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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.
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.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Knowing a bit on your background would help helping you. Really.
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.
Who wants to hear comments from someone that switches between three distros and two window managers on every release?
Snippets from the article:
"I will say again, Gnome 2.14 has definitely improved in its responsiveness, and is quite a pleasure to use (until KDE 4.0 comes out I will use only Gnome 2.14)."
"Finally, to summarize, although FC5 definitely is not the perfect linux operating system, it will be my primary desktop until Suse 10.1 & Ubuntu Dapper is released."
Sounds like a fair weather guy to me.
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.
That's inhibited by most pervasive and universal force in the world of engineering: NIH.
...all seems well. The fonts seem a bit nicer, for what that's worth. Not sure about the new eye candy (rotating thingies around the cursor), but, hey.
Mostly I'm hoping that this problem is fixed. We shall see...
The Army reading list
I installed FC1 a long, long time ago... Then I changed my yum repositories over to Rawhide. Since then, the newest version of Fedora is always a "yum upgrade" away.
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
I've updated my main development box and I really like it so far. The only issue I had was getting the Nvidia drivers installed, however after a little bit of research even that was quite easy. I'm currently in the process of installing it on my laptop and that has also gone fairly smooth. Practically, everything has worked by default and the only issues on the laptop so far have been that I had to use ndiswrapper to get the wireless drivers working, which I also had to do under Debian and Ubuntu, and the ATI drivers aren't as easy to install as they could be.
If you're a developer or just love tinkering with software and your OS I would highly recommend it. The install is fairly straight forward and it has a lot of bleeding edge software available. The yum repositories are also quite full for it only being released a few days ago.
If you don't have the patience or the ability to install a kernel and the ATI or Nvidia drivers, I would simply recommend waiting a few weeks while the How To's and the repositories get updated with the new packages. If you're new to Linux, obviously, this isn't the distribution for you and you'd probably be better off trying to use something like Ubuntu. In my opinion, Fedora is and always will be for developers and hobbyists.
"A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing." - Alan Perlis
... have been around since before the Fedora split as redhat-config-* (after Fedora, they were renamed to system-config-*).
He is right that they're useful. Ubuntu, Suse, and other distros could really use system-config-samba, system-config-nfs, and others. (system-config-samba alone is about 10 times better than Ubuntu or Suse's Samba utilities.)
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
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.
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.
Sheesh, what else?
An enormous amount of work has gone into it, and it is being given away for free. There might be some issues to get thru, but they WILL be fixed, and the updates made (again) freely available.
The mind boggles that people exist who not only look the gift horse in the mouth, but also denigrate it.
Use the stanton finley install notes here if you want detailed instructions on core 5 setup.
http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_5_installati on_notes.html
I've tried both Fedora and {K/U}buntu. I stuck with Fedora for one reason ... sudo. There is no way to get rid of using sudo to do administrative tasks. Give me a user account and a root account on Ubuntu and I'll probably switch.
And yes, I do know you can enable the root account on Ubuntu, but I don't know how to make it such that it asks for the root password rather than the user password for sudo.
Oops...better run Windows. Errr...maybe not. Back to UNICS (http://support.internetconnection.net/DEFINITIONS /Definition_of_Unix.html).
That's nothing... Gentoo's already up to 2006.0 .
Has anyone else noticed that yum sucks? It's just plain slow. apt-get or rug are a lot faster. Is there no way to switch away from yum or simply make it do whatever apt or rug do to be so much more responsive? In general it's just not very user-friendly though. Maybe more so than apt is but less than rug. If we're going to use yum then lets make it work a little better.
Of course I wonder why in this day we are still using multiple packaging systems. It'd be great if at least the big two, Debian and RedHat, could get together and merge the best points of deb and rpm into a single package system both would use complete with good package management. Is it really so hard to do that? What issues are keeping these two package systems apart? Unity in package management would just make life easier for users of both family of distros and therefore would make Linux easier and help it grow.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
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.
I stopped with Fedora Core 4, and went on to try Ubuntu 5.10 for my satellite machines that require a minimal disk with OS, and use NFS (for the home directories), NIS (for authentication), email (routing), PostgreSQL, DNS, gateway, etc. from my main server machines.
