Fedora Core 5 Available

Jan Slupski writes "New release day today. Fedora Core 5 CD images are now available for download (i386, ppc, x86_64) on the ftp servers or via the torrent page." Linclips also has a short screencast on some of the default functionality.

Comments

bug sorted?

[LiquidCoooled]

It appears as though FC5 contains a bug which prevents none GPL modules (read nVidia) from being used.
Has this been fixed in this one yet, or is it worth waiting a few more days for the fix to be rolled out?

(It was identified too late to be pushed to the mirrors)

Info about it is here.

Re:bug sorted?

[osvejda]

Fixed kernel is here. It's not in official updates yet.

Re:bug sorted?

[Anonymous Coward]

nvidia binary drivers are against linux core philosophy. This isn't a bug, it's a feature.

Re:bug sorted?

[skogs]

I believe you will find that the kernel that is autocompiled beforehand will not accept the binary drivers...just like any other non-custom-built kernel that leaves out that option.

Rebuild your kernel per directions found on several sites, install the drivers per nvidia's instructions...

game. xgl. whatever.

Re:bug sorted?

[typical]

Actually, this *is* a bug. It was not intentional on the part of the Fedora folks.

Of course, I don't *like* binary drivers very much, but ATI and NVidia have agreed to stick with 'em if you want 3d support on their modern cards. I have a Radeon 9250 (with the 128-bit datapath), which is about as peppy a card as you can get and still have open source drivers.

If the Open Graphics Project ever releases any hardware, unless it's $400 or something like that, I'll buy it -- it'll be fully open source.

If one vendor would release even a half-decent card and support it fully with open-source drivers, I'd buy it in a moment (binary microcode is okay, but I want everything running host-side to be OSS).

I know that few people feel this way, and most gamers are happy just using binary drivers and the current NVidia or ATI cards, but there are a group of people who feel the same way I do.

Re:bug sorted?

[gr8_phk]

"I believe you will find that the kernel that is autocompiled beforehand will not accept the binary drivers...just like any other non-custom-built kernel that leaves out that option."

You make it sound like it's supposed to be that way. IT'S NOT. FC3 and 4 both worked fine. You make it sound like Fedora decided to change policy on their default kernels. They didn't, that's why they've stated that an update will correct the problem. This is a bug introduced right before they created the images (commence conspiracy theories).

Someone F***ed up, didn't test properly, and isn't owning up to it.

Re:bug sorted?

[Maffy]

This is very OT...

Presumably you're using the open-source drivers developed at r300.sf.net (although now merged into X.org, I think)?

I've been considering switching to a Radeon card and using these drivers. It would be great to know how well you found them to work. In particular, how stable are they and how does their performance compare to the official drivers?

Thanks,

Matt

Re:bug sorted?

[skogs]

bug...not really a bug. Just a two keystroke mistake. It isn't a bug in any program or anything. My appologies for not being so up on fedora's policies...its a simple reconfiguration. One that I wish more distros would auto-compile into the kernel, but sadly many don't.

Re:bug sorted?

[typical]

Good question. No, the 9250 uses the RV280, not the R300. I've had some interest in the R300 project, but last time I looked at it, it was nowhere near as far along as the R200 code. The R200 drivers have been part of DRI for quite some time.

And even the R200 drivers have problems. I can't use the accelerated framebuffer driver at the same time as xorg (I have to use the standard VESA one). I don't have texture compression support, despite the fact that my card supports it (this may be because S3 has the texture compression format used in graphics cards patented -- not sure). While the drivers are usable, I *have* managed to hang the system before while playing 3d games as a non-root user -- that could be an xorg bug or a R200 bug.

I haven't used the official ATI drivers after one attempt long ago where I couldn't get them working.

Re:bug sorted?

[typical]

In terms of performance, I can tell you that I can play Darwinia and NWN, though both have slowdown at places (and NWN unnecessarily limits any card that doesn't support texture compression to minimum-resolution textures). It's not a card that would be acceptable for someone seriously interested in playing modern games, however.

Re:bug sorted?

[Maffy]

Thanks for your response.

It sounds like I should hold off for the moment, or at least treat it as a project if I do decide to upgrade.

Cheers,

Matt

Re:bug sorted?

[Anonymous Coward]

The definition of a bug depends on the number of keystrokes involved? It's a defect, a mistake, a problem, something that shouldn't be there. A bug!

Re:bug sorted?

[MSG]

Those responsible are "owning up" to the mistake. It's been discussed on the testing list, and corrected packages were made available to the testers. It's a sad fact that a bug was introduced in the kernel very late in the testing process. The first kernel update will correct the problem.

Don't blow it out of proportion. Fedora Core is a distro for developers and hobbyists (which is why I use it). For that audience, this bug isn't anything more than a minor annoyance.

Re:bug sorted?

[MSG]

I believe you will find that the kernel that is autocompiled beforehand will not accept the binary drivers

Normally, they do. The Nvidia drivers are broken because the spinlock macros were accidentally made GPL-only. The first kernel update will fix the problem.

install the drivers per nvidia's instructions...

It's probably better if you don't. If you read the Fedora Projects notes on 3rd party drivers, you'll notice that Nvidia and ATI both break X in subtle ways, and may leave GL in an unworkable state, even after uninstalling them.

Re:bug sorted?

[Omnifarious]

I feel very much the same way you do. I'm a gamer (and a developer), and it really gets under my skin that nVidia's drivers are closed source. It's why I refuse to buy a motherboard that has their chipset, and why I recommend against everything but their graphics cards to all I talk to.

This is an almost intolerable situation. I have DRM on my system (some silly analog/digital anti-copy technology, spectravision or something). I feel dirty.

Re:bug sorted?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are DVD labels for FC5 LINK

Flash is Evil! Evil, I say!

[AKAImBatman]

Linclips also has a short screencast on some of the default functionality.

That screencast is in Flash, and we all know that Flash is evil.

Thus, Fedora must be evil by extension.

Fedora is the development branch for RedHat. If Fedora is evil, RedHat must also be evil.

Microsoft is well known for being evil.

We all know that RedHat is a competitor to Microsoft.

Ergo, RedHat is the next Microsoft.

QED

(Yes, this is a joke. Laugh.)

Re:Flash is Evil! Evil, I say!

[Dashcolon]

[i]Red[/i]hat, [i]Red[/i]mond. coincidence?

Re:Flash is Evil! Evil, I say!

[AKAImBatman]

-1 Troll? Drats, I thought it was funny. Ah well.

FWIW, the new Fedora version does look nice. Each version of GTK & Fedora really help smooth out the looks. However, am I the only one who thinks that the latest bluecurve is starting to look a lot like the alloy look and feel?

It's too bad that RedHat got out of the Desktop business at just the point where they started to become a strong competitor. Fedora has really been feeling a lot more solid than their jury-rigging of the past. Add in features like Multimedia playback for a RedHat branded Desktop, and you'd end up with a pretty decent home machine.

Re:Flash is Evil! Evil, I say!

[parmadil]

Who are you who are so wise in the ways of logic?

Re:Flash is Evil! Evil, I say!

[eno2001]

You obviously have absolutely no sense of humor. Hmm... I wonder if you thought Friends was funny. If so, then you definitely have no sense of humor at all. At least not one worth speaking of.

Re:Flash is Evil! Evil, I say!

[Philosinfinity]

If I had mod points, I woulda modded it up. I got a good chuckle out of it.

Re:Flash is Evil! Evil, I say!

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's too bad that RedHat got out of the Desktop business at just the point where they started to become a strong competitor.

Red Hat didn't get out of the Desktop business. They only got out of the retail business. Red Hat still sells Desktops and even has an enterprise product called Red Hat Desktop. And they obviously still have a huge focus on the desktop. Where do you think Fedora comes from? A lot of the cool desktopy stuff like aiglx and NetworkManager are coming from Red Hat.

Screenshots?

[Orestesx]

I don't believe there is any power way to evaluate a linux distro than screenshots, except for maybe it's logo.

Re:Screenshots?

[rubycodez]

the name has to sound cool, uncool names are out. Like Gentoo and Slackware: pfft, gay! Ubuntu and SuSE, those just radiate coolness. Though I also agree with logos, if the packaged set includes stickers.

Re:Screenshots?

[tehshen]

OSDir to the rescue

I don't like how it looks, but I'll probably get used to it. Having used FC3 and 4, the new 'f' logo looks pretty... weird. The theme is also a lot shinier than Bluecurve. Why are all desktop environments slowly tending to shiny?

Re:Screenshots?

[Morrigu]

Version numbers. Don't forget the version numbers.

If it's not high enough, then it's not even worth booting.

Re:Screenshots?

[Captain_Chaos]

I don't believe there is any power way to evaluate a linux distro than screenshots, except for maybe it's logo.

I'm sorry, but I'm just curious: how on Earth did you manage to misspell "other" as "power"?! (Assuming that's what you meant, but it's so far off it could just as well be any other word!)

Re:Screenshots?

[alx5000]

LILO 22.7.1 really turns me on.

Re:Screenshots?

[Wesley Felter]

No, I think he meant "poorer".

Re:Screenshots?

[level_headed_midwest]

Naw, you want LOW version numbers because all of the really good cutting-edge stuff has low numbers, such as Xgl, Beagle, etc.

Careful...

[include($dysmas)]

any avid Fedora fans be warned, in a few hours there might be a story saying it was all a mis-understanding, induced by fermenting slurm or something

Re:Careful...

[absinthminded64]

They'll just ask for more.. and more . . and more..

MP3's?

[d2_m_viant]

Its been a few years since I used FC...but have they fixed the runaround that they put you through just to play MP3's?

Re:MP3's?

[r_cerq]

It won't be "fixed", it's like that by design. Check http://fedora.redhat.com/About/ (Why can't Fedora play mp3 files?)

Re:MP3's?

[Nighttime]

Short answer is no.

From http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems

MP3 encoding/decoding support is not included in any Fedora application because MP3 is heavily patented in several regions including the United States. The patent holder is unwilling to give an unrestricted patent grant, as required by the GPL. Other platforms might have paid the royalty and/or included proprietary software. Other Linux distributions not based in a region affected by the patent might ship MP3 decoders/encoders or they might have included proprietary software. However, Fedora Core cannot and does not ship MP3 decoders/encoders in order to serve the goal of shipping only free and open source software that is not restricted by software patents.

Fedora Suggests: If possible, use patent unrestricted formats such as Ogg Vorbis (a lossy audio codec that has better quality than MP3), or FLAC (a lossless audio codec).

Re:MP3's?

[typical]

You know, I didn't even realize that this was the case -- I only have .ogg and .flac files.

Re:MP3's?

[Azarael]

It's not that hard if you just want a player. Just recompile the latest xmms source or install the rpm. I guess if you want mp3 support in other apps, then that would be a big pain.

Re:MP3's?

[Alioth]

No - they can't, or they would be liable to pay royalties to Fraunhofer for the MP3 patent, which isn't tenable for a Free free distro.

The long answer is if you want to use FC5 and play MP3 files, then it takes approximately 10 seconds to add the Livna yum repository and type 'yum install xine' (or the media player of your choice).

Re:MP3's?

[Almost-Retired]

No, and it won't ever be fixed until the patents on mp3 expire. So you might as well get used to it, its not gonna change in the near future.

--
Cheers, Gene

Re:MP3's?

[Zerathdune]

I'd like to go for ogg/flac, but unfortunately, my mp3 player doesn't support them. They'd be fine for my computer, but I wouldn't be able to listen to them on the go. the day I find a high quality mp3 player that supports them, I will drop mp3's without a second thought. unfortunately, for the moment I can't seem to find a good solution.

Re:MP3's?

[jb.hl.com]

I asked this question in another thread, and didn't get an answer. Has anyone ever been sued for building RPMs or DEBs of MP3 codecs, MP3 encoders, Mplayer etc? Ever?

Re:MP3's?

[Kjella]

This answer is valid to April 2010: No, and it won't. I think we can safely say at this point that ogg isn't taking over mainstream and that once it is freed, ogg will go back to a very very little niche. It'll simply take another four years.

Re:MP3's?

[just_forget_it]

From the Fedora website: "The ATI graphics drivers are proprietary and many kernel developers consider this driver to violate the GPL license of the kernel. Fedora Core does not include proprietary software. Fedora Suggests: Consider using a graphics adapter from Intel or any other manufacturer that supports open source with full specifications and/or source code. Note that ATI adapters will usually work well using the drivers included with Fedora, but accelerated functions (OpenGL) will not be available. " This is exactly what is keeping a lot of people from using Linux. Fedora's hard-nosed stance against non-GPL software is laughable. This advice sheet is fine for someone building a new machine, but I'm not going to go out and buy some shitty Intel chipset just so I can use Linux. The whole tone of the forbidden items page is "We purposely broke that feature because it conflicts with our idealogy, but that's ok, you don't really need things like hardware 3D acceleration and the ability to play your mountainous library of MP3's anyway." It's not the fact that the NVidia drivers aren't included that bothers me, no OS bundles that driver, it's the fact that Fedora people and a lot of Linux zealots seem to have the "change your hardware to things we like" attitude as opposed to "we don't include support for that because of , but here's how you can add it yourself."

