Fedora Core 1 has been out now for a few days now and many faithful Linux fans have already installed it. Red Hat’s Linux is still one of my favorite distributions because of one main reason: compatibility with Linux software. Red Hat is a market leader and following the market leader assures the least trouble for most users. But is this the case with Fedora Core?
Installation of the software went fine. I believe that Fedora’s installer is both easy to use and powerful and succeeds in satisfying both power and casual users. My monitor was in their database; it correctly found all the horizontal/vertical information, the Nvidia graphics card was auto-detected as well (only in 2-D mode), and loaded the OHCI driver for my TI Firewire PCI card. Later, the included GTKam utility worked fine with my husband’s USB Kodak DC265 camera too. The only problem I had with the installation was that the first time I booted to install the distro (with cold boot) X would die a few seconds after Anaconda would load. Resetting the machine and re-trying worked fine (with warm boot). The betas had the same problem too, but Red Hat Linux 8 and 9 did not have that problem at all on the same hardware.
The first boot went fine too, all services got up and running correctly, and creating new users also worked great.
Fedora Core comes with Gnome 2.4.0 (plus some 2.4.0.1 updated packages), Mozilla 1.4.1, Gaim 0.71, OOo 1.1, XMMS 1.2.8, KOffice, Gimp 1.2.x, gThumb 2.0.2 (pretty outdated version), Epiphany 1.0.4 and many hundreds of other packages. The distro includes most of what users would need for their home usage: Internet applications, office apps, games, some multimedia support, easy administration for most things via Red Hat’s preference panels.
New features include a graphical booting sequence which is really nice in my opinion (and it can be even better by integrating the booting sequence with the login and the Gnome loading procedure). There is also prelinking by default which speeds up application launching, and better ACPI support. It is 2.6-ready, has better support for laptops, an updated Bluecurve theme with more color selection (default background image is lovely) and bumped up security.
Fedora Core also comes with lots of server software like Apache, mySQL, PostgreSQL, a news server, an FTP server, SSH support and other advanced technologies that power users or administrators will love to get their hands upon.
Applications indeed start pretty fast and especially some third party statically-linked apps (e.g. Lost Marble’s Moho or Blender) load immediately. I have never seen Moho load so fast, not even on BeOS (which was its original platform).
And the niceties stop just right there. From then on, it was an uphill battle to get this OS up and running according to more modern specifications.
My disappointment started when I tried to upgrade Gaim 0.71 to 0.72. The third party Shrike RPM wouldn’t work because of pspell dependancy problems. Downloading pspell and compiling it manually wouldn’t work either as libpspell-modules were nowhere to be found in the newly compiled archive. So I decided to download the source of Gaim and compile it myself. All went fine with Gaim’s compilation except the MSN plugin wouldn’t load because gnuTLS that provides SSL to Gaim was not installed. I got to gnuTLS’ FTP site downloaded the source, only to ask me for libcrypt. Downloaded the source of libcrypt, only to ask me for the source of GnuPG. I downloaded the gnupg, compiled fine, went back to libcrypt, only to bail out badly with severe compiling errors. This is a simple user scenario that should have not happened, no matter whose fault really is. Now think what a newbie user coming from Windows-land would think about this whole –literally– usability fiasco.
But that was nothing compared to the rest of the problems I further encountered. I wanted to install the Macromedia Flash plugin and I first downloaded the tar.gz version which installs its two files via a bash script. Problem was, the script wouldn’t run correctly. It would tell me over and over again that the directory I was trying to install is not valid (I tried both the existing /usr/lib/mozilla and /usr/lib/mozilla-1.4.1, no joy). I wonder, didn’t Red Hat’s QA actually test common proprietary software that many of its users will want to install? I mean, by my estimation there are not more than 10-15 commonly-installed popular proprietary applications in this category, so it should be no big deal to test them all. Anyway, the story doesn’t end there. I read the script itself and saw that all it does is copy these two files (.xpt and .so) to the right directory and changes permissions with chmod 755. So, I did it by hand, logged out and back in again, and still none of my browsers would work with the plugin (plugins are enabled). So, I decided to download the Fedora and RH9 RPM just in case these would work (using Synaptic and apt, would not help out here either). Thankfully, the RPM GUI utility that comes with Fedora installed the Flash plugin and told me that it will need to also install some gcc libstd-c++ compatibility libraries. It asked me for the 3rd CD, I put it in, and then the installer bailed out. Fedora would not even install its own RPMs from its own db/CD. This is a well known bug from the second Fedora beta and I am very, very surprised that it is in the final too. Update: Here is the bug report and a preliminary fix for it as found on Red Hat’s bugzilla.
And no, it doesn’t end here. Just as a test, I went to the main “Add/Remove Apps” utility and told it to install the X11-vim application. Same problem, as you can see from our screenshots. It just wouldn’t install its own RPMs (third party RPMs that do satisfy dependencies and get installed via the command line DO work, mind you). It is poor QA, from all I can tell.
Then, it was Java’s turn. I installed the latest Java SDK (j2re1.4.2_05) and thankfully all went well (I can run Java apps), except again, the browser plugin. Konqueror was the only browser that did recognize the plugin and worked with it. The rest of the browsers completely ignore it (the java plugin’s link is correctly in place and I now understand that it works better if you install it for the current user on your ~/.mozilla/plugins/ but the trouble starts if you want to install it for all users).
And on top of all that, you frequently get RPM-locking (I found rebooting to be the only method to get RPM functionality back) an annoying bug which is with us since Red Hat Linux 8.
And then there is Samba which didn’t work. Samba 3 still doesn’t work for me via Konqueror or Nautilus (smb-client command line tool kind of works better), because it insists on connecting on my VMWare’s virtual IP address of 10.0.0.19 instead of my XP’s real 10.0.0.10 IP on my home network (even when I do “smb://10.0.0.10”). It manages to connect once every 10-15 efforts (and asks for my password a zillion times, for a shared folder that does not require a password) and even then I can’t do anything with the files. Mac OS X, Slackware and… Lindows don’t exhibit the problem connecting to that machine. Yellow Dog Linux also has the same problem, as it is Red Hat Linux-derived. I filed a bug months ago with RHL9 and it is still not fixed.
And then you’ve got all the little application bugs (which is nevertheless the distro’s responsibility to do QA on to make sure they work well): from the crashy RhythmBox, to the Python errors in redhat-config-network (screenshot), to the annoying KDE applets loading on Gnome’s desktop instead of following the freedesktop.org standard (it is details like these that destroy the overall impressions, no matter if I know ‘why’ some things happen the way they do), to KOffice going berserk when adding a spreadsheet and chart kpart on your presentation, to the Assistive Tech Support preference panel which makes Gnome want to log out when you click Metacity’s close button (another reported bug that’s still there), to Nautilus occassional crashes, to gtk/aspell’s own bugs via Gedit this very moment I am typing this (tells me it doesn’t know several words but when I check its “spelling suggestions” the words are in its list already) and other such annoyances. Granted, all OSes have bugs, but it is a different story to find 5-6 bugs in months of using an OS (e.g. in my OSX experience and even fewer bugs on my XP) and to find 15 of them in a few hours of usage as in Fedora’s case.
And then there are the actual limitations of the distro that are well known: no mp3 support, no out of the box serious video playback support, no included video editor for home movies. In fact, I can live with all the above problems, except the following one: multimedia performance. It is a different thing to not have multimedia support out of the box and to not have good performance on it even when the user takes steps to compensate for the lack of it. I compiled and installed the mp3 plugin for Fedora’s XXMS (download it from here or here), I installed Xine, Mplayer and Totem and worked fine for the most part but Ogg and Mp3 playback would skip with XMMS after using the machine for a while (quality would degrade with time). After changing the eSound back-end to OSS I got a bit better performance but still not acceptable. Playing Frozen Bubble and having XMMS on the background playing an internet radio station (so the disk was not really touched, plus DMA is on for all my drives) sound quality would drop to the floor. Sometimes, XMMS would skip even when loading new folders on Nautilus or when loading a new web page with Epiphany. This machine is an AthlonXP 1600+ with a Yamaha XG-754 PCI sound card and 256 MB of RAM. I expect more out of it, especially when my XP Pro does not skip on a way slower machine (dual Celeron 533 Mhz) or when Mac OS X manages just fine on a Cube G4 450 Mhz. The same AthlonXP machine also has Slackware and YellowTAB Zeta in it and these two OSes have no problems with media performance. Fedora Core has though even if its installation was fresh.
