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

Screenshot tour?

[fpga_guy]

Sorry, but screenshots are not what this is about. Let's talk about features baby, I want substance!

There's a lot more to an OS than the damn window manager!

Re:Screenshot tour?

[northcat]

There's a lot more to an OS than the damn window manager!

But thats what most newbies (who come from windows) seem to care right now...

Re:Screenshot tour?

[Hammer]

A fancy-schmancy gooey during install may be nice or a BIG bother.
The important is wether it works or not. I gave up on RH/FC with FC2. It insisted on installing and starting a whole bunch of shit that I explicitly unchecked. Examples:

• install and start IR on an old server that neither has nor ever will have IR interface
  
• install and start CUPS on a server that neither has nor will have access to a printer
  

The reason "it has to be installed to satisfy dependencies". In previous RH/FC you could ignore those dependencies in expert mode. Now I spent lotsa time turning of stuff that didn't do anything (I wonder WTF the IR daemon actually does on a server w/o IR card???)
Now I use Mandrake/slackware. I might try the new SuSE...

Re:Screenshot tour?

[Slack3r78]

I sure hope it's a marked improvement over FC2. I downloaded and installed FC2 on a test machine of mine on the day of release, expecting great things, and ended up being so thoroughly underwhelmed that I'd replaced the load with something else inside of a couple of days.

It's not that FC is a bad distribution, per se, it's just that I fail to see anything particularly special about it. At the time, I'd just discovered Dropline Gnome, which is an excellent desktop-oriented meta distribution on top of Slackware. But even so, Debian fits for the hardcore freedom types who want easy updates, with Ubuntu looking like it's going to fill the desktop end of that, Mandrake does well as a starter distro, Gentoo is great for the "1337" types, but where does FC fit in?

It's supposed to be a desktop distro, as I understand it, but frankly, it palled in comparison to others when I tried it last. It's going to be especially hard to convince me otherwise now that Novell's recently introduced Novell Linux Desktop is out. It's SuSe based, but with a level of polish added, and quite frankly, is the most impressed I've been with a desktop distribution since somewhere around Mandrake 7.3 (ie: the first graphical installer that actually worked that I dealt with).

Basically, what I'm saying is I fail to see where FC stands out above other distributions that would make me want to use it. Granted, after the general buginess I experienced with FC2, I may be biased, but the whole point is the fact that I wasn't having similar issues with the other distributions, so why should I have to put up with them with FC?

Re:Screenshot tour?

[ajs]

It's not that FC is a bad distribution, per se, it's just that I fail to see anything particularly special about it.

Best endorsement of Fedora I've ever heard! Hey, if you want the shiny-things OS go buy a Mac. If you're looking for the logical successor to the free Red Hat Linux distribution (which was never "particularly special"), Fedora is your choice.

You CAN tweak the hell out of FC3 and get it to look and feel very pretty, but the important things to most long-time RHL and Fedora users are careful integration of new features combined with a smooth transition from previous releases. I get all of the above from FC3.

Re:Screenshot tour?

[Kingpin]

It should be the distro that "just works". I want an abstraction above my hardware so no Debian or Gentoo for me.

Ubuntu is just the next new kid on the desktop block - just like Xandros, it's a lot of promise, but lack of finish.

Although it's becoming fashion that we have to pay for Linux, I don't want to - so no Novell Linux Desktop for me.

FC is based on 10 generations of RedHat releases, in my book that counts for quite a bit - even if it takes a little time for the releases to stabilize.

I'll use it as a server OS, ie. no X. I don't have to pay. The installer is great. The packages plenty.

Re:Screenshot tour?

[dsinc]

Geez, when are people going to drop those nonsensical buzzwords? "Mandrake good for starters", because of its "graphical installer" mainly? I don't know where this cretinous obsession with the installer comes from; that is what makes transition easy or difficult for someone who hasn't used Linux before? Gimme an effin' break... Secondly, I've been a Unix sysadmin since the eighties and still I like Mandrake very much (surprise, surprise) and I'm using it for some very serious stuff; why do I like it? because it allows me not to waste time with minor-but-nice-to-have things like colored output from ls, SSL for Webmin and such (things that are trivial to implement, but time consuming and really annoying to deal with in a production environment). Besides that - wow, XFS (I've always loved this file system), good-but-not-crazy optimization for your executables, a huge number of mdk-specific rpms (yes, that too saves time, you don't have to rebuild from tars, you don't have to try some exotic programs available only for Younameit, but not for your distro etc), very active development, with a pletora of cutting-edge programs and so on.