Re:MP3's?

[justsomebody]

but have they fixed the runaround that they put you through just to play MP3's?

Out of the box?

In short, no.

But here is how you do it
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/download/fedora5. html

Re:MP3's?

[quintesse]

And it is people like us who will make sure that ATI and nVidia will never change their ways, why should they? People still keep buying their stuff even if they have to jump through hoops to install the drivers.

Now, truth be told, I said "us" because I use the proprietary drivers as well and I am happy they exist but I also agree that ATI and nVidia must be pushed as hard as possible to open up more and Fedora/Redhat/Debian (and probably others) can't do that if they tell people "you shouldn't use those drivers, but this is how you install them".

You make a decision and you stick by it.

I have decided I _need_ my daily FPS-fix ;-)

Re:MP3's?

[gnud]

Well, perhaps they just take care to do so in a country where the patents don't apply?

Re:MP3's?

[pyros]

The problem isn't distributing a codec, the problem is you can't legally have a GPL implementation in a jurisdiction where the patents on those formats applies (like the US). In the example of MP3, the patent holders grant free license for ditributing a decoding implementation, I believe. But that's not liberal enough to be compatible with the GPL, because the license could be revoked.

Re:MP3's?

[Listen Up]

For years I have used The Unofficial Fedora Faq located at http://www.fedorafaq.org/ to install all of the software missing from the Fedora Core downloads.

I agree with everything on that page, except for Java support. I develop Java and suggest that anybody who wants to develop serious Java applications use the official Java JDK from Sun. Otherwise, everything else is spot-on to help make Fedora a serious Linux desktop distribution.

Re:MP3's?

[just_forget_it]

I agree with that. ATI and NVidia aren't going to open up their drivers unless Linux grabs a considerable market share from Windows, which is unlikely to happen anytime soon. A considerable market share can be as low as 10% though. It doesn't sound like much but it's enough users that a company doesn't want to alienate.

I'd just like to know if there are any video card manufacturers with open drivers whose product performance matches ATI/Nvidia and is compatible with enough applications. As far as I know, Intel (Fedora's suggestion) only makes crappy on-board chipsets with shared RAM and no hardware 3D. Am I correct on this? I'd seriously like to know if Intel has an AGP or PCI-E standalone graphics card and how it measures up to the competition.

Re:MP3's?

[MvD_Moscow]

Just a suggestion, you might consider using iRiver HDD 'multi-codec jukeboxes.' While they are not as sexy as the iPods (are at least thats what they say), they are pretty functional and can even play video (only avi with Xvid/mp3 sadly). And of course, iRiver's products support ogg.

Check this out:

http://www.iriveramerica.com/prod/hd/

http://www.iriver.com/html/product/prpa_product.as p?pidx=42

Re:MP3's?

[Anonymous Coward]

Get off your soap box. They are just suggesting you buy hardware with open-sourced drivers. They are not holding a gun to your head, and information on how to install the proprietary drivers is all over the web. The open-sourced drivers provided with X on Linux are generally as capable as the default binary drivers provided my Windows XP, so it's not like they're screwing you that way, either.

Re:MP3's?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nvidia wont EVER open source their drivers.. EVER. Never, ever, ever.

Their hardware has been subpar with ATI for a long while, what allows them to compete are the nasty performance hacks in their video drivers. That and all the employee trading that seems to happen in the graphics card driver shops, you can bet there is a good deal of stolen IP in the nvidia drivers and probably ATI too. Open sourcing their drivers would probably put them in a mound of legal trouble.

Re:MP3's?

[Josh Coalson]

I'd like to go for ogg/flac, but unfortunately, my mp3 player doesn't support them. They'd be fine for my computer, but I wouldn't be able to listen to them on the go. the day I find a high quality mp3 player that supports them, I will drop mp3's without a second thought. unfortunately, for the moment I can't seem to find a good solution.

there are plenty:

http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware

http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/VorbisHardware

Re:MP3's?

[level_headed_midwest]

:D Me too. I ripped all of my CDs as .flac files starting a few years ago and haven't come across an MP3 in a while. However, streaming QuickTime and WMV9 formats *SUCK.*

Re:MP3's?

[Millenniumman]

It's not that hard if you just want a player. Just recompile the latest xmms source or install the rpm.

Irony.

Re:MP3's?

[DragoonAK]

Or you could install gstreamer mp3 plugins and all gstreamer-enabled progs will play and perhaps encode mp3s. Gstreamer has had some birthing problems, but it's pretty awesome when it works.

Re:MP3's?

[pivo]

'yum install xmms-mp3'

Wow, you're right. That was hard.

Re:MP3's?

[just_forget_it]

I'm not debating the effectiveness of the drivers. I'm just saying that their suggestion for Intel chipsets is ludicrous. As far as I know, Intel only makes the crappy on-board shared-memory graphic chipsets.

Re:MP3's?

[Dlugar]

I agree with everything on that page, except for Java support. I develop Java and suggest that anybody who wants to develop serious Java applications use the official Java JDK from Sun.

Actually, their FAQ explains how to take the official Java JDK from Sun and package it as an RPM, so you get all the goodness of the official Sun JDK and if you want to install packages that depend on Java, they'll install properly resolving Sun's JDK as fulfilling their dependency.

Dlugar

Re:MP3's?

[Listen Up]

I was referring to the suggestion in the FAQ to use gcj. Also, I have not had any problems using the Sun JDK directly as an internet plug-in, using the installation instructions available directly on Sun's Java website, so I forgo the use of the JPackage.org packages. If I have any problems using Java as an internet plug-in with Fedora Core 5, I may look for other solutions, such as JPackage.org at that point.

Re:MP3's?

[Anonymous Coward]

While they are not as sexy as the iPods (are at least thats what they say), ...

No, we who are more interested in audio players than in fashion statements are saying that nothing is as homosexy as an iPod.

Re:MP3's?

[Listen Up]

Another excellent website for Fedora Core configuration is http://easylinux.info/wiki/Fedora

Re:MP3's?

[Dlugar]

Yes, I agree that the suggestion to use gcj is retarded.

With regards to packaging Sun's JDK as an RPM (as opposed to using Sun's installer), the purpose for that isn't for if you just want to use Java as an internet plug-in, it's for if you want to download software packages via yum that depend on Java. For instance, let's say you want to install Azureus, which depends on Java. If you just do "yum install azureus", yum won't know that you've installed Java, so it won't want to install Azureus. But this is pretty much a moot point, since hardly anyone installs Java packages via a package manager like yum.

[off topic] GPL v3 and Linux distribs

[sreekotay]

Hunh - off topic, but makes me wonder. If Linux kernel doesn't adopt GPL 3, will any of the major vendors? *Can* they?

I think ideology and capitalism are about to meet again - mainly because of the server loopholes
--
graphicallyspeaking

Re:[off topic] GPL v3 and Linux distribs

[/ASCII]

Distributions don't change the license of the programs they contain. So if the kernel remains GPL2, then the kernel shipped with Fedora will also be GPL2. Basically all Linux distributions ship with programs using a whole bunch of different licenses. The parts of a distribution that are mostly distribution specific can use any license. I seem to remember that Yast, the Suse setup tool used to be closed source.

Yowza

[MAXOMENOS]

We're up to *five* CD-ROMs now?

Re:Yowza

[ziggamon2.0]

Yeah...

Or *one* DVD.

Your choice. IIRC you can get by with only the first couple of discs for a standard GNOME install.

Re:Yowza

[toleraen]

I don't recall which version it was, but I seem to remember installing off 5 disks several years ago. Maybe Redhat 7 or 8? The last two disks in the past have just been the source code for everything. You'll likely only need the first three disks.

Re:Yowza

[zlogic]

Suse 10.0 already is.
IMHO a dual-layer DVD would be a better choice.
That's the difference between philosophies - Ubuntu and distros like it mantain only the best and most needed stuff on one CD (and all additional stuff has to be downloaded separately) while Fedora, Suse, Mandrake etc. have everything and the kitchen sink - great when you have dialup or expensive internet but need that not-so-popular package. And you can install everything including that maths app and Frozen Bubble game on your friend's PC (or notebook) without an internet connection.
Short answer:
For Ubuntu etc. many CDs is bad;
For Fedora, Suse, the more CDs, the better.

Re:Yowza

[presarioD]

IMHO a dual-layer DVD would be a better choice

Not all of us have a DVD burner you insensitive clot!
(Believe it or not, once mine faltered and died I've been living on CD-RWs ever since).

Re:Yowza

[level_headed_midwest]

Well, to answer both your post and the GPP, SuSE is available as a dual-layered DVD in the retail box. There are torrents for it that are legal too- you can search for it at the torrent sites (hey, they actually DO have some legal stuff!) It is good to have all kinds of install media available. SuSE has a mini net-install boot ISO, 5 CD sets (only for i386, AFAIK), 32- and 64-bit DVDs, and that 32/64-bit DL DVD.

Upgrading

[Rik Sweeney]

I new to Linux and am still running Fedora Core 3. Am I right in thinking that to upgrade to FC5 I have to basically backup anything I want to keep and reinstall everything? Is there no easier way of upgrading?

Re:Upgrading

[/ASCII]

No, all you need to do is get the CDs or DVD and boot from them - you will be presented with the alternatives of overwriting the current install or upgrading it to FC5. It is a very good idea to backup your data just to be sure, but I've never had any problems going from one RedHat/Fedora version to a newer one.

Re:Upgrading

[MAXOMENOS]

It depends. I feel a little better about upgrading my system because I keep all my important data -- photos, tax records, etc -- in its own separate ext3 partition that mounts to /home.

If you've done that very basic and important step, then you can upgrade -- or even install a new system from scratch -- without fear. (There may, however, be a few hours of tweaking involved, to install printers and the like.)

The same works for Windows, too, btw -- and can save you from losing all your data when XP destroys itself and you need to recover your system.

Re:Upgrading

[Rik Sweeney]

Who the hell modded that as funny?! I was asking a serious question!

Stop laughing at me :(

Re:Upgrading

[Anonymous Coward]

there is a way to do it without reinstalling. but it's sometimes not easy, it depends. upgrading from redhat9 to fc4 was kind of hard. just use google to search it, guess it's explained on the redhat pages somewhere...

Re:Upgrading

[LizardKing]

Err, I haven't used RedHat since FC3, but upgrading is normally accomplished by selecting the upgrade option when the installer finds an existing installation. That said, backups before major upgrades are *always* a good idea.

Re:Upgrading

[ElleyKitten]

You should backup everything you want to keep everytime you do something major to your computer (such as upgrading your OS). Actually, you should backup your stuff on a regular basis anyways.

I'm not 100% sure about Fedora, but I know other distros support upgrading while keeping all your programs and settings, so I'm pretty sure Fedora does too. The backup is just a recommendation in case something goes wrong.

Re:Upgrading

[typical]

There are three things you can do:

First, Fedora has an "upgrade" (as opposed to "install") option in the installer that lets you upgrade from the previous version. Download the CD images for FC4, burn 'em, boot off the CD, choose "upgrade", and then do the same for FC5. That's the "supported" path.

Second, it may be possible to just stuff the FC5 CDs in and upgrade directly from FC3 to FC5. Dunno.

Third (and this is probably not the best choice if you're new to Fedora), you can usually upgrade via yum. Download the fedora-release RPM package from FC5, and then run "yum update" and with some tweaking (apt is really better than yum at this kind of whole-system update, since it will actually uninstall things), you can generally update a system on-line. This is really best for people who are hobbyists, like me, and aren't worried about a server going down and can handle fixing any breakage. Red Hat doesn't support this approach, and while I've done this for a long time, there have been some nasty interactions -- on one version I remember, RH didn't include a dependency on fsck, and the new kernel required a new modutils that was incompatible both with the old kernel and the old modutils. Doing this meant that you'd get a new kernel with a new modutils, but one that couldn't boot without the new fsck. You do tend to learn a lot about your system doing this. :-)

Re:Upgrading

[Jarlsberg]

Backup, install, and spend the next fortnight tweaking your system back into shape. There is no other way. ;/
(I've got FC4, and I'm *not* upgrading)

Of course, if you've got all your documents etc. on a separate partition, you shouldn't run into really bad problems when installing FC5. Be sure to backup config files etc. that you may have put on the system partition.

