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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?"
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.
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?"
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'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
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?
Here's my mini-review:
/home despite using yp - not so great
- 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
- 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.