Read the Fedora review article at LinuxBeginner.org.
A Week with Fedora Core 1
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Read the Fedora review article at LinuxBeginner.org.
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
It’s been none to bust, and you end up loosing all your menus, this might be a Gnome bug not a Fedora one.
that’s known to bust not none to bust.
I tried it, hated it, put sommething else on my system.
And well, to me its great. I see alot of people “booing” it but it is still very RH. Hopefully the next release will not be so RH, but that doesn’t bother me so much.
At the end of the day, FC 1 does all I need and does it as expected. Can’t asl for much more
Wasn’t the package manager broken in the default install? That sounds like a pretty big QA issue to me.
And kernel hangs on my dual Percision 420 Dell.
But I’ve had Fedora Core 1 installed since the release and I’ve used it exclusively since then. Most distros I dump after a month or so but so far Fedora is the only one where I’ve been able to get everything up and working (even though it might take a little effort, I’m by no means a linux guru) and nothing has broken since then.
I’m excited for the next release with kernel 2.6
I downloaed and burned the three CD’s and had no installation problems. I too chose the Personal Desktop. The only issue I have is that it’s pretty slow at this point on a pretty fast Athlon XP system with lots of RAM. But, it is just the first release.
The author wanted to install some of his favorite apps that aren’t on there. When I do sort of a test install like this, I like to try and use what’s been installed to see if it meets my needs and the probable needs of others who would choose a Personal Desktop install. I found everything I really needed already there.
As for OO.o being there, I see the author’s point, but there is no real alternative…there is no OO.o Lite 🙂 Apple has AppleWorks and on Windows you can get a really nice suite like GoBe 3.04. But, with Linux distros, there is nothing like that I know of.
Except for the speed at this point, I like Fedora Core. I always have loved the BlueCurve theme, so that helps in my case too.
I did a successful Red Hat Update, but it took forever 🙂
From all the reviews I’ve been reading, Fedora just sounds very much like alpha-level software. Give it time, I guess. I ran RH9 under a VMWare window and didn’t like it at all… this from a Redhat fan who learned Linux from Redhat 5.2 however many years ago. It tries too hard to be a corporate desktop, Bluecurve is a mess, IMO, and the speed is horrible. (A lot of people have told me, yea, but you ran it in VMWare. Except that I have VMWare tools installed and my Xandros VMWare virtual machine simply flies compared to Redhat). For now, Libranet w/ Debian sid upgrades has been cracking away fine for me. The only small nightmare I had was when I upgraded totem to the sid version and found it not starting up. Debian package maintainer told me it was because of my nonstandard xlibs package (pre1v1), so I upgraded to experimental debs for xlibs, and totem works fine. The other small problem was relatively inconsequential (DRI issues with a Radeon 8500, which are universal and have been fixed in the latest drm-trunk debs from Michel Daenzer).
Not too bad. Maybe you Redhat/Fedora people should try on the Debian hat
Why does everyone have to astroturf for their favorite distrobution? I see this on every FreeBSD story, too.
The reviewer should have used ISOs, or got some FC1 CDs off a friend. I have the CDs, and I didn’t have any problems during the setup. None at all.
And I haven’t got any error messages or crashes since, and it has been many weeks now. If people thought RH9 was polished and stable, FC1 is just as impressive. The packages included are 11 months newer than RH9, and just as rock-solid stable.
I dont mind if it is similar to RedHat. RedHat contributes to the Fedora project and vice versa. The redhat-artwork package is different 🙂 These days I use XFce4 (not GNOME or worse, KDE) – so the UI is however I like.
Like RH9, FC1 has XFree86 4.3.0 – something the poor Debian folk might see in a couple of years.
I installed from CD, and had no problems. To make a change from saying what I like about Fedora, here’s what bugged me…
1. No ALSA support as standard.
This is a real oversight. ALSA is mature, stable, supports more sound cards than OSS, and I have not found any OSS apps that will not work with it’s OSS emulation mode. Most other distros include ALSA, so why this strange omission?
2. Apt-get and Synaptic not part of the standard install.
If the combination of these two was the default way of installing software, and they were already set up with a list of repositories, it would solve so many people’s problems. Nobody should ever have to resolve a dependency, and not leading people right away to a simple, reliable, gui based software installation method is just careless.
Why is this not the case? Are people afraid of overloading the servers, so they keep quiet about it?
Looking over the article again, it appears that the two changes I mention would have probably fixed most of the problems ‘robochan’ had.
As far as editing menus go, right-clicking was the *first* thing I did to try to edit a menu entry, but I agree that the options it gives you are confusing and not obvious. I’ve not had any problems with the menus so far.