I usually start with a clean disk and just reload everything (this was one nice feature of Fedora). The last "stable" Fedore was Core 2 though, since then I found that there were just a multitude of little problems getting NIS, NFS, almost anything, to work.
I still like the Fedora way of installing packages and updates, so for a quick or specific purpose machine I will use CentOS, where I can expect updates well into the next decade. Fedora leaves me an orphan after a year or so. So I'm trying Ubuntu, which I have found that things are better tested and integrated. There's still a few "gotcha's" but for the most part I hadn't had to spend hours and hours trying to get NFS & NIS working. However, we'll see the true test comes when the next Ubuntu arrives. Instead of the clean disk approach, I will be using the full update capability, because Ubuntu just installs the minimum and requires me to pick and choose the packages I want or need.
Anyways, the bottom line is that I care diddly squat about how the distribution works! I care how well it integrates with the other Unix services like DNS, NIS, NFS, printing, email, etc.
I hate sigs (especially yours which is a waste of my bandwidth)
"One size fits all" doesn't work for operating systems.
Stuff that works very well for certain types of users may be incredibly annoying for other types.
For example, Ubuntu is designed to be very friendly to new users. As a power user, the first time I tried Ubuntu it was like bashing my head against a brick wall repeatedly. It's a great distro for many people, it's just *not* for me. (And IMHO, not for anyone trying to set up a server machine.)
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Gentoo is an excellent distro for experienced power users, but it's a nightmare for new users. (In fact, it gives those new users more than enough rope to hang themselves. New Gentoo users typically push their CFLAG optimizations to insane and unstable limits because they can and it's cool, in the end breaking their system. Those are the users that the "Gentoo is for Ricers" page targets.) This is why I use Gentoo but would not ever reccommend it to a Linux newbie.
Fedora Core is somewhere in the middle ground between Ubuntu and Gentoo. As such, it tends to be the distro I reccommend to new people who want a system that's reasonably easy to get started with but still allows you to become familiar with the "down and dirty" details of a Linux installation.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Can someone tell me what the actuall differences are between the major linux distro's?
If you really want a detailed list of differences, just compare each distro's list of which versions of which packages they include.
Beyond that, the differences exist as more of a philosophical matter than anything you would necessarily notice at a glance or any packages you'll find outright missing.
For example, Slackware tries to look the most Unix-like. Debian tries to use absolutely nothing except free-as-in-speech software. Gentoo tries to squeeze as much performance as possible out of a specific system by compiling the entire distro on the spot. Redhat tries to make sure their business versions work as intended by using the Fedora line for testing.
In practice, though, they all have basically the same things installed, in one or two semi-standard locations.
As for which you should use - Entirely up to you. I considered myself a Slackware guy until the 10.x line, where I kept getting kernel "Oops"es (on three totally different machines, so not just bad hardware on one of them). On one of them, I have FC4 running now, and I'll probably move the others to Fedora as well if it runs stably enough.
And just to drive home my point about the similarity - As my basis for choosing FC4 over Debian Stable, I could FTP all four RH4 install ISOs at once from different sites, while I couldn't get a single HTTP or FTP debian mirror to let me have them without throttling me (and Debian fans, don't bother telling me about Jigdo or to just use BitTorrent - I just wanted to get a single machine back up ASAP, not learn how to use yet another zealously-required download manager).
Ah, the classic Package Management Unification topic! It rears its head from time to time, and will probably never be resolved. I've rarely downloaded rpm's from sources other than managed repositories (official or unofficial places like Dag Wieers and Livna), with CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office being one exception. I can't think of many pieces of software which aren't repackaged by Debian/Fedora (the distributions I'm familiar with) besides Helix Player, Skype and CrossOver Office.
Each distribution maintain their own packages and meet the dependencies for their own versions, applying custom patches that work with the custom patch-sets applied to their distribution's kernel. The typical path for these kernel and utility patches to merge is upstream with their authors, and until there is more cross-fertilisation of home-made patches, I can't see everyone adopting even an LSB-compatible package format.
