Submitted by Yet another review of Fedora Core 6. “I’m through hoping that the next version of Fedora Core will fix all of the problems with the previous release. Fedora’s identity has gradually eroded over six releases, finally ending up as a second class clone of Ubuntu. On the other hand, Red Hat Linux was never really all that easy to install, configure, and use, so I guess this is just the natural evolution of a product that was destined to be eclipsed by more complete distributions like Mandriva and more easily configured distributions like SUSE.”
The reviewer doesnt value the Fedora is all about Free software and complains that the project doesnt make it for him to install proprietary and possibly GPL violating drivers.
Fedora has several unique features over any other distribution. It’s implementation of SELinux reference policy enabled by default, graphical virtualisation manager, ability to connect to custom repositories during installation and so on
Edited 2006-11-08 11:51
+1
The reviewer doesn’t have enough knowledge about the technology and what he is talking about seems neither here nor there.
Fedora/Redhat is committed to Free Software Movement and would not compromise for a short term benefit like Ubuntu and Novell do.
This is what happens, if an ubuntu user writes a review.
This guy complains about missing codecs and proprietary software. I’d recommend to read this (at the bottom) before writing such reviews: http://fedora.redhat.com/About/
He complains about a missing gui tool to add/remove software. What’s easier??
1.) yum -y install thunderbird
or
2.) open gui tool, find out in which software group thunderbird is in, search thunderbird within this group (which contains about 300 packages), click on it, being informed, that additional packages have to be installed (after having checked dependencies for a while, confirming, that you want to install these packages and wait until the installation is done – and still not having control about what mirror server will be used.
This gui stuff makes things more opaque and not easier. I would *never* use a gui tool to add or remove software. fedora has a new gui for updating the system. I’m not using it, since there’s nothing easier than “yum -y update” or better “screen -d -m yum -y update”
He claims to make it easier to install proprietary software. If he had read the documentaion at http://freshrpms.net/ (he would not even have to click any further links, as the necessary information is on the very first page), he would have entered the following commands:
rpm -i http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/6/freshrpms-rel…
(extremely difficult to add a new repository, isnt’t it??)
yum -y install nvidia-x11-drv xmms-mp3
(and again it’s extremely difficult to add proprietary software, isn’t it??)
This review has nothing to do with fedora. Maybe this guy accidentially installed a different distro?
bye
rpm -i http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/6/freshrpms-rel…..
(extremely difficult to add a new repository, isnt’t it??)
Why do you make it so difficult;-) Just click on the “click here” link on the freshrpms site, and after a root password a “OK” or two the new repository is added.
Other than that, I have to agree, this is one of the worst reviews of FC6 I have seen so far. According to the author the real problem with FC6 is that it isn’t Ubuntu.
To some extent, I can agree with him that fedora is about as bad as it gets if you try to target the Linux desktop of the average Joe. This is no different from previous Fedora releases. The good thing though, is that, as bad as it gets, now days is REALLY REALLY GOOD.
Also remember, that what makes Ubuntu better for the newbie is also the things that make it difficult to grow with as you become a more advanced user. Try use SELinux, or install a Xen host on Ubuntu and you see what I mean.
Some things could have been improved though:
1)
FC6 and its predecessors asks for the root password if you try to perform some admin task, such as installing new software. This is a reall bad practice as it does not scale well.
In a business you typically have more than one sysadmin and they should have their own passwords. Using sudo (like Ubuntu) would have been much better. If I remember correctly RHEL have the same problem. This is really surprising given that they target an audience where this is very much needed.
2)
The permissions dialog in nautilus should support ACLs.The ACL concept is much easier to grasp for a former windows admin, than the Linux/Unix group concept, not to mention that there is a limit to how many groups you can have. As it is now you can’t even use the GUI to specify that you should make an application runnable for one specific user.
3)
It would have been nice with an Ubuntu style live CD from which you could run the installer while having access to a full desktop with word processors, e-mail, web browsers etc. Perhaps not all that necessary as the installation is simple as it is, but it would certainly have impressed the Microsoft crowd, and it would have made it easier for people new to Fedora to check out Linux without losing their existing set up.
All in all, very good distro – terrible review.
