So, there it is, the highly anticipated second release of Fedora Core. Again, I wanted to wait for a few days for things to calm down,and again, I couldn’t resist updating my production system within two days after the release. Well, I’m just a Linux junkie, i guess…
Before we get this thing rolling, I would like to give you a little background about me: I am 28 years old, I live in the lovely capital of Austria, Vienna, and I am studying history here (yeah, for real…). I earn my money being a self-employed IT-consultant, mostly doing small companies with Windows desktops, Windows or Linux servers, removing viruses, updating websites, all the small stuff. I have been into Linux for about three years now, and I have been an avid user of Red Hat Linux ever since. That dates back to 2002, when I really wanted to like Mandrake, but every release of Red Hat seemed to be a bit less buggy and more stable. Until Red Hat 7.3, I used the KDE desktop, with 8.0 I switched to Gnome (and that’s pretty much the reason why I use Fedora today).
I have installed Fedora Core 2 on two computers here: one is an old PIII, 256 RAM, IDE drives, some old 4MB GPU, PS2 keyboard and mouse, really nothing special. The second computer is my – much beloved – Compaq Presario 2815 that i bought two years ago: PIV mobile, 512 RAM, 30 GB IDE drive, ATI Radeon 7500 GPU, USB mouse. Both systems have already seen everything from Red Hat 7.3 – Fedora Core 1 (and Mandrake 8.x to 9.x), and I can’t recall any installation problems ever.
Before the installations, I was a little frightened of the 2.6 kernel hardware support, and, since both systems dualboot Windows XP, I was thrilled if I get caught by the infamous dual-boot-bug. I was not that frightened, because, after all, this is not a Fedora-specific bug, but a kernel2.6 bug, and it also happens with Suse 9.1 and Mandrake 10. So I thought, it can’t be THAT bad, these systems have been out for some time. Also, I don’t have any firewire stuff, so I didn’t mind that firewire was disabled in FC2.
I didn’t really care about the old PIII, it’s just there for backup-reasons. I had the backup-hd removed during installation, and I knew I could set it up again easily enough. Installation on this computer went without a problem, I just deleted the old Linux partitions, let the installer create new ones behind the NTFS-partition, selected personal desktop and that was about it. I was able to boot Windows, I was able to boot Linux, and I got a chance to see if immediate upgrading of my notebook would be worth it. Of course, since my notebook featured a rock-solid, finetuned Fecora Core 1 installation, immediate upgrading would have NOT been necessary. Oh well… I chucked CD1 in, deleted my everyday-I-love-it-and-can’t-live-without-it system and went for the new thing…
Again, the installation went without a hitch. And I was lucky. No bug again. (Not that I’d really need the Windows XP installation. I boot it about once a month and the only thing I do is upgrade my virus-definitions. Duh.). The whole installation process took about 20-30 minutes, I just installed the default “Personal Desktop”, around 2GB of software. All hardware was detected properly (I don’t know if the winmodem is set up correctly but I couldn’t care less).
Ok, on to my regulars: first of all, I had to edit fstab to mount my data drive (a FAT32 partition that sits between my Windows and Linux installs, you probably guessed it). Routine for me, still someone at Red Hat should do something about this. This should be automatic. You can do it during the partitioning of the installation, but that’s also not too intuitive 🙂
Ok, Mozilla – check. Openoffice – check. Gimp – check. Gaim – check. Rhythmbox – check. Let’s add some of my day-to-day software: I opened the package installation tool, and installed the samba packages, K3B, Mozilla Mail, XMMS (which is surprisingly not installed by default) and gFTP (same here). I set up Mozilla Mail, copied my mail directory back and checked mail (I am sitting behind a DHCP’ed router, so internet connection was there without any further configuring). Surfing the web, checking mail, and my Windows install was not trashed. Good stuff 🙂
Now, I had to get back those multimedia capabilities we all need and that are not included because of patent issues. I edited my yum.conf to connect to freshrpms.net and installed xmms-mp3, gstreamer-plugins-mp3 (mp3 support for rhythmbox), and totem. No problem again, but here, I’d like to make a suggestion to the Red Hat Team: while I completely understand that they don’t include mp3-support, ntfs, dvd-support, the java runtime environment and flash browser-plugin, it would be real nice to make this a bit easier for the average Fedora (and sometime in the future, maybe Red Hat Desktop!) consumer. What about having a little message box during firstboot, that says something like “fellow costumer. we can’t include mp3-support yadda yadda for patent issues. do you want to add these capabilities to your system?” checkbox says (checked) “no, i’d like to keep my system free in every way” second checkbox (unchecked) says “yes,i want to sign a pact with the devil and add these capabilites to my system” (well, maybe not exactly that wording but i guess you got it…). Then the system would set up yum.conf (or is it another file for up2date?- dunno) accordingly. I guess that would solve this issue. The isos would stay free of this proprietary stuff, and the users would have no more issues with multimedia stuff.