Re:Upgrading

[curmudgeous]

I've built many linux machines over the years (with several different distros) and I've learned through experience that best practice is to keep system files and user data on separate volumes. Either create a dedicated partition for /home or use another physical drive entirely. I've had too many upgrades go bad and didn't have the time or patience to poke around to find the cause, so the quickest and best solution was to format and start over. Just my 2 cents.

Re:Upgrading

[Vellmont]

Some people report no problems with upgrading, others report many problems.

Fedora and Redhat have never been intended to be forever upgraded like Debian or Ubuntu have, so it's always a little risky. If you're talking about a production level machine that's doing critical work you rely on every day, I wouldn't trust an upgrade at all. If it's just your desktop where you store some MP3s or whatever, it's not a big deal to try the upgrade.

Re:Upgrading

[endrue]

Its easy!

apt-get dist-upgrade

Oh wait...

- Andrew

Re:Upgrading

[moranar]

Yes, you made a few typos. The command is actually:

yum update

Don't worry, it happens to the best of us :P

Re:Upgrading

[smoker2]

I make a point of not upgrading to the last update until the next new version is out. I just upgraded from FC3 to FC4 about 2 weeks ago. I'm not completely unhappy with FC4 but among other things, certain icons have gone missing in Gnome, virtually all the panel apps went missing, Gdesklets broke, the weather panel applet doesn't have forecasts for my area anymore and the pop email applets went missing. That last one was a bugger, as I have about 5 different addys I need to keep an eye on. I ended up with Mail Notification 2.0 which is not the same thing at all. For one thing it can't perform seperate actions according to which mailbox has mail :(

On the plus side, my 400GB LVM volume didn't get lost in the upgrade, so I should be grateful ;-)

Oh, I upgraded using yum BTW and it all went fine. IIRC, you have to install the later version kernel first, then reboot, then run yum, so that it gets the correct distribution. Here's the how-to I followed.

When FC6 comes out, I'll take a look at upgrading to FC5.

Re:Upgrading

[MintyGreen]

I've upgraded Fedora installs (and from RedHat to Fedora) plenty of times using that command. Apt4rpm, anyone?

However, yum does handle multilib far better than apt. It gets a bit frustrating on sparc64 and x86_64 systems.

Re:Upgrading

[heson]

As long as you dont install any tarballs you are safe from havock, you might have to upgrade a broken packet or two afterwards though. If you love to do tar zxf foo.tgz;cd foo;./configure;make all;make install, you might get some crust in the filesystem to clean up.

Re:Upgrading

[firl]

Yes, yes there is, there is a MUCH easier way for updating emerge --update world but that requires Gentoo ... Always helps to have your computer be able to upgrade all of its software without reinstalling from a new CD

Re:Upgrading

[caldroun]

You should be able to jut upgrade...however I will still recommend you BACK UP what you want!

Re:Upgrading

[presarioD]

If you are new to linux and you want to upgrade with the least possible fuss backup your data (throw everything in the /home partition) and then do an install of FC5 instead of upgrade. The reason is an upgrade is as unaggressive as possible which means that some configuration files (of the notorious .conf kind) will not be overwritten and some libraries/packages will not be uninstalled which might (or not) create a problem down the road (which will be easy to handle if you know what you are doing).

If you really feel like tackling the whole thing and acquiring the experience go ahead, if you don't want to deal with the hassle and would like a clean upgrade just let Anaconda install on top of your old FC3 /root partition.

That's my humble advise from someone that upgraded from RedHat9 to FC2 to FC4.

Re:Upgrading

[techno-vampire]

Currently, I'm running RedHat 9 as a secondary system. I'd heard about using yum -update to go right to the current FC. Is it a good idea? If not, what do you reccomend?

Re:Upgrading

[typical]

My guess is that you will probably get breakage -- RH9 has a few years on it by now.

I don't think that RH supports skipping versions when upgrading. It may work, it may not.

Unless you're really interested in learning about your system by breaking it six ways to Sunday, I'd probably take a deep breath and suck down *all* the Fedora Core CD images and upgrade incrementally through them. Yes, all 20+ CD images.

You don't actually need every CD image -- you don't need the CDs that just contain source, for example. I don't know which ones you can skip, though. :-| Sorry.

You might try fedoraforum.org for a better answer.

Re:Upgrading

[mrmeval]

But But But can't I just let the new OS load from the net. :-P

Re:Upgrading

[Anonymous Coward]

"never had any problems going from one RedHat/Fedora version to a newer one"?

Sorry, but no "FC upgrade" ever worked smoothly before FC4 to 5. This was the first time nothing serious got screwed, and I am with FC since 1 and "upgraded" (installed new in the end) every single version.

Good for Older laptop?

[SaidiaDude]

Would this distro work for an old laptop - UMAX 233MHz 256MB 3GB? I have one lying around and was thinking about creating a wireless terminal to check email and possibly display pictures. A basic Core 4 installed fine but the UI wasnt very responsive sometimes. Thx for your help.

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[LizardKing]

NetBSD may be a better choice for older hardware, as it consumes less resources than recent versions of Linux. Note that this is not an anit-Linux troll, much of that extra resource hungriness seems to come from the added functionality rather than superfluous bloat - and despite my personal preference for NetBSD, I'm considering putting FC5 onto my PowerBook, as there appears to be support for Java on PowerPC Linux.

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[SClitheroe]

I'd be interested in the answer to this as well. I tried Ubuntu on an older Dell Latitude running at 233mhz, and although it was well supported, it was pretty slow (although everything on it seems slow, I guess)

-Scott

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[/ASCII]

You can probably compile GCC4 and Classpath yourself to get the same Java support FC5 has for NetBSD. On the other hand, you can use DSL or some other lightweight Linux distribution that runs like a champ on a Pentium 233 MHz.

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[Mdalek]

No, i would try a distro which is a bit less heavyweight, even with the Gnome 2.14 speed improvements it would still feel rather slow. I would recommend Debian with a simple Desktop Env, look into XFCE4 or fluxbox etc.

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[iwnbs]

I wouldn't recommend it. I've got FC4 installed on a similar machine but with a P-III 650 and it's almost unusable. You might be able to get away with a smaller desktop environment (i.e. don't use KDE or Gnome), though. Fedora is built for hardware that was created in the last 5 years. That's my rule of thumb.

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[nath_de]

Seeing that the main focus of the new Gnome included in FC5 was higher speed, it should be better than with FC4.
I'm running FC 4 on a P2 300 Notebook with 192MB RAM and will upgrade when the torrent is finished.

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[dylan_-]

A good one for older hardware is VectorLinux. The standard edition uses icewm and Rox filer, which is nice and fast.

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[Anonymous Coward]

also Damn Small Linux: I run it on a p100 with 32 Mb of ram and it works fine :o

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[LizardKing]

I'd read that IBM have a port of the Sun JDK for PowerPC Linux. While GCJ and Classpath are progressing fast, I don't think they're quite ready for all the Swing and Tomcat/JSP based stuff that I'd like to do. The Swing classes at the very least are still a bit patchy. However, both projects have come on in leaps and bounds in the last couple of years, and along with the new Fortran 95 compiler I'm looking forward to the next few releases of GCC4.

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[lordross84]

This one sounds to me as "I've got an old "Casio FX-82MS" calculator. Is it possible to install FC5 on it? "

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[JonLatane]

I'd recommend not using GNOME for it if you want to do everything easily. Probably the easiest thing to do is get Ubuntu and do a Xubuntu installation (this will give you an XFCE desktop; it's good looking and still not a resource hog). Basically, just pop in an install disc and choose to do a server installation, which after rebooting will give you a terminal. Login and then do:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install gdm

This will give you a desktop and a login manager. The Ubuntu support page will explain everything you need to know about installing new software with the Synaptic Package Manager. And once you've enabled the Universe and Multiverse repositories, setting up MP3 playback will be one hell of a lot easier than with any Fedora system I've used.

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[ChrisA90278]

Yes it will work fine if you are carful about what you install. Both KDE and Gnome are not god for a low end machine. use one of the lighter weight window managers.

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[j-cloth]

I went through this process a few months ago. I'm typically a pretty hardcore RedHat guy, but I ended up settling on Debian (P90 w/40MB RAM). I find the Fedora install doesn't give enough control to limit packages as you need to do in limited space (HDD and RAM). For example, I didn't want gnome, but it kept sneaking its way in there on me anyway. Other than that, I have no problems running a current OS on 10+ year old hardware.

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will probably work, but the UI, especially GNOME will probably run very slowly unless you turn down a lot of the eye candy.

selinux

[typical]

Someone on the target webpage asked how to disable SELinux. I don't really feel like making an account on that website, but you should edit /etc/sysconfig/selinux.

Re:selinux

[ihavenospine]

At the installer prompt:

linux selinux=0

Re:selinux

[typical]

Surely that only disables selinux for the kernel being used to execute the installer, and does not actually affect the installed copy?

Re:selinux

[typical]

Although that does disable selinux earlier in the boot process, which, I guess, could be useful if somehow selinux was preventing you from booting.

You'd add "selinux=0" to the kernel arguments by (E)diting the boot option and then (E)diting the line starting with "kernel". That'd disable it for the current boot. To permanently disable it, you can edit /boot/grub/grub.conf and add "selinux=0" to the list of arguments after "kernel".

I ran into this mostly because I wanted to try out reiserfs v3 (and reiserfs does not support selinux).

FWIW, while I've seen the benchmarks that should mean that resiser is somewhat faster than ext3, I was kinda disappointed -- I didn't notice any speed benefit on my machine.

Re:selinux

[Azarael]

I'm not sure if this is still the case, but SELinux and the nVidia graphics drivers do not seem to get along either. I had this problem in FC4.

Re:selinux

[LnxAddct]

Or disable it in the installer by clicking "Disable SELinux" when prompted, you can't miss it. If you happen to miss it, just go to Desktop->System Settings->Security Level from gui and disable under the SELinux tab. New users don't like editing config files, Fedora will let you disable SELinux through the gui.
Regards,
Steve

Re:selinux

[Anonymous Coward]

Very wise. SELinux: designed by fascists and control freaks and implemented by fools.

SELinux is probably the worst thing that Red Hat has ever done. It's ridiculously fragile, incomprehensible and a DRM dream (part of one, anyway.. tie SELinux to TCPA hardware to remove the possiblity of root altogether and it's practically the MPAA/RIAA's wet-dream operating system). Every update to the policy file breaks something. Red Hat even managed to render FC3 systems unbootable with a simple update to the policy file not too long ago.

Seriously... even SUSE decided they'd had a gutful of it and bought (and opened up) AppArmour. Google for it... it gives 99% of the benefits of SELinux without the pain and sinister input from the "Treacherous Computing" boys.

Re:selinux

[typical]

Fair enough.

I've been using RHL and Fedora for a long time, though, and never bothered to learn the GUI. The GUIs always change and shift around -- first there was the Tk control-panel back in the day, then system-config, then a sequence of other utilities. If you learn some of the GUI, you wind up having to relearn the thing down the road. The config files stay in the same place over the years.

Re:selinux

[typical]

I think the idea is that SELinux is fine on a server that's doing more-or-less standard things. I know that it can interfere with hobbyist stuff, where you're significantly changing the system around. I also don't think that the end user is supposed to directly write SELinux policy rules, but to use high-level tools that control it (though I'm unaware of what tools exist to do this). SELinux is more of a toolkit for letting you build systems that provide secure environments than actually such a secure environment.

Also, I'm unaware of any ties between TCPA and SELinux. I would be surprised if such exist -- SELinux was done by the NSA, which obviously has little stake in DRM.

Re:selinux

[Anonymous Coward]

uncle Crispin Coward for President!

Re:selinux

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of the high level tools for SELinux:

SETools - http://tresys.com/selinux/selinux_policy_tools.sht ml
the SELinux IDE - http://selinux-ide.sf.net/
the reference policy - http://serefpolicy.sourceforge.net/
Polgen - http://polgen.sourceforge.net/

Re:selinux

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, I'm unaware of any ties between TCPA and SELinux. I would be surprised if such exist -- SELinux was done by the NSA, which obviously has little stake in DRM.

SELinux and Trusted Computing systems are intimately linked... under the banner of security (against the owner of the machine in this case). Red Hat are already working on using SELinux for DRM, which will obviously require a kernel that cannot be modified -- and they are already working with IBM on a TCPA-based Linux kernel which will rely on SELinux (you can google for that too), and will be every bit as locked-down for DRM as anything Microsoft is cooking up.

It's about time someone started asking Red Hat a few awkward questions about this... because they've been very very quiet about it. It would also be nice for someone to get Red Hat corporate position on the GPL v3 -- I'm betting they don't like it. They no more want to lose the potential control that holding onto the crypto keys give them than Microsoft/Apple/IBM do.

Re:selinux

[ajs]

Yes, in order to disable the extra security provided by SE/Linux you just need to install Windows... it's not recommended, however.

