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Fedora Core 6 Review
luna6 writes to tell us that they have posted a pretty thorough review of Fedora Core 6 with the installation procedure and even a few work arounds for the couple of bugs encountered during the process to help users get up and running smoothly. From the article: "To sum up Fedora Core 6, I will say that once you have it set up properly FC 6 runs very impressively. I had the impression that FC 6 may have been rushed, just because of the handful of minor bugs that appeared. The mixup of arches, i586 & i686 was weird and the first system update having a update conflict was a glaring error, even though it was easy to fix. Setting up the Nvidia drivers was way more problematic than it should have been. I should also note that Mandriva 2007 worked from the start with AIGLX and their 3D drake worked flawlessly. With that stated once the minor problems were fixed, Fedora Core 6 worked as well as any Linux distro I have tried and the visuals were second to none. Well except the default icons...but we have something to look forward to in FC 7 now don't we?"
SUSE does, Ubuntu does not. SUSE only requires a couple clicks and entering the network ID/password, while even the instructions for getting WPA running on Ubuntu are daunting. How does Fedora compare?
yes. Stick the CD in, reboot and select "Upgrade".
Because I haven't been able to with linux.
debian rules
For example he complained that a package conflict he saw "totem-xine conflicts with totem." was an example of the distro being rushed out... He missed the fact that totem-xine is a non-free package (patented codecs) distributed by a third party repository which he manually configured.
In other words, a new linux distro has failed to prevent someone with the root password from shooting themselves in the foot. NEWS AT 11.
its pretty darn good. there's only the occational...[carrier lost]
yes. Stick the CD in, reboot and select "Upgrade".
Sorry, that's too complicated. I need a CD that sticks itself in the slot.
Even before the first post.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
>> Setting up the Nvidia drivers was way more problematic than it should have been
And yea verily as the sun shall rise in the East and the Pope is Catholic and bears crap in the woods, yea verily the setting up of the Nvidia drivers shall be way more problematic than it should be, thus is it written, amen.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
You mean "rushed" like being in too much of a hurry to proof read your article? It was in the second paragraph sheesh...
1. Fonts. Linux weenies delude themselves that fonts under Xorg are just fine nowadays. BZZT. Compared to XP with cleartype the quality of font rendering in Xorg is laughable. Importing the XP fonts into a Linux system makes no difference, because they just do not look as good.
2. Klunky UI's. Both Gnome and KDE are horrible in terms of wasting screen space. Also the UI's just don#t look as clean and polished as XP. I see rough edges on widgets, and various other things that makes UI's look cheap.
If they ever get resolved then things might be different.
What if you don't have a CD? In debian you can just change your sources.list and type apt-get dist-upgrade.
Yes, you can manually edit your yum configuration and run "yum update"._ com_yum.php
There is a step by step in my site (sorry, brazilian portuguese only): http://cenoura.homelinux.com/linux/upgrade_fedora
Ouch... The reviewer's site has been badly slashdoted...
1) Actually, I run KDE with nVidia drivers installed, and I made it a point to ask people how the fonts look (since it used to be such a big issue with Linux newbies. When asked, numerous Windows users either said they looked nice, or they looked better than Windows.
2) KDE can easily be changed to take us less screen space. If you ever decide to give up your career in trolling and start using computer software, I recommend you try DesktopBSD. By default, they size down the KDE taskbar, making it the same size as Windows XP.
If they ever get things "resolved", then people like you would be crying that they're trying to look too much like Windows.
Anyone cached a copy before it died a slashdot death?
I'd say so...
warden root # uptime
16:00:49 up 532 days
See http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html
Apple has several patents covering the bytecode interpreter for executing the hinting programs included in most truetype fonts. The freetype library has support for this patented tech, but it is disabled by default in many Linux distributions for obvious legal reasons.
It would be possible to invent a new hinting system, but such a system would be incompatible with existing fonts.