(Incidentally, it's odd how F/LOSS has advocates who recommend people use it to avoid reinventing the wheel, while each distribution has people who reimplement work done by others in their own distributions...)
Fedora Core itself is a *great* distro, imho one of the best, and in many ways *technically* better than Ubuntu 5 (I'm holding out for ubuntu 6 to be THE killer linux - fc5 will hold me tight until then). Unfortunately Fedora's real problems are not bugs on CD, but problems with the project and community. There is none. The official website says nothing, rarely updated more regularly but to quietly change a digit after a new release. Look today and you'd never know a cracking new version was released yesterday. Compare with the GNOME.org page!! That's what I like. Sell yourself! If Fedora Core 6 wants to take back some of the sprawling ground I forsee Ubuntu 6 will have stormed over (perhaps in an early firefox way), the project really needs to pull their socks up in this respect. These are the major gnome distributions equating to the old red hat v debian. Certainly anyone starting with Linux today would choose Ubuntu over Fedora Core. Their website is an friendly warm inviting smile not an empty cold wall. Yes there is fedoraforums and fedoranews and the project wiki, but I don't feel like I'm giving feedback or get any special kick from using this system. So yes I still love my perfect Fedora, but I want more!
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.
Sudo isn't supposed to ask for the root password - it's supposed to ask for the user's password because its intent is to verify that the user really is the user who was granted permissions by visudo. The program that would escalate you to root, requiring the root password, is su.
And I'm sure that it works that way on Fedora too, by the way. That's not a distinction between Fedora and Ubuntu.
-Neil
I've nothing to say here...
I tend to disagree - I find those utilities very limiting and rarely have I used any of the daemons they've got those tools made for in the way that they thought I should use them. I've had to hack up the config files just about every time - Samba doesn't work when it's only a few options. There are more for a reason. And CUPS and NFS, and PAM especially.
Ultimately, those utilities and the OS's reliance on them are one of the biggest drawbacks I think.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
I knew that my incredibly hard-to-understand scrawling would cause some confusion.
I don't like sudo because I have to append "sudo" to everything. I made a root account on Ubuntu, but the pop-up windows for GUI programs that required it, still used the sudo (user) password.
Upon looking around, I hear using "sudo bash" is a good way to get around typing "sudo" on every line. Why I never though of that, I'll never know. I'd still like for an attacker to have to break 2 passwords rather than one.
Note: Fedora doesn't use sudo by default. It can be installed, but I don't like it. Ubuntu requires it.
Actually, I agree with you... I rarely use the system-config-* programs myself. I'm a CLI junky and prefer to edit the config files myself with vim.
About the only one I use regularly is system-config-samba to add Samba shares quickly and easily. Just a few seconds to add a new share, change it to share-level security, and you're done; Samba picks up the changes immediately. I find system-config-samba much easier to use than editing smb.conf by hand.
Ubuntu has no means by which to change the security level (other than by hand). Suse's YaST doesn't seem to keep the settings when I change it to "security = shared".
Where I can get Samba public-access shares working out-of-the-box with Fedora, it takes a lot of effort to get it working under Ubuntu/Suse.
While I or you may not appreciate the GUI tools (because we're smart and whatnot), by no means does the OS rely on them, they're just available for all the stupid people.
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
Yeah, I'm new to Linux. :-)
Thanks for the info.
The big splits are around package management, kernel features, and choice of default applications.
...
For package management you have APT + dpkg (Ubuntu, Debian, MEPIS); Portage (Gentoo); RPM and YUM (Fedora); RPM and YAST (SLES); RPM and APT (Connectiva),
For kernel features, some distros have a "Not Invented Here" syndrome which can be problematic. For example, RedHat have a religious objection to ReiserFS, to the extent of not supporting it at all in RHEL, whereas it's the default filesystem on SuSE--even SLES.
Then there are the distributions that pick sendmail, vs the ones which pick postfix; Postgres vs MySQL; GNOME vs KDE.
