“As a test release, Fedora Core 4 Test 2 shows just how good FC4 will be when it’s officially releases. Should you punt FC3 and upgrade? Frankly, not on your primary system unless you don’t need the guarantees of an official, complete release.” Read the rest of the preview here.
Fedora Core 4 Test 2–Plenty to Look Forward to in FC4
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I dont see really much of an update at all here, and most of the “new features” he talks about in the review, were already there in previous versions, I guess Gcc 4.0 is pretty big, Im still waiting for a Redhat LDAP Directory Server with kerberos authentication, where it would be easy to administer services, and lockdown users, and set many policies.
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=319&slide=3…
Gnome 2.10, KDE 3.4, and GCC 4.0, and you’re saying that’s not much of an update?
FC3 works well with all the patches and updates
applied, I hate to reload and start all over
yet again with FC4.
Redhat RHEL3 runs well, it is just stripped of
functional apps, for home use. But still not
bad for basic all around computing I still
prefer Fedora on my workstations and laptop.
steve
I am writing this now on FC4 Release 2 using Firefox 1.0.3. I love FC4. Gnome is faster, startup time is faster, Nautilus has faster folder previews. On a down note I had to manually install Open Office using RPM’s since the ones that came with release 2 would not work right. This should be fixed in the final release.
I have a screenshot showing FC4 R2, XFCE4.2, and Gnome applications running. http://markbokil.org/index.php?section=mozilla&content=c_menux.php
Tried but existing Raid partitions were not recognized…. No responce on bugzilla either….
“I have a screenshot”
Yeah right..
Advertise your own extension. How lame.
Shouldn’t your subject have been — “Here’s my extension, check it out.”
What a maroon. ( Bugs Bunny impersonation implied. )
Slighlty off topic, but the site linked to has the most annoying ad I have ever seen.
by default, can you hear sounds from more than one application, either by hardware, kernel or sound-server mixing?
Yeah right..
Advertise your own extension. How lame.
First of all it isn’t an advertisement. It just happens to be a project I am working on right now for fun. The extension is GPL’d and I am not trying to sell it. I just wanted to show how Firefox is picking up the latest bluecurve theme correctly . Jeesh. Such a cynical crowd. If you feel the screenshot is lame please don’t bother downloading the extension once it hits update.mozilla.com since I don’t want you to use it!
looked sweet to me – fsck the rest of these dicks. Looks like a sweet extension, too.
Thanks for the encouragement. If you want to be added to the testers mailing list send an email to menux[at]markbokil[dot]org.
>Don’t use sly or sneaky tactics to reel people in.
Yeah, this isn’t WinHEC!
looks sweet to me too. Once you disable like half the services, nuke the bootsplash stuff, FC usually perform very well. I’m a debian guy, but I can’t help installing every new FC release, there’s something about FC…
And gnome 2.10 is just great, I love the new ‘places’ menu.
I love the new ‘places’ menu.
I’m a Debian guy too (Ubuntu actually). I’ve had that feature for months. Ooh, fun stuff.
Will it be as fat, bloated, and slow as FC3?
Nope
Call me crazy, but I’m one of those guys who doesn’t really consider having a whole slew of free stuff just sitting on the hard drive as bloat.
Eclipse and Logical Volume Management on Desktop–>System Settings are new features inside FC4. GFS which was from RHEL4 is ported to FC4 development repositories. On surface not much change but beneath is significant.
The versions of up2date and yum provided with FC4T2 are still on a shakedown cruise, though it’s sometime difficult to tell the difference between problems in packages and package repositories and problems in the applications themselves. My original attempts at using up2date reported that every available package update was size 0, so I couldn’t actually update anything. Yum reported problems with unsigned packages and unresolved dependencies, both of which I could work around (for the most part) using yum’s groupupdate feature. However, updates are necessary and frequent for test releases, pre-releases, and actual releases–caveat emptor!
Just so people are aware, if they are not on the mailing list. In rawhide, the problem isn’t yum, there are packages that are built on a daily basis. There will be breaks and it will happen, the next day things get sunny again. Besides that, you can always use:
yum –exclude=<package-name>
or another new tasty treat
yum shell
> update
> transaction solve
<some error occurs here>
> exclude package-that-causes-error
> update
> transaction solve
<no errors>
> run
> quit
Very handy, FC4 will rock!
