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Fedora Core 3: Worth The Upgrade?
Chris writes "With new features such as SELinux, GNOME 2.8, KDE 3.3, Evolution 2.0, Remote Desktop, Helix Player, and of course Firefox, it may be worth your while to make the switch. At OSDir our screenshot tour of Fedora Core 3 takes you through boot, installation, desktop, taskbar, menus, configuration, and the new features of this new release. Our Core 3 screenshot tours have taken you through Test 1, 2, 3, and now the final release. Check it out."
There's a lot more to an OS than the damn window manager!
thanks for all the helpful links!
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
]$ cat /etc/yum.confe buglevel=2e westa ctarch=1
/etc/yum.repos.d
[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
d
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
pkgpolicy=n
distroverpkg=redhat-release
tolerant=1
ex
retries=20
obsoletes=1
gpgcheck=1
# PUT YOUR REPOS HERE OR IN separate files named file.repo
# in
It is a little empty compared to the preconfigured Fedora Core 2 and 1.
Everytime I see those Fedora releases I'm overwhelmed by the DVD size download. Why don't you make a stripped down version with the CD size a la Firefox?
Fedora Core I have never tried, I dunno if I ever will either. I think red hat can do better as a company. Being the market leader I would like to see a little more out of a company than what red hat has put forth. It will take much to pull me away from SuSE / Mandrake favorites. Not only that, all these "features" in fedora, are already in other distros so I guess I don't see what the big deal is.
Theres a feature which works remarkably well under Windows XP, much faster and seamlessly than most remote X window logins. I'm not surprised they want to call that feature by the same name. Strange considering that network transparency is supposed to be X's strongpoint.
As I found out the hard way over this past weekend, they left out all the java and java related rpms that FC2 had.
Are they using two different development teams for Fedora the way RedHat did for the x.1 and x.[02] releases?
Can anyone confirm whether or not this version still has the bug which makes NTFS partitions unbootable without some serious recovery work? I nuked my system with FC2 and would not like to deal with the same issues again if I decide to try FC3.
Also, have they got IEE1394 working yet? It wasn't turned on by default in FC2, I know, because of some bugs..
I upgraded from Core 2 on the weekend and in a word, yes. It's very polished, all of my complaints with Core 2 seem to have been fixed, specifically burning CDs. It even recognized my firewire DVD burner and was able to burn a data dvd on the first try. The only nit so far is that the NVidia drivers (downloaded from NVidia) don't work. Appearently there is a work around for this and I am sure that it will be corrected soon.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
I realise I'm going against the more-windows-than-windows trend these days, but I really don't want fancy install screens , pull down menus and all other eye candy junk when I do an install. I just want a nice clean simple text based interface that asks me what I want to install then just gets on with it (ie like Slackware). A friend on mine tried to install mandrake 10.1 but because he was a wierd video card and mandrake (apparently) insists on using a GUI installer he kept getting unexplained crashes. Well ins't that nice. The irony is he only wanted the linux box as a samba server anyway so the GUI side was a complete irrelevance!
GNOME 2.8? KDE 3.3? Evolution 2.0? Firefox? http://www.pld-linux.org/ got there first...
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
I installed it on a fresh xeon 2.6ghz and I was abhorred at the slowdown. FC2 was a LOT faster than this is.
I'm not talking of booting into X and doing things in there. I'm talking just getting to a login prompt and attempting to sign on.
I'll go back to slackware before I load FC3 again
Avoid FC3 like the plague. It's buggy and awful, imo: too many big changes (switching to udev for one) too fast. The sheer number of bug-fix updates released for it already should back me up.
Look at the size of that taskbar task.
So I take it from the screenshots that Fedora now has a GNOME desktop layout similar to plain, vanilla GNOME, rather than the more traditional Windows-style layout of application launcher in the bottom-left corner?
Looks a lot better, at least in my opinion.
Frankly, a whole bunch of numbered image files does not make for a Fedora review. Personally, I can't even bother sorting through them all.
/dev only includes devices that actually exist in your system. This is kinda nice. e2labelas deprecated, as there's now a whole bunch of ways to uniquely refer to devices rather than just their label. This is good for people who hot plug a lot of devices.
/bin/sh, it runs as Old School Bourne shell.
I run Fedora Rawhide on my laptop. This would be the equivalent of say, Debian Unstable. So I have a good idea of what FC3 offers...
- Bluecurve theme finally covers everything.In particular, Firefox and OpenOffice look like every other KDE or Gnome app.
- If what I've seen in the RHEL 4 beta is the same for Fedora, partitioning now uses LVM by default. There's a new GUI LVM config tool called 'system-config-lvm' in Rawhide to provide the post-install disk resizing. Additionally, online resizing with ext3 should work and, if you use RHEL, be supported.
- Firefox and Thunderbird.
- SELinux turned on, including policies for locking down Apache, Bind, and NIS. A GUI config tool is provided for this.
- There's apparently improvements to yum which I'm not sure about. Personally, I'm a fan of up2date, which can use directories full of packages (without needing index files) as one of its sources.
- Udev.
- HelixPlayer is now included by default.
- Bash 3 - not much difference for me, apart from the new inbuilt range system that obsoletes the old 'seq' command. If you call it as
Seriously, this is the first thing I check nowadays when evaluating software. If the documentation is bad you can wasted days, weeks, months trying to resolve problems - frankly I value my time too much. So can those in the know profer some opinions on the quality of the documentation?
----
FC3 is really fast on my Athlon 1.4Ghz Thunderbird and it has really good font rendering but I experienced some hurdles:
My system has both EIDE devices and SCSI devices. If I use eg. my EIDE cdrom drive I cannot use my SCSI cdrw drive anymore as this system seems to use the ide-scsi emulation layer per default. The SCSI cdrw is only detected by Nautilus if I put a cd into it (I don't like these autostarters)
I tried to build ReZound http//rezound.sf.net/ but it failed to compile
Neither does Audacity
When compiling MPlayer it fails to build with GUI and it fails to play sound if you playback a video
These are problems which I don't have with my other SuSE system (on the same machine)
JAVA: I don't like to have gcj installed instead of a real JVM
MP3: none of the installed sound tools can play or record MP3 files
The eth0 device is automatically detected but the DSL configuration doesn't configure eth0 to be used with pppd. As a result the kernel tries to start eth0 but fails and the pppd connection starts afterwards. This unnecessarily slows down the boot process.
With the SELinux am I correct in assuming that the more typical ownership is replaced with ACL's, and the GUI config tool for said things is at least halfway nice?
Included in FC3, has less features than the 1.4 series and it's not (IMO) nearly as beautiful. Is it possible to downgrade? Has anybody tried?
Why no linux src rpm?