</sarcasm>

Re:selinux

[rjforster]

>I'm not sure if this is still the case, but SELinux and the nVidia graphics drivers do not seem to get along either. I had this problem in FC4.

I don't think it is a problem any more. At least, it isn't for me.

Re:selinux

[pembo13]

just run system-config-security level.

Finally I can say what MS is saying for years

[A beautiful mind]

Bug? Naaah. Feature!

Some initial installation notes

[clear_thought_05]

There are some pages: installation guide, installation notes which should be valuable starting points.

Re:Some initial installation notes

[Metaphorically]

I used that same installation guide to find the setup for my NVidia card and a few other good tweaks.

Fedora Mirrors

[Brian The Dog]

Am I the only one that thinks it is awesome that playboy.com mirrors the distro? They should have 'customized' it. (Special backgrounds, prepopulated bookmarks, etc.)

Re:Fedora Mirrors

[Secrity]

Playboy.com also mirrors Firefox, Thunderbird, Apache, FreeBSD, and CPAN. Playboy uses FOSS in it's operation and wants to give back to the community by providing mirrors.

Re:Fedora Mirrors

[LnxAddct]

Most major sites that run Fedora to host their website, also mirror it. Kernel.org and Playboy.com are two of the largest sites that I can think of off the top of my head that run Fedora in the back and mirror it, but there are plenty of other huge sites running it as well. It really is a good distro, zealots tend to spread sensless FUD about it though.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Fedora Mirrors

[ziggamon2.0]

Yeah, and if your girlfriend/mother sees you, you'll know what to say ;-)

Re:Fedora Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here. Nobody on slashdot have mothers.

Re:Fedora Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

mmmm, Playboy-customized FreeBSD... lots of red latex... mmmm...

Re:Fedora Mirrors

[JollyFinn]

Yeah. You can always say that you downloaded 3.3GB off stuff from playboy.com today, and didn't have to pay a dime.

Re:Fedora Mirrors

[bgarcia]

And when IT confronts you and says that your machine accesses playboy.com, you can just say "I was merely downloading the latest version of Fedora Core!"

Re:Fedora Mirrors

[darthnoodles]

Would these mirrors be on the ceiling...or around a bathtub???

Re:Fedora Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Playboy mirrors a number of sites. I understand that Heff had a few spare boxes lying around....

Re:Fedora Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

mmmm, Playboy-customized FreeBSD... lots of red latex... mmmm...

Indeed.

Re:Fedora Mirrors

[( _0_ROOSTER_0_ )]

Now if we could get them to add a few computer related articles in their mag for a special issue on computer babes, and maybe include a copy of fedora core. I think alot more people would start using linux, you know sex sells

Re:Fedora Mirrors

[level_headed_midwest]

Then who just made us dinner upstairs? I think you meant to say that nobody on Slashdot has girlfriends.

Re:Fedora Mirrors

[Kynde]

Playboy.com also mirrors Firefox, Thunderbird, Apache, FreeBSD, and CPAN. Playboy uses FOSS in it's operation and wants to give back to the community by providing mirrors.

While I appreciate what they're doing I can't help but think that providing mirrors is hardly the best way for them to "give back to the community". They have the rare possibility of providing us something that we'd appreciate even more than bandwidth, quite the opposite really, the lack of bands, strings and other forms of strategic clothing.

what's included

[b17bmbr]

silly question, but I'd like to know what kernel version, hardware support, etc. is included. perhaps a link would have been nice. but, i dumped fedora a while ago for ubuntu.

Re:what's included

[kuyaedz]

I recently tried FC4 and was, again, disappointed. I had previously (a few years ago) used Red Hat 9. I use Ubuntu now on my machines. Anything else I've tried doesn't compare.

Re:what's included

[pembo13]

What disappointed you?

Re:what's included

[kuyaedz]

On my recent FC4 install I had the following issues: correct resolution wasn't detected & I wasn't able to manually adjust. The screen turned into a split-screen mirror when updating the resolution my touchpad was very jerky (synaptics touchpad on notebok) maybe this is just me not being used to the updater but the up2date wouldn't work--kept getting critical error--but if I did 'yum update' from the terminal it worked fine. ...that just seemed odd. I remember having similar problems on my RH9 install a few years back as well. Specifically with my printer (could not do color) and scanner.

Re:what's included

[ebuck]

You should forget up2date. It was sort of RedHat only / proprietary since it required access to RedHat servers and a subscription. If you didn't subscribe, there was limited support (for awhile) to up2date servers, and then only for limited bandwidth.

Eventually they did rework up2date to be configurable to point to non-RedHat servers, and then up2date seemed to work ok. But by then I had become so accustomed to "yum" that I barely even considered checking if up2date worked correctly. If I recall correctly (and I might be wrong) this was done by routing up2date through yum.

FC5 (I've been using their test releases) has a much nicer GUI installer of RPMs. I forgot it's name. It's even simpler than up2date, and it comes pre-properly configured to point to the right servers. Still, I find myself using yum. Old habits are hard to break, and yum does the job for me nicely.

Zen

[skogs]

This comes with the virtual machine support now I believe. I look forward to wiping my current win2k install and installing virtual machine.

I like the idea of being able to do some extensive testing on virtual machine setup, run win2k, run FC5, run gentoo, and probably ubuntu too. All at the same time.

Very slick.

I look forward to it.

Re:Zen

[/ASCII]

If my memory serves me correctly, Xen needs either special virtualization support from the guest OS (meaning you can pretty much only run Linux as the guest OS) or special virtualization support from the CPU (On the way from both Intel and AMD, I belive), so you'll probably have to wait a bit before you can use Xen and Windows.

Re:Zen

[ColourlessGreenIdeas]

I don't think Xen can currently run Windows.

Well, it can, but you need to re-compile the windows kernel with a special patch that Xen can't give you. Since you probably don't have the source to the Windows kernel, this is totally theoretical. This may change when CPUs have proper support for virtualisation (assuming you have a new CPU)

Re:Zen

[AKAImBatman]

Xen has been included since Fedora Core 4. So it's not that new of a feature. :-)

Re:Zen

[Shawn is an Asshole]

You currently can't run Windows under Xen as Xen requires the OS to be modified to run under it. Until the new CPUs with virtualization are out you can't use Xen to run Windows.

Right now, though, there is a good free (beer) alternative: VMWare Player. I've been using it with a Win2k guest and it works great. A bit sluggish on Athlon XP's (2500+) and lower, but it feels almost native on an Athlon 64 (3200+).

To create a disk, install qemu and use the following command to create the disk:

qemu-img create -f vmdk disk.vmdk 15G

To create your *.vmx file use VM Builder (it's a webapp).

Open the VMX file in VMWare Player and install Windows normally.

To install VMware Tools, just download an old version (tar.gz, not the rpm) of the Workstation or the betas of the Server. There is a "windows.iso" file in the archive that has everything you need.

Re:Zen

[ashayh]

I think what he means is that Xen install/configure is much simpler in FC5 vs FC4. I think this qualifies as a new feature. Kind of.

Re:Zen

[HuguesT]

Thnks, very informative !

Re:Zen

[Shawn is an Asshole]

Apparently the moderators don't think so.

Oh, great, I've just upgraded to FC4

[Russ Nelson]

Oh, great, I've just upgraded from FC2 to FC4 ... and now there's an FC5?? Technology marches on....

Re:Oh, great, I've just upgraded to FC4

[ziggamon2.0]

Yeah, but you should be thankful you don't have to compile it all like in gentoo! ;-)

Re:Oh, great, I've just upgraded to FC4

[drooling-dog]

Me too, but unless there's something you really need in FC5, why bother? FC4 isn't going to stop working on you.

Re:Redhat Naming

[AKAImBatman]

I never understood why Redhat chose Fedora.

Fedora is a hat. You see the "Red Hat" logo? The type of hat the guy is wearing in the logo is called a Fedora. Given that the hat is named after a Frech play, I don't think that anyone is really worried about what it means in Portugese.

Good to know

[MAXOMENOS]

Of course, I want my KDE.

eh!

[cyranthus]

no DVD isos yet? i dont feel like going through 5 CDs just to update my Fedora Core.

Re:eh!

[nath_de]

There are DVD Isos for all supported platforms. At least the torrents for them are there.

Re:eh!

[cyranthus]

ah i see it now, thanks. just had to look around a bit.

Beagle (Dashboard) in Gnome

[SlashdotOgre]

One of the main features I'm looking forward to in FC5 is the inclusion of Beagle (a personal information search tool written in Mono). I currently use Beagle in Gentoo, and I have been quite impressed. It doesn't seem to suck up my processor like most document indexers (unless I pass the variable BEAGLE_EXERCISE_THE_DOG=1), and it handles a lot of formats. I've tried getting Beagle to work in FC4, but always ran into issues (mainly had to do with mono). What I'm really hoping is now that Beagle is so easy to install (yum install beagle -- ought to work out of the box in FC5, no need to add repo's), it will expose it to more people and motivate development.

Re:Beagle (Dashboard) in Gnome

[justsomebody]

One of the main features I'm looking forward to in FC5 is the inclusion of Beagle

In that case you should upgrade beagle to 0.2.3, and here is why http://planet.gnome.org/ search for "joe: yes I also want to know about the leak". His site doesn't seem to work now

Re:Beagle (Dashboard) in Gnome

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

That's been working in Suse and Ubuntu for some time. I'm surprised Fedora's so behind the times.

Re:Beagle (Dashboard) in Gnome

[Dolda2000]

What I'm really hoping is now that Beagle is so easy to install (yum install beagle -- ought to work out of the box in FC5, no need to add repo's), it will expose it to more people and motivate development.

It's easier than that -- it comes installed and enabled by default. They've even added support for it in Nautilus. No need to do anything at all.

Poor testing

[gr8_phk]

Never mind that they don't test with proprietary drivers. They applied a patch that affected the functionality of tainted kernels - normal development practice would natrually require *that patch* be tested with a tainted kernel regardless. Throwing a patch over and saying it's OK because the automated testing didn't find a problem is like saying "it compiled - ship it".

So if I wait for 2.6.16 kernel on FC5 is that going to break with nVidia too? I saw a comment in the 2.6.16 story saying that doesn't work either (may have been distro specific).

Damn people, I understood the 4K stacks thing - make a good decision for good reason and let nVidia catch up. This utter disrespect for drivers used by a large number of people is really unacceptable. Actually, when a disto fails to test with drivers used by a large portion of their userbase, it is the user who feels the disrespect. Please don't make excuses - that's disrespectful too. Just get FC6 right.

That said, I'm downloading FC5 now ;-)

Re:Poor testing

[warpSpeed]

Never mind that they don't test with proprietary drivers

Why should they? If RedHat a bug with the driver what could they do? It is not their job to fix closed souce drivers.

This utter disrespect for drivers used by a large number of people is really unacceptable. Who are these large numbers of people you speak of, and are they paying RedHat for this support? This is a test and development kernel put out by RedHat to test what will go into their enterprise product.

Actually, when a disto fails to test with drivers used by a large portion of their userbase, it is the user who feels the disrespect.

I'm sure the enterprise product will be tested with drivers that will support a large protion of the user base (the paying user base). And as a result the various distros that base themselves on RedHats product will enjoy this as well.

If your using this for anything important your fingers will probably bleed...

That said, I'm downloading FC5 now ;-)

I'm right behind you...

Re:Poor testing

[rm69990]

Why should they? If RedHat a bug with the driver what could they do? It is not their job to fix closed souce drivers.

The bug was with the kernel, the drivers are fine.

I agree with the rest of your comment though.

Probably the worst beginner's distribution

[MikeRT]

I had a professor who loved Fedora and made his classes use it. In particular, he made us develop and deploy web apps onto a Fedora Core 4 system that each team built and wouldn't let anyone use Red Hat Enterprise, even though we had a department-wide site license that allowed that use. For most of the people there, it was their first experience with Linux and damn were people turned off to Linux by it.

1) It was slow.
2) It was a bitch to install... the installer kept freezing halfway through or dying on certain packages for certain teams.
3) The whole system would sometimes get unwieldy.

IMO, it is the worst beginner's distribution because of how little time there is between releases. It takes the cake from Mandrake. Knoppix, Ubuntu, SuSE, RHEL, these are good distributions to start with. Fedora is not. It's cobbled together compared to these distributions. Just look at how much time has been put into the changes in OpenSuSE by comparison, just to go from .0 to .1. Fedora doesn't even do point releases.