Call me a zealot or whatever, but what advantages does Fedora Core have over something like Ubuntu or other debian/other distro’s with sane package management? None as far as I can see.
What a maroon. ( Bugs Bunny impersonation implied. )
Now I for one find this completely uncalled for. First of all, how do you know he’s a deep, reddish-purple color? More importantly, should OSNews really be the place to judge and ridicule people based on their various shades and hues?
As for the screen shot and FC4 – cool!
Some how Clinton, the Bug’s Bunny quote just got funnier. 🙂
About yum as package management:
– yum can make difference between 32 bit and 64 bits. It is bi-arch. Apt-get does not support that feature yet.
– use of metadata which means each repository is made on a single file (useful to list mirror server)
Fedora Core can use other package managers such as apt-get and smartpm. Therefore, it is more about choice although I personnaly choose yum as it is the default.
First off, apt runs on Fedora if you so desire. So how is that any different than Debian or whatever you want me to call you a zealot about? Secondly, if you’re going to sit there and tell that without a frontend package manager that rpm packages are really any different deb files, well, I hate to break it to you but you’re pretty ignorant when it comes to all things Linux.
Here are the full technical details
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraDocs_2fReleaseNotes_2fCore4Test…
LVM by default
SELinux by default and heavily updated from FC3
GFS
PHP5
OpenOffice.org 2.0
Native free Java stack ( Java programs compiled using GCJ)
Yum using sqllite to heavily speed up performance
GCC4 and every program will be rebuild on GCC4
XEN
Fedora extras by default
I am probably missing out a good number of stuff
@Mathman
“First off, apt runs on Fedora if you so desire”
True but APT4RPM doesnt support multilib ( both 64 and 32 bit libraries and software intermixed) and the primary maintainer has been working on smartpm now. Yum is more actively maintained than APT4RPM and is written in python which is easier for Fedora developers to take over maintainance or fix bugs by themselves if thats necessary
Eclipse natively built on Fedora
LVM frontend (incomplete on FC4T2)
@finalzone
“Eclipse natively built on Fedora ”
I mentioned Free Java stack which includes eclipse, tomcat and a whole lot of other stuff. read the release notes I have linked to.
“Will it be as fat, bloated, and slow as FC3? ”
Thats a pretty vague question but FC4 will bootup significantly faster. There has been some optimisation work using bootchart created explicitly for this
http://bootchart.sf.net
FC4 will also have a login screen show up pretty early in the boot process.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2005-April/msg00416…
I am not sure of the exact effect of GCC4 but in general its expected to improve a few things
by default, can you hear sounds from more than one application, either by hardware, kernel or sound-server mixing?
Yup on either GNOME or KDE.
About Firefox extension (MenuX):
– very impressive especially for laptop users. If I will ever get a laptop, I will not hesitate to try it out.
I mentioned Free Java stack which includes eclipse, tomcat and a whole lot of other stuff. read the release notes I have linked to.
My bad. I thought Eclipse can also edit some languages other than Java.
A question. I was wondering it it is possible to change the format of Fedora wiki with css. I will help if necessary. Thanks.
Eclipse can edit also c and c++ languange using CDT http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/
I don’t know if eclipse shipped with fedora contains CDT…
I think it’s about time Fedora manages their own repositories,instead of Dag Wiers &co.
Sure, but from what I understand, apt for debian doesn’t support multilib either. You need to build a 32 bit chroot thingy. But either way, my point still stands.
I was a Fedora Core 3 user, but I am a KDE user too. Fedora might be a good distro for Gnome useres it’s not too great on the KDE side of things. Let’s see if this changes with FC4
@ finalzone
“My bad. I thought Eclipse can also edit some languages other than Java.”
Of course it can. A free Java stack means a set of software written in Java not that its limited to it. Apologies for any confusion regarding this
“A question. I was wondering it it is possible to change the format of Fedora wiki with css. I will help if necessary. Thanks.”
Please subscribe to the fedora-devel list and post your ideas are there. Any help to improve the wiki is most welcome
@nothingman
“Eclipse can edit also c and c++ languange using CDT http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/
I don’t know if eclipse shipped with fedora contains CDT…”
Yes it does.
