It’s been about 2.5 years since the first release of Fedora Core. And boy has it come long way! The new version of Fedora Core (FC) is featuring a number of goodies and performance enhancements as we describe below (and yes, it even includes a new logo).The installation of FC5 is very much the same as any older Anaconda installation procedure, however some refinements have also taken place. The package selection for example is now much more pleasant to the eyes and… brain, the boot manager and partitioning screens have seen a refreshment while a long-standing kernel bug on our laptop (a LinuxCertified laptop) that used to trigger during installations of recent Debian/Ubuntu/FC has been fixed. Overall, installation went without any incident. It was quick and up to the point (heck, the installer even used the better-looking Vera font than the default desktop did!). Anaconda is the best installer out there today (on par with Mac OS X’s in ease of use, albeit more powerful than OSX’s).
When booting FC5 for the first time we immediately recognized the work that was put behind the speeding up of the booting process. The system feels snappier overall and applications start faster than before too, but nothing had prepared us for the memory consumption reported by the system: 95 MBs (Cups was off btw, I don’t have a printer connected to this laptop). Wow, just wow. FC4 was taking over 220 MBs of memory on a default Gnome boot but now the System Monitor app reports anywhere between 90 and 95 MBs. I don’t know if the memory-calculation algorithm changed or if FC and Gnome were truly that much optimized. Regardless, our system felt snappy.
FC5 comes with a completely redesigned packaging system. Two new applications, Pup and Pirut, have taken over the previous cumbersome updating system. Pup checks both Fedora’s and any other subscribed repository for updates on already installed packages and suggests upgrades. Pirut has taken a Gnome-ish approach to new package installation that includes a “Search” facility and a full list of available or installed packages. Pirut was a bit buggy still, but I am sure it will be ironed out very soon. Overall, it has made the life of the average user with RPM, easier.
Other cool features on FC5 are the new and updated versions of Xen & SELinux and even a new clustering utility. It’s amazing how Fedora Core is able to balance between being a desktop and a powerful server at the same time. We should also not forget the inclusion of brand new versions of X11 & GCC and the addition of gnome-mount, Gnome User Share, Ekiga, LVM and Gnome Power Manager. Among the positive surprises on this release was the inclusion of Mono and Beagle as part of the system. We also installed the Mono applications MonoDevelop and F-spot which worked wonderfully. And of course, NetworkManager has seen an overhaul and it works much better now than it used to. Metacity now “sticks” windows at the borders of the monitor which is a very nice effect, however the double-click-wm-to-minimize feature that was added a few months ago is not part of the Metacity preference panel for some reason.
FC5 comes with a very mature version of Classpath, the free Java re-implementation. We tried it with the Eclipse IDE and it really worked much better than it did in FC4. Classpath is a huge piece of work and congratulations are in order to the team for pulling this out. I was also very excited to see software sound-mixing working on FC5 out of the box. At last, no more one-sound-at-the-time and no manual .asoundrc configurations. That was so ’90s.
Of course, as with any project or product, there are problems. One of the big deals of this release was the much-hyped suspend-to-RAM feature that was overhauled (easily triggered either via Gnome Power Manager or by closing the lid, or via a gnome-panel applet). Well, it didn’t work with our laptop. The laptop goes to sleep as it is supposed to, but it never wakes up. The keyboard remains in raw state, the screen never turns back on (ATi Radeon 9000, default XOrg r200 driver used) and the fan spins like crazy. I had to reset the machine to get it back in order.
Then, there is the eternal issue of non-free stuff (mp3, Flash, codecs, MS fonts, mp3-profiles in Sound Juicer, wifi firmwares etc), which while it is fully understandable why FC5 can’t include them, it still remains one extra thing that the user has to do manually. The whole procedure feels like a post-installation installation and while there are many guides online how to enrich FC, there are always glitches. For example, after subscribing to Livna and Freshrpms FC5 repos and installing all relevant libraries and apps, VLC just doesn’t work (crashes upon trying to play most videos), Muine still refuses to play mp3 and totem-gstreamer doesn’t want to co-exist with totem-xine (I used to have them as such on my Arch Linux box, it was admittedly handy). These third party repositories are not as well-tested as the official repos (and Fedora Extras) and this is a “strategic problem” in my view, because these repos are going to get used a lot by the majority of FC5 users.
