The latest issue of Red Hat Magazine includes an interesting overview of the new Fedora Core 4 among other things, released earlier this week.
Meet Fedora Core 4
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Does it support mp3 out of the box yet?
No, it doesn’t and it never will. Its easy to add anyways if you spend a minute googling about it.
its fast, but installing the video drivers is self-inflicted pain. Still have to figure out how to increase the resolution with the gnome menus intact hehe.. maan all i can do is laugh in disbelief.
>but installing the video drivers is self-inflicted pain.
only if you use the official driver binaries…
if you use the RPMs from http://rpm.livna.org/ installing working ATI or nVidia drivers is a matter of seconds
Slow as what compared to what?
I have a dual boot laptop with a semi-fresh install of XP-Pro(latest SP) and FC3 I carry for supporting clients.
Just today I had to use Windows. You must be joking… as XP is the slowest pos compared to the slow as f… FC. Does XP even use threads? A copy process nearly renders XP useless for anything else. I thought XP was running through QEMU. XP vs FC or Linux in general… Not even an horse race.
And don’t give me that ‘you need a faster cpu’ stuff. This was apples to apples.
Maybe enable DMA on your hard drives, yes? Or perhaps install some chipset drivers? Geez, I would hope stupidity has its limits …
Nice try at FUD’ing though. Copying files renders it useless … hahahahah. Try again.
How about the fact that opening Word 2003 on my machine takes <0.5 sec? Or opening a command window is instantaneous? Or that opening Media Player takes about ~1 sec? FC3 on this machine was slow as garbage compared to XP SP2. There’s a very perceptible lag in modern Linux distributions when it comes to drawing on the screen/starting applications/using applications.
yeah, gna try that later after i get off work. I need the nvidia-glx and the kernel right?
>yeah, gna try that later after i get off work. I need the nvidia-glx and the kernel right?
nvidia-glx and the kernel-module, yeah:
kernel-module-nvidia-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4-1.0.7174-0.lvn.3.4.i686.rpm
nvidia-glx-1.0.7174-0.lvn.3.4.i386.rpm
see:
http://www.fedorafaq.org/#nvidia
I’ve been using MS stuff since _before_ they had DOS… along with every version of Windows on several boxes… so don’t give me that ‘Nice try at FUD’ing’ stuff. Your last paragraph shows you don’t know how MS achives that type of response.
never been much of a fedora/red hat man, but I downloaded the fc4 x86_64 iso and I’m probably going to install this on my amd64 box….. don’t think it will replace my gentoo install, but, who knows… I’ll give it a shot
while everyone is on speed… generally linux running kde or gnome will run very similarly in speed to a well kept or new XP system. I’ve only seen a couple of linux distros that were noticably faster than windows, Gentoo and Arch (not saying there are not others) which is mostly because of intense hardware optimization and no unneeded bloat. I used FC3 on one of my machines for a while and while It did drive me nutts (not a fan of rpm’s)… speed was not one of the issues that I had had a complaint about.
Wow, that makes you a pro.
There are no excuses for the bloat in modern Linux distros. Sorry.
Shouldn’t atleast one person have read the article yet? =)
I’m reading it now so far I noticed the new ‘window focus’ feature but it didn’t occure to me it was new till reading the zine.
Fedora has simply gotten better with each release, whatever people complain about in the last release the new one fixes. Even the infamous “where is mp3” might even be done in FC5 if RedHat can wash its hands of the legal issues by turning over control to the community. But I mean first what was it, yum is to slow (fixed) bootup is slow (fixed) no extras by default (fixed) better security (selinux) What Am i missing? are there any problems left? oh the ‘i can only afford to download one cd people’ You can do that just choose min install or do a ftp,nfs,http install.
best multi purpose distro out there =)
For the RPM sucks people:
Can I ask what is it that all you guys are downloading that isn’t in extras, livna or dag?
I am a security nut and even my impossibly complicated perl scripts and tiny networking tools are found in there.