Re:Screenshot tour?

[Slack3r78]

Here's the thing, most of the newer distros I've dealt with "just work." In fact, I specifically mentioned Dropline Gnome because DG 2.8 paired up with Kernel 2.6.9 is the most impressive thing I've seen when it comes to desktop Linux I've ever seen, going back to when I got into the scene around '98.

Freedesktop.org's HAL, while still immature and definitely not without bugs, essentially turned Linux into a completely different OS from a desktop perspective for me. The nasty supermount hacks are replaced by CD automounting that works like it should, hardware autoconfigures itself, config files are handled on their own. It's really amazing how different my ease of use was after a simple system update.

As far as NLD goes, the only thing you have to pay for are the Red Carpet updates, the OS itself is free for download. I'm sure free updates will spring up from the community much like they did with RH, and the distribution itself is so polished that it really does add to the sense that FC is somehow lacking something. And it's based on a history of SuSe releases almost as lengthy as FC's. :-) I can't wait til they put out a release with Gnome 2.8+ and the HAL stuff enabled, as that should elevate it from being a nice distro, to being a really great one, IMO.

Re:Screenshot tour?

[LWATCDR]

There is nothing special about Fedora except that it just works.
Debian is nice but you have to use unstable and testing if you want anything that is up to date.
Mandrake is nice also URPMI is a great tool. I recomend it highly except I did not feel all that comfortable when using it without X.
Fedora I like. YUM is a good tool for updating and installing software. I have found it super stable. I have had no real problems with it. It is free and comunity driven. Suse is also a good distro for desktop and servers. I find it odd that you are dissing Fedora because it just works.

Re:Screenshot tour?

[IMightB]

Erm, the business types? Just about every company I've ever worked at has used Redhat/Fedora or Suse running. The reason they like it is that
A) It just works
B) Have tools to make configuring easy
C) If needed, (Very Very Rare), you can get support from Vendor.
D) Updates and installation are easy and quick. No configuring from source, you don't have to worry about configuring the source *Just Right* when your updating your customers server, you don't have to worry about having everything the customer needs compiled in and downtime is very minimal. The majority of the time, if you need to do anything, all you have to do is 'service program start'.

Also, many companies do not have very good tracking of what features or services were added and when. Especially over time, as the support department Alters/Tweaks it via support requests. It is must easier to keep track of "Sepecial Cases"

In short, both Redhat/Fedora and Suse make excellent distros for business types. The rest for the most part appeal to the "Geeky" types for one reason or another.

Re:Screenshot tour?

[ajs]

If you want a tweakable Linux distro, there are better choices than FC to start from.

I would disagree with that. There are distributions with different approaches and different trade-offs, but "better"? No.

Plus, it has been acknowledged as a testbed for RH Enterprise distro's, so you can't exactly hope for rock solid stability.

I don't see how that follows. If, by rock-solid stability, you mean "nothing ever changes", then yes, you're correct. If you mean "software works out of the box," then I can't agree. I have yet to find anything in FC3 that behaves out of specification. The problems I've had have been related to the performance of spam checking in E2 (not a stability issue); the brokeness of the NVidia binary driver (not an FC3 issue, and not even SHIPPED with FC3); and the lack of portability of some FC1-2 apps (again, not an FC3 issue).

I have yet to see a (OS-wide, or application-specific) crash since I loaded FC3 (saw some under FC3test3). Actually, that's a lie. What's more accurate is that I've yet to see a crash in a component that shipped on the FC3 media... other things I added, HAVE crashed once or twice.

Other than people who are forced to keep Red Hat legacy systems[...]

I am not forced to run FC3, and it suits my needs. Your milage may vary, and that's fine.

Size?

[News for nerds]

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?

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?

[cerberusss]

I'm overwhelmed by the DVD size download

Well, don't download the DVD in the first place. Download the three CDs with the .torrent file that's provided.

Re:Size?

[Anonymous Coward]

So where's the 1 CD version?

Surely they can do what Microsoft can with their bloated Windows XP?

Damn multi-CD distros not using the fact we're *gasp* usually connected to the Internet and can download what we want.

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).

Re:Size?

[lachlan76]

Damn multi-CD distros not using the fact we're *gasp* usually connected to the Internet and can download what we want.

Not everyone has high-speed internet you know.

Re:Size?

[Taladar]

Even more reason not to let them download whole CDs but only the packages they need.

Re:Size?

[Epistax]

Actually you can do an http or ftp install from just the boot image which is about five megs. That's how I installed it. I don't see a reason to download several gigs of things I don't use, such as emacs.