Since the roadmap states that they will be using 2.6 in Core 2, I would assume they would be using ALSA, unless they want to use the now deprecated OSS drivers.
I’ve used it for 3 months now.
I play mp3, burn cd, Installed Java and flash, I can play DVDs
And I love the Gnome themes.
I’ve been using Fedora for about a week now, and it works great. I do have an issue with not being able to change the menus, but there’s a fix for that somewhere on the net. Otherwise, i have no issues with it. I dont use up2date anymore; just straight Apt. I’ve also been using the latest version of Arjan’s 2.6 kernel (equivalent to about 2.6.1-rc1) and it’s great…it’s even fixed the problem I had with previous 2.6 kernels of having to do “export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4” before using any rpms. Can’t wait for Core 2.
After 2 hours of waiting for the cd’s to do their thing, FC1 seems to do its thing just fine. One just needs to visit http://www.freshrpms.net and get the necessary goodies installed. After that, all seems well. Mplayer sometimes misbahaves but then there’s always Ogle for DVD’s and tvtime for watching stuff on tv. I think as long as you dont go nuts trying to customize it, Fedora Core 1 is just dandy, if not a little slow on some things.
Although it’s a fairly typical of these types of reviews (eg not much meat) I think it’s fairly spot on review of fedora as a desktop distro. He fails to mention much about the redhat-config-* packages which are no replacement for yast, mcc, or even xadminmenu, they are still helpful. He makes a good point about yum it should default to using the cache (especially since fc1 stable isn’t being updated all that often). Of course yum is pretty slow, but oh well. (hey kiddies wanna try apt? Don’t listen to those yum naysayers, rebuilding your rpmdb is something you should know.)
Very very polished distro. With all of the current updates, my machine is rock solid stable. I had it lock up once, but that was with one of the earlier kernels and I believe I may have inadvertently triggered a bug in it that was later fixed.
The omission of ALSA is an annoyance, but it will be in Core 2 like previously mentioned. Performance isn’t bad at all, especially compared to something similar like Mandrake.
Anyone else notice how gorgeous the font rendering on Fedora is? That’s defintely one of my favorite things about it.
All and all I think it’s the best general purpose distro out there. Definitely required the least amount of work to get it setup to something useable. Yum is slow, but only if you always let it update the cache, and definitely better than nothing at all. I haven’t bothered to setup apt-get, it’s not in the default install and yum and up2date work good enough for me.
Anyway, can’t wait for 2.6 and ALSA. Fedora Core 2 should be really excellent.
This is not a shameless plug for Debian, but SID Gnome 2.4 allows menu editing like described and works without a problem.
Anybody else confused that the author wanted to add KMail and clicked his KDE entry? Maybe he thought he was using KDE?
Anyway, i would like to see an “open terminal here” option too in Nautilus. Else i like it perfectly well – not doing to much and still rather fast.
why can’t people who do reviews research? I just don’t get it.
This is why I’ll never do a debian review or suse one cause I’ve never used them and don’t know what a real problem is and what is due to ignorance. _some_ reviews should be geared towards the 1st timers but EVERY one?
Someone who knows fedora should do a review, just once instead of 50 “I’m doing it wrong reviews”. if he would have went to the ‘Unofficial Fedora FAQ’ (type fedora FAQ in google) he would have got a yum config with just about every package there is with multiple mirrors built in, he would have found out about the menu editing issue, he would have had alsa drivers, how to get reiser FS, etc.
A question, for two years now _every_ review of RH boxes have said “mp3 support” when will this end? When redhat includes it and gets sued, or pays $5 million every six months to include it?
That being said a few of his problems are genuine, I don’t like redhat-config-packages (its broke for me in the past) and the terrible default server speed when it fails its looks like a system hang with no “time out” type of errors so some people kill -9 yum sometimes resulting in a broken database.
I read this article and decided to try this and it would not install at all with the graphical installer and after installing with the text mode the system would lock up tighter than a drum. The mouse would work for a few seconds then the system would freeze solid.
“I read this article and decided to try this and it would not install at all with the graphical installer and after installing with the text mode the system would lock up tighter than a drum. The mouse would work for a few seconds then the system would freeze solid.”
Known issue, see Bugzilla. Basically as noted in the Release Notes the driver for higher end radeon cards is *experimental*. Since the most recent version of XFree86 at the time didn’t support the newer cards (such as the 9800 Pro). You have to install in text mode, and then boot the system in single user mode and install the official ATi drivers, then the rest will be fine. Annoyed me too, but I can’t expect RedHat to test and own every single possible video card in a free distribution.
hmmm… Wonder why they just don’t use the standard vesa driver which works with all cards for the install and if they can’t load a reliable driver it should default to VESA or give you the option in the install to use VESA.