I gotta admit, I really am a Gnome-fanboy. KDE just isn’t for me. I like the simplicity. I like the consistency. I like the new file-dialog, heck, I even like the spatial nautilus. Fedora has a link to a navigational nautilus, so some users won’t even notice that the file-manager philosophy has changed. I see spatial browsing more as an additional capability. Sometimes it is really helpful. The trick – for me – is to put some shortcuts to the folders I use regularly on the desktop. Often, I really want to put a file from location A to location B. Works like a charm then…
The multimedia stuff is all good. XMMS is solid as ever, Rhythmbox plain rocks. I have all my (around) 130 CDs ripped to my computer. I did that in Windows sometime ago, because it was just easier. I simply can’t use grip, this program always was a usability nightmare. Sound-Juicer, on the other hand, is exactly what I want, but it still misses the one and only important feature, i.e. setting quality. Please, include this as soon as possible. It’s just not fair to have a brillant, nice-looking program that is – unusable. With this release, I switched from mplayer to totem. Gnome consistency issues (though i give kudos to the mplayer-team, they have a really nice program!). Totem is finally “there”, plays back all my video files, VCDs, DVDs without an issue. Ok, I admit, I do possess exactly 1 (one) DVD, but that one worked 🙂
I added bluefish for web development (again via freshrpms yum repository). I have yet to install java and flash. But I think I will abstain from flash. Nowadays, all I ever see are flash ads. I can’t wait for mozilla to include the flash-blocker… On another note, my usb flash stick finally *just works*. I plugged it in and there was, after a short time, an additional entry in the “Computer” list. Installing my Printer (a Laserjet 1100) via a JetDirect printserver was as easy as ever.
Now that I have used Fedora for three days, I am really quite happy with it. The whole system feels snappy, all my regular programs work. The whole system feels a bit more refined again. The menu layout is way better than before. Openoffice has beautiful icons now and german is installed as the default language (very important, i constantly had gripes with the spell-checker in Fedora Core 1). Still, I have some issues with Fedora Core 2: the Gaim tray icon doesn’t work for me, I have to investigate why. I encountered a pretty bad bug when I opened a pdf-file with gnome pdf that I had just created with Openoffice’s pdf-export (see screenshot). Nautilus sometimes behaves weird when I try to open a folder with the pictureview-style. Some less annoying issues: Mozilla was originally english, even though I had selected “german” during installation. Not a real problem, at least Openoffice is now german out-of-the-iso. Rhythmbox no longer has a “quality”-column, but that’s a temporary issue, it will probably be included again with the 1.0 series of Rhythmbox. Gnome still lacks a decent CD-burning application. K3B is a nice addition but I would prefer a Gnome-app (see Totem). The Red Hat configuration tools don’t use the new file dialog, but that’s probably (hopefully) solved in Fedora Core 3 (still, this is a consistency issue – did I mention that consistency is important for me?). On the whole, I gotta say that I follow the Gnome development very closely and I am more and more satisfied with Gnome. Red Hat 8 was pretty much unusable, Red Hat 9 just gave a glimpse of what Gnome could become someday. Still, Red Hat 9 was the system that finally made me switch from Windows to Linux as my day-to-day system. Fedora Core 1 was a refined Red Hat 9, Gnome 2.4 was once again a very nice improvement. Fedora Core 2 now features the new kernel, Gnome 2.6 and the whole package really starts to fly. Overall, I am pretty much impressed.