I know some consider it trolling and some love Fedora for various reasons, but I have seen it make people say that Windows kicked ass compared to Linux because the Fedora installer alone just crapped out on them so much that it wasted their time. If you want to introduce someone to Linux, use any other major distribution, even if you have to **buy** it from RedHat or SuSE. I used to be one of the "Linux guys," but the experience for many was so painful, and Linux got such a bad name among those with no prior experience, that out of embarrasment I had to remind people that I am first and foremost a Mac and BeOS guy, not a Linux fan. The Linux users really got undeserved egg on their faces based on how bad FC 4 was for most of the students, and what they were doing was not so hard that it should have been happening.

Re:Probably the worst beginner's distribution

[AKAImBatman]

FWIW, Red Hat has always liked to be on the Bleeding Edge of Linux, but in their own way. (e.g. If GNOME 2.x isn't ready to ship, make quick patches around the problems and ship it.) This tended to get them into a lot of trouble, because their OS would have all kinds of idiosynchrasies and inconsistencies that other distributions didn't exhibit.

RedHat decided to address the matter with the Fedora branch. Fedora is a perpetual beta of RedHat's enterprise product. By releasing this beta, RedHat is able to get real-world testing of their latest tech before they foist it upon paying customers.

As a result, Fedora tends to look very nice and has a lot of nice features that are hard to find elsewhere. (e.g. Its beautiful BlueCurve theme.) Unfortunately, it also means that you're testing beta software. Unless you are completely comfortable with that, you shouldn't use Fedora.

So you're right. Your professor was being a little kooky on this one. He was probably blinded by the "latest and greatest" mentality that tends to permeate the software industry.

Re:Probably the worst beginner's distribution

[ziggamon2.0]

Right... cause Ubuntu's release cycles are much longer than fedoras... right...

Isn't it time we get a new Godwin's law about comparing OS:es to Windows? ;-)

Re:Probably the worst beginner's distribution

[MikeB0Lton]

Funny, I've been using Redhat since release 5. The only installation problems I had were due to an old Promise ATA/100 PCI RAID 0/1 card. No issues other than that. Now issues with user experience, well... Redhat Linux 8. Need I say more :-) Perhaps it is your situation, but I've not had the problems you speak of. Have you submitted a BUG REPORT? Thought not.

Re:Probably the worst beginner's distribution

[xtracto]

So, that one was your one issue, my one issue was that when I tried to install it to my laptop external USB FC4 did not recognized it, nothing, zero, nada. For the installation my USB HD just did not existed.

I read in some forums that I needed to boot with some flags or something but I really did not wanted to bother so I installed Mandriva 2006 which recognized my external disk and installed without major problems.

I wonder if that bug/problem was fixed in this version...

Re:Probably the worst beginner's distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

Several questions here...
1. What were the specs of the machines?
2. How reliable where the CDs burned and the CD-ROM drives?
3. What do you mean by unwieldy?

Give facts, then you can point fingers. What if the CD-ROM drives were actually old and lousy at reading CDs? Paying RedHat for the pay-version won't solve that problem. Did you actually try another Linux distro? Just to at least prove that it was a Fedora problem, rather than a hardware problem. What if the CD-ROM drives were actually old and lousy at reading CDs? Trying another distro might result in the same problems.

You see, when you want to argue a point, give the facts.

Of course, trolls normally don't give facts.

Re:Probably the worst beginner's distribution

[4pins]

Amen brother. For the above application I would have used Debian for the ease of installing the components you need as you need them.

Re:Probably the worst beginner's distribution

[Listen Up]

Unfortunately, your last sentence is entirely speculation, based on absolutely no knowledge of the professor's motives whatsoever. That is the same problem as the parent poster, who is bad mouthing his professor in his post, although never actually asked his professor why he chose Fedora over RHEL.

If the parent poster was such a great Linux user, as he claims, he would have been interested in helping his fellow classmates to install, configure, and use Fedora so that everyone would be able to succeed at using Linux in a meaningful manner. Maybe he could have even setup a small user forum for his class to answer questions. There are a lot of possibilities, but the least of which would have been to ask his professor his reasoning for choosing Fedora over another distribution. Maybe with the proper arguments, it could have been brought to his professors attention that problems were occuring within the class by fellow classmates and that another solution or distribution could have been chosen to accomplish the tasks assigned to the class.

I will offer another speculation, that maybe Fedora was appropriate because it does not contain any non-GPL or possibly-illegal-in-the-US software out-of-the-box?

Re:Probably the worst beginner's distribution

[wintermute000]

Horses for courses... stable server environment = CentOS or Debian general purpose desktop = ubuntu electronic sandbox = fedora I learnt 'Nix from scratch via wrestling with FC4. Sometimes it was like wrestling jelly but now I'm keen as mustard to see what FC5 can do. Anywayz, since you were in class, whats the problem? More faults = more learning. If everything just works you learn nothing! The only thing I have trouble now with FC4 is proprietary video card drivers, and I'm not the only one / only distro with issues with bloody ATI :)

Re:Probably the worst beginner's distribution

[level_headed_midwest]

Hmm. I have a professor that likes FC4 as well. However, it seems to have not given him any problems on his 20 machines, or else he has fixed them and nobody's the wiser. A couple people in his class have D/Led and installed FC4 and have had awful problems with it regarding MP3 support, so I generally point them to SuSE 10.0 and the Guru/Packman repositories.

Re:Probably the worst beginner's distribution

[dbIII]

1) It was slow.

The default GUI environment is probably not suitable for your hardware, and is probably the entire problem. Personally I don't like gnome at all and would see that as most of the problem and suggest using something else, but I'm sure people here have tips on how to change the configuration to make gnome run better on slower hardware. Fluxbox , enlightenment and dozens of others handle resource usage a lot better.

It's linux - you can add all the stuff you like in SUSE or Debian or whatever to it, the distribution is just what you start with if you don't like it. If the teaching exercise was to get you to install and maintain systems then it sounds about right - why did the installer freeze on these people - did they give it stupid instructions, did they have bad hardware (happened to me in a FC4 install on an old disk two nights ago) or was the installer really buggy? How did the students get around this - did they have to use the text installer instead or feed it kernel options for odd hardware like RAID cards?

Re:Probably the worst beginner's distribution

[Sqwubbsy]

This reminds me of when Slackware jumped from Version 4 to Version 7 so it didn't look like they were lagging behind.

Re:Probably the worst beginner's distribution

[JungleBoy]

I'm going to get flammed onto the other side of zero for this, but...

I think you're full of it. I have FC3 & FC4 production servers out on the Internet. It rocks. I even use it on weird/cutting edge hardware and am able to make to purr like a kitten. I've had more problems with my Ubuntu install (on my laptop) than any other distro lately, except maybe Gentoo on an old Alpha, but that's another story.

If the students can't get their stuff together with FC, then RHEL isn't going to help them. Although, I do really like RHEL. SELinux & RHN are my friends.

As an aside, FC/RHEL is great for linux on the desktop, my Mom has been using it since RH 7.2.

Full disclosure. My bias towards RedHat is obvious, I'm an RHCE.

FC5 mirror

[Yenya]

The Fedora Download page, which is according to the announcement message supposed to redirect you to one of the mirrors, does not work - it redirects to ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com which is (of course) busy. So let me allow to advertise my mirror - if you are in Europe, I have still about half a gigabit of bandwidth free at

ftp://ftp.linux.cz/pub/linux/fedora-core/5/

-Yenya

Re:FC5 mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Half a gig? That's 500mb right? That's not even 1 CD. Use the torrents people.

Re:FC5 mirror

[Yenya]

It means gigabit/s, of course, this mirror has no data transfer limit. Anyway, sorry for the typos and two signatures in the previous post.

Re:FC5 mirror

[zerocool^]

Ditto for USians.

Mirror.cc.vt.edu

622 Mbits.

Also: CentOS just released 4.3 two days or so ago.

Re:FC5 mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, help everyone out and just seed a torrent.

Re:FC5 mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, though it would be cool if you carried the DVD images too.

Re:FC5 mirror

[zerocool^]

I don't actually run that one, it's run by the computing center. I'm not sure why they don't mirror the DVDs, I'll ask.

Re:Upgrading -- config files

[softcoder]

Quote: "Be sure to backup config files etc. that you may have put on the system partition."
Aye there's the rub. Even if you have all of YOUR stuff in your home directory (on a separate partition), how about all the config stuff? As a newbie, how would you even know what config stuff there was? If you upgrade, and the upgrade installs a new version of shorewall say, will the upgraded shorewall be able to use your existing config? How about hosts.allow and hosts.deny - are ehy preserved? how about your xinetd tweaks?
Not to mention any third party installs you have done that are not distro related, like say an MP3 player, or OpenOffice (say you have 2.0 and the distro ships with 1.x?) What about your custom KDE/Gnome menues?

The FC people don't seem to provide any guidance on any of the above. Not that I've found anyway.
I avoid upgrades like a trip to the dentist; I only do it if I absolutely have to.

Upgrade via yum is easier

[Cosine0]

Just download and install fedora-release.xx.rpm
Next, "yum upgrade"
And you don't even have to reboot...

Re:Upgrade via yum is easier

[NoExec]

That sounds quite appealing! Here is a page with more detailed instructions.

Re:Upgrade via yum is easier

[jroysdon]

"Only experienced Red Hat/Fedora Core users should attempt this, as the upgrade process may cause problems.

Theoretically, you should be able to upgrade from any Red Hat Linux/Fedora Core release to any Red Hat Linux/Fedora Core release with a yum-compatible repository (i.e. containing yum "header" files). I have successfully upgraded the following operating system releases using yum:

        * Red Hat Linux 7.2 to 9
        * Red Hat Linux 8.0 to 9
        * Red Hat Linux 8.0 to Fedora Core 2
        * Red Hat Linux 9 to Fedora Core 1
        * Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 2
        * Fedora Core 2 to Fedora Core 3
        * Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Core 4
"

Uhm, pass, I think I'll just do the traditional upgrade method. It's enough trouble dealing with the stuff that it breaks... I don't need extra work.

Re:Upgrade via yum is easier

[Anonymous Coward]

Before you do this, make sure your kernel is up to date, reboot and remove all of the old kernels.
FC upgrades usually have new features that won't install if old kernels exist.

rpm -qa|grep kernel
for everything except the most recent
rpm -e packagenames

Then you should be able to grab and install the new fedora-release.xx.rpm and continue as normal.

Xen can...

[LuckyStarr]

Well, I did actually run Windows Server 2003 using Xen 3.0.1. This was only 2 weeks ago. The only prerequisite is a Intel processor with the Vanderpool virtualization technology. Access to the screen is done via VNC.

Re:Redhat Naming

[Transdimentia]

Well... At least it's not stinky like a guy...

FC5 Release Announcement

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I'm missing something, but do we really need an Release Announcement like this? What is this? Linux for 5 year olds?

Fedora is great for server duties

[realmolo]

As a desktop distro, it sucks pretty hard. But for servers, it's great. It seems that *every* piece of server-oriented software is designed with Fedora/Red Hat in mind.

Re:Fedora is great for server duties

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm very happy to use it on the desktop. Some people, like me, use RHEL at work even without being IT guys or Linux gurus. In my case, for scientific computing and scientific application development for an oil company. For us it is great to have Fedora to use at home, so that when a feature appears in RHEL, we are already familiar with it! Also, continuously learning new stuff about Linux / Red Hat specifics at work translates into better productivity at home. A really virtuous circle.

Re:Fedora is great for server duties

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude been using Fedora as my desktop of choice since I moved off RH9. It absolutely rocks on the desktop and is stable as hell as well.

Not a beginers distro. for sure, but for experienced Linux professionals, it just plain rocks.

Re:Fedora is great for server duties

[madmaxx]

Insightful? I'm not sure how "sucks hard on the desktop" is insightful. We have several developers (and a few office staff) here who have used Fedora for a few years now, and we've had a very good time of it. It works well for us, our clients, and many of the people we know.

Do you perhaps have some insightful reasons why it sucks so hard?

Re:Fedora is great for server duties

[Alioth]

I'm probably not a typical desktop user, but I find Fedora Core makes a fine development workstation (by definition a desktop machine). Admittedly I'm not doing much word processing or printing on the box or what normal people might consider desktoppy stuff. But a development workstation is still a desktop.

I stand corrected

[ColourlessGreenIdeas]

I'd failed to notice that Vanderpool CPUs were available.

Fedora is on a fast development cycle

[winkydink]

If you prefer something that looks like RH but evolves at a more stately pace, may I suggest CentOS. This is RHEL built from the the Open Sources.

Re:Redhat Naming

[Anonymous Coward]

Typically on /. english is spoken. Can you define 'Frech'? Is that the Chinese pronunciation for 'fletch'? We all know what that means.....

To the tune of a Dire Straits song...

[jd]

I want my.... I want my KDE....

I want my.... I want my KDE....

I want my.... I want my KDE....

Now look at them desktops, that's the way to do it

You get your DCOP from your KDE

That ain't working, that's the way to code it

Widgets for nothing and your glyphs for free.

