Submitted by Fedora 8 has been released. It sports a new look and feel, a codec installation program, the first signs of the GNOME online desktop, various security improvements, support for Compiz and Compiz-Fusion, Java support via Iced-Tea, and much more. Get it from the download page. Update: A couple of articles about the release: 1, 2, 3. Update II: One more: 4.
F8’s features far exceed any other distro out there, pulseaudio for one is unique, more details below
check it out > http://linux-noob.com/review/fedora/development/#f8
cheers
anyweb
pulseaudio isn’t unique for Fedora. It’s everywhere you know. It would be more correct to say: “Finally, even Fedora has it now”.
It’s great to see people show enthusiasm about their distro of choice, but don’t hype what the rest of us has had for a long time
PulseAudio (and Avahi) developer is a Red Hat employee and Fedora 8 is the first distribution to have it enabled by default. It has been in the repository for a long long time. Read the news carefully before taking a jab at others.
1) I’m not taking a jab at anyone.
2) “Enabled by default” is irrelevant and has nothing to do with this. The only thing that matters is whether or not it is available. Besides that, not all distributions have a default configuration
3) I read the news carefully, and it is news. But dissing other distributions despite them having the same packages installed (by default or as dependencies for other packages) for longer than Fedora simply isn’t acceptable.
4) I have nothing against Fedora users, but I do have something against people dissing other people. So, don’t do that.
I’ve been a Fedora user for long long time too (and Redhat Linux 6 thru 9 before FC2). It’s also a long long time since I jumped to another (and more bleeding edge as well as stable) distribution.
All I wrote was that people shouldn’t hype what the rest of us already have. Nothing wrong about that wish.
Defaults do matter for the large majority of users and makes a big difference in the user experience and is infact what makes distribution’s different to a large extend. Also PulseAudio maintainer is a Fedora developer and has done months of work in getting it to a state here it works robust enough for many use cases. As an example, a plugin for Flash for written during the Fedora 8 development time in response to request from users testing and participating in the discussions while makes Flash and PulseAudio work well together. I doubt that any other distribution has it yet. So yes, defaults matter and what is in the repository and how it is configured matters too.
So from now on we’ll judge a distro based on what it has enabled by default ? Yeah, I’m going too far, still, I’m not willing to do that. Availability counts more than enable-ity. Giving the credit for pulseaudio development is one thing, saying a distro is better because it has it by default, is another. For the average users, it won’t matter if it’s there or not, since they don’t know what it is anyway. For us here, the news is that it’s in a better state of development, and that it’s available, the rest well, chitchat.
Yep. Teh first packages I saw of Pulse was in Ubuntu. Up until recently what was missing was the flash support and xine support. Luckily this has been resolved and is pretty easy to find and configure the correct packages. i’m hoping that pulse becomes the defacto sound server since it has many promising features coming down the line.
The biggest problem seems to get some proprietary apps to work on Pulse. In some cases it’s possible to use OSS/alsa wrappers, but few important apps (Realplayer, some Skype versions..) still refuse to work (pasuspender is a last resort for those).
So it’s good that RH is pushing this as default. It will force them to either support PA or make their applications work with the emulation.
I have been using it happily since 7.04 Ubuntu (0.9.6). ESD emulation refuses to work, but otherwise I enjoy added functionallity (still with minor annoyances like latency while changing volume, etc.).
Funny, it is already 8, yet 6 & 7 seem to have passed me by without notice. I easily switched to Opensuse after experiencing too many issues that should never have existed in the first place, most which Suse did not have.
But, correct me if I am wrong on this, but it seems Fedora community has done a lot of work during this time to really put out a fine distro. Reading over the release notes it seems that Fedora is once again back on track, which is nice because I have always had a preference (probably due to having been a longtime Red Hat user). I have to say the this new release seems much more impressive than any of the last 3-4 versions.
what people have probably missed in the last few releases is the huge amount of work on the ‘infrastructure’ behind fedora in order to get it to where it is today,
it’s clear now that that work is now showing the fruits of fruition and everything is coming together
* custom spins
* fedora 8 on a usb key
* pulseaudio
* codecbuddy
* yum improvements (yes it’s fast)
* packagemanagement improvements (change repos and more)
* gui for firewall
* online desktop
* the whole fedoraproject.org website and associated projects
i think F9 (yes I’m talking about that already) will be awesome, as it’ll most likely have compiz enabled by default plus a whole lot more, and no doubt it’ll have ironed out any bugs still present or yet to be found in F8
cheers
anyweb
How can Red Hat and the Fedora community do all this great job without an alliance with Microsoft ?
It’s more about getting OpenOffice and other linux tech to work better with Microsoft’s products. Microsoft can’t possibility just make them working together without some gain or license.
The same way other great distros do it: Hard work and dedication to the goals of the project. Ubuntu is as far along in some respects, and further in a few more, than Fedora and without any help from Redmond. Slackware, while behind on features, is hands down the most rock-solid, stable major distro out there, again without Microsoft’s help. FreeBSD, while not a Linux distro, is open source UNIX and is the most popular internet server OS, without a shred of Microsoft input.
Why on earth would any Linux distro or other alternative OS really need help from them to do good things?
Dude honestly, what rock did you crawl out from under? If you want “rock solid Linux” use RHEL. It has a multitude more qa and users finding and ironing out bugs. Also Pat makes Slackware a (mostly) 1 man job. You’ve never ran mission critical servers with uptime requirements allowing less than 20 hours of scheduled downtime / year have you? It shows.
FreeBSD might be the most popular server os if you work at Yahoo, but the rest of the internet disagrees with you. If you want to refute what I’m saying show me a reputable source with some numbers to back it up. You won’t find them.
Edited 2007-11-09 00:40
I could ask the same of you: Show me the numbers. But that wasn’t what my post was about. My point was that none of the distros I listed needed Microsoft’s help to be as good as they are.
In response to your rant, maybe RHEL is more secure and stable than Slackware but my personal experience shows otherwise. It’s an opinion based on my own experience and should be taken as such. You are probably right in that RHEL is more stable and secure but whatever.
As for internet servers, here’s a few tidbits:
From http://www.serverwatch.com regarding FreeBSD:
* Yahoo uses FreeBSD and Apache to power one of the most popular Web servers on the Internet.
* The MP3.com Web site uses FreeBSD and Apache to serve pages and mp3 music files.
* Microsoft uses FreeBSD — not Windows NT — to power its Hotmail electronic-mail servers.
From Wikipedia regarding FreeBSD:
FreeBSD is the most common free operating system listed in Netcraft’s list[3] of the 50 web servers with the longest uptime.