I've been thinking along the same lines recently. What's the point in submitting a story to /. when it's patently obvious your server isn't going to be able to hold up? 20 comments and it's gone down, and, of course, most Caches are useless for things like screenshots.
/.'d and it struggled to stay afloat, and it's a dual P4 dedicated server with 1GB of RAM.
If you're going to faff around hosting pictures at least try to spread the load a bit. My site got
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
What is the point of upgrading, really? I mean, if the software offers a substantial, useful upgrade, then go for it. However, if you're just doing it for more widgets and later version with minimal changes, what's the point?
There's a negligible difference between Mandrake 10.x and Debian Sid or Sarge. One is supposedly cutting edge, while debian gets hell for being 'behind'. The only 'behind' I see is that debian doesn't tend to set everything for the user up automatically - good or bad, your call. That's all
I really see in new releases of distros like mandrake and fedora - more automation and 'seamless' operation for the newbie type. That's all good, I guess, if you're looking to get Windows-like acceptance and saturation one day, but I guess it's not for me. Hell, I don't even use hotplug because it irritates me. *g*
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Beware though, FC3 comes with gcc-3.4.
Make sure the C++ libraries you use compile with this version before pressing the little UPDATE button.
Cause it had nothing negative to say... so here's the bad stuff about Fedora, from someone who uses it, knows it well, and still likes it moe than other distros:
- Lack of a good GUI config tool installing packages. Ideally, system-config-packages should use up2date (rhn/yum/apt/dir) repositories to pull its packages from. Synaptic's the closest thing, but it only works with apt repositories.
- As painful as it seems for the Gnome guys to either test this out or believe anyone who says so, most users disable spatial Nautilus. This should be done by default. However otherwise the Gnome on FC3 feels great, particularly the file associations and launcher editing tools.
- Garret no longer works for Red Hat. Hence the new wallpaper for FC3 is kinda ugly compared to previous masterpieces.
- Needs a default sudoers file that allows particular groups of commands (but not all) to be run with root privileges by paricular users. I checked this into bugzilla so it should be there for the next release.
- General Linux stuff. Eg, I'd like the re-architected X servers fd.o are proposing - where X sits on top of OpenGL drivers - the only driver necessary to run a card. This involves replacing the current X drivers tho. It'll happen, but it'll take a long time...
I really-really hope that we can get stability back from version 7.2-7.3 which were still the best 'red hat' releases when it comes to stability.
before people start complaining about stability and features, FC is a developer oriented experimental type OS. it's not meant to be as "polished" or have as many neat stable features as other distros, this is a test platform.
if you want stable releases of everything, 3rd party apps(that aren't free software) and corporate support, go get novell, suse, mandrake, slackware, whatever, but don't bitch about FC.
I'm not a fan of the HAL daemon. I can't edit /etc/fstab. As a result, I can only play my CD's as root. It won't recognize my audio disc.
i had Fedora 2 on this PC (and Fedora 3 Test2) installed, both worked fine, but Fedora 3 final refuses to boot.
i have tried an upgrade, fresh install (ereased and recreated all partitions), nothing helped. it stopped everytime at different points in the boot process.
PC is a P4C 2.8 GHz, i865PE, 512 MB Ram, Geforce 4Ti so nothing really special about it
this my be isolated to my PC or not, but stuff like this stopps People from trying Linux. (i'm not really sure if i should re-install Fedora 2)
Ubuntu is a fantastic distribution, easy to install and with good support. It's a single CD which they will send you free for the asking and, because it uses debian, you can order an assload of easy to install software on 7Cds for about ten bucks. I don't have broadband either but I do if I take my laptop into town, but even with all that free bandwidth it's still cheaper just to order the CDs (even at a couple MBps it takes HOURS to download seven CDs!)
We upgraded from RH73 to Debian and, yes, it was worth the upgrade. Wished we had done this sooner.
I switched from Mandrake 9.2 (at the time) to Fedora Core 1 -- which sucked ass. I don't know if it got better in 2 or 3, but I'm sticking with Mandrake 10. (BTW, I also tried Debian, but the version of Grub included screwed up my MBR and caused me to have to painstakingly reinstall the WHOLE computer from the bottum up).
ACLs are seperate from SELinux. They're properly called an 'extended attribute'. They're a superset of normal permissions - ie, they allow multiple users and multiple groups different access levels on a single file.
- When listing a dir, 'ls' shows a + next to the permissions on files that have ACLs.
- The command 'getfacl' shows a files ACLs, and 'setfacl' allows you to change them.
- The GUI to change them doesn't exist. There's an entry in Bugzilla for 'ability to see / edit access control lists' though.
The answer is yes. Fedora 3 uses a government level of security. The FBI (or was it CIA, they're all the same) created their own linux version, with their own level of security (think ultra-high). Since it had to be open-source, that security has been added into Core 3. I don't know much more else about it, except that you have full control over each file's security settings, haven't had much time to really look in to it.
To install Fedora on MS Virtual PC or VMware under Windows is a mega-mess. Same with Suse. Shame it!
Did they correct the stupid 4K Stack thing in the kernel? Everytime I reinstall FC I go download the latest kernel so I can use my wireless NIC (via ndiswrapper)
Jon Stewart Daily Show 11/11/04 (It's still on the Bit Torrents, if you want to see it.)
Judging by the 50 posts thus far, Red Hat/Fedora appears to have fallen out of favor with the averaging posting SlashDot reader. Nothing but a string of complaining, despite most being unfounded or flatly wrong.
Fedora Core 3 is a terrific GNU/Linux distribution. On one hand, it contains only Free software. No proprietary, patent protected, or closed source. Everything included is safe and the principled users of software can be at ease.
On the other hand, it is very polished. There are no dark corners of breakage, everything Just Works(TM). Network, video card, printing, CD burning, fonts, office applications, PDF viewing, email, file browsing, graphics, etc. All the little niggles of versions past (not just Red Hat either) been resolved to result in this super clean and functional distro.
As a Red Hat user since 5.0, Fedora Core 3 is the first version I feel is good enough for a non-geek Windows user to try. There won't be any surprises. Much of this is simply the development of GNOME 2.8, but Red Hat (ok, the Fedora Core team) has done an excellent job IMO of refining the base, too.
Now I'm sure posters can (and will) lament the downside. Fedora Core 3 will not be found perfect, featureful, fastest, most flexible, most standards compliant, most free, or the most usable. But across the board, FC3 is the best at fulfilling a balanced set of these qualities.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
I'm running FC2 with 2.6.10-rc1 kernel on the laptop. This kernel was a bit easier to get tuned for speed than the one that was shipped with FC2 and some user space code (gnome ;-) that used to cause hard crash only crashes the window manager now.
Will be loading up FC3 in today or tomorrow to see how it runs.