Thus the patent system has made sure that it is impossible for someone without a large patent portfolio (for mutually insured destruction style protection) to have rendering of TTF equal to that of Windows and MacOS.
It's quite possible to recompile freetype with the patented software enabled and many people do... However, if you do so you'll probably run into a number of other bugs (pango rendering, etc) because most of the rest of your system is not well tested against freetype with the full hinter vm enabled.
BTW- Freetype 2 includes a built in auto-hinting which is really impressive tech.. Most people will agree that it's often almost as good as hand hinting, and some (myself included) find it preferable to the hinting in many of the fonts and thus consider the patent issue fairly moot.
After spending days fixing broken crap and searching for missing .rpm's Red Hat Core was fantastic! Except for the fact that it didn't detect my wireless LAN adapter, but hey, a little bit of fantastic goes a long way right?
Fortunately Ubuntu practically installs itself and works without any fixing, so I was able to roll back to a working OS in about 30 minutes.
Don't know what the hell you're talking about. I've never had this issue and I've been running Linux systems of various flavors (RH v5.0+, Fedora Core 4+ primarily) for years now. I have not had these 'scheduled reboots' at 49.7 days on any of these systems, and up until the latest ones, these have been shitty systems or substandard by most comparisons, especially for the duty of a file server and windows domain controller. The only reason my system comes down is for power outages, and that's only because I cannot afford a UPS.
I need a CD that sticks itself in the slot.
And I supose you're going to be fussy about which slot, ain'cha?
KFG
Because they can't fit the whole thing in their prissy little mouths, that's why.
You kids get off my lawn!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Looks pretty nice; the startup screens are whizzy, Rails and PostgreSQL and Eclipse run fine, everything seems snappy. Besides:
$ uname -r
2.6.18-1.2798.fc6PAE
w00t!
The Army reading list
Sorry, that's too complicated. I need a CD that sticks itself in the slot.
That was one of the features cut from Vista - it was a little too careless about which slots it sought.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
xmms-mp3 and things like that make sense to me. But in my experience (on FC5) totem and xine fight like three-year-olds. What does the totem-xine package do?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
At least they fixed it. Being able access the internet kinda takes priority, since it is difficult to download updates without a connection.
We have a whole slew of Debian PCs in our lab, and for the most part they run fine. One of our newer clusters just experienced some weirdness, but we tracked that down to my jobs (I'm creating hordes of minions in an attempt to develop artificial consciousness so that they'll write my dissertation for me) overheating the CPU. The solution, of course, was to edit the BIOS to raise the maximum allowable operating temperature... :)
P.S.: It wasn't my detective work that figured out the problem. Thanks Andrew!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
You've been trolled.
I can give you the article summary, and you can save yourself a click:
"Error establishing a database connection"
man, that sounds yummy.
Does that mean it uses apt-get to download and install the network manager?
1. Fonts. Linux weenies delude themselves that fonts under Xorg are just fine nowadays. BZZT. Compared to XP with cleartype the quality of font rendering in Xorg is laughable. Importing the XP fonts into a Linux system makes no difference, because they just do not look as good.
You're joking, right? Cleartype looks blurry and awful. I've yet to see a Linux distro that has fonts as painful to read as "Cleartype", just as I've yet to see a Linux distro with fonts as sharp and clear as the standard Windows font smoothing/fonts out of the box. This tutorial helped me enormously, though.
For the FC6 DVD, I've been getting about 20KB/s download with only very occasional short spikes of 50-100. Over the course of 8 hours, my sharing ratio varies between .5 and 1.0. So far this is the slowest major distro torrent ever.
I don't know the cause, but I kinda wish they had a separate trackers for the US, Europe, and Asia at least.