I could go on, but you get the picture.
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That bit about MS using FreeBSD instead of Windows on Hotmail is absolutely *ancient*.
I believe, but am not certain, that the uptime counter on 32 bit Linux still rolls over after 2^32 jiffies. (Not sure how, if at all, the new tickless operation might affect that.) So the Netcraft statistic might be pretty meaningless.
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Yes. But perhaps not the one you intended to paint. 😉
FreeBSD is a solid enough player that I’m sure there are better examples to be had, though.
Edited 2007-11-09 01:39
“I believe, but am not certain, that the uptime counter on 32 bit Linux still rolls over after 2^32 jiffies.”
It does, but that isn’t what makes Netcraft uptime statistics meaningless. They used to (correct me if I’m wrong) calculate uptime from TCP signatures (like nmap does), which stopped being reliable a long time ago for Linux, but also for other OSes (like FreeBSD). For this reason, netcraft stopped publishing uptime top lists.
Last I heard, they had switched to using a (then new) feature of Apache which reports the uptime… but is subject to the rollever effect.
Microsoft stopped using FreeBSD years ago man. Remember that they bought Hotmail and up until then, Hotmail was an all FreeBSD shop. It isn’t that I’m knocking it, ports is pretty nice. Its just that it is difficult to manage source based operating systems in mass (being > 1000) easily while they are being used in production.
It looks like Netcraft stopped doing their “top operating system” charts awhile back. Here is the most recent one I can find. It certainly isn’t like Linux has lost a ton of marketshare since 2005. If anything it has grown quite a bit since then. http://survey.netcraft.com/surveys/analysis/https/2005/Jun/CMatch/o…
And like I stated earlier, Yahoo is known to be a huge freebsd user. You were totally right about none of those distros needing help from Microsoft. I certainly won’t complain that OO.o can open up and use Excel macros thanks to Novell though. I was playing devil’s advocate and being a bit more of an ass than was called for.
Now now children….
Please keep your hands in the windows, and stop flipping off the nice policeman on the motorcycle.
FYI: “codecbuddy” is a new API from the gstreamer project. As a matter of fact, the idea came from some random Ubuntu developer and was punted around with the gstreamer upstream. They wrote the code and Ubuntu was the first distro to have this functionality.
Now upstream gnome software like totem is taking advantage of that API if it exists to do this on any distro. Very cool stuff indeed.
Not quite true. Ubuntu used a separate shared library called libgimme and Bastien Nocera, Red Hat developer who is also the Totem maintainer pushed the code upstream and it was made part of the upstream project itself instead of a separate shared library. Then he used that API and worked with other developers to enable codeina aka codec buddy. Refer http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/CodecBuddy for more information on this.
Edited 2007-11-08 21:07
That’s what SEJeff wrote.. *sigh*
Read what people writes, before you take a jab at them.
Sorry for the trolls modding you down. Its too bad Adam hasn’t enabled code to let you see who mods a comment down. I modded you +1 not because you agree with me, but because you are right.
I’m confused what exactly you disagree with me on since you agree with exactly what I said.
The idea came from a discussion on the Ubuntu development mailinglist of which I subscribe. They punted around ideas with gstreamer upstream and gstreamer upstream wrote in the hooks. libgimme won’t work without the hooks in gstreamer fyi.
This was a huge deal during the feisty (Ubuntu 7.04) development period because the Canonical developers weren’t sure if the gstreamer developers would have the API complete in time for them to sync the changes and ship it with Ubuntu before the freeze / release of Feisty. libgimme-codec was a stopgap until the API was feature complete.
Then this was pushed upstream and now other distros can use it. Kind of like how Ubuntu uses Fedora’s system-config-printer and they sent enough bugfixing patches that they have commit access to it’s vcs repository.
So what was “not quite true” about this?
I’ve skipped the last few Fedora releases, I think openSUSE does a better job, but I do plan on trying Fedora 9. I think F9 really has the potential to blow up! What I mean is Fedora could really get huge, depending on how the implement KDE4. That’s why I think F9 could really get big, is if KDE4 is really slick and smooth in Fedora, combine that with just having Fedora now, no Core and Extras, I think it really might prove to be a sweet release.
…must stop urge to distro hop…
It’s too much, I have to download it now!
well, you can always use vmware/qemu/virutalbox…
heh, i’m curious, what are you hopping from ?
“heh, i’m curious, what are you hopping from ?”
I was considering hopping from Ubuntu. Though Mandriva 2008 looks good too…mmm so many polished choices…
I’m thinking the same thing. Ubuntu has been nice but who cares about loyalty when you have timeshifting wallpaper
.
Never have I seen a binary Distribution so cutting edge, very few packages are not there latest versions. It also makes me wonder which is better a release every in a 6 month cycle based on gnome like Ubuntu or to release ad-hoc. It definitely has worked to fedoras advantage in this instance. It does make me wonder is release based on every other kernel would not be a better option.
Wow. We agree. 😉
About the cutting edge part, anyway. That’s what makes Fedora fun. And it does not stop with the included packages, either. The cutting edge regression testing and quality control means that it’s actually pretty stable, considering the amount of churn in the packages. It is not only up to date when you install it. It tends to stay that way. If an upstream developer releases a 1.02 release to supercede 1.01, Fedora passes that on to the user. WRT the kernel, have a look at the updates repos for previous releases. You will find that as new kernels are released, and after a period of testing, they update the kernel. For example, FC6 started with kernel 2.6.18. But currently has 2.6.22.
So, you see, cyclops, your wish to have the latest kernel is already granted. 🙂
And, IMO, it really makes more sense to plan around the release of the default DE. The DE is really more significant to most end users, and requires more attention by the distro maintainer, than does the kernel. Assuming desktop use, anyway.
I know we don’t always see eye to eye. But since we are both impressed with Fedora, I do hope you find this helpful and interesting.
-Steve
Edited 2007-11-08 19:17
You creepy individual; I have said stop following me it was flattering at first, but I’m getting tired why don’t you spread your bland anti-linux/fsf rants elsewhere. I understand your compulsion now, no more demonstration in needed.
Heh… looks like you really did him the “smackdown.” Don’t worry, though… Sbergman isn’t a Vista User like I am.
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Don’t worry, though… Sbergman isn’t a Vista User like I am.
“””
I avoid it like the plague. 😉
But I thought “creepy individual” was a bit half-hearted and unimaginative. A far cry from the old days when he used to call me a “slimy little toady”.[1]
Ah, memories! 🙂
Anyway, I have about 5 internal and customer servers I’ll be ungrading to F8. My own desktop first, of course. This does look like a nice release.
