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?"

Comments

Does it support WPA-PSK out of the box?

[Rob Simpson]

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?

Re:Does it support WPA-PSK out of the box?

[pyros]

That Ubuntu Wiki makes it look a lot harder than it really is. The wiki doesn't make it obvious that the paragraph after the first three apt-get commands is where the process ends for 95% of users. In most cases (if your wifi chip is already recognized and working) you can install network-manager-[kde|gnome], start the Notification Area applet, select your network from the list, enter the credentials, and you're done. The rest of the page is for manually setting up all the wpa stuff that Network Manager handles for you.

Reviewer = idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Can I upgrade without reinstalling

[drooling-dog]

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

[wsanders]

>> 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.

Re:Setting up the Nvidia drivers

[coaxial]

There is just something about working from a commmand line and manually doing a lot of the maintnance and setup that the inner geek craves.

I understand how you want to Know every bit of your machine, but frankly there's better things to do. Like actually working on cool stuff. These problems are solved. Don't go and reinvent the wheel and spend your time fiddling with trival things. There aren't enough hours in the day to spend so many doing that.

I'm tempted to give the GF Ubuntu and try out FC6 (or maybe something like gentoo or slackware for a true uber-geek OS experienc).

I used slackware Back in The Day(tm), I can't comment on it 10 years later. Gentoo always struck me as the ultimate loser distro. You know like the losers who stick neonlights underneath their honda civic and then proudly display kanji stickers on their rearwindow upside down, because kanji is k3w1, but they don't know what it is. There's no point to compiling everything from source. All you're doing is putting your machine in an usuable state for a long time. The benfit is nonexistent and negligable at best. Unless you're installing on ancient or esoteric hardware what's the point. There's no real difference between your P4 and some other guy's P4, or hell even a third guy's athlon.

Re:Setting up the Nvidia drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

They should - after all, polar bears are just rectangular bears under a coordinate transform!

I'll get my coat...

Re:Can I use my digital camera with it ?

[Neil Blender]

Try this:

http://picasa.google.com/linux/download.html

Re:Slashdotted Already

[jazman_777]

Maybe the hamster powering his server is taking a break.

Feeding the Troll

[Einstein_101]

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.

Re:Have they fixed this issue yet?

[QuesarVII]

I'd say so...

warden root # uptime
16:00:49 up 532 days

Re:Why linux sucks on desktops....

[MobyTurbo]

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.

That's because the freetype library cannot use patented algorithms that are used by Windows and Macs. Recompile your freetype library with the patented stuff enabled and you can get it to look identical. Incidentally, I don't find the usual auto-hinting that is in most distros all that bad - so that's what I use nowadays. The Deja fonts now included with many distros are excellent actually, I like them better than MS core fonts.

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.

That problem is because you are using environments that imitate Windows, if you want something that doesn't use much screen space by default the *box wms such as fluxbox (I don't use 'em, but you might like them) use much less screen space than Windows and Mac, and actually look pretty nice. Another you might want to look at is fvwm-crystal, that's the coolest theme I've seen for fvwm - and it doesn't at all look like plain fvwm, transparency and decent performance at the same time!

If they ever get resolved then things might be different.

I have the feeling that nothing will satisfy you except for bug-compatible Windows emulation, and even then you'd find something to critique.

Re:Can I upgrade without reinstalling

[kfg]

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

Posting this from FC6

[tcopeland]

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!

Re:Posting this from FC6

[Erwos]

I'm also running FC6 on my home print/storage server. I wish I had something to cry joyously about in this area, but it's more of the same - which I think is a good thing. My firewire RAID transferred flawlessly over, and once I figured out that, yet again, SELinux and Samba don't play nicely together, sharing was a breeze. I keep wishing I had one of those fancy VT/Pacifica chips so that I could experiment with the virtualization tools, which look particularly nice. I never really understood the hate some people have towards Fedora - other than a little bit of oddness with the graphical installer, it configured perfectly.

I'm sure I'll have something much more interesting to say once I've had a chance to put it on my laptop, which is primary "user machine".

Article Summary

[StormReaver]

I can give you the article summary, and you can save yourself a click:

"Error establishing a database connection"

Re:Can I upgrade without reinstalling

[pyros]

What if you don't have a CD? In debian you can just change your sources.list and type apt-get dist-upgrade.

man, that sounds yummy.

Re:Totem-xine? wtf?

[forrestt]

Fights like a schizophrenic 3 year old.

Re:Have they fixed this issue yet?

[tyler_larson]

There is a nasty bug in Linux that makes the computer reboot every 49.7 days. The worst part is that this bug has been around for more than 10 years...

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.

What good is a million eyes looking at the code if they are attached to half a million idiots?

I dare say they're not the idiots, here, sir.

Re:Can I upgrade without reinstalling

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's a contest for ridiculously (and needlessly) ugly installer, then you're right. Debian rules.

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 .Xsession or .xsession file detected..."

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.

Re:Can I upgrade without reinstalling

[djmoberg]

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?

Re:Can I upgrade without reinstalling

[creepynut]

The last time I tried upgrading Linux from a CD that stuck itself in the slot I ended up with a broken floppy drive!

Re:Totem-xine? wtf?

[egr]

gstreamer-plugins-ugly package has a quicktime support, not sure about wmv

Re:running it now and...

[arth1]

Here's my mini-review:

- 64-bit version that actually installs without errors - great!
- selinux enabled (and not permissive) out of the box - great!
- very quick installation - great!
- gnome 2.16 - great!
- enabling yp doesn't actually start ypbind at bootup - not so great
- setup requires you to set up a user under /home despite using yp - not so great
- with two network cards with dhcp, the second will overwrite the configs of the first - not so great
- dhcp client not sending hostname to dhcp server - not so great
- bluetooth servers enabled by default and crash on shutdown on system without bluetooth - not so great
- beagle started in slurp mode by default kind of throws any security advantage out the window - not so great
- vnc started by default - not so great
- acpi services enabled by default on system without acpi - not so great
- X crashes if you click the button for enabling effects - not so great
- no choice for popular packages with alternatives (like vim/nvi, firefox/seamonkey, bash/ash/ksh) - not so great
- loads and loads of selinux warnings during normal operations, with logs growing to a gigabyte within a couple of hours - not so great
- update and install apps hang every now and then, and have to be killed - not so great

All in all, I like it better than the latest SuSE and Ubuntu, and I can see this being a good alternative for people who don't want to roll their own or use a lower-level approach like Gentoo. It still needs some polishing, though - especially in the networking and hardware detection setup. And I recommend setting this up on a trusted LAN only, as it seems to me to run too many services that may be helpful for newbies but spell potential trouble on untrusted networks.

Re:Can I upgrade without reinstalling

[thephotoman]

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.

Desktop Effects very cool

[spiritraveller]

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.

El Fedoro Strikes Again

[chemaja]

Boring. Boring. BORING!

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