I’ve been using Linux since the Redhat days. Since then, it has grown from a curious look to a hobby, and more recently to my main operating system. Due to starting out with Redhat, I admit to being partial to the Redhat/Fedora series. Don’t let that concern you though, as I’ve tried all of the mainstream distributions, even Lycoris and Linspire.
Introduction:
Even though Fedora is currently my distro of choice, my experience with it has not always been top notch, with each version so far there are ups, and there are downs. Fedora Core 1 was overall a pleasant experience for me, while it was slow it was very basic, stable and it got the job done.
Fedora Core 2 was where things went downhill for me. I had high expectations, which may have been part of my bad experience with it, but for me personally I found it an unstable, bug ridden experience. My system would constantly crash as soon as I loaded the closed-source Nvidia drivers, and the only salvation was recompiling the kernel and disabling a few things that corrected the problem from crashing once a day to once every three days. An improvement, but I still couldn’t depend on my system with FC2 installed. With bugs from the test version remaining in the final release, I went distro to distro until FC3 Test 2 came out, and since then I’ve been curious to see if FC3 would make up for FC2. Did it? Read on to find out my findings.
Test System
My test system isn’t the most up to date machine you will ever see. In fact, it’s quite outdated, but it still gets the job done.
Processor: AMD Athlon 900mhz
RAM: 768MB
Hard Disk: Western Digital 80GB 7200
Video: Geforce FX 5200 128MB
Installation
I downloaded the DVD, since it seems much more convenient to me to have all four cd’s on one DVD. Prior to my installation of the final version, I have went from Test 2, to Test 3, to the Release Candidate, and then to the final version, upgrading each time. Each upgrade in succession went smoothly, but took about an hour. However, believe it or not, upgrading to FC3 Final took about 7 minutes. I don’t know if its because it’s a DVD (Doubt it, my DVD drive is old and slow) or because there hasn’t been many changes between RC1 and Final, or maybe they optimized the install speed? I am not sure. Nothing has changed here though, this is Anaconda, the same one you’ve used since Redhat and the logos are slightly different, that’s it.
Usability
Honestly, it’s really nice to be up to date with Gnome 2.8, and KDE 3.3, but I really don’t see how they’ve changed since Gnome 2.6 and KDE 3.2. Gnome has a different method of selecting panel items, which ends up slowing me down and making customizing my panel much more annoying. KDE has a brand new, wait, get back with me on that, I don’t see anything new. Gnome still has spatial browsing, which is easy to turn off if you don’t like it. For those of you that don’t know, this basically means all icons you click on open in new windows, like they did in Windows 95. Gnome folks added the name “Spatial Browsing” to it and considers it an innovation.
When it comes to speed, I have found FC3 to be slightly faster than FC2 but not by much. FC2 was already faster than Windows on my PC, FC3 is a slight improvement in that area. When it comes to other innovations, Evolution 2.x is here, and Xorg looks absolutely beautiful. Everything is cleaner, crisper, and brighter, and is one area where FC3 shines.
Stability
As I’ve said above, FC2 in my experience was a bug-ridden mess. Maybe it was just me. Ever since I installed FC3 Final, system has not crashed once, I even have the closed-source Nvidia drivers installed and my favorite games seem to work faster than they did prior.
SELinux is back, and this time it’s a default. It’s easy to turn off, and turning it off was the first thing I did. I might be willing to give it a shot, but with FC3 Test 2 and Test 3, it sometimes made my system unbootable and would give error messages as I booted, Same thing it did with FC2. No thanks, if it takes that long to fix it, I don’t want it.
Bugs/Problems/Rants
FC3 isn’t exactly perfect. My first complaint is not directed to the Fedora team, because they don’t control it, but instead to the folks that work on Gnome and KDE. I like both, and I don’t favor one over the other. Last week I was using primarily Gnome, this week I am using strictly KDE. I don’t know what I will be using next week. Anyway, my complaint is that KDE 3.3 and Gnome 2.8 has changed little, if at all, from their predecessors. KDE 3.3 should’ve probably been named 3.2.4, and Gnome 2.8 seems more like a 2.6.x release if anything else. Don’t get me wrong, they are both great, but if you only have the prior versions, you’re not missing much.
When it comes to the Fedora team, I feel a great aspect to improve would be the look and feel. Most of the themes, icons, and widgets are the same you can get in any distro, except for Bluecurve but if you like that one, I am sure you can probably download it or import it into any distro. Regardless, KDE and Gnome are opensource. Fedora could really make an original, raw-looking desktop if they wanted to. (We will probably have bluecurve based themes for the next few versions at least). Other things in this department that could use touching up, would be the Bootup screen (this is the third Fedora release to use the same boot screen) and adding a shutdown screen, maybe even a cooler looking login screen.
Conclusion
Even though I have a few small complaints, the complaints I do have aren’t really the most important you will ever read. Most importantly, my system hasn’t crashed since test 2. It looks like the focus of FC3 was to include the latest Gnome, KDE, Selinux, xorg, and Evolution, but stability was definitely a goal, for the first time since FC2 I can depend on my Linux PC again. Despite minor complaints, Fedora is my main distro again. Stability is the main thing I’ve been wanting, and I finally recieved it. If any of you try it, I hope you find it as stable.
In closing, I’d like to bring up one last point. My largest dissapointment with Fedora is that it may never defeat Microsoft. As you all know, it is the testing ground for new technologies that may make it to Redhat Enterprise Linux. I highly doubt we’ll ever see it in a shiny box next to Windows on store shelves giving casual users a choice, instead it is mostly limited to those with broadband and a burner, or a generous friend with a burner and DSL. If a distro is to truly challenge Microsoft, sadly it won’t be Fedora that pulls it off. That’s okay to me though, because I know how to navigate FTP mirrors very well, but your average “Joe User” probably doesn’t know what “FTP” actually means. Will Linux take the Microsoft throne? I surely hope so, it will be a number of years before Longhorn is released, and I hope Linux vendors take advantage.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
y’s everyone gotta hate on spatial? let it go…
Gnome 2.8 bring a whole lot of enhancement. The integration of HAL/Dbus, the new mime system, integration of Evolution, etc.