[1]http://www4.osnews.com/permalink?272915
Edited 2007-11-11 02:26
Looks like a excellent feature set, I hope they fixed the compiz screen tearing because that really annoyed me with 7 and it makes scrolling sloppy. It’s good to see the security features being kept as a priority and nothing like having the security in place ready for the big time market.
Can any Fedora 7 users say what their upgrade experience was like? Did it go smoothly, with a few hiccups, or not at all?
I know many people like to just reinstall, but I’m trying to get away from that and would like to see how good Fedora is at the distribution upgrade thing.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DistributionUpgrades
Important :
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f8/en_US/sn-Installer.h…
I did an upgrade from a vanilla 7 for 7.92 and then applied the patched to that to get to what to all intents and purposes is Fedora 8.
There were a few glitches with the 7.92 but according to Bugzilla, these have been fixed if the released package set for Fedora 8 and so far, I have to say that it was overall and pleasurable experience when compared to other FC series upgrades (3,4 & 5)
I have to agree with a previous poster. There has been lots of work under the covers that has improved the overall distro in leaps & bounds. This is especially true with 7 and now 8.
So far, so good.
Make sure you have a LOT of free space:
$ yum upgrade
[snip]
Error Summary
————-
Disk Requirements:
At least 24122MB needed on the / filesystem.
WOW! I know, I only have ~150Mb free on / (after downloading all updated packages) but still…
You also need a lot of RAM, apparently:
Cleanup : pcsc-lite-devel ################### [1337/2012]
error: Couldn’t fork %preun: Cannot allocate memory
Cleanup : gnome-mag ################### [1338/2012]
error: Couldn’t fork %preun: Cannot allocate memory
Cleanup : perl-IO-Socket-INET6 ################### [1339/2012]
error: Couldn’t fork %postun: Cannot allocate memory
Segmentation fault
Nice. Anyone know how to “recover” from this?
Better place to ask about that…
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
Edited 2007-11-09 11:02
Just curious, have you tried these methods below before upgrading?
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq?highlight=(yum)#head-95a2ac1207272256325354f5ebb0b9cc05511d7a
Yes and in the end I decided to just re-install from CD.
Now I know who “yum upgrade” isn’t recommended.
Something there is pretty sloppy. They go OOM and then segfault? Great testing there!
If you OOM, all sort of weird things happen. That isn’t specific to the upgrade process. moreover the yum upgrade is still not supported officially. Refer
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.p…
I think the worst thing about running linux, is the constant need,want to try EVERYTHING! They all make it sound so good!
Well that’s true only for nerds. The kind of people who also wanted the latest and the greatest for Windows ;-). The downside with getting the latest and the greatest with Windows is that you had to pay or pirate :-p
//The downside with getting the latest and the greatest with Windows is that you had to pay or pirate :-p//
Yah, having to *pay* for software is a ridiculous concept. Long live communism!
Being RedHat behind Fedora, I am sure Fedora project will become better that even Ubuntu very soon !!! (may be in one or two next releases). The Gnome version is supperior than any destro out there. Lets not forget RedHat was one of the main supporters of Gnome from the early days of it’s creation.
Common Fedora Rise from ashes.
Fedora has actually been in development longer than Ubuntu.
Not quite. Ubuntu began its life with as a fully formed distro that forked off of Debian, so while Ubuntu was in development as Ubuntu for less than Fedora was, it started with all the advantages Debian had.
And Fedora didn’t start off with RedHats advantages?
I’d rather not go down this distro war path. Fedora put out an outstanding release and i can’t wait to try it, im just ticked nobody can install satellite till next week! they were supose to be her tomorrow tha punks.
This looks really cool, I’m seriously considering putting this on my laptop. However, I know that the Fedora community takes patents seriously, so I need to know: Will my intel wireless card work in this? How about my broadcom based Bluetooth adapter? Both of these devices work fine in ubuntu, but I’m worried.
Give the Live CD a spin it should give you a good idea how well supported your hardware it. In general, the intel wireless cards are pretty well supported.
The Live CD isn’t installable, perchance?
yes, you can install it to hdd
Yeah, you can install from the Live CD.
i think your intel wireless will work just fine,
read this:-
“Fedora 8 also brings a new graphical firewall configuration tool called system-config-firewall, this tool allows users to quickly and easily configure their firewall. Werewolf also claims to have better laptop support, which is always popular, and I for one can only agree, my wireless nic (0c:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN Network Connection (rev 61)) worked out of the box, all I had to do was configure WEP.
”
taken from > http://linux-noob.com/review/fedora/development/#f8
cheers
anyweb
I have the infamous Broadcom 4318 card which finally has decent built-in support in Ubuntu 7.10. It still requires that you either already have the firmware as a local file or else that you have a working wired connection before it will fully enable. I’m sure this is purely because of license issues as there is no open-source firmware for this chipset. Still, it’s better than the tedious command-line dance of 7.04 and earlier.
I’m downloading FC8 right now and I look forward to finding out if it is just as easy as Ubuntu to get wireless up on my card. I have a feeling it will go as smoothly if not more so.
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Me too. In my laptop. But the support for it in Ubuntu has been good for the last 2 or 3 releases. It is supported by the restricted drivers manager now. But in Edgy and Feisty, installing the firmware was just a matter of telling synaptics to install it and saying “yes” when it asked if you want to install the firmware. Yes, you do need a working wired connection first. But it’s a hell of a lot better than all the hunting around for a working link to the firmware that I used to have to do.
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Been there. Done that. It’s not. I spent an hour trying to get mine going and it didn’t work. I decided to put Ubuntu back on it. But I’m waiting for my bittorrent download of F8 to complete so I can upgrade my desktop box from F7.
That’s odd because the fwcutter package in the repositories in 7.04 and previous didn’t work for my card. I resorted to command-line stuff I found on a few forum posts. They all involved manually downloading the .debs from other locations as well as pulling my own firmware from my laptop’s recovery CDs. As of 7.10 though, the restricted drivers manager has a built-in link to a firmware that works, though I’ve found that using my own firmware instead gets me better signal strength for some odd reason. Either way, it’s a few clicks in a GUI compared to a lot of copy-and-paste to a terminal.
For what it’s worth, my laptop is a Compaq Presario V2565US.
V2552us here. Yeah, fwcutter in 7.04 worked like a charm for me. The previous release, as well, I think.