I have an RPM dir and a SRC dir inside ~/downloads and they hardly ever have anything in them except a couple themes and a few tools/scripts other than that the repo’s house everything i can think of.
you might want to think about learning how to build your own rpm’s I did and they are pretty darn complicated but there is a package called rpmdevtools in extras i believe that makes creating RPM’s a snap so maybe you can submit your favorite app to extras. Hey why not help when its really easy?
Also check out the RPM manpage there is some intersting stuff in there like finding out where all the files are installed to, the change log, all from the cmd line, like ‘rpm -qi package’ gives you a discripton of the package.
Its time people educate themselvs on RPM its a pretty cool tool once you understand what its job is.
By the way, Ubuntu Linux supports MP3 out of the box. I guess it’s because it’s made in a free country and not the USA.
I never said I hated rpm’s, I simply said I was not a fan and besides….. I’m a gentoo man, if I like FC4 when I try it, I will actively participate.. otherwise I won’t…. and back to gentoo I go… not that I would really leave anyway, I’ll give fedora a shot though
Nick so what packages are you missing from FC3 that wasn’t in the Repo’s? I know its not going to house everything in the world but for the stuff that has more than 100 people using it, or some no longer developed sourceforge project it should be there.
———
Ubunto has mp3 out of the box, hey thats a good reason to throw away selinux, KDE, kernel patches, oracle compatibility, exec-shield, a theme that doesn’t look like a human armpit gcc4 (security features compiled in), GCJ compiled Eclipse and ooffice, better system admin GUI applications.
Yep id trade all that in to have mp3 out of the box since I have no idea how to add a non free repository.
WinXP was released when? 2001/2? And you are comparing it w/ FC which is released in 2005? Why not compare the speed of Win98SE and XP? Then I’ll say that WinXP is freaking slow and bloated compared to Win98SE.
I used Gentoo for a long time, and I went back. It was due to all the lost time that I could no longer afford to waste.
Oh I heard you say something about not liking RPM’s and I just was wondering why you even needed to see them in the first place. I installed FC4 last monday and still haven’t gotten any rpm’s from the net, everything has been in a repository. Thats why I asked.
You don’t like that people are comparing the speed of FC with a 4 year old OS? Well, I guess we should stop any and all comparisons with Windows because it’s too old and outdated! That is what you’re saying, right? You also seem to be saying that it’s to be expected that OSes will get more bloated as time goes on, so any bloat in FC should be par for the course. The fact that it’s still less bloated than 4 year old WinXP is pretty telling, isn’t it?
Umm… you have to be joking? I haven’t used Linux in a while because well.. every time I do I just come back to XP
But Speed was never in its favor.
XP has always booted faster and felt more responsive than any Linux I have tried (SuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora)
I also have no problems securing it, it runs all my games perfectly, drivers and configuration isn’t a nightmare, and there is a whole bunch of FOSS software for me to use on it.
I want to like Linux, really I do, I would love to switch over out of a philosophical reason, but its just not realistic and hearing things like “XP Bloat” compared to some Linux distro’s I’ve tried is just a sad joke.
Right now when I need to get my *nix on my PowerBook does the job. I look forward to the day when Linux is the one faster than Windows, but that is definitely not the case – especially with KDE and Gnome being either
a) so unsightly (KDE)
b) so slow (Gnome)
I tried to like XFCE but I can’t even use a desktop on that.
Isn’t this a thread for Fedora Core 4’s features? Why do other people have to brag about the optimizations they are doing w/ their distro of choice? How is the optimizations of a source-based distro for a specific machine related to the features of FC (a binary-based distro?
I actually think this is by far the best Fedora Core release yet. I have it installed, and it’s worked wonderfully well. Fast, stable, and no spyware worries.
Props to the Fedora team!
I second MrApophis’s idea.
I used Gentoo myself for a while, but once you realize the bloat it brings with itself(the install grew to 15GB, Ubuntu and Fedora have never climbed past 4), I left it for good, plus I don’t really have the time to set it up.