I had a BIG problem with trying to install FC3 on the server. It seems the megaraid driver has been rewritten and no longer supports PERC2 and older. COnsidering that the server is a Dell 2450 built in 2000, this is NOT GOOD. Had to settle for FC2 for the server upgrade and all the messing around wasted a day.
I've got some problems with the decision to leave out standard unix utilities like uuencode-uudecode as well. WHY? Are there no more 7bit connections in the world? Of course they were gone in FC2 as well. Yes, I know I can add the stuff, but it should be part of the distributed package.
Other than that, I'm still keen on native transmeta arch. Where's the homage to diversity we expect from linux.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
I was just looking through OSDir at some other stuff when the Slashdot effect took hold.
Just typical.
how tightly setup is SELinux is setup on this system...
I know it was optional on Fedora Core2, but not it's aviable by default for Core3.
If they did a good job SELinux will make Windows XP SP2 security look like a bigger joke then it already is.
I have yet to update my IBM laptop to FC 3.0.... Not sure if I want to yet.
Also, there is nearly a CD worth of updates less than 1 week after the release. Using YUM, it took overnight to download them all on a T1. Maybe the Fedora group should plan on a 3.1 release in 30 days or so.
..."it may be worth your wife to make the switch"
If only i had one....
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
Have they decided to include an mp3 decoder with XMMS or Rythmbox?
Does updating packages work well?
Last time I used Fedora it was Core 1 and these two things alone drove me insane. I know they excluded an mp3 decoder due to patent reasons, but that's just lame - almost every other distro includes the decoder.
I was a bit shocked about the many bugs I immediately ran into after a clean install.
/etc/sysconfig/desktop still says 'desktop="GNOME"'.
- If you deselect Gnome and select KDE instead when doing a custom install then Fedora will boot straight into TWM because
- If you deselect the graphics tools you'll not be able to print from OpenOffice (in some cases?). Fedora recognized the Epson C40UX printer but when you try to print nothing happens (not even an error dialog). After turning the CUPS log-level to debug I found that CUPS was trying run a script called "ijgimp..." (don't remember the exact name) but that script doesn't exists. Seeing the name I installed gimp plus all addon packages and now printing worked...kind of because the output was heavily distorted. Messages on the web say the printer works out of the box with the "stp" driver on older Fedora Core versions but "stp" is not selectable in CUPS anymore it seems so printing doesn't work for me now.
- ISDN is very broken. During the boot process I get a "failed" when Fedora tries to load the ISDN modules for the Fritzcard ISDN yet when I then call "/etc/init.d/isdn start" after login the modules load fine...except that I get a weird error in the log that says udev cannot find an appropriate sysfs class for ippp0. Also when I now configure a ISDN dialup connection using redhats tool and click "activate" the connection is up but the status in the tool still says "deactivated". There also doesn't seem to be a tool included that makes it possible to easily connect or disconnect from the system tray, I had to create my own icons on the desktop calling isdndial and isdnhangup.
- In a different case installing Fedora Core 3 on my Toshiba Satellite M30 requires the addition of a modeline in xorg.conf to make X11 work properly on the WXGA 1280x800 screen. Also I have to add "psmouse.rate=40" (again, I would have to go look to get the exact name) as bootparameter to make the touchpad work properly.
All of this was right after installation even before I was able to really use the system.
I've used RH since about 6.x and went through all the versions up to Core 3 but after installing that one I really feel like I've been kicked in the balls. I know that this is supposed to be the "hacker" version used as a testbed for RHEL but the outright shoddy level of QA suprises me. They had three test releases and a bug as grave and visible as the Gnome/KDE/TWM one doesn't get noticed? If anything Fedora Core 3 reminds me that Linux still has big (!) issues on the home desktop and is still very hard/impossible for the newbie to install.
I ran into a parted bug before I even got that far. This comment seems to be about the same problem, but my troubles were on FC3, where FC2 worked fine.
The fact that in order to upgrade you have to download and burn all 4 cds to upgrade is going to make me switch back to debian as soon as sarge is released.
Fedora is nice but I can't play these upgrade games where you have to fuss around burning cds and rebooting and all this nonesense.
People say "Fedora is as good as Debian it has apt!". Yeah, well, if I can't do a "dist-upgrade" then it's just a bullshit crippled apt not the real thing.
I upgrade over the weekend, and now I can't access anything on the secondary IDE controller without major problems - my load average when I woke up this morning was over 230. This hardware has been perfectly stable for 2 years.
hdc: dma timer_expiry: dma status == 0x21
hdc: DMA timeout error
hdc: dma timeout error: status=0xd0 {Busy}
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hdc: DMA disabled
ide1: reset: success
hdc: irq timeout: status-0x80 { Busy }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
ide: reset: success
ReiserFS: warning: is_tree_node: node level 19789 does not match to
the expected one 1
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
I had problem burning good FC3 CDs from the bittorrent images in FC2 before the upgrade. I ended up using Windows XP Pro to burn the CDs.
I had various troubles with an "upgrade from FC2 to FC3 on my workstation. Most of the problems were gone when I later did a full install.
Everything seems to be polished and working wonderfully now, with a few exceptions: My graphics is slow (I have a nVIDIA GeForce 4MX), and I still can't burn good FC3 CDs.
-- Weiqi Gao weiqigao@speakeasy.net
But I will tell you anyway. I ran mandrake for a long time. they changed gcc systems with every release, and seemed to install it broken about half the time. Until this most recent switch (when I left them forever) I had been using mdk10.1 "community" for the last few months and have been completely unable to get the damn compiler to work even to run basic make-installs on simple stuff like rar and divfix.
So, every time I wanted to install something I had to spend hours looking up shit on rpm.pbone and hoping I could find all the packages it needed to solve the dependancies. Even with urpmi (which is inarguably better than basic RPM) it was not uncommon for the installer to get completely stumped and either give up or just mangle the OS. The times I tried to upgrade gnome resulted in my having to perform a complete reinstall over the mess it made of my desktop. and because I use an encrypted userland it NEVER shut down because of the way it (and last I tried, RH) deals with encrypted partitions (although that's another unrelated point I mention it because I find it hilarious they've apparently been given a bunch of money to develop a "secure linux" - good luck France, you're gonna need it.)
With ubuntu "upgrades" are about two clicks and a lotta downloading away. If you're on a broadband link I doubt you'd ever have to reinstall, because the package installer is so very reliable. It's not perfect, but compared to RPM it's like running linux in seven league boots.
Evolution 2.0 in Mandrake 10.1 is lightning fast for me, updates imap very quickly, using a secure connection. Despite all the Evolution 2.0 negative talk, I think it's great!
FC3 feels a LOT slower than FC2 did. I'm running an overclocked 3.2ghz p4, and the systems takes an eternity to load up. And once I've logged into X, it takes several seconds before I have anything other than a blue screen, and loading any program has a noticable lag.