The whole fiasco with installation and the broken RPM GUI engine has put me off from trying out nVidia’s 3D drivers. I think I will wait for Fedora-specific builds, if I decide to keep Fedora on this partition until then and I haven’t nuked it in the meantime to install something else.
On the distro’s credit I have to remark that the icons and themes look more polished and the mouse movement on X is very smooth and precise (something that most XFree86-based OS/distros lack as of 2-3 years ago when some mouse code got broken – freedesktop.org’s new X Server project is trying to address the problem, we learned). We learned that this is because of some specific enhancements to the Linux kernel made by the Red Hat engineers and also similar enhancements will bring better OpenGL performance too (haven’t tested it though).
Fedora has certainly a few new key elements, but none of them can be called important or really ground breaking for most users. It is a step ahead of RHL9 in some respects, exactly as RHL9 was to RHL8, but with way more bugs and problems. Fedora is barely evolutionary and not revolutionary. Innovation does not seem to be Fedora’s goal. We’ve seen it all before, we just got newer app versions and a nifty graphical boot this time around. But the bugs and the overall usability of the OS need to be further improved. It is in the details that Fedora (and most Linuxes in general) need to work out.
Fedora Core is a community-driven and Red Hat-managed and sponsored open source distribution project. This has its ups and downs. The project is open and everyone can participate, but on the other hand QA seems limited and abandoned by Red Hat. A shame really, but it is to expected with Red Hat having changed its focus to the Enterprise market.
There is not a chance that I would use Fedora as my main OS at this point. It’s got as many bugs as swiss cheese has holes, multimedia performance (at least with XMMS) and included multimedia feature-set is below par, application installation is a major pain in the rear, and there is no official support anymore for the bugs encountered throughout the experience. If this distro is just serving as a testbed for Red Hat’s ideas to see if they work and then move them to their Enterprise product, it just means that Fedora will always be in beta state, whether or not they announce them as final or not.
“The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software” we read on Fedora’s site and at least this version of the software is not polished enough or full-featured to be used as a general purpose OS for the majority of people. I do see some casual users switching to this free offering but not without going through some, initial at least, pain.
For the rest of us whose time is money, we will keep using Mac OS X or Windows XP and if we feel like using Unix/Linux, there is always FreeBSD and Slackware who at least they don’t pretend to be more than they really are. This might not be Red Hat’s product per se anymore, but with Red Hat having a prominent role in the development of Fedora and by releasing it in this state, it reflects badly on the company and I believe it does more damage than good to their image. I hope future releases are more polished.
Installation: 8.5/10
Hardware Support: 8/10
Ease of use: 6/10
Features: 7/10
Credibility: 6/10 (stability, bugs, security)
Speed: 7.5/10 (throughput, UI responsiveness, latency)
Overall: 7.16
it for some reason will not let my sound work on my laptop no matter what I do. I needed ACPI support in order for sound to work, so I did the acpi=on in the grub.conf and it comes on and all, but the sound just does not work.
I have a zt1130 pavilion laptop, anyone have a similar experience and got it fixed? I really like the integration they have added to this version, very nice.
Flash is not their fault.
The plugin seems to not work with a browswer that has been compiled with a newer (GCC3.3) compiler.
I had this problem when I recompiled Mozilla w/ GCC-3.3.2 and Flash suddenly stopped working, even though none of the plugin files had changed.
I haven’t had this problem w/ JAVA though, it’s been trucking along.
On updating, Can’t you use Up2Date w/ the free YUM repository for apps like GAIM? Doesnt YUM automatically resolve dependancies?
Rhythmbox: pre-0.6.0 is extremely buggy. Try using 0.6.0, it seems a lot more stable.
Also, build it with the XINE backend,not gstreamer (use –with-xine). Gstreamer itself is really messy, and XINE hasnt given me any problems.
The reviewer’s expectations were too high. You’re not supposed to compare Linux distributions with Windows or OS X. Comparing Linux distributions with other Linux distributions is the only fair way to review Linux. So I happen to think that FC 1 is a great release. It is much better than Mandrake and SuSe IMHO. I also have high hopes that Linux will be as good as Windows and OS X by the next decade. Open source is the superior development model, it just needs more professional programmers participating.
I used Synaptic and apt repositories.
As for Rhythmbox, it is my job to review what they offer, not what I can update myself. Their version is buggy, and as such they should have either fixed it, or not include it at all. That’s what makes a product good: QA.
>Flash is not their fault.
As a user, I don’t give a damn if it is RedHat;s or Macromedia’s fault. All I know is, as a user, I cannot use Flash. That’s the bottomline.
they also have forgotten to skip redhat limitation on fs in install: always limited to ext2/3, LVM whereas stock 2.4 kernel also support reiserfs and JFS
rpm also seems broken as
rpm –rebuild, rpm -ba/-ta don’t work, need to use rpmbuild …
i also have trouble with vnc4beta, freeze, bad support of different window manager …
hope they will change in next release … if they keep redhat way, have to wait release 2 or 3
I was running RH9, I did a clean install of Fedora Core 1 just the other night. I am very happy with it. My Toshiba A10 is very responsive and perfoms as exepcted now… Well done FC team!
My only “complaint” if you will, is boot times.. if they could speed boot times somehow I would be really happy..
Keep it up guys
> You’re not supposed to compare Linux distributions with Windows or OS X
WHAT? Excuse me, but did you read the goal of Fedora??
To create a good general purpose OS for users to use? Excuse me then, but OSX and Windows are exactly that. Therefore, Fedora and any other such OS WILL be compared to the market leaders. Why? Because it wants people to switch, these people need to know their options and good these options are. And this is exactly my job over here!
I had issues getting x to work with my radeon 7000, with works fine with most everything else, so I went back to RH 9.2.. like the bootup though, I do have a VE with 2 monitors attached, so it might have been an Xinerama issue, but I couldn’t log into a terminal, and could not restart X..
Oh well
-Todd
You can fix “RPM locking” without rebooting – I discovered how by snooping through the init scripts. You need to remove /var/lib/rpm/__db*, and then it works properly again.
I also had problems figuring out that you needed to use rpmbuild in the latest versions of RPM. They built in support for automatically calling rpmquery, rpmverify, etc. when using the various rpm flags, so I wonder why they didn’t make rpmbuild get called in the same way.
I think it is reallt irrespossiable that they put rythmbox in there. rythmbox is so unstable its not even funny!
I disagree with the gaim problems. Yes there are always problems when you use rpms that are built for different distros. Yes, even version changes like RH8/RH9, if they work, good for you, otherwise, tough luck.
What you should do is wait for fedora to release an updated version, and that should upgrade cleanly. Complaining that you cant compile programs that are not meant to be easy to compile, and that rpms not meant for fedora dont install cleanly is not a fair complaint IMHO.
Can we please also cut the stuff about the Multimedia lacking? Eveyone knows its not there! You didnt even mention http://rpm.livna.org/, which contains all these nonfree packages and were compiled for FC1!
You also compare performance with your self compiled plugins. Try the plugins from livna, or try playing an ogg (so you use an ‘official’ plugin) and see fi you get the same performance issues.
You want good java rpms? Try these: http://dag.wieers.com/packages/j2re/
Once again though, you can give me third party things that dont work, while I can give you third party packages that do work.
More then half of your article is complaining about third party packages, and how they dont work. Sorry but that really brought down the level of your review. There are many good problems there (like the samba issue, that ximian has gotten right using unholy hacks, but atleast it works), but instead of focusing on them, you focus on the ones that arnt fedora’s fault.
