TuxTops reviews Fedora Core 4; the user has some requirements regarding his operating system and some of these requirements are met by FC4 and some are not. The article makes mention of bugs, problems but also some good new features like the boot speed-up and the ease of use provided by the Red Hat preference panels.
FC4 is a major upgrade vs the buggy FC3.. I would say to home users wait until the Blag group adds all the multimedia stuff to it and use their version..(found at distrowatch.com)
A fine distro otherwise, can’t wait till FC5 with built in encryption and the like.
MrX
It looks like slowly by surely Fedora Core is loosing its momentum and Debian/[KU]buntu are stealing the mindshare behind FC. If this process continues to go this way, FC5 will be the biggest yawn in Fedora history.
Only Ext3 … you can’t install/format it on reiserFS partition … And more of it you should use lilo/grub provided by Fedora otherwise you CAN’T boot on it from another lilo due apparently to an ext3 ( again … ) crappy patch !!
Ubuntu is a good Distro, but I am really impressed with Fedora. It look more professional than Ubuntu out of the box. After I install Ubuntu, I always install another theme. Can wait for gnome 2.12 on Fedora and Ubuntu. How much faste is the boot time on Fedora Core now? (Before someone complains, Yes it is important for me for my laptop, that is the only reason, I do not turn my computers off).
I installed with ReiserFS. If you do not use manual partitioning explicitly, it can be hard to find. It really needs to be documented. This works:
1: Use the Text install, with the following GRUB command
linux text selinux=0 reiserfs
2: After Auto-partitioning, the Disk Druid will appear. It does -not- appear during the X install. Change the main partition under the LogicalVolume with “Edit” and scroll through the file system type list (yes, the ‘#’ is a scrollbar) for reiserfs. Select it, hit ‘OK’, and continue normally.
Done!
This really should be documented. ReiserFS is so nice, especially for developers, where C/C++ compilation needs rapid file search and opening.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems
To install with ReiserFS, simply type:
reiserfs
at the boot prompt. The installation goes normally, and Disk Druid will show ReiserFS as the default format.
toped working after my first update. Also of importance is the fact that Fedora does not automount FAT/NTFS partitions and so new users will find this a bit dissapointing. Having to use “mount” in the command line or have to mess up with your /etc/fstab is hardly fun. And speaking of fun, there is not much entertaining that’s going to happen with a default FC4 system, as mp3 and other proprietary media technologies are not included for licensing reasons. Lastly, I would much rather see Graveman or Gnomebaker included instead of the scary-looking XCDRoast (KDE is not installed on my system, I do not like its look & feel or clutter).
So, how do I feel about Fedora? Well, it’s a powerful system, it works well-enough, but not well-enough for me. It is not a polished system, and it is somewhat bloated, making a potential polishing attempt very difficult as going through the hundrends of applications and libraries included can be daunting. I am sure that many people will find it good enough
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Come on people. Is really playing MP3’s and other such crap
on a computer really such a big deal these days when you can
buy a portable cd player you can toss alongside the monitor on the desk and plug it into a set of speakers for $15-$20 dollars? For $30-$60 bucks you can find portable cd players that has an AM/FM tuner which also can playback MP3’s burned on cdr/cdrw disks.
What kind of an utter moron thinks XCDRoast is “scary-looking”?
Give me the straight-forward approach to buring a cd/dvd used by the “scary-looking” XCDRoast over the pre-school interfaces used by NERO and the rest of crap the people who tend to created these idiotic “reviews” seem to like.
As for not automounting FAT/NTFS partitions, think of this as an *SAFETY/SECURITY* feature. Why mount partitions you’re not going to be using? If you need to access the information on those partitions then mount them yourself.
I can certainly attest to FC4’s bugs, at least in the AMD64 version. It took four tries just to install the thing from DVD (yes, I checked the DVD for errors, it’s fine). First I had some unhelpful error messages at some random point of the install that I eventually figured out was because it didn’t like my partitioning (I forgot about the root partition being too big and requiring a small /boot partition). Next I just told it to do it’s own automatic partitioning of my second harddisk, and just as it was about to install the packages I got what looked to be some random error in the Anaconda installer’s python code spat out onto the screen. Finally, I tried it one last time with exactly the same proceedure that previously gave me the python errors and it installed without a problem. Go figure…
When it was done I rebooted and it hadn’t bothered to install GRUB to my MBR. I had to boot the DVD into rescue mode, chroot to my installation and do it manually.