Edited 2006-11-08 14:27
I don’t use the gui either.apt-get install whatever works and gives me the choice of more than 20000 packages.
Are you suggesting that if you use a GUI, there are less packages available? I think a GUI for package management is a good thing, particularly for new users who are not well versed with the command line.
Yes but regardless of how easy yum is, it still is a negative reflection on the GUI for fedora. If fedora is for *nix users only then fair enough, but a gui is the norm elsewhere.
yum -y install nvidia-x11-drv xmms-mp3
is very easy to type… assuming you know the names of the packages you want to install. If however you want to browse the available packages or do not know the exact package you are looking for a gui to abstract the process is useful.
(Slackware, Debian, SLES, and Ubuntu user for the record.)
He just plain missed the GUI package management tools. pirut is the simple group-based package selection. yumex is the more advanced interface to yum. pirut was pretty rough in FC5 but is better in FC6.
He also misses yum-updatesd, the graphical updater daemon. This will be useful for my dad who never updates because he doesn’t get notifications and doesn’t want to use the command-line. He wants the notification icon and yum-updatesd provides it.
This is a terrible review, if the author wants to rant then fine, just don’t try to pass it off as a review. In fact, the tone of the article is highly insulting to the Fedora projeect, and all open-source software contributers, who provide this OS completely free of charge.
I disagree with the above posts. Review is good from the standpoint of an ordinary user. My experience is the same as it is described here and i really, really do not have two days to solve a simple problem of getting my wireless card to work. And not only that. After following some suggestions on how to solve the atheros chip problem, I found out I cannot do it without going even deeper into the system (the instructions which worked for FC5 were not usable on FC6). I am not a student nor am I an IT professional and I do not have much spare time. Even if I would like to I am not able to use Fedora. I just installed the good old Ubuntu back and worked like a charm. If Fedora continues on this track I really do not see its future as a mainstream distribution.
Edited 2006-11-08 13:12
Continuing on this track is EXACTLY what will see it continue in the future. A lot of users are getting tired of this attitude that proprietary is just fine and dandy or only using linux because it is the popular thing.
Fedora can not help if you bought a crappy wireless card dude.
Strange that even Shutteworth has discussed making a truly FREE Ubuntu when according to you there is no need.
Edited 2006-11-08 14:13
There is precisely one kind of 802.11g chip that works with a completely free driver: the rather uncommon Ralink chip. All other chips require either a proprietary driver, ndiswrapper, or a proprietary firmware blob. It’s essentially impossible to 100% guarantee the card you buy will have an Ralink chipset, and in many places it’s essentially impossible to even give yourself a high chance. That’s not even mentioning the issue of laptops – I don’t know of any popular laptop line which uses Ralink chips for the onboard wireless, in general it’s either Intel or Broadcom all the way.
The author of the article did not really mind the absence of proprietary drivers or firmware in Fedora itself. Yes, go read that sentence again, since it’s obvious you missed the bit in the review where he said this. What he really didn’t like is that, according to him, it’s very hard to install the stuff even from external repositories. I don’t have any personal experience with Fedora from this perspective, so I can’t say if I agree with him or not. I’m just explaining what he wrote, since obviously half the people commenting on this thread had difficulty reading it.
I actually have an atheros card and it works quite well after installing from livna the madwifi-kmod driver.
“FC6 resembles a less functional Ubuntu. What reason would anyone have to use Fedora Core when Ubuntu uses an almost identical interface, but is easier to install and configure?”
And Ubuntu is what? The only true God Tux? (while all the other distros are mere mortals)
My reply: “What reason would anyone have to use Ubuntu when Debian uses an almost identical interface, but it is the real deal and it is ways more stable?”
I have found Ubuntu bugs to increase exponentially with every release.
And if you are complaining about ease of use, proprietary plugins… I suggest you try SUSE or Mandriva, rather than Ubuntu.
BTW, posting this from a test install of Fedora. And I like it.
Edited 2006-11-08 13:47
“My reply: “What reason would anyone have to use Ubuntu when Debian uses an almost identical interface, but it is the real deal and it is ways more stable?”