Re:Size?

[log0n]

a complete set of development tools

They're available as a separate download - the vast majority of Windows users neither want nor need them.
--

But most Linux users do...

Re:Size?

[slimak]

Actually Windows XP does include burning. Just copy files to drive and select burn (similar to OS X's implmentation). IMHO this is actually very intuitive a makes creating a simple data CD very easy. I am guessing that we will see a similar version of CD burning in the near future from some distros.

Re:Size?

[nmx]

I am guessing that we will see a similar version of CD burning in the near future from some distros.

Nautilus already has this.

Re:Size?

[I. M. Bur]

Have you actually examined the implementation of the burning feature in XP? It copies all the files to a temporary location on the system partition (consuming that much HDD space there) and then when you tell it to burn the files, it creates an ISO image on the system partition (you guessed it, consuming once more it's size of HDD space), which it burns afterwards. The system partition must therefore have over 1GB of free space to be able to burn a standard 650MB CD (almost 10GB for a DVD!), not to mention the useless copying between disks.

Re:Size?

[magefile]

That's what FTP installs are for. CDs are just for backup and rescue disks anyway.

Re:Size?

[pbrammer]

chkconfig

OR

/etc/rcn.x directories where startup scripts are stored based on the runlevel "n". Simply remove the symbolic link, or rename the start up and kill scripts to lowercase S & K's.

OR

If you are using the GUI, there is a services screen that works just like your friendly Windows utility.

Talking of Remote Desktop

[iamnotacrook]

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.

Re:Talking of Remote Desktop

[l3v1]

much faster and seamlessly than most remote X window logins

Unfortunately (i.e. for Windows) that's not all someone wants from remote sessions. What I want e.g. is to allow many users concurrently logged on and using the machine through different X sessions, happily and joyfuly, and without needing to pay for a bag of licenses for being able to accomplish all this.

I'm not surprised they want to call that feature by the same name

Just a name won't buy them fame. What already has brought that fame was the possibility to have graphical truly multiuser remote sessions long before MS started to think about adding network support.

Re:Talking of Remote Desktop

[Erik Hollensbe]

Well, as someone who uses ARD and RDP a lot, X as a network protocol is long in the tooth by today's standards. It's just barely above VNC as far as network usage is concerned, especially because it was meant to render Widget sets like Motif and Xt and now it's doing GTK and Enlightenment.

Besides, terminal server has been out for years, if that's what you need.

Re:Talking of Remote Desktop

[Bake]

My favourite part about the Remote Desktop the fact that it's like screen(1) in that I can start an application and then leave it running while I disconnect from it. Then when I have moved to another location I can connect and the application is running right where I left it.

Re:Talking of Remote Desktop

[dasunt]

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.

Odd, I consider it just the reverse.

Using windows built-in tools, it appears to be impossible to share just one application window.

Almost every linux/unix install has ssh, which makes it trivial to remotely launch an application over a secure connection, and that application's window will be a native part of the desktop as far as window decoration goes[1]. Ssh also makes it rather trivial to tunnel an x application through many firewalls.

Ne'ermind that X is multiuser. RDP is limited to one. X, without any add on tools, seems a lot more capable of client/server setups, while under windows you need additional commercial software to do so.

RDP has some nice features -- bandwidth usage is a lot more efficient, while under X even the low bandwidth proxy is not as efficient. And some people find it easier to setup then X.

Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. For what I use it for, X seems to be more "polished".

That is my opinion.

Slightly OT: Reading how windows is so much better then linux in the usability department only leads to my disappointment down the road. I end up using the rare MS Windows machine, and I find a cut & paste problem, or something ends up near impossible to do, etc. I keep expecting the greatest thing since sliced bread, and I find that windows is just another OS, still flawed in its latest release.

[1] Cut & paste beyond plain text is still a problem though.

Re:Talking of Remote Desktop

[itzdandy]

the program being run can do VNC or RDP. VNC is more 'universal' and is prefered but RDP is available. RDP linux clients usually have little configuration options for some reason while VNC is very good on linux IMHO

Re:Talking of Remote Desktop

[l3v1]

Besides, terminal server has been out for years, if that's what you need.

No, it's not :) Windows "developing" (as in evolution :) ) pretty pricey terminal services solutions in the last decade won't make me switch my ways of thinking about the capabilities of *nix/Linux network solutions.

Re:Talking of Remote Desktop

[maraist]

OK, I'm nieve. How do you do that - disconnect from a running display?