Too often things are left out of Gentoo’s make.conf. i.e. NTPL, that is an AMAZING thing to have installed, and unless you want to bootstrap all over again, you probably won’t or can’t get its real performance. same goes for GCC4, I don’t care for re-compiling the entire system whenever a vital upgrade like that comes out. Plus I’ve found Fedora does run a decent bit faster then Gentoo did, why? you’d be surprised how much of gentoo’s “features” are really just standard.
-02, -pipe, -formit-frame-pointer, pentium4 arch, whatever, it usually already compiled into a distro’s binaries. i686 is nearly identical to P4, they both use mmx and sse, where the core of the speed comes from. FC is a i686 based distro.
Maybe I’ll get some benchmarks and prove my point.. If only I had the time to get gentoo installed..
still no out-of-the-box support for my NetGear wireless NIC. Ubuntu had support (at least it was recognized, but was still flaky) six months ago. I guess I’ll still have to use NdisWrapper. :/
MrApophis, generally people in a production environment are not constantly installing and uninstalling software anwyay…. and if they are programming….. they are compiling regardless. If you were using it on remotely modern hardware you should be able to install software in use everything else at the same time…… no time lost
i don’t know if i mentioned this but….. i run x86_64 via amd, and gentoo is by far the best way to run 64 bit on linux
-pipe doesn’t improve the generated code…
IMO non-programmers shouldn’t touch compiler flags. Everytime I see a Gentoo ricer who compiled his entire system with -O3 (or -O9 for the really special folks!) my opinion is reaffirmed. Sorry guys, that’s just insane. -O3 is known to regulary break perfectly fine code and often creates slower binaries than -O2.
Gentoo users are .. well see http://funroll-loops.org/
one more thing….. if you have not taken the time to fully understand, use, and maintain Gentoo, it will get bloated and possably run slower…..you simply need to do some house cleaning… takes about hmmm… 2 minutes.. and you only need to do it after you install a lot of software…
sorry….. this is my last post in here on this… i know how much this annoys me in other threads when people get off the subject
So Slackware is made in the USA(free country). Your jealousy of the USA is obvious.
With regards to running Linux on an x86_64 system, I’d have to disagree. As far as I know, Fedora is the only distro out there that handles multilib setups.
yesterday and formated after 20 minutes because i couldnt compile cryptsetup and it havent kicked me into any gdm, startx didnt worked etc.
Sad but i gone back to hoary
The worst Fedora so far.
Crashes all the time, buggiest installation procedure, etc…
The good thing is that it does boot faster than any other Fedora release before. Still a lot of work needs to be done to make it usefull.
Can I ask what is it that all you guys are downloading that isn’t in extras, livna or dag?
I have not checked since Core 4 was release, but I always had problems finding bittornado-gui.
Sounds to me like you just need to invest in some quality hardware. I’m guessing memory.
Will try to get this topic back on topic again
No bitching from my site, i’m just very happy with FC 4, it just feels fast and complete. The dewd above claiming crashes in FC4, should goto bugzilla right-a-way 
Well, in fact, no.
For example, using the boot.iso to install FC4, anaconda crashes if you pick the French language. Using English, it does work. That’s the kind of issues one may have because of badly tested installation procedure.
What’s funny is that Mandrake was critized a lot because of that in the past, now Fedora is worse ?
In Fedora Core 3 my D-Link keyboard switch works just fine, with Core 4 it doesn’t work anymore.
Switching to the Core 4 machine the mouse hangs and I need to reboot then it works until next switch. *grin*
There was the question from bitterman what specific software packages people are missing for FC4.
Well what I miss currently the most is mplayer (no FC4 repository seems to have mplayer packages, neither dag nor livna) and the complete mono stack (monoproject.com doesn’t offer mono for fc4 yet and dag only has rather old versions for fc3).