I never had any (major) problems like these installing FC2&3, even the AMD64 versions. Still, once I finally got through the installation issues everything seemed fine.
My Dell Latitude D600 [email protected] according to boot chart is at .59 seconds.
Does mplayer have the mp3 codec? I downloaded it after I heard that Fedora is not exactly music capable, and intend to install it after I install Fedora.
Sorry for sounding like a noob. I’m migrating from XP next week.
You are going to install mplayer from 3rd party repositories anyway, so yes, it plays mp3.
Just like pretty much whatever you throw at it 🙂
Thanks
>>And speaking of fun, there is not much entertaining that’s >>going to happen with a default FC4 system, as mp3 and other >>proprietary media technologies are not included for >>licensing reasons.
Please stop. We all know why it will never have it. Just install it, if you cant, then you are using the wrong distro. Change. Use Gentoo, emerge mplayer… boom. MP3 support. Debian, Ubuntu, whatever you want, but leave talking about Fedora and MP3 support every time.
Tell me what distribution you use and I will find similar flaws or even worst.
disabled vmware and ntpd on boot and my laptop went to 45 seconds. Not bad.
I didn’t have any problems installing FC4. I did a HD install, which was suprisingly easy. I do get errors with nautilus, normally on bootup, that causes some open windows to change from one directory to another. So for instance, I leave my music folder open in a separate workspace and it is there when I turn on my computer. Sometimes, if I have other windows like my home directory open, the home directory will be inside of the music window, with the same folder and window settings as the music directory. A minor error, but an error nonetheless.
I was able to install ndiswrapper without any problems and use the internet with Linux for the first time with my wireless network connection, and used YUM for the first time with FC4. Pretty simple, and new GUI interfaces like yumex make it easier to browse the repos.
One problem that I’m not sure how to fix: Whenever I open a window as root (such as server settings), it uses what seems to be an old GTK2 default theme, completely different from my theme. Not sure if this is a problem on FC’s part or not.
Bootup is faster, although I don’t notice it too be all that significant. It loads in about the same time as my WinXP partition.
I’ve been with FC since version 1, and I’ve always liked it. It seems to be getting better and better with each release, and I like the rapid release cycle that it has. Overall, I’m satisfied with my FC4 experience.
Can’t get my FC4 DVD to install.. keeps locking on usb_storage during the initial hw probe.
Check this out http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedora-install-guide-en/fc4/sn-instal…
The install guide made it painless for me to install from HD, so if there is a problem with your DVD or DVD drive, than it should get around it (seems logical to me at least).
to work under Fedora 3.
My sister is threatening to go back to Windows.
Decisions. Decisions.
yum is so terrible slow and cumbersome. and the available guis for yum are slow as well (yes, i don’t like pyhton …). i know there is apt4rpm – but have you ever tried to upgrade a whole system with it?
One problem that I’m not sure how to fix: Whenever I open a window as root (such as server settings), it uses what seems to be an old GTK2 default theme, completely different from my theme. Not sure if this is a problem on FC’s part or not.
Technically its not a problem since a root along with any other user has completely different settings from each other including the GNOME theme. If you want a theme to be uniform across root and your normal account you can launch the theme preferences as root and set it to the same theme as your non-root application. There might be better ways to deal with this.
On a wider scale, Red Hat is working on sabayon which would be useful for more profile control
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/008jun05/features/sabayon/
yum is so terrible slow and cumbersome. and the available guis for yum are slow as well (yes, i don’t like pyhton …). i know there is apt4rpm – but have you ever tried to upgrade a whole system with it?