Screen is not graphical but instead a pts (pseudo-terminal) multiplexer. Meaning a background process sits inbetween your pts port and your real terminal. "Screen" accepts all output (logs some fraction and dumps history-overflow), such that the underlying applications have no ability to determine whether there's a physical terminal at the other end or not. By accepting all input, it prevents applications from pausing once 2k of stdout has been queued but not sent/accepted. It's similar to redirection output to /dev/null, except that pts-inquieries won't fail (because you're talking to a real pts instead of a generic file). The biggest advantage, of course, is that an end user can disconnect or reconnect from the intermediate "screen" multiplexer (given the appropriate permissions).

Another feature of screen is similar to "virtual desktop". Since you have a multiplexer, "screen" allows a single physical terminal to switch between multiple pts channels.. So if you have a dial-up-modem (direct terminal, not TCP/IP), you can have dozens of different "windows" with different applications running in each (multiple vi windows, several command prompts, several log files, etc). If the modem hangs up, you dial back in, and type "screen -r", and you're back as if nothing had happened. You're alternative was to run all applications with "nohup myapp myargs" and if the modem hung up, then stdout would be redirected to a file.. This way you don't lose the output or have an interruption in say a slow compilation. But the problem is that you can't regain interactive access to a something like vi window. (Course, text editors have their own recovery capabilities).

So the original poster was trying to say that they wanted these incredibly valuable features in a graphical form. vnc and rdesktop allow a user that has their network connection broken to be reconnected without the underlying graphical applications ever being made aware of the interruption. With X and a static IP-address, there are time-out issues. And more commonly we move to different machines or different access points and thus necessarily can not recover a graphical session with X.

X was designed as client-server with state. It is this state that necessarily prevents it from acting like VNC or rdesktop. "screen", vnc, and rdesktop keeps it state on the machine with the running application. X keeps the state on the machine with the physical monitor/keyboard/mouse. I believe the original idea of this design decision was to distribute resources. The application server only performs tasks related to function, not display. Graphics becomes simply the ability to handle events and send graphical commands to a network access point. The terminal is then responsible for all resources related to interpreting graphical commands. This is similar to the postscript paradigm. postscript is a series of "logo" like commands (draw a box from this point to this point), and the printing resource determins how to render the fonts/color schemes, etc. Unlike postscript, however, X graphical commands aren't encapsulatable into a portable relocatable format since there is bidirectional communication going on.

Another particular of X is its peer-application structure. To run X, in addition to the terminal software and the physical applications, you need a font-server and a window manager. While this is great for pluggability (and even clusterability; running a single-threaded graphical program across 4 different machines), it necessarily provides greater latency for even simple tasks.

vnc merely adds a multiplexing layer to the back-end of X or windows, just like screen. So vnc necessarily adds a layer of overhead to the graphical process. More importantly there is an impeedence mismatch between the graphical transport of vnc and that of X. X is designed to send postscript-like graphical commands (draw a square of this size fi

Lack of Java rpms and other stuff

[suso]

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?

Re:Lack of Java rpms and other stuff

[Nailer]

Are you sure FC2 included Java packages? Such items are usually included on an extras CD, but shouldn't be part of FC unless their licensing permits them to - unlikely to be the case with the 2 popular closed-source JVMs.

That saiud, the Java Packaging Project (which includes some Red Hat staff) have repositories for FC.

Re:Lack of Java rpms and other stuff

[prefect42]

But they were buggy as hell. The ant that shipped with FC2 was very very quick compared to a normally compiled ant, but sadly fell over all over the shop ;(

Windows HDD Killing Bug?

[Anonymous Coward]

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..

Re:Windows HDD Killing Bug?

[lauterm]

Supposedly the NTFS killing bug was specific to upgrading to FC2. I don't remember the details, but a clean install is preferable anyway with the LVM and SELinux changes.

Re:Windows HDD Killing Bug?

[slivkoff]

I've been using FC3 for about one week now. Both of my external firewire drives (Maxtor) are working seamlessly with FC3. All three of my externals--these drives and my USB Flash drive--show up on the desktop (thus, fstab is working flawlessly). Real nice. I have a dual boot machine, with XP (NTFS). No problems with the install (I did a fresh install).

Re:Windows HDD Killing Bug?

[tindur]

According to comment no 161 on this page it still has the bug.

It's no problem however if you follow instructions on this page.

Re:Windows HDD Killing Bug?

[mshiltonj]

I'm running WinXP & FC3 dual boot right now. I installed WinXP first, resized the partition, installed FC3. No Problems.

Worth the upgrade?

[smartin]

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.

Re:Worth the upgrade?