Oh, and I miss the offensive fortunes from fortune-mod. 😉
reason for no repository having mono packages is maybe that novell provides them:
http://www.mono-project.com/Downloads
there are no fc4 packages yet, but that won’t take long
I just read in the mono mailing list that according to a novel developer FC4’s gcc miscompiles mono and thus it will probably take some while until we see (good) mono packages for FC4. KDE blacklists the gcc from FC4 too.
maybe because mplayer is found in the freshrpms repo
🙂
FC4 doesn’t work, I’m now running Ubuntu.
* Abiword, Gnumeric (GNOME Office), and KOffice—duplication with OpenOffice.org
* bzflag, gnuchess, and a few other games—they do not really belong in the Core of the OS
* exim, a mail transfer agent (MTA)—duplication with Postfix
* XFce 4 desktop environment—duplication with GNOME and KDE
* Xemacs—Emacs is already in Core
* xmms media player—duplication with Rhythmbox
—————————————————
* Fedora core GNU/Linux-duplication with Debian GNU/Linux, Mandriva, etc, etc…..
hahaha
If you want choice, build yer own distro 😉 You still can install those apps from the extra repository. Glad fedora tries to limit the bloat!
SO I decided to give Ubuntu a try. For starters the /etc/sources.list is commented out. So if you do apt-get update nothing happens. Next the distro was freezing on me for no apparent reason. I thought let’s recompile the kernel and remove extra modules. Well Ubuntu does not even bother to extract the source files for you. After extracting “make bzImage” it worked fine for 1.5 min and froze up on me . OK how about make modules 2 min and it froze on me. Alright lets try to install Nvidia switch to init 3 , hell the machine froze again.
After all this I decided Ubuntu may be snappy but certainly I can’t work with a distro that freezes so much.
FYI I have had uptimes close to 3 days on my laptop using Fedora Core 3 and CenOS 4.0.
I have Ubuntu running on my laptop without any issues using KDE. However, when I tried Ubuntu (two different versions) it crashed often when running Gnome Desktop.
I downloaded FC4 and plan on trying it. I have FC3 and CentOS at work and never had/have any issues with them.
Ubuntu doesn’t print with OOO. I’m ready to try Longhorn, but than again Longhorn is just a Myth.
Is an upgrade really an upgrade if you can’t even install the operating system? I’m so glad that I chose to never work in the computer profession.
Disappointed as usual. There hasn’t been a Linux distribution that I hasn’t left me d/pointed except Yoper. Yoper is the only one that has made me happy. Back to FC 4. So many little things drive me nuts. Here is a few, afer I installed the rpm for NTFS support, when I mounted the NTFS volume, I tried copying files from NTFS XP to ext3 root, I kept getting error messages about the files (the ones I had selected)not existing. You select a few files and then it tells you it doesn’t exist. I was “forced” to the shell prompt and use the standard way of copying files. Why did I have to use the shell prompt? Why not use the file manager? Second, after I copied some font files .ttf from WindowsFonts, I went to the KDE front end Font Installer, clicked Add Fonts, selected the fonts and it kept saying to me “Only font files are supported”. Hellooooo, it IS a font file!!! Again I was forced searhing for the FONT directory and doing it the non standard way. The KDE panel icon size, once you go below size 30 or around, the icons become too small by a big bit instead of decreasing their size by a small bit. Now I don’t care if you flame me or not, this is MY personal experience of FC 4. I did nothing wrong, I got the thing and installed it. These little annoyings MUST NOT be present!
I’m reduced to the old typewritter. I’m serious, I’m digging it out of the closet. Getting ink refills might be tough though!
I figured out what I have to do. Pencil and paper, it’s one kick ass technology and it won’t let you down. That’s more than I can say for the gazillion dollar tech companies.
I installed FC4 yesterday, and found that it works so far for what I’ve been doing. I installed it from HD using info from the install guide; it was nice to not have to take the CD out and put a new one in 3 times. Last night, for the first time I got ndiswrapper working and was able to use the internet with Linux (first time here), and the first thing I did was download the GNOME Interface for YUM from gnomefiles and try out YUM. Of course, I also checked slashdot and osnews
Over all, I am very happy with FC4. I’ve been using FC since the beginning and I haven’t regretted it yet.