Previous to that, I had gotten so darned frustrated with the 4318 that I ordered in an intel based mini-pci card to replace it. Guess what? The bios checks against a list of supported (HP) cards and won’t boot if it finds an unauthorized (Intel) card instead. And all that time I had mistakenly thought it was my laptop, since I had bought and paid for it and all, and not HP’s.
Edited 2007-11-09 04:02
>I’m downloading FC8 right now and I look forward to finding out if it is just as easy as
>Ubuntu to get wireless up on my card. I have a feeling it will go as smoothly if not more
>so.
If it depends on proprietary code, it’s “no go” on Fedora.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems#NDISwrapper
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.advisory-board/32…
Edited 2007-11-09 07:46
The bcm43xx driver is already in vanilla kernel.
Works semi good. There are some problems with the signal strength (10 meters from my router the signal strength drops to 47%, i get 10% at ~25 meters). But at least it works.
You still need to get the proprietary firmware.
Don’t know about fedora, but ubuntu installs the firmware using the ‘restricted drivers’ tool.
Edited 2007-11-09 08:42
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f8/en_US/sn-Live.html#s…
“You can do a text mode installation of the Live images using the liveinst command in the console.”
I imagine this is the installer option for the live CD?
That is just the text based installer if you are booting from the live cd into runlevel 3. If you are booting into a desktop environment, just click the “install to hard disk” icon on the desktop. It doesn’t get any easier than that 😉
Here is a screenshot
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.p…
That’s the Fedora KDE Live image but GNOME Live image works the same way too.
in action, the Install to hard drive icon can be seen clearly.
http://www.linux-noob.com/forums/uploads/monthly_11_2007/post-1-119…
Edited 2007-11-08 20:44
The main reason why I use Ubuntu is because it’s really easy to install software using Synaptic.
How does this compare to Fedora? How is the package management in Fedora?
What are the experiences?
Considering that Fedora has synaptic too, I wouldn’t say it a difference at all 😉
# yum install synaptic (which uses apt-rpm)
and off you go. Yum which is the default package manager and Add/Remove programs (pirut) which is the default graphical frontend does work well. Users who want more advanced options might take a look at yumex which is a alternative graphical frontend.
Others prefer Smart package manager which is also available in the repository. Finally the next version of Fedora will have PackageKit which is a distribution neutral graphical frontend. Refer
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/FeatureList
package management in Fedora is very easy too,
you can use the gui tool (Pirut) or do it via a terminal if you prefer aka:- yum install xchat
easy and quick.
cheers
anyweb
Thanks Rahul and Anyweb!
So when you use Pirut/Synaptic/Yumex or in the future PackageKit you automatically are connected to a Fedora repository?
Yes that’s the coolest thing. They all connect to the same Fedora repository and use the exact same RPM database. You can even switch between them whenever you want. This is possible because yum, recent versions of apt-rpm and smart all understand the repomd format originally designed for yum and they are rely on RPM libs to do the backend transactions.
Similiar for PackageKit which can work as a graphical frontend on top of yum, apt,smart etc.
That sounds great!
I think it’s time to try it out again!
(The last time I used Fedora/Red Hat was version 6.2)
“(The last time I used Fedora/Red Hat was version 6.2)”
wow, it’s change a LOT since then,
please DO try F8 now !
cheers
anyweb
What about availability of up-to-date software. If for example Gimp upgrades to 2.6 two weeks after a Fedora version is released, do they offer backports or anything? What about versions of non-supported less common software packages? I personally find Ubuntu’s backports to be limited and slow to upgrade.
Fedora has a stated objective (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives) of staying close to upstream releases which includes not patching unless necessary and updating software quickly in the repository. Fedora includes new features in updates tooin the main updates repository itself rather than just security or bug fixes and Fedora repository has grown nicely over the last few releases.
Check out http://spevack.livejournal.com/33586.html. There are other third repositories which offer packages that are non-free or patent encumbered too that Fedora official repository excludes.
I’ve downloaded and burned it etc. but I know that I’m going to eventually regret it. I’m very eager to try it out but the hopping back and forth from openSuse/Kubuntu/Fedora has me really weary. I’d decided to remain with openSuse 10.3 because everything works and there seems little advantage to install a new distro. The struggle to re-import onto my older hardware drives me a little nuts and the wireless thing – with Fedora madwifi/ndiswrapper quickly forced me into dependency hell. Then the insane number of updates eventually gets you in too deep. I was really impressed with Kubuntu 7.04 and was committed to it but when I upgraded to 7.10 (it had to be better right?) it wasn’t good enough, too many things were too much of a struggle to get working again. With openSuse all I had to do was have madWifi saved on a flashdrive and everything else was a breeze. Enough whining eh? I’ll have to commit or get off the pot I guess…..The good part is that we have something new, hopefully better to work with. The bad part is that with diversity we sometimes have less continuity and greater fragmentation.
I decided to try the live CD, so I spent a few minutes downloading the .iso and burned it to a CD. Sadly, it bombed on my Gateway laptop. It got to the login screen, but both the keyboard and touchpad were unresponsive. Heck, I couldn’t even eject it from the CD drive without resorting to a paper clip in the emergency-open hole!
I can understand some hardware incompatibilities. I might even understand the touchpad not working without a specific driver, but the keyboard? Unacceptable!
So, it’s back to Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium for me. I’ve not had a single problem with it, have not had to configure anything other than my user ID/password and ISP info. I suppose some command line fiddling would have gotten Fedora to work, but why bother when Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium “just works”?
I decided to try the live CD, so I spent a few minutes downloading the .iso and burned it to a CD. Sadly, it bombed on my Gateway laptop. It got to the login screen, but both the keyboard and touchpad were unresponsive. Heck, I couldn’t even eject it from the CD drive without resorting to a paper clip in the emergency-open hole!
Smarter people simply press power for few seconds, turn off their notebook. Turn it on again and press eject.
Even if you eject unresponsive system, what is the benefit here??? You’ll turn it off eventually.
So, it’s back to Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium for me. I’ve not had a single problem with it, have not had to configure anything other than my user ID/password and ISP info. I suppose some command line fiddling would have gotten Fedora to work, but why bother when Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium “just works”?
Can you explain me why I have to reinstall so many XP instead of Vista if it “just works”?
Can you explain me why I have to reinstall so many XP instead of Vista if it “just works”?
Hopefully I’m not opening a can of worms here, but in my experience it has been a combination of what the user needs along with what their computer is capable of. A good example is the $500 HP systems at Wal-mart with VHP preinstalled. Those machines are good enough to run Premium, though without much breathing room beyond that. Light gaming and multimedia are fine, upgrades of RAM and video are required for anything beyond that. A true gamer or video/audio pro would buy better gear initially though, so in my opinion that example system hits the mark just right.