Yum in FC4 is pretty good. If you want fancy features check out yum-utils in extras
http://blog.sethdot.org/index.cgi/233.html
you mean update all the packages in it?. I do that all the time. If you want to do a distribution upgrade check out
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq
In general it would work but caveats are documented there
I have FC4 installed on my laptop, and it works great. However, I through a ATA drive into my desktop to install FC4 and ran into major problems. I have Win XP on my SATA, and when I tell Grub that is where to install the bootloader to that drive, it would go through like it worked, but once I finished the install and rebooted, it went straight into Windows, no boot screen at all. I’ve tried several forums to figure out how to fix that, but no luck at all.
The only other distro that I’ve played with is Mandrake (10.1 and LE2005), and between the two, I find FC4 to be much more stable and quick.
Just wish I could figure out how to get it working on my desktop.
This page has info on installing many of the extras needed for Fedora that Redhat can’t provide with be default:
http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/fc4-tips.php
Due to licensing issues, unfortunately, it’s unavoidable to go and add some things post-installation to get multimedia support up to scratch..
Re FC4 I must say 6/10 seems a little harsh for what I find to be a fantastic distribution.
Come on people. Is really playing MP3’s and other such crap on a computer really such a big deal these days when you can buy a portable cd player you can toss alongside the monitor on the desk and plug it into a set of speakers for $15-$20 dollars? For $30-$60 bucks you can find portable cd players that has an AM/FM tuner which also can playback MP3’s burned on cdr/cdrw disks.
*blink* *blink*
What kind of an utter moron thinks XCDRoast is “scary-looking”?
Compared to K3B, it is.
Give me the straight-forward approach to buring a cd/dvd used by the “scary-looking” XCDRoast over the pre-school interfaces used by NERO and the rest of crap the people who tend to created these idiotic “reviews” seem to like.
Well, I guess me and my 8+ years of Linux and 15+ years of other Unix plus Mac and Windows experience makes me a baby.
As for not automounting FAT/NTFS partitions, think of this as an *SAFETY/SECURITY* feature. Why mount partitions you’re not going to be using? If you need to access the information on those partitions then mount them yourself.
Agreed to a point. It should be visible as a currently unmounted but mountable volume.
I love FC4 but it has a few quirks. One with the i810 Xorg driver, too much to get into there. But also it has some many usless extras. For example, I’m a Java Developer, but I don’t find the extra download size to accomodate all of the Java libraries useful. I also find the natively compiled Eclipse to be slower, and buggier, than Eclipse 3.1 running under Java 5. That’s at least 200+ megs that could be removed from the distro. trim the fat, We’re going to download this stuff anyway.
For all those that need help with there FC installment check http://www.fedoraforum.org
You will receive tips to getting most anything “working” in this distro from mp3 to DVD to kernel hacks.
My big beef with the FC4 install is the partition editing. I usually modify the partitions which was OK back before the added LVM by default but now it’s a mess just to add or remove a partition. That needs some more smarts. They should have a quick partition wizzard with checkboxes for things like “create separate /var partition” and “use LVM” and maybe even “RAID1 these 2 disks”.
Also, the best way I have found to install Fedora is from the DVD image, loopback mounted (on another linux box), and shared out to the netwrok. You make an install boot CD from the images/boot.iso file. I just plop the CD in the drive, the machine DHCP’s and asks where to install from. I point it to the install I share from my web server (seems to work the best) and the box comes up and installs like mad. The small boot.iso burns very fast and the install over the network is lighting.
My other beef so far with FC4 is the 2 toolbars thing. They should make Gnome like KDE where they ask you to pick a default style when you first log in. I prefer a Windows like toolbar at the bottom and it’s a pain to reconfigure it every time I install. The fact is that 90% of computer users are use to this UI layout also. It’s like getting in a car with the gass and break controls on the dashboard or sitting down at a keyboard with the keys arranged differently. There’s a reason interface standards don’t change unless there is a pressing need.
I wish they would release point releases iso images of Fedora that basically roll up all the currently released patches. It would save everyone a lot of bandwidth. FC4.1 images 1 month after release would probably be a good idea (the bug fixes usually come fast after a release) and other point releases after 2, 4, 8, and 16 months also would be nice. That way when I install FC4 5 months after it comes out I don’t have to reinstall half the OS because it had bugs. They shouldn’t be new OS’s and should still call themselves FC4 on the backend but just save everyone some patch downloading.