I switched from Debian to Kubuntu because (and only because) Kubuntu had newer a KDE available. I like to stay “edgy”. But even Kubuntu is easier to setup and configure than Debian.
So I guess you are thinking absolutely all Linux users are experienced, that they don’t need (K)Ubuntu because they can apt-get into whatever, vi some config files and they are done configuring and maintaining. There’s still a lot of people that are better suited to Kubuntu than plain Debian. There’s nothing wrong with that.
“There’s still a lot of people that are better suited to Kubuntu than plain Debian. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
I agree. But please let’s stop these people who tell us every day that Ubuntu/Kubuntu is the best thing after sliced salami and everything else isn’t even worth considering.
The reviewer is a DOBBER, Fedora core 6 is the best distribution around at the moment, windows media even plays on the x86-64 version after a trip to livna. Red Hat have contributed more than Ubuntu to the community and the kernel so they get my respect.
“The reviewer is a DOBBER, Fedora core 6 is the best distribution around at the moment”
Totally subjective point of view.
“windows media even plays on the x86-64 version after a trip to livna”
Lucky you!
“Red Hat have contributed more than Ubuntu to the community and the kernel so they get my respect.”
You realize that Ubuntu is no more than 2 years in the market and Red Hat has been like 12 (?).
Edited 2006-11-09 02:29
“You realize that Ubuntu is no more than 2 years in the market and Red Hat has been like 12 (?). ”
So there is no comparison. Redhat is one of the main contributors to the free Software movement while Ubuntu is a distribution packager and borrows heavily from Debian.
They package proprietary software. That’s evil. See what its users has become.
this is second bad review i have read on osnews recently. i don’t know if there is any connection in that they were both fc6 reviews (by noobs)or what. i don’t mean bad as in bad for fc6; i mean bad as in quality. if these people knew what they were talking about and still had bad things to say about fedora there would be no problem, these people are writing uninformed bad reviews. which is painful to read. your better than this osnews, give us well written and well informed reviews. when i haven’t used fedora since fc3 and i can still point out the solutions to these peoples problems its a poor quality review.
this is the other review i’m speaking of
http://www.osnews.com/story.php/16405/Fedora-Core-6–Batteries-Incl…
I am finding Fedora Core 6 an excellent example of how advanced linux has become.
I am using Gnome with the default background and the Mist theme and it looks gorgeous.
I can install packages with Yum, Smart or apt/synaptic.
Without enabling any external repositories there are 6525 packages available.
But what really amazed me is how easy and fast is to suspend the system and wake it up again. Much easier than in Windows.
Reading all the comments I cannot help but think that a lot of people here are experiencing some kind of Coca cola-Pepsi syndrome, noticed so many times in the Apple community. You like one and would criticize/kill anybody drinking the opposite. How sick can it get? And that in the “open source” community? The ALTERNATIVE? Right! But anyway, I have seen a lot of bad press for Fedora 6 and I cannot say that all of it is wrong. There are pluses and minuses but it seems the minuses keep adding with each release. Remember: criticism is a good thing and don’t take it personally.
You like one and would criticize/kill anybody drinking the opposite. How sick can it get? And that in the “open source” community? The ALTERNATIVE? Right! But anyway, I have seen a lot of bad press for Fedora 6 and I cannot say that all of it is wrong. There are pluses and minuses but it seems the minuses keep adding with each release. Remember: criticism is a good thing and don’t take it personally.
Nope, you’re wrong. While I agree that criticism is good and fedora has its mistakes, this review didn’t make one single attempt to review Fedora.
When you go with Fedora you go with FREE (yes, there are limits of free distro, and Fedora never denied that). Why would one review proprietary when review Fedora is beyond me.
People expecting what reviewer expected are much better off with some other distro.
First sentence on Fedora site could tell them all: “Fedora Core is a free operating system that offers the best combination of stable and cutting-edge software that exists in the free software world.”
http://fedora.redhat.com/About/
explains that even better.
is the highlight of my day 🙂 It is true that I don’t use my old notebook to listen to the music or watch movies (I use an entartainment center for that), but I put it through the paces with number crunching, testing etc. Even on a very modest hardware platform (such as mine) it works perfectly. On the install side, a minor annoyance to me is that it DOES work way better if you have a network connection, most of the crashes that other people have experienced are due to the lack of network connection (probably people are relying on the wireless adapters which are not recognized by anaconda during the install). I do support fedora team on their stance on proprietory software and keeping them out of a distro. If all other distros would do the same, pressure on manufacturers to open their drivers would increase. This issue alone is going to be a major reason for my recomandation against the adoption of SLED in one of our companies. I am getting a bad vibe from novell-microsoft deal.
