It's been about 2.5 years since the first release of Fedora Core. And boy has it come long way! The new version of Fedora Core (FC) is featuring a number of goodies and performance enhancements as we describe below (and yes, it even includes a new logo).
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2005-12-31
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Member since:2005-12-31
I mention earlier about anaconda, but it was with Kudzu. Between kudzu, 3com and kernel it had problems.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=107389
thnx.
Member since:2006-01-09
Member since:
2005-07-06
Downloading it now; will be interested to see how it goes; all my hardware is supported; finally deleted those videos off my ipod; weighed it up, not worth using it as a video device, audio is all I need.
It looks good, I'll force myself to use GIMP, hopefully it has improved over the last time I used it (over a year ago); GNOME looks a whole lot nicer, and hopefully OpenOffice.org 2.0 is also well behaved :-)
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2005-07-07
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Member since:2005-06-28
For example, on PocketPCs ActiveSync is able to pass-through Internet connection, mount the PDA's internal storage as a drive and sync via Bluetooth. While these things are theoretically possible on Linux too, it requires waaaay too much tinkering and Multisync/Opensync alone won't do them automatically for you.
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2005-07-06
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Member since:2005-12-09
Mandriva has been beaten already. Not because its not technically good, but the bugs and politics keep making it irrelevant. This is painful for me to accept because its my favourite Linux distro but over the last few years, Mandriva has shifted from being an innovator to being a follower.
Member since:2005-07-06
Innovator to follower? Hum. Our network applet supported WPA six months before NetworkManager figured it out. No-one else has an interactive firewall. I upgraded my VMware test install of FC4 to FC5 last night; worked quite smoothly with yum following the instructions on the wiki, and it's all nice and polished (like all major distros these days), but I don't see anything particularly innovative - about the only thing I can think of is the X startup thing (which is neat). Other than that it just looks like a nice packaged GNOME desktop, just like my Ubuntu test install...
Member since:
2006-03-26
I don't use fedora but you can fix the back/forward in history problem you mentioned by adding the following lines in ~/.mozilla/firefox/YOUR_PROFILE_DIR/user.js
user_pref("mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action",0);
user_pref("mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines",1);
for info on what exactly these lines do check out:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entries
search for "mousewheel.horizscroll" in the page
Member since:
2005-08-10
I've got it installed on this machine now, and I must say its a vast improvement over previous Fedora releases.
Some things still aren't quite right however. The size of the default install is still far greater than it needs to be for most people, and the network install I did (from what has been for me, the fastest mirror over the last couple of years) took nearly two hours. The installer seemed to grab the packages quickly enough, but forever to install them.
As has been the case since Redhat 8, KDE is a second class citizen (I'm a KDE guy), and large parts of GNOME cannot be removed without seriously screwing up the system. (OT rant: Too many distributions IMO favor GNOME these days. It saddens me ;^)
Worse tho are things like error messages. The ones in GNOME *SUCK* compared to the KDE ones. Fedora has never had mp3 or DVD support out of the box. Fair enough, I understand their reasons. Just for kicks, seeing how HAL udev, dbus etc. have progressed, I inserted a DVD anyway (before installing the packages from freshrpms to make it work), and totem pops up with an error message saying that it can't read the disk "No reason." Different story in KDE. Told me exactly why (which I already knew, but this is just an example).
FC5 seems much faster than the previous versions I've tried out both in booting up and jugling various day to day tasks, and I am rather impressed by it. Nautilus still seems flakey tho, and so far I've had it crash once, and it crashed hard. I was reading the contents of a data DVD at the time 
Regardless, for a distribution intended as a testbed for a future enterprise product, it's not so bad as prior releases have been.
Edited 2006-03-26 11:32
Member since:2005-07-06
If you, like me, rather use KDE on FC, try the KDE-Packaging (http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/) project.
I'm using it to run KDE 3.5.1 on FC3 and FC4 machines. (Both i386 and x86_64.)
Gilboa
Member since:
2005-12-27
"- A pain to install non-free stuff manually"
Thats why Stanton Finley is such a great guy it is so easy to just copy and paste his instructions just google for Stanton Finleys FC5 installation notes.
"- No iMovie/iDVD-style applications"
Video Lan Client is available in extras repo, Stanton Finley give more in deps on this and getting all supported formats to play on FC.
"- No Gnome menu editor included"
Alacarte is in core repo it even is custumied with fedora icon so it is the approved menu editor of gnome, and I can say it is the best menu editor yet for gnome.
Member since:2005-06-29
"- No iMovie/iDVD-style applications"
Video Lan Client is available in extras repo, Stanton Finley give more in deps on this and getting all supported formats to play on FC.
VLC has nothing to do with iMovie/iDVD. iMovie and iDVD let's you CREATE movies/DVDs, not just play them.