Releases happen every 1-2 years. It is stable. It is secure. And you don’t have to worry about upgrading every 6 months. Best of all, it’s RedHat.
While making this an easy process in planned, you can do this yourself following a similar procedure and share the results
http://fedoranews.org/contributors/gene_czarcinski/update_distro/
FC5 actually has a 9 month release cycle and previous releases are supported by Fedora legacy for a relatively long time.
http://fedoralegacy.org/about/faq.php
If you are upgrading every year or so you can very stick with Fedora
… like the memory usage, the network manager and the vfat partition mount.
In my laptop with 1gb of ram and with firefox running, fedora only use 113mb of ram and 0 of swap so I guess that probably has to do with the machine hardware.
I can access the netowk manganager drom the applications menu with a standard installation…
I can also make FC4 mount automatically vfat partitions. In the anaconda installer you can mount just by telling where you it. As for the NTFS, FC4 doesn’t even has drivers for it due to legal reasons, so it is understandable, but you can always get a rpm for it.
Yup, my impression with the various linux desktop distros were that they were buggy, no matter whether they were considered cutting edge or not. Seems like things aren’t changing. Honestly, I don’t see similar problems with commercial software, so I’m beginning to question the open source development process.
Technically its not a problem since a root along with any other user has completely different settings from each other including the GNOME theme. If you want a theme to be uniform across root and your normal account you can launch the theme preferences as root and set it to the same theme as your non-root application. There might be better ways to deal with this.
On a wider scale, Red Hat is working on sabayon which would be useful for more profile control
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/008jun05/features/sabayon/
Interestingly enough, root’s default theme is Clearlooks, but that isn’t the theme being displayed. That’s what I would have expected, at least. I installed Fluxbox to try it out, and when it opened a GTK app like the GIMP, it used clearlooks! Bizarre. Should I su while in my username and set the preferences for root that way (instead of logging in as root and doing it)?
Getting Tungsten to work in FC3.
http://www.clasohm.com/blog/one-entry?entry_id=12096
Have you not heard of iPods? People don’t buy CD players anymore. If Fedora’s support of MP3s comes up so often, I think it’s because it’s a significant flaw even moreso now that the market for MP3 players is so enormous. The fact that Fedora isn’t working right now to integrate iPod support into their OS more effectively is a shame.
Oh, be sure to look in the comments lower down on the page. You’re looking for the comment “Tungsten T5 settings.”
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems
I wish people would get this whole mp3 crazy out of there system since I think it was rh 8.0 that stopped providing stuff like this.
You realize that it takes less than 5 minutes to add mp3 right, ok, gtkpod, ok.
fedora, suse and mandriva (and debian) should all merg into a pot… with all their new stuff in would be freaking interesting…
what I mean by this is their default installed features…
should be potted in one install process.. and their efforts should be to create the best linux os no matter where parts were created…..
they need to break out of the if its not created here then we wont go…
maybe simular effort on how the kernal is created…
if xen was a novell creation like beagle would it even be mentioned in fc4 so fast???
id also like to see gnome and kde move closer together (desktop.org is moving things but faster faster) … can still have two techs but they should be working to join the pages together better….
anyway… thats my wish list for xmas…..
Due to : http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems specifically the support for ATI 3D drivers, I’ve had the worse time migrating to FC3 AND FC4. During installs, my system would hang during any FB graphics, and that’s right at the beginning. Also, the lack of FS support, and the ability to download packages from the internet caused me to switch to Debian. In addition, a sources-based distribution allows me to keep up with the latest patches and not have to run up2date or yum to retrieve new patches.
Lately every tom dick and harry have started to do a review. No mount for Fat/NTFS how long does it take to get these working. He missed the whole concept,Fedora cannot include Patented and proprietary stuff. If you are a little technically inclinded you can get everything that you have in Windows running in Fedora Core 4. Re memory usage who cares with the low memory prices, go upgrade your memory to 1GB or more.
My case I have a FC4 64 bit, I have done following
– Burn CD’s with Nero Linux and K3b
– Use MSCorefonts, freetype2 and a little /etc/fonts/local.conf tweak to make my linux fonts look exactly as windows.