Thats my point, Ubuntu may considered a half cooked stuff at the best. And you have “try ubuntu” “Ubuntu is great” spammed almost in any forum. Well now I have tried it and it does not work.
I guess the best approach Ubuntu can take now is try to have a stock kernel that works on any x86 platform. Once they are there should they venture out to brining the latest and greatest.
Thats my point, Ubuntu may considered a half cooked stuff at the best. And you have “try ubuntu” “Ubuntu is great” spammed almost in any forum. Well now I have tried it and it does not work.
TBF, Ubuntu’s a good distribution with a promising future – however, it’s clearly over-hyped.
Just to be more clear, the error messages when copying files were only present with Konqueror, not default GNOME. With GNOME file manager I had no problems.
It is weird how I can get a lot of different distro to get through the install process just fine when other people install crash. Some hardware might not work out of the box of course, but that’s what the wiki and guide are for. Good wiki and guide are what I look for when choosing a distro since I am still new to linux. Ubuntu has great wiki and guide. Fedora 4 seems pretty nice. I guess I’ll give it try later on today.
I used Gentoo myself for a while, but once you realize the bloat it brings with itself(the install grew to 15GB, Ubuntu and Fedora have never climbed past 4)
hey, sveglione, did you realize that all the source tarballs you download remain in /usr/portage/distfiles unless you delete them by hand?
1. I ran Fedora 1,2, and 3 on machines with Nvidia cards and never had a problm instaling the drivers? Why? Because I read the directions. Read the readmes, read the release notes, read the docs. If you’re too lazy to do that. don’t whine and spread lies on public forums like this.
2. If the inclusion of MP3 capability determines whether you’ll use an PS, maybe you’d be better off with a little toy like an iPod, and save your money until you grow up and have something better to do than play music while you chat with your buddies. And, let’s get this straight: distributions are as free as you are to put MP3 capability in their products. It’s the threat of a lawsuit that keeps it off some distributions. If you ran a business, you wouldn’t sell something that might trigger a suit that would put you out of business. Unless you were an ignorant selfish adolesccent, as many posters around here seem to be.
I’m fairly new to the Linux world, with only about 4 months of “here and there” use with Linux. I started off using MDK 10.1, and thought it was really easy to navigate around in, and had recently did a fresh install of MDK LE 2005, and found it to be very unstable (X would lock up constantly if I left the laptop up and running at night, as well as some smaller quirks). I just installed FC4 yesterday (workstation install of off DVD), and I’ve found it so far to be very fast, and it feels more stable. I’ve never used Gnome before, but thought the look and feel thus far is rather nice.
Installing MPlayer and XMMS wasn’t too big of a hassle. As someone that’s new to Linux, it only took a few minutes of googling to figure out that I simply needed to edit the yum.conf and add some more repos to it.
Overall, I think it’s really nice distro.
okay well rpm.livna.org’s homepage has mplayer as an example, its one of the first links you’ll see on the page heh. It will also install many codec’s along w/ it if i recall. there is also mplayer plugin’s, mplayer fonts, and mplayer skins in dag.
Dag has bittorrent-gui http://dag.wieers.com/packages/bittorrent/
Mono is in Dag and should also be supplied by go-mono. FC4 has not even been out a week. I suspect builds for the new mono will show up soon.
So this was my point, for everyone saying RPM’s suck you should have little reason to use them cause most stuff is in a repository. I highly suggest using them too cause on new systems its best to let yum grab all those libs you never heard of but many apps require. I do the same with yum install “gnome system development” too cause it grabs all those libs for compiling ppl have to constantly track down.
I keep going back and forth about which distro I like better Fedora or Ubuntu. I personaly think that they are the 2 best available for my needs. I guess I’ll switch back to Fedora as my main distro. I just did a Ubuntu update on my main box and it broke the sound and my usb drives are no longer detected. I’m suspecting it has to do with a kernel update. So back to Fedora (Home) I go.