If it’s not visible on the outside, it’s not that the inside don’t change. And between 2.6.x and 2.8, there is big change.
And Core 3 is a lot more stable than FC2. Run nicely on my laptop without any major bugs.
Actually I was hating spatial. After I gave it a go I really liked it. Now I’m very efficient with, just like I’m a the terminal.
Cheers,
gamehack
1) spatial browsing is not the same as windows 95 navigation and nobody is gnome ever called that an “innovation”.
2) selinux in fc3 is a targetted policy which only covers certain specific deamons like apache. the rest of the system falls back on the original DAC model of security. disabling it because it showed errors in the development branch is a poor idea
3) the list of improvements in gnome 2.8 and kde 3.3 is significant and are well documented
http://gnome.org/start/2.8/notes/
http://kde.org/info/3.3.1.php
if you dont call udev,hal and gnome volume manager an improvement, I dont know what you would
4) the review is lacking in details… it barely mentions anything at all
The GNOME team has made lots of important progress since the 2.6 release:
GNOME 2.8 just integrated the whole evolution client into the GNOME deesktop. Try clicking on your date/time applet in the panel for example. Notice that your appointments show up? Integration like this rocks.
There is a whole new MIME system. This is a big deal.
gnome-volume-manager is a whole new way to manage removable media. When I plug my digital camera into the machine, a dialog prompt automatically pops up, asking me what I want to do with the photos on it. There was a lot of work, “Project Utopia” (using udev, hald, and d-bus) it was called, to get this to work.
I can pop a DVD in my DVD drive and get totem to launch automatically with my movie.
They even through in a VNC viewer front end for good measure.
What you may notice is that the actual UI for GNOME, as defined by the HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) is maturing. The technology continues to advance pretty fast.
I think Fedora should provide XFCE RPMs on their main discs. It’s definitely my UI of choice now.
Quoth: There is a whole new MIME system. This is a big deal.
Yes there is and it annoys the living crap out of me. It is the whole reason I’ve had to switch from Galeon to Firefox on FC3. Not out of choice, really, but because of it. Why? Well, I use Xfce4. So, when I wanted to move .mp3 from trying to use Realplayer by default to XMMS, the only way to do is *start up Nautilus*! AAAAA! Instead of some nice gnome-file-properties-like app you can call on the command line, you have to get a file like you want in your directory, start up Nautilus, right-click it…sigh. I had to download a .pls file from Shoutcast to redo that.
I have been using FC2 and FC3. There are a few things that were forgotten in FC3 like yum. Well, not exactly, but they did forget to add the default mirrors to yum.conf. Its not all that terrible and easy to fix, but it is an annoyance.
Also, they moved the cdrom to /dev/hdc, and all the devices from /mnt to /media. This causes gnome-cd to not find your CDRom initially. You have to change the permissions to /dev/hdc and then change the device in gnome-cd. It also mutes the cdrom by default.
I did not like the authors comment on the spatial navigation.
1. Spatial navigation was a MacOS thing, not a windows 95 thing. It was implemented improperly in 95.
2. Spatial navigation includes opening new windows and positioning those windows. In 95 they are positioned cascading. In GNOME 2.6, they are better positioned.
3. win95 did not dim the folder icon when it was open. MacOS did and GNOME 2.6 does. One improvement that can be made is to dim the items on the desktop when those are loaded, as well as dim application icons on the desktop when loaded.
(Just like MacOS used to 
)
Another thing: the new dialog to add items to the panel also uses *gasp* drag and drop, thus making it easier to add multiple items at once.
Laptop support in FC3 is also very good. My laptop sleeps faster, and last longer on the battery. It is also very quick. Quicker than MDK 10.1 anyway. (What isn’t
)
it is Red Hat not Redhat? I could also point out that SUSE is called SUSE but hey that would be way too much.
XFCE is a part of the main installation now
“For those of you that don’t know, this basically means all icons you click on open in new windows, like they did in Windows 95. Gnome folks added the name “Spatial Browsing” to it and considers it an innovation.”
I don’t care you you like spatial or not. Please do your research. This is pure ignorance as spatial browsing existed long before Microsoft even though about releasing any version of Windows, not just 95.
I don’t care if people like spatial. I’m not even a gnome user. But anyone who follows distros and linux knows that spatial browsing is not win95. There were tons of articles on it. Using such a lame statement reflects poorly on teh reviewer.
When is Eugenia going to do reviews again? I preferred her UI analysis to this vague nonsense.
“Instead of some nice gnome-file-properties-like app you can call on the command line, you have to get a file like you want in your directory, start up Nautilus, right-click it…sigh.”
Actually, the MIME system was revamped to comply with freedesktop.org standards. It was implemented to be functional from within the Gnome desktop environment. Any fd.o compliant app could change this behavior. In fact, why don’t you write it?
Now people, calm down, everyone can make mistakes.
Spatial browsing is indeed not a unique windows feature, as we all know, but the fact that the reviewer made that mistake is no reason to diss the review alltogether.
Now, what I find important: did they finally fix the hugely cluttered menus? I recall FC3T2 (and older versions) having 19-20 (!!) menu items in the Foot menu…!
Wish I could say the same about the crashes. I did a clean install on my home machine jumping from RH9 to FC3 and went from 0 crashes period to 2-3 crashes in the few hours I use the machine a day.
Thanks for reading my review everyone.
First things first, it says “A Short Review”. So clearly if you were expecting something much more in depth, you’re in the wrong place, it’s a short review just like the title says, what you see is what you get.