Bow that ain't working, that's the way to code it

Lemme tell ya, them guys ain't dumb

Maybe get a glitch in your brand-new icon

Maybe get a glitchy core-dump.

We gotta install ISO 9000

Custom language packs

We gotta move those partition boundries

We gotta move that Berlin GUI

Re:To the tune of a Dire Straits song...

[ahaning]

Hah. Thank you.

(But I think you meant ISO 9600?)

Re:To the tune of a Dire Straits song...

[absinthminded64]

Now. . if only we had the computing power to package a cool computer generated animation with your new tune.

Surely computers of the 80's wouldn't have handled such a task. They had enough trouble keeping the candles in their Candle Generated Array monitors lit.

Re:To the tune of a Dire Straits song...

[Narishma]

No, he probably meant 9660.

Re:To the tune of a Dire Straits song...

[Alien Being]

Monkey For Nothing

Now look at that monkey that's the way you do it
You trade unfairly with your WinPC
That ain't workin' that's the way you do it
Monkey for nothin' and chimps for free

Now that ain't workin' that's the way you do it
Lemme tell ya them guys ain't dumb
Maybe get a summons from DOJ lawyers
Maybe get a chair thrown at your head

We won't install no microsoft software
Custom kernel parameters
We'd rather relink all of those modules
We'd rather move those shared IRQs

See the ugly monkey with the sweatstain and the chrome-dome
Yeah buddy that's not his butt
That ugly monkey got his own jet airplane
That ugly monkey he's a billionaire

We won't install no microsoft software
Custom kernel parameters
We'd rather relink all of those modules
We'd rather move those shared IRQs

Re:To the tune of a Dire Straits song...

[ahaning]

Dammit, you're right.

Mod parent post up

[skogs]

Mod parent post up

Re: Inspector gadget

[matt me]

>We're up to *five* CD-ROMs now?
That's only half a DVD.

what sad..

[Anonymous Coward]

whats sad is windows XP is a single CD...

Re:what sad..

[MintyGreen]

Yes, and it has loads of third-party software, right? Right?

Oh. I guess not.

Re:what sad..

[YooHoo2U2]

whats sad is windows XP is a single CD...

I've never understood why some people bitch about getting stuff for free. So, tell me, Mr. Coward: Does that single CD also contain an office suite, multiple SQL servers, a full suite of programming languages (C/C++, perl, ruby, python, java, and more), dozens of games, etc. etc. etc? No? Then you better count the CDs for MS Office, SQL Server, Visual Studio, etc. etc. etc. When you get done, let us know how many you come up with.

(Actually, I guess I have to agree with you: It *is* sad that XP is a single CD because you don't get very much for your money)

Re:what sad..

[level_headed_midwest]

No, I think that he laments the dearth of software on that one XP CD. I mean, you sometimes can't even install it without sticking in a RAID/SATA floppy! And then when it is installed, you have to install all of your drivers, office suite, applications, etc. ad nauseum.

I for one appreciate the large amount of pre-installed stuff. I just wish that GCC would be installed by default as it almost never is.

Re:what sad..

[Millenniumman]

Does that single CD also contain an office suite, multiple SQL servers, a full suite of programming languages (C/C++, perl, ruby, python, java, and more), dozens of games, etc. etc. etc?

How many people use all of that?

Still too small, IMHO.

[jd]

It would be possible to triple the size of Fedora Core without even breaking into a sweat. And that's without even supporting multiple configurations of the same application (which they really should do) or rarer applications. If you want those, I reckon a 20 DVD pack would be necessary to be truly diverse.

I would re-work the layout of the CD-ROMS, though - you need too many for a minimal install - and I'd also re-work how to pick what is installed. At present, it is unnecessarily tedious to pick out what you want and I'm not convinced the default settings are useful or desirable.

However, since a lot of people download CD and DVD ISOs, probably the most useful utility would be to allow people to pick from a web form what they want, then have the server roll the appropriate images for you. Then, you only download what you actually need, not what Red Hat thinks you might need.

Re:Still too small, IMHO.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

However, since a lot of people download CD and DVD ISOs, probably the most useful utility would be to allow people to pick from a web form what they want, then have the server roll the appropriate images for you. Then, you only download what you actually need, not what Red Hat thinks you might need.

It's called apt.

Re:Still too small, IMHO.

[bogado]

I believe that a future fedora core will have optional CDs, this means that one cd will have development tools other will have KDE, other will have server software so you could only download what you need. I think I read this at fedora-planet, but I don't remember when it is suposed to be available, is it FC6 or is it later?

BitTorrent seeds

[bernywork]

Is anyone seeing any data coming from the BitTorrent seeds yet? (17:39 GMT)

At the moment, I can't see any peers who have data, and the seeds don't appear to be sending data yet. The amount of seeds is slowly rising though...

Re:BitTorrent seeds

[JourneymanMereel]

When I started downloading there were two seeds and only about 18 or so peers (and at least one of those was a friend of mine who I told about the release!), so it was very slow going... I was only getting about 10kb/s. Now there's 5 seeds and 4 distributed copies with 55 peers and I'm downloading at about 300kb/s. So I think the slashdotting is helping things :).

Re:BitTorrent seeds

[JourneymanMereel]

BTW, I probably started my download at about 17:00 GMT... and it looks like the release was at 16:18 GMT. This is the first time I've ever downloaded a distro on release day.... let alone started downloading about 45 minutes after the release was official!

Re:BitTorrent seeds

[Micah]

I started getting the i386 DVD around 16:00GMT with my 47KBytes/sec cable modem (in Ecuador). For the first few minutes I was only getting about 2KB/sec down, then it went up to about 22KB. When I checked on it around 18:30GMT, it was still wavering between 19 and 27KB. At that rate, it will take more than another day. :( Hopefully as more seeds come online, it will go up to the 47KB max, so I'll have it by tomorrow afternoon. :)

First time I've used BT for anything so big, so we'll see how it goes.

Re:BitTorrent seeds

[jroysdon]

Bittorrent usually has a slow ramp-up period where everyone is still leaching and not much data is available yet (no full seeds). My ds3 connection has been running for 45 minutes and has 1.1gb downloaded, so things are looking much better now...

# Filename Size Download Upload
1 bordeaux-binary-i386 3.1GiB389.3KiB/s323.4KiB/s
(34.8%) ETA in 2:57:10 - 75 peers 4 seeds 5 dist copies - 2.1GiB up 1.1GiB dn

Mind you I have it rate-limited to 15mbit/sec for upload, but there still is plenty of room.

The problem is usually most slower uploaders have a chicken-and-the-egg problem. You can't get a spot on a fast download peer unless you're uploading (which requires you to already have data to upload). You'll get dropped when the slots fill up and other uploading peers connect.

Once you have a bunch of data to upload, you'll start downloading faster and then have more data to upload, and generally see your upload/download rates max out.

So, like you said, you really need to find some good seeds to latch on to, since they don't require you to upload anything. Here's the stats changes while I was uploading... I found another couple seeds too:

# Filename Size Download Upload
1 bordeaux-binary-i386 3.1GiB453.9KiB/s321.1KiB/s
(38.6%) ETA in 2:38:17 - 74 peers 6 seeds 4 dist copies - 2.2GiB up 1.2GiB dn

Re:BitTorrent seeds

[Micah]

Hrmph. 5 1/2 hours ago, it was telling me 1 day, 8 hours left. Now it's saying 1 day, 23 hours! My cable modem speed is 47KBytes down/16K up (I'm in Ecuador, and sucky as it looks, this is a huge improvement; until a month ago it was 15K up and down!). On this transfer I'm averaging about 18 down, 13 up. I've *never* seen it over 30K down.

Sure hope it speeds up, or I won't even have it for work on Wednesday, which is what I was hoping for ...

Looks like I should have used wget, but I'll stick with BT this time for experiment sake.

Is there a 3D-enabled desktop in FC5?

[cciRRus]

I've tried XGL on Kororaa and I found it to be really cool and functional. Is XGL or equivalent packaged along with FC5?

Re:Is there a 3D-enabled desktop in FC5?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried XGL on Kororaa and I found it to be really cool and functional. Is XGL or equivalent packaged along with FC5?

Short answer: If you have a supported video card, I believe you should be able to run

gconftool-2 --get /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager --type bool true

to turn it on. Don't have FC5 installed myself, but, IIRC, it's what I heard would happen for FC5.

Long answer: AIGLX is built in, which is more or less equivalent to XGL. The main difference is that AIGLX is expected to be merged into Xorg soon, and that AIGLX is an incremental backwards-compatible upgrade to X instead of a replacement like GLX is.

The cool features and functionality you played with were probably compiz. Metacity has much of the same infrastructure as compiz (both are dual window & compositing managers, though the compositing side of metacity was considered broken before 2.14.0) and some of the same eye-candy. If I understand correctly, you can enable it on the fly after a default install via

gconftool-2 --get /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager --type bool true

(Note that this won't work with upstream metacity unless you're running from CVS HEAD; Fedora's metacity had at least one patch that went on HEAD and not the stable branch that's needed for this feature). compiz has more eye candy at the moment and should work on AIGLX; someone will probably decide to make packages of this at some point.

Re:Is there a 3D-enabled desktop in FC5?

[cciRRus]

Thanks, your reply was very informative (mod parent up?) but what I am actually asking is...

Is the 3D desktop feature included out-of-the-box?

That is, do I have to install more packages (other than the 5 CDs) or even compile from sources, other than altering the configurations (such as with gconftool2)?

AIGLX is built in , which is more or less equivalent to XGL. The main difference is that AIGLX is expected to be merged into Xorg soon , and that AIGLX is an incremental backwards-compatible upgrade to X instead of a replacement like GLX is.

"AIGLX is built in", yet "AIGLX is expected to be merged into X soon". Sounds contradictory to me. Care to elaborate further?

But I think I got this right: assuming AIGLX is present in FC5, so one could get the 3D stuff up and running with the preinstalled, default Metacity window manager, without needing to find and install Compiz.

Re:Is there a 3D-enabled desktop in FC5?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Thanks, your reply was very informative (mod parent up?) but what I
> am actually asking is...
> Is the 3D desktop feature included out-of-the-box?

I think he explained this very well. Note that we're talking about FC5 as a developer distro, so if you don't know how to configure it, then FC5 may not be the right distribution for you.

> "AIGLX is built in", yet "AIGLX is expected to be merged into X soon".
> Sounds contradictory to me. Care to elaborate further?

I think both contributions, Novell's as well as Redhat's, will be merged into the upstream. I don't see a contradiction.

Re:Is there a 3D-enabled desktop in FC5?

[init100]

assuming AIGLX is present in FC5

It isn't, but many of the necessary packages are shipped with FC5. If you want to try using AIGLX, you can install a separate X server with AIGLX support without touching your primary X server. More information can be found here:

Fedora Rendering Project Wiki
Fedora Rendering Project Wiki (AIGLX Page)
How to install AIGLX on Fedora Core

Fedora is a hobbiest OS

[skogs]

This is a hobby OS. It is the developement tree for RHEL. What is so hard to figure out here? It is not a beginner distro, it is a testing ground for new ideas and functions. The entire point is to test things, and separated by name so that people like your professor cannot sue RedHat when something doesn't work as it should.

Point release version numbers don't really apply to something that is perpetually beta. There are dozens of Fedora based distros...ever notice that they all make changes/mods for better security/hardwaredetection/userinterface/etc..

I know this is a flame, and some fedora fanboys will mod be down for this and flame me, but please...do look around> this is a perpetual beta. If you want the 'good stuff' pay for it, or download something that has another couple of steps of tweaking built in.

Re:Fedora is a hobbiest OS

[Nermal]

While it's true that Fedora is a proving ground for new technologies, it's a mistake to say that it is in "perpetual beta". Rawhide, the development branch of Fedora, is in perpetual beta. Fedora Core is the stable branch of Rawhide. If it's not stable then something is wrong. So while on the one hand Fedora is not intended to be enterprise-grade and I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the GP, on the other it does have its own test process and its own devel/stable release cycle.

Also, Fedora doesn't have point releases because point releases are old-fashioned. There's no need to wait for bug fixes to accumulate before making them available anymore because tools like Yum can be used to make them available immediately. New features are added every six months or so in a new major version, but it serves the same purpose as what used to be called a point release. The only difference is in the numbers.

Re:Fedora is a hobbiest OS

[Danny Rathjens]

I had to finally agree with you and am in the process of ditching fedora. I had upgraded my company's local servers(not production servers(those run RHEL)) to fedora from redhat and have had many issues. I would report bugs and they would get fixed in rawhide for inclusion in redhat enterprise and the current development fedora core, but never get fixed in the existing fedora core trees... that tells you where the priorities are.