Power users, on the other hand, may find Vista’s flaws much faster than the average user. In such cases, XP may still be the OS of choice if Windows is a requirement. Personally I feel that any modern OS is fine for basic web browsing, chatting, email and light office work, with Linux-based OSes edging out Windows and Mac because of the vast selection of high-quality free software. Most major distros are “ready to roll” with at least one good program for each conceived need already installed by default. OS X would be a close second in this area, with iLife, Safari, Mail and iChat already there. Vista lags behind on this front, though it’s a step in the right direction at least, with better built-in photo and music handling than XP.
Exactly.
p.s. I was talking about more expensive notebooks though. There is no OS without flaws.
Can you explain me why I have to reinstall so many XP instead of Vista if it “just works”?
Your comment sounds like someone trying to install Vista on a computer with a pre-existing OS rather than buying a computer with Vista pre-installed. I am sure that if my laptop came with one of the various GNU/Linux distributions pre-installed, it would “just work” as well as Microsoft Vista Home Premium does.
Might be just me, but… why do I feel this comment sounds just like a commercial?
If vista just works and does everything you want, why did you try linux in the first place?
up until now, a linux distro would boast of supporting a particular software sometimes especialized to the flavor at discussion to show how good it is. this is no better than a waste..
a software must boast about itself, and it must be a default that such software can be installed in an OS. indeed, it must be the responsibility of the software to tell the world it can be installed on an OS. linux distros however tend to (impractically) feature the opposite.
I net-installed an AMD64 PC and an x86 PC and both of them hung with “Redhat Nash version 6.0.19 starting” shown on the screen.
I had FC6 working just fine on the same machines.
Try removing rhgb quiet from the grub entry.
On the grub screen, move to the fedora entry end press ‘e’, move to the line which ends with rhgb quiet and press ‘e’ again.
Then remove rhgb quiet and press enter and then ‘b’.
You should now see some more messages.
Is it hanging with inifinite messages that look like this?
init[1] divide trap error rip:…. rsp:…. error 0
Edited 2007-11-11 02:23
> init[1] divide trap error rip:…. rsp:…. error 0
Yes I’m getting these errors.
Do you have FreeBSD partitions on you pc, even if on different HD than the one on which you installed F8?
(why the hell people are modding down this guy???)
I tried to download the x86_64 version of the ISO image at the university due to their fast connection speed.
After 3 hours I had less than 12% of the download. During the last hour a classmate tried using BitTorrent on another machine and we couldn’t get it to download fast enough to be done by closing time at the computer lab.
Be sure to allow plenty of time for this 3.6+ GB download! (BTW, I plan on using more than one spin so downloading only one of them wouldn’t be an option.)
FWIW, I’ve downloaded the i386 and x86_64 DVD using BT at an average speed of 80KB/s per file.
I’m sitting on a 2.5M/256K cable line.
– Gilboa
For those Linux souls that decided to install and try Fedora 8, please share your impressions with us!
I just installed it on my laptop (after using Ubuntu and OpenSuse for last 3 years only) and I am really impressed ! its nice and easy to use destro ! great tools and UI ! I love it !
I just installed Fedora 8. It’s pretty nice. You can add remove repositories by GUI now. The firewall tool is nice but I think I still like firestarter better.
There is the pulseaudio sound server but I have yet to figure out what the advantage is.
Anyway, as usual I have some configuring and software to install in order to get it the way I like it.
It is now possible to install packages from either CD/DVD. Using Add/Remove Software, make sure to check InstallMedia (it should be more descriptive) and disable other online repository. That is one of the most awaited features for Fedora users who don’t have connection or have slow narrowband network.
I have a fresh machine to test this out on. I have been a fan of Ubuntu for a while but will give this a spin. It has been a while since I used an RPM based distro, lets see how it goes..
FC8 vs Ubuntu reviews should be interesting.
Edited 2007-11-09 10:54
I’d like to share the first impressions I got after running the Fedora 8 Gnome live system CD.
Initialization was fine, but I had to adjust the monitor settings a bit (at the monitor) because the upper region of the screen has been placed outside the CRT. The monitor is an Eizo FlexScan F980 21″ tube model.
Personally I did like the “Show details” button when boot stage had reached X level, so you could do some diagnostics at services startup. Good idea.
The mouse pointer, allthough excellent in shape and color, seemed a bit blurred to me, because of the strange shadow beneath it. To me, it is a no-go to make things less cognizable.
Now for internationalization: I selected the “Change language” button at the login screen and selected “German”, so de_DE.UFT-8 got set. After loggin in the user “fedora”, the problems started. Allthough the error messages were displayed in German (Good!), the result was a bit disappointing. I will translate the messages for you. #1: “The language default.desktop does not exist. System default will be used.” #2: “Could not find ‘exec’ command in the session script ‘fedora’, so the secured GNOME session will be tried for you.” #3: “This is the secured GNOME sessopn. ou will be logged into the GNOME default session, no start scripts will be run. This is for troubleshooting only.” (abgesichert: secured / saved / failsafe). After that, the whole GNOME desktop waas in English. Allthough I could do System / Administration / Language: German (OK), there was no change at all. Using System / Administration / Keyboard, the german layout could be selected without problems. But problems started inside the Terminal when Umlauts (ö. ä, ü) and Eszett (ß) were entered, strange repeatition effects appeared.
Hardware detection was good, e. g. bttv0 and agpgart were working. Even the PD drive was recognized, as well as the UFS volumes on the harddisks. Sadly, they could not be accessed. If I put a jaz in the iomega jaz drive (This device is used for entertainment only.), in “Computer” a new icon appears, titled “jaz%20Drive.drive”, but the media cannot be accessed. The error message did not help very much, especially the advice “try dmesg | tail or so” sounds a bit impertinently. In “Computer” there was a folder “Network”, containing another folder “Windows Network”. Huh? “Windows”? This folder was empty. Very strange… it seems to be a placeholder only.
The middle mouse key did not work as intended (middle key = scroll, when mouse moved forward / backward, and paste selected text if clicked), it seemed to do the same as the left key. This is what I’ve used:
% dmesg | grep “^u[km]”
ums0: Sun Microsystems Type 6 USB mouse, rev 1.00/1.02, addr 2, iclass 3/1
ums0: 3 buttons
ukbd0: Sun Microsystems Type 6 USB keyboard, rev 1.00/1.02, addr 3, iclass 3/1
Printing was fun. The HP Laserjet 4000 has been detected correctly and the printer driver worked without any problems, after the A4 standard paper format and the duplex unit availability have been selected. And hey, Abiword is a cool application. 🙂
Enabling desktop effects did not work, maybe my old ATI Radeon 9000 RV250 with 128 MB is not supported. Rotating the screen 90° did render the screen unreadable.