About spatial browsing, I respect everyone’s opinion. If you like it, that’s great, I’m glad you find it useful. It is considered an innovation in the Gnome Community, I even read in a forum someone considering it to be more like real life (Come on now) and while I said it was evident back in Windows 95, I did not say it was first in Windows 95. So telling me to do my research is just silly, read it more clearly.
My stance on spatial browsing will remain, with almost all operating systems we could select a setting to make all windows open in new windows, and even in KDE you can choose to remember the window size so that its the same next time you open the browser, spatial browsing is nothing new, however it does warrant good word if you enjoy it, but I don’t.
Disabling SELinux is not a poor idea. No personal preference is poor, its just opinion. Should I spend a few hours on google clearing up error messages, or disable it? Again, that’s a preference. Theres nothing wrong with disabling it and there is nothing wrong with enabling it. It’s your perogative.
Next, UDev is a Fedora change, not a Gnome change. The Mime system is good, I do like it, but even though its cool its not the absolute best innovation I’ve seen.
Again, I understand that MacOS probably had spatial browsing earlier than Windows 95. (I did not say Windows 95 was first) but the fact that MacOS had it before is even more reason Spatial Browsing in Gnome isn’t new.
Anyway I respect all of your opinions and am not trying to sound harsh, it just seems that the Linux community now is divided and quick to lash out when the tiniest error is made in a review. It’s a “Short Review” not an in depth technological look at the sourcecode/background and how it implements into the OS. So relax and enjoy FC3, I truly think its a great OS overall.
I also love it…except, open openoffice writer, and type something, (a misspelled word) and right click on it to see the spellings. My machine locks up. Everytime.
Does someone else have that problem?
“Next, UDev is a Fedora change, not a Gnome change.”
Arrrrggggghhhh, udev is a frigging kernel change, not a fedora change and it’s the basis for the whole project utopia stuff (dbus,hal) that has now been integrated into gnome with the gnome-volume-manager. And if that isn’t a change that warrents a new version I don’t know what is.
Look, I never said I was an expert. A review is just an opinion based article, I think you guys are taking what I said to be fact when like I said a review is just opinion. We all share common ground so lets get along, I have alot of respect for each and every one of you.
I say thanks for the mini review.
This is the fist (short) review about fedora core 3 i have read … so thanks to share your opinion
Ignacio
I tested FC3T3 and find out the real potential, it can detect any mounted partition included fat32 (not sure about ntfs). It is incomplete as that feature is still buggy (raid and lvm issues).
I currently am at my second week of using FC3 before writting a review as I want to fully exploit the system. This review is not bad but it didn’t talk about XFCE4 that is included on FC3 on Anaconda installation.
You’ve adressed the issues, don’t be drawn into an argument. It’s an OSnews pastime to flame any writers no matter how well they do. That being said I know you said its a ‘short review’, but keep in mind you’re talking to OS geeks who want to know geek things. Not like your sister who wants to know why a new window pops up everytime you click a folder. You did that with anaconda/install just fine.
If I can find the time to research, i’d love to write a review =)
First of, sorry for being so rude.
Overall I think your review is fine for a short review, I guess I just didn’t like you complaining about the lack of changes when there were a lot (there are also a lot in kde, for example the kdepim stuff really improved). And then comming back at people that corrected you like you did just ticked me off I guess.
Sorry again.
For desktop Ubuntu is so much a better choice over Fedora that it’s kinda sad. I use RH for server stuff, specifically RHEL 3 at work and FC2 at my house for my personal server, but it just doesn’t compete on the desktop level.
Why? Because Fedora is clearly a testing ground for RHEL and therefore has far too much server stuff in there for a desktop user. Ubuntu is clearly a desktop OS, it’s look and feel is outstanding for desktop use. Having the debian packages to fall back on also helps it for desktop use since about any program imaginable is available for it and easy to install. One more note is that installing nvdia/ati binaries is a piece of cake since they have the .debs (setting up Doom3, ET, and AA is cake).
As for other things:
-The Mime system rules. I hated Mime handling before 2.8, it’s extremely useful now
-Project Utopia rules.
-FC3 is more stable, FC2 was a big dissapointment for me, especially for sound.
– Win 95 didn’t do spatial, at least not how spacial is supposed to work so the comparison makes spatial browsing look bad.
please define ‘fast’ and provide details of the tests you used to measure comparative speed.
FC3 is mostly OK, but package management via the built-in tool is awful. There is no way to deploy any of the ‘everything’-classified packages that aren’t presented in the other categories without either going on-line or by digging through the DVD/CDs at the command line. The tool also doesn’t supply a way to search the package list that comes with FC3.
This has been a continual niggle since RH8 IIRC and I’m surprised that FC3 hasn’t tackled it. Given the amount of work that has been done to strap a GUI onto the majority of tasks, it seems an odd omission in the toolset.
It’s too bad about the user who mentioned the frequent crashes of FC3. I switched to Linux because I wanted better stability than what Window 98 provided. But I have consistently observed frequent random X server crashes on Slackware-based distros, Redhat-based distros, Mandrake-based distros, and Debian-based distros. I was thinking maybe my RAM is bad– I have a very old computer. However, PCLinuxOS p7a has not “randomly” crashed yet on my computer after a few months. So I can’t figure out what’s going on. Wish I could at least identify the problem. Some reviewers don’t even mention system stability, as though it’s a given, so I’m glad the reviewer mentioned his experiences re: stability.
> http://kde.org/info/3.3.1.php
That are the notes from a bugfix release, better http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-3.3.php and http://www.kde.org/announcements/changelogs/changelog3_2_3to3_3.php
have you tried the two? Fc3 uses WAY more time on booting/starting proggies. The thing about Fedora that I hate is yum it`s slow vs apt, bah I am not spending more time on this
I’ve put FC3 on my home server, but I hardly ever have to boot it, so I can’t address that. As for yum, I noticed in the past that it was very slow compared to apt.