[Soko]

The nvidia failure can be due to 2 things:

You have SELinux turned on. I've set mine to "Warn" until I understand it just a bit better. If you didn't turn it on, keep reading.

Once SELinux is disabled, run these in order:

[root@rsd800fc3 ~]# modprobe nvidia
[root@rsd800fc3 ~]# cp -a /dev/nvidia* /etc/udev/devices
[root@rsd800fc3 ~]# chown root.root /etc/udev/devices/nvidia*

Should fix you up. The reason AFAICT is that the NVIDIA driver is not aware of udev, which FC3 now uses.

BTW, NVIDIA released a new driver the evening FC3 was released - go get that too : 1.0-6629

Soko

Re:Worth the upgrade?

[smartin]

The NVidia problem is discussed here with a work around. Hopefully the new version mentioned above will solve it.

Re:Worth the upgrade?

[OneHungLo]

I was in the exact same boat. CD burning never worked in FC2, unless I wanted to manually run mkisofs and cdrecord from Bash. It works fine in FC3 with the built-in CD/DVD Creator, and with K3B.

The NVidia driver is only a real problem because of "UDEV" or whatever it's called. I guess it's supposed to dynamically load all the drivers at boot time, but it won't load them unless they were a part of the initial driver installation. If your machine is hanging at "Configuring Kernel Parameters" on the boot screen, run the FC3 rescue CD, mount your root filesystem and do

chroot /mnt/sysimage
vi /boot/grub/grub.conf

(or whatever your favorite editor is)

Locate the line that points to your current FC3 installation, remove "rhgb", and change the 5 to 3, so that instead of trying to load the graphical boot and go to runlevel 5, it will put you in a runlevel 3 terminal. Save your changes, exit, remove the CD, and restart your machine. Boot into FC3, and you should be at your terminal. Log in as root, and do this:

modprobe nvidia
cp -a /dev/nvidia* /etc/udev/devices
chown root.root /etc/udev/devices/nvidia*

If you want, after that is finished you can edit your /boot/grub/grub.conf again, change the runlevel back to 5, and re-add rhgb. Once you reboot, as long as you made the xorg.conf adjustments in the NVidia installer README, your machine should boot normally.

Now if only they would include kernel source in a default installation, it would be almost perfect.

Re:Worth the upgrade?

[Soko]

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

Soko

Can't stand it

[Gambit Thirty-Two]

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

Re:Can't stand it

[c]

> I installed it on a fresh xeon 2.6ghz and I was abhorred at the slowdown.
> FC2 was a LOT faster than this is.

Odd. On my Athlon 2200, FC3 seems about 50% faster. I'm fairly light on memory though, so it could just something like that.

c.

Re:Can't stand it

[sirReal.83.]

Yes, our boot-up is slow. :/
We're working on it.

Re:SuSE

[lachlan76]

My first experience with Linux (I'm 15 now, so I've only been going about a year) was somewhat destroyed by not being able to install much, simply because my distro didn't ship with gcc - not just the default install, but missing entirely from the cd. And then I had 56k.

You have no idea how quickly I switched to RH8.

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.

Re:This article contains next to no useful info

[Erik Hollensbe]

I guess this works for some people, but as someone who works with most of his machines remotely, Fedora is a giant piece of poo.

The symlink/script mess that is SELinux is not fun to play with when you are trying to install third party packages. Sure, your GUI tool may be nice, but I guess I have better things to do than to wait for a X window to refresh between the west coast and chicago.

It's a disturbing linux trend and bothers me quite a bit - many systems contort rc.d beyond comprehension - good luck writing init scripts that properly load on boot without having to run an obscene number of shell scripts and touch a few config files. gentoo has a whole damn bourne shell "replacement" for running init scripts. It's disgusting. And it's guaranteed to be different on every linux distribution, and often between releases as well.

And it seems, that a great deal of the work being done today is to make linux more useful on the desktop - strangely, I feel like I'm being alienated on the server.

I think that debian and slackware are the only systems left that have any sanity in the linux world.

Documentation?

[barcodez]

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?

Re:Documentation?

[gears5665]

it doesn't really exist for fedora core 3 yet. However it's not too different from FC2 and that exists to some extent.

Re:I don't want pretty menus on install

[HazE_nMe]

As the other replier stated you can install without the GUI, in fact when I installed Mandrake 10.1CE on my recently aquired (for free) Gateway 2000 G6-266 (pentium2 266mhz with 32mb edo ram) it automagically loaded the non-gui install without giving me an option to choose. Took forever to install compared to my other boxes, but it finished without a hitch.

