FC2.

What happened to yelp?

[rsilva]

I have to agree with the author in one poit: yelp, gnome's help viewer, have been crippled. It doesn't display man pages or info documents anymore, it doesn't have a place to search for documentation, and it seems to force me to browse the help system until a find the desired document (if I know the document I want to read, it would be easier just to type its name (or URI)). The way yelp is right now it can used only if you call if from application you are already using.

I'm On FC2 Right Now

[HerbanLegend]

It took me a tremendous amount of time to get my version of FC2 working. As a former Windows user, now fully converted over to Linux, I have a lot of hardware that I bought on the cheap and that just isn't supported natively by Linux. It took me an installation (after trying dozens of other things) of ndiswrapper, new scanner libraries, special asm runtimes, Kernel 2.6.7, my own personally patched .c files in the kernel source, and close to two weeks of assuring my wife "Really, It'll be Better than Windows when it's done!"

Now, finally, it is done. However, there are still things that annoy me. For instance, since I opened Slashdot from the daily email, I'm using Mozilla right now instead of firefox. I still haven't figured out how to circumvent that!

To be honest, (and I've said this before on Slashdot) Linux has a lot of ground to gain before it will be truely more productive for the average user, above and beyond Windows. Right now, there is no free application that supports the whole gamut of windows drivers, and until you can assure a potential convert that everything they already have will work in Linux, and that their future purchases will ALSO work in Linux, it isn't cost effective to save the $90 on Windows. If you figure that I spend 60 hours getting this computer working, and assuming my time is worth only $5 an hour, I've still spent more money on Linux (Just to Get it Working) than windows!

Not quite ready for the masses yet...

[pointbeing]

Since I'm not very bright, I tend to install bleeding edge components on production hardware without waiting a couple weeks and browsing Usenet to see who had problems. Apparently I haven't had enough pain to know better yet ;-)

Anyway, when a shiny new production FC release came out I upgraded my FC1 box. Not much on there, it runs mail, web, mySQL IRC and a couple other daemons. I host my own domain but only have about ten mail users.

My observations:

alsa. I have an ISA PnP sound card (SB32) that quit working. I don't care a whole lot since this is a server but I'd like the damn thing to work without having to buy a PCI sound card. I've already spent more time messing with it than a cheap sound card would have cost me, but it's the principle of the thing.

cyrus. Migrating to a new imapd wasn't exactly painless. Getting mail+cyrus+clamav+spamassassin to work took a little bit but functionality is now where it needs to be - plus I pitched MailScanner for clamav-milter. Much better performance. I know of a few people who pitched cyrus for dovecot or rolled back to FC1's imapd.

The default yum.conf blows chunks. Several better ones are available on the net.

There are some problems with gnome-system-monitor. It only shows one CPU - interestingly, on ky dual processor box the CPU it shows is CPU1. top shows both processors running, though. I've heard it's a bug in procps but bugzilla doesn't provide anything that looks like my problem.

Oh, well - it all works now - except sound, and i'm stubborn enough to get the damn ISA sound card working ;-)

it depends on the....

[zogger]

... person you are recommending it to, and whether or not you are right there to help them get started. I think with one hour instruction from someone anyone could use fedora right now, but I ALSO think that applies to windows and mac as well. That is important to remember. If it's just you telling aunt martha on the phone to go get it, nope. she would be confused no matter what it was, windows, mac, linux, any flavor. If it's you able to go over to aunt marthas house and just hand hold for a short install period and give a little set of pointers, etc, then it's swell. If it's a person who is a power user either mac or windows, they won't have any problems with it that I could see. Really, the MP3 playback is the only one I can see really bugging joe everybody right out of the box, and it's not that hard to fix with any even dismal googling skills. You can type in mp3, fedora, and find the fix with the first few hits. if they can't do that, they shouldn't be on the internet unsupervised yet, with ANY distro. Perhaps geting it installed dual boot would be the only major problem. About the only other thing I would tell newbs is not to do a kitchen sink install, because they don't need servers installed on their machines. Maybe if some kind person would release a "fedora lite" version that is just a joe homeowner version that fits on one CD it would be better, and one that came with normally uneeded services turned-off better, and the more "exotic" repositories installed in the sources list. A release like that WOULD be ready for joe casual newbie I think. If they can get on the net,work their firewall so include firestarter by default, use some media player to view/listen to ALL the stupid ridiculous formats out there, write and save a document, use email, have some chat functions, and their printer works, that's really about it, that would cover at least 90% of the needs of 90% of computer users out there. The last 10% they can go figure out, because that's such a huge variable, and I think that's where distros get in trouble,and where it gets hard, covering that last ten percent. Even at that level you (could) have a TON more stuff that comes with windows default install, and it's better quality and more secure, and easy enough to use, and costs a lot less than xp or osx.

