Submitted by “Over all, Fedora Core 5 seems to be alot more of a solid distribution than the last time I ran it (FC3), they finally got rid of that nasty up2date that seemed to hang at the worst possibly opportunities – when you’re 98% of the way there. The applications also seemed to be tested alot more than previous releases, and the speed as improved substantially, especially with GTK; whether its due to the compile, cairo or some other mystical voodoo I don’t understand, what ever the case, the improvement is great. Over all, this is probably the best distribution I’ve tried; if you’re looking for an easy to use, no fuss UNIX-like desktop, look no further than Fedora Core 5.”
FC5 was, in general a pretty good distribution. However, I didn’t like yum. apt-get seems a lot more flexible and faster to me.
Hmmm….Looks like I’ll be using Ubuntu for quite some time.
in general I have found apt-get to be faster too, but it doesn’t support alt. architectures from what I have been told. Or maybe its just apt4rpm that doesnt. Anyway, yum is getting better. It used to be really bad.
Quite debatable. Apt-get has been long since ported to RPM based systems and available for Fedora too. Yum supports multi lib in Fedora unlike Apt-get.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tools/Apt
Yum has support for plugins.
http://wiki.linux.duke.edu/YumPlugins
For example Fedora Core 5 ships with the installonlyn plugin by default.
Many of the advanced features are supported by a add on package – yum-utils in Fedora Extras.
http://blog.sethdot.org/index.cgi/233.html
Yum speed is very much comparable to Apt-get in recent versions which has improving db performance using sqllite, better cache and metadata management and is even faster in local networks
I have abandoned yumex in favour of kyum. And with vlc application, I have a delightful desktop environment.
Have you checked kyum out? What I like is the progress information onscreen, and the ability to manage repos from it.
Kyum is very well thought out.
Leslie
apt-get isn’t available for Fedora anymore?
Hmmm….Looks like I’ll be using Ubuntu for quite some time.
Likewise 🙂
I have found that accessibility features causes extremely slow keystrokes. It took a bit of hunting around to find this as being the issue. This did not occur in FC5 test3.
Turn off the accessibility features and you should be good to go!
–griz
Hmm, didn’t notice that; I wonder whether I hadn’t noticed because of system specification differences between your computer and mine; oh well.
I’ve been a fan of fedora through my college days, using fedora core 3 for my choice linux in the school virtual machines.
However, after a horrible weekend of hair pulling, Fedora Core 5 has one massively important feature missing. I downloaded all 5 cd’s, and only needed two of them to install. After the installation, I had no program whatsoever to search the other cd’s for important packages. The add/remove programs software, when started, complains about no internet connection, and promptly closes.
I have no idea if fedora core 5 includes ndiswrapper in it’s distribution! The distibution was also supposed to include the alpha broadcom 43xx drivers, but because I have no way of browsing the packages on the cd(except manually through nautilus), I couldn’t find them. I put in each cd one at a time and browsed for “bcmw43xx” and broadcom, and they were non existant. Just how am I supposed to manage my packages without an internet connection?
I only have wireless internet, and if I can’t get wireless up, the whole distribution – no matter how good it may be – is useless.
Using sneakernet, I got copies of ndiswrapper, which wouldn’t compile. It complained about not having a compiler; well, lemme install that from the cd; oh wait, which cd/cds is it on?
I’m sticking with ubuntu, merely because I can get my wireless up and running.
Edited 2006-04-01 18:04
offline management is configurable for the Add/Remove programs (see http://katzj.livejournal.com/380795.html for future plans) and there is a detailed mirror guide if you want a more sophisticated setup.
http://www.city-fan.org/tips/YumRepoFromImages
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/mirror/
ndiswrapper is the livna repository but not provided with in Fedora Core since it doesnt meet the Fedora ideals.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2006-March/msg00395…
You need to get bcm43xx-fwcutter from Fedora Extras or get the firmware manually if you need broadcom connections to work as expected.
One tip – do what I do and only use the DVD release. DVD burners are under 30 pounds here in the UK and *rewritable* DVD media is now 50p a disc. There’s really no excuse for not having a DVD writer nowadays if you’re prepared to install an “alternative” (read: superior) OS on a PC really. Oh, and use the official torrent rather than an FTP/HTTP download, because a) it’ll speed up the torrent overall and b) you won’t run into the >2GB problems you can get trying to save a DVD ISO image.
ndiswrapper is available via livna rpm repository.
If you choose the customize now, it will provide you with a full choice of software available from the DVD or multiple CD’s. If you choose to customize later, then you require an internet connection where the very latest updates will be fetched.
Wireless support is finally in Core5.
I still can’t figure out how to get Nvidia accelerated drivers installed working.