I'm almost done downloading the FC6 DVD ISO. I decided to download it when the yum command stopped working on my FC4 installation. I figured it was because of the Fc6 release yesterday. Reading that their entire site went down the day of the release doesn't make me feel any better about upgrading. But it has to be done. XGL ftw. :D
You're think about Windows 95 and NT, not Linux. Windows drivers used the number of milliseconds since boot as the primary timekeeping mechanism. When that wrapped around to zero, some drivers crashed. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216641 for more information on this bug.
Even though all of Microsoft's own code now properly handles the 49-day boundary, third-party code is still a problem on Windows systems. Most programs still use GetTickCount() as their primary sub-second timer, which returns that 32-bit milliseconds since boot. In fact, it was this very thing that shut down the LA air traffic control center some months back.
This has never been a problem with Linux. Linux doesn't use milliseconds as any internal time representation. Instead, it uses either the timeval structure, or jiffies. Jiffies are 100ths of a second, whereas a timeval is a set of two numbers representing both seconds since 1970, and nanoseconds in the current second.
Note that jiffies (in 32-bits) wrap around after 497 days, which used to cause a benign bug where the uptime display would wrap around to zero after that time period. No crash, though.
I dare say they're not the idiots, here, sir.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
What were the editors thinking?! I'm flabbergasted that this didn't make the front page. It certainly deserved the space more than the gaim article.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
If it's a contest for ridiculously (and needlessly) ugly installer, then you're right. Debian rules.
.Xsession or .xsession file detected..."
I just installed Debian stable (sarge) for the first time. The partitioning portion of the install went fine. But, the part where you actually choose _what_ will be installed was UGLY. And, when the install was finished, I was left with a non-functioning X environment. Running startx brought me to an X screen with an error something like, "No window manager detected. No
So, I just had to know to run "apt-get install kde" to actually get a functioning X system? What kind of stupid installer selects and installs the X server but no window manager? Hell, RH 4.1 (not RHEL) "Vanderbildt" had a better installer ten years ago. Idiotic.
Oh, also, if you're looking for a distro that's only compiled for i386 and nothing higher on the x86 platform (i586, i686, amd64, etc.) then Debian is your guy.
IMHO, aside from being the OSS purist distro, Debian is for people who need that little ego boost for having installed and configured a distro by hand -- but aren't willing to go the gentoo route.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
yes. Stick the CD in, reboot and select "Upgrade".
Sorry, that's too complicated. I need a CD that sticks itself in the slot.
May I suggest the Soviet Russian Linux distribution?
The last time I tried upgrading Linux from a CD that stuck itself in the slot I ended up with a broken floppy drive!
At home I use Samsung SyncMaster 913N (natural screen resolution 1280x1024) with my HP Pavilion dv4000 laptop (intel graphics, 1280x800). At Grub, I can choose with Fn+F4 between laptop or Samsung display. In case of Fedora 5, both resolutions, depending on my choice, were set correctly. Fedora 6 stubbornly sets Samsung's resolution to 1024x768 and there is no possibility to choose the natural resolution. Interestingly, even if I remove /etc/X11/xorg.conf, X gets somehow automatically configured to 1024x768. I have Redhat/Fedora experience since RedHat Linux 1 and it is in some sense funny, that I can't solve this problem. You could only imagine the situation of a novice, who decides to migrate from WinXP to Fedora.
WPA works great. I couldn't get it to work with NetworkManager and FC5, but with FC6 it "just worked."
Good to know, I'll give Fedora a try the next time I do a Linux install.
yes. Stick the CD in, reboot and select "Upgrade".
-- Sorry, that's too complicated. I need a CD that sticks itself in the slot.
---- I want an update doesn't require a CD or slot, or selecting anything.
Is this a joke?
