Fedora Core 4 Quick Tour

linuxbeta writes "redhat.com says the new Fedora 'has just turned 4' and it 'purrs', 'hums', and 'mesmerizes'. Has Steve Jobs taken over Fedora's marketing dept. or is this release something to really get excited about? OSDir has put together a quick tour of this fresh release in KDE and GNOME desktop flavors. Release Overview. You be the judge."

Comments

Steve Jobs...

[brilinux]

If Steve Jobs had taken over the marketing department, then I think that the announcement would be more like "Fedora Core runs on x86 now" or something ... wait a minute... OMG!

Now back to my OSX/Debian Box ...

"Unrestricted"? Not to me.

[zorn]

I find it interesting that the release announcement claims that FC4 is "unrestricted" when in fact it has a very important restriction - GPL. Given Linux's rise in stature, we should be more careful of our claims.

Re:"Unrestricted"? Not to me.

[frag thief]

Labeling it as "warning: don't violate copyrights for selfish wants" or labeling it with "please: do not attempt to ingest fedora CD" amounts to the same thing -- both targeting idiots I don't care about.

Broken right out of the box

[MobyDisk]

Browsing of Windows shares fails on Fedora Core 4 systems that have the standard firewall configured. This is most easily noticed in the failure of the desktop to display shares. The firewall disrupts the broadcast mode of SMB browsing, which is the default.

So the default configuration out of the box does not work with Windows shares. That's not reasonable! This is how Linux gets a reputation for hard to use and hard to configure.

The bugzilla report makes it even clearer: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi? id=133478

Re:Broken right out of the box

[dougmc]

So the default configuration out of the box does not work with Windows shares. That's not reasonable!

Security is not always free. Often some functionality needs to be given up to keep a system secure.

In this case, the default firewall either needs to be opened up (or an option given to open it up if you need this functionality), or this functionality needs to be documented as `not working with the default firewall'. It's probably a good candidate for a release note mention in it's current state, but isn't serious enough to prevent the release of FC4 until fixed.

Personally, I think a default configuration of `secure' is better than a default configuration of `everything works'. Things that are broken by the security should be documented, however, with instructions included on how to open things up to get the functionality you need.

This is how Linux gets a reputation for hard to use and hard to configure.

... and the opposite is how Windows gets a reputation for being insecure. If you think Linux (and we're painting with a really wide brush here, as there's dozens of very different Linux distributions out there) is bad in this regard, take a look at OpenBSD ...

Re:Why do they bother

[jd]

Well, "yum" makes for some horrible screenshots, and kudzu isn't much in the way of eye-candy, either. :) Seriously, there's nothing in Red Hat or Fedora that won't/can't exist in other distributions, except what is under the hood, and those components don't display anything.

Personally, I don't think the reviews are nearly strong enough for Fedora, Linux in general, or indeed any computer technology.

Imagine having a chart showing all of the options that have been developed over time, for that specific product. Now compare the product with that entire chart, both as a percentage for each feature AND across all features.

We would rapidly see that the "specialized" tools do very well at one or two things, but that's it. That more generalized tools generally (but don't always) suck at everything they do do, which is still only a drop in the bucket of what they COULD do.

(This is one reason I like specialized tools. They don't pretend to to everything, and I can always bolt them together, because that is how they are generally designed. Many specialized tools should, always, beat one universal tool.)

Working Correctly Right out of the Box

[HopeOS]

My OSX-based Mac at home does not allow Windows SMB messages through its firewall either. Does that mean that all OSX installations are "broken right out of the box," too? Blocking SMB by default sounds perfectly reasonable to me; there are no Windows computers on that network anyway.

SMB is a non-essential port. If you want that protocol, open the firewall. Welcome to modern secure computing.

-Hope

Few thoughts during instalation...

[kosmosik]

I'am just during test drive instalation on my laptop. I've transferred entire partition (FC3) to my server and I do clean install. The instal right about now has rebooted me to fresh system. ;)

So what I saw during instalation:

* Installer now uses different GTK theme (ClearLooks instead of Bluecurve?).
* LVM partitioning actually works which is quite cool.
* Subbmitting "linux reiserfs" as boot command does not work (it should activate ReiserFS as an option during partitioning).
* Selecting packages is not selecting packages but you select functionalities - like "Web Server" instead of "httpd, php-foo..." package names - it is for sure less confising for newbies, but somebody who wishes to have more custom package setup needs to remaster instalation media...
* "Minimal Instalation" option is still retarded, checking it still requires you to have discs 1, 2, 4 - and it copies less then 60MB from disc 2 and 4 so if somebody did it better you could do minimal just from disc 1.

Now the system has booted (few FAILED messages but I can manage that) and it is EXTREMELY FAST, it booted (Minimal Install) in like 10 seconds on P3 based low-end laptop. This is quite nice... Now im going to clean up this mess and see what this baby can do. ;)

Thank you Fedora Devs!

Lock down wizard:

[tod_miller]

Would you like to browse other windows machines shared directories? Yes | No | Exit

Would you like to run an smtp server, ftp server, ssh server, plus the other 27 servers that are installed by default on your distro? Yes | No | Exit

Would you like to bother setting up cups? Yes
No | I don't have a printer maaaan

Would you like to auto-configure Firefox for faster pr0n access Yes | Yes | Exit

You see, easy to use doesn't have to be expensive.

if a disto rises in the forest will anybody hear?

[dankelley]

Hm. it's 7:11PM and I see

• 24 posts regarding FC4 release posting 7 hours ago
• 375 posts regarding No threat to linux with apple and intel deal posting dated 4 hours ago

An apple thread thus attracts comment at 30 times the rate of a Fedora thread. Does this say something about interest in Fedora?