I am an IT director for some health clinics and one of my first tests is to see if the distro I am using will run the Meditech client in wine without tinkering with fonts. FC4 did, Ubuntu did not. I did, however, get Ubuntu to work after about 2 hrs. I know this is a very specific thing that probably only relates to me, but in this case I am pretty impressed with FC4’s default wine config. Maybe if someone is out there who knows more about this they could inform me.
Alas, I am back to using Ubuntu full time because it is less buggy than FC4. Nautilus keeps crashing in FC4 for some reason when I copy files…hmmm.
Does anyone know a quick way (maybe right click…) to open a file as root in gedit to edit it? I am finding myself having to run gedit as root, then open the file. There must be an easier way.
What is great and so original in Ubuntu. Isn’t it based on Debian. I would understand when people would hype up about comparing Debian , Fedora, Slackware or even Gentoo. Since all them are original.
But Ubuntu gimme a break it needs some serious work before being advertised. I guess ubuntu folks should work more on their technincal department and less on propaganda.
Sure it’s possible, check out http://g-scripts.sourceforge.net/
You can certainly write your own if one is not readily available.
I’m just tired of every thread being hijacked by ubuntu users, gentoo users have calmed down a bit (or should I say moved to ubuntu?)
Its annoying you get about 10-20 comments like this:
“something broke the thing and now im going back to <enter distro here>” All this is, is an advertisement for the distro they want you to use. otherwise you wouldn’t put what distro you moved to cause its irrelevant heck half the time they put a link to make sure its easy for you to visit. EVERY distro has bugs, if you keep moving around every 3 months cause of bugs the problems never get fixed. Stick with something you like and atleast learn how to work around your problems if possible.
You know, I grabbed FC4 the first day, and had absolutely no issues installing or configuring it on my IBM Netvista X41 (all in one). The thing ran great.
Then I tried to install my usual barrage of apps… Komodo was up fiorst, and hit the nice dependancy issues. libstdc++.so.5 is needed for quite a few of the apps I wanted to use. FC4 has libstdc++.so.6 I found that realBasic needed the same thing. Even with the compat libs installed, none of them liked to run.
So in the end, I put Ubuntu back on. The only thing I don’t like about Ubuntu, however, is that it doesn’t seem to regulate my CPU fan. I have to:
“cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/temperature”
just to get it to read temps and then change the fan speed. Annoying…
Everyone whining about installing drivers, mp3 support, flash, java, etc, needs to check out FedoraFAQ.org. This wonderful site makes it brain-dead easy to do these things.
First, it gives you a complete yum.conf file that you can easily copy and paste into your existing yum.conf file, and joila, you have instant access to fedora extras, livina (to get all those drivers and mp3, flash download, Java packages, and the terrific Dag repository.
Second, FedoraFAQ spells it out clear as day how to add Nvidia 3d acceleration, mp3 support, flash, java, etc, with super easy yum intall package commands.
I think the reason people whine about support for this stuff in Fedora is because they are unaware of FedoraFAQ.org. If they did realize the existence of this wonderfully informative website, they would have support for this stuff within minutes – no fuss, no muss – and have no reason to whine.
BTW – there are Linux distros that support all of this stuff out of the box – ones that are oriented towards home desktops – Mepis, Linspire, Xandros all come to mind. Fedora Core is more a gernalist distro oriented towards enthusiasts, professionals, and early adoptors. Yet it still remains very easy to install, tweak and use, even for newbies who are willing to read the extremely easy instructions at FedoraFAQ.org.
Finally – to those who say WinXP is faster – that hasn’t been my experience. I have an eMachines with 1.6 GHz cpu running XP and Mepis (dual boot) and Mepis kicks WinXP’s but. I also have a Thinkpad 600 (300MHz cpu), and running Fedora or Mandrake or Ubuntu or Mepis, I get snappier performance than XP running on a cpu with more than 5 times the speed. There’s nothing special about the XP installation, and nothing special about the Linux installations (no extra services or other bloat on XP). So Linux has most certaninly been faster for me.