Member since:2006-01-02
I've never understood people's slavish addiction to iMovie and iDVD. Personally I find these applications to rigid in their approach, and they don't allow sufficient flexibility. Furthermore, I've never got iDVD to actually render a DVD. It always hangs part way through the process. The final killer for me is that the quality of the output when compared to both kino and mainactor v5 is just not that good. I find the quality much better on the linux apps.
Kino may be a little quirky to use, but it has some very flexible output options. Mainactor is much more traditional in terms of its interface, and is very flexible and powerful. Also the speed of its conversion from dv to mpeg2 is fantastic.
Anyway just some thoughts based on my experiences of video editing on linux and mac.
Member since:2005-06-28
>to rigid in their approach, and they don't allow sufficient flexibility.
They are just fine for basic HOME usage. If someone wanted something more powerful, Apple already offers three other, expensive, products. But people love iMovie/iDvd exactly because they are easy to use and does all the basic things very easily.
Kino is a mix-n-mash of things, others too. Except Diva on Linux (which is still an alpha), nothing comes close to Apple's *home* multimedia offerings, at least in terms of usability. Pitivi is not as usable either.
Edited 2006-03-26 19:18
Member since:2005-11-11
kensai even though you were modded down I felt that your pointer to Stanton Finleys' FC5 install notes was very helpful. Thanks! Here is the direct link:
http://www.stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_5_installation_notes.html
Member since:
2006-01-02
It's still too slow. I feel like everything on my desktop has a little bit of glue on the back and while everything moves and changes just fine, it's just not snappy at all. I see the widgets in windows redraw. I see the window decorations leave trails on previously obscured portions of the windows beneath them. It takes half a second or more for Firefox to switch tabs. It just feels slower.
Why is it that only Gentoo and Windows XP are the only snappy OSes I've ever had on this machine? Do other people who use Fedora and Ubuntu really tolerate this kind of behavior? I have a pretty fast machine (ThinkPad T43) with a decent graphics card (ATI Mobility x300 w/64 MB of video RAM). What do people who have slower machines do? And how can some of these same people complain about Windows XP being slow?
Member since:2005-07-13
Member since:2006-03-26
I have even slower laptop then yours. I have T22. Pentium III, 192MB RAM.
I tried Vector Linux SOHO 5.1.1 last week. And I liked it a lot. Eventhough I am Fedora/Gnome user. In Vector I had to use KDE. And you know what, I liked it. I liked the OS a lot. I suggest you give it a try on your laptop. It's easily customizable and pretty snappy distribution.
http://www.vectorlinux.com/mod.php?mod=userpage&menu=12&page_id=4
Member since:2005-07-06
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2005-12-18
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2005-08-22
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2006-02-17
hi there, thanks for the review.
i'm a fedora user, so as soon as it was possible i downloaded and installed fc5.
i've however a little problem with java:
when i try to launch it, it says graphics2d is not implemented and cairo not found?
someone experienced the same?
i just did a plain install, it's vanilla fc5 right now but i get this java error..
anyone can help?
tnx
-----------------
[freaks@kanzume ~]$ cgoban
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.Error: Graphics2D not implemented. Cairo was not found or disabled at configure time
at gnu.java.awt.peer.gtk.GdkGraphics2D.<clinit> (lib-gnu-java-awt-peer-gtk.so.7)
at java.lang.Class.initializeClass (libgcj.so.7)
at gnu.java.awt.peer.gtk.GdkGraphicsEnvironment.createGraphics (lib-gnu-java-awt-peer-gtk.so.7)
at java.awt.image.BufferedImage.createGraphics (libgcj.so.7)
at java.awt.image.BufferedImage.getGraphics (libgcj.so.7)
at dK.b (cgoban:130)
at dK.a (cgoban:78)
at dK.<clinit> (cgoban:60)
at java.lang.Class.initializeClass (libgcj.so.7)
at org.igoweb.cgoban.CGoban.<init> (cgoban:152)
at org.igoweb.cgoban.CGoban.main (cgoban:92)
[freaks@kanzume ~]$
Member since:
2005-06-29
I'm using it now on my Toshiba Satellite (pentium III 600mhz/192mb ram), it works nicely, but pirut is truly unusable for me (slow and hangs alot).
@Eugenia: I've been keeping an eye on http://pitivi.sourceforge.net/ , maybe it'll interest you too. And diva doesn't seem to be coming along soon, last commit was 7 weeks ago.
Member since:
2005-11-20
Member since:
2005-12-14
Fedora Core 4 was the first Linux distribution is started with. I quickly switched to Ubuntu though and have been with it since, allthough i tried practically every other distribution that came out in the last 6 months too. I installed FC5 last wednesday, and used it since. My experiences have been mostly positive. The positive things imo are:
- RAM usage. It's amazingly low. You said in your review that you had about 90 mb of RAM used after a default boot. My experiences are even better, after a default boot i have about 75 mb (!) of RAM used. This is including the RAM that the process manager program is using.