– Use gmplayer for all the video
– use Nvidia drivers for fast game response
– Recompiled the Kernel with preempt turned on enable ntfs here too.
– use ndiswrapper to get my wireless working
I do think that it is not as snappy as other distros but it is stable. And that is what matters at the end of the day.
Haha, you got to be joking me. You had to recompile your own kernel and you had to install new system software and drivers, and then you still give Fedora the thumbs up?? It is Fedora’s JOB to do these things for you, that’s what a distribution’s job is. If you have to do such manual work to have basic functionality, then something is wrong with Fedora mate. The review is on spot.
I wouldnt mind if you leave OSnews alone and take a vacation or something
He recompiled the kernel to use a preempt option because he incorrectly beliefs that it would improve his system speed but its a option that will break several drivers and hence its not enabled by default
If one buys a wireless card they need to check which ones are supported by their operating system. It is exactly the same for Windows. Trying running some of the older Epson printers on Windows XP. They work fine in Windows 98
If you want to get proprietary software you need to install them seperately. They arent being included for legal reasons and to meet Fedora’s goal of being an operating system which is fully open source.
When did Debian have proprietary software included?. If you want external non-free repository similar to Debian go use the livna repository
How hard is rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/4/i386/RPMS.lvn/livna-release-4-0.lvn.2…
and yum installing stuff you want?
Actually, his recompiling the kernel to get ntfs support is unnecesary. You can go to this site: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/
There you can download a very small RPM that will install the driver.
The rest of the drivers he installed such as closed-source nvidia drivers are not available in almost all distributions, not just Fedora, because of legality issues. Expecting distributions to break the law in order to give greater convenience for users is unrealistic.
As for k3b, k3b is included as an installation option in Fedora, because it’s a KDE application and KDE libraries are not included by default. k3b can be installed without installing the rest of KDE other than what it needs. (You probably already know that, just clarifying the original post.)
I’m not using Fedora at present, but I find the decisions made by Fedora and other distributions to avoid illegalities to be reasonable ones. One can usually in a very simple fashion add the missing bits.
“Haha, you got to be joking me.”
whats the joke…????
you had to install new system software and drivers
Do a fresh install of XP win2000 or 2003 on almost any machine and your telling me your never have to install new drivers???
Are you saying MS Firewall or MS CD burning, Antivirus are the best on the market…???? and you would never install new system software..
Or how about codex in media player… or image viewing apps like lovely 1980s MSpain(t)..
I wont go into I.E. as its not even an app…
How well does windows server products detect scsi drives on fresh installs… I have oftern been given a server with no drivers… and nothing was correctly detected on standard server hardware…
How well are MSserver products at the task of tracking liecences on their products???? how well have they managed this over the last 15 years… is this not important product for the ones counting the bean machine everytime you voilate and steal extra cals???
“It is Fedora’s JOB to do these things for you”
Is it not Windows job to do these things for you…???
“that’s what a distribution’s job is”
surely creation of an OS can be for many reasons…. Trustix for example is not trying to get every webcam for desktops supported in ther distro…
PalmOS is not trying to impliment enterprise mail servers or store 100TB of data securely..
“If you have to do such manual work to have basic functionality, then something is wrong with Fedora mate.”
depends on your view points.. but I believe you are not looking at the bigger picture….
The review is on spot.
I would think that if his requirements where the following…
“I like clean, fast, small, usable, stable, bug-free, good-looking, sane and lean but powerful systems”
then he should not sit in a tank and expect or demand f1 performance..
this will get u going…
did the reviewer run out of toilet paper to write the review on…… and did it on the empty cardboard roll…
cause for a product thats over 12gig and spans x86 x86-64 and PPC (plus others) theres not really much in the way of content….
I actually agree with you on this one.
People are too willing to settle for less, on all camps. I demand perfection and ease-of-use.
For the Linux community, there needs to be an easier way to install proprietary software and drivers.
For the Windows community, I hate having to spend upwards of 4 hours to install all my drivers to get something besides a 640×480 screen and to be able to middle click and such.