The problem that really drove me crazy though was the default touchpad functionality. Firefox would move pages Back and Forward in History just by touching the lower bottom of the touchpad. This was extremely annoying. And so I disabled it by replacing the Synaptics section on /etc/X11/xorg.conf with the following:
Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Synaptics" Driver "synaptics" Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice" Option "Protocol" "auto-dev" Option "LeftEdge" "1700" Option "RightEdge" "5300" Option "TopEdge" "1700" Option "BottomEdge" "10000" Option "FingerLow" "25" Option "FingerHigh" "30" # set MaxTapTime to "0" to disable tap-to-click Option "MaxTapTime" "180" Option "MaxTapMove" "220" Option "VertScrollDelta" "100" Option "MinSpeed" "0.06" Option "MaxSpeed" "0.12" Option "AccelFactor" "0.0010" Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes" Option "SHMConfig" "on" EndSection
(Warning: if you are going to use the above snippet make sure you change some of the “Left/Right/Top/Bottom Edge” numbers because each touchpad model is different).
One strange behavior I noticed on both FC and ForesightLinux was that most of Gnome 2.14’s preference panels open up with a warning splash window and then these go immediately away (weird…). Other problems I encountered was the less-than-good support for Pocket PCs and Palms, while there are no useful tools for cellphone management either (at least under Gnome). The Gnome Bluetooth UI on FC5 is only good for some basic file exchange but there is no GUI for A2DP, printing or handsfree profiles (HSP/HFP profiles can be useful for VoIP). Additionally, there are no well-done applications for home video editing and DVD authoring (I am aware of Kino, DVDAuthor and others, but I am looking for something as elegant and easy to use as iMovie and iDVD; I hope that Diva will get released soon). Also, Gnomebaker should replace the two ancient GTK+ 1.2 CD/DVD burning applications included on FC (can’t remember their names now; no, I don’t mean nautilus-burn). Lastly, two features that are mysteriously missing from FC5 are a menu editor (part of Gnome for more than 6 months now) and the Fast User Switch applet (SELinux issue?).
In conclusion, this is the first Fedora Core version that I can honestly trust as my desktop and use without having thoughts of its competition doing it better. SuSE and Ubuntu will have to try harder this time to beat this Fedora. It’s usable, it’s prettier, it’s faster, it’s stabler, it’s richer. I have no doubt in my mind that FC6 is going to rock even more (especially with the possible inclusion of AIGLX by default) and I expect at least 3 out of the 7 issues I mention below to be resolved by then. The future is bright-er.
Pros:
– Great decreased memory requirements
– Faster to load and operate than before
– Enhanced Xen & SELinux support
– New package management tools
– Mono and Beagle are included
– Software sound mixing works
– Free as in speech Java stack
Cons:
– Suspend-to-RAM didn’t work as advertised
– No phone tools (PDA support hit and miss)
– A pain to install non-free stuff manually
– No iMovie/iDVD-style applications
– No UI for most Bluetooth profiles
– No Gnome menu editor included
– No Fast User Switch applet
Rating: 7.8/10
This sounds all good but I wonder if they ever fixed the 3com nic and/or anaconda bug that was in FC2 or FC3?
It never did read my 3c59x 3com nic.
I have the exact same NIC on my dual Celeron machine. I don’t recall ever having any problems with it and Linux (tried FC2 on that machine back in the day).
I mention earlier about anaconda, but it was with Kudzu. Between kudzu, 3com and kernel it had problems.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=107389
thnx.
never had a problem with dozens of 3c905b/c’s from rh6-fc4.
Downloading it now; will be interested to see how it goes; all my hardware is supported; finally deleted those videos off my ipod; weighed it up, not worth using it as a video device, audio is all I need.