I'd do it myself if I knew what I was doing. I don't really NEED 4 cds worth of stuff for my home useage purposes. I got stuff on here I have no idea what it does, and I don't care, it seems I never use it anyway. And I only ever install gnome now, I don't need even more duplification of apps, and I don't get into kde versus gnome versus obscure window manager nonsense. I picked gnome because it's obviously what redhat intergalactic likes better, that's all, and I picked redhat because it's big enough it's not going away into obscurity any time soon, and I picked fedora because it's the freebie version, although I popped for the paid redhat before. And fedora can be as pedestrian as you want, or souped up and turbocharged all you want, so it's OK to have that.

Basically, apps are apps are apps in linux land, they are available to anyone once you get into to for more than a month, so what you start with isn't that important as long as it's a binary based distro with a good installer. Any of them are good enough, especially if they were stripped down. I've never tried any of the slicker costlier ones like xandros or linspire or whatnot, so I don't have a frame of reference if they are all that much easier to use for a raw new computer user. Fedora "as is" is very close though now, heck, the RH 7 series was pretty good really, once they went to ext 3 by default.

boot load impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

I know only a little about *nix systems, but am an experienced programmer. I recently tried to load FC2 on an unloaded machine (micron millenium 500 mhz, through the .iso install) and was faced with the message "operating system not found". How is any normal person supposed to cope with a distribution that doesn't even bootload all the time?

Re:boot load impossible

[vegaspctech]

How is any normal person supposed to cope with a distribution that doesn't even bootload all the time?

That's just it, normal people aren't supposed to cope with the distribution at all. I don't know how so many could miss it, but if you even just skim through the obvious pre-install sections of fedora.redhat.com you'll see plenty that makes it clear that Fedora is not meant for everyone. It's meant for people who like working or playing with bleeding-edge components. If you want to work or play with a distribution that doesn't ever bite you and you wound up on fedora.redhat.com, you made a wrong turn somewhere. Try redhat.com, debian.org, slackware.org, suse.com, mandrakesoft.com or any of a number of other sites for which I'll probably get blasted for having failed to include them here. When you land at one go to their download section or on-line store and look for the phrase 'latest stable release'. What you'll find there is meant for everyone and will, generally, work right out of the box

Fedora closer to Debian than the old Red Hat

[bangular]

I think a lot of people are under the impression "Yeah, Fedora is just Red Hat under a new name". Fedora is a completely different beast all together. I wouldn't put Fedora in the same class as Mandrake or Suse. Fedora is muich more cutting edge/ development oriented. The type of crowd that actually should be using Fedora aren't going to have to boot back into Windows to read info about their problem. They will boot back into their other linux partition, mount the Fedora partition, chroot to it, and fix the problem.

isn't the adoption of "Linux" already blown?

Fedora is wrongly reccomended to those that haven't already adopted linux completely. Everyone really should stop using Fedora and Red Hat synonimously because they aren't. If you want to adopt people to Linux, reccomend Suse or even Mandrake. Reccomending Fedora is like reccomending Debian to a newbie.

Re:Fedora closer to Debian than the old Red Hat

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora is muich more cutting edge/ development oriented.

You mean it's a buggy, crash-prone continuous beta release? Fedora is the beta-testing distribution for RHEL... Red Hat hasn't made that some kind of secret. it's stuff that is too buggy to go into their Enterprise Linux but may mature farther on down the line. Why in the hell would you want to run a beta release?

Re:Fedora closer to Debian than the old Red Hat

[minus9]

I am posting this from a machine running Fedora Core 2. I installed it the day it was released and it has been up since then. I would say 100% uptime is about as far from crash-prone as you can get.

Hard to please everybody

[r6144]

Maybe many linux users are a bit spoiled... but I'm quite sure that everything on these 5cd linux distros are used by quite a few people. Old schoolers like me hate to have to look for some apps (like mc) on the 'net, while the said app has always been included in the "large" distros. Even relatively new users may be bitten when they firstly try to compile some software from source and find that some necessary tools are not installed. It is the same reason why it is often better to choose the packages by hand rather than choose the big "Workstation"/"Desktop" options which often install quite different things from what you want.