Why is RPM an issue to debate when you probably need to use yum in the first place. It is easier to manage your machine and takes little time.
yum -y update
How to use yum if you are behind an http proxy
Renaldo:
still no out-of-the-box support for my NetGear wireless NIC.
I use a Netgear wireless card and unted down the correct RPM before installing FC4. Grab one from http://atrpms.net/dist/fc4/madwifi/
***
Can’t comment on the mp3s, but when I took FC4 for a test drive there weren’t any nvidia rpms in the usual repositories (Actually there were, they just had dependencies to non-existent packages). Tried installing using NVIDIA’s installer (Which I’ve done many times before on different distros), end result was a hard lock which I had to reboot to get out of. Since the stock nv driver leaves me with a horrible 60hz screen that pretty much ends my FC4 experience. You can’t be too harsh on 3rd party packagers being a touch slow so I guess I’ll try again in a few weeks when there are good NVIDIA rpms available.
The only other problem I had was installing GNOME from a minimal FC4 install. Everything installed fine (After importing GPG keys…Why the hell do you have to import keys that COME WITH THE CDS?), but there was no pretty loading screen and X had to be started from the command line. If I was sufficiently bothered then altering the runlevel to include GDM wouldn’t be a problem, but should I really have to? It’s difficult to be too critical, since it’s likely these problems wouldn’t have happened when installing using all the disks.
One thing I DO have a huge problem with is smb. There are precisely 3 options given by the Fedora site to the smb problem. 1) Turn off the firewall (Are you serious?) 2) Run a WINS server on the network (Now I KNOW you aren’t serious) 3) Deal with it you big wuss. Ok, so altering the firewall rules isn’t a big deal, but how many folks are going to bother?
I really fail to see how that is possible. When Windows is first installed it is consuming about 60-80 megs of ram, then after patching it goes to around 100
Every Linux I’ve ever tried always consumed WAY more than that. Plus, everyone comparing speed also always seems to forget services.msc where you can shut down a large amount of non-essential services if you know what you are doing for even MORE speed.
Maybe Linux got a serious kick in the pants over the last 6 months and I’ll see for myself but I’m not counting on it. But “Its been slower than XP for me” type stuff I just don’t see as true. I can’t because I have always seen such a drastic performance gap.
How to use yum if you are behind an http proxy
http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/yum8.html
Near the very bottom, the yum man page tells you how.
For it to detect my SCSI raids….. Can’t wait to try it
I really fail to see how that is possible. When Windows is first installed it is consuming about 60-80 megs of ram, then after patching it goes to around 100
Every Linux I’ve ever tried always consumed WAY more than that.
I’d like to have a euro for every time I read this nonsense. Linux use RAM for caching, so when you need again those data you don’t do an expensive disk read.
Consequence is that reported memory usage seems to be 85-90% while the “real” memory usage (measured à la windows) isn’t over 25-30%.
I installed FC4 on my desktop machine yesterday.
My ASUS 138g Wifi card was not detected. No worries I think, I am prepared for this.
tar xvfz /mnt/fat/ndiswrapper.tgz
make
make install
rpm2cpio /mnt/fat/driver-marvell-2.3.0.3-1ark.i586.rpm|cpio -idv
ndiswrapper -i ./usr/share/drivers/marvell/mrv8k51.inf
ndiswrapper -m
ndiswrapper -l
Installed ndis drivers:
mrv8k51 driver present, hardware present
Rebooted.
Ran Fedora’s Network config tool, selected wireless. Choose ndiswrapper(wlan0) from the list etc….
Clicked to activate the interface.
ping 192.168.0.1 (My router), it pings perfectly.
ping google.com – Won’t ping it.
Checked browser, can’t see any web sites at all, only my routers webmin page.
Edited /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0
GATEWAY is blank, changed it to GATEWAY=192.168.0.1.
