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."

Comments

Re:Size?

[prefect42]

AFAIK a minimal install only uses the first CD. A default workstation install uses three, but barely touches the last. I don't know what a default desktop install uses.

Re:Size?

[prefect42]

In which case do the HTTP install, and don't even download that much. I think the rescuecd can function for this purpose, and it's fairly small (about 80 meg).

This article contains next to no useful info

[Nailer]

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.

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. /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.

- 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 /bin/sh, it runs as Old School Bourne shell.

I experienced some problems with Fedora Core 3

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Worth the upgrade?

[Soko]

The new version does not solve the udev issue - you still have to run those three commands.

Soko

Red Hat is apparently no longer cool

[digitect]

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.