In this article I take a look at Fedora Core 4 Test 2. This review is only intended to preview the change from Fedora Core 3.System used for review
CPU: AMD Athlon XP2500+ Barton
Motherboard: Gigabyte K7 Triton GA-7VM400M-P
Videocard: NVidia Geforce FX 5600XT
Memory: 1GB DDR-RAM
Storage: 120 GB HDD WD + 40 GB HDD Maxtor
Media: built-in sound card, 32X CD burner, 16X DVD-ROM drive, floppy drive, 4 USB ports back and 2 USB port front
Getting Fedora
There are various methods of obtaining Fedora Core: ISO, hard drive and Internet through HTTP, FTP. In this case, we will choose ISO method that involved burning a CD or DVD. Currently, “media check,” which is a program that verifies if the CD/DVD is properly burned or does not have some defective issue is buggy so you should probably skip that step. I would recommended that you try it when the final release is available.
Installation
Anaconda, the graphical installer, has been cleaned up. Language selection has been moved to Package Management. Most of the packages that are no longer on the CD/DVD like XFCE, XMMS and Abiword have been transferred to the Extras repository. Included in this CD are:
GCJ, commonly known as free Java
Java development tools such as Jakarta
Eclipse native-built for Fedora.
Like previous releases, it is possible to change the type of installation: server, workstation, desktop or custom. Of course, once your selection has specified some default settings, you may subsequently customize the installation.
Since Fedora Core 3, LVM (Logical Volume Management) is the default partition with ext3 file system used for /boot path. The advantage of using LVM is its easy expansion size when adding a second hard drive.
First boot
The speed of the boot sequence of Fedora Core 4 Test 2 is a major improvement over Fedora Core 3. Default services such as ISDN and pcmcia won’t boot if the associated hardware is not installed, reducing the boot time. The login screen appears almost instantly after these initial boots.
Desktop environment
GNOME: default theme is Clearlook which uses generic Gnome icons. The old Bluecurve theme is still available. Core 4 is using Gnome version 2.10. The top bar now has Applications, Places for accessing home folder, searching files and Desktop to set preferences and system.
KDE version is 3.4 is also installed. Some features like tooltips are disabled by default (users can active it on Control Panel). The default theme is Bluecurve. Some features like translucency and shadow are disabled by default. Control Panel has a new look.
XFCE, no longer on the Core repository, is available in the Extras repository. Latest version is 4.2.
New Applications:
Open Office 1.89: now split into different packages (Writer, Calc, Impress, Base, Draw). Users no longer have to remove the whole office if they simply want to replace a specific OpenOffice application. OpenOffice now uses GCJ as an alternative of Sun’s Java.
Eclipse: a tool for creating Java applications.
Logical Volume Management: originally from Red Hat Enterprise 4, this application allows you to resize/add/remove LVM partitions. It is currently feature-incomplete.
Evince now replaces ggv as the new pdf reader.
Media
Fedora Core 4 Test uses open source audio/video formats such as ogg, wav. Due to its open source nature, Fedora Core does not include any proprietary formats. Not much change from Fedora Core 3 other than updated versions.
Package Manager
Yum is improved, which is noticeable by its speed. It now matches apt-get for rpm while keeping its advantage by supporting bi-architectural packages. Currently, no GUI is available for yum.
up2date is functional but has some bugs such as a “select all” function that won’t select all packages and forward button disabled. Testers are suggested to use yum instead.
Overall
This test release is a major improvement over Fedora Core 3 in terms of speed. It is stable despite its test status which is a good sign for the final release.
About the author:
Finalzone is a Fedora Core user since its creation. He is actively involved in fedoraforum.org when he continues to help new users.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
Xen in FC4 will be really cool.
RPM dependancies are handled by yum, EXACTLY like dpkg is handled by apt-get.
Fedora is not optimized for i386
There will NEVER be MP3 support, oceans 12, or starwars installed by default.
Yes you can boot from one CD its called “minimal installation”
We know ubunto’s URL.
If you want boot speed improvement disable SElinux, RHN applet and any services you don’t want.
Am I missing anything?
Okay please continue being ontopic from here on out. TY
nice summary; short, to the point. that’s what i like to see. i’ll look forward to the final release.
It didn’t make it into FC4-t2, but there was a recent thread on the FC development list about how to get the login screen started before all services have started:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2005-April/msg00416…
As a tester, I have to say that the improvement was significant and helpful.
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=319&slide=3…
I’ve always been frustrated with Fedora’s boot time, even when nothing extra has been installed. FC2 was the worse, I believe. So is it much faster? If so, I might actually give it another go
I doubt it. But you can articially speedup those boot scripts in less than admirable ways…
search mailing list for ‘early login’ .. all the details are there on how to enable it. its pretty alpha but no doubt will improve before fc4 final is out.