Btw, just that people should generally know, most of the problems reported in the article are not distro problems. So you will probably see these problems if you use any other distro too, that dosnt heavily patch (like RH used to do). This is not that fedora isnt good, its just that now fedora dosnt have as much reasources to heavily patch their packages as they used to. This means that the packages are more ‘pure’, and therefore a tad more unpolished. It is a shame since RH have fixed a large number of bugs with their patchs and most of their patchs got accepted upstream in the end.
Fedora in terms of the important stuff (kernel, initscripts, configurability, how everythings ‘fits’ together, etc..) is pretty rock solid, waiting to see if this will hold for future releases…
reiserfs has been there since 8, you just have to type
“linux enable reiserfs”
at the boot prompt during initial install. No one ever seems to mention that.
As far as
#rpmbuild –rebuild
AFAIK, that is because of rpm not RH specific, use any rpm distro that has an updated rpm package and it should be the same across the board.
Redhat/Fedora developpers/mainteners should concentrate more on FIXING BUGS and stabilizing the system than exhibit each time a new release of Gnome desktop with new features (but with a lot of bugs).
Redhat 7.0 came with Gnome 1.4
Redhat 8.0 came with Gnome 2.0
Redhat 9 with Gnome 2.2
Fedora 1 with Gnome 2.4
……………….
Each time the developpers were unable to fix all bugs ..
Fedora is community-based and they welcome bug reports.
If you find a bug, you will do a service to file at http://bugzilla.fedora.us/
Peter
<quote>I wonder, didn’t Red Hat’s QA actually test common proprietary software that many of its users will want to install?</quote>
no, they didn’t. fedora’s q-and-a is done by the “developer community” and red hat takes no responsibility for it… refer to this chart:
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/rhel.html
you think having a hard time getting gaim running was annoying? imagine if it was your company’s mail server. bottom line: fedora is useless and dangerous for anyone but desktop users and hobbyists. if you’ve run servers on 7/8/9 do NOT expect to just continue on as normal using fedora.
Yes, I just installed Fedora myself and have had a few problems. In general, thinks are working okay, but it definitely isn’t as polished as RH9 was.
My first attempt at Fedora was to try to “upgrade” my RH9 installation. Fedora warned that it would do its best but that some RPMs weren’t the original versions. I went for it anyway. That installation generally worked, but had some problems with various little things (like my desktop was pretty screwed up, OOo had problems starting up, and some system utility applets didn’t work quite correctly).
Anyway, I decided to wipe clean and go for it again. That seemed to work a little better.
But I’m still having problems getting RHN to work correctly. And this on a clean install. I don’t get it.
So yes, in general, I agree with Eugenia. Unless there is something you know that Fedora will do for you, I’d stick with RH9 until they get the kinks worked out.
Eugenia … here is what I needed to do to get the java plugin to work in mozilla:
http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/linux.html#Java
Well, you’re right about Rhythmbox. It’s buggy, and they shouldnt have included it on the CDs. 0.6.0 is pretty nice though, if you use XINE.
But you can’t blame them for flash. Do you want them to use an old compiler just to get a plugin?
What if Macromedia doesn’t update their linux version for another year? Do you want them to stay with an old compiler then?
Open source software can’t be held back by proprietary companies. GCC3 is perfectly stable, and is in product use on many distros.
You’re not supposed to compare Linux distributions with Windows or OS X. Comparing Linux distributions with other Linux distributions is the only fair way to review Linux.
Perhaps, you aren’t too bright or you need to re-read? She has compared with Slackware, YellowTAB Zeta, MacOS X _and_ Windows. She just shows that all others work fine included other Linux distros while Fedora Core has some strange problems. Therefore, I think it’s very reasonable for her to compare those.
I have to say that Fedora Core release “1” is amazing. I have to say congrats to the Red Hat community. I appreciate Red Hat providing yum support out of the “box” so to speak. I don’t use the “up2date” util so there is no need for me to complain (plus I have read they fixed this up2date problem about 1 day after it was released). I have also noticed improvements in the stock generic Nvidia support, making me not even having to worry about installing the Nvidia drivers from the site. Well done, a few bugs are expected but that goes with any “freely downloadable” distro. If you want bright polish desktop run RHEL WS. Beautiful, also good job Eugina about your problems, this is definitely not for someone who has not tinkered with linux before. But if you know how to use apt/yum and install rpms this distro is for you.
Um…it’s a good review. As a user of Fedora and SuSE, I can attest to these same problems. RPM locking being the biggest hassle. I like the general desktop feel, however, it’s not as polished as I would like.
On another note: How would one go about taking Fedora and repackaging things, and releasing it? For example, with actualy MP3 support and what not? Where could I go to learn about this sort of thing?
>But if you know how to use apt/yum and install rpms this distro is for you.
I wish it was that simple. I use apt and Synaptic. But that does not solve all problems. All problems is not just about software installation, but about simple bugs too.
I’ve been using FC1 since t was released. I’m happy so far, but I don’t give a twit about mp3s and multimedia stuff.
That said, the issues Eugenia raises have been reported and discussed on the Fedora mailing lists. We will see what happens.
In the meantime, I think what we have here is RH9 with a few improvements around the edges, and, as Eugenia points out, some annoying bugs.
Bottom line: If you aren’t interested in multimedia, if you aren’t trying to turn your PC into an entertainment center, if you consider the absence of Flash a blessing, and if you avoid installing updates from non-Fedora sources,then FC1 is a pretty slick release.
how about waiting a couple of weeks till the repositoties can switch completely to FC1 ???
the situation had drammatically got better in the last two days….
Eugenia, perhaps this is what RedHat’s CEO meant when he said Linux wasn’t ready to be a home user desktop system.
Instead of saying Linux, he should have said “Fedora Core 1” isn’t ready. Then again, I’m not sure he’s actually used it himself.
By the way: Listening to streaming Eurodisco? Eugenia, were you shakin’ it to the Cheeky Dance?
I too, had some problems with Fedora 1 which I didn’t encounter with Red Hat 9 (and < 9). My Soundblaster AWE64 ISA was not detected and my monitor had its maximum resolution set to 1024*768 (it can do much higher ones).
Of course I could solve these problems in no time, but a more newbie user could not and it is strange these problems were not in RH9. Makes me wonder how much this is based on RH9. All around a very nice distro though.
I managed to install Flash in Fedora Core 1.
“ln -s /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5 /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3”
should do the trick.
I think the points made were valid. I tried a few different things to get Nvidia’s drivers working and it was a no go. Also Ximian’s Desktop2 wanted no part of Fedora. I do think these things will change pretty soon.
If the industry looks at Fedora as “Red Hat 9.2” like i think they will, these problems will clear up soon. In the meantime, I’ve been using Slackware 9.1 and i think it’s great.
AFAICT the review is fine, i.e. the Fedora distribution works mostly fine (whic it does btw). What does not work OTOH are third party rpms – so? Tell the third party developers!
I use apt-get/yum and haven’t had any problems at all with flash et al.
Regarding RPM locking,
do not “rpm -Uvh” and use up2date/yum/etc
at the same time.
Fedora lacks support for my sound card, an onboard
chip on A7V8X-X, even noticed that ALSA does support it.
WHY doesnt Fedora uses ALSA if its a standard???
I am really disapointed, its a very bad distribution and
I agree with Eugenia on this.
When will MDK 9.2 ISOS are to be released?
Nobody is commnenting on it anymore….
Fedora is very bad for me… Did you ever tried MDK?
“On another note: How would one go about taking Fedora and repackaging things, and releasing it? For example, with actualy MP3 support and what not? Where could I go to learn about this sort of thing?”
I’ve seen docs on who to do this before, try google.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=custom+r…
I installed it and saw the following problems (I day of use):
– No java support. I installed java and it didn’t work with any browser
– Flash. I instlled it using my user in the Mozilla and Nestape place. Didn’t work. Install as root didn’t work too.
– Couldn’t find MPlayer.
– After the installation I don’t have an option to reconfigure my video card to support 1024×768.
– My other partitions wasn’t recognized.
It seems the this version is worse then 8.0. Too bad.
Some of you can say: It’s not their fault!!