I tried to install updated nVidia drivers for my Fedora Core 4 partition a while back. It didn't work. I followed the directions exactly, but X wouldn't start up. This makes me wonder, with nVidia being one of the most common 3d accelerators in PCs, why can't the update manager download and install these for you? I don't see why I should have to go through a complicated (for a newbie) multi-step installation procedure just to update video drivers. For a time, Linux support was one of the advantages that nVidia had over the competition, so why isn't nVidia working with the major Linux distros to try to make this process simpler? It seems like promoting Linux as a viable gaming platform would be one of the best ways to encourage the adoption of Linux for home computers.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
Would Debian or Ubuntu perhaps be to your liking, then? Because it's quite easy to upgrade those systems over the Internet without a CD.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Just turned on the wobbling windows and workspaces in a cube. I thought this required some fancy new video card. My card and the machine it's connected to are at least 5 years old.
But it worked out of the box!
This is good stuff.
Thanks for the review, it beats at least 90 % of the distribution reviews out there since it actually contains useful information.
This past year, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon's [cmu.edu] School of Computer Science [cmu.edu]. It has been a remarkable experience that I would lik e to share with the Slashdot community. Here's an account of my experience.
Week 1, Sunday: I moved in today. My roommate, a sophomore CS student, had already moved in tw o days before me. The floor is already completely covered with garbage. He also smells. I think he might be gay too. He's already asked me if I like the color he painted his toenails. This should be interesting. I am almost completely settled in. Techno music is playing in every room in every floor of my dorm. There are computers and other types of trash out in the common areas. What a mess. Tom orrow, I am going to go sign up to get my network connection.
Week 1, Monday: I got hooked up to the CMU network today! I jacked into the network, only to f ind that the hostname and address assigned to me were colliding with another system. I'll just increm ent the network numbers a few times. I am really eager to get on.
Week 1, Tuesday: I am still looking for a free IP address. Can't anybody here properly configu re their systems?
Week 1, Friday: I finally found a free IP! It's mine! You sons of bitches can't have i t, I found it, I keep it, it's mine! To hell with all of you! Head hurts really bad. I've slowly be en developing a headache since I first arrived. Everywhere I look there are these Lucent Technologies wireless access points. I wonder if that's the problem.
Week 1, Saturday: I sat down at my computer today. My desktop wall paper is now the goatse.cx guy. Pleasant. Scattered over every directory on my C: drive are thousands, possibly millions, of fi les titled "J00AR30WN3DBITCH-phj33r-" and then some random hacker's name. Don't these people have liv es? Maybe they need laid or something. It'd take days to clean this out. I mentioned to my roommate that I needed to reinstall Windows, and immediately he jumped up and shouted: "NO! Do NOT use Window s!" Suddenly, two dozen other guys (all of them possibly homosexuals) appeared at the door, each tout ing an operating system called Linux. Half of them got into a fight over which was better, Debian, Re dHat, Slackware, and a bunch of others I couldn't recognize. Some kid who appeared to not have shower ed since he was born was touting "Linux From Scratch", saying that only losers used pre-made distros. A crowd of people in the back kept quiet about how I'd be sorry if I used Linux instead of BSD on the network. Who the fuck are these people? Classes start next week. Hope I have my computer working s o I can do my assignments.
Week 3, Friday: People are still trying to get Linux to work on my system. They keep telling m y that my hardware sucks. We go through about four or five distributions a day. Every now and then, I notice a little devil on my screen. Stickers for every of these distributions have been plastered o n my case. Suddenly, my room stinks a lot more with these people in here. I ask them why they never shower, and the usual response is something along the lines of "showering is like rebooting" and "I do n't want to lose my uptime."
Week 3, Saturday: There's a troop of men running naked in a circle around McGill Hall. I am no t even going to ask.
Week 4, Wednesday: Linux is FINALLY working on my computer! I have a pretty slick desktop too. I think I might like this. I can finally work in my room instead of the labs, although considering the every increasing layer of garbage on the floor...
Week 4, Thursday: My computer flashes messages about how I am "0WNX0RED" and how I should "PHJ3 3R" whoever and how "L4MEX0R" I am for having an insecure box. A kid suggests we reinstall Linux afte r discovering about 17 rootkits.