However, I’ve seen at least one report that yum is much faster in FC3, and based on limited experience this seems to be the case.
The Dual boot bug is still there.
I even installed grub on the boot partition and not the MBR. Everything worked until Fedora locked at “configuring kernel parameters” at boottime.
I read somewere that I had to remove rhg or something like that (can’t remember) from the kerneloptions in grub.conf.
I did, rebooted and then windows would’nt boot again.
As I have SATA, the tips about setting LBA in bios didn’t help (as I don’t have that option on Sata). The sfdisk command didnt do shit either.
I had to insert a Pata disc to even get the Windows Install CD to boot. At the Recovery Console, fixboot and later on fixmbr didn’t help. And on top of that I had to run the Windows install 3 times before the install could continue.
That sure was 3 days wasted.
I hope I have better luck with Ubuntu….
What is the point of this review? It basically says that FC3 crashes less and that the author doesn’t notice many big changes. Did we need a two-page article to do that?
“About spatial browsing, I respect everyone’s opinion. If you like it, that’s great, I’m glad you find it useful. It is considered an innovation in the Gnome Community,”
this is just your opinion. i spoke to several developers including the nautilus ones who said it was a change from previous gnome desktops and as such not considered innovative. your generalisations are wrong
”
Disabling SELinux is not a poor idea. No personal preference is poor, its just opinion”
no. its a poor idea from the viewpoint of security and your reasoning that just because it gave you errors on the development series, it is disabled is the one i was questioning
“t just seems that the Linux community now is divided and quick to lash out when the tiniest error is made in a review.”
thats fine. you can do short reviews but do your research before you submit to popular news sites. osnews is a geek site for people who want to know indepth about various popular and obscure operating systems. If you do it wrong we will lash you. dont expect anything else
Arrrrggggghhhh, udev is a frigging kernel change, not a fedora change
—-
actually udev is a userland binary. so technically it has nothing to do with the kernel
“I also love it…except, open openoffice writer, and type something, (a misspelled word) and right click on it to see the spellings. My machine locks up. Everytime.
”
easy workaround is to disable all dictionaries you dont use. reported and resolved in mailing lists. if you do not have a bug report file it at bugzilla.redhat.com
“I even installed grub on the boot partition and not the MBR. Everything worked until Fedora locked at “configuring kernel parameters” at boottime. ”
The “dual boot bug” never had a problem reading linux partitions. I believe what you’re experiencing is something else. Maybe there is a kernel problem that prevents linux from booting and because you have it on hdb or whatever instead of the MBR you can’t get into windows. btw RedHat Graphical Boot (RHGB) is what you’re talking about taking that out of /etc/grub.conf shouldn’t be too hard.
I personally hit the dual boot bug in FC2, but didnt hit it in any of FC3’s test releases with the exact same configuration.
Oh come on !!! FC2 is much more stable then 3!!!. Go download the 2.6.9 kernel source files from kernel.org. Then re-compile the kernel for your CPU since its only for a P-pro generic when it’s installed…
FC2 is much more faster and stable, especially when using the 6629 nVidia drivers and Doom3…
But again, most people on here don’t even know how to even know how to compile their own kernel so are probably running on the stock Pentium-Pro config..
HAHAHA!!!
The default install for Fedora (or most other Linux distros for that matter) have far too many menu choises to make a useful system. The problem is that different usesrs need different menus. This means that it should be simple to remove unneeded menu items. In Fedora this is done by hand editing XML files. This really need to be fixed before Fedora even start to compete with other oses on usability.
” Still not possible to edit the Gnome menu.”
its disabled because its fucked up. read
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=130733
ya. thats a sun developers comment which redhat devels totally agree with
FC3 is very good. the most stable one so far! .. everything just seems to work!
Well I think the best thing about this review is all of the comments that it got, whether it was agreeing, disagreeing, or just adding. Overall the reveiew + comments make it quite a decent review.
People always say that spatial browsing is not what Windows 95 had but, in all the comments and articles which I’ve seen that claim made, I have yet to hear HOW and/or WHY they’re different. Is it because the difference is semantical (meaning, practically speaking the two are really no different at all)? Can I borrow a clue please?
Its alright everyone I am new here, I’ve done articles before but never noticed the comments much until now (Lame, isn’t it?)
Anyway I will try better next time, I promise!
No hard feelings, I know you are all geeks like me but geeks are smart so I know that understanding that I may not be advanced as some of you should come easy. Anyway again you guys rock!
Why is it that one individual can single handedly create a Linux distro that has been tweaked for performance (Andreas and Yoper), but Red Hat can’t manage it with its collective resources?
Core 3 is even more resource-intensive and slow than C2. In contrast, Yoper is as fast or faster and more resource efficient than Windows XP. I have no doubt that Core has more features overall, but not enough to justify the *seemingly* exponential increase in resource requirements (nor the correlating hit on performance). Moreover, disabling the extras that RH has does very little to improve overall performance – things still run slow and bloated. Conversely, enabling those missing features in Yoper does little to slow that system down – Yoper still runs as fast.
Then there’s the ridiculously long boot time. Why hasn’t parallel execution been implemented yet? COME ON Red Hat, WTF is the excuse? That your distro is free and that we’re lucky to get what we do? GET REAL, don’t cop-out, take the damn high road. Do you not have any pride in your work? Do you not want people talking about how srite and nimble your distro is? Coz that’s not what people ar saying right now (except the RH zealots, many of whom I’m sure will reply to this post). Come on – if Andreas can do it on his spare tim, sure to GOD you can’t manage it with the vast resources at your disosal.
If you read all of the comments you would have noticed this by abbie:
“I did not like the authors comment on the spatial navigation.