Think like a HOME USER!!! All of this stuffs must work without to install anything.
Linux only will be ready for the desktop when this kind of problem is fixed.
I’m thinking about to try Lindows or Xandros…
I’ve personally tested fedora core 1 on a laptop and desktop, and I must I liked it but it has its issues. Samba 3 is a pain to make work, and all in all I’ve removed fedora core after a while. They’ve pushed this release out of the door so that they can keep up with the promissed release date and to satisfy the community.
I’d love to see a review of SuSE Linux 9.0 from you. I must say SuSE Linux 9.0 is a great release, works good out of the box and is very stable. It doesn’t comme with gnome 2.4, only 2.2 but stabilitty comes first. Also the difference between 2.2 and 2.4 is not big. KDE 3.1.4 is very polished and has overall hacks and neat stuff compared to the stock KDE.
For production/office/business use I would recommend SuSE Linux 9.0 Pro. Its stable, and we need also stable releases. Having the latest .x releases of software every few months doesn’t help. In Linux Land software changes much every once a year, and major changes can be seen every 2 years. SuSE 9.0 is also cool for development.
Maybe we see a review of SuSE 9.0 from you Eugenia:)
Compiling software for Gnome is generally a nightmare.
Why is it that so many apps fail to compile for seemingly no reason. Every dependancy met, blah, blah, blah. For instance Mono will not compile on Fedora from CVS or tarball.
Is this just Fedora? Has anyone managed to achieve this monumental feat?
The only problem with Flash that I had was that it needed a particular version with libstdc++, which was in an RPM that was not installed by default, namely compat-libstdc++. Java was easy; I installed the RPM from java.sun.com, and in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins, I did “ln -s /usr/java/j2re1.4.2_01/plugin/i386/ns610-gcc32/libjavaplugin_oji.so”.
That said, Fedora certainly has its annoying quirks. up2date pops up a dialog to register with RHN; I click “Register with RHN”, and it runs up2date without any registration. Eh? The up2date applet also warns that
“The applet has been unable to access the following information sources in its last attempts: fedora-core-1 @ http://fedora.redhat.com/releases/fedora-core-1, updates-released @ http://fedora.redhat.com/updates/released/fedora-core-1“
even though the core up2date app can handle those information sources just fine.
The graphical boot needs to go back to the drawing board. It doesn’t hide the kernel messages, which undermines the whole point of a graphical boot, and worse, it breaks support for the Wacom USB Graphire, and temporarily freezes regular USB mice.
That said I didn’t find Fedora nearly the disaster that Eugenia did. I may switch myself to Slackware, but that has more to do with wanting a platform that is easier to tweak and “abuse” than any particular problems with Fedora.
I had no luck compiling Gaim(+MSN support) with GnuTLS either. I spent a whole night trying to to that but the GnuTLS project seems to be very messy as far as dependencies are concerned.
On the contrary, Gaim compiled fine using the Mozilla Project NSS/NSPR libraries. More info at: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/buildnss_31.html
Mandrake wait to reach a common agreement with LG !
The likelyhood is that we will have a 2nd boot cd n°0 with the updates. You will have 4 CDs.
Chears
Jean-Michel Fayard
NB : IMHO, Mandrake should not wait _too much_ that LG wakes up. But, it would be good that LG can find a way to repair the CDROM drives.
I agree, the liva.something yum repository has Mplayer, but when use ‘yum install mplayer’ it tells you it is missing a package for dependancy. Thats pretty funny. Why bother putting mplayer in the repository without all the packages needed for it?
Actually that has happened with quite a lot of Fedora packages. Fedora is a huge disapointment for me.
I hate the added bloat to the fedora config so I tried building my system from a minimal install using yum for installs and dependency checks and adding the needed mp3,mplayer rpms after.
“yum install gnome*” installed x, samba, gnome and some utilities and to my suprise after setting the resolution startx loaded me into a very trim system. Then I did yum install openoffice*,xmms*,gedit*,gimp*,gaim*,epiphany*,balsa*,emacs* and redhat-config* and I was pretty much done cept for mp3s:-). Fedora isn’t perfect but its an excellent start.
i am using it as i type this, it is not bad, i had a couple of minor peeves but nothing i could not resolve..
First peeve, the option to check thru individual packages was gone from the install, but the grouped package selection seemed a little more improved…
Second peeve, the option to choose LILO and not Grub was gone, i easily fixed this by getting a copy of LILO from Rawhide and making a lilo.conf file from scratch for /etc…
Third peeve, no xmms-mp3 plugin for xmms-1.2.8, not found anywhere on the net as of this post, the one for xmms-1.2.7 wont work in xmms-1.2.8. i gor around this by installing mplayer which can play more multimedia file formats anyway so no real loss…
other than those three peeves i have no problems…
xfce4 that was built for Redhat-9 runs just fine in Fedora Core-1 i did not install or use Gnome or KDE so i can not say anything good or bad about them…
Mono won’t compile on Fedora Core 1?
Strange I just compiled it directly from CVS.
Make sure you install all the development tools you need for compiling mono.
Sounds like Eugenia had a torrid time with Fedora Core 1 – with my 2.0Ghz P4 with an Nvidia card, I had no problems at all 🙂
Some things I did different to Eugenia:
* I updated to mozilla 1.5 (can’t understand why 1.4.1 was shipped with Fedora Core 1) very easily – just downloaded the official RPM from http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/yum/SeaMonkey/releas…
* I searched for Fedora Core Flash RPM (no double quotes) on Google and the second link returned took me to:
http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/macromedia/site_ucsc.html
which had a nice downloadable RPM. It has a dependency on compat-libstdc++-7.3-2.96.118.i386.rpm though, so I had to install that from the FC1 CDs (that should really be installed as part of any FC1 install !).
* I downloaded the Sun Java 1.4.2_02 SDK (big !) and JRE from http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html (you have to run a shell script to unpack an RPM, which then install).
The only “nasty” with Java is that to get it enabled with Mozilla 1.5, you’ve got to put a crazily-obscure soft-link in (not surprising that Eugenia didn’t work this one out):
ln -s /usr/java/j2re1.4.2_02/plugin/i386/ns610-gcc32/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/mozilla-1.5/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so
* I then downloaded the xine RPMs (following the instructions) from here:
http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/xine/
and DVDs were playing pretty soon after that (I run them from an icon with the command “xine –auto-play=f –auto-scan dvd –deinterlace”).
* Opera 7.21 was then downloaded from http://www.opera.com/ – no problems with the RPM (I hate its default layout – it’s ludicrously cluttered and takes ages to get it “slimmed down”).
* abiword 2.0.1 RPMs for Fedora Core worked fine from http://www.abisource.com/download/ though be wary that extra dictionary (“abispell”) RPMs from Sourceforge install into the old /usr/share/AbiSuite tree from abiword 1.X – you have to copy them into /usr/share/AbiSuite-2.0’s equivalent directory.
* Good old Nvidia drivers from http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_1.0-4496.html worked, but they’re not RPMs, so quite fiddly to install (you’ve got to set something like IGNORE_CC_MISMATCH=1 before you run it, otherwise they complain, plus it’s poor the installer doesn’t auto-hack your XF86Config for you).
* As a final treat, I added in the Really Slick Screensavers from http://www.gurulabs.com/downloads.html (where you can also get xmms 1.2.8 RPM with MP3 support compiled in, yes, the ones Eugenia moaned and groaned about).
Sort of makes Eugenia look a bit of a newbie really doesn’t it?
I must admit though, this is all from previous RH 7.2, 8.0 or 9 experiences – if I was starting from scratch, it might take me a few more hours to sort it out.
> The only “nasty” with Java is that to get it enabled with Mozilla 1.5, you’ve got to put a crazily-obscure soft-link in (not surprising that Eugenia didn’t work this one out):
I HAVE DONE this. Please do not get conclusion about me without knowning what I have done and what not.
I’d give the review a 10! It It has length, width and depth. Many other reviews cover only installation. And the author knows the subject. That helps. Hopefully something good will come out of this review not putting the bad stuff under the rug. The review mentions 10-15 commonly-installed popular proprietary applications. I’d like to know what these are if someone would care to list them.