Also, five CDs are not that hard to carry about, and when your all-slimed-down distribution hit the market, everyone else can use DVD-ROMs without too much difficulty (and then maybe everyone can have a 250GB hard drive so that full installs are almost always done).

They are

[Run4yourlives]

I saw that statement when I installed FC1 a while back.

Besides the fact that it should be common knowledge... you don't ever install bleeding edge in a production environment... hell Apache 2 even has a similar warning.

Happy Fedora/RedHat user here.

[guacamole]

The title of this article sounds almost like anti-Fedora/RedHat FUD. It impiles that supposedly Fedora 2 "doesn't work" out of box. I don't know about others, I didn't have to do anything special to "get my Fedora to work" other than changing some settings to suit my needs. Everything that I use works just fine. I have been really happy with all Redhat Linux releases starting with 6.0 many years ago. However, it seems like there has been a constant and still ongoing RedHat bashing campaign in the community, which is being specially magnified by Slashdot. Besides, MS products, I can't think of any other OS that's being bashed as much on Slashdot as RedHat Linux and Fedora. Most of the articles seem to be sensationalist in nature often picking on things that are essentially non-problems or small changes in the distribution and then blowing them out of proportion (the bashing of the RedHat 7.x compilers was a good example). This often has led me to run into system administrators who more or less told me "we didn't even touch it because we thought that RedHat Linux X.X was fundamentally broken because there was this article on slashdot that generated lots of noise".

Re:Happy Fedora/RedHat user here.

[bruns]

I haven't had any issues with FC2 at all. I'm a die hard RedHat person, having used 4.x back in the day, through 7.3, then finally going to FC1 (I wont touch 8 or 9).

Most of the Redhat bashing comes from Debian users/developers (I am going to get modded troll for this, I know) from my experience. I do not see any other group of Linux users so hellbent on bashing Redhat users.

Just an observation, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who has seen this...

Re:Happy Fedora/RedHat user here.

[iggymanz]

blown out of proportion? the 7.x compiler issue caused major havoc for the datacenter where I worked even though no kernel compiles were done. i Still consider myself a great redhat fan, but let's not pretend it's all been peaches. There's been major releases of RH that never should have been pushed out the door as production grade products, and business users have to take that into account. Clearly Fedora is for people who want to have fun testing for RedHat, which is just fine for some.

Re:Happy Fedora/RedHat user here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the Redhat bashing comes from Debian users/developers (I am going to get modded troll for this, I know) from my experience. I do not see any other group of Linux users so hellbent on bashing Redhat users.

Perhaps the Debian users, having suffered through the installation, feel everyone else should have to suffer as they have. Or perhaps the notion someone can actually survive without apt is alien to them.

Windows: Making it Work

[Anonymous Coward]

For some reason, I don't think an article about this would make it on Slashdot.

Re:Windows: Making it Work

[e_xworm]

Then again you can't make windows work so why bother?

The packages *I* want and can't find

[V_drive]

The mp3 thing was annoying, but I updated to the yum.conf file suggested in the article and it still can't find galeon or any kind of gnutella (ran "yum info \*utella\*" and nothing returned).

These are hardly exotic packages. Why wouldn't they be included? I'll just get rpm's myself, but I would have expected FC2 to have at least galeon.

Seems to work pretty well

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend installed Fedora Core 2 on my Thinkpad and it seems to work pretty well. There are a few minor problems:

* I no longer get warning beeps (not that I mind, as it is annoying to get a beep whenever I use the tab to get filename completion).

* I can move the mouse with the touchpad, but tapping the pad doesn't click on anything.

* When I maximize Xemacs, there is a flickering at the upper right corner of the window and Xemacs doesn't seem to work properly, but if I click the maximize box twice I get a nearly full-screen window that seems to work ok.

I can run Firefox ok, though once when I tried to launch it after starting Mozilla Mail I got a Mozilla browser window instead.

But I haven't had any major problems.

I don't use Nautilus since I typically just open a bunch of maximized command line windows in several desktops and a browser in one other desktop. If I need to use a long path I just stick it in an environment variable so I can do things like "ls $a" and so on. But reading about spatial versus navigation views, I don't see the advantage of opening a zillion windows over using a simple, familiar, browser-like interface. I played with Nautilus briefly a while back, and the tree seemed reasonably easy to use, but Nautilus crashed a lot. Also, it was a nuisance having to wait for all of the little thumbnails to appear in a large directory.