“I think it’s about time Fedora manages their own repositories,instead of Dag Wiers &co.”
I agree. http://fedoraproject.org/extras/
@mathman
“Sure, but from what I understand, apt for debian doesn’t support multilib either. You need to build a 32 bit chroot thingy. But either way, my point still stands.”
Yes. Your point about the possibility of using APT on Fedora still stands however its not usable for all systems that Fedora Project supports and hence wouldnt be the default. I gave a list of unique stuff that I recall is being planned to ship with FC4 to address your other concerns
“I was a Fedora Core 3 user, but I am a KDE user too. Fedora might be a good distro for Gnome useres it’s not too great on the KDE side of things. Let’s see if this changes with FC4
”
KDE is very close to upstream version except for a potenial change in the default theme and possible removal of legally questionable stuff. If you find anything wrong in it feel free to file bug reports in bugzilla.redhat.com. If you still find this unacceptable there is a choice
kde-redhat.sf.net
I would be certainly interested in knowing what your specific issue are
Extras repository will only include open source (GPL, LGPL to name a few) packages. Dag and Freshrpms (which form RPMforge repository) are there to fill that void when it comes to proprietary formats.
” Dag and Freshrpms (which form RPMforge repository) are there to fill that void when it comes to proprietary formats.”
Just a clarification. proprietary or software that voilates patents wouldnt be included in Fedora Project – core,extras or otherwise. However Fedora Extras can include software that supports proprietary formats if they are legally safe
Is the fedora kernel compiled with execshield by default?
“Is the fedora kernel compiled with execshield by default?”
Don’t know about FC4, though previous releases did enable it by default.
“Is the fedora kernel compiled with execshield by default?”
Yes. SELinux and GCC and glibc enhancements too. The following article talks about RHEL4 but all of them apply to FC4 too
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/006apr05/features/security/
@ Nothingman
Yes the version that comes with FC4 includes a CDT option.
@ . (Fedora managing their own Repo’s)
One of the MAIN points of fedora is that it is a comunity project, we are MEANT to have third party repo’s.
I’m not sure why you feel that Fedora should be managing them all? seem’s to go against fedora’s “purpose”
Mind you this could be yet again, some one whining about the lack of MP3 support *ugh*!
@ The person commenting on OO2
This is unlikely to be included in the final release due to OpenOffice.org pushing their release date back due to the amount of user feedback on the beta testing.
Impressive,some distro’s offer something similar but you have to decide and compile yourself.Along the compile way a lot of things can brake though.
“I was a Fedora Core 3 user, but I am a KDE user too. Fedora might be a good distro for Gnome useres it’s not too great on the KDE side of things. Let’s see if this changes with FC4”
Add the fedora-for-redhat repository. Latest KDE desktop and KDE apps, no problems. Running 3.4, super karamba, and amaroK as we “speak.”
kde-for-readhat in the body of that message, too. Still working on my first cuppa joe here.
I think that if RedHat can get away from the RPM mechanism and develop a more “apt-gettish” style of package management, which takes dependencies into account and installs them automatically, then it will be much better. I remember that I used to be able to do this with Ximian but I often had problems with Ximian versions of applications or libraries conflicting with the RedHat versions. I have been impressed with where RedHat, Novell, and Mandrina have brought Linux, but IMO, RPM package management schemes have always been these distributions’ pitfalls. I haven’t used RedHat in about a year so I’m not sure if they’re working on this or not, but it would be nice if RPMs were something that they were planning on moving away from or if the RPM mechanism was something that they would upgrade to automatically upgrade dependencies, when needed.