- Eye candy. The new Fedora bubbly theme looks beautiful, as does the cairo-clearlooks theme. It looks really good. Also i like the iconset, but that doesnt seem to have changed since FC4. Also the rhgb thing is beautiful. For those who dont know what it is, it is basically a X11 session which shows the boot progress. It starts immediately after udev, so you only see a few text messages.
- Boot speed. It really fast. Also with included runlevel editor app you can stop some processes you dont need from starting, which makes booting even faster.
- Installing mp3 codecs: i thought this was really easy. It was basically entering two commands which i found on the rpm.livna.org site:
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-5.rpm
yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly
- Speed of starting programs. They start really fast. I did disable SELinux though, dont know whether this matters. The only exception seems to be Firefox though, which takes really long to start. Hell, even OpenOffice starts in like
10 seconds!
- Software management. Pup and Pirut really simplified this, and both have clean and attractive interfaces.
- Sleep, suspend to RAM or whatever it's called worked out of the box for me.
- Beagle included!
There are some bad things too though, including:
- The 5 cd's arent needed. There should just be a base install and all the additional software should be in the repo's not on the cd's.
- Fedora can't seem to decide whether it wants to be a normal user desktop distro, power user desktop or server distro. This is probably why they got 5 cd's too.
- The menu's are cluttered, they should follow the new ubuntu menu´s. This depends on what they decide what kind of distro they want to be too though.
- The hard disk partitions are not included in the my computer folder, places menu and the gtk save dialog. This is very annoying for people who have their data on another partition. (Someone know a gconf-key to change to enable this?)
- My home folder, trash and computer icons rearrange themselves on every login so i have to rearrange them back every time.
- No gnometris by default 
The other problems eugenia had had mostly to do with peripherals i dont have so i cant comment on them. And there IS a menu editor, as someone else pointed out.
Basically, Fedora needs to decide what it wants to be. I not saying it is bad in anyway, it is actually one of the best desktop/server combination distro's, but it could be so much better if it just chose what it wanted to be. It could be a seriously ubuntu contender if it chose to be a home user desktop distro.
Member since:2005-07-06
- Speed of starting programs. They start really fast. I did disable SELinux though, dont know whether this matters.
New version of SELinux is modular and easy to understand. Ther eis policies "compatibilities" that allow to enable some plugins like Flash. My system, a Athlon XP 2500 with ASUS-AS7X8-MX motherboard and 1GB RAM didn't get performance hit with SELinux enabled. Check out more SELinux on:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SELinux/Config
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SELinux/Dummies
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SELinux/Login
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SELinux/FAQ/ProposedAdditions
Addendum:
Basically, Fedora needs to decide what it wants to be. I not saying it is bad in anyway, it is actually one of the best desktop/server combination distro's, but it could be so much better if it just chose what it wanted to be.
It is a general purpose OS since its existence i.e a jack trade where it is possible to customize it as desktop(like a Fedora based distos Blag, FoX Linux and Berry Linux), workstation (used by Pixar, New Zealand studio for the incoming movie Halo) and server (Wikipedia and SourceForge).
Edited 2006-03-26 19:34
Member since:2006-03-23
Member since:2005-07-06
"- The 5 cd's arent needed. There should just be a base install and all the additional software should be in the repo's not on the cd's."
You have to think about all users, not just yourself. There are many people out there on dialup connections who get their CDs from Cheapbytes, or who have dialup at home but broadband at work and download ISOs there. How do you think they would feel if they were told they had to download, for e.g., OO.o over a dialup modem link?
Member since:
2005-07-06
if you find that FCR5 doesnt display your LCD resolution correctly (for example you tell it to display 1400x1050 and xorg shows 1024x768) then you need to get the 915resolution fix,
http://www.linux-noob.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2188
it happened to me, and the fix is easy
f.y.i
glad to Eugenia writing again :-)
cheers
anyweb
Member since:2005-07-06
I had a similiar problem. FC5 wanted to use 800x600, if I went into the screen resolution from preferences to change it, it would not display properly. It was like a mirror effect on the right side of the screen from the left. An edit to xorg.conf and adding "1200x800" to the screen resolution section fixed the issue and all looks clean and clear now
Member since:
2005-07-06
Good review of FC5. I was pretty impressed with it when I loaded it on to my laptop Wednesday night. It loaded fine, it detected hardware fine. But I didn't test it as extensively as you because I don't use some of the featues like bluetooth or suspend to RAM.
The thing thats got me hooked on it is that it works better on my laptop than Ubuntu did. I just had to pop the dvd in and start loading. With Ubuntu the screen would go blank and I wouldn't have a console unless I typed in vga=771 before loading. Ubuntu would hang unless I disalbed something else as well, maybe the ACPI? That my change in dapper.