I can’t say much about Macintosh for the sole reason that I’m not informed enough about them.
The important point I’m trying to make is that it should be an Operating System’s job to make things easy enough for people to not realize that it is even there and things just work.
I don’t understand where you ppl come from at times. Linux certainly has alot of faults but getting software is not one of them. as someone said rpm -i the livna yum and it will install that repo to which you will have 97% of the software you’ll ever install with a single command like “yum install mplayer” Comparing this process with the windows process of hunting down things in google that may or maynot be bundled with spyware (codecs, Cracks) Is almost laughable.
Fedora isn’t perfect but how anyone can complain about software installation just seems crazy to me concidering the alternitives (except mac)
Fedora 3 used to work fine, it was buggy and all. Fedora core 4 fails to recognize my computer’s motherboard. Anyone else have this problem.
Just because Windows is hard, and Linux is better for open source software (not proprietary software by far) doesn’t mean that it’s good.
And the 97% figure seems grossly inflated. What if you want to run something that isn’t in the repository, while still being free? And there is absolutely no question about non-free products.
Windows seems to have an actual 97% figure, as things are actually made for it de facto. I just really hate clicking next at least 4 times for each product.
The point is, don’t try to justify apt, yum, urpmi, or yast as an awesome solution to all your package management troubles just because there is a worse system out there.
To the person who said there was no boot screen from grub and that XP was booted directly: you should get a 4 second lag when you are allowed to press any key to get the grub screen. You can edit grub.conf (in /etc/grub) and comment out the line that says “hidemenus”
Hope this helps…
toped working after my first update. Also of importance is the fact that Fedora does not automount FAT/NTFS partitions and so new users will find this a bit dissapointing.
It could if you set hal policies to enable automount fat/ntfs. However, it is disabled due to critical bugs with IDE Raid hard drive.
One problem that I’m not sure how to fix: Whenever I open a window as root (such as server settings), it uses what seems to be an old GTK2 default theme, completely different from my theme. Not sure if this is a problem on FC’s part or not.
It is not a problem. You did not install your favorite theme in root profile. Once you did that, the window (from root account) will open using your favorite theme. It is all about security.
Just because Windows is hard, and Linux is better for open source software (not proprietary software by far) doesn’t mean that it’s good.
You haven’t tried distros like Linspire, have you? Generalization leads to false assumption.
And the 97% figure seems grossly inflated. What if you want to run something that isn’t in the repository, while still being free? And there is absolutely no question about non-free products.
Do you mean free as a beer where you can see the source code? If a free software is not open source, it cannot be included in Fedora Extras repository. Currently, new packages are added into Fedora extras once they pass requirement.
Windows seems to have an actual 97% figure, as things are actually made for it de facto. I just really hate clicking next at least 4 times for each product.
A number alone without a single reference means nothing.
The point is, don’t try to justify apt, yum, urpmi, or yast as an awesome solution to all your package management troubles just because there is a worse system out there.
Did you know you can locally install package using yum? For example, I installed an Epson driver using that command ” yum local install ipscan”.
People are too willing to settle for less, on all camps. I demand perfection and ease-of-use.
It seems you set your goal too high. Obviously you haven’t tried distros such as Linspire or Mepis. They include proprietary softwared buy it comes with costs due the license fee for using them. It is generalization about Linux distros that leads to very bad mistake. To include proprietary software on Fedora, simply go to fedoraforum.org or fedorafaq.org like someone pointed out.
For the Linux community, there needs to be an easier way to install proprietary software and drivers.
See above.
I can’t say much about Macintosh for the sole reason that I’m not informed enough about them.
Apple have to pay license fee to includ DVD, MP3 and other proprietary software which probably explain why OSX is expensive.
The important point I’m trying to make is that it should be an Operating System’s job to make things easy enough for people to not realize that it is even there and things just work.
What you don’t understand is OSes like Fedora cannot include proprietary softwares due to patents issue and non-compatible with their objectives.
Fedora just gets more bloated and hard to install/use with every release.
It is so very slow now that it is just about useless trying to use it with VMWare. And it’s not like RedHat supports VMWare worth crap anyway. I’m sure there is some crappy VMWare-clone that true Linux jockers will tell you use.