However, the new features it has are quite nice.
I tried Fedora 3 on my Dell Dimension 8200 over the weekend. Happily, USB works (it hangs up on Mandrake), but sadly, sound is broken. It works when the sound card is tested during the install, but emits only silence thereafter. The sound card is a Santa Cruz, using ALSA cs64xx driver.
All the new stuff looks great, I'd really like to have this working properly.
Mike.
If anything, it's less stable. To be fair though, I had no stability problems with FC2 at all.
So far, Evolution crashes quite frequently, and Nautilus has crashed once.
Most of my other problems were related to SELinux though. Disabling that seemed to get rid of a lot of them.
It will never be as good as Debian or Gentoo. For one reason: portage/apt. The ability to pick a package (let's say for example, GNOME) and have it download and compile it and all it's dependancies from one command (apt-get install gnome, not sure how portage works) makes these two distros easily the best of the bunch. The fact that while Debian is something I don't classify as a newbie os can be so easy to use shows that it's far ahead of the rest. Fedora's just a joke. Shiny, but ultimately a joke.
Sleep, she is for the weak..
But, coming from SuSE, its a nightmare. I went from FC1, to SuSE9.0-9.2, back to FC3. I forgot how unpolished RH/Fedora is. An awful lot of tweaks (four days) had to be done to get it "nice". Nvidia drivers were the easy part. Then last night I was trying to get compositing working, and it was. The system eventually completely froze. When I rebooted it, it came back with an error that was something like unable to read kernel settings. Went into rescue mode and tried to fsck the disk, and it said it couldn't find the Superblock for the partition, which I assume is beacause they force you to use LVM on the default install and fsck doesn't know how to address it. Since I don't know about LVM, and tried my best to figure it out, but couldn't figure out what LV tool would work. I eventually gave up. I'm thinking it requires a reinstall... and since it does, i think i'm going to reinstall SuSE.
well.. today, everyone made jokes about gentoo on the new livecd release.
and now, i'm laughing at the fedora/redhat guys.. i'm running kde 3.3.1 since some days now, with gcc3.4 and gnome 2.8 besides.. i don't have to care about this stuff, i'm constant on the bleeding edge (desktop system)
and no, i didn't touch a gentoo live cd since years! - my "core updates" come via the web! and it compiles fast on my p4 2.8ghz.. well, fast enough ;-)
let's get the flaming started..I tried out Fedora Core 3 on a different HD and I must say I was not impressed in the least bit, it kept giving me problems - even with yum, though it was an easy fix. or something to that degree.
Everything seemed to be both working and not working at the same time - polished one second and slopped together the next.
I severely dislike the package management system and the lack of a well integrated setup like Ubuntu had.
I disliked the DVD-size install, I had to use 3 CD's to get my system up and running with Fedora Core 3.
I also liked the support of Ubuntu moreso than Fedora's - Ubuntu has a nice Wiki which explains everything very clearly, while Fedora has a lot of stuff about Core 1 and Core 2, but I could sorely find anything about Core 3.
-- This is not meant to be a flame
I installed this over the weekend on my slow 333MHz laptop, and I have to say it's really quite nippy. Definitly faster than FC2.
I've got some problems with the decision to leave out standard unix utilities like uuencode-uudecode as well. WHY? Are there no more 7bit connections in the world?
Not only that, are there no newsreaders in the world? Some of them start uuencode/uudecode as a separate process.
Build failure can be caused by the following: (1) the code has problem with the gcc version you use. or (2) library dependencies are not installed. The first could happen if they bumped the version of gcc used. I think programs written in c++ are more prone to this problem. For the second possibility, if you upgraded your existing installation, it may be the case that your old -devel packages were obsoleted by new versions of the library, but the new version -devel is not picked up during installation. If you installed anew, then you definitely should install the -devel packages again. Definitely check your dependencies again.
Also, mp3 hasn't been included in RedHat distro since 8.0 or so. You should check this out instead. Freshrpms is a complement distribution to RedHat that contains everything missing, such as mplayer, mpg321, and audacity.
I once had a signature.
I've given FC1, 2 and 3 a try on everything from my XP2400 to my Athlon64 3400 and its grossly over-hyped and grossly under polished for a desktop system.
I don't know about you, but i don't expect my desktop to run slower, my disk IO to chug along and my drivers and system to be stuck in DLL hell.
Suse 9.2 on the other hand was much more refigned, less "bastardized" (all the redhat focus on gnome) and much quicker.
Ofcourse i'm the unlucky SOB with a ATI 9800 pro card expecting support under X.org on a 64bit platform.
However Solaris 10, Windows 2003 x64 and Windows XP 64 all run flawlessly, quickly and have a polished feel to them compared to FC *.*
Call me a troll if you want, i'm just utterly dissapointed in the fedora releases for anything but a server - and even then i'm not fond of Redhat'isms.
Another year? sure... but by then Microsoft and others will have polished & tweaked and nailed the market.
Well, I made the mistake of throwing FC3 on my Sony Vaio laptop over the weekend. Unfortunately, this seems to apply to me:
= 10 84
http://freedesktop.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id
In any event, while I can still run a VESA-compliant driver at 800x600 it looks pretty tiny on my laptop display. I guess I'll have to patch things and proceed.
On the upside, FC3 detected just about everything else. My USB mouse worked properly as did the hard drive connected via firewire. The network install went flawlessly via NFS with the caveat that a text install was needed to work around the defective video.
Remember folks - this is still a preliminary release and should be considered Beta. You shouldn't install this on your primary workstation and expect everything to work.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
I don't use Gnome or KDE, so I don't know what's changed on that side of things. But the rest of my system runs roughly the same as before. I haven't noticed any significant speed or stability issues. All-in-all I consider it a worthwhile upgrade, but one will need to be ready for several significant changes. Read the Fedora README for a good summary of them, as usual.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
I've had nothing but issues with compiling 2.6.9 under fc1 and fc2, so I'm really looking forward to getting 2.6.9 prepackaged and working right, so I can finally get acpi functioning properly. I'll be loading tonight and if all works well, I can't think of a better selling point for fc3
Technology's a battle between companies producing more idiot-proof systems and nature producing bigger and better idiots
reason to download several gigs of things I don't use, such as emacs
Without emacs your computer will crash.
"...normal evolution would have gone Word to Frame to troff, but instead, the computer industry has gone the other way!"
Some functional issues that I was happy to see resolved were.
Pros
*Dual booting is now much easier to set up with XP...just worked.
*USB keydrives seem to be better supported.
Cons
*NVIDIA drivers will break your install. There is a fix out there though.
*I haven't been able to find any good sources for yum or apt just yet to get software.
