Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 6th Jun 2007 23:02 UTC
Fedora Core Some review of Fedora 7. First, eWeek concludes: "We were impressed to see how amenable to customization this popular Linux-based operating system has grown." Linux.com also reviews Fedora 7. "Fedora 7 was released last week, a little bit behind schedule, with a spate of new features, updates, and live CD installable "spins" of Fedora in KDE and GNOME flavors. I found a lot of good in this release, but a bug in the FireWire stack that attacked my external backup drive made this release just a little shy of perfect." Update: Two more Fedora articles, a review and a news article.
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review is balanced and fair
by buff on Thu 7th Jun 2007 03:52 UTC
buff
Member since:
2005-11-12

I thought the review was pretty fair and balanced. The writer discussed some of the new features which allows a group to spin up their own flavor of the Fedora distro. The virtualization GUI tools make it very easy to try out this features. I barely knew what I was doing and I just used the wizard, clicked next several times and at the end I was running Windows XP -- very cool. Other features such as the new Wifi stack worked well for me and Fedora picked up my Wifi card on install.

Ah, but I liked the article since it was fair and stated that Fedora is bleeding edge and recent changes can create problems. For example, I have several USB drives connected. I rebooted after installing nvidia's drivers and my USB drives became read only. Puzzling. So I logged in as root and changed the permissions to read/write for everyone since they are USB drives. Installing all the software for proprietary media formats like MP3 can also be confusing for new users. Fedorafaq describes how to get all your favorite media to play. To get mpeg video to play I added the Livna repo using RPM and then issued the yum command 'yum install mplayer mplayer-gui mplayer-fonts.' A lot of the media issues might disappear when Codecbuddy works its way into version 8. http://www.fedorafaq.org/

Sometimes I wonder who the Fedora distro is for. Is it a Red Hat test bed? Not really. Is it a newbie desktop linux. Nope. I like to use it since it is pliable in terms of hacking together different modules. If you want more reliable stability I would stick to centos, if you want an RPM based distro. If you like to tinker a little and want it all you might like Fedora 7.

Edited 2007-06-07 04:05