The application differences are the smallest issue, really, as it's usually easy enough to switch. Crippling the kernel to remove support for standard filesystems (is a real pain, and I wish distros wouldn't do it.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
You're a dumbass troll. Fedora is the testbed for RedHat. By definition, they have faster, less tested releases. What would be the use of waiting for a fully tested release? Then they'd be no different than RedHat itself.
/me turns my troll filter up another notch.
And yes, we are product testing. We're quite aware of that fact. Why do you think that OSS projects have public bug databases?
I guess this makes me a dumbass for responding to such a blatant troll.
or, like, sudo su -
or something
or sudo vi , then !
or something
Since I'm trolling, explain to me how this is ANY DIFFERENT from what Suse is doing? They give away OpenSUSE, as well as sell retail boxed sets. Isn't what Fedora is doing with buggy releases the exact same thing that got Mandrake deemed as "crap" for years on end? Instead of heated name calling, do clarify the differences.
That's because there aren't any, and you're just trying to divert attention from the issue by using the same old "troll" name calling tatic.
It's Debian, right?
Join Tor today!
Instead, as with Mac OS X, after the first boot you are *required* to make a non-root user before you can log in and actually use the computer. Apparently his motherboard problems prevented him from reaching this first boot stage.
And forget about the mp3/dvd stuff. Get over it. Fedora will *never* support this stuff without adding a 3rd party repository because of legal reasons. Ubuntu doesn't either, out of the box. Now arguably Ubuntu wins here because it's package utility will give the option to automatically add in the 3rd-party illegal (in the US) repositories straight away. Fedora might want to consider that.
Anyway, I find all the comments about how fedora sucks to be amusing. I find that Fedora fits my needs quite well, thank you. I don't use every version; I only upgrade once a year. I'm typing this on FC3 right now, which is working great. FC5 will go on soon. I'm kind of on an odd-number schedule. In my experience the odd-numbered releases of Fedora Core are the best anyway. I tried Ubuntu recently, and was impressed, but it won't replace FC anytime soon on my box. One good reason for that is that I maintain 10 or 12 RHEL4 boxes, and I need an environment that is similar for development purposes.
Ubuntu doesn't prevent the creation of a root password, that's just not the default.
I believe that
sudo su -
passwd
will let you set the root password, after which you can log in as root.
# sudo passwd
set your root password
now you can login as root...
Well, for me I'm having to upgrade a machine to FC5. At work we had FC4, but some people had their machines upgrade to hp compaq dc7600. FC4 doesn't like the keyboard; once past grub, the keyboard is unresponsive. However, FC5 works. Probably something with the kernel, but at least the machine is usable now.
Handy tip I learnt the hard way. I had a problem with FC3 (this should really be fixed by now - I did file a bug). The installer allowed me - unfamiliar with linux but confident and willing to learn to partition my system myself to install with / and /swap, WITHOUT a /boot partition. This I later learnt is quite important, and it's absence fucked stuff severely, most noticeably not running the first-boot stuff, meaning I didn't create a user. When I first turned it on and I could not login. I reinstalled.
You could have at least included a link or a quote:
http://funroll-loops.org/
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.
I really wish I'd read this before Sunday.
"There was enough glitches in the second install, that I can say if you have a Nvidia card or a motherboard with the Nvidia nForce chipset, you should look elsewhere for a linux o.s. or be prepared to do a fair amount of tweaking."
I have both an Nvidia graphics card and the nForce chipset, and this was my first Linux install ever. I formatted a 120gb hard drive, painstakingly backing everything up and exporting configs and such, and did the tedious format and install process. Once actually logged on to Fedora, the graphics were horrible and after a vague 15 minutes downloading the results of a "nvidia linux drivers" search (didn't work) I reformatted and put Windows back on (which incidentally, picked up "b4db0yz.exe" within an hour and wouldn't let me use Windows Update due to services failing, so had to be formatted again). If it wasn't for the slow response time due to the graphics issues and the horrible lag and refresh rates I would have kept it installed, though.
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?