1. Spatial navigation was a MacOS thing, not a windows 95 thing. It was implemented improperly in 95.
2. Spatial navigation includes opening new windows and positioning those windows. In 95 they are positioned cascading. In GNOME 2.6, they are better positioned.
3. win95 did not dim the folder icon when it was open. MacOS did and GNOME 2.6 does. One improvement that can be made is to dim the items on the desktop when those are loaded, as well as dim application icons on the desktop when loaded.
(Just like MacOS used to 
) “
”
Then there’s the ridiculously long boot time. Why hasn’t parallel execution been implemented yet? COME ON Red Hat, WTF is the excuse? That your distro is free and that we’re lucky to get what we do? GET REAL, don’t cop-out, take the damn high road.”
read fedora-devel mailing list. there is a thread on optimisation right now and its pretty interesting. a update for rhgb just fixed a major performance problem with it. there is also a recent osnews article explaining redhat’s approach at solving the boot time delays
in addition, one of the basic principles of spatial browsing is that each individual folder is treated as an object with entirely separate properties from any other folder, and those properties are remembered and re-used. i.e., if you make a folder X by Y pixels, positioned at V, W on the screen, sorted by date and with a detail (as opposed to icon or list) view, then the next you open the folder, it will be X by Y in size, at V, W, sorted by date and use a detail view. No matter what other folders you open in the meantime or what you do to them. Win95 had a very half-assed implementation of this part of spatial browsing; GNOME’s implementation is excellent.
Ahhh, so the difference is actually a qualitative one (Windows 95 did it poorly, whereas GNOME does it well) rather than quantitative (whether Windows 95 did it at all or not. It seems it did).
That knowledge doesn’t change my opinion of spatial mode (I dislike it ;-), but thanks for the clarification. 😛
“I think Fedora should provide XFCE RPMs on their main discs. It’s definitely my UI of choice now.”
if you do a customized install of FC3 you’ll see you have the option of installing XFCE
XFCE is definately the way to go on older hardware that struggles with Gnome and KDE
“That knowledge doesn’t change my opinion of spatial mode (I dislike it ;-), but thanks for the clarification.”
in gnome 2.8, its very easy to disable it too. its good that you have now actually understood it better and still choose to disable it. no arguments about that.
only arguments is with people who say its the same as win95 and such silly comments
Nautilus also has lots of convenient features to make spatial efficient. Middle-double-click folders to close parent window as you open folder. Shift+ctrl+w to close all parent folders. Shortcut in the lower-left of the window to move up in the tree to parent folders of any generation. Ctrl+L to enter location. etc.
@ Adam Scheinberg (IP: 66.20.53.—)
Don’t they provide the RPMS on the CDs/DVD?
Did Mr. T. Chung get them from elsewhere,
http://www.fedoranews.org/tchung/fc3-final/screenshots/add-remove-a…
Yes. they do
libxfce4mcs.i386 4.0.6-1 base
libxfce4mcs-devel.i386 4.0.6-1 base
libxfce4util.i386 4.0.6-1 base
libxfce4util-devel.i386 4.0.6-1 base
libxfcegui4.i386 4.0.6-1 base
libxfcegui4-devel.i386 4.0.6-1 base
xfce-mcs-manager.i386 4.0.6-2 base
xfce-mcs-manager-devel.i386 4.0.6-2 base
xfce-mcs-plugins.i386 4.0.6-2 base
xfce-utils.i386 4.0.6-1 base
xfce4-iconbox.i386 4.0.6-2 base
xfce4-panel.i386 4.0.6-1 base
xfce4-systray.i386 4.0.6-2 base
Thanks Anon.
Talking about spatial mode…
I’m trying gnome for the first time and i’m really getting used to it. One thing I don’t like, however, are the default spatial-related shortcuts in nautilus. For example, ctrl+shift+w closes all parent folders. alt+up arrow opens parent folder, etc.
Is there any way I can change these shortcuts?
Thank you (and sorry for the OT post)
“Is there any way I can change these shortcuts? ”
probably yes. you can try searching through gconf-editor
My stance on spatial browsing will remain, with almost all operating systems we could select a setting to make all windows open in new windows, and even in KDE you can choose to remember the window size so that its the same next time you open the browser, spatial browsing is nothing new, however it does warrant good word if you enjoy it, but I don’t.
This is not what spatial browsing is. The fundamental philosophy behind “spatial browsing” has nothing to do with opening every folder in a “new window” or remembering window sizes.
It’s to do with treating folders in the UI as discrete objects, like real folders in the real world. The most obvious way to see this is note that you cannot (or should not) be able to open two windows with the contents of the same folder in them. That is, you can only ever have a single window of a given folder open at once.
That’s why Windows 95’s implementation _wasn’t_ spatial browsing – because you could open multiple views of the same folder. All it did was open every folder in a new window and (sometimes) remember those windows’ sizes. It was, basically, a ripoff of the look of MacOS without actually understanding the functionality. In a spatial system, when you try to open a folder that is already open, the existing window is just brought to the top of the stack – a new windows is not (or, rather, should not) be opened.
Personally I don’t like spatial browsers – I think a directory tree + file list (or multiples thereof) is a far more efficient way to do GUI file management. I find spatial browsers add significant visual clutter to the UI and are clumsy and tedious with any remotely complicated directory structure. *However*, at least if you’re going to criticise them, understand what they are first. Explorer is *NOT* a spatial file manager.
”
Personally I don’t like spatial browsers – I think a directory tree + file list (or multiples thereof) is a far more efficient way to do GUI file management.”
yes. a tree view file manager is better if you are doing a large around of tasks managing files in a deeper hierachy but a typical linux workstation user nautilus does the job pretty well.
typically newbies get confused and hate tree views. something i have found out by actual user testing and inference
Well, since everyone is now posting an opinion on Spatial Navigation, I’ll post mine.
I love it.