*The graphical Security Level config tool seems to be broke out of the box. (Install Firestarter...much better imo)
Here's my 'beef' with Fedora Core 3. I'm not sure if I can contribute this to SELinux additions, or to the new Gnome 2.8 - but everything starts slowly (I'm talking 20 seconds to start a Gnome-Terminal), or four times slower than it was on Core 2. I'm going to try to set up my environment in KDE and see if it's any better, but so far, I'm not impressed.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I had it installed for a few days, and I wasn't overly impressed. The installer was nice (something I find lacking in most Debian-based distros), and Gnome 2.8 looked nice when it booted, but it was the biggest resource hog I've come across (regardless of the WM or what I had running). Having Firefox open and tryng to install something via Yum (which had few available packages, it couldn't find secpanel or a couple codec packages, among many others) made my system lock up. Yes, it's only 128 megs of ram, but still, my current Libranet system doesn't lock up.
All in all, if you've got a decent system, and don't want many "extra" packages, then you might like it.
I have been running FC3 betas on a desktop for a while and liked it, so I tried upgrading my FC1 Dell laptop to FC3. I ended up with the fonts being off just enough to be annoying, the mouse pad acting funny, and suspend to RAM not working. I got the fonts looking almost OK and learned how to set Synaptics parameters in X, but the suspend was a killer. So I wiped the disk and went back to FC1. Apparantly suspend in ACPI is far from complete. Furthermore, booting with ACPI disabled and APM enabled, allows suspend to work, but resume fails. I guess I am stuck with a 2.4 kernel based OS for a while.
I saw that FC3 was released and setup bittorrent to download the isos. I installed FC3 and it was pretty painless. Once I found this site: http://home.gagme.com/greg/linux/fc3-tips.php and http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc3.s html
I was able to add those features that are normally removed due to licensing. I'm definately a fan of Fedora.
You said "RPM sucks ass", but you seem to be comparing RPM (a package format and low level package tool) with ubuntu's high level package tools (synaptic and apt, IIRC?). I've been pretty happy using synaptic and apt on top of RPM, and I'm told that yum and up2date aren't bad either (never tried urpmi). I'm sure .deb files would suck ass too if all you had to install them was dpkg.
I'm a relative newbie to linux, though I messed around with Red Hat 8 for a bit. I recently did a fresh install of FC3 on my main computer, as a complete install (with every package possible). I may regret this later, but I don't mind having a dozen text reader programs now.
;\)
I like FC3, it was easy to set up and it seems nicely customizable. I was having some difficulty setting up a few things though. The only DC client I got to work is complete trash (it works but is very buggy). I had to install a RPM to allow xmms to play MP3s, since the default MP3 player didn't support a playlist. And, I recently got VLC installed for a media player.
I haven't had any problems specific to FC3 yet.
-veraction (my registration email should have arrived by now
I've run suse and wasn't any more impressed with their "yummy" installer than with urpmi. None of the rpm tools I've tried have been able to keep up with synaptic running debs, and I even tried the synaptic installer on fedora. So yes, I would say that, compared to the system on ubuntu (deb packages with synaptic), RPM sucks ass. It can't just be the installer, because the same installer still didn't work as well when it had to grok with RPM.
Fedora brand Redhat has the legacy project for updates of older versions, and official Redhat you pay for has (RHEL) 12-18 month release cycle and 7 years support for each of the 3 versions. A clone to redhat proper is Whitebox linux.
When FC3 first came out, I raced to get the CDs and DVD image... once I got those I got lazy and was distracted by other things. Time goes by and this weekend, I decided to burn my CD images and consider installing. Running FC2, I had some trouble writing CDs... (surprised?) My laptop running FC2 burns CDs better than my desktop -- who knows why? I don't. I also picked up a new DVD writer... a "too good to be true" deal from Fry's -- EMPREX DVD Dual 16x Double Layer internal DVD+/- R/RW Drive. Cost? $79.99 limit one per customer (or two if you're paying cash and ask for separate receipts like me! hehehe)
:) Now I'm glad I didn't follow through with it just yet... I expected the following "problems" however, since I'm not new to using new stuff:
...but as I said, I think I'll wait. There are gobs of people out there way smarter than me and who have time and energy not only to solve the problems before I experience then, but to document them as well. :)
It tried like hell to burn the CDs as root but just did't look or act right... got slightly better results with Webmin's CD writing interface (strange since they both use the same underlying software right?) Anyway, 2 of four CDs would pass the CD test and I burned the other two using my laptop and all was well... but I made a few coasters along the way -- good thing they're cheap these days.
I was tired and not prepared to spend the rest of the night installing FC3 and then the next morning I see this thread.
* A bazillion updates to be installed after installation -- after all, not a lot of people wanted to use the test release versions as it seems that fewer people are willing to spend their time trying to figure out if something is a bug or if they are just stupid.
* User Interface tweaks -- OMFG! Grow up people. UI's are a very individualistic thing and rarely will anyone love it out of the box. Play with it; have fun with it; make it yours. I can't think of a better way outside of solitaire to look as if you're doing something useful when you're really just wasting time.
* Hardware integration issues -- Can you think of a time when this didn't happen? I'll admit I was pretty happy when I got damned close to a seamless install from time to time, but there's always something unless you've got some pretty well selected hardware. Having a Dell Inspiron 5000+ laptop, I was kinda bugged by the problems with ACPI and all that -- I was struggling for weeks on that without any really good solutions and I look forward to something better with my laptop and FC3...
Aside from 'dependency hell', this habit of most linux distros to often include everything + the kitchen sink is what turned me away..
..
After the change to FreeBSD, never really looked back.. Beyond idle curiosity
Never had a dependency problem since, and i dont have that bloat, since *I* decide what is installed..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's me and thanks. But I don't get what you're talking with "could have been." Ubuntu is a pretty new distro (at least "offically") and it's pretty widely popular with the folks I know who have tried it. And with the stated mission being to remain "free as in everything" it's a safe bet it's going to continue to grow in popularity.
I like the name. It's even prompted me to learn more about south africa and the zulu, which (I think) was part of the reason for choosing the name. Nangamalungelo!
I remember back with Fedora Core Test 2 I had all sorts of weird crap going on and stuff just not working that I had no problems with in Gentoo. I was wondering if I could get some sort of gauge of how much the bugs and glitches have been ironed out in this release before giving it a try.
Coral Cache Link
I'm somewhat of a Linux on the desktop noob. I hate dual booting, and I have a spare machine but figure if I'm not going to use it on my primary machine it's not worth using at all.
A couple nights ago I downloaded and installed the DVD of FC3. I have been fairly impressed. It seems a little more smooth around the edges than other/previous distros (I skipped FC2 because of bug warnings, but I've tried FC1, RH9, MDK, Gentoo (ugh), SuSe, and Debian 3 in the past). Most exciting is that my sound worked immediately, mapping printers through my D-Link print server was absurdly easy, and it came with Firefox and Thunderbird.