And finally, after export PS1=”/u@/h:/w/$ ” (used / instead of backslash because it disappears from the post), the Terminal was quite usable. 🙂
So, to sum up my very first impressions: Fedora looks good by default, brings a lot of functionality on the live system CD, but I think it needs to be installed to harddisk in order to get some things working. If I find a spare disk, I will try for sure.
… Due to obvious size limitations, the Live CD has a lot of language packages missing.
While the LiveCD should have logged in cleanly when set to non en_US language (or disable the language selection altogether), I’d venture and guess that the actual installed system will work just fine.
Never the less, can you please take the time and file a bug report about the reported problems? [1]
– Gilboa
[1] http://bugzilla.redhat.com
1. How fast is it? Gutsy Gibbon’s speed is appalling compared to Debian’s so this is a serious question.
2. Has rpm gotten any better? The last time I’ve tried rpm-distributions (SUSE, Red Hat) the quality of their package managements was, well, uhm, not good at all.
1) There are good performance improvements. You might just want to download and try it out for yourself though
2) When was that? “RPM based” is a very broad sweep. Yum works well in Fedora. If not there is always alternatives like apt-rpm (synaptic) and smart. Feel free to post your impressions.
One thing I found is depending on the distro/version you use…sometime cpu-scaling is enabled by default, some not. Debian/Ubuntu usually run about the same for me if the scaling is turned off. chmod+s for the selector allows you to set the speed on the fly from the gui.
Same goes for distro’s like OpenSUSE and Fedora, check the scaling, alot of the fast VS slow arguments come from people not knowing what the defaults are, check it out, you might be surprised.
Hello,
What about using VMWare Server/Player on F8? Any issues? Anybody tried it?
-Paulo
I’m running vmware on SuSE 10.3 with kernel 2.6.23.1 without any problems so far.
Probably vmware server and player will run on FC8 as well.
I installed it earlier today in a VMWare Image.
No problems.
Ok, I didn’t expect any.
But there are often unexpected surprises in any new release…
I have just finished upgrading a PPC Mac Mini. Again everything worked OOTB.
In answer to another post about broadcom support, the output drom ‘dmesg’ shows a url where you can get the microcode for 43xx based WIFI Adapters. A definite improvement here. This was on a Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop.
You’ll need to latest any-any patch [1] to build the VMWare Server kernel module under latest-F7 and F8.
However, this is true for every recent distro. (that uses kernel >= 2.6.23 *)
– Gilboa
[1] http://knihovny.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/vmware-any-any-update114.tar…
* -current/-testing distro already beginning to get 2.6.24rc kernel.
However, this is true for every recent distro. (that uses kernel >= 2.6.23 *)
The latest vmware-workstation 6 compiles without the any-whatever patch on a 2.6.23.1 OpenSuSE factory kernel.
I haven’t tried to install vmware server but i don’t see that much difference. Perhaps SuSE allready has patched the kernel.
… If/when vmware server 1.0.5 is released, it should compile out of the box on 2.6.23.
Hopefully vmware will get their kernel module accepted into the mainline kernel tree ASAP.
– Gilboa
Workstation 6 works just fine, you just have to (manually) apply this patch to /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/build/include/asm/page.h since Fedora’s gcc will otherwise balk when building the modules:
— page.h.orig 2007-09-13 14:36:24.000000000 +0300
+++ page.h 2007-09-13 14:36:24.000000000 +0300
@@ -109,7 +109,9 @@
static inline pte_t native_make_pte(unsigned long val)
{
– return (pte_t) { .pte_low = val };
+ pte_t pte;
+ pte.pte_low = val;
+ return pte;
}
#define HPAGE_SHIFT 22
I’m currently in love with PulseAudio. I couldn’t get it to work in Fedora 7 on my sound card (Intel DG965WH integrated STAC 9221 audio) despite investing a lot of time and effort. In F8 it worked out of the box. After downloading http://platan.vc.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/vmwaredsp-1.3.tar.gz and compiling the libraries from its src subdirectory (the precompiled ones didn’t work) and running the supplied vmwareesd script instead of the default vmware wrapper and I can *finally* stop worrying about sound (VMware is still stuck in single-open antique OSS-land via /dev/dsp
Without applying the patch the modules were compiled without any issue on FC8 (kernel 2.6.23.1). Thus vmware-workstation 6.0.2 build-59824 installed sans problems.
This was also the case with OpenSuSE 10.3
I doubt wether the any-any has to be applied with the newer kernels.
Edited 2007-11-14 10:03
Being excited about the feature set, I decided to give Fedora 8 a try.
First, I tried the live CD in a VirtualBox VM. This ran fine, albeit very slow. I did the hard drive install (to the VirtualBox virtual hd), which went OK, but slow. Finally, the installed to hd VM went really really slow.
Then, I burned the iso to CD, and tried to run it as a regular Live CD (natively). The X server failed to start.
Now, this laptop I’m doing it on is nothing fancy. It’s a Via chip (with integrated via video card on the motherboard), with a gig of RAM.
All other distros that I’ve run on this machine (tons of ’em) have detected video and properly configured X and started the X server. But Fedora 8 couldn’t, nor could Fedora 7.
Fedora couldn’t even get standard VESA running.
That’s rather shocking. Getting standard video configured and up and running is a Linux problem that has been solved for years now. Only heavily manual/command line oriented distros like Slackware or Arch make it a little more difficult (but not much). All other desktop and server oriented distros can, at the very least, get the standard VESA driver running on pretty much any hardware/video card.
And all the auto-configure scripts out there are open source, as well as the kernel, kernel modules, and kernel patches. Just use the Knoppix script, if not directly, as a reference, for goodness sake.
How a huge distro like Fedora, backed by a major corporation like Red Hat, can fail to get X auto-running on extremely ordinary hardware, while all other distros have succeeded on this same hardware, is beyond me.
Oh well. Perhaps there is a cheat code that will make it X run properly. I’ll look around for it. But if anyone knows of a cheat code, I’ll be appreciative of being alerted to it. 🙂
First, I tried the live CD in a VirtualBox VM. This ran fine, albeit very slow.
I am confused here. You expected this setup to run Fedora speedily, yes?
“I am confused here. You expected this setup to run Fedora speedily, yes?”
No. I expect a little bit of sluggishness while running an OS in a VM, especially on my hardware.
