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Initial Reactions to Fedora Core 5
Ki writes to tell us that he has put up a short review of Fedora Core 5 which covers the install and general first impressions to the new release. The author highlights several quirks in the installation and a few problems getting down to business, but overall the Fedora team seems to have made some very good progress.
That's what CentOS is for.
http://www.centos.org/
Holy crap! They're up to 5 already? Slow down guys. Nobody wants to upgrade systems they use for actual work that often. There's something to be said for stability.
The initial idea was Fedora was the testing ground for Red Hat Enterprise and that for actual work, you'd use RHEL and not Fedora. By its very design Fedora is supposed to be a fast-moving, cutting edge distro.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I think your best option is to read the comments at www.distrowatch.com and test them by yourself. The differences cover the package management tools, specific distribution tools, slightly different filesystem hierarchy and boot scripts, and finally the set of packages available for that distribution among others.
They could indeed borrow things from other distos, and they do. It's the entire point of collaborative software. However, each distrobution has its own particular style and way of doing things; ultimately, it comes down to user preference in most cases. For example, Slackware is your rock solid, never-fail distribution for servers and tinkerers; Ubuntu is your user friendly, easy-to-use distribution with great support for mom and pop; SuSE and RHEL are for corporate machines requiring easy administration and solid integration with existing technologies; Gentoo and LFS are for those intereeted in learning about the core of the system (and for masochists with lots of time).
It all boils down to preference and application. Successful approaches are shared for the good of all.
This is par for the course regarding Fedora. I've had the misfortune of having to install it on testbed machines at work, and it is the ultimate example of beta software. That's fine, I guess, for people who like to play with a beta OS, and RedHat made no bones about the fact that this is what they were doing with Fedora. That's all well and good - I just have no desire whatsoever to use a rickety, unstable system whose tools (like, say, "ifconfig" on FC4) segfault on me.
There are a few things you need to consider before giving Fedora a try.
1. No NTFS support: If dual boot, you will not be able to read your Windows partitions.
2. No MP3 support (it's been like that for a while.)
3. No support for propietary drivers: I've been told that this is more of a bug than an intended feature, but I haven't heard any certainty to support either side.
4. No ReiserFS
It's also missing the Tango Icons, Anjuta, and a few more apps. They aren't necessarily deal breakers, but with a 5 cd download, you'd expect them to be there. Lack of MP3 support is by design, although a lot of people really aren't aware of it. Items 1,3,4 can all be resolved by compiling your own kernel, but not everyone enjoys doing that, - and with a newly released distro, you probably shouldn't have to. I can understand no NTFS and MP3 support for patent issues, but why no ReiserFS?
Here is a link to one of the reviews that I came across. You should probably check the Forbidden Items List as well.
Really, how could Mandriva, Ubuntu, and Fedora Core be all that different from each other?
The answer is that these days, most large distros aren't dramatically different so far as I can see. There are slight differences in taste, with respect to choices of default sofware and configuration options, but not so far that you can't configure one to be equivalent to the other. They differ in preferred desktop (Gnome vs. KDE), preferred file system (ext3 vs. Reiser), but these hardly matter. They have different default UI themes. Ubuntu comes preconfigured to rely heavily on sudo for administrative work, if you believe in that sort of thing. All these distros have enough mindshare and resources behind them that practically anything you want is very likely to be available on all of them.
Fedora is, of course, a "bleeding edge" distro, which means you'll run into a few more problems, but nothing that people who want that sort of thing can't handle. Mandriva concentrates on working for most users who just want to have their OS working "out of the box". It's nicely polished, with well thought out defaults and a good selection of reasonably up to date software that works pretty well togeter. It's very impressive. Suse is pretty much the same, but it might be a better choice for corporate use, if you anticipate wanting to use Novell products to manage your Windows and Unix systems. Ubuntu is an innovative debian based distro; it has Debian's ideological purity without its dowdy conservatism. On the other hand, I've found its possible on Ubuntu to configure/upgrade yourself into a bit of a mess, for example you can amuse yourself getting captive-NTFS to work after a kernel upgrade, but people who ask questions like yours don't feel the need to have the latest kernel.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
everyone with a clue knew that about Redhat around version six...
Correction: version 5, which shipped with a very broken beta libc.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Yeah, but once they fixed 5, it was pretty good. 6, on the other hand, never got fixed...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
# sudo passwd
set your root password
now you can login as root...
Yes. Proper package management is one of the most complex things in modern software if done wrong. Never compound it all by making a package cocktail.
Besides, it's not the package format that makes compatibility. That's trivial. It's the underlying tree of software, where everything is put and how that is difficult. By advocating a single, compatible 'format', what you're actually advocating is a single distribution. Which would be stupid and unworkable for reasons I won't go into here.
So there you go kids - never stray from your vendor's repository unless you really really need to. And then only if you know what you're doing.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.