It looks good, I’ll force myself to use GIMP, hopefully it has improved over the last time I used it (over a year ago); GNOME looks a whole lot nicer, and hopefully OpenOffice.org 2.0 is also well behaved 🙂
You might try OpenSync which is in Fedora Extras. It provides quite a few backends, but I haven’t tested it out, so this might be my blind shot.
I have tried it. OpenSync is as much of an alpha as Multisync is. It just doesn’t do all the things I want to do.
Ok, it was a blind shot:)
But just for the sake of my curiosity.
It just doesn’t do all the things I want to do.
Which things?
For example, on PocketPCs ActiveSync is able to pass-through Internet connection, mount the PDA’s internal storage as a drive and sync via Bluetooth. While these things are theoretically possible on Linux too, it requires waaaay too much tinkering and Multisync/Opensync alone won’t do them automatically for you.
“SuSE and Ubuntu will have to try harder this time to beat this Fedora”
Can I take it you feel Mandriva has it beaten already?
😀
either that, or mandriva isn’t even in the running anymore
Mandriva has been beaten already. Not because its not technically good, but the bugs and politics keep making it irrelevant. This is painful for me to accept because its my favourite Linux distro but over the last few years, Mandriva has shifted from being an innovator to being a follower.
Innovator to follower? Hum. Our network applet supported WPA six months before NetworkManager figured it out. No-one else has an interactive firewall. I upgraded my VMware test install of FC4 to FC5 last night; worked quite smoothly with yum following the instructions on the wiki, and it’s all nice and polished (like all major distros these days), but I don’t see anything particularly innovative – about the only thing I can think of is the X startup thing (which is neat). Other than that it just looks like a nice packaged GNOME desktop, just like my Ubuntu test install…
I don’t use fedora but you can fix the back/forward in history problem you mentioned by adding the following lines in ~/.mozilla/firefox/YOUR_PROFILE_DIR/user.js
user_pref(“mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action”,0);
user_pref(“mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines”,1);
for info on what exactly these lines do check out:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entries
search for “mousewheel.horizscroll” in the page
I’ve got it installed on this machine now, and I must say its a vast improvement over previous Fedora releases.
Some things still aren’t quite right however. The size of the default install is still far greater than it needs to be for most people, and the network install I did (from what has been for me, the fastest mirror over the last couple of years) took nearly two hours. The installer seemed to grab the packages quickly enough, but forever to install them.
As has been the case since Redhat 8, KDE is a second class citizen (I’m a KDE guy), and large parts of GNOME cannot be removed without seriously screwing up the system. (OT rant: Too many distributions IMO favor GNOME these days. It saddens me ;^)
Worse tho are things like error messages. The ones in GNOME *SUCK* compared to the KDE ones. Fedora has never had mp3 or DVD support out of the box. Fair enough, I understand their reasons. Just for kicks, seeing how HAL udev, dbus etc. have progressed, I inserted a DVD anyway (before installing the packages from freshrpms to make it work), and totem pops up with an error message saying that it can’t read the disk “No reason.” Different story in KDE. Told me exactly why (which I already knew, but this is just an example).
FC5 seems much faster than the previous versions I’ve tried out both in booting up and jugling various day to day tasks, and I am rather impressed by it. Nautilus still seems flakey tho, and so far I’ve had it crash once, and it crashed hard. I was reading the contents of a data DVD at the time
Regardless, for a distribution intended as a testbed for a future enterprise product, it’s not so bad as prior releases have been.
Edited 2006-03-26 11:32
If you, like me, rather use KDE on FC, try the KDE-Packaging (http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/) project.
I’m using it to run KDE 3.5.1 on FC3 and FC4 machines. (Both i386 and x86_64.)
Gilboa
“- A pain to install non-free stuff manually”
Thats why Stanton Finley is such a great guy it is so easy to just copy and paste his instructions just google for Stanton Finleys FC5 installation notes.
“- No iMovie/iDVD-style applications”
Video Lan Client is available in extras repo, Stanton Finley give more in deps on this and getting all supported formats to play on FC.