Also, I notice that if you run in runlevel 3 (text only) and have manually started X and try to quit back to text prompt, you never get the prompt back unless you switch virtual terms (alt-f2) and back to the tty0, you finally get the prompt.
FC5 DVD covers – http://booth.zapto.org/~foxkm/FC5/
To install nVidia’s drivers:
1) Upgrade your system so you have Linux 2.6.16-1.2080_FC5 installed.
2) Run the commands, as root:
# rpm -Uvh rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-5.rpm
# yum install kmod-nvidia
3) Now edit /etc/X11/xorg, replacing “nv” with “nvidia” in the “Device” section.
About your console problem, are you sure just pressing Alt is not enough? I assume the screensaver is activated, pressing any key should be enough if that’s the case.
3) Now edit /etc/X11/xorg, replacing “nv” with “nvidia” in the “Device” section.
Normally, you don’t need this step as long you get a package called “xorg-driver-nvidia” installed alonf wih kmod-nvidia and livna package will automatically configure xorg.conf.
Ok, a PC DVD drive is $30 in the UK, but what about those of us with laptop systems?
I have broadband, so my ideal would be a “network install” that lets me install from a single-cd, 100 MB image, and then get whatever else I need with yum.
This would probably save the Fedora project considerable bandwidth usage, at least in my case, since then I’d only be downloading the packages I actually need, rather than all 3 GB of cd ISO images!
Debian already does this, and either yum or apt is a shoe-in for the task – why hasn’t this already been done?
Why do you think a network installation feature is not there. It has been there for Red Hat Linux in a number of years and in every release of Fedora.
You can download a 6 MB rescue disk or a slightly bitter boot.iso image from the images folder. For example for x86 FC5,
http://ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/linux/fedora-core/5/i386//os/images/
burn and in the boot prompt “linux askmethod”
Just read the installation guide which covers this all in detail
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedora-install-guide-en/fc5/
the bubble theme is really hideous. Is there anyway to completely turn it off? It looks like a joke. It looks like a toy. I have changed my background already, but the bubbles are still everywhere. I want to get rid of them completely.
Change the background and the GDM theme. Shouldnt take more than a few mins. Art is personal subjective taste.
I quite like the bubble theme, it has a retro 1970s look about it; although I’d admit if it were a hideous combination of orange and brown, then I’d start to get a little worried.
I installed FC5 on to my laptop. Everything went really smoothly. I didn’t have to type in any commands to get it to load. When I tried installing Ubuntu it would lock up or would not detect video properly so I couldn’t finish the install. Even using command line options for installing Ubuntu was a little be sketchy. I got it to finally work with vga=771 and acpi=off, but with FC5 I didn’t have to do any of that. Also when FC5 boots up I can actually see the services starting. So while some people like other distros, for me I’m going to stick with FC5 for a while.
Fedora 5 is a nice effort, but its still not good enough to convince me to switch. Its still got the classic Redhat bloat, and Ubuntu really beats it in every category i care about.
Still, it is probably the best effort yet from Red Hat.
How would you call it ‘Red Hat bloat’ considering that ubuntu only bundles one of each – one desktop, one text editor? now sure, if you wanted the basic setup, one merely requires the first two cd’s, but at the same time, the whole point of a 5 cd distribution is to allow people to make those choices, pick and choose the components the like and dislike.
If it were me with ubuntu, I might end up finding that the files they install are completely useless to me, resulting in me having to spend another 2 hours downloading more files that I might consider should have been on the cd.
Agreed with kaiwai on this one. Not many people have broadband connection for just one CD so it makes sense to get most of packages available on 4 or 5 CDs without the need to install them online. Another point to add is Ubuntu is not flexible when it comes to customize the installation from CD/DVD to network.
I have been using FC5 since test 2 came out and I love the final version. I really don’t see any bloat issues that people complain about. I didn’t like the bubble desktop image so I changed it — it took about 20 seconds to change.
In terms of the startup time improvements and Gnome UI responsiveness this version is much faster than previous Fedora releases. All the programs I have installed with yum such as mplayer and the Nvidia drivers have installed without any problems. I have been using Seamonkey as my main browser, email client and they work great with Gnome 2.14. I would definately reccomend this version over previous versions. It rocks.
first thoughts of FC5 was grat installed on mt older PC ( i386 ) went fine for awhile till it totally crashed, which was ok as it was on old IDE drives an needed to be changed over to SATA which i have done .. i tried to install it on my newer 64bit PC which didnt work kinda, i did have issues with pirut an yumex an a few other programs freezing/crashing. overall i thought the speed was Great. i expect FC6 to be even better .. my thoughts KDE needs to speed up now IMO
It’s a pity no one talks about translations, which are very incomplete with this version of Fedora.