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:I experienced some problems with Fedora Core 3

[ophix]

i will attempt to address some of your gripes.

mp3s: yes by default fc cannot play mp3s. this is due to patent issues and those same issues are the reason that fc doesnt include ntfs support either. honestly fc isnt for the normal home user, never was. if you want mp3 playback you can use the apt/yum repositories from either rpm.livna.org or freshrpms.net, your pick (they may not be fully populated yet, but if not they will be soon).

mplayer: mplayer can be downloaded from both of the repositories mentioned above so you dont have to compile it if you dont want to.

java: so install java rpms?

ide/scsi issue: dont know what to tell you on this one, i dont have a scsi cdrom drive to test with to see if i can come up with a work around.

network: set a static ip on eth0 and see if it works that way, horrid work around i know, but it should speed up boot time as it wont be looking for a dhcp server.

cant help you with rezound nor audacity, i can try them later and see what happens for me, but offhand the only thing i can think of is that they might have build dependencies you dont have installed or they might not like the version of gcc on fc3. what sort of errors do you get?

Re:I experienced some problems with Fedora Core 3

[ajs]

I tried to build ReZound http//rezound.sf.net/ but it failed to compile [...] Neither does Audacity

Well, that's hardly Fedora's fault. You could always port those packages and contribute back the changes... Many packages end up relying on compiler or library features that they should not. I've had problems compiling some pacakges that don't play ball with the newer glibc because of this. These projects should be appropriately spanked and given patches.

When compiling MPlayer it fails to build with GUI and it fails to play sound if you playback a video

I'm running mpalyer and mplayer-gui as provided, what did you need to compile your own for that SRPM wasn't sufficient for?

JAVA: I don't like to have gcj installed instead of a real JVM

gcj has nothing to do with the JVM not being present. The JVM is not present because it's not free. Talk to sun about releasing it under an OSS-compatiable license.

MP3: none of the installed sound tools can play or record MP3 files

This is, of course, old news. Red Hat stopped shipping anything related to MP3 a long time ago due to patent concerns. You can always get the mp3 goodies from elsewhere, but Red Hat won't ship them and hasn't since RH9 (possibly as far back as 8, I'm not 100% certain).

Your other comments are quite interesting, and I'm not trying to say that the above aren't problems, it's just that I think you want to keep some perspective on these issues which don't all have trivial solutions.

Re:I experienced some problems with Fedora Core 3

[mauriatm]

To address most of your problems:
Fedora Core 3 Installation Guide
MPlayer Fedora Guide

Evolution 2.0

[fpedraza]

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?

Re:Evolution 2.0

[The Asmodeus]

That's odd. I do IMAP over SSL and it's faster than 1.4 for me. I have about two dozen folders with several hundred meg of mail in them so it's not like it's a small task to scan my email.

My observations where over a cable modem so YMMV.

Keep in mind that SSL doesn't like packet loss so if your network was experiencing any problems...

upgrades are stupid and pointless

[CAIMLAS]

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*

Re:upgrades are stupid and pointless

[wessto]

I also ask this question every time a new version is released. My system is running fine, why upgrade. I always end up upgrading, however because I worry that at some point, there will be a feature I need to have and the upgrade process will not work because I have not been updating all the time. Dependencies bleh. I think that's the only reason I keep upgrading.

Actually, the parent could be improved too...

[Nailer]

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...

Stability

[roalt]

I'm pretty interested in the stability of this release: FC2 was one of the worst, even with all yum updates. Okay, it works okay for desktop usage (I still use it), but as server or as workstation it crashes a bit too much.

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.

Re:Stability

[Alan Cox]

FC2 is basically straight 2.6 - the earlker 2.6 has had a few problems as you'd expect from new code. 2.6.9 is getting pretty solid now. It tends to depend what drivers you run more than on core load.

14:37:45 up 66 days, 5:47, 1 user, load average: 9.80, 10.33, 12.20

Thats FC2 on a big FTP server that's still being hammered by FC3 downloads.

14:34:34 up 447 days, 4:38, 2 users, load average: 0.07, 0.02, 0.00

Another box thats better secured so hasn't had to have a kernel update recently - running FC2 but still the FC1 kernel since when it booted FC2 wasn't out.

So it certainly can be pretty solid.

Re:Stability

[Pros_n_Cons]

Also I believe sourceforge switched from Debian to FC2 to serve up those TB's of data. That should show Fedora is pretty stable. Atleast more stable than It's given credit for.

Re:Stability

[Pros_n_Cons]

1-xmms refuses to play MP3, moronic RH choice.