That said, I’ve run several Linux live iso’s in VirtualBox, as well as Windows 2000, and all ran acceptably fine. Sure, there was latency due to a live iso running in the VM, but the speed was enough to make it usable.
Fedora, on the other hand, was really really sluggish in this set up, to point of not really being usable (like running Vista with only 512meg RAM).
Plus, I did the hd install (into the VirtualBox virtual hd). What was odd was that it ran even more sluggishly this way. I had expected the opposite.
But the main thing is that trying to run the live CD directly (not in a VM), it failed to start X.
To me, that’s what was really odd. In the past, I always had good luck with Fedora, CentOS, and Red Hat, with running it on pretty much all hd without problems. But now, it can’t start X, on my extremely ordinary hardware, while all other distros could run X on this same hardware with zero problems.
Your cheat code is:
On the installer command line:
xdriver=vesa
FC8 x86 live CD KDE boots as VMware guest under 30 secs on a AMD64 3000+ 2,2GHz with 1GB RAM.
The thing that keeps me from looking at fedora again (I was once a dedicated user) is the fact that other distro’s have said they will ALWAYS be free. The server versions of the software will be the same as the desktop versions. Never will they ask for money for the linux software itself. It’s ingrained into the distro and every release that follows. In my books, that’s huge.
I know that if I support (for example haha) Ubuntu, they will support me. RedHat doesn’t have the same lofty mission statement.
I’ve found in the past that Fedora was WAY too buggy on laptops and I didn’t really know/understand the direction. Plus, YUM really sucked!
So for now, for the foreseeable future, I’m with Ubuntu.
So has Fedora. Refer
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives
Fedora believes in the statement “once free, always free” .
RHEL is not Fedora. It is a derivative distribution like OLPC and others are.
Edited 2007-11-10 01:39
Plus, YUM really sucked!
You should know that yum sucks much less than it used to. It is faster and the presto delta rpms feature makes updates very fast. Delta rpms are not standard yet in Fedora but will be in Fedora 9. Fedora 8 is a solid release. In my experience it is more stable than version 7. I absolutely love the new pulseaudio sound server. It rocks!
Unfortunately sucking less than before doesn’t mean it doesnt still suck. Performance is still horrible (seriously, every time I start Yumex or Pirut it build packing lists and stuff for forever. What’s up with that?) and the interface is not up there with Synaptic yet.
That said, it does work and I’ve never had it screw up any dependencies or anything. The big issues for me is the abysmal performance and that the gui needs some/lot of polish.
seriously, every time I start Yumex or Pirut it build packing lists and stuff for forever
I can honestly say I have been using Fedora since version 3 and I am currently using 8 and I never used those GUI utilities. It is easier to just open a shell and type yum upgrade or yum check-updates. Faster too since the GUI doesn’t have to build up. I just ran a yum update on 8 to get some data to post here. It took 25 seconds to check the repos and report back there were no updates. Not too shabby. Skip the GUI update Linux via a shell/terminal.
Edited 2007-11-10 13:16
Why can’t they just copy synaptic’s interface and call it synyumptic or something. It’s not like synaptic is rocket science, the interface is pretty straight forward, it shouldn’t be that hard to copy.
I wish i could install the stupid thing. I’ve tried installing it several times since test 3 and even tried F7 with no luck at all. It keeps giving me a promise controller error, which I though all those issues with promise controllers were resolved like 5 years ago and my hardware is anything but new. I don’t have anything raided, yet the stupid lvm thingy still gives me errors and won’t install. I’ve asked questions on the forum with absolutely no answer and I’ve never had this issue with older versions (up until FC4) of fedora when i was a fedora user. Ubuntu, Suse, mandriva DO NOT give me this issue at all. Extremely disappointed at this point with FC.
Reading through these posts on this long thread, and seeing some other reviews, and considering Dvorak’s rant (whatevery Dvorak’s rants are work, very littel, but he did detail legitimate problems), and my own experience (Fedora couldn’t start X on my ordinary hardware), I’d have to say Fedora has serious, serious quality issues.
Yes, we all know Fedora is Red Hat’s experimental branch – a test bed for latest cutting edge stuff.
But you’d think that they would want to give a better user experience, and just make sure that basic hardware works properly (like it does with, like, 300 other distros).
Red Hat definetely has the resources, and they could simply copy hd detection scripts (all open source) from other distros that have great hd detection (like Debian, Ubuntu, Mepis, PCLinuxOS, openSUSE, Kanotix, sidux, knoppix, Mint, and many others).
If those other distros can make the vast majority of hardware “just work” out of the box, why can’t Fedora do so (when it’s backed by huge successful corporation Red Hat)?
Yes, Fedora is free, and experimental. But Red Hat will lose the ever so important mind share if they keep putting out crap with Fedora.
Oh well. RHEL is rock solid, as is the free CentOS.
But Fedora should be avoided, until Red Hat makes it a priority to put a little quality control into it.
It is time to stop having the wrong assumption. Fedora is a community project that includes Red Hat and community developers and users. When you look to the features, you see an active involvement of the community. Nodoka theme, Fedora Electronic Lab, Revisor utility to name a few are one of these examples. Fedora is actually the base of several distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Yellow Dog, OLPC Sugar and Pepper Linux. Rawhide is actually the test bed no different from Debian unstable.
For hardware detection, that is the classic YMMV (You mileage may vary) it might be a matter of bad luck from some while it works for others. In your case, it might the former. You can install an utility called Smolts (http://www.smolts.org) so you can report which device did not work or worked badly.
What is ‘isn’t very good’???
Ok now this is opinion and speculation here stating to avoid it?
I have been using Red Hat since 6.0 no expert but I have NO problems with Fedora and just passed my RHCT on Friday of THIS week!
Fedora has never had any stability problems that I am aware of and I have it custom configured and ALL of my hardware works fine, I have Logical volumes, Raid Arrays, and you name it working without a hitch.
This was not a legitimate claim to say avoid something that you do not understand or work with.
That may be the case for you, but I can’t even install the stupid thing on my five year old pc that used to be able to install FC1-4 without any issues. I’m happy you are ab;e to install it without issues. Now I remember why I switched in the first place, Fedora was always way too experimental, things would break from one version to the next. I really do want to try it because it looks good and they are doing interesting things but the installer won’t let me.
I installed it today, and I cannot get the network to function at all. It detects my RTL8139 NIC but gives the message “Determining IP address failed”. Not a very good first impression.
LoseThos doesn’t have networking. It’s a supplemental operating system, not intended as your primary operating system.