“- No Gnome menu editor included”
Alacarte is in core repo it even is custumied with fedora icon so it is the approved menu editor of gnome, and I can say it is the best menu editor yet for gnome.
“- No iMovie/iDVD-style applications”
Video Lan Client is available in extras repo, Stanton Finley give more in deps on this and getting all supported formats to play on FC.
VLC has nothing to do with iMovie/iDVD. iMovie and iDVD let’s you CREATE movies/DVDs, not just play them.
I’ve never understood people’s slavish addiction to iMovie and iDVD. Personally I find these applications to rigid in their approach, and they don’t allow sufficient flexibility. Furthermore, I’ve never got iDVD to actually render a DVD. It always hangs part way through the process. The final killer for me is that the quality of the output when compared to both kino and mainactor v5 is just not that good. I find the quality much better on the linux apps.
Kino may be a little quirky to use, but it has some very flexible output options. Mainactor is much more traditional in terms of its interface, and is very flexible and powerful. Also the speed of its conversion from dv to mpeg2 is fantastic.
Anyway just some thoughts based on my experiences of video editing on linux and mac.
>to rigid in their approach, and they don’t allow sufficient flexibility.
They are just fine for basic HOME usage. If someone wanted something more powerful, Apple already offers three other, expensive, products. But people love iMovie/iDvd exactly because they are easy to use and does all the basic things very easily.
Kino is a mix-n-mash of things, others too. Except Diva on Linux (which is still an alpha), nothing comes close to Apple’s *home* multimedia offerings, at least in terms of usability. Pitivi is not as usable either.
Edited 2006-03-26 19:18
kensai even though you were modded down I felt that your pointer to Stanton Finleys’ FC5 install notes was very helpful. Thanks! Here is the direct link:
http://www.stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_5_installation_notes.html
It’s still too slow. I feel like everything on my desktop has a little bit of glue on the back and while everything moves and changes just fine, it’s just not snappy at all. I see the widgets in windows redraw. I see the window decorations leave trails on previously obscured portions of the windows beneath them. It takes half a second or more for Firefox to switch tabs. It just feels slower.
Why is it that only Gentoo and Windows XP are the only snappy OSes I’ve ever had on this machine? Do other people who use Fedora and Ubuntu really tolerate this kind of behavior? I have a pretty fast machine (ThinkPad T43) with a decent graphics card (ATI Mobility x300 w/64 MB of video RAM). What do people who have slower machines do? And how can some of these same people complain about Windows XP being slow?
It’s still too slow.
Try disabling SELinux, makes gnome a lot snappier for me.
I have even slower laptop then yours. I have T22. Pentium III, 192MB RAM.
I tried Vector Linux SOHO 5.1.1 last week. And I liked it a lot. Eventhough I am Fedora/Gnome user. In Vector I had to use KDE. And you know what, I liked it. I liked the OS a lot. I suggest you give it a try on your laptop. It’s easily customizable and pretty snappy distribution.
http://www.vectorlinux.com/mod.php?mod=userpage&menu=12&page_id=4
I really suggest you trying Epiphany as a default browser, it’s very fast, I cannot believe I did not do it before. Also, try xfce, it makes my linux system feel nearly on par with XP.
One question…
Does fedora bundle with the latest version of Gnome ?
Yes.
2.14.
downloading fc5 now! this is a truly great review!
hi there, thanks for the review.
i’m a fedora user, so as soon as it was possible i downloaded and installed fc5.
i’ve however a little problem with java:
when i try to launch it, it says graphics2d is not implemented and cairo not found?
someone experienced the same?
i just did a plain install, it’s vanilla fc5 right now but i get this java error..
anyone can help?