FC3 also fails to ship shrek 2, the new Eminem album , and MS Windows source code.

Something to think about

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

No (on my PC)

[Val314]

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)

Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Linux

[Proudrooster]

Last week Jon Stewart started the Daily show with this (It summarizes nearly every Linux/Windows thread on Slashdot):

If you're ever looking to start a fight.
If you're ever looking to just to get into a real riotus situation, where you are sure violence must happen, just shout "I love a Linux based system that can plug into USB, but doesn't have the RAM of my ass!"

I don't know what any of it means, but clearly other people do and have very strong opinions about it. You put the Google people next to the MSN search people and the whole f*cking thing explodes.

Jon Stewart Daily Show 11/11/04 (It's still on the Bit Torrents, if you want to see it.)

Re:buy CDs

[lachlan76]

I understand your feelings about RPM.....if I ever leave Gentoo, I'll really miss Portage.

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.

Re:Red Hat is apparently no longer cool

[hermeshome.se]

Couldn't have said it better myself. We Fedora Core (1,2,3) users that are happy never, or seldom, complain.
We all use our distro of choise and are quite happy with it. If you're not happy with distro X then change to Y or Z. Don't blame the distro-maker for a distro that don't fit YOUR individual needs.

Remember that this is our strenth, not weakness; the flora of choise!

Re:Red Hat is apparently no longer cool

[RichDice]

There are no dark corners of breakage, everything Just Works(TM).

Whenever someone says this about a distro, it is apparent to me that they have nice shiney happy friendly hardware. So many times I have taken a friend at face value when they've told me about the sweet time they're having with some new random distro (Ubuntu, most recently) and so I go off and spend an hour installing it... and then a weekend fucking around with rescue disks trying to recover some semblance of functionality out of my Laptop From Hell.

Try saying this instead: It worked for me, but your mileage may vary.

Cheers,
Richard

Re:Red Hat is apparently no longer cool

[robyannetta]

I agree.

I have 13 PCs of varying snapshots of historical technologies and there's NO version of any distro that works with all of them properly.

Fedora Core 3 says in the release notes it was compiled for the latest and greatest P4 processor. Well, that leaves 80% of current users out.

Normally, in a situation like this I would suggest Gentoo since you can choose your installation arch from the installation CD, but until they find a way to safely auto-append all the config files without user intervention, I can't say it's perfect. (It's faster than the roadrunner on speed, tho!)

Re:Red Hat is apparently no longer cool

[prefect42]

Again compiled for, doesn't mean exclusively for. They've optimised for P4, compiled for 586.

Re:Phew!

[LnxAddct]

SElinux? Kernel 2.6.9? Improved Wireless utilities? A ton of other things including a professional and consistent feel despite the desktop environment being used? Fedora got there better;)
Regards,
Steve

Re:buy CDs

[gbjbaanb]

What exactly, is wrong with RPM then? I only partly ask fo you to justify your comment, but also to educate me to its shortcomings, and the alternative's improvements.

I need a new server OS soon, and I'm a bit fed up with RedHat's obsolescence program - ie every time I install a RH OS, its obsolete in what seems like a few months.

Fedora Core 3 is surprinsingly buggy

[marvin2k]

I was a bit shocked about the many bugs I immediately ran into after a clean install.

- If you deselect Gnome and select KDE instead when doing a custom install then Fedora will boot straight into TWM because /etc/sysconfig/desktop still says 'desktop="GNOME"'.

- 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.

Re:I don't want pretty menus on install

[opkool]

Whatabout reading?

The first splash screen on boot from the CD says "Press F1 for options". Press 'F1' to access a (text) screen where you can read that typing "text" will start the installer in text mode.

And this is all explained in the Installation Documentation from all Mandrake releases.

I know that reading is an arcane science. However, you should try it.

Peace

no justification

[poptones]

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.

Re:could linux BE any more secure?

[/ASCII]

It's called SELinux, it was written byt the NSA, and even without it you already have pretty fine grained control over file permissions using groups and file permissions. What SELinux gives you is the ability to also restrict such things as network access, the right to fork, run execve, switch userid, etc. SELinux can grant these rights not only based on userid, but also on which program is run.

In the end, what this gives you is a system where, if a process using a properly configured SELinux has been taken over (0wn3d), it can't do anything other than screw up it's own job, unless it figures out how to fool SELinux.

FC3 on my laptop

[FrostedWheat]

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.

Not really at all worth the upgrade on Desktops...

[cybrthng]

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.