Wow…. great review. Very informative and succinct!
I like how the author doesn’t waste time boring us with tireless, verbose, and useless descriptions… like how many times it took to get a working CD image downloaded…. or dwelling on some absurd error that the reviewer caused in the first place.
mad props to this reviewer. I’d like to see more like this.
Good article, giving a good feeling of what FC4 is going to be. It helps deciding whether to install FC4 (when available), or stay with FC3.
I wish there were more useful reviews such as this one.
I am curious about the speed improvements. Any benchmark or idea of how long it takes comapred to FC3 ?
Rating:8/10
Startup isn’t that bad.. by far I spend most of my startup waiting for my ECC ram to initialize itself, then waiting for my reiserfs partitions to mount. I wish I could switch them to ext3, but there’s no way I’m putting all that data on cds..
I wish there was a way to rate article and authors, that way readers could immediately spot quality contributors (such as that one) or quality sites (such as arstechnica) linked from OSNews.
That’s out of scope though, so feel freek to moderate this comment down…
Thanks for this. I am a dedicated Mac user but I see a Fedora box in my future!
Bill Penishead M.D.
there are a couple of GUI frontends for yum
Yumex
http://linux.rasmil.dk/cms/modules/wfsection/article.php?articleid=…
GYUM
http://fedoranews.org/tchung/gyum/
Lot of java stuff in in default install finally, probably some does not like it but i do.
And eclipse is not just tool for greating java applications.
Good to see FC keeping up there distro and not letting Ubuntu steel the spotlight. Speed improvements are a great improvements that almost everyone will welcome.
Hmm is it me or are there a lot of menu entries missing in KDE in fc4r2? For example Kontrol and Settings entry.
Looks like Khrist has abandoned you.
Hmm is it me or are there a lot of menu entries missing in KDE in fc4r2? For example Kontrol and Settings entry.
————–
these might have been bugs. please file them in bugzilla.redhat.com
To all,
Thank you for the feedback. Glad to hear this review was really helpful and will inspire future reviewers.
Re: GUIs for yum (Yellowdog Updater, Modified)
Both GYUM and Yumex crashed after startup on FC4T2 due to the internal change of yum. Yumex creator is working on that issue with developers’ help. Frontend yum will uses python API.
Hmm is it me or are there a lot of menu entries missing in KDE in fc4r2? For example Kontrol and Settings entry.
What do you mean? I never heard that before. If you means Control Panel, it is there.
Oke i got my missing menu entries back, after yum updating the machine. And hell KDE is starting up FAST
I suggest everyone to try SMART, a new package manager that handles better dependancy problems than APT or YUM.
Plus it manages prorities and have a GUI… and much more.
It also works on other distros, for those who use Debian or Mandrake for example.
Have a look at this tuto (to install it): http://fedoranews.org/blog/?p=573
Frankly, it’s better than YUM or APT and it’s maintained by the guy who made Synaptic and the APT-RPM port for RPM-based distros.
try…
#>up2date -uv –nosig
works everytime. since this is a beta release i_set up2date to not ignore kernel packages
In the typical, every day use of a system, I don’t bang it particularly hard. Though I am a software developer/maintainer/administrator/consultant, on a day to day basis, I probably use an Email client, a Web browser, and a text editor far more than anything else, and some days, that is all that I use. Other times, I do hit the package management system pretty hard because I DO like to TEST a lot of software (testing is my main interest these days rather than heavy development).
Fedora Core 4 Test 2 did a reasonably good job in my personal tests. One oddity that I’ve found in my personal configuration is this: I set up my systems to set their hardware clock to the local time. When I run Libranet, my preferred every day system, it respects my local time and realizes that current local time is set to EDT, Eastern Daylight Savings Time. A few distributions seem to get this backward (in fact, a Libranet Beta test not too long ago got it backward, too). Fedora Core 4 Test 2 messes with the hardware clock and sets to UTC, when in reality it’s local time. The check box in the installation says to check it IF you use UTC. I did NOT check it because I do NOT use UTC, so it screwed up my clock. I found the command line utility hwclock and used it to fix this minor quirk.
All else went surprisingly well, in fact, well enough that I used it as my desktop system for about 12-18 hours, and left it on overnight with no mishaps.
It’s not show time for Fedora Core 4 Test 2, but the fact that it’s already usable for a routine desktop system bodes well for it. The installer is already reasonably clean, there are undoubtedly some bugs out there (as evidenced by the traffic in the fedora-test-list Digest). Nevertheless, I think that Fedora Core 4, when released, is likely to be the best release out there yet.
I think the reviewer did a good job of portraying where things stand, and he reviewed more specifics than what interests me at the moment, but I found a similar experience, overall, a positive one for a test release.