Linux distro integration

[mcrbids]

Before you laugh, hear me out...

I think there's a compelling marketplace in providing integration services with a major Linux distro.

For YEARS, Linux has had good and proper dependency checking and network-based installs. (EG: Apt-get, up2date, yum) But, when I go to install America's Army, I end up with this weird binary thingamajig installer that's 100% in-house, and unique to that package.

Thus, to get everything working properly, I spend another 2 hours hunting down weird error messages with google, before I can get it working right.

And then, when an upgrade happens, I get to do it all over again. (sigh)

But, what if something like the Dag repository were to come up with something that allows a commercial or 3rd party vendor to:

1) issue a certificate for an install of software to a user,

2) easily download/install the software via Yum,

3) handle dependencies so the install is always smooth and quick.

Here's how I picture this might work: (I'll use yum in examples, any of the network-based installers would be fine)

A) I set up yum with this commercial repository by copy/pasting a few lines into /etc/yum.conf.

B) I buy XYZ product for Linux. I can choose to download a binary installer, or I can simply download a certificate.

C) If I choose the certificate, then I would issue "yum install packagename".

D) Part of the install process would ask me for the certificate to verify that I do, indeed have rights to install the package on this particular machine.

I think there's a tremendous business model here! I know I would almost KILL to have some packages install this way, and having this kind of service would be a boon to Linux adoption and deployment.

apt arrogance

[Chemisor]

> (in case your not using it, check out dag wieer's
> apt repository, very nice, and it cross links with
> others such as freshrpms.)

No, I'm not using it, and for the very same reason. If I were to download binaries, I would need much more bandwidth and would have no sources, meaning that if I need to recompile with some different option (like if I just added a library it can use), I'd have to download all over again. Even more frustrating are broken downloads; if I'm downloading by ftp and the line goes down, I can just redial and reget.

"Adopt Late" strategy flaws

[jgardn]

What happens when the community stops testing the RCs and doesn't install the newest version is you get a whole lotta not testing happening. The whole reason these issues in FC2 made it through to the release is because not enough people tested. I remember one thread in the mailing list that basically went like this.

A:"My video card doesn't work."

B:"What kind is it?"

A:"XXX-YYY."

B:"Don't we support XXX-YYY? I thought we did."

C:"We should, we didn't get any reports of any problems in testing."

B:"A, What's your configuration?"

A:"Here it is."

C:"It's a bug. Why didn't we catch it in testing?"

B:"A, did you test the RCs?"

A:"No."

B:"Then how do you expect us to get your configuration to work if you don't test it? We'll have a fix out soon, hopefully."

The point is, if you don't download the RCs and don't test them, you really can't expect the final release to be any better than the RCs, unless someone else is testing your configuration.

production & mp3

[asciiRider]

Anybody who uses the words "production" and "mp3" in the same article obviously has no idea what "production" means.

Let's get back to reality folks.

Laptop install

[GoneGaryT]

Just installed Fedora Core 2 on my works Toshiba Tecra M2, dual boot under grub with XP. I have to say it was about the easiest GNU/Linux install I've been through... although up2date seems to be hanging as I write this. Oh well :)

A big thumbs up from here, anyway. NB: if you want WiFi on one of these, blag a supported card from somewhere - the built-in Intel 2200g has no GNU/Linux support yet (but they're working on it).

broken bits...

[studarus]

Watch out - I got burned by FC 2. The 'ant' (java equivalent to Make) is broken in FC 2. And the named install (BIND) has all the config files moved from where it is in RH. I have no idea what other things might be different so tread carefully.

Wine

[newhoggy]

What about Wine? Has anyone managed to get wine running of Fedora Core 2? All I get are segmentation faults.

Do we really need all this extra work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell needs to waste a couple of weeks figuring out why the damn thing won't work, why the windows partition can't be seen, and why half the things in fedora are broken. Just switch to Debian, Mandrake or any other distro and no more hell. We did that with our servers here and we're happily running Debian for the past year and a half with absolutely no problems. Mandrake is what we recommend for end users and there have been far fewer complaints after moving away from redhat / fedora.

system beep is not default

[rkaa]

Did a handpicked upgrade from RH9, and the system beep went missing in action.
After several weeks (of not trying too hard) I stumbled across the reason: pcspkr module wasn't loaded.
A funny default, but maybe rooted in some half documented problems regarding speaker volume.