All in all, RedHat’s value proposition is getting very nebulous.
its not a review… its just a rant.. or a moan….
before installation of fc4 there was a bone to pick…
Im not saying that picking on this is at all bad, i am not saying that picking on user friendlyness is bad…
i am saying if your going to do a review do a full review of what and where this product is being positioned in the software market… what it includes what it does not include…
it does not compaire fc before and after this release…
it does not look at the changes this distro has that other linux based dont… … like suse9.3 mandrake and debian…
?????????????????????????????????????????
how many words should a full review be???
(which would be worth reading and people would read…
If i wrote a ten page full review (including from my outside perspective) would anyone want to read this over a few lines of moans???
?????????????????????????????????????????
>actually agree with you on this one.
>
>People are too willing to settle for less, on all camps. I >demand perfection and ease-of-use.
>
Go buy an Amiga. Oh you can’t, because trying to cater to people like you basically drove Commodore out of Businesess.
>
>For the Linux community, there needs to be an easier way to >install proprietary software and drivers.
No there doesn’t has to be. Our OS, our rules. Take it or leave it.
(Fedora core 4 fails to recognize my computer’s motherboard)
Hey, ya just gotta love LINUX
fedora core disks checked fine yet failed install adn wrecked my other partions with it!
DAMN j00 fedora core1
I’m currently using FC4-x86-64 (installed over NFS) on my Dual Opteron workstation and I’ll be slowly deploying it on my other machines (@work and @home) as it matures.
A couple of things:
A. Enough with the MP3/NTFS already! Fedora does not, and will not break the law. Have problems with it? Contact your leaders about changing the patent laws.
B. The first release of FC4 contains a couple of major bugs; gpilot/jpilot doesn’t work; X screensavers are missing under KDE; gdb may segfault when debugging libraries; etc.
*However* instead of bitching an moaning about it, I took the time to create bug reports and a couple of bug-fixes are already in -testing.
C. Yum works just fine. Unlike older versions that were slow as hell, I’ve got no beefs with yum and/or yumax. If you don’t like yum, get apt/rpm. (http://apt.freshrpms.net/) Do remember that x86-64 requires bi-arch support that isn’t present under apt.
D. If you can, wait a couple of weeks before you switch from FC3 to FC4.
In general, beside a couple of nasty bugs (that are being fixed as I type this), FC4 x86-64 was a pleasant experience.
@Eugenia
Haha, you got to be joking me. You had to recompile your own kernel and you had to install new system software and drivers, and then you still give Fedora the thumbs up?? It is Fedora’s JOB to do these things for you, that’s what a distribution’s job is. If you have to do such manual work to have basic functionality, then something is wrong with Fedora mate. The review is on spot
A. You don’t need to recompile the kernel in-order to get NTFS support.
B. CONFIG_PREEMT was disabled to a reason.
C. You have a very *weird* definition of basic functionality, if you consider breaking the U.S. patents law “basic functionality”.
D. The review is short, and very limited. FC has many strength and weaknesses, but the writer never bothered to use it long enough to look into it.
Fedora have got fewer and fewer bugs in all releases, with the exeption of this release. FC1 was almost unusable, FC2 was quite OK, FC3 was very good. This new FC4 falls back to the FC 2 level.
My guess is that this largely is a result of switching to gcc4. This means that some drivers won’t compile properly e.g. matrox drivers may fail, leaving black screens with green borders as a result. Another example is the realtec driver for some wireless cards.
Some bugs have nothing to do with the new gcc but is still very annoying. One example of such things is that LDAP authentication is broken, as there is a problems with an extra linefeed in the passwords. I wonder how things like this slips through.
Other than that, it looks good. The new Gnome 2.10 interface is so much better that I can cope with a few bugs to get it. The only thing I miss in the Gnome interface is the ability to change the program menu from the GUI. Now that can be done by an application called “Smeg Menu Editor”. Why that isn’t included is beyond me. It makes it easy to remove or move all the programs you seldom use or only use from the command line. This makes usability a lot better. So, please Fedora team include it in the next version if the Gnome guys haven’t fixed this problem by then.