A directory tree + file list may be more efficient for large tasks (And it is), but for most of my daily tasks, I find the Spatial model makes it easier to get my work done.
I fell in love with the Nautilus spatial browsing paradigm once I discovered the neat little tweak whereby my /home directory _IS_ my desktop. Thus, all of the folders in my home directory ~/Tunes, ~/Pictures, ~/htdocs, ~/Code, ~/Documents, etc. are all on my desktop, one click away. This has made me much more productive when working on my website, or when working with my digital photos and other images.
For the curious, in Fedora Core 3 (under GNOME), go to:
Applications -> System Tools -> Configuration Editor
Other distros may call it GConf Editor, but with GNOME 2.6 or GNOME 2.8, the result is the same
This will launch the GConf Editor. Navigate the folders like you would the Windows Registry. Proceed to:
apps -> nautlius -> preferences
Look for the key labled:
desktop_is_home_dir
Check the box next to that key, and logout. Log back into GNOME and you now have a spatial browser that makes it super easy to browse the contents of your home directory.
Obviously this works best if you use your home directory to store the majority of you files and media.
If I hear that spatial is just opening a new window one more time…
Do you people even use it, or do you just judge it without trying. It might surprise you to know that Windows Explorer, is still spatial.
Why?
It remembers how each folder looked the last time you used it. That’s spatial, opening the new windows is just one annoying part of it, that is not integral to it.
It might surprise you to know that Windows Explorer, is still spatial.
No, it isn’t.
It remembers how each folder looked the last time you used it.
This has nothing to do with spatial file management (although it is almost always included).
The author writes:
“Most importantly, my system hasn’t crashed since test 2.”
I’m using RedHat on my desktop for years now, and I’ve stopped changing versions in a moment RH went commercial.
So I still have RH9 on my desktop and I don’t remember that it has ever crashed from the moment I’ve installed it till now.
I’m using yum and Fedora legacy project for updates and that works fine.
Fedora core was a big step backward in every sense…
But since the money drives the world, and there is no ‘free’ like in ‘beer’ software, but only corporate interests, we can not expect it to get any better. Or you think RH would finance competition to its own line of WS products?
Aurelius
“I highly doubt we’ll ever see it in a shiny box next to Windows on store shelves giving casual users a choice,…”
Windows OS on the store shelves? I can’t remember having seen it. What I see is upgrades. The original you get by buying a new PC with it pre-installed.
Linux could actually take advantage of that – for the time being it would be alone on the store shelves – in addition to pre-install as Dell, HP and others now also offer.
So when is this ALSA crap going to be replaced with something that just works? I hate having my volume muted time after time and now the mixer settings isn’t loaded at all anymore. No error messages.
I installed Fedora a little over a week ago. Since I installed it, I’ve spent most of my time in Windows, while when I’ve had other distros installed in the past such as Gentoo and Ubuntu I spent the majority of my time in linux. The showstoppers for me are:
1) I don’t want to recompile my kernel just to be able to burn cds/dvds. SCSI emulation seems to be off by default. So far NO distro has let me burn out of the box, and despite my years of using linux and hours reading the burning faqs and trying every single burning program out there, I have yet to successfully burn one cd under linux. So this is really a problem with linux in general, but fedora could at least enable scsi by default to make it a _little_ easier.
2) It’s not clear to me which program to use for what, yum or up2date. Package selection on fedora is confusing at best. I have no idea where to add repositories, they should it least allow you to manage repositories/software not on the cd from up2date. Gentoo, Ubuntu, slackware, freebsd, all are very simple to add software to. In fedora I’m stuck without any mp3/video/games/p2p.
3) Instability. Gaim crashes, Helix player (which seems like totem with a new name, what gives?) crashes, nautilus crashes. Other apps crashed too, I couldnt be bothered with remebering the details.
I expect to install Ubuntu within the next week sometime and be done with this nonsense. One other note is that Gnmomes menus are very nice in Ubuntu. If only they would add all the apps I install through synaptic to the menu automagicly I would be set.
I’ve been using Fedora Core 3 for quite some time and I am suitably impressed.
My only problem is with Evolution v2.
Under FC2 and Evolution 1.46, things worked great.
After I upgraded to FC3, it fails to send mail via pop but receives mail just fine.
I get the error
Error while performing operation:
MAIL FROM response error: Unknown
Postings to the alt.os.linux.redhat usenet group and google searches have produced nothing but a note to clean up /etc/hosts.
If anyone knows of the a fix, I would be greatly interested.
1) I don’t want to recompile my kernel just to be able to burn cds/dvds. SCSI emulation seems to be off by default. So far NO distro has let me burn out of the box, and despite my years of using linux and hours reading the burning faqs and trying every single burning program out there, I have yet to successfully burn one cd under linux. So this is really a problem with linux in general, but fedora could at least enable scsi by default to make it a _little_ easier.
You do not need scsi emulation any more to burn CDs.
2) It’s not clear to me which program to use for what, yum or up2date. Package selection on fedora is confusing at best. I have no idea where to add repositories, they should it least allow you to manage repositories/software not on the cd from up2date. Gentoo, Ubuntu, slackware, freebsd, all are very simple to add software to. In fedora I’m stuck without any mp3/video/games/p2p.
I agree. Currently the situation is quite a mess having up2date, yum and apt-get. But I heard the devs will probably settle on a single rpm frontend and also offer a GUI for configuring repositories.
3) Instability. Gaim crashes, Helix player (which seems like totem with a new name, what gives?) crashes, nautilus crashes. Other apps crashed too, I couldnt be bothered with remebering the details.
Helix player is an open source player playing different open video and audio formats. Realplayer is built on top of Helixplayer.
Mandrake lets you burn out of the box.
But it is also unstable and slooooow.
are you guys using like old 386’s or something??? K3b has always worked for me bug free and ripped just great starting from FC2. Runs even better if you get the source and recompile for your CPU since it’s usually done for i386 or generic Ppro/x86.