So in other words: A quick "/sbin/modprobe pcspkr" will fix the problem on the fly.

bug 124339 and bug 123689

Sucky review

[Brian Kendig]

Man, what a sucky review of FC2.

First off, his original review of it links to a "scathing criticism of Gnome 2.6" which says that Gnome 2.6 blows because:

• it opens folders into new windows, instead of reusing the current window
  
• there's no way to change individual colors in desktop themes

... and that's it. Two pages of a "scathing criticism" of Gnome 2.6, and that's the best the author could come up with.

Then the FC2 review says that FC2's "admirable qualities cannot save it from its congenital defects." What defects? Well, he doesn't like a bug in the 2.6 kernel's ALSA drivers, a bug in OpenOffice.org 1.1.1, the fact that Gimp 2.0 is missing color management... hey wait, these are all complaints about the open-source software that's included with FC2. Where are the complaints specific to FC2? He doesn't have any.

Then I'm amused that his latest article says that to "fix" FC2, install KDE instead of Gnome. Gee, that sounds more like Gnome-bashing than a constructive review...

Guess what? I *like* FC2. It's much more up-to-date than other Linux distros like SuSE, and package management (especially with the automatic updater) is much easier than with other distros such as Debian (for whom "stable" is ancient, "testing" is fairly outdated, and "unstable" sometimes means "not backwards-compatible with the old version"). I want to be able to run the latest code without fears of hosing my system. Fedora Core lets me.

And I like Gnome, too. It has a much more professional look than KDE, and its settings are much more streamlined as well. KDE suffers from feature bloat and an overabundance of options to configure even the most trivial aspects of the user interface. I don't want to be able to tweak everything; I want to be given an interface which looks sharp without *requiring* me to tweak anything.

A Windows-convert's experience with Fedora, Suse

[DCSeuf]

Hey, I'm a former Windows hack. You know, the kind that has been building PCs for awhile and has whined about Microsoft and Apple for years, but who would never take the time to find out about Linux. Well, I finally looked deeper in May, and now I am a convert, and very pleased about it. Anyway, I decided to make an investment and buy Suse Professional 9.1, and I found it extremely easy to install and use. For comparison, I just switched hard drives and loaded the Fedora 1 core, and I like that as well, for different reasons. I don't think either should be dismissed in any respect. I found Suse to be much, much easier to load, mostly because it seems to be built for Windows converts. It may also have helped that it was the AMD-64 version and I have a new 3200-64-bit AMD processor coupled with MSI's new NEO Platinum Gforce3 250 pro board. It took me four installs to get Fedora running, in part due to my inexperience with Linux, I suppose. My larger complaint with Fedora 1 is with its newbie-unfriendly partitioning system - at least as compared with Suse's. I am not the "average" Windows user, so I figured it out fairly easily, but that's an obstacle that should be corrected if Red Hat/Fedora wants to attract Windows users. My only real complaint with Suse is that it won't natively support my Microsoft Intellimouse wireless mouse, which, IMHO, is better for Photoshop users than any other. It is true that I am not using Fedora Core 2, or the 64 version, so I can't truly judge the lastest distro, but from what I've just read on this board, it seems to have many of the same problems as Fedora 1. Also, I Suse automatically loads KDE, so perhaps, as some have suggested, the differences are in part due to the desktops used. So if I am asked how a Windows user should convert, and to which distro, it's an easy choice: Suse. I can find a workaround for the mouse problem. But I am going to keep both versions for further evaluation - that is, if I can figure out how to make Fedora allow a second Linux system. When loading, Fedora seems to prefer that you uninstall other Linux systems (while Suse tells you how to configure all of your OSes at install). One last thought, re: Windows users migrating. Based on my experience, I can't see why a Windows user would NOT migrate, and I don't think it will be a huge problem changing OSes, as some suggest. It may be a bit harder for some than it was for me, but the new distros seem to be making it more and more easy. If Linux developers really want to make this great OS most attractive and easy for converts, I have one suggestion: get as far away from the command line as possible, and, in doing so, make the apps easier to run immediately, without compiling, commands, mounts, etc. The idea should be to get people easily away from Windows, not make advanced users out of the "Average Joe." I have no doubt that Linux will rock most desktops away from Microsoft. If nothing else, it will give Gates and company the competition that they've never really had, and force them to get off of their butts and make a better product.