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

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

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.

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).

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

[molarmass192]

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

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: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: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.

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: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: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.

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'