So I finally made the switch to debian; it's not every slick, but is a lot more geared to what we need; a very configurable stable platform to run our own or our customized software on.
The security consciousness is very nice, too. After installing a simple base system I did 'apt-get install ssh' and I got a dialog asking whether it should disable ssh protocol 1 in the config and explaining why it might be a good idea and the drawbacks. It's a great combination between informative and somewhat user friendliness and impressive configurability.

Re:Fedora is a hobbiest OS

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to comment in your journal about why you were modded a Troll, but you don't allow comments (how ironic): perhaps it is because only Trollish assholes use the word "faggot"?

Re:Fedora is a hobbiest OS

[Knara]

I would report bugs and they would get fixed in rawhide for inclusion in redhat enterprise and the current development fedora core, but never get fixed in the existing fedora core trees... that tells you where the priorities are.

Not supporting enterprise servers, that's for sure. It's a testing and hobbyist distribution. If you need something stable and reliable from redhat, you pretty much have to pay for it. Not sure why this surprised you in the least.

That said, Debian is a good choice.

Re:Fedora is a hobbiest OS

[Chaoticmass]

I've always thought that Fedora, with it's rapid release cycle, was the distro you for you if you want the latest that linux has to offer. The bleeding edge if you will. Of course there are trade-offs. Before I settled on debian I tried a few distros, Fedora, Mandriva (Mandrake at the time), and Ubuntu.

I like Debian the most because of several things... Using Debian I feel like it's of higher quality. The long release schedule gives a lot of time to get everything working together well. It's not the most up to date, but I dont get weird problems from using it. Debian has a consistency-- It's that 'The Debian Way' thing. The way things are handled, configured, installed, etc seem to be more organized and consistant than other distros.

Using Fedora you get the latest of everything, and for me it's been stable and fast, but it doesn't seem to have the same consistency that I have grown to depend on in Debian.

I actively keep track of what Fedora is doing and I kind of root for it-- because I know the features it adopts will soon trickle down into other distros (and in a few years, maybe into Debian ;)

Re:Fedora is a hobbiest OS

[rasjani]

Modded a troll ? Maybe because i *was* trolling. Do you think that i was *not* flaming the op ? =) But to tell you how ironic i am, i really never disabled comments in the journal, i didnt even know there was such feature. I guess i need to enable them.

Re:Fedora is a hobbiest OS

[rasjani]

Ack, maybe you where referring to the actual journal entry i had IN my journal. That was posted years ago which is totally irrelevant to this case where i actually trolled. Btw, i was referring to meatball by faggot. http://www.hellward.dsl.pipex.com/Faggots2.jpg

Re:Redhat Naming

[Anonymous Coward]

Pray tell, what DOES Fedora mean in Portuguese? I mean, I'm Brazilian and I don't think I've ever heard of that word in Brazilian Portuguese. A Google search also yields no meaningful results, only Fedora Core related links, even when restricting the search language to Portuguese.

Re:Redhat Naming

[srmq]

Also, parent post is nonsense. Fedora does not mean anything in portuguese. "Fedor" (which comes from Latin "foetore") has no feminine in portuguese.

Looking more and more like OSX

[pete.com]

or is it just me?

Re:Redhat Naming

[Anonymous Coward]

u missed the point... reread..

Kernel version

[jd]

Fedora 5 comes with Kernel 2.6.15 with Red Hat patches. The latest official kernel is 2.6.16, which includes some important bugfixes. At the time of writing this, Fedora Core does NOT have 2.6.16 in the development tree, so it may be a few days before this upgrade is available.

Just as a personal note, I compile my own kernels, using the vanilla kernel patched with Andrew Morton's patches first, then with whatever of Red Hat's will still apply cleanly. Andrew Morton's -mm patches adds a lot of extremely useful functionality, for me, so that's my patchset of choice. (There are some nice real-time patches out there, too, but they're generally not compatible with other patchsets, making them a pain.)

Re:Spare me the bandwidth and tell me (flamebait)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it still sucketh. Which is why the clued people use gentoo or bsd.

Re:Redhat Naming

[DarkSarin]

I'll look it up later, if I remember, and post what I find--I've got a couple of good dictionaries. I don't recall the word, personally. Of course, you probably have access to a better dictionary than I do.

Re:Screenshots? Logos?

[markhb]

Somehow, I think that new logo looks suspiciously like the one found here, or even here.

Re:Redhat Naming

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe he missed the 'n' while typing "french".

Re:Spare me the bandwidth and tell me (flamebait)

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the "clued" as you call them are all masochists?

First security patch...

[romain wartel]

...has been released 25 minutes before the actual OS release. Generally you need to wait for at least a few minutes!

        * From: Fedora Project
        * To: fedora-announce-list redhat com
        * Subject: Announcing the release of Fedora Core 5
        * Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 11:18:16 -0500
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-li st/2006-March/msg00027.html

        * From: "Raymond Strode"
        * To: fedora-announce-list redhat com
        * Subject: [SECURITY] Fedora Core 5 Update: xorg-x11-server-1.0.1-9
        * Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 10:55:41 -0500
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-li st/2006-March/msg00026.html

--
Romain.

Re:First security patch...

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess that puts them about... lets see... carry the one....

Yeah, 3 months ahead of M$'s security patching force.

Re:First security patch...

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAHAHA!!!!! Did you think of that all by yourself or did you have mommy help you?

Re:First security patch...

[level_headed_midwest]

Didn's MS already have to patch Vista for the WMF exploit?

Distro Convergence

[tabdelgawad]

I was recently evaluating distros to install on my home server, and I basically realized that all the 'distros that matter' are converging. The big split used to be Gnome vs KDE, and it seems Gnome is winning as the standard. Add OpenOffice, Firefox, and Evolution, and you'd be hard-pressed to distinguish one desktop distro from another, except by the version numbers of the packages.

Yes, there's still an rpm-deb split, but with apt and yum, it's all the same to the end user. The server software suite is basically identical. The 'distros that matter' all offer regular patches and easy core updates/upgrades, and documentation is improving across the board.

I was going to install Ubuntu breezy, but then realized I lose nothing by going with Fedora Core 5. I just get the latest versions of the standard software available now. I'm sure if I were installing in May, Ubuntu dapper would be the natural choice. I wonder if within a year, the only question remaining will be: do you prefer brown themes or blue themes?

Fallacy

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Fedora Suggests: If possible, use patent unrestricted formats such as Ogg Vorbis (a lossy audio codec that has better quality than MP3), or FLAC (a lossless audio codec).

Fedora's suggestion sucks. For a start both Ogg and FLAC are encumbered by patents just like every other compression technology out there. Why Ogg and FLAC are exempt when JPEG2000 is not is quite beyond me.

And second, and most obviously, what's the point of excluding mp3. Hundreds of other pieces of software and even the kernel itself are probably "infringing" on hundreds more patents. That's how the computer software industry works.

Mp3 was excluded for one reason. Dogma. It has nothing to do with Fraunhofer being beligerent, because if it did, don't you think Ubuntu or others would have excluded mp3 support by now. No. It has to do with Red Hat, and now the Fedora Project, trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, i.e. trying to get the world to move away from mp3, and towards FOSS alternatives.

Wake up call. Mp3 is here to stay. Lossless formats will superceed it long before Ogg et al stand a chance. Fedora need to learn to live with this and give Fraunhofer and any other parasite who latches onto success the proverbial v-sign.

Re:Fallacy

[PitaBred]

Ubuntu HAS excluded mp3, though. You have to open up other, international repositories and install libraries before getting mp3 support. Most American-based distros are afraid of being sued for supporting copyright/patent infringing technology, so they don't do it. This is especially true with high-profile things like mp3.

Re:Fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Mp3 was excluded for one reason. Dogma. It has nothing to do with Fraunhofer being beligerent, because if it did, don't you think Ubuntu or others would have excluded mp3 support by now.

Uh, Ubuntu does exclude MP3 support by default; it is not included on the CD, you have to install an external package: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RestrictedFormats

You can do the same in Fedora.

Re:Fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Which part of "by default" do you not understand?

Re:Fallacy

[Crispy Critters]

"For a start both Ogg and FLAC are encumbered by patents just like every other compression technology out there."

Then why does the Ogg Vorbis FAQ say, "it is completely free, open, and unpatented"?

Why does the Flac FAQ describe it as an "open patent free codec"?

Please explain in what sense they are encumbered.

Re:Fallacy

[pyros]

It's not the existence of the patent, it's the license that the patented algorithms are offered under. That license is not compatible with the GPL for MP3 and CSS.

Re:Fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

'default', obviously

Re:Fallacy

[crush]

Mp3 was excluded for one reason. Dogma. It has nothing to do with Fraunhofer being beligerent, because if it did, don't you think Ubuntu or others would have excluded mp3 support by now. No. It has to do with Red Hat, and now the Fedora Project, trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, i.e. trying to get the world to move away from mp3, and towards FOSS alternatives.

I think if there's any "dogma" on display it's yours. Red Hat is a company incorporated in the USA and is legally liable for any infringement of Frauenhofer's patents. Ubuntu does not face that situation. Red Hat also owns significant assets unlike Ubuntu and is vulnerable on that score.

Cent OS - Free RedHat

[gatzke]

Remember, you can get the free version of RedHat from CentOS

http://www.centos.org/

No silly annual payments just to get support.

I personally use knoppix / debian since RedHat started charging for support.

People need to know CentOS is out there.

Re:Cent OS - Free RedHat

[SocietyoftheFist]

Where do you think Linux would be if people weren't making money of their distributions and if companies like IBM weren't paying people to work on it along with other OSS projects? Don't delude yourself in to believing that you'd see half of what you see without the immense interest of money making entities. Linux now compared to what it was 8 years ago isn't even close. Linux would be about as popular as any of the BSD distributions are noww if it was still all community based support and not those crazy companies asking for "silly annual payments just to get support".

Re:Cent OS - Free RedHat

[Isaac-Lew]

You do not have to pay for Fedora Core, either.

Re:Cent OS - Free RedHat

[Knara]

Linux would be about as popular as any of the BSD distributions are noww if it was still all community based support and not those crazy companies asking for "silly annual payments just to get support".

Wow, someone touched a nerve. Listen, he thinks the updates are silly. Good for him. Big deal. Get a grip.

Re:Cent OS - Free RedHat

[SocietyoftheFist]

LOL, no nerve touched. I just enjoy reading the writings of people that really believe that Linux is where it is at because of a bunch of guys sitting around helping each other out without renumeration for their work. I've been using Linux since Slack 2.x, the earliest kernel I ran was a 1.2.13 kernel, so I like it and use it. I'm not stupid enough to not realize that the reason that there is so much inertia behind it is because of money thrown at it though.

Re:Cent OS - Free RedHat

[Knara]

I'm not stupid enough to not realize that the reason that there is so much inertia behind it is because of money thrown at it though.

Therein lay the problematic assumption.

It's entirely possible given the statement by the OP that he realizes that the money from the sources you mentioned have progressed linux, but he finds it silly that personal users get charged for updates to a non-hobbyist desktop operating system (or server for that matter; after all, even MS doesn't charge for the windows update service after you've paid the one-time charge for a CPU license)

Re:Cent OS - Free RedHat

[pembo13]

So knoppix / debian gives free support?

Re:Cent OS - Free RedHat

[SocietyoftheFist]

Microsoft does charge for Windows update, it is included in the price of the operating system. Redhat can't charge for Linux, they charge for providing packaging and support. Redhat has done a lot for Linux and I don't really think it is fair to take them to task for building a successful busines model.

Poorest joke in a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever remnant of actuall "funny" there might be in that stupid post was rendered completely impotent by the last paranthesis. Not that there was much to begin with. May want to practice on your humour there, friend. Read some actually funny peoples work and turn off Seinfeld for a while.

Bought on DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

If like me you don't have broadband, you can get it from budgetlinuxcds.com on DVD for only $5

Re:Bought on DVD

[pembo13]

You can find more of such here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/OnlineV endors

Yeah...

[jd]

But it's too many syllables. (I think standards writers do this deliberately, to make parodies harder to write.)

Re:Redhat Naming

[bogado]

"fedor" is a substantive in Portuguese, it means bad odor. If you want to call someone a stinky you say the he is "fedorento", witch means has a bad odor or more plainly stinky. A woman with a bad case of lack of deodorant would be called "fedorenta".

"Fedora" has no meaning in Portuguese, but it does seam like the feminine for the word "fedor" and may sound like that to the more ignorant people. Usually switching a "o" for an "a" in the end of a word does turn it into a feminine word, for instance "enfermeiro" is a male nurse, while a "enfermeira" is a female nurse or "empregado" e "empregada" for employee. So you see at a first glance "fedor" e "fedora" may seem a male/female variation.

fluxbox

[chocolatetrumpet]

Try fluxbox for a light-weight window manager.