Week 5, Friday: Someone got BSD work
Why bother.
Are they telling us that Linux, that Open Source software, that the stuff not made by Microsoft has bugs? I am shocked, I tell you. Analyzing the past five years of OSS development, there is little doubt that Linux is still a long way from posing any serious threat to Microsoft's hegemony. The problems with Linux begin even before you get a chance to use the OS. So far only SuSE managed to produce a relatively simple and reliable installation process. If an average PC user with no Unix skills cannot even install Linux, should we be surprised by the tiny market niche occupied by this OS? Instead of fixing numerous bugs and improving the installation process, Linux developers seem to be spending an abnormal amount of time adding eye candy. Are they building the new Windows?
Let me get this straight:
:-/
The Fedora Core 6 release was rushed because their website was down on the day of release? What does that have to do with the development process? Maybe by rushed he meant that people were rushing to get it.
and dinking around with it (and various repositories) for a day, I have it almost working as well as Ubuntu with EasyUbuntu. --AC
I wish it were that easy, sometimes...
:(
Downloaded my FC6 DVD x86_64 iso, burned it, began the installer, verified the disc and got started...
Resolving dependencies...
Waiting...
Waiting...
Waiting...
[ 3 hours later, I have eaten dinner, washed the dishes, run errands halfway across town and returned home ]
It's still resolving dependencies, with about 20-25% left in the progress bar. This is going from FC5-> FC6. Ouch
I did give up -- for now anyway. Maybe I'll let it try and resolve while I go to work tomorrow.
Actually, on newer systems, HZ=1000, so a jiffy is one millisecond.
That actually would cause problems - a lot of stuff uses CLOCK_MONOTONIC and expects it to obey its name. But it must be fixed by now, since I have an HZ=1000 system with an uptime over 49.7 days. I think they're using an unsigned 64-bit number, which would last over 10^8 years.
best linux distro IMHO
been using it since FC1
13 updates within a day of release.
NVIDIA drivers can't be installed without tweaking (OS drivers don't support resolutions above SXGA, and my monitor is UXGA)
Skip FC and go straight to CentOS. You get the real bin-compatible RedHat without having pay monstrous money for it, and you don't have to worry about all the little niggling things the FC releases screw up. I gotta say, the first time my newly-installed FC box undid a route I added manually on the command-line, I wasn't a happy camper. The constantly broken package dependencies, the constantly broken upgrade paths, the constant hassles getting video working.. good grief. I really wanted to believe, but it's just too much effort to support you, FC.
... moments later... "Gone again! W...T...F...!"
"WTF! My route's gone!" *click click* *clickety* "There.."
So some system daemon thinks it knows better than I do how to route the box. No, thanks, I don't need a "desktop" install that makes the presumption I don't know what I'm doing.
Actually current (>=2.6.13?) have slowly been reducing this value 250 and now 100 in-order to reduce idle power usage. http://lwn.net/Articles/145973/
What is the best distro for a small home server? I'm tired of doing a full re-install every year because FC is no longer supported.
Is there any way to upgrade without a re-install and without the DVD?
I know that with CentOS, you can do something like 'up2date metapackage' and that will perform a full update of your system to the latest version.
Is there anything similar to this for FC6 ?
Joy - can't update any servers because of this. Doh!
I want to hear praise for my beloved distro!
Not smelly little nVidia problems!
Not patent-encumbered .mp3 files!
WHY I LIKE FEDORA (comments/corrections welcome):
* Ubuntu mangle upstream like Satan's little bitches (case in point: compare Dapper's Gnome logout dialog with Zod's implementation). I *like* vanilla Gnome. Leave us poor "vanilla GNU/Linux" people alone! Go modify your artwork and plug some gaping holes if you have to, but FFS...
Fedora generally works closer with upstream, from what I've seen.