The other thing I’d like to see is optimized builds for certain processors, specifically AthlonXP and Pentium 4 builds. If I remember correctly, RedHat distributes a build that will work on any 32-bit system, which works, but Gentoo has spoiled me with the performance increase I’ve obtained from CPU optimized builds. Again, I don’t know if this is in the works or already being done (I didn’t see and info on it anywhere) but I’d love to see that in Fedora.
although it is bloated (compared to f.e.arch linux),
i always keep coming back to fedora (plus arch linux which seems here to stay), because it is very solid and up to date (and most apps that run on RHEL run on it as well – i need that for work), and – after some customizations – makes a pretty good desktop!
however [rant on], there are things that simply suck, for example having to download 4 cds, that the menus are incredible bloated, that the boot time is horribly slow (due to graphics and because too much services are switched on by default which you don’t need for a desktop), that it installs too much packages by default, that yum is dogslow compared to apt (first thing i do after a fresh install is to install apt), that up2date sucks really bad (the applet crashes/freezes often, the graphical frontend as well!), that package management in general is not consistent at all (rpm, the install-from-cd-tool, apt, yum, up2date – could we just consolidate, pls?), that the helixplayer included is of no use because it doesn’t contain the proprietary real codecs etc.
[rant off]
nevertheless, it feels like home to me, but i hope it will improve and diversify a bit more quickly instead of just incorporating the newest packages!
“I think that if RedHat can get away from the RPM mechanism and develop a more “apt-gettish” style of package management, which takes dependencies into account and installs them automatically, then it will be much better.”
I believe you are being ignorant about the actual mechanism here. APT is not comparable to RPM. RPM is on the same level in Debian as dpkg which does not resolve dependencies. Red Hat has included up2date for a long time and Fedora Project also ships with Yum
http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/ which would have significantly improved performance. If you would prefer to use APT which has been ported to RPM long before, please go ahead
http://apt4rpm.sourceforge.net/
RH/FC will never move from RPMS 😉
and develop a more “apt-gettish” style of package management, which takes dependencies into account and installs them automatically, then it will be much better.
They have that, its called yum and/or apt-get, I prefer yum.
There are discussions about sliming Fedora core to 1 or 2 cds. I am not sure how that would work out but you can still do a personal desktop or minimum installation with just 2 cds already.
Boot time is currently being improved using bootchart (bootchart.sf.net) creatively exclusively for this purpose and work on GDM early login
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2005-April/msg00416…
Services are turned on by default only when it makes sense. For example people typically point to an MTA like sendmail as unrequired but it is there because it is used to send out logreports and other critical information.
up2date applet could be replaced by pup (gui package manager / updater)
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-config-list/2005-January/msg0…
Helix player is being shipped without proprietary plugins in Fedora for two reasons
1) Fedora project is exclusively open source
2) It is illegal to ship any software encumbered by patents for a US based entity
Fedora must be great cause the worse people can come up with are no longer issues or never were to begin with.
RPM sux0rz:
No it doesn’t you just don’t know what RPM’s job is and what yum/apt-get job is.
Bloat:
You can install with less than one CD, one CD. Either download the boot.iso which is a couple megs and do a FTP/HTTP/NFS install or download the first CD only and click “min install” after that install finishes and you boot into your new box login as root and type yum groupinstall Gnome Desktop Enviornment (or kde, etc) This will ensure you only grab packages you will be using such as doing a group install for devel packages, kernel building, video, etc.
speed:
RH is not optimized for 386, its optimised for i686 with a 386 instruction set. meaning it makes your box faster but can run on anything. RH dev’s have also done alot of speed improvements with this release. Including the bootsequence and gcc 4 is suppose to have improvments which the whole distro is compiled with.
no mp3:
Hehe
I think Redhat & Fedora Core actually make for pretty good corporate distros. It includes most stuff you need to get work done.
But for gamers & folks who want to do multimedia….well, there are definitely better choices out there. I’ve had a few too many headaches trying to install & update different media and encoding applications.
Not necessarily redhat/fedora’s fault, it’s just that there’s just way too much crap about DRM & patents running around.
Also if there’s some application that doesn’t have an rpm package available it’s a huge pain in the butt. Also distro support abandonment is another big issue. I guess that’s just one of the negative side effects of running a “snapshot” type disribution.
Sadly no one’s come up with a distro magic bullet just yet. I guess the open source world & linux are just too flexible for their own good (not a bad thing, mind you).
Ok, once for all, I will try to teach some Debian users how packages are managed in both (debian and fedora) distros.
Actually, some people criticize RPM packages because of their supposed dependancy problems.
CASE 1 : install a package on a system not connected to internet
– under debian : dpkg -i package.dep
– under fedora : rpm -ivh package.rpm
And under BOTH these distros, if there missing librairies, a message will be displayed. So stop pretending RPMs suck because of their dependancy problems, since DEBs have the same!