Basically, it's really hard and arbitrary to do OS versioning. In software, there's guidelines in versioning. If the API changes and might break stuff, that's a new major number. Significant features might also get a new major version number. Its not so easy with an entire OS. Fedora doesn't really have an API that would change. A distribution doesn't generally make huge leaps and bounds between releases like a piece of software might either. Sure, the numbers will eventually get up there, but so what? Is "Fifty" that much harder to say than "five"?
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Start with Fedora Core 4.
Browse to: http://nvidia.com/drivers
Select linux IA32/AMD64 as your platform.
Download, make executable, run. Should automagically set up everything for you.
It worked fine for me...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
It would be great to have suspend2 (aka hibernate) support. When I'm not using my home computer I want it to use zero power but still be able to leave all my applications and documents open.
Score: 0 (-1 offtopic, +1 interesting)
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
sudo su will drop you to a super user shell from which you type exit to return to regular user land.
.*" to erase all my personal pref files, but instead typed "rm -rf /*" (. and / being next to each other). After a minute, I began to wonder why it was taking so long to erase what should have only been a few files.
On Ubuntu, enable the root account, and remove sudo rights from your main user account, and now it works just like normal. However you'll have to log out to do any graphical superuser functions (or start those graphical superuser functions from a superuser shell).
In general it is considered bad practice to ever open a super user shell. One of the reasons people like to use sudo is that it lets you execute a series of superuser commands in a row with only having to type your password once (before it times out and requires the password again in a few minutes). It's the middle road between the danger of a full-time root shell and having to type your root password for every root command.
Running in a root shell when you can avoid it is dangerous because there are certain very easy to make typos that can have absolutely cataclysmic results. I once meant to type "rm -rf
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Advanced Fedora may be, but Ihope they fixed their installer. I tried it a few weeks ago from the beta, and it took forever to get anything done.
After asking me a lot of extraneous questions (a more confusing install than even Debian's installer), and then afterwards, it would present me with a screen explaining what it was going to do (e.g. generate the package list), and then prompt me to click 'Next' to start it. It would then do whatever it needed to do, and then present me with another screen telling me what it was going to do, and then prompt me to click 'Next' to start that. This went on several times until the installer just locked up (as near as I could tell) and I just gave up on it.
Pretty sad situation. I often say that Microsoft needs to take a lesson from Apple's installer, but it's kind of depressing to say that Fedora needs to take a lesson from Microsoft's.
I see where our mis-communication is now. When I said no ReiserFS support, I meant in the partioner. You can install on an existing ReiserFS partiton, but you can't create one during the install process.
I find samba to be one of the daemons that you really should do by hand. The syntax is easy to read and fairly straightforward, and you just get so much better control from doing it that way. Some utilities are really helpful though. I like the service one since it puts all of the initd and xinitd stuff in one well organized place. You don't have to wander all over /etc to get things set up.
...
Check out this page. But yeah, I see what you are saying.
> Since I'm trolling, explain to me how this is ANY DIFFERENT from what Suse is doing? They give away OpenSUSE, as well as sell retail boxed sets.
...
And they just started doing so, what, six or seven months ago? The opensuse.org domain was registered July of '05 versus fedoraproject.org which was registered in September of '03, FWIW. My take is that it's an attempt to gain them visibility and to grow a community around their product (much like Fedora) so that their enterprise products wouldn't be marginalized. I've certainly taken a harder look at the SUSE stuff now that I can get a copy of it for free versus some rather obtuse LiveCD that wouldn't install to a hard drive. So, to answer your question - there is very little difference except that SUSE has only very recently gotten in the game and hasn't had as long to suffer at the hands of the community. Recall the old adage about too many cooks and the broth
> Isn't what Fedora is doing with buggy releases the exact same thing that got Mandrake deemed as "crap" for years on end?
Perhaps, except Mandrake insisted that you PAY for their crap (or wait an additional period of time so that folks in the Mandrake Club would iron out many of the issues and then release a free version). Why anybody put up with that is beyond me.
> Instead of heated name calling, do clarify the differences.
I trust that clarifies the differences for you.
> That's because there aren't any, and you're just trying to divert attention from the issue by using the same old "troll" name calling tatic.
