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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/
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
Umm, didn't you notice that Fedora is the development testbed? It's supposed to update quickly so new things get tested before RedHat gives them to paying customers. If you're doing real work on Fedora, I feel your pain. Switch your servers to Centos, and save Fedora for playing on your desktop!
Centos + Dag Wieers' repo is a sweet setup. Dag, if you read this, thanks a lot for great packages.
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.
If you're doing real work on Fedora, I feel your pain.
I don't. I do my real work on Debian stable.
I know it's a testbed, it's just shocking that it's at version 5 when it seems like only yesterday that it didn't exist at all. We are talking initial reactions here, right?
I know it's a testbed, it's just shocking that it's at version 5 when it seems like only yesterday that it didn't exist at all. We are talking initial reactions here, right?
Except when Fedora was announced, they were very upfront about what it would and would not be. This is not a general purpose distro. If anything, I'm impressed they've kept the schedule. And the Fedora works at all.
I'll go back to my Centos box though, it might not be as flashy, but if you're running Debian stable, you aren't looking for flashy either.
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
That's nothing... Gentoo's already up to 2006.0 .
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?
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.
Zealotry is one thing. But zealotry-zealotry?
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.
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.'"
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.
# sudo passwd
set your root password
now you can login as root...
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?
No, no, no, no, no! That's, "Advanced Fedora may be, but fixed, I hope, their installer they have." Yoda-speak right can you do not?
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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.