tnx
—————–
[freaks@kanzume ~]$ cgoban
Exception in thread “main” java.lang.Error: Graphics2D not implemented. Cairo was not found or disabled at configure time
at gnu.java.awt.peer.gtk.GdkGraphics2D.<clinit> (lib-gnu-java-awt-peer-gtk.so.7)
at java.lang.Class.initializeClass (libgcj.so.7)
at gnu.java.awt.peer.gtk.GdkGraphicsEnvironment.createGraphics (lib-gnu-java-awt-peer-gtk.so.7)
at java.awt.image.BufferedImage.createGraphics (libgcj.so.7)
at java.awt.image.BufferedImage.getGraphics (libgcj.so.7)
at dK.b (cgoban:130)
at dK.a (cgoban:78)
at dK.<clinit> (cgoban:60)
at java.lang.Class.initializeClass (libgcj.so.7)
at org.igoweb.cgoban.CGoban.<init> (cgoban:152)
at org.igoweb.cgoban.CGoban.main (cgoban:92)
[freaks@kanzume ~]$
I’m using it now on my Toshiba Satellite (pentium III 600mhz/192mb ram), it works nicely, but pirut is truly unusable for me (slow and hangs alot).
@Eugenia: I’ve been keeping an eye on http://pitivi.sourceforge.net/ , maybe it’ll interest you too. And diva doesn’t seem to be coming along soon, last commit was 7 weeks ago.
To edit GNOME menus, try a right click on the Applications tab on top panel bar. Default in FC5 without installing Alacarte.
Fedora Core 4 was the first Linux distribution is started with. I quickly switched to Ubuntu though and have been with it since, allthough i tried practically every other distribution that came out in the last 6 months too. I installed FC5 last wednesday, and used it since. My experiences have been mostly positive. The positive things imo are:
– RAM usage. It’s amazingly low. You said in your review that you had about 90 mb of RAM used after a default boot. My experiences are even better, after a default boot i have about 75 mb (!) of RAM used. This is including the RAM that the process manager program is using.
– Eye candy. The new Fedora bubbly theme looks beautiful, as does the cairo-clearlooks theme. It looks really good. Also i like the iconset, but that doesnt seem to have changed since FC4. Also the rhgb thing is beautiful. For those who dont know what it is, it is basically a X11 session which shows the boot progress. It starts immediately after udev, so you only see a few text messages.
– Boot speed. It really fast. Also with included runlevel editor app you can stop some processes you dont need from starting, which makes booting even faster.
– Installing mp3 codecs: i thought this was really easy. It was basically entering two commands which i found on the rpm.livna.org site:
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-5.rpm
yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly
– Speed of starting programs. They start really fast. I did disable SELinux though, dont know whether this matters. The only exception seems to be Firefox though, which takes really long to start. Hell, even OpenOffice starts in like
10 seconds!
– Software management. Pup and Pirut really simplified this, and both have clean and attractive interfaces.
– Sleep, suspend to RAM or whatever it’s called worked out of the box for me.
– Beagle included!
There are some bad things too though, including:
– The 5 cd’s arent needed. There should just be a base install and all the additional software should be in the repo’s not on the cd’s.
– Fedora can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a normal user desktop distro, power user desktop or server distro. This is probably why they got 5 cd’s too.
– The menu’s are cluttered, they should follow the new ubuntu menu´s. This depends on what they decide what kind of distro they want to be too though.
– The hard disk partitions are not included in the my computer folder, places menu and the gtk save dialog. This is very annoying for people who have their data on another partition. (Someone know a gconf-key to change to enable this?)
– My home folder, trash and computer icons rearrange themselves on every login so i have to rearrange them back every time.
– No gnometris by default
The other problems eugenia had had mostly to do with peripherals i dont have so i cant comment on them. And there IS a menu editor, as someone else pointed out.
Basically, Fedora needs to decide what it wants to be. I not saying it is bad in anyway, it is actually one of the best desktop/server combination distro’s, but it could be so much better if it just chose what it wanted to be. It could be a seriously ubuntu contender if it chose to be a home user desktop distro.
– Speed of starting programs. They start really fast. I did disable SELinux though, dont know whether this matters.
