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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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?

[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.

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?

[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?

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

[mauriatm]

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

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

[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.

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.)

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: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: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.

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.

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

[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