Fedora isn’t perfect but its an excellent start.
I think that you just hit the nail on the head. Your statement would be very valid if this was indeed a distro just starting out. But, the reality is that the distro is quite old and should be mature, only the name is new. Fedora Core 1 would have been Red Hat 9.x or Red Hat 10 if Red Hat hadn’t decided to abandon support.
With a fairly long lineage of good distributions (Red Hat 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, 9.0) it is not unreasonable to expect the next generation release to improve upon the feature set and quality of its predecessors. But, it appears that Fedora Core 1 is actually a step back in features and quality from Red Hat 9. We can only hope that a scathing review, such as this one, will catch the eye of the Fedora developers and that they will exert greater effort on quality control before the next release.
Everyone is watching Fedora closely. Red Hat was the most popular distribution and, now that they have abandoned support, people are looking to see if Fedora truely fills the gap or if they must look to some other distribution. So far, Fedora doesn’t really appear like it will fill the gap left by Red Hat. The next critical mile post for Fedora will be ongoing support. If they fail with on going support, people will certainly look for a new “most popular distro”.
“reiserfs has been there since 8, you just have to type
“linux enable reiserfs”
at the boot prompt during initial install. No one ever seems to mention that.”
No one mention this because it’s not enough.
1) Why do we have to type in this secret parameter? The choise should be just there
2) This doesn’t work with LVM
3) This doesn’t work with upgrade
> The only “nasty” with Java is that to get it enabled with Mozilla 1.5, you’ve got to put a crazily-obscure soft-link in (not surprising that Eugenia didn’t work this one out):
I HAVE DONE this. Please do not get conclusion about me without knowning what I have done and what not.
But did you do
ln -s
/usr/java/j2re1.4.2_02/plugin/i386/ns610-gcc32/libjavaplugin_oji.so
or
ln -s
/usr/java/j2re1.4.2_02/plugin/i386/ns610/libjavaplugin_oji.so
The former has a “-gcc32” in it.
I agree, the liva.something yum repository has Mplayer, but when use ‘yum install mplayer’ it tells you it is missing a package for dependancy. Thats pretty funny. Why bother putting mplayer in the repository without all the packages needed for it?
Probably what has happened is that the RPM from Livna is expecting an RPM that hasn’t yet migrated from Fedora Core 0.95 to Fedora Core 1.
My first impression of FC 1 were also negative. I had the same problem at my first install as the reviewer: X would die a few seconds after Anaconda would load. I had to reboot and then begin the installation once again. Everthing was smooth after that. Maybe the FC team can look into this …
Other than that keep up the good work FC!
Even if you were not satisfied with Fedora I don’t understand why you don’t mention other Linux distros like SUSE LINUX instead of writing that people will stick with Win, Mac or FreeBSD.
I mean Fedora/Redhat is not the only Linux distribution out there.
Greetings
Felix
1. Eugenia, you are breaking your own rules:
– no hardware description
2. Samba may not work but VMWare is emulation mode that may or may not work. If Fedora can connect with other smb shares but not with xp on VMWare then it is the least priority. Run tcpdump and other diagnostic tools to see what is going on. Otherwise it maybe your faulf (misconfiguration)
3. This is first pre-release of fedora I would not compare it to gold OS X or xp or final version of any OS in fact. So hold on your horses and wait for final release of fedora and then you can compare it to xp, os x or whatever. Right now it is even not least informative.
4. problems with installation of packages (gaim) only prove that their (fedora) database still needs work. By the way – this proof of the superiority of FBSD packaging system – it will take care of all dependencies needed.
the sound did not work on my laptop using fedora because I has the speakers on mute before I installed the system.
“No one mention this because it’s not enough.
1) Why do we have to type in this secret parameter? The choise should be just there
2) This doesn’t work with LVM
3) This doesn’t work with upgrade”
I use reiserfs with LVM. Why they don’t mention it, no idea.
gimme a break,
this is a solid review and Eugenia is explaing the experiences she has had with it and from what she is saying i tend to agree,
rpm package management is broken, why ? this is the ‘final’ release ? isn’t it ? what was test 1,2,3 all about then ?
i don’t see ‘test’ anywhere on this release as was clearly visible on the test 1,2 and 3 releases.
if you mean final as in ‘the final release of fedora’ then who knows what that is ? fedora 10 perhaps
cheers
anyweb
p.s. good review Eugenia and well written and researched, don’t mind the whiners.
.. now where they introduce SUSE to the US of A big time, you need not return to good ole Europe in order to get a working system.. 😉
Hi, I wanted to tell you my experience with Fedora.
I am no geek. I simply used what comes with the distro (plus what’s missing….)
I used RH9, took my Toshiba TECRA 8200 and fresh installed FC-1. After that I have gone to Macromedia site and downloaded the shockwave/flash plugin for Linux. When prompted I told the installer to install in /usr/lib/mozilla-1.4.1/plugins and all went fine. With Java (read Mozilla 1.4.1 release notes) I knew that only gcc32 java plugin would work. For Mp3 I got what I needed from freshrpms.net and so I did for ogle (DVD Player) and Xine+totem. 15 minutes after the end of installation I had a system to fulfill my needs : Office, Browsing, Internet Content (not MS …) It was a Personal Desktop install. The only disappointment was when I discovered the bug in redhat-config-packages. Filed the bug on bugzilla and 4 hours later I had the patch.
Easy, fast, polished. I am happy with that, it seemed even a little bit more speedy and smooth.
Good work.
I have to say that if a lot of people had a different experience with Fedora, this means that not everything is in the right place and more work needs to be done in the core libraries install and hardware detection phase. We know that XP installs fine on (almost) every hardware but I would keep OS X out of the game, because installs on hardware it was written for. Apple is good, but developing software for a hardware you build is a sort of cheating… On the other side, it’s very hard to make an OS that should install on Intel/AMD with a lot of different chipsets/pci cards around…. Even Windows often has troubles with that.
– Regards
– Pasha
My experience with FC1 has been a lot different: I like it a lot better than RH9. OpenOffice starts a lot quicker (thanks to prelinking in Fedora), printer configuration is improved, and most programs seems to launch a bit faster.
And contrary to your experience, multimedia support is a lot *better* on my poor 500MHz laptop. I haven’t been able to make XMMS, Totem or Rhythmbox skip yet. Not once.
And installing flash can be quite easy, if you’re using apt: “apt-get install flash-plugin” should do the trick (apt from fedora.us is preconfigured with a flash repository).
If Fedora is aiming for the desktop market, then anything that requires a user to locate, download and install software is he kiss of death. If it isn’t installed by default,
it needs to be as simple as this: “Yum install new-app-that-I-Want”. (without telling the user to tweak yum.conf to pull from some non-fedora site.)
“My disappointment started when I tried to upgrade Gaim 0.71 to 0.72.
…
So I decided to download the source of Gaim and compile it myself.
…
This is a simple user scenario that should have not happened, no matter whose fault really is. Now think what a newbie user coming from Windows-land would think about this whole –literally– usability fiasco.”
I don’t picture most users coming from a Windows background would care that much about what version Gaim is, or attempt to update it (with RPMs for another distro at that). Talking about about dependancies and compiling threw any kind of plausibility in the arguement had out the window.
The changes between any version of Gaim are, for the most part, incremental and 0.71 alone is more than aduquate for MSN. I don’t see 0.71 to 0.72 being a nessecity unless you’re following a bug real closely.
I think that the imperfections in Fedora are a feature, not a bug. RedHat has said (prominently) that Fedora is to be a *community* project, not just a fancier version of rawhide.
RedHat *doesn’t care* what you want. They, if they are involved at all, are participating as just a few more individuals in a large project. Fedora is a *fork*. It is not “RedHat’s new desktop distro.” RedHat is shaping no goals, laying no groundwork, determining no future for Fedora; it is up to the community. It is what we decide to make of it.
The favor that RedHat has done us is this: that now the delineation between proprietary add-on tweaks and true, core OSS project development is just that much clearer. It’s $179. If you want the proprietary tweaks and services, spend the cash. Buy RHEL 3 WS. No one’s stopping you.