New version of SELinux is modular and easy to understand. Ther eis policies “compatibilities” that allow to enable some plugins like Flash. My system, a Athlon XP 2500 with ASUS-AS7X8-MX motherboard and 1GB RAM didn’t get performance hit with SELinux enabled. Check out more SELinux on:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SELinux/Config
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SELinux/Dummies
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SELinux/Login
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SELinux/FAQ/ProposedAdditions
Addendum:
Basically, Fedora needs to decide what it wants to be. I not saying it is bad in anyway, it is actually one of the best desktop/server combination distro’s, but it could be so much better if it just chose what it wanted to be.
It is a general purpose OS since its existence i.e a jack trade where it is possible to customize it as desktop(like a Fedora based distos Blag, FoX Linux and Berry Linux), workstation (used by Pixar, New Zealand studio for the incoming movie Halo) and server (Wikipedia and SourceForge).
Edited 2006-03-26 19:34
Concerning the startup speed of programs; I don’t know what you are comparing with but… on my machine Firefox starts notiably faster on w2k than on fc5 (using the same hardware). And I don’t use fastlauncher tray icon on w2k.
“- The 5 cd’s arent needed. There should just be a base install and all the additional software should be in the repo’s not on the cd’s.”
You have to think about all users, not just yourself. There are many people out there on dialup connections who get their CDs from Cheapbytes, or who have dialup at home but broadband at work and download ISOs there. How do you think they would feel if they were told they had to download, for e.g., OO.o over a dialup modem link?
if you find that FCR5 doesnt display your LCD resolution correctly (for example you tell it to display 1400×1050 and xorg shows 1024×768) then you need to get the 915resolution fix,
http://www.linux-noob.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2188
it happened to me, and the fix is easy
f.y.i
glad to Eugenia writing again 🙂
cheers
anyweb
I had a similiar problem. FC5 wanted to use 800×600, if I went into the screen resolution from preferences to change it, it would not display properly. It was like a mirror effect on the right side of the screen from the left. An edit to xorg.conf and adding “1200×800” to the screen resolution section fixed the issue and all looks clean and clear now
Good review of FC5. I was pretty impressed with it when I loaded it on to my laptop Wednesday night. It loaded fine, it detected hardware fine. But I didn’t test it as extensively as you because I don’t use some of the featues like bluetooth or suspend to RAM.
The thing thats got me hooked on it is that it works better on my laptop than Ubuntu did. I just had to pop the dvd in and start loading. With Ubuntu the screen would go blank and I wouldn’t have a console unless I typed in vga=771 before loading. Ubuntu would hang unless I disalbed something else as well, maybe the ACPI? That my change in dapper.
The problem that really drove me crazy though was the default touchpad functionality. Firefox would move pages Back and Forward in History just by touching the lower bottom of the touchpad.
I couldn’t agree more. It wasn’t specific to firefox, it was anything that had a tab to include a terminal window. Thanks for the tip on how to disable it.
* On my 2.6ghz,1gb ram FC5 takes 1min15s to boot while w2k only takes 46s.
* Firefox launches in less than 2 secs on my freshly booted w2k (without the fastlaunch tray icon) and often more than 4 seconds on a freshly booted FC5 (the same hardware).
* When I rapidly resize firefox on FC5 the graphics are lagging behind in a clunky manner. This is not a problem with FF ofc, but it rather reflects the poor 2d gfx and windowing performance of fc5 (or possible my gfx driver in fc5, not sure). Anyway, on w2k it resizes smoothly regardless of how fast I drag the mouse to resize FF.
* My soundcard (Creative Audigy) didn’t work in FC5. Made me feel like I was installing slackware in the 90ies. This soundcard always works out of the box after I have installed w2k.
* Selecting either “Add/remove software” or “Package Updater” in the Gnome FC5 menu resulted in “Unable to retrieve update information” and then these apps just quit.
Some of the “cons” mentioned in the article seem to be GNOME specifc. For example KDE has a fast switch user applet, it has gui tools for dealing with bluetooth, a menu editor and tools for syncing with mobiles and pdas. I am sure those using KDE on FC5 will not have a problem with some of the “cons”.
A fast user switch applet and a menu editor are standard in GNOME. For some reason FC doesn’t include the applet though.