First off if someone is having problems installing is the media valid, did it burn ok, did the MD5SUM check validate against the key?
I believe people are casting negative light on Fedora Core and they have NEVER used the Distro. I went from Red Hat 9.0 release wiped it and loaded FC3 and never had ANY problems or anything of the mystical errors, drives not found to no networking???
I am leading to believe these are people making ‘false’ reviews of Fedora because they dislike Red Hat and NOTHING else. This is wrong and just because you do not like a distro that does not give the right to comdem it and tell others lies about it.
Like I said earlier I just passed my first RHCT on Friday of this week and have NEVER heard/seen any of problems being reported on here about Fedora Core # any release.
I find it a total disservice to the Open Source movement and Free Software core.
Media, checked, cd burned 4 times, FC7 was tried and that too was burned more than once and checked. No luck at all. This is not an attack on the distro, his is my experience as user trying to install fedora. I’ve even tried the DVD installer which I was trying to avoid since I hate having a dvd full of crap I can download later.
Your post comes off fanboyish, when all that people are doing (or at least in my case) is trying to use it. There is no casting of negative light, if it looks that way it definitely does not fall on our shoulders, it should fall of RedHat’s shoulders, for not caring enough about its users to give them a smooth user experience, instead relegating them to the position of a guinea pig.
i find it a disservice that instead of helping users who are having issues with fedora, you instead accuse them of bringing Redhat down.You said you passed your first RHCT, why don’t you provide knowledge instead of accusation, it would probably be more helpful and it might change my mind about the fedora community support (or lack of).
If this is what the Fedora community has evolved into then I don’t think I want anything to do with it. I remember it being a lot more friendly.
I would be more than happy to help anyone I am no expert but I have learned from a Unix guru at work that is in the learning curve of SELinux, and so on like me.
I am not trying to be a ‘fan boy’ to any degree to be honest with you I tried Ubuntu and found that it was not for me. The main reason behind my acceptance of Fedora dates back to purchasing $60+ boxed set of Red Hat Professional I bought back in I believe 1999-2000 or so. I knew nothing about Linux and basically really never grasped the start of the underpinnings until I started a new position as a Linux Admin and I was required to take the RHCT and I have to study to take the RHCE in Feb/Mar of 2008.
So basically tinkering with Linux I was able to change IT jobs from a big Corp to a smaller company where you can learn and grow.
I am a member of Linuxquestions, Linuxforums, and Fedora Forums, in fact I will be signing up to becomea a ambassador in Fedora in Arkansas no less…..
Now I can relax a bit and be able to contribute my knowledge and be able to learn from others to. Maybe this can change your viewpoint.
Great. Do you know why I keep getting a /dev/mapper/pdc_heiegcdb error everytime I try to install FC7-8 from both the live and DVD installer on my machine. I know its an issue with the promise controller (on my five year old machine) and lvm but I’ve never encountered this issue in other distros and now I’m not sure how to proceed. It keeps telling me the file can;t be found but when I got ot dev/mapper the pdc_heiegcdb file is there. I’ve tried looking for th answer on both the fedora forums as well as google and the error message doesn’t even get a hit. I found one lead on the fedora forums and that was dead end since the guy never got a response, neither did my own inquiries. So if you can help that would be great.
I’m no linux newb, I have been using linux since debian potato, and then switched to Redhat 9 and then FC1-4 then switched to Ubuntu at some point down the line (first version warty). This isn’t the first time i’ve had issues with the promise controller but that was like five years ago when I first built the machine, and it was with Mandrake (yes mandrake) 10. FC1-4 didn’t have this issue. From what I gathered on google it migh have something to do with lvm and libsata, but I’m not sure.
Can you install ISO distro’s, so I assume you have a DVD drive correct will it play other media formats?
Sounds to me like a hardware issue, LVM is the logical volume manager you can perform a custom install and partition out your drive without LVM’s. Also what kind of hardware is it, I was having all sorts of problems with the file system and the hard-drive was defective.
Yep. Like I said I have been installing Linux on this machine since whenever I built it. Everything from mandrake to Debian (even Gentoo). In the disk that I was going to install Fedora, I installed opensuse with no issues.
I installed opensuse with no issues.
Well that’s the beauty of choice. I had xorg lockups every now and then with OpenSuSE 10.3 retail. With FC8 i didn´t have any issues.
Whatever works.
Whatever works indeed.
I have the complete opposite situation.
Fedora 8 locks up my laptop but Opensuse 10.3 is very stable – not one hiccup.
Go figure
My whole thing is that I don’t acutally like suse all that much and wanted to use Fedora like I did before I started using Ubuntu, to re-acquaint myself with “The Red Hat way” TM of doing things. I’ve wiped opensuse and installed debian, but I really needed fedora on my machine.
A couple users have noted problems getting X up and running and one person couldn’t get their Network card recognized.
Linux is not Windows. I always check before purchasing new hardware to ensure it will work with the kernel I am using and the distro. It takes extra effort but there is the reality that drivers are more challenging to find for Linux.
Fedora 8 worked right out of the box for an older Athlon Thunderbird system and a new Intel dual core chip. The only issue I had was the resolution of the LCD monitor had to be set by hand. It was not listed in xorg.conf and the Gnome utilities wouldn’t recognize the correct resolution. I wish minor things like this didn’t exist on Linux but they do. Less common hardware profiles don’t get recognized properly. I had the same problem with Ubuntu and this LCD monitor. I don’t mind doing a little extra technical work to get everything free. It is frustration sometimes, yes. Fedora lets me sample the cutting edge and I expect some tweaking. If I was looking for more stability I would probably use a commercial version of Linux but then I wouldn’t be able to mess around with pulseaudio and other cool features.
Edited 2007-11-11 15:19
I have a Toshiba laptop with a Celeron processor.
Not a fancy laptop but it’s quite functional.
Anyway I downloaded the LiveCD and then installed it to my hard drive. The install went smoothly.
The only problem is that now and again my usb mouse and keyboard keep locking up.
I don’t know if it’s something peculiar to my hardware.
A sincere good luck to everyone.
I just downloaded and installed FC8. I quite frankly like the default artwork. Nonintrusive and familiar. Yumex is notably faster. For the rest everything works. And last but not least security is not an afterthought:-)
One thing I did do was report bugs on ‘bugzilla’ and I got prompt responses and the devs wanted more info and the problems were resolved very quickly.
I am not programmer, but sometimes the Dev’s don’t know certain problems exist and they can fix things or maybe escalate it to a higher level.
Just a thought, an example was Evolution the latest version was crashing for no reason I posting it within a week it was patched I find that amazing!