De-activated then activated the interface again.
Still the same, got no external access at all.
Played for a few hours then got fed up Mandriva on. Worked fine. Same as Ubuntu and SuSE did.
Other than that, FC4 looks really good. It’s noticibly faster than Ubuntu, SuSE and Mandriva on the same hardware.
GCJ Eclipse seems very nice too.
I don’t mind the free distros not supporting costly licensed crap like MP3, but what is SuSEs excuse? If you charge for your distro, support MP3 damn it.
RPM… God how I don’t miss that POS package system. Give me .deb any day of the week. Even with Apt-for-rpm, RPM is truely a pain. If SuSE would just ditch their DeadRat roots with its RPM system, I would switch back (maybe), otherwise for this guy it is Debian or bust.
“I’d like to have a euro for every time I read this nonsense. Linux use RAM for caching, so when you need again those data you don’t do an expensive disk read.
Consequence is that reported memory usage seems to be 85-90% while the “real” memory usage (measured à la windows) isn’t over 25-30%.”
Exactly. I couldn’t have put it better myself.
I don’t think the other Jeff, who is touting Windows as faster, realizes that Linux caches stuff in memory, to avoid expensive disc reads, and free’s untouched caches as needed for new apps (and flushes – saves – touched caches, to disc). Windows does not do this, thus requires more disc reads, and get’s slower performance for some tasks (particularily lot’s of data reading, or settings files).
But then again, I don’t discount the other Jeff’s experience. If he loaded SuSE or Fedora out of the box, he might very well have had slower performance than XP, as these distros are more server oriented and thus have more services running, and thus use more memory. But it’s easy to turn the other stuff off and get more optimal performance.
Windows does not do this, thus requires more disc reads, and get’s slower performance for some tasks (particularily lot’s of data reading, or settings files).
You don’t think Windows caches stuff? Now that’s real comedy. Is this OSNews or an audition for Saturday Night Live?
“You don’t think Windows caches stuff? Now that’s real comedy. Is this OSNews or an audition for Saturday Night Live?”
Is this osnews.com or windowsfordummies.com?
Either you can’t read, or you just don’t understand what you have read. Either way, looks like the call centre for you when you grow up. 😉
Either you can’t read, or you just don’t understand what you have read.
I read it just fine. Windows VM might work differently to Linux, but similar filesystem caches are there. It’s basic, bog-standard OS design. The way Linux memory information is formatted might be confusing to a newbie, but caching is NOT some magic Linux thing.
Either way, looks like the call centre for you when you grow up. 😉
Maybe I’ll be lucky and you can do my job interview. :p
You missed the point completely.
The poster didn’t say “Windows doesn’t cache stuff”, he said Windows doesn’t cache the same way as Linux.
So why did you say “You don’t think Windows caches stuff?”
That was why I was a bit harsh to you.
So, exactly how does XP handle disk caching? Is its cache allocated and deallocated dynamically, or is it some silly staticly allocated thing, like SCO OpenServer 5 still does? I’ve been wondering about this for a while.
So why did you say “You don’t think Windows caches stuff?”
That’s just the way I’m reading it. I’m not trying to twist his words, as far as I can see that’s what the guy is actually saying.
That was why I was a bit harsh to you.
I was too harsh in the first place. No harm, no foul.
@Steve Bergman
The Windows filesystem cache is (By default) a fixed sized (Configurable via the registry). There is however another setting that lets it dynamically take up practically all available RAM. OSX probably beats out both Linux and Windows because IIRC it can store information about an application’s working set of pages, letting the VM be more intelligent about what to keep or swap.
I was a longtime Fedora User, but now I recommend Ubuntu.
Good riddance I say, you probably were unhappy with some GNOME/KDE thing like the rest of the trolls here, really not helpful for the project.
If you experience a problem with rhythmbox or konqueror or whatever, it’s probably not the distributions fault. GNOME/KDE is not what a Linux distribution is all about everybody, please keep that in mind.