Actually, you were trolling. Had OpenSUSE existed for as long as Fedora, then you'd be correct in calling foul, but to compare a project with two and a half years of baggage to a six-month-old (and, arguably less popular so far) project smacks of revisionist history.
James
Intel wireless 2100, 2200 and 2915 are working just fine in FC4 and FC5. You only need to download the firmware for it, because it is not legal to distribute with Fedora.
The reviewer was not prompted to create non-root users because he did a text install, which booted into runlevel 3. Runlevel 5 (graphical mode) runs firstboot, which gives you the option to create users, setup ntp and other stuff.
You missed the point entirely, although that was a nice attempt. The point was call a duck a duck. Don't say "deal with it because it's free". Don't say "if it sucks that's your fault for using an unofficial product." So although well said, your point wasn't the least bit relevant, although I greatly appreciate you respoding with opinion as opposed to insults.
Oh and FYI: SuSE isos were available for free download since early 2004. That's not that bad, since Fedora's first release was in late 2003.
When do those pesky MP3 patents expire, anyway? I don't see distros fretting about GIF support anymore..
/another FC3 user
I'm pretty sure the gif patent did expire finally. Unfortunately the mp3 patent probably won't until the format is long obsolete. In the meantime, all my music is in ogg, and I transcode to the patent-encumbered formates for external devices. With high-quality oggs, the transcoding is hardly noticable on most portable devices.
Successfully upgraded from FC3 to FC4 online, one reload of the server to get the new kernel running. Should be the same with FC5 when I decide to take it live.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
The IP address for them doesn't exist, or at east that is the error all the torrent clients on 4 networks on 2 different backbones all tell me.
I HATE installing an OS on multiple CD's...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
This is just silly.
sudo -i is the root-like shell.
sudo -s starts a root shell, maintaining most of your environment (this is the most commonly used, I'd think)
Breaking two passwords? Are you insane? With sudo, at least your list of sudo-able users is generally only readable by root (afaik) and sudo attempts on non-sudo enabled users are logged, whereas with the usual root accou setup anyone who breaks any user account can take a look at the user groups, find the root group (if any), and on many systems be able to su from any compromised user account by default!
I would say your argument is fairly tenuous in substance, at best.
Personally I didn't think this review was worth the read... does this guy actually know anything about linux? Fro example he states:
"Basically a new kernel was required because of a glitch with the default kernel and non-gpl drivers."
Yes - nVidia have non-gpl drivers which is why they're not included in the distro, however a new kernel is NOT required to install them. When installing the nVidia drivers they install script will try and download the driver module for the correct kernel via ftp, if there are no drivers on the ftp site for your kernel then it will compile them. This requires the kernel source, which Fedora doesn't install by default (something I think it should do but anyway). If you install the kernel source rpm the nVidia drivers will install fine with the default kernel.
The MP3 issue is the same, the MP3 format is not free all over the world - therefore it is not included as default. If you can legally use the MP3 format where you are doing a "yum install xmms-mp3" (if you use xmms) is hardly a problem... although perhaps they should have an option during installation asking if you can legally use MP3's and do it for you.
Also there's no mention of disk partitioning, did the user just choose auto partitioning? Someone I know tried FC5 last night and had problems with overlapping cylinders and not being able to create 4 primary partitions. Sounds like there's a few bugs in the version of disk druid - still not a problem if you use the emergency shell (ctrl-alt-f2) and use fdisk and return with ctrl-alt-f7 to tell disk druid which partitions you want as which.
From TFA it seems like this reviewer is more concerned with nice eye candy (downloading a wallpaper etc) than actually writing the review... perhaps he should move back to Windows if that's the case!
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
What are you talking about? Suspend (SWSUSP), the in-kernel version, already supports hibernate (suspend-to-disk), and is enabled on FC5 by default. Coupled with (also in the distro) gnome-power-manager, I just have to hit the power button on my laptop for it to go into hibernation... Or if you're the "do it by hand" type, just run "pm-hibernate" (part of the pm-utils package)
> You missed the point entirely, although that was a nice attempt. The point was call a duck a duck. Don't say "deal with it because it's free". Don't say "if it sucks that's your fault for using an unofficial product."