Very odd.
for those using fedora, i’ve got 2 nautilus scripts that might be useful to you. one is a “new text document” script to create a blank file almost anywhere. the other is a “open terminal here” script. it used to be for my rh9 setup. but i modified it to work with gnome 2.4’s new variable for the desktop. anyway try it out.
thepoch.cjb.net
I downloaded the ISO’s and performed md5sum on the files in order to see if they downloaded correctly, than used cdrecord to burn them to disk(s). I installed the Fedora Core platform and it works great. It’s very fast on my hardware. OOO writer opens in 3 – 4 seconds and somehow Ximian Evolution opens in 2 seconds (definately an improvement). I applied the Noia icons and installed some new fonts. I was able to get the Java2 runtime working with Epiphany, but I couldn’t get Flash to work. The only area which I found was worse then RH 9.0 was UpToDate. It failed a few times however each time I logged out and back in and restared the update, it continuted from the point where it was last interrupted. Linux update utilities have always been by far superior to MS Windows UpDate and this is the first time where I had any trouble on Linux. At any rate, I can get by with only the default distribution as the base install, than I simply install by source (./configure, make, make install) from that point on, all of the software is on sourceforge.
Fedora Core 1 worked great.
How could he complain of the lack of reiserfs when he chose auto partitioning? Even if Reiserfs was present, you won’t get it as an option when you partition. Duh.
I could quite fairly conclude that he’s just repeating the problems he has heard from someone else.
Also having done lots of FTP, HTTP installs, I doubt that his problem has anything to do with Fedora. Blame the mirror for keeping out of sync packages. Also HTTP installs have worked better for me than FTP.
*****
By Anonymous (IP: —.megared.net.mx) – Posted on 2004-01-05 00:23:58
I’ve used it for 3 months now.
I play mp3, burn cd, Installed Java and flash, I can play DVDs
And I love the Gnome themes.
*****
that’s just lovely.
been doing all that in Redhat 8/9 for over a year.
but FC1 is broken in soo many ways.
even the Freshrpms packages are buggier on FC1.
Well, I installed Fedora soon after release and there were indeed some emberassing problems. Nothing that could have stopped me from using it though and those are all “quick fixes” for an experienced user (or googler).
Not long ago, my father installed Fedora (after not beeing really happy with Gentoo anymore) and usually there are a lot more problems on his computer than on mine. So I was surprised that it worked so well for him, he didn’t seem to have discovered any problems whatsoever. Up2date worked flawless (he liked it much better than the old RHN version, which I’d agree with) and it seems that the available updates fixed most of the graver problems before he coudl stumble above them.
I’m not sure how polished newer versions of Mandrake, SuSE and others are today, but I (we) haven’t any more problems with Fedora than with _any_ other distribution before. Even Red Hat 9 had more annoying bugs for me. Maybe not that user visible, but less trivial to fix.
I installed it yesterday on my old dual PII400, works just fine so far except for the following. No mp3 or dvd support (of course) and a ssh session in a konsole window while running KDE locks up. But ssh works just fine under the gnome desktop. Other than that it seems to work well. The install went fine although the partitioning software is a bit confusing to work with…
I’m still using RH 9 atm… I’ll take a look at Fedora Core 2, when it comes out, but I had a rather disappointing experience with Core 1. It installed flawlessly on my Athalon XP 2200+, and I chose to install KDE (which I prefer over the default GNOME)… I noticed that it was using a old version of bluecurve, some kde utilities like kfind that worked in RH9 didn’t work at all or crashed in Fedora, kmenuedit didn’t save changes, I couldn’t browse samba shares using Konqueror, arts was misconfigured and so noatun wasn’t working at all (not even playing waves).. all of these things worked in RH9 flawlessly.
GNOME is a really bad user interface. That is what I don’t understand about RedHat. KDE is so much better and SHOULD be the default, not GNOME. I’m sure this user would have been much happier if he had installed KDE instead of GNOME.
Well, that was a well thought out argument. Let me see GNOME is bad. KDE is better. How old are you?
I found that FC1 worked pretty well. My only really complaint is the stupid ‘bluecurve’ default theme (especially the icons — Okay, *mainly* the icons).
PS: I don’t find FC1 _that_ slow as everyone states.
System:
PIII – 1.4Ghz ( Tulatin )
896MB RAM
gForce3 Ti