Some things I struggled with:
1. Installing Flash was difficult until I found an RPM for FC3+Firefox. The auto-install feature of Firefox would not work, giving the error "Failed" with no other details!
2. Installing Java plugin to Firefox was rediculously difficult, but after several newgroups reading, I figured out the symlink thingy. Doh!
3. Some of the keyboard mappings were troublesome. I have to get used to the new hotkeys in Firefox (like switching and closing tabs), and no Windows key to open up the start menu. I realized that's more of a user problem than a software problem.
4. Most annoying is that it keeps defaulting me to WindowMaker or something as my default instead of KDE. Hella lame, as I have to click "Session", then "KDE" every time I log in. I know there's a fix for this and haven't bothered to search for it yet, but I find it odd that is the default.
5. When I got the Java 1.5 plugin installed in Firefox, Java apps ran retardedly slow. Not sure who is at fault there.
6. I haven't delved into the process of burning DVDs, but I have no doubt it's going to be painful. Also, no good alternative to DVDshink AFAIK.
All in all, I really like the RedHat way of doing things. I've tried MDK and SuSe, and they just didn't feel as comfortable as RedHat. I also find it easier to find RPMs for RedHat. I dislike installing from source because I more often than not break something, although I will do it if I cannot find an RPM.
Anyone know of an APT repository where I can get more recent versions of packages?
ATI has made linux drivers available but only for a select few video cards... mine not included :(
:n
Those new features are great. How about a tour of the bugs that keep us from adopting FC3? A brief, prioritized summary of their bug database would answer lots of questions about the risks of running that OS, and probably dispel a lot of FUD. Sounds like a great cost:benefit for Red Hat's staff and expenses: mining the free work of their FC open source community. And fans can pitch in for free!
--
make install -not war
You could grab this before from one of the extra yum repositories, but I think there will be alot more players for this awesome game now that its bundled with fedora core. Quite possibly the best decision made by the developers.
that Evolution people have removed that feature where you can browse for RDF news. I used to read slashdot through that borwser + 10 other websites. Now, I have to go manually and visit each single one of them, and usually i miss some of them. Is anybody aware of a plan to include that feature again in future releases (hopefully the next one :)
"Evil thrives when good men do nothing"
If you are already running Fedora Core 2, then you can use yum to upgrade to Core 3. (yum is like apt.)
.isos.
Read these good instructions on how to do this yum upgrade.
I plan on following them later this morning and so I won't be part of the bottleneck downloading the
Like Digital Freedoms? Then donate to EFF before they're gone.
I have no trouble with them offering the kitchen sink as an *option*..
But most make it damend hard, if not impossible to not have it all installed..
Chose one optional part, you get tons with it..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've installed FC3 from CDs. It's great and quite polished, I must say. I also liked the feature that allows you to test your CDs before you use them to install Fedora - prevents those incomplete-due-to-corrupt-cds installs.
However, now that I have installed off CDs, is there a way to get the Add/Remove programs application to either use the ISO images or better still a mirror as a source for packages?
Yeah, I know about command line yum, but how do I get the GUI based Add/Remove programs app to use the ISO images? It's kinda irritating switching CDs back and forth when installing something because of the dependencies involved.
Anyone?
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
I know a lot of folks are more interested in how FC3 runs on more modern hardware...but I have an old box from 1996 that has been upgraded to the below specs and I noticed a significant boost in overall performance in going from FC2 to FC3. I'm only a casual linux user, so I really have no explanation for the change; but it was welcome considering the age and limited capability of the old Packard Bell. I'm ashamed to even admit that's what it is...but oh well...we all had to start somewhere. ;)
400MHz AMD K6-2 (Powerleap)
256MB L2 Cache
96MB RAM
8MB ATI Rage 3D PCI
13GB 33Mbps Maxtor HDD
Have they unlocked the Gnome menu yet? This is the one bone I have to pick with Fedora Core (I've used 1 and 2 and now use 2 exclusively). Mind you I'm not a power user.
I spent a few days playing around with Ubuntu, and you could edit the menu there, but I found it was a bit too lean for my tastes, and I prefer the GUI setup for things like Samba and Apache, that Ubuntu didn't have.
Cheezit! We're boned! - famous 31st Century bending unit
I had the exact opposite experience. Fedora 2 was dog-ass slow for me. I was ready to look for another distro, but then FC3 came out. I did a clean install (my /home is on its own partition), and holy cow. I saw an IMMENSE improvement in speed. Using Gnome 2.8 and SELinux is enabled. I especially like udev. My computer is a laptop (ultralight) so I am constantly plugging and unplugging USB 2 drives. udev makes it a snap.
/etc/modconf. Fedora tries IPv6 first for everything. I found this issue with FC1 and noticed a speed improvement when I disabled IPv6.
One thing you may want to try. If you are not on an IPv6 network, you may want to disable IPv6 in
Even though this is still for FC2, this site still has some good information:
Unofficial Fedora FAQ
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
Sorry that should be "/etc/modprobe.conf"... My bad.
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
I found it relatively easy to get my Bluetooth mouse working with FC3. I documented that and a few other things here.
/dev/nvidia* /etc/udev/devices /etc/udev/devices/nvidia*
The one major problem I had: FC3 won't boot with a nVidia graphics card until you logon in text mode without rhgb (use the "a" option in grub to modify the kernal parameters, delete rhgb and add "3"), build the nVidia drivers, modprobe nvidia, and:
cp -a
chown root.root
as documented here. That was true with both my notebook (GeForce 440 Go) and desktop (GeForce 6800GT). Maybe the nv driver work work too, I didn't check.
AMD64 power management works automagically now.
The upgrade was worth it to me for Bluetooth and power management.
Does anybody know how to REALLY turn off font antialiasing in FC3 ? With RH9
:(
a GDK_USE_XFT=0 did the trick for GTK, but I never managed to turn off libxft in QT.
And with FC3, even the GDK_USE_XFT=0 doesn't work any longer...
Antialising just plain sucks if used on modern LC displays, but apparently nobody
except myself seems to care (an extensive googling didn't get me a solution
i'm not really sure what the grandparent post was speaking off, when i hit up FC3 after being a RH user since 6.1, i was happy at how fast it was.
My previous FC1 and FC2 installs have been happy on a 2.1ghz machine, so i was antsy about how FC3 would behave on a Sempron (1.5ghz) bitch-box i'd just bought for play/testing. It was fast and snappy as other Cores had not been. Used to 128megs of video ram and a gig of ddr, i wasn't sure about this Sempron with 256megs of ddr and lamer video card (i don't game, so i don't care, but was curious how it'd behave all the same). To my surprise, FC3 was fast and snappy as i said. Very nice. Very painless install (as all the Cores have been...just gotta know what you are doing..i get the feeling some around here do not).