...
... spotty. That's simply the nature of a community-driven distro. Early on Fedora had RedHat playing the part of the heavy and keeping people focused on all the necessary minutia. But they got yelled at because the process wasn't "open" enough. So they loosened up control and the inevitable result happened: broken releases.
But my point was that these aren't both ducks. They both exhibit duck-ish behavior in that they float on water and fly, but one is a mallard and the other is a canadian goose. =P
> So although well said, your point wasn't the least bit relevant, although I greatly appreciate you respoding with opinion as opposed to insults.
Er, I appreciate the cordiality but I'm not the only one missing points apparently
> Oh and FYI: SuSE isos were available for free download since early 2004. That's not that bad, since Fedora's first release was in late 2003.
Having ISOs freely available isn't quite the same thing though - and THAT was my point. Sure, SUSE made ISOs available but that wasn't a community-driven project, it was their formerly commercial-only product that was tightly controlled by internal engineers. Versus RedHat's increasingly more hands-off approach to Fedora, which is what their community demands.
What I was attempting to point out was that Fedora's quality will continue to be
Fedora has no strong center, no singular vision to guide it. Ubuntu has Shuttleworth and a nicely-defined hierarchy to look to for direction. Slackware has Patrick. Debian has similar community issues though they manifest themselves differently - they just never release distros anymore (and the last one they did push out was initially even more broken than FC5).
I guess what I'm saying is that, despite RedHat's involvement, thinking of Fedora like you used to think of RedHat 9 and earlier is incorrect. Fedora's new focus is on tracking the latest-and-greatest releases of stuff and not on achieving any great stability. If you want something that will predictably just work then you want one of the Enterprise-focused distros.
Time has moved on and this duck has evolved into a goose.
James
Although this discussion has ended, I will gladly admit that you make a lot of good points. I guess I missed the point as well, because the whole discussion somehow got off tangent, and I followed along instead of writing the ship.
My point was this: don't answer every problem there is with Fedora or Linux in a whole with "it's free so shut up". Don't counter someone's bad expieriences with "well it's a test bed so that's dumb on your part." I was not trolling in any way, shape, or form. Both of the quotes I put in the original post were said in this very thread, and they're frequently said on the topic of Fedora. So how can one be trolling if they're merely responding to someone else's remarks? It amazes me how opinions to the far right are openly accepted here, but comments from the middle (not even to the left) are always considered trolling. And we as Linux users wonder why we're always considered zealots and such.
If Fedora WASN'T someone's personal favorite, and it had the same problems, the same people who made those comments would be saying "that's why I don't use Fedora, switch to distro X". If it were Microsoft giving someone away for free, these same people would be telling you they should have some sort of responsibility to release better software, even if it is free. The whole issue reeks of personal bias.
Just like there is something that's free and always broken (not necessarily saying that Fedora is), there is something Like Slackware 10 or Ubuntu that works or is less buggy.
Just installed FC5 last night and aside from the nvidia/ati driver issue it's a great release from Fedora guys. If you're running FC3, now is the time to upgrade. Fedora Core 4 was such a buggy/slow/broken mess that everyone except for the beta testers should've avoided it altogether. Could that be that it had an even number in the release? ;)
Stopped reading TFA on the second page when the reviewer couldn't spell 'lose'. I don't really care if you think this is petty, or I'm a spelling nazi...if you can't spell a 4 letter word, you have no business passing yourself off as any type of writer. And I don't consider myself one...just a geek who can tell the difference between loose and lose.
Okay...went back and read the rest of the "review".
A "review" that spends 3 out of 5 pages on what the installer looks like is...lame. How many times do I have to read about the "Fedora Bubbles"? Is that relevant to how FC5 operates as a system?
I see very little to back up this claim: "But apart from these little details I can confidently say that Fedora Core 5 is the best desktop GNU/Linux distribution available at the moment.".
Really? Why? Because the installer was so pretty?
Canonical Anonymous Coward
Can a sig be more clever than it's creator?