As a side note, the reviewer seems to be of modest capabilities. His lack of knowledge is evident when he talks about partitioning.
Try installing Ubuntu and getting it to connect to a WPA AP with their pathetic configuration tool. I’m a 15 year veteran of IT, the last 7 on Linux and I couldn’t get it to work. Had to install Network Manager to figure it out.
I also find Ubuntu to be less stable than Fedora. The Ubuntu developers seem to just throw patches at bug reports without proper testing and/or mis-configure compile time options. Basically, I need a business desktop and Ubuntu is less oriented towards a business environment.
Edited 2006-11-08 17:10
+1
And don’t forget that Networkmanager is developed by Redhat Dan Williams <[email protected]> Robert Love <[email protected]>, as is many other softwares.
Took me about 30 min to set up WPA from the console on Ubuntu, fairly straight forward if you do a quick google or read the manpages for wpa_supplicant and wpa_supplicant.conf.
Thought Ubuntu was the greatest thing since swiss cheese? Command Line? 30 minutes? Just works?
What am I missing?
1. Visit rpm.livna.org, follow simple instructions to add repository.
2. “yum install ipw2200-firmware” or use the GUI Package Manager.
3. reboot.
4. Let Network Manager do its job…
Less than 5 minutes, no man pages.
The missing element is the configuration of this particular laptop.
1. Most of the access points I use do not provide DHCP.
2. One access point also establishes a VPN tunnel if it connects.
3. If none of the access points I have explicitly listed are available I do not want it connecting to any available access point.
By doing a custom config in /etc/network/interfaces I had much more flexibility than was provided by network manager. Not needed for most, but I guess my point was if you did not (or can not) use Network Manager the standard config files are still there and fairly well documented.
Edit: Network manager is painless to install in most distros, I was replying to a coment complaining that it was needed to connect to an AP using WPA.
Edited 2006-11-08 21:23
by the voting system???
Well, I could write same quality review about new car from BMW:
“Deep underwater this car performs way below specs BMW would like you to believe, in fact getting it up to 100km/h takes hours and not seconds as in brochure.
I can also note having troubles at the take off, which usually results in bumpy flying. Where I have to note that longest flight wasn’t nowhere near to 1000km as one would expect”
Fedora and proprietary doesn’t mix.
One crappy review deserves another – only mine will be positive. <review>I just finished an HTTP install of Fedora Core 6 on my primary desktop box. Everything works just as it’s supposed to.</review>
Muppets should not be allowed to write reviews.
OSNews should publish a wide range of opionions, but there should at least be restrictions placed on the level of technial competence of the authors.
Core 6 is a brillaint release on the heals of a solid Core 5, Fedora has finally found it’s feet.
And to echo the opinions of many other posters, Suse and Redhat have done more for linux than Ubuntu, and most of the hype spread about ubuntu is about things developed by Novell and Redhat employees. I like and use ubuntu, but Fedora is my distribution of choice, and technically superior to most others.
That this review is more of a rant from a user who can’t get Fedora to work, but it is hardly the worst review/article posted on OSNews.
Fedora has a following and many like it, I just happen not to be one of them. I move around distros on secondary boxes a bit, but generally have a distaste for rpm based distros. The problems of the early days of RPMs are not nearly as prevalant as they once were, but I can not get over this prejudice. Except where I can not avoid it I will stick to Slack and Debian based distros.
This does not mean that Fedora is bad, just not for me. Same for Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, and Slack for others. Praise your distro but try not to stereotype the users who have different priorities please. Ubuntu bashing is easy due to the large influx of newbies, but it is getting old.
Another bloody review of Fedora Core? What is it with Fedora Core? Not even Ubuntu gets that many. Must be some kind of conspiracy