Fedora's verison of KDE is broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad the KDE version that Fedora and Redhat are distributing is broken.

Re:MP3's? See Fedora FAQ site

[normandr]

The Fedora FAQ page shows how to easily add mp3 functionality to FC4, FC3 etc.

http://www.fedorafaq.org/#mp3

I expect that the same steps will be available once yum packages are ready for Fedora 5

might be

[zogger]

In my experience using newer OSes on older hardware, RAM is way more important than CPU speed. I would suggest a minimum of half a gig if you want the latest gnome and kde desktops to function well without driving you nuts. Up to last year when a very strong surge borked my machine, I was still using a real old IBM with a PP200 as my main desktop. At half a gig, it ran the latest fedora at the time (FC2) quite well. At a quarter a gig RAM it sucked.

Of course, you might have a hard time trying it on a 3 gig hard drive(every release gets bigger), be very picky what you install from the disks. Do a semi bare minimum then download the rest application by application using yum (I use yumex the gui for yum). And be sure to add in the Livna repo if you want to get any propietary multimedia running, and he is good for later on tweaking the ATI and nvidia video drivers so they install and work without headaches..

Kudos for keeping old hardware running! I honestly don't know how well it installs on laptops (or runs sleep, etc), but on the desktops I like fedora. As an alternative small nice linux distro, you can always run one of the minis like puppy, damn small, or austrumi,etc if you have an optical drive in the machine. They give you "one of each" of the normal things you might need, no bloat.

Install always worked for me... PXE/ks is awesome!

[thule]

Personally I think the install program is one of the best around. The best feature is that is records your installation choices to a file so that it can be used later for a kickstart install. Using PZE and kickstart is a dream. Just reboot a machine, PXE boot it over the network. Tell the pxeloader which distro you want and walk away.

evolution note

[ebvwfbw]

If you upgrade from a previous version, it seems to do away with your Inbox. Simply pull up Folder-> Subscriptions and check Inbox on all of your servers. Someone with Evolution or Fedora should say 'Doh!

Phobia for odd numbers keeps me away...

[presarioD]

...from this one. Not just yet at least. If tradition is to be followed I'll upgrade from FC4 to FC6 all my machines later on. I want to erase WinXP from one of them and release that 50GB associated with it for data storage but since time is short I can just do all that in a scoop when upgrading with Anaconda next year.

Also, there seems to be some issues that creep up with odd numbered FCs that tend to smooth out in the evens, ya think?

Re:Phobia for odd numbers keeps me away...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think quality peaked with the release of Fedora 3. Too many things were broken in Fedora 4.

They totally lost me when they decided not to fix the broken Red Hat Network Alert Icon applet. That's the thingie that (should have) let you know about (critical security) updates.

Why wouldn't they fix it? The reason given was that it didn't matter if people didn't get the updates because Fedora 5 was coming.

Access to more than 2TB disk space

[sisukapalli1]

Any experts know whether the default installation of FC5 can see disks of size more than 2TB? We have problems in making FC3 see the disk, and were planning on testing with FC4. It appears that we may as well jump to FC5. Any thoughts on this?

S

Re:Access to more than 2TB disk space

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it can

- Expert

Thanks, but no thanks...

[HotBBQ]

If FC5 is like the last FC I tried (FC3) I still won't try it. Gentoo/Debian may have a steeper learning curve, but I think FC is just "too dumb" in comparison. Then again, FC is a great way to start using Linux, and probably the most (novice) user-friendly. Any particular reason to upgrade?

Re:Thanks, but no thanks...

[pembo13]

1) How will you know if you don't try it? 2) Someone said just the opposite (didn't agree with him either). But how is it dumb? or are you refering to Gnome?

Re:Thanks, but no thanks...

[HotBBQ]

Well the installation procedure comes to mind. I really disliked the package system; finding it to be very slow, cumbersome, and a bit rpm crazy. These are just my gripes. Like I said, I prefer other distros, but this one serves a purpose. I suppose I would call it "dumb" like I would call Windows "dumb", and certainly Windows is popular.

Yes, but...

[tsager]

does it run Firefox 2.0 alpha? ;-o

Now there's a rare sight...

[Kjella]

...someone that asks for a slashdotting by linking to huge binaries. Also, do not mind the trolls they're just jealous they don't have 500Mb/s of bandwidth (to spare, even!)

Re:Upgrading -- config files

[Jarlsberg]

Oh, I agree with you, and that's why I'm not bothering to upgrade. I've spent a lot of hours configuring the system for my use, and I'm *not* keen to do that again. Even installing something as basic as Mplayer is a huge undertaking on Fedora Core.

OT: Good, Slashdot!

[claes]

I am glad to see that Slashdot does not show the same disrespect to its readers and to Fedora as OSnews does. What I am thinking about is this comment: http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=14024& comment_id=105792

I am done with OSNews

Does FC5's udev work with orinoco wireless cards?

[Jswalden86]

Do orinoco wireless cards work with the udev/kernel used in FC5? The latest udev in FC4 breaks orinoco NICs, and I'd rather not install FC5 to find that it's still broken. (Presumably it is since there's been no activity in the bug recently, but there's always the chance it was fixed upstream and never noticed by Red Hat.) With FC4 I could revert the kernel/udev updates that broke it; doing the same with FC5 isn't just installing the "previous" udev/kernel packages (since there are none unless I want to start tracking through rawhide), and I don't have the time to make the effort.

And giving us lots of T&A

[cybrthng]

Isn't enough?

Personally i wouldn't know if playboy mirrored. The last thing i would be looking for there is linux.

Never release when drunk (Re:FC5 Release Announ

[Anonymous Coward]

This should remind us that it is a bad idea to announce a software release after drinking too much.
I'm sure writing like a 5 year old sounded good at the time.

What's with 2 pixel width default font.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're still using that stupid default font that makes every word appear like it's always bold. Use regular font like the default in M$ and MacOS. ie. The verticle line in the letter 'l' should be one pixel wide, not two as in gnome. Blame gnome for setting it, and fedora for not changing it.

Re:What's with 2 pixel width default font.

[r00t]

It's a message that your video resolution settings are obsolete.

Perhaps your eyes are young and healthy. Many people have trouble seeing little tiny things. For ages the work-around has been to run at 640x480. It's much nicer to just use fonts with lots of pixels so that things aren't so pixelated. Many LCDs look wonderful in exactly one resolution, the very highest, and crappy in all other resolutions. So a good installer will pick the highest resolution, then choose fonts big enough for old people to read.

You can change the font if it is too big.

If the font were too small, you couldn't read well enough to change it!

Ba-dum Tish!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://joke.popey.com/

note from a long-time linux user

[mozkill]

I have been a linux user/tester since early versions of Debian in 1996. Ubuntu 5.10 is the only distrobution out of a hundred I have tried in the last 10 years that worked as well as windows right out of the box.

Specifically, all the multimedia stuff worked out of the box.

All i did was install Ubuntu and then run the Automatix script. It worked like a charm and I am now a happy linux user once again. It worked so well that it is drawing me away from windows for use as my file sharing client computer.

Re:note from a long-time linux user

[pembo13]

Ok. So what's your point. This story is not about Ubuntu.

Re:note from a long-time linux user

[mozkill]

after reading all the comments on that article, it was obvious that people had a problem with the usability of Fedora. I have also had problems wrestling with that distrobution. i had to chime in and show my support for Ubuntu, which is the first linux distro I have ever seen that works great right out of the box.

i know that my comment wasn't directly related to the topic, but I was relevant.

Re:Redhat Naming

[level_headed_midwest]

So you're saying the French stink?

Go team!

[Dissectional]

My ISP in Australia has mirrored 5, but has denied access to the dir.

GG, Internode!

Idiots.

Re:Go team!

[Matt_R]

It's still in the process of being fully mirrored. Would rather they allow access to an incomplete mirror (and corrupted files)?

Why all the Fedora bashing?

[yobtah]

I've used a variety of distros (SuSE, Gentoo, Mandrake, Slackware, Debian) in addition to Fedora both at work and at home. Fedora remains my favorite for a wide range of reasons. Most of them are somehow related to, "it just works".

I like the ability to build things from source in a correctly configured and working build environment. Yes, the Fedora guys patch the kernel, but at least I can easily obtain source and expect it to build too.

The user interface is usable for multiple tasks and for extended periods. It isn't trying to be Enlightenment.

Package management is standardized, usable (there's that word again), and packages are readily available.

I enjoy using Linux, and I use it to do real work. Unfortunately there aren't many distros that lend themselves to this type of use. Fedora is at the top of my very short list.

And Fedora *finally* gets Firefox/Thunderbird 1.5!

[rklrkl]

The final release of Fedora Core 5 has, at long last, fixed the frankly bewildering lack of Firefox 1.5X and Thunderbird 1.5 in the distro. Yes, that's right - despite Fedora Core 4 still being a supported platform and OpenOffice.org 2.X being released for it, the Fedora developers steadfastly refused to upgrade Firefox or Thunderbird to the 1.5 release.

"Ah, but you can always build the Rawhide release on FC4" I hear you cry - sorry, bzzt, neither Firefox nor Thunderbird 1.5 will build without some mods of the respective Rawhide .src.rpm files. A very poor showing from Fedora devs there - let's happily jump to OO.org 2.X in the middle of FC4, but not go up a minor version of Firefox/Thunderbird during the same period.

In the end, I lost patience and packaged up the original mozilla.com binary .tar.gz's into RPMs using Thomas Cheung's Firefox/Thunderbird instructions, but I really shouldn't have to do this!

Worth look at Tomahawk Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

How does Fedora Core 5 different from previous versions? Is that just the packages more recent? Everybody else is offering Firefox, OpenOffice, etc? How does it different from others?

If you are looking forward to something new than package versions, its worth have a look at the Tomahawk Desktop, the multimedia Linux OS.

Government users and Playboy mirror

[T5]

Playboy mirroring FC has been a serious problem for some of us federal FC users. Imagine having to explain to those cleaning out your desk and processing your exit paperwork that you were just updating your computer!

Good thing that at my site I am the computer security manager. Since I'd have to sign-off on my own termination, I'm still good to go! Others may not be so lucky...

Re:Government users and Playboy mirror

[Secrity]

If any employer has a problem with their employees getting authorized software from particular sites that are listed as an official mirror by the software maintainers, the employer should block those sites at the firewalls or routers. As the computer security manager, why don't you 'protect' your employees from accidentally using the 'wrong' mirror?

I am not advocating government censorship, the government has the right to secure access on networks that it owns.

Knowing that the US government has such prejudices toward certain software mirrors, it makes me wish that I owned some hard core porn sites to use as FOSS mirrors.

You're lame

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up

It's the 5 disc installation

[rinkjustice]

Fedora absolutely rocks IMO, but the 5 disk installation is idiotic. I feel you on that one.

Uh 5 CDs?

[Sr. Pato]

That seems a little excessive; don'tcha think?

Although I must say, the interface looks mint.

Wireless support

[Chiisu]

How well does FC5 support wireless networking? I'd like to easily be able to use my Linksys G card for internet access.

First observations

[Hyvtti]

Mirrorlist from fedora.redhat.com that yum uses only has one mirror listed: http://download.fedoraproject.org/ . http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/ has no alternatives for fc5. Should wait a few days before trying 'yum update' again. Some updates are already available.

When in text mode installer, I go to package group details with F2, then select all packages, click OK, when I go again there, they are not selected. Therefore, it is not possible to install emacs initially, as emacs is not installed by default, at least in productivity / office profile.

Graphical installer cannot be used with flat panels, as the X server starts with vertical refresh rate over 85 Hz, and usually flat panels top below that. Only text mode installation is possible with flat panels.

gcj

[kingdon]

I've been developing with gcj since mid-2005. I would say that gcj (and the tools built with it like eclipse) are starting to be usable for the first time (as of the Fedora Core 4 updates from fall 2005 - haven't tried Fedora Core 5 yet but I'm eagerly awaiting to see if they got line numbers in stack traces working - that's a key thing which is missing in 4).

Now, "usable" means you can develop with them. It doesn't mean bug-free or complete. For one thing, the features correspond to Sun's 1.4 - little/no 1.5 stuff yet.

So going with Sun is still the path of least resistance, but if you are an open source bigot^H^H^H^H^Henthusiast, give gcj a try. It is really easy to install on Fedora (and perhaps a few others like Ubuntu).

Re:And Fedora *finally* gets Firefox/Thunderbird 1

[griffindj]

Have you thought of unpacking the tar.gz into /usr/lib/firefox-1.5/ and then changing the symbolic links in /usr/bin??? Worked for me, dont make things harder than they have to be, and then complain about them being too hard.

The new FC5

[GuyRCook]

It's definitely faster, had no issues installing, proving the Irish are indeed lucky. Keep up the good work, liking what I see so far.

GC