Does the ATI kernel module for X11R6.9.0 work with the R7 release that ships with FC5, or will we have to wait another 4-6 months for them to catch up?
> I’ve been keeping an eye on http://pitivi.sourceforge.net/ , maybe it’ll interest you too.
PiTiVi is not nearly as good looking or easy to use as Diva is.
>And diva doesn’t seem to be coming along soon, last commit was 7 weeks ago.
Try the link I provide in the article. 😉
>To edit GNOME menus, try a right click on the
>Applications tab on top panel bar. Default in FC5
No it’s not. You can’t hide/unhide or add new menus like that. Not anymore. It was removed two releases ago.
No it’s not. You can’t hide/unhide or add new menus like that. Not anymore. It was removed two releases ago.
Actually, FC5 has menu editor that you can hide/unhide unless the update removed it which I didn’t notice.
Addendum:
I have no doubt in my mind that FC6 is going to rock even more (especially with the possible inclusion of AIGLX by default) and I expect at least 3 out of the 7 issues I mention below to be resolved by then
AIGLX is included in the distro. Follow the step on
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RenderingProject/AiglxOnFedora
but you don’t need to read install/uninstall step. Still experimental though.
– No Fast User Switch applet
Hidden in the menu. Right-click application -> menu editor. Look for “System Tools” and you got new login men. Hope it helps.
Edited 2006-03-26 19:49
> No it’s not. You can’t hide/unhide or add new menus
> like that. Not anymore. It was removed two releases ago.
That’s incorrect. You can hide/unhide menu items, by simply right-clicking on the Applications menu, and using the Edit Menus dialog.
Anyone tried it on a Mac? FC4 would not install on a Mini for me, blowing up during the install.
If someone has it installed on a Mac, how does it handle sleeping and spinning down the drive? I’d like to put Linux, preferably Feedora, on the Mini, but won’t if I can’t put it to sleep or if the drive goes “Whirrrll!” all the time.
…it’s still not quite there yet, IMHO. For instance, if you install the x86_64 version of FC5, you get 64-bit Firefox only (32-bit Firefox actually hasn’t been built in the 64-bit tree of Fedora Core, so you can’t just “yum install firefox.i386”), which at this moment in time means you can’t run various 32-bit only plugins (e.g. Flash or Adobe Acrobat Reader) and you have to painfully manually download 32-bit Firefox and several of its 32-bit dependencies from download.fedora.redhat.com to get 32-bit Firefox up and running on your 64-bit system.
FC5 *still* runs too many services by default that you have to chkconfig off – who needs atd for example or any of the laptop-related services on a desktop? I’ve also had trouble saving the position of my GNOME terminal windows (seems to revert to a single-window setup every time I log in) and even fiddling with the Sessions option off of the main menu doesn’t seem to help.
Finally, Azureus barfs out a Java trackback what may be a result of an SELinux issue (I left it on “Enforcing” during install), but still seems to run…but then you can’t check for updates or install any additional plugins (e.g. Speed Scheduler is crucial if your ISP has peak-time quotaing like mine does), making the shipped Azureus not much use to me and I suspect many others – ended up having to hand-install Sun’s Java [can’t use the RPM version!] and Azureus from Sourceforge to get a fully operational Azureus. Nice to see Amule – its “cousin” for the eDonkey network – available for Fedora at long last though.
Looks better than XP.
lol, you’re kidding right?
Why would he be kidding? Some people actually prefer a clean, simple look over the teletubbies XP default look.
Well, pretty much everything looks better then XP!
“Furthermore, I’ve never got iDVD to actually render a DVD. It always hangs part way through the process.”
I will write you a one paragraph book for “dumbies”.
I made my first dvd on the program using it for a few minutes.
Bottomline, you need computer help!
I have a Sony VAIO laptop and the suspend to RAM works as follows: If I have the power cord plugged-in and suspend, the laptop won’t wake up. However, when I put the computer to suspend without charging it at the time, it wakes up just fine.
TH
Has the kernel bug been fixed yet?
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=14009