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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".
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.
>> 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?"
Try this:
http://picasa.google.com/linux/download.html
You mean "rushed" like being in too much of a hurry to proof read your article? It was in the second paragraph sheesh...
It's almost like people are planning to RTFA before posting, but this is /. so there must be some other explanation.
Most distros have had great support for cameras for some time now. I'm quite sure the entire Fedora series has had "out of the box" support for cameras. I know Ubuntu has, from the start. I'm quite sure that Debian has had it for some time too. Suse has had it since 9.2? or was it only in 10?
Just like http://fedora.redhat.com/
is it just me or does it seem odd to have a "pretty thorough review" considering it's only been released for an hour?
Maybe the hamster powering his server is taking a break.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Would OSS software still be OSS if it's not updated every 10 minutes? In the typical lifespan of OSS software, Fedora 6 is already middle aged, it seems.
What ever happened to all of the older, wiser Unix geeks that would install a piece of software, and run it indefinitely, so long as it worked?
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
That's funny, because Ubuntu/Kubuntu don't support WPA-PSK out of the box, so I had no luck getting it installed and connected to my home network.
Fortunately, it was a LiveCD and I could roll back to a stable, working system just by ejecting the CD and throwing it in the trash. Maybe next upgrade cycle Ubuntu will be usable...
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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
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.
You'll probably be getting a thank you card from your garbage man any day now.
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?
I can give you the article summary, and you can save yourself a click:
"Error establishing a database connection"
Yes, it works well for installing any package that are part of repository. Package not on repository? Tough luck - no native rpm support, no RPM builds for Ubuntu. Good example of this case is Acrobat Reader, or IBM Java RPMs.
So yes, Ubuntu might work well in many cases, but it doesn't work well in all.
Since WinXP and OSX do not need drivers for most USB cameras, I was guessing that the parent was asking about similar compatibility. (Access like a USB drive for most cameras...)
Yes more info might have been helpful, but not absolutely needed for a general answer.
man, that sounds yummy.
Does that mean it uses apt-get to download and install the network manager?
Yes some work better than others. I have tried deploying Red Hat Core and Ubuntu to non-tech users. Ubuntu has worked out much better for them and me. The Java and Acrobat can be easily installed with "Easy Ubuntu" ( http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/ ). No rpm needed. I do apologize if that came off as a flame. I agree that Red Hat Core is an excellent distro.
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
Unfortunately, all I've see so far, both from Fedora and Ubuntu, is "read-only" support for cameras. You can plug the camera in and transfer your pictures from the camera to the computer, but you can't transfer pictures from the computer to the camera (which is very useful when trying to fill up a flash card to bring to the store to have them printed). I never figured which device to mount to get write access to my camera.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
gphoto's been in RH since version 6 at least.
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
And what camera might that be?
My Olympus Camedia has worked with Linux fine since the day I bought it 3(?) years ago. It's one of those that just uses the standard USB mass-storage drivers, so you plug it in and it appears as a drive. Those will work on any modern OS with no trouble.
Presumably yours needs a specific driver, which means that no one will be able to answer your question without knowing which camera you have.
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.
Read the discussion on the gphotofs site. People are working on this. One problem is that Canon doesn't support upload, which is the camera owned by the developer, but others have gotten writes to work.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
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!
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.
I'm not the OP, but my Genius VideoCam LOOK doesn't work (I got the driver to detect it according to dmesg but no programs can read from it). I also tested a Logitech QuickCam Exprees which does work but looks *much* worse than it does in Windows.
My website
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.
Point 2: if you don;t like the way space is used up, use something like FVWM. my setup just has a black screen. everything is handles through keyboard shortcuts. even the windows only have 3 pixel borders and no title bar because I have no use for a title bar. is even possible to get such a setup of windows and still have it be usable?
That makes not a lot of sense, though - why use Picture Transfer Protocol? Admittedly for the most part I use a CF reader, but when without this I've uploaded stuff to my EOS 5D using the USB cable (but as a mass-storage device, not a 'camera') with no issue, why not use that?
Actually, I can report that both Fedora and Ubuntu both have excellent digital camera support. The day I bought my Fuji FinePix, I just plugged it into the USB port, and voila! There were the pictures! No drivers to install, no need to load additional software (at least on Ubuntu).
My blog
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.
amusingly enough your camera, if it has act as disk mode (which my HP Photosmart 735 does) the correct device would be /dev/sda1 (assuming it is the only USB / SATA drive in the system. Yep, USB or SATA drive...
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/
Most digital cameras with USB have a configuration option to switch between using Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) and acting as a USB mass storage device (UMS). Probably your camera is configured for PTP. Enable UMS instead. Ubuntu automounts it by default. Read and write to the camera as you please.
PTP is largely useless, just another protocol to confuse everybody. And most cameras only implement an absolutely minimal subset of it anyway.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
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?
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
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.