If you don’t, then if you want things from a community project, you need to pay the traditional price: participate in the community.
So, in brief, stop whinging and contribute.
Joe
>RedHat *doesn’t care* what you want.
If Red Hat does not care and Fedora’s community members do not care about the quality of the project, sorry mate, but I don’t care either. SOMEONE has to care, otherwise they don’t deserve all this publicity and much more it doesn’t deserve the # of downloads it had so far.
The project has to become better, no matter who is steering the wheel. Currently, it is a dissapointment, fork or not, gift from Red Hat or not. It just doesn’t work as it should.
I do agree.
We should keep in mind what’s out-of-the-box (or out-of-the-distro) and review that, no need to go find the xx.yy release. Let me add that for the same reason it’s time to stop complaining about mp3 unsupport in RH product lines: we know that. I have been through many forums and it seems to be not legal in US, so far so good. I do not know why VLC or Ogle or Xine are not there but maybe it is for the same reason (anyone can confirm that ?). EU distros comes with multimedia maybe no legal problems here.
Ogg is good enough if you plan to store your music on your hard drive. Sure is not enough to carry your music with you … Anybody knows about an ogg player ?
– bye
– Pasha
The installation itself went without any problems, but as a desktop os Fedora is very limited, and it is too bothersome to make those bits and pieces run, which used to work quite well in RH9. Apart from the small evolutionary changes, which are ok enough, Fedora offers little new compared with its predecessor. I therefore re-installed RH9 and will keep it there, for some time still..
Fedora is running fine, all hardware has been grabbed and setup fine. I was even able to install the Radeon 9500 PRO drivers from ATI without a hitch. Yum has been a blessing with the new repositories since I’ve been able to grab all kinds of new software without dependency hell.
All I can say is that if your having problems submit your reports to Fedora’s bugzilla.
Todu:
You’re not supposed to compare Linux distributions with Windows or OS X
I disagree. Fedora is being touted as an operating system that can stand on its own merits. If it is to be considered an alternative to using Windows or OSX, then it must be compared with Windows or OSX.
It’d be like saying that GEM Desktop is fantastic compared to GEM Desktop, yet giving no comparison. Anybody that wants a GUI would quickly determine themselves that Windows et al offer a better interface than GEM!
Benabdellah:
Redhat/Fedora developpers/mainteners should concentrate more on FIXING BUGS and stabilizing the system than exhibit each time a new release of Gnome desktop with new features (but with a lot of bugs).
That’s not part of the focus of Fedora. Quite plainly, they intend to stay closer to the bleeding edge, being aimed at the desktop user (ultimately). For cleaner versions, you’re supposed to look at RHEL.
That’s why they [RedHat] are not focussing on backporting features into Fedora Core, as they have done historically.
I, for one, actually welcome this. I hate being on versions of Mozilla that are 3 or 4 versions old, or behind the eight-ball with OOo too.
Re: Flash.
Strange to hear that people had trouble; I used the library straight from Macromedia and it worked fine! Of course, I satisfied the dependencies for compat-libstdc++ by hand first. Why? Because at that stage, the RPM GUI wasn’t working (as per Eugenia’s review.)
Speaking of which, Eugenia, the RPM GUI bug was fixed pretty quickly. Again, I installed it by hand, but I would hope that it has hit a yum or apt repository by now.
I assume that the reason you didn’t apply the patch, and thus complained about an already fixed bug, is because you were reviewing it from an average user’s point of view. A good distro that is touting itself for a simple point-and-click administration/configuration should not require dropping to a CLI, I agree.
(But you’ll have to tear my CLI from my cold, dead claws!)
Cheapskate:
First peeve, the option to check thru individual packages was gone from the install, but the grouped package selection seemed a little more improved…
I agree with the peeve (no tick for individual packages) and raise you an extra peeve:
There is no way of informing the system what CD images you have. To make this worse, there is no way of knowing what CD’s that you are going to need until you commit to the install.
Australian broadband is behind that of the “free world” in that we have to shell out for our traffic. I didn’t want to use up a whole monthly allowance in the first week, so I only sucked down the first couple of ISOs. (And some kind person decided that the kernel should be on CD 3!)
It took a lot of experimentation to find which groups wanted the third CD and leave them out!
“Easy, just pick some ‘bare minimums’ and install the other groups after you reboot,” you say? Tried it; at that stage, the RPM GUI bug was still there.
(I can’t agree on the LILO peeve, though. I really couldn’t give a toss about a bootloader that only pops up for 10 seconds whenever I reboot. I don’t reboot often enough – and a bootloader is a bootloader ultimately!)
Third peeve, no xmms-mp3 plugin for xmms-1.2.8
Try the livna repositories. They worked for me.
[email protected]:
Sounds like Eugenia had a torrid time with Fedora Core 1 – with my 2.0Ghz P4 with an Nvidia card, I had no problems at all 🙂
Yeah, that’s all well and good. I can (and did) install most applications by hand too. (I like control!) New users that are coming to Fedora Core from another OS aren’t usually up to this steep learning curve, however. It can be a turnoff.
Anyweb:
rpm package management is broken, why ? this is the ‘final’ release ? isn’t it ? what was test 1,2,3 all about then ?
Bloody oath! There is no way that this glaring error should have made it into the Final release.
My take:
I’m disappointed in not being able to get my Promise ATA RAID going easily. Promise’s support is abysmal (they do have native support for RH 8 & 9 which makes life easy!), so ultimately the only option is the opensource ATARAID.
I would like to see Anaconda support installs using ATARAID by default. More and more systems are coming with Promise & HighPoint on-board (mine is an expansion card) and it would be great to use these for a cheap RAID 1.
Big gripe:
I’m beyond irritated at redhat-config-printer which has been shoved down my throat!
I have a postscript 3 printer, which has a fantastic vendor supplied PPD. redhat-config-printer does not support adding third party PPD’s. This I wouldn’t normally care about…
What I do care about is when said application screws around with my CUPS configuration when it should leave it alone!
I setup my printer using CUPS web interface (localhost:631) with the vendor PPD and things went beautifully – much like all of my experiences with a properly setup CUPS configuration.
Then Gnome’s PrintManager fired up redhat-config-printer & it got a hold of my new setups. It changed the “driver” which resulted in all of my printer output being turned into postscript garbage. (This is a known issue, introduced in RH9 – and the easiest way around it is “rpm -e redhat-config-printer redhat-config-printer-gui –nodeps” as Fedora claims that it is a vital component.)
At the end of the day, I have found Fedora to be smoother & quicker than the RH8 system I upgraded from. Besides the above two gripes, I have had flawless operation – far superior to the previous RH8 system. I have yet to have an application crash, even on the workstations (running LTSP).
Of course, I’m using it to run a business network, so multimedia nonsense is not only an issue, but a waste of space for me, sorry.
I LOVE FLASH ANIMATIONS.
I LOVE MOVIES.
I LOVE MP3s.
How could they release this BUGGY thing?
You are a little confused my friend. What you listed are features that are not found in this release for good reasons. I can assure you that these things are added easily (maybe not the flash in the future though). Buggy would mean unstable or unfinished. Fedora is not unstable, I have not had one single crash on the R1 release. And as far as hardware bugs have yet to see any on three different boxes I’ve installed Fedora on.
The question you should be asking is:
“How could they release something so feature incomplete?”
Eugenia,
Sorry to disagree but I think that you are taking all too at heart. Ok, some bugs in final release shouldn’t be there, especially in a critical component like the package manager, but maybe this is the price you pay for a free Red Hat community project.