Then add Xine with all the goodies and its a done deal!. Its running sweet even on my Dell Inspiron 4150 laptop which is a P4-M 1.7ghz with 512ram.
But I’m still sticking with FC2 is more solid with 2.6.9 recompiled for your system and all the modules taken out.
But as for burning, get with the times and buy a $39 IDE burner….
It is ?
I found it just a tad faster and quite a bit easier than fedora core 2. Mandrake 10.1 CE for reference.
Riiiight. k3b will work so much better when compiled with instruction set extensions intended for heavy multimedia operations, since it does so much, y’know, video resizing and audio compression and stuff. Oh, wait, it doesn’t.
Recompilation is not Cool ™ unless you know what the heck you’re doing.
But as for burning, get with the times and buy a $39 IDE burner….
That’s not what he’s talking about. If you been around for awhile, you’d know back in the day you had to use ide-scsi emulation to use an IDE burner.
I swore at Fedora for awhile until I realized they hacked up cdrecord so it took dev=/dev/hdd instead of the older dev=1,0,0 notation.
Recompilation is not Cool ™ unless you know what the heck you’re doing.
Wow, back in the day the first thing you did was recompile the kernel to make your machine lean and clean. It does suck that modern desktoppy distros so discourage you from recompiling.
Why? Why does that suck? Why is an operating system which forces me to recompile its kernel to make it work properly better than one that doesn’t? Is recompiling a kernel inherently either a) useful or b) entertaining? No, of course it isn’t. It’s gruntwork. If someone else can do it for me, that’s a *good* thing.
Why? Why does that suck? Why is an operating system which forces me to recompile its kernel to make it work properly better than one that doesn’t? Is recompiling a kernel inherently either a) useful or b) entertaining? No, of course it isn’t. It’s gruntwork. If someone else can do it for me, that’s a *good* thing.
Yeah, I’m with you on this one. Just for kicks, I just now asked my sister if she knew what the hell “recompile” meant and she was like, “huh?”
Try (as root)
alsactl store
to save mixer settings
If that does not work, and there is something wrong with the way alsa is being initialised, it’s a problem with the distro’s init scripts, rather than the sound card driver.
I downloaded the dvd for Fedora 3.
But the install crashes. It freezes while finishing the copied rpms.
Anyone else having problem with the dvd?
the dvd has worked for several people. why dont you join the users mailing list and ask there. I am pretty sure you will get better answers than the 78th comment on this review
Is it just me or is this the slowest fedora yet? It takes forever to boot even after turning off several unused services. Logging in takes forever and applications take forever to start. Even after recompiling the kernel for my cpu (athlon xp 2GHz) and enabling the pre-emptive kernel option its still a dog. Firefox seems to be the worst offender, it takes several seconds to change tabs or highlight text. Firefox has also crashed on me repeatedly.
At this point I’m about to give up and give gentoo a try. I have always wanted to give it a go but I have never had the time to wait on the install. Anybody have any ideas on optimizing FC3 before I ditch it completely? I really wanted to start using it constistently since we are using RHEL 3 at work and I wanted to be up on what would be coming out in RHEL 4 but its just too damn slow.
… including the kernel, is fine, as long as it Just Works ™. But noooo, it almost never does, there’s almost always a wrinkle. It’s enough that I should be expected to compile the software I run (ridiculous), but to have to debug said compilation? No freakin’ way, I have better things to do (like waste my time here ;-).
If you are thinking of giving Gentoo a run but do not want to go through a tedious install, you may want to give Vidalinux’s VLOS v1.0 a try.
It is Gentoo made easy.
Downloading the core is a single CD.
Everthing else is installed by downloading and compiling.
Optimized ISO’s are available for AMD and P4.
It runs FAST but installing things can be slow because each package is downloaded and compiled from source.
VLOS uses Porthole to manage/install the portage packages and it behaves similarly to apts synaptic.
If you are interested, go to http://desktop.vidalinux.com/.
At least XFCE is now part of Fedora Core as of FC3, however one thing that I noticed that’s a major annoyance, is there’s no integration effort whatsoever to populate even a sampling of the app list you get from gnome/kde.
In other words, if you don’t know what app you want to fire up, you’ll be pretty lost. Your initial choices pretty much come down to browsing the web, reading e-mail, launching a music player, and configuring preferences and printers.
Now I realize that people like some degree of customization, but some sensible defaults would have been a good idea considering how many apps the thing ships with, as well as all the system-config-* tools. *sigh*
however one thing that I noticed that’s a major annoyance, is there’s no integration effort whatsoever to populate even a sampling of the app list you get from gnome/kde.
Actually, this is 4.0.6 version issue thus nothing to do with Fedora. It is fixed in 4.2 version or later.
I’m quite surprised that they didn’t include XFce 4.2 beta in the FC3 CD, actually. My 4.2 beta is more stable than my 4.0 ever was.
“Anybody have any ideas on optimizing FC3 before I ditch it completely? ”
disable rhgb, readahead and all unnecessary deamons. consider disabling selinux too if you dont know about it
Kreg:
I, also, had major lock-ups with Open Office Writer under FC3. At first it acted like I was taxing virtual memory or something, everything grinding to a halt. I know Oo Writer is a big program (which is why I prefer Abiword for most things), and I only run 256 of RAM, but it worked all right under FC2.
I’ve had other issues with FC3 since I installed it yesterday. When I minimize a window, it disappears! I don’t know where the heck it is!
I’m also getting an error message whenever I log in. I tried disabling SELinux, thinking that was the culpert, but the message remained. I click the “Long on anyway” optons to the message and everything seems to go ok, so I do’t know what’s up.
