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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.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The author seems to have jumped the gun a bit on the install, since the NVIDIA issues were announced almost immediately after the release, and subsequently have been queued for immediate repair.
As for his comment that due to these issues it may not be the best starter disto, I agree, but only because Fedora is a testbed product, created to directly fill the void left by RedHat going to a subscription-only model for RHEL. CentOS is more stable by building RHEL from sources. In Fedoraland you take STABLE releases with a grain of salt.
My FC5 install went without a hitch this morning, and it let me create users after first boot (don't know why his didn't).
I actually like the new fonts and eye candy. The only visual *yawn* is that the Bluecurve icons are still there, and I've never been partial to them.
Compared to RHEL4 on the same system, FC5 is MUCH snapper, but I had my usual issues of smartd failing and having to use a PCMCIA wifi card instead of my built-in Intel (Thinkpad T43p).
Overall, the install worked and the system looks and responds great "right out of the box" (as well as any other distro or better).
If you're half as beautiful naked, you'd be 4 times as beautiful with twice as many clothes on.
Zealotry is one thing. But zealotry-zealotry?
Well, I won't contest that he does sound like a switcher, but that's not necessarilly a bad thing. In fact, it's good to always use whatever's best for you instead of getting stuck with what's most comfortable.
I actually liked the review. He was very helpful in sharing what needs to be done to get FC5 working with nVidia hardware. He was also very impartial to distro and desktop environment. The fact that he had a favorite Gnome desktop background makes his "until KDE 4.0" statement sound like he's just being openminded about things.
Kudos to the author! Very helpful article.
Note: I actually have an x86_64 machine with nVidia hardware (nForce4 and 6600GT vid), but oddly enough, graphical installation worked like a charm.
You're just being silly. In my experience yum is easier than apt-get (by a tiny amount), faster than apt-get (often by a large amount, but usually not noticeably so, and there are cases where apt-get is faster), and much smaller than apt-get (I like small software, as it's easier to fix--I once patched an early version of yum to re-add authentication support because I needed it and it took all of two hours to do...I couldn't even begin to grasp the apt-get 200k+ line codebase in two hours...I also suspect there are more bugs in apt-get because there are a lot more lines of codes for bugs to hide in).
To update your system with the latest packages:
yum update
vs.
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
Why the added "apt-get update" step? Because we need to make sure the repository data is up to date. yum checks for us, and downloads new data if the repository has changed. It only downloads new repodata files if the repository has changed, unlike the assertion of another poster that it downloads it all every time you use it. Software ought to do that extra step for me; I'm clearly connected to the network if I'm doing an "upgrade". It doesn't make sense to make the user do an extra step. yum offers the option of listing repos without pulling down repodata, since that can be done without network access. apt-get doesn't offer the choice of automatically getting new repo data. It seems to me that the edge case of listing packages without connecting to the net trumps the common case of updating or installing software in apt-get. That is a small wrongness that bugs me every time I use it.
That said, they both work amazingly well and I love them both. I am perfectly content to use either one on any system I manage. They far surpass yasts package management tools on SUSE, and many systems don't even have anything remotely comparable. I consider a system like yum or apt-get to be a minimal level of package management capability for any server I choose to deploy. Thus I'd never roll out a Mac OS X server, despite the quality of the hardware and shiny-ness of the GUI. Likewise for a Sun machine: until they have a system like yum/apt-get they're not even in the running. Patching on Sun is laughably obtuse, or it was a year or two ago when I last managed a Sun system. At least Windows allows OS updates to be performed easily and with some automation (but not effectively from the command line, and none of the non-MS software can be updated via Windows Update). But I'll happily deploy Fedora or Debian or CentOS or Ubuntu systems for production use. If up2date fully supported yum repositories (including the authentication support I mentioned needing) I would include RHEL in this list. Kickstart also rocks my socks and I hate not having it, but this discussion isn't about automated installations.
Has this changed? I tried it on a Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop. It has a i686 architecture/chipset and nvidia card.
However, while things such as yum are excellent and it had all necessary drivers (except nvidia but that's propietary, have to download, same for all distros) the system is slow and heavy.
I read that that's because the distro is optimized for i386, not i686. Anyone can tell me if this has changed in FC5?