Remember :
“It’s unwise to pay too much. . . but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money. . . that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot. It can’t be done. If you deal with lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better.” — JOHN RUSKIN
I respect Linux and open source community, but I know the risks. It’s better that paying $$$ for XP and have all this security holes in return. Maybe Fedora is not ready for prime time on everyone’s desktop, but neither RH9 or RH8 were. They lack multimedia, browsing the internet with all its contents (Media Player 9…) and if you look at Slackware or Debian, well newbies would be scared. People want thing easy. I do no need to be a geek to install an OS on my PC I want to use it. Fedora, Mandrake and SUSE did good on that. SUSE wants money for the distro, and you find more things there. Mandrake almost had a financial problem, RH simply decided to move away from a no margin business. Unless the hardware vendors do not write drivers for their hardware Linux will always be as it is today. This maybe is the real problem. The older your pc is, the better. Linux install flawlessy there.
– Regards
– Paolo
I have been reading review after review for Fedora ending each with an uncertainty of what my actual experience would be with the distro. Only now do I feel I can paint an accurate picture of how the distro would perform as my desktop operating system. I would just like to say that it a breath of fresh air reading your non-bias reviews. You seem to call it pretty much like it is. I have been reading osnews for quite a while and there is still no other web site on the net that is as non-bias in it’s information, good or bad.
I think it would be more fair to test it out without VMware, unless vmware will cause absolutely zero problems.
Also, why is every comment getting reported?
They are not reported, it is just that the forum is locked atm, and so everything gets screening before going live.
>I think it would be more fair to test it out without VMware
Sorry, but you should not attribute the failures of Red Hat’s Samba to VMWare, especially when OSX, Windows, Slackware and Lindows work fine with it. It is just that the patches Red Hat uses for samba, create a new bug that can not distinguish which IP address is which when a machine has two ethernet devices. It is a bug and it should be fixed.
If Redhat isn’t interested in the desktop why bother?
Yes… Why?
Why should I use a distribution that hates videos, games, browser plug-ins?
<p>Well so far I’m very impressed. And once you setup yum to point to the “legal questionable” repositories you get all of the audio/video tools installed and updated automatically … including resolving all the dependencies. This is much better that the old up2date.
<p>I see this as a great opportunity for custom repositories. Even Nvidia could set up their drivers in a yum repository so as to ease installation of their proprietary drivers. This may be the future of Desktop Linux.
<p>Next step would be to build a GUI to ease adding repositories to your system or maybe a Mozilla plugin.
<p>Also very impressive is Fedroa’s use of BitTorrent, http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/, for downloading. Even though I was getting the ISO at the end of last week, a day after release, BitTorrent kept my connection pinned at 300kBytes/sec. Downloaded all three ISO in a couple of hours.
Eugenia,
The “you” in that quote was absolutely not aimed at you. Your reviews and editorial stance are valuable and appreciated. I liked your review, and have liked most of your previous reviews. They are (or should be, if the project participants are listening) of great value to the projects you review. Of course, some projects are run by idiots. (IMNSHO, XFree86.)
The “you” (darned English ambiguity) in that quote was aimed at the collective group of respondents who were misunderstanding at least one of the purposes of a review like yours: to be a thoughtful and well-considered bug report for the project’s participants. *You* were participating, and the “you” of your quote were not. *They* were whinging.
“Oh no, my free software isn’t perfect without additional effort!” As though perfection was ever a goal of free software, or even possible in our imperfect universe. This was not a movie review, and Fedora is not a detergent.
To them, I say, get over it and file a bug report.
To you, Eugenia, I say thanks, and that I don’t think that I know of a harder-working or more evenhanded editor in all of blog-dom. Thanks for your efforts. May you sell a lot of advertising, and become wildly rich.
Joe
Don’t understand all the fuss. I had my java plugins and macromedia plugins working fine in less than ten minutes just like in RH9.
I simply su – (the – is important…) and start up the flash installer passing it the /usr/lib/mozilla-1.4.1 argument.
For java I use the ControlPanel app to install the plugins as per the instructions provided by sun. No probs there either.
I like Fedora, it does a great job with integrating rpm with apt/yum, gnome with kde, and commercial with community. It is perfect for development: it has the latest stuff, and is nice, easy and fun to use. now I use it in stead of Debian-unstable. I only hope that the apt/yum repositories will get some apps soon, I am getting tired of having to search for the tarballs. Anyway, this is the first redhat-based distribution I like since 5.1!
Well, I just have to agree with Eugenia on that fact, Slackware still owns “THE distro”-title
This kind of crap come and go, Slackware just “is” and always quality releases. Considering the fact that Patrick packages only stable programs to current, I’ve been running half years slack-current now (updated with swaret) without any hassle or problems, always having _newest_ programs with swaret –update && swaret –up-all -a … probably these people who got enough about fedora/mandrake/insertyourrpmdistrohere buginess, should really try wonderful world of slackware and non-modified vanilla packages.
These are the ones I noticed or heard about. Anyways the whole gcc 3.22 and gcc 3.33 issues is lame IMHO. Either make gcc 3.22 the official complier or compile everything for 3.33. You can’t make gcc 3.33 the default compiler and then expect people to be happy when an app won’t compile or compiles but does not work with the default gcc 3.22 compiled kernel.
For those having problems hopefully this link that I have provided will help you guys out. I like the way this distro feels on this old 400 mhz pc but the bugs are really annoying IMHO and I agree with Eugenia opinion about this distro. IMHO I see a lot of potential but it’s covered under some lame bugs and errors.
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=34&threadid=11821…
It’s not very easy to download even with a high speed cable modem. For some reason < http://www.linuxiso.org > doesn’t offer new versions of RH or Mandrake for download.
How about a review of SuSE 9.0 pro ? I don’t see one anywhere on your site, and it’s been out longer than fedora right>?
Redhat always has sucked after 6.x, to me it is the responsibility of a DESKTOP O.S. to include things that any DESKTOP USER would so obviously require. Includes of course, multimedia video and audio. There are FREE and GPL mp3 encoders/decoders, DVD encoders/decoders, etc etc. Yeah no kidding about patents, but in this day and age, as well as the relative CHEAP COST TO LICENSE these things, it is the O.S. Distributor’s OBLIGATION to include these things for a DESKTOP system.
Case in point – when Linux Desktop vendor gets knocked on the head enough to come to it’s senses and realize this, and comes with WORKING and good performing base, then windows will have no chance.
The means are there, so come off your high-horses dillholes (@distros).
.
Well I got Flash working quite happily, I also got loads of other proprietry software working — NVIDIA Graphics drivers, Java, Borland C++BuilderX Personal Edition, Winex.
In terms of multimedia — I have had no problems at all, getting mp3 support was a simples as apt-get install xmms-mp3 from freshrpms.net, in terms of flash, apt-get install compat-libstdc++ and presto flash just worked. What I don’t understand is why a user takes makes things hard for themselves, there are hundreds of repositories out there even since fedora was released a few days ago. Next up using Redhat 9 rpms, I installed the RH9 version of Gimp quite happily (latest dev version). I don’t use samba so I can’t help you there, but using samba in a linux enviroment for me is a load of pants. Next up, at my new job I develop on windows everyday and let me tell you, that I have never had half the problems out of the 6 years that I have been using linux (3 1/2 of which I didn’t use windows) and linux kept chugging along windows kept breaking on me, do you know what its like to deal with a memory leak on windows????? Using .NET is even worse!
Overall I have had few issues with Fedora Core 1, the package-manager is a load of arse, (redhat-config-packages) but it has been fixed, if you had a look at the bug database you would find that there are patches out there, no compiling needed, xine, totem and all the rest installed happily, the only thing I did compile since my installation were a couple drivers (NVIDIA, modem etc) the next bit was rhythm box, I got 0.6.0 working with xine, it rocks, no problems, no lag nothing!
My laptop — perfect aside from an ACPI issue which can be fixed easily enough… (Just can’t be arsed at the moment!)
Overall I think that a lot of users are lazy, spend a lot of time complaining about bugs that they themselves don’t report! Eugina, I love your reviews to bits, this was (forgive me) crap, all it did was run down an effort to create a cool new distro, and besides remember: It is COMMUNITY MAINTAINED and is above all ONLY VERSION 1 regardless of it being based on Redhat Linux, it will have its own set of teething problems and finally: It is not yet designed for home users, I am a hacker, I use it because it offers everything I need to write my software and do my research, and even play a few games
most users can overcome their problems by simply going to GOOGLE.COM! 
it works for me, oh and reading the mailing lists.