About the author:
Christian Paratschek is a 28 year old self-employed sysadmin, who has used Linux for about three years. He tries hard not to be a Red Hat zealot, as well as he tries hard not to be a Gnome zealot (and he fails consistently).
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
I liked this review, thank you.
Ray
> (or is it another file for up2date?- dunno)
yes it is
http://www.fedora.us/wiki/FedoraHOWTO
Using up2date with fedora.us
The up2date versions distributed with Fedora Core have the ability to use yum and apt repositories. This means that up2date can be used to download and install fedora.us packages simply by adding the appropriate channels to the configuration file /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources as described in Fedora Sources.
Great review btw
I’m kind of tired of those reviews who just complain about how everything is buggy, bloated or not as they wanted it to be.
This is the type of reviews want to read.
I’m running fedora Core 1, but going to switch to Fedora Core 2 when I get my cd-r’s, and I have never encountered the bugs people have complained about.
The author does a great job of putting FC2 in perspective. However, many people have spent many hours trying to recover from the dual-boot bug, for which there appears to be no patch yet.
“However, many people have spent many hours trying to recover from the dual-boot bug, for which there appears to be no patch yet.”
The fix is here, but beware, it doesn’t take hours to accomplish:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-May/msg02143.h…
I’m running FC1 and probably won’t go to FC2 until the bugs are fixed in a dual boot system. I already have GNOME 2.6 and every update now that FC2 already has. Good review and it won’t stop me from trying FC2 once I can get a dedicated, NON-Windows machine.
The author does a great job of putting FC2 in perspective. However, many people have spent many hours trying to recover from the dual-boot bug, for which there appears to be no patch yet
I fixed that is 30 minutes by installing Mandrake 10.
Seriously, I really like fedora core2 and so far find it quite stable.
a good review.
however, I did not like fc2, can’t put my finger on it, as it install flawlessly, and after restarting it was nice and fast
I usually like gnome over kde too, but there is just something about fc2 that I did not like. I removed it after a few hours, and went back to manny 10
I might give it a go again at the weekend, to at least try and find out why I don’t like it
Thanks for the review. I used both Core 1 and 2 and I think Core 2 is a lot better. It also compares well with other distributions, I think.
I installed SuSE 9.1 recently for my wife and it had all kinds of problems, especially in foreign languages, and was unusable. I had to try something else, so I installed Core 2 for her and it has worked flawlessly so far. I’ve been very impressed.
The author said there’s a bug that he believes is in the 2.6 kernel since he had trouble dual booting with WinXP. He said he experienced some dual boot bug with Fedora and SuSE Linux when trying to create a dual boot configuration. I have never experienced what he’s talking about with either the 2.4 kernel or the new 2.6 kernel and I have installed successfully SuSE on various hardware configurations that included WinXP for some users. Possibly the issue he is having is either due to a corrupted Windows NTFS or FAT partition, HDD platter failure or the settings in his BIOS for the HDD.
Myself, i have had nothing but problems. I’m an LFS’er myself, but since I was setting up a reference system for a classroom, I figured that a commercial distro would be the best bet. Unfortunately I was VERY wrong.
The platform : 2.0 GHz P4, Intel Desktop Board D845GVSR , 1 GB RAM, 80 Gig drive (completely dedicated)
The result: DOG SLOW desktop environments.
The system itself booted very fast, and the GDM login screen seemed to come up without a hitch. Logged in as a user created during install. Up pops the Gnome splash screen. 2 Minutes and 50 seconds later I finally get a desktop. Hmmm. Lets open a terminal and see what’s running that could slow it down. 39 Seconds later, I get my terminal window. I know GTK can be slow, but really…
So I install the XFCE RPMS from the disk, and log out. i restart X, and login to XFCE. Everything seems to be fine. Seems pretty snappy.
Log out, restart X. Log in to Gnome. @ min 37 seconds later, I have a desktop. Guess it’s not GTK. I open OOo. Seems to open reasonably fast enough ~10 seconds. Open a gnome terminal. 34 Seconds later a terminal window. Hrrm. Weird.