I had a few issues with FC2 (like the system volume controls would never stay locked; I had to reset them every time I logged on in order to have sound in the CD player) but overall, it gave me fewer quirks than FC3 seems bent on doing.
“disable rhgb, readahead and all unnecessary deamons. consider disabling selinux too if you dont know about it.”
Thanks for the tips. I had disabled every daemon that I’m not using and its still a dog. I have not tried disabling selinux in the kernel. Maybe I will try that next.
the author was being kind to spatial nautilus. It IS a poor imitation of win95. ‘window placement’ your kidding right?!?! There are those with super high resolution monitors and then there is everybody else. And what’s worse, gnome is after the business desktop, but yet har har har no business in their right flippin’ mind is going to give some call center moroff, hell desk dweeb or secretary a monitor with a resolution over 1024×768. The widgets in gnome are gigantic, beastly, ginormous, f’kin huge mate, bigger than all else, the apex of kindergarten widgets. There is no possible way to even use gnome based apps because the file selector and widgets take up 90% of the flipping screen, how the hell is window placement going to matter?
Actually, spatial is similar to Mac method. Don’t forget you can change Nautilus spatial into browser like.
FC 2 had issues usually only when I tried to install it as a dual boot system. For some odd reason I could never fathom, FC2 would nearly always miss initializing the console keyboard on my desktop (after installation, on bootup), which would stick me in the new hardware screen and try to prompt me to remove the keyboard entry, only a hard reset would break me out of it. When I installed it as the only OS on the system that problem didn’t happen. I never had a problem with the Nvidia drivers (using 6xxx series because the card i have wasn’t well supported pre-6xxx) like some have mentioned. I suppose I was lucky. The biggest annoyance I have with FCx is you can’t choose alternate filesystems other than ext2/3 during install. Considering this is supposed to be about choice, what happened to my choices for Reiser or XFS?
But FC3 would never install at all, it would always lock up at the post install stage no matter what I tried to correct it. So from my pov, things went from annoying to completely unusable as far as FC2 and FC3 are concerned.
just install FC3. Stable, fast, cutting-edge, as in article. Hope December ATI proprietary drivers will work with latest x.org.
When you had it installed as a dual boot, were you booting Fedora clean or booting into it by rebooting from the other OS? Odd as it may seem, some systems have trouble with this; some OSes don’t actually shut all the hardware down properly when they ‘reboot’ the system.
There is a graphical frontend for yum. It’t called yumgui or guiyumi or something like that. You can find it at cobind’s site (the redhat-with-xfce4 distro).
When Red Hat calls its audience for Fedora “hobbyists,” they’re basically calling Fedora a toy. RHEL is the real version, and that’s only for enterprises. There is an important audience that has been left out: people who want to use Linux as their desktop system, to do real work.
Debian would be great for this, if it were more up to date and easier to use. Knoppix would be great for this, if it weren’t just a live CD. Xandros, Linspire, and Lycoris would be great for this if they didn’t try so hard to imitate Windows and dumb everything down so much. I thought SuSE might be perfect for this, but it looks like they’re just going in the same direction that Red Hat did.
Red Hat Linux used to fit the bill perfectly. Now it’s gone, and that void has never been filled.
Wooing the enterprises might be good for the short term bottom line, but it will be short-lived unless we really strive for ubiquity. As long as Linux is just a hobbyist toy, or confined to enterprises, it will always be considered a fringe, and like every other fringe OS, will eventually fade into irrelevance.
what do people see in fedora and redhat???what a waste of time it’s so primative compared to other os out there, i think
mandrakes the way to go for all linux users, well it’s just my opinion anyway. Dos is dead so is is the shell in linux going in same direction as xp did to dos ,if you know what i mean.one thing i cannot knock with redhat or mmmm fedora is the internet speed
that can be gained from using them.Don’t get me wrong i never knock them poor fedora programmers for there work
wich is good however i think there being used by someone whom wants to pocket money for there work…
So go buy a copy of Mandrake. Desktop users fully supported!
You mentioned instability with FC2 as your reason for dislike of it. My experience with FC2 is exactly the opposite, probably no surprise, in that FC1 was clunky for me, and FC3 offered no significant improvement over FC2. FC2 has been rock-solid stable and dependable for me. The only problems I have experienced have been self-induced; i.e. I let my enthusiasm outreach my experience level, and I accidentally kill something. FC2 far surpasses my old Windows 98, and at least equals the performance of Windows XP, which my company laptop uses, as far as functionality goes. Concerning security, Neither Windows 98 nor XP can begin to compare to the security of FC2.
My guess is that your experience of instability had more to do with either your hardware or your selections of packages than with the FC2 release distribution.
This whole thing seems to me to be counter productive… It is interesting to hear the differnet views of how everyone can have the same thing installed and have such differing problems. What it comes down to, in a nut shell, is this… All systems, including linux (which I use daily, it is my job, and I love it), have negatives. Sometimes, (more often in Linux case), the OS and applications can work around or with the negatives. However, there are times that negatives can’t be worked around. For instance, bad cpu’s, memory, or really bad add on cards (video, for instance). I have found that more often than not, bad problems tend to come from broken, weak, or misconfigured hardware. Now, that is not to say that there are not some problems with the OS’s involved here. I personally have a FC2 and FC3 box at home, a FC3 box at work, and several RH7.3, RH9, and other RH boxes at work. My view has been that FC, all of them, have been fairly stable (not including test), and that if you hit a bad problem, it has been a rogue program, a bad bit of hardware, or possibly even the hardware your system is compiled for (x86_64 vs i386). My x86_64 box has more problems with KDE applications, for instance, than does my Celeron based box at home. So, before anyone says “FC3 and all that sucks” or “FC3 rocks my world”, ask around about hardware. Check to make sure that hardware is not the answer, or a single program, or a botched install even. And if you find a problem, make sure and submit it as a bug to the Fedora project. I have used it, and it has helped.