To save the headache, i just grab the first iso and install off a fast mirror via ftp...very simple, very fast. FC3 is good stuff. Wouldn't put that donkey on a firewall machine, but everything else, it looks like it'll work. i do miss seeing my process list fill up 1/2 a screen (gentoo and openbsd), but hey, i can't complain too much.
Aside from the corporate, enterprise editions. Redhat 9 for me is still the most blazingly fast version. I don't know if it's my imagination, but every Fedora version feels beta-ish.
I did a fresh install of FC3 the day it was released. I did it on an 1.4 GHz XP nForce system.
The install went smoothly. Everything looks nice. I had no errors or odd messages on first boot. I've been using Redhat since before Fedora and I have to say that the system is evolving nicely over time.
Here is a true testament to how things have improved: I ran a fresh install, logged in, loaded OpenOffice Writer and printed a document to my printer without having to ever configure or look at any printer settings of any kind! As a long-time GNU/Linux user, that really WOWed me. Wrestling with the printer had always been a right of passage on any new install.
I have run into a few things that annoy me...
1. NVIDIA driver trouble - lots of people are having them. The video driver will not load at boot time. I have to boot at runlevel 3, load the driver manually and then switch to runlevel 5. I could just load it with a custom script at startup but I think this issue will be resolved soon, so I'm just going to live with it for now.
My NIC suddenly stopped working. I'm not sure if it was because I booted into a different OS and then switched back or what. I installed the closed-source NForce driver for the NIC and the integrated sound. The NIC works fine, but for some reason the open source driver still gets loaded. I can't figure out what is loading it. It's not hurting anything though. Similarly, both sound drivers were being loaded. I'm still using the open-source one because it's working fine but I can't figure out how to get the nvidia one to stop loading.
2. SELinux and ntpd - There's a bug in the SELinux policy that prevents ntpd from doing it's job. Supposedly, it's fixed but I'm waiting for the fix to be officially released. I suppose I could learn a little about SELinux policies and fix it myself but there is only so much time in the day.
3. OpenOffice.org - printing Envelopes arg! Printing envelopes has been a pain in my ass on every system I have ever used, regardless of Hardware, OS, or Word Processing software. Not really a FC issue.
4. USB 2.0 storage device in a system with only USB 1.1 controller - doesn't work. It's recognized, but not loading the usb-storage driver. The same hardware works with a different OS and the device works with FC in a box with a 2.0 controller. Had this same problem with FC2, btw.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with FC3. Considering, I jumped on it the day it was released, I've had very few issues.
-Jason
Just a quick comment here at work:
I uninstalled FC2 after 2 days because of 2 things:
1) No synaptics touchpad support (for Dell Latitude c400). That there is an existant driver to add this support, and that this driver was not included, was insane to me.
2) Still no wireless support out-of-the-box (at least for my card, a Belkin card that uses the atmel chipset (for which there are current drivers)).
I am happy to report that both these problems are fixed in FC3. Wireless card is detected and works correctly with no post-install configuration, and the touchpad driver is installed by default, though some tweaking of the xorg.conf file is necessary to get it running to user specs (I expected this).
With most of the OS and DE(s) meeting or exceeding other systems (Windows, Solaris, etc), cleaning up these little problems goes along way towards drawing a userbase.
B
"We must still have chaos within in order to be able to give birth to a dancing star." --Friedrich Nietzsche
Can't these people keep up with changing technology?
RHEL is not all that it can be as a server. My major peeve: incomplete support for headless installs. It is work to install over a serial port if you want features like LVM. Those exist only on the "graphical install" side of things.
There are also some "headless only" issues that should be addressed (ie. it should ask about the serial port's "magic key" initial state, given that there's no CTL, ALT or DEL key <grin>
In this, and in several other "headless" issues, I see no difference between Fedora and RHE.
That said, a lot is right. Installing headless gets the proper entries in grub.conf, for example. That was a pleasant surprise, and it works in both RHE and Fedora. Installing diskless using DHCP and TFTP is also quite easy (although I could wish for better documentation on this from Redhat; I've not yet figured out how to use kickstart in this environment).
Still, my key point: RHE still has room to evolve in server support, and I've seen little difference on these issues between RHE and Fedora.
Having logged out for years using Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, this was a tough habit to break (and my wife still oopses over this one frequently).
Granted, assigning temporary device ownership to non-root console logins was a nice modern touch, but not making it in harmony with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace was a real pain. I suppose one could argue that "drastic" console X session termination does not have to be clean, but I'd counter that if such termination logs one out of the console, the usual console logout functions should be at least attempted.
You could've hired me.
Is it not possible to discuss the upgrade of a distro without flaming/trolling on other distros...
Wait.. this is slashdot
It isn't a matter of "cool"; it's a matter of reliability. We have a lot of RH 9 boxes, and very few (a half dozen or so) Fedora boxes, but there many more problems with the Fedora Boxes. It may be shiny but that doesn't matter much if it doesn't work correctly.
RH9 -> FC1 was a drop in stability, and FC1 -> FC2 wasn't much of an improvement. I haven't seen enough of FC3 to rate it, but I can understand people's concerns.
-- MarkusQ
Worth The Upgrade?
No.
I usually upgrade my distro only when the libc/XFree/any core library start to become really obsolete.
I changed my slackware 3.x for RedHat 6.2 when too many application needed libc6 instead of libc5 and XFree was compiled for libc5 so it was not reentrant/thread compliant.
Then, I upgraded my RedHat 6.2 with RedHat 8.0, for almost the same reason: get XFree 4, new libc6 and mozilla started using gtk2, i guess, so I had to recompile it myself but I had not enough horse power to do it.
My last upgrade was with Fedora Core 1 and at work I still have a RedHat 9 that can run most of the actual software.
So I guess Fedoca Core 3 is not really worth an upgrade for me.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
The downloaded iso checked out on MD5SUMs.
I am reusing CD-RW for Fedora Core 3, on one computer the media check is fine, on another computer the media check fails on Fedora Core disc 2,3 and rescue CD. Even after blanking out fully the CD-RW has a media check problem.
I gave up on making a Fedora Core 3 on reused CD-RW and put Fedora Core on one DVD. I installed Fedora Core 3 on my machine. What a wonderful upgrade. I screwed up Fedora Core 3 by putting the All in One Radeon patch from gatos.sourceforge.net. The X windows has been upgraded but not the All in One Radeon patch. I used the bad media check rescue CD to fix my Fedora Core 3. I am back in business. Now if only the media check message would go away and if there were a new All in One Radeon patch I would be happy.