Mod parent +1 blasphemy

[fishermonger]

reason to download several gigs of things I don't use, such as emacs

Without emacs your computer will crash.

Took my laptop back to FC1 after trying FC3

[saw]

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.

some details

[zogger]

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.

Coral Cache Link

[Abjifyicious]

Since the site is getting bogged down and nobody's posted one of these that I've noticed, here's a

Coral Cache Link

Re:Well, I'm not happy

[ptomblin]

There is a CD-ROM on there.

I always thought that making your hard drives the masters and your CDs the slaves was the preferred arrangement? At least, that's what it said in one of the readmes in the kernel source last time I checked.

Re:Kitchen Sink

[LnxAddct]

Some people like everything and the kitchen sink. Its nice to sit down at a computer and have *everything* you need to just be there so you can get right to work and not have to worry about *anything*. It all just works. Also just installing everything makes installing other 3rd party stuff (like small little utilities that noone has heard about) later that may not be in any yum repositories much easier because you most like have everything that it depends on. Regardless, if your running a server you can always do the FC3 server install and you can have a fully functional server with lots of nice goodies and the added security of SELinux in less space then a cd can hold (Probably much less in cases where you only need to do one thing like run a web server). I've run many many distros over the years, including FreeBSD, and Fedora Core 3 has gone above and beyond my expectations, it is truly impressive and the best I've seen. Plus its so damn fast and responsive, Red Hat has out done itself.
Regards,
Steve

You can upgrade without the .iso/.torrents

[BrianWCarver]

If you are already running Fedora Core 2, then you can use yum to upgrade to Core 3. (yum is like apt.)

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 .isos.

Re:Beef? You Want Beef?

[flosofl]

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.

One thing you may want to try. If you are not on an IPv6 network, you may want to disable IPv6 in /etc/modconf. Fedora tries IPv6 first for everything. I found this issue with FC1 and noticed a speed improvement when I disabled IPv6.

Even though this is still for FC2, this site still has some good information:

Unofficial Fedora FAQ

Re:Kitchen Sink

[Donny Smith]

> another annoyance: Sarge installer is still not ready for prime time, no matter what anyone else says.

Major, major annoynance: people comment on those god damned installers like they install their OS every day! What the hell is wrong with them?

For Christ's sake people! Use the minimum install (no GUI), wget and install apt-get or yum and then install whatever you want. What exactly is not to like about this simple procedure?

Mostly good

[jasoncc]

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

Re:Kitchen Sink

[The Vulture]

What's wrong with it? I'll tell you what's wrong from my perspective.

I'm a geek. I like to tinker, but I still want a working computer where I can run an installation program, and everything is configured for me, ready to go. I don't want to have to manually grab all sorts of packages to make my machine usable.

My employer develops embedded software in Linux. My manager pays me to develop software, not install operating systems. We're a small company and don't have time to have somebody roll something out for the developers to use.

Since I'm the software developer most familiar with Linux, the questions come to me when something doesn't work. Because of this, I gave Fedora Core 3 a shot, and it seems that the other developers like it. We're now standardizing on it, because:
1. I can show somebody else how to start the installer, and they can figure it out on their own (assuming a new PC, no special partitioning)
2. It includes everything we need
3. Everything (mostly) has a consistent look and feel
4. It's easy to keep up date (once apt-get comes out for FC3, if it's not present already)
5. For the most part, it just works! (Lindows doesn't work well, despite it's claims, as one of the developers found out.)

It just has to work and install the software that we need to get our work done.

-- Joe

Re:How to turn off font antialiasing

[prockcore]

Does anybody know how to REALLY turn off font antialiasing in FC3 ?

Go to Preferences -> Fonts

Pick "Monochrome" for Font Rendering.

Antialising just plain sucks if used on modern LC displays

Maybe you should pick "Subpixel smoothing" instead.

Not worth the upgrade...

[eguaj]

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.

• Gnome ? Sorry, I don't use gnome/mono stuff.
• KDE ? well, yes, I use it, but I can get the latest one from kde-redhat.sf.net
• Firefox ? www.mozilla.org will be perfect.
• Helix player ? player.helixcommunity.org works like a charm.
• Remote desktop ? VNC/x0vncserver/etc. are working perfectly on my RedHat 9.0 and Fedora Core 1
• Evolution 2.0 ? mutt is much user friendly when used remotely over SSH and Evolution 1.2/1.4 is enough for me when I don't want to look like a cave man when the other around are using Outlook...

So I guess Fedoca Core 3 is not really worth an upgrade for me.

Re:Beef? You Want Beef?

[flosofl]

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.