CASE 2 : install a package on a system connected to internet
– under debian : apt-get install package
– under fedora : yum install package
Both have a package manager that handles dependancy problems, installing or removing a package is 99.99% EXACTLY the same.
So please, please, stop criticizing RPMs because of a supposed problem with dependancies, DEB has the same.
By the way, I suggest everyone (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandrake users) to try Smartpm. It’s a new package manager (made by the developper of APT-RPM and Synaptic) that handles packages better than apt or yum. Just have a look at the README page of this website : http://smartpm.org
For Fedora users, to install Smartpm, follow the instructions at http://fedoranews.org/blog/?p=573
And to know the differencies between versions of Fedora : http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=fedora
a while back i remember someone working on a project that increased the boot load up speed, it was suppose to be included in fc4 is it there?
so will it be easy to upgrade from fc3 to fc4?
in ubuntu upgrading from one version to the next is basically a case of replacing “warty” with “hoary” in /etc/apt/sources.list or in the synaptic prefs, and clicking reload, mark upgrades and apply.
also can yum continue a partial download yet? ie for people on dialup with connection time limits.
Anyone know if FC4 looks like it will have comparable ACPI support to SUSE 9.2? Are there any projects out there that create Fedora Live CD’s so we can test hardware compatibility?
I would like to see some benchmarks as far at GCC 4.0 compile fedora vs other versions. Personally i think the inclusion of GCC 4.0 is the most significant improvement.
The only livecd I can think of that would be a good comparison to FC3 is ADIOS
http://dc.qut.edu.au/adios/
As far as ACPI, here is the portions of config in the latest kernel in rawhide.
#
# Power management options (ACPI, APM)
#
CONFIG_PM=y
# CONFIG_PM_DEBUG is not set
# CONFIG_SOFTWARE_SUSPEND is not set
#
# ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) Support
#
CONFIG_ACPI=y
CONFIG_ACPI_BOOT=y
CONFIG_ACPI_INTERPRETER=y
CONFIG_ACPI_SLEEP=y
CONFIG_ACPI_SLEEP_PROC_FS=y
CONFIG_ACPI_AC=m
CONFIG_ACPI_BATTERY=m
CONFIG_ACPI_BUTTON=m
CONFIG_ACPI_VIDEO=m
CONFIG_ACPI_FAN=y
CONFIG_ACPI_PROCESSOR=y
CONFIG_ACPI_THERMAL=y
CONFIG_ACPI_ASUS=m
CONFIG_ACPI_IBM=m
CONFIG_ACPI_TOSHIBA=m
CONFIG_ACPI_BLACKLIST_YEAR=2001
# CONFIG_ACPI_DEBUG is not set
CONFIG_ACPI_BUS=y
CONFIG_ACPI_EC=y
CONFIG_ACPI_POWER=y
CONFIG_ACPI_PCI=y
CONFIG_ACPI_SYSTEM=y
CONFIG_X86_PM_TIMER=y
# CONFIG_ACPI_CONTAINER is not set
#
# APM (Advanced Power Management) BIOS Support
#
CONFIG_APM=y
# CONFIG_APM_IGNORE_USER_SUSPEND is not set
# CONFIG_APM_DO_ENABLE is not set
CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE=y
# CONFIG_APM_DISPLAY_BLANK is not set
CONFIG_APM_RTC_IS_GMT=y
# CONFIG_APM_ALLOW_INTS is not set
# CONFIG_APM_REAL_MODE_POWER_OFF is not set
One question for the RH users, if I install the release candidate now, can I easily update to the “full release” through yum when the time comes? Or will there be very important install changes, etc?
Are there any good comparisons around for RH vs. Solaris 10 ?
Updating via yum may perhaps work but updating this way from a release candidate to the released version is completly unsupported.
The other possible down side is that if some (there will be) packages don’t need to be updated from version # then they will stay and there will be debug info compiled into the package that can make it slower. Depends on your hardware I guess, I run several rawhide box’s at all times even after releases and I don’t really see a speed hit.
Hmm is it me or are there a lot of menu entries missing in KDE in fc4r2?