FC3 is good once you get it to go. It did render my system unbootable when first installed, however.
I boot of a SATA disk, and was running a FC1 system with a 'roll-your-own' 2.6.5 kernel.
When i upgraded to FC3, it seems that the SATA drivers are compiled as modules and aren't loaded at the correct time to make the system see the SATA drives correctly - thus the system would simply refuse to boot.
Booting on my old 2.6.5 kernel got the system up, and recompiling the redhat kernel from SRPM with the SATA driver compiled in fixed all this, but it seems a bit of an oversight to ship a distro that isn't bootable from SATA these days.
GStreamer did not install correctly, and FC3 is pretty crap out-of-the-box for playing sound/video etc.
Xorg produced strange noise and snow on my screen with the 'nv' driver, something i had never seen before on any distro.
There is a real problem configuring yum/up2date repositories - newbies shouldnt have to hand-hack files, and almost everyone will need to configure livna/freshrpma/atrpms etc. to have a decent system.
I also had to hand-hack xorg.conf to get NVidia Twinview working - not surprising but no newbie will be able to see how to do this.
On the plus side, FC3 seems much faster than FC1, and GNOME 2.8 is getting pretty good - Once installed, it seems yo 'just go', and stay mostly out of my way, which is how a desktop environment should work. Every other aspect of the system seems solid, and as someone who has been using RedHat since 5.x, it all seems very familiar and comfortable.
I would recommend it as a corporate desktop where support is there, or for a power user.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
not really to troll, but is there an official distributed package management? afaik it seems pretty segregated now doesn't it
It won't be in there. You have to explicitly turn it off. Add the following to /etc/modprobe.conf:
alias net-pf-10 off
alias ipv6 off
Not absolutely sure if the second line HAS to be there, but the first one does.
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
From graphical login (hitting enter):
- 2m04s Splash Screen first appears
- 2m49s Splash Screen disappears
- 3m (even) GAIM login first starts
- 3m20s Menu is first visible
- 4m35s Theme finally appears
I'm not giving up (yet), and I thank you for your help. It is heartening to know that not everyone has the crap performance that I'm dealing with.Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I've tried some six or seven distros the last few weeks, to see if any of them could be close to usable for my parents. This one so far seems to hit the spot, but I've been unsuccessful in getting optical output from my onboard nForce2 AC97 chip to work. Any thoughts? And yes, I've googled it. Everybody seems to have Sound Blasters nowadays...
I use FC 2 all the time. I installed FC 3 on a brand new Hard Drive. The installation went great, but when I tried loging in using GNOME, or KDE it freezes half way through the configure setup(Splash Screen for KDE). Has anyone had this problem?
Well, being a complete Gentoo nut, I still wanted to see what this had to offer. I was really impressed this time. I don't really like rpm based distro's but this was definately worth the blank dvd and time. it had most of the latest stuff and it ran pretty fast.
That's to say, that my set-up is plenty fast enough to run TuxRacer quite smoothly. It just takes a full minute and thirty to get to the point where TuxRacer's main menu appears.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Don't bother upgrading if you plan use your ATI video card for 3D purposes. Whereas there was a workaround to get fglrx support in FC2, it no longer works in FC3. I believe the problem is actually caused by Xorg 6.8, but in either case I have half a mind to go back to FC2. I have read that you can simply revert to Xorg 6.7 and get 3D support, but half the reason I upgraded was to play with XDamage, Transet, etc. Besides the ATI problem, I haven't had any problems.
One thing to note is that there is no longer a kernel-sourcecode RPM, rather you need to download the SRPM for the kernel (in FC1 & 2 they included both). Details are in the release notes.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Going from FC2 to FC3 broke gnome for me. Everything sort of worked, but I couldn't change any settings. After deleting a few directories (like .gconfd), everything worked fine again. For me, changing distros or versions of distros seems to always break gnome for some reason.
I had another problem where the root password I had set didn't work. (Fixing it just required rebooting in single user mode and running passwd.) I assumed I had just mistyped it, but someone else installed FC3 on a box at work and had the same thing happen. Are we both horrible typists, or is this happening to other people as well?
Otherwise, everything seems to be working fine.
-jim
Two posts with god in now one with hell in, not feeling like heaven to night are we.
Suck bush cock, he like's it that way.
What's the market like for Linux Shareware?
This is my sig.
extereme? I alluz tho't it to be extreme.
Eastern Mass.
Is your hostname resolving properly?
/etc/hosts file.
(if you do nslookup `hostname`, does it resolve?)
If not, then try putting your hostname in your
This is the problem I see most often with slow X startups.
Paranoid, perhaps, but it paid off when my FC2 install got hosed and again when I installed Win4Lin/Windows in the Linux filesystem. I use an rsync script to back up to a mirror Linux drive.
It's hard for me to sympathise with anybody who dual-boots to partitions on the same hard drive, meaning that it should be obvious that a screwup on either partition can hose the whole HD and nuke any unbacked up information. One's last few years of work, for instance.
Tech Public Policy stuff
- up2date still doesn't seem to be able to determine the size of the updates: The individual packages are still labeled with "0 kB" and it still comes up with "Total size of selected packages to download: 22 kB". Yeah, right.
- The menu still categorizes stuff in strange ways. How many times have I searched for something in "System Settings" when it really was in "Preferences" or even "System Tools"?
- And don't you just love it to have a submenu in "Preferences" that is labeled "More Preferences"?
- Unfortunately, the screen shot of the sound preferences doesn't tell us whether it is now possible to disable sounds for specific events (or whether the default startup sound is still such a disgrace).
- Seems like there is only one "aesthetically pleasing" theme. Why include themes that are not "aesthetically pleasing"?
- The Service Configuration thingy still seems to be a usability nightmare (if you are geeky enough to notice that you can edit more than one runlevel).
- Add or Remove Applications! Seems you still cannot search for specific packages.
- IPv6 still enabled by default to foul up your web browsing?
Seems like all they did was update Gnome, KDE, and a bunch of applications. Seems like I'm not going to update.You don't understand because you haven't been listening. My parent post explicitly pointed out I didn't want them to be able to run all commands.
My followup post pointed out that there should be a whole bunch of logically grouped command aliases (for common, related tasks).
I know how to write a sudoers file. Coming up with the command aliases you actually use, to do it properly, takes a long time. As I have said before. Idiot. My sudoers is about fifty lines long.
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc3/x8 6/#id850167
This is surely bad news as far as encouraging the curious to examine the kernel source?
This move has a fair rationale, but must disuade newbies slightly; it does not serve the goal of free software. Surely it's better to swallow the inconsistency?
Wikileaks, no DNS
I have installed Apt Get on FC2 with no real problems. Haven't tried it for FC3 but I don't anticipate that it would be particularly hard.