The problem that really drove me crazy though was the default touchpad functionality. Firefox would move pages Back and Forward in History just by touching the lower bottom of the touchpad.
I couldn't agree more. It wasn't specific to firefox, it was anything that had a tab to include a terminal window. Thanks for the tip on how to disable it.
Member since:
2006-03-23
* On my 2.6ghz,1gb ram FC5 takes 1min15s to boot while w2k only takes 46s.
* Firefox launches in less than 2 secs on my freshly booted w2k (without the fastlaunch tray icon) and often more than 4 seconds on a freshly booted FC5 (the same hardware).
* When I rapidly resize firefox on FC5 the graphics are lagging behind in a clunky manner. This is not a problem with FF ofc, but it rather reflects the poor 2d gfx and windowing performance of fc5 (or possible my gfx driver in fc5, not sure). Anyway, on w2k it resizes smoothly regardless of how fast I drag the mouse to resize FF.
* My soundcard (Creative Audigy) didn't work in FC5. Made me feel like I was installing slackware in the 90ies. This soundcard always works out of the box after I have installed w2k.
* Selecting either "Add/remove software" or "Package Updater" in the Gnome FC5 menu resulted in "Unable to retrieve update information" and then these apps just quit.
Member since:
2005-12-09
Some of the "cons" mentioned in the article seem to be GNOME specifc. For example KDE has a fast switch user applet, it has gui tools for dealing with bluetooth, a menu editor and tools for syncing with mobiles and pdas. I am sure those using KDE on FC5 will not have a problem with some of the "cons".
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2006-03-17
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2005-06-28
> I've been keeping an eye on http://pitivi.sourceforge.net/ , maybe it'll interest you too.
PiTiVi is not nearly as good looking or easy to use as Diva is.
>And diva doesn't seem to be coming along soon, last commit was 7 weeks ago.
Try the link I provide in the article. ;-)
>To edit GNOME menus, try a right click on the
>Applications tab on top panel bar. Default in FC5
No it's not. You can't hide/unhide or add new menus like that. Not anymore. It was removed two releases ago.
Member since:2005-07-06
No it's not. You can't hide/unhide or add new menus like that. Not anymore. It was removed two releases ago.
Actually, FC5 has menu editor that you can hide/unhide unless the update removed it which I didn't notice.
Addendum:
I have no doubt in my mind that FC6 is going to rock even more (especially with the possible inclusion of AIGLX by default) and I expect at least 3 out of the 7 issues I mention below to be resolved by then
AIGLX is included in the distro. Follow the step on
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RenderingProject/AiglxOnFedora
but you don't need to read install/uninstall step. Still experimental though.
- No Fast User Switch applet
Hidden in the menu. Right-click application -> menu editor. Look for "System Tools" and you got new login men. Hope it helps.
Edited 2006-03-26 19:49
Member since:2006-01-16
Member since:
2005-11-13
Anyone tried it on a Mac? FC4 would not install on a Mini for me, blowing up during the install.
If someone has it installed on a Mac, how does it handle sleeping and spinning down the drive? I'd like to put Linux, preferably Feedora, on the Mini, but won't if I can't put it to sleep or if the drive goes "Whirrrll!" all the time.
Member since:
2005-07-06
...it's still not quite there yet, IMHO. For instance, if you install the x86_64 version of FC5, you get 64-bit Firefox only (32-bit Firefox actually hasn't been built in the 64-bit tree of Fedora Core, so you can't just "yum install firefox.i386"), which at this moment in time means you can't run various 32-bit only plugins (e.g. Flash or Adobe Acrobat Reader) and you have to painfully manually download 32-bit Firefox and several of its 32-bit dependencies from download.fedora.redhat.com to get 32-bit Firefox up and running on your 64-bit system.
FC5 *still* runs too many services by default that you have to chkconfig off - who needs atd for example or any of the laptop-related services on a desktop? I've also had trouble saving the position of my GNOME terminal windows (seems to revert to a single-window setup every time I log in) and even fiddling with the Sessions option off of the main menu doesn't seem to help.
Finally, Azureus barfs out a Java trackback what may be a result of an SELinux issue (I left it on "Enforcing" during install), but still seems to run...but then you can't check for updates or install any additional plugins (e.g. Speed Scheduler is crucial if your ISP has peak-time quotaing like mine does), making the shipped Azureus not much use to me and I suspect many others - ended up having to hand-install Sun's Java [can't use the RPM version!] and Azureus from Sourceforge to get a fully operational Azureus. Nice to see Amule - its "cousin" for the eDonkey network - available for Fedora at long last though.
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2006-01-04
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2006-03-27
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2005-08-19
Has the kernel bug been fixed yet?
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=14009