>I don’t see one anywhere on your site, and it’s been out longer than fedora right?
We have one coming out next week. I am not reviewing as much as I did in the past, so it is up to our contributor editors to submit reviews for publication. I only review OSes that I personally want to use, and not for the sake of reviewing them for OSNews anymore.
>I think Eugenia has a personal problem with RedHat, or the community driven Fedora project
No, I have absolutely no problems with any communities or Red Hat. This is a really wrong conclusion you got there. The point of the matter is/was: Fedora is buggy and not ready. There is no way around it, but fix it.
As I can see in the comments there’s to many people advocating for Fedora. Stuffs like:
“It’s not their fault”
“Flash/Java/etc is not installed by default for a good reason…”
The fact is if Fedora wants to be a Desktop distro, it must to do like the Japaneses: Copy what is good and change it to make it better.
They must to see what Mac, Win, Lindows and Xandros are doing.
It’s do boring when a home user wants to do some basics and he can’t. Doesn’t matters where’s the problem. To home and corporate users it must work without to know how to install a package or consult FAQS…
I’m a Linux advocate but I think that a community Linux distro only will be ready for the desktop when it stops to think like a geek/hacker and starts to think like a USER.
Out of curiosity why was KDE just barely touched on this review? KDE is one of the leading desktop environments for Linux and it comes installed with jsut about any distribution of Linux by default, including in Fedora.
It seems that this review has not even provided a screenshot of a KDE desktop so we can see if there are any changes in look and feel since Redhat 9. The only screenshot that I can find which is devoted to KDE is one that shows it crash.
I think that you prefer GNOME to KDE. Sorry if I got the wrong impression, but you are much more active in the GNOME community, writting reviews of Glabels, Gtodo, Rubrica 2, pointing our more issues with GNOME’s UI and how to fix it than for KDE’s and in contests prefering the entry use GNOME technology just makes me think so. However, keep in mind while both desktops are good, KDE has significant mindshare too and many of your readers are interested in it and want to see more coverage of it, espcially since Fedora is no longer a Redhat product.
Does anybody have some screenshots of KDE on Fedora?
PS: I softened up my post, please don’t mod this down, I have been polite, and patient.
>Out of curiosity why was KDE just barely touched on this review?
Mostly because Fedora’s main DE is Gnome and all the tools are written wiht GTK+. KDE is there, but it has a second role, we like it or not.
>I think that you prefer GNOME to KDE.
Yes, I do like Gnome’s simplicity better than KDE’s bloatware. However, I have said many times, that the development framework of QT is way better and more advanced than GTK+’s. I like KDE for its dev environment and I like Gnome for its simpler and well thought-out usability. GTK+ sucks.
>but you are much more active in the GNOME community, writting reviews of Glabels, Gtodo, Rubrica 2
For a KDE user, you are reading way too much gnomedesktop.org 😉
>I softened up my post, please don’t mod this down,
Indeed. And this is why you got a reply now. Be like that in the future and you will get a reply. Be like you were earlier and you will get mod downs. It’s how the game plays.
So far Fedora is giving me what I wanted..A bleeding edge distro that has a lot of packages. Some may forget the fact that this merger has only happened recently and things are still being figured out and adjusted… Fedora has had a good starting platform to reinvent itself and I see good things coming from them.
> Re: Flash.
> Strange to hear that people had trouble;
Yeah – compat-libstdc++ really should have been installed by default.
> Australian broadband is behind that of the “free world” in
> that we have to shell out for our traffic.
Only the poor souls that can’t get ADSL. I switched from Telstra cable to ADSL to escape their restrictive (and expensive!) plans.
> I didn’t want to use up a whole monthly allowance in the
> first week, so I only sucked down the first couple of
> ISOs.
You could have downloaded it for free from your ISPs download site. (files.bigpond.com)
> My take:
> I’m disappointed in not being able to get my Promise ATA
> RAID going easily. Promise’s support is abysmal …
They have just recently started helping kernel developers improve the opensource drivers. About time.
> At the end of the day, I have found Fedora to be smoother > & quicker than the RH8 system I upgraded from.
It’s definitely an improvement overall.
I could care less about Fedora. But after hearing about another Anaconda crash, it makes me wonder why the $*#% Debian is going to include it when there’s nothing wrong with its own installer.
My experience on Fedora was completely different. Fast and clean install, and everything worked out of the box except for some of the proprietary stuff. I had to do the most minimal configuration ever – no need to download apt or wireless drivers.
The samba browsing thing – I didn’t have any trouble at all, except that I needed to enable the Samba service from RedHat’s configuration util.
OK, I had to grab xine and xmms-mp3, which was hardly the most horrible thing ever. I _did not_ have any trouble installing Flash, so I’m not quite sure what Eugenia’s problem was. Haven’t seen a single RPM lock, and I’ve been using it since RC3. No MP3 skipping, either.
The fact that you’re using VMware is also problematic because most people ARE NOT. I know, VMware is great, but you’re adding another layer for things to go wrong. A review is supposed to be representative of an average user, and the average user is NOT a VMware virtual machine.
I don’t know what you did, Eugenia, but it must have been different than what I did. There’s no denying the release was put on a little too fast, though, and that there was not appropriate QA.
I guess the other problem with the review is that it felt like you glossed over all the good parts of it. The installer is absolutely fantastic, and has features no one else has, such as install using VNC. There’s pre-linking. There’s new versions of everything. You can drop in a 2.6 kernel.
That said, I firmly believe that the situation will improve, and that Fedora Core 2 will be much better. Your rating of 7.16 is a touch low, but not too far off – it’s actually only a .5 difference from SuSE 8.2, which you seemed to rather like.
Give the user community some time to improve – it’s rapidly progressing with a merger of four major RPM repositories.
-Erwos
Fedora is buggy but it is the only distro that works with my dell gx270 sata drive. So I install and fix what I can and continue to be happy that I can use linux on my new box.
“Red Hat’s Linux is still one of my favorite distributions because of one main reason: compatibility with Linux software”
Uhuh. If there’s one thing I hate about other Linux distros, it’s that sometimes you just can’t run Linux software on them. Uh-huhhhhh.
Trying to install RH8/RH9 packages in Fedora, and then blaming Red Hat for poor QA? That takes the cake.
C’mon. This is version 1.0 of a new release — and anyone with even journeyman knowledge of Red Hat can overcome the problems that stymied this reviewer… excepting of course the ones she made for herself!
Gaim CVS builds perfectly on my FC1.0 system, and Flash installed perfectly… of course, I didn’t try to install from RPMs. And if you can’t build an RPM from a src.rpm, what exactly are you doing running 1.0 of ANYTHING?
Comparing Linux distros to Windows or OSX is perfectly fair, but let’s just remember you get what you pay for. If you want something that runs perfectly out of the box, take a look at RHEL-WS. It’s cheaper than Windows or OSX.
The dominant operating system in the world comes with neither DVD player, or movie codecs besides Microsoft’s own like wmv. It does not come with mp3 encoding capabilities either.
The mp3 playing software you need is so small to be next to insignificant to download. gstreamer-mad is about 17KB and mad, libmad are less than 500KB. DVD playing software you have to get, just like you do in Windows.
Why should Redhat pay for a license when you will not pay for the distro. You want free softwae, you get free software. The mp3 decoder is NOT free software. If consumer pressurized the owners of mp3 enough, there could be a royalty free license to develop decoders at least. Which is non-revocable. If redhat were to become a big enough target, and they shipped this software, Thomson would be on them in a heartbeat. How quickly have we forgotten about the SCO situation.
I did the workstation install of FC1 and then installed Flash on Sunday (9 Nov) and it worked fine. The installer worked exactly as it had with RH9 for me. In fact, I have Flash open in another tab right now. What is the problem other people had?
enough said…
Did it work before you added a ton of foregn packages to the RPM tree and broke the libaries?
Despite the review it still sounds good. Way to go Fedora.
Don’t be silly please. The OS was running natively, not via VMWare. You mistunderstood it seems.