* Debian doesn't package FreeNX. While it is possible to use a 3rd party repo, I'd really rather not -- I don't want to run some subtle fork of Debian. Debian's design and enforcement of quality distro policy is what makes Debian so great, and I want to see this greatness preserved, alive and evolving.
Fedora Extras gives me FreeNX. I can't live without FreeNX -- it makes those long days at work sooo much nicer to have my home FC6 box at my fingertips in a fast way.
* Arch Linux strip GNU Info documentation -- Arch becomes inconvenient to many, and may be seen as disrespecting the GNU Foundation.
Fedora has GNU Info documentation. Duh! :-)
* openSUSE are Novell's bitches, and Novell seem to be involved with travesties such as AppArmor and XGL. SELinux and AIGLX are the better implementations. Oh, and I remember cringing when finding PDF (not HTML) Novel/Linux documentation on Novell's site once upon a time. Ugh.
Feodra have the most evolved SELinux implementation I've seen.
* Foresight Linux is still a little unusable/unreliable for my needs. But "go team" for rPath and Foresight, that conary package manager has extreme potential :-)
Ooh, and just one more little doosie: Fedora was the first *major* distro on the block with a stable (albeit self-declared "stable") Gnome 2.16.
-chemaja
I'm not sure how you know my age, but I will say that I haven't been in academia my whole life. After graduating from GT, I managed a theater for a couple years, substitute taught for a couple years, taught full-time high school physics/chemistry for a couple years, and then worked for a software company for 6 years. I do agree that academia is NOT the same thing as actually trying to write software that you need to sell to real customers who don't always know what they want. For the first few years of working in the software industry, our software ONLY worked under DOS (or DOS shell). Also, I think you're confusing me with someone else, because I wasn't disagreeing with you. I just want you to GET OFF MY @#&$ LAWN!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Interesting. I hadn't seen that. Is there a sysconf(3)-style way to see what HZ is on the currently-running kernel?
I had seen that really new kernels are eliminating HZ entirely (and good riddance). Umm, google for "tickless Linux".
by tyler_larson (558763) Alter Relationship on Wednesday October 25, @05:51PM (#16585190) Note that jiffies (in 32-bits) wrap around after 497 days, which used to cause a benign bug where the uptime display would wrap around to zero after that time period. No crash, though. Is there a fix for this issue? I still have a Slackware 10 box that does this.
All those blue boxes in the article are the reason Linux isn't ready for the general user.
What the hell is the point in having install packages if you then have to add lines like 'Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"' to a file, and more importantly how the hell are you supposed to know you need to do this? And in this case why didn't the OS do all this for him? it knew the PC had a nvidia card in there!?
Why did he need to add that repository? if its that useful, why doesn't the OS come with it added?
The problem seems to be too much choice, I really think that the bigger distro's need to be a little more strict(or 'meaner') and pick an set of apps to support, if properly supporting means that similar apps are harder to install (and need all these command lines entered!) then I think that's a fair trade.
----- I refuse to have an argument with an unarmed person
The common fix is to use a 64-bit counter to track uptime instead of the 32-bit one. It's included in some kernels and not others. As another poster pointed out, the resolution on that timer is configurable, and may be tweaked a bit depending on who built your kernel. 1/100 sec was the standard for a very long time, but a slower interrupt clock means lower power consumption; desirable for laptops.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
Take this inflammatory, biased trash about your "beloved distro" elsewhere.
On the contrary, providing it is a disservice to users. Proprietary software is dangerous (go to any popular GNU/Linux IRC channel and wait for some newb to come with his system screwed up by proprietary drivers) and takes away users' freedoms.
Fedora is not Debian. It does not endorse proprietary software.
Staring at a white background [on a computer screen] while you read is like staring at a light bulb — Maddox
How is Mandriva 2007 relevant to a review of Fedora Core 6? Apologies if I sound like a newbie for asking, but I'm a Mac user who's recently decided to try Linux so I'm not very experienced with it.