Log out, restart X. log back in. Hrmmm. Same deal. So, I decide to try KDE 3. Not a fanboy, but what the hell. Install the RPMS. Log out, restart X again just in case. Log in to KDE. It’s slow too. It’s snappier than Gnome, but still a lot slower than it should be on this box.
Tried everything, from adjusting X parameters to disabling various processes that were running, but not 100% necessary. Still slow. Reinstalled, with as minimal a configuration as possible, with the exception of X and Gnome. If you can believe it, it now ran even slower.
And that is my experience. Now on to my next linux install on these systems for me.
1. Put in live CD
2. Partition the HDD
3. Download and unpack sources
4. chroot
5. ./configure && make && make install
6. wait
7. Everything works exactly the way it should have after the install of fedora.
8. Use Fedora Core 2 CDs as shiny coasters and/or small frisbees.
and that’s my .02
why don’t you write about the bugs? try to mount a smb-share, it doesn’t work! try to reboot sometimes when you have worked with yum, up2date and have manual mounted partitions. Then you can realize (if you look at the screen) that Fedora doesn’t unmount / partition correctly ( / busy)
That’s annoying, that’s alpha quality!
And you really tested the programs? Then look in the option menu and move the tabs in rhythmbox, so you can find a “quality” tab!
Again at Slackware-Current. It works.
i had the same problem yesterday when preparing some documents for my employer.
i dont know what the underlying problem is, but changing the font from what i liked (Luxi Mono) to Monospace did the trick.
this was in gentoo, so its either gpdf or openoffice 1.1.1-ximian doing the badness
hi folks!
i am quite thrilled that my first review got on osnews AND that most of the posters also liked it. thank you again, this means a lot to me 🙂
some clarifications:
i have solved some of the issues i had:
gaim tray icon works, i just didn’t know that it is part of gnome notification panel” that i usually turn off instantly after install because i use yum and not up2date. so that works without a hitch
the “boot bug” is not really a bug in kernel2.6, but in windows xp. there’s a quite easy fix here: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-May/msg02143.h…
the picture-vire bug only happens on the fat-partition. everything ok on ext3. i guess i really have to kill the windows partition on my laptop soon 🙂
adding mp3-capabilities to rhyhtmbox is now accomplished by yum’ing “gstreamer-plugins-extra-audio” (last week, it was still gstreamer-plugins-mp3)
regards,
christian
He mentions his usb-flash device “just working”. Is GNOME now more integrated with hotplug+usb-mass-storage, or is something else going on?
I’d really like to know as I’m still using RH8.0 and am looking at upgrading to FC2 pretty soon. Having my usb devices “just work” would be entirely awesome for me, but I’ve not really been a GNOME or KDE user (usually fluxbox). So, what’s going on here?
Any definitive howtos, FAQs, articles to get wg311 without trying a zillion sugestions? Not a flame, but you’d think that with the benefits of pnp, non-exotic hardware detection and installation would be a top priority for a major desktop-oriented distribution. (Maybe I’m wrong and wireless detection is not a top priority, must-have feature. In all fairness, MDK 10-com. doesn’t detect it either.)
Assuming this quote, found on http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/
“NdisWrapper
Some vendors refuse to release specs or even a binary linux-driver for their WLAN cards. This project tries to solve this problem by making a kernel module that can load Ndis (windows network driver API) drivers. We’re not trying to implement all of the Ndis API but rather implement the functions needed to get these unsupported cards working.”
is true, does it imply that major linux distros will not have out-of-the-box wireless configuration (read – requires reverse-engineering hacks) as long as vendors refuse to release specs?
Linux loading NDIS drivers sounds like someone is asking for trouble.
So in conclusion, are there any DEFINITIVE instructions how to detect, configure, and use a wg311v2 on either FC2 or MDK10c, using kernel 2.6.x, or do I have to implement a hardware solution. The hardware solutions is idiot-proof, and works as expected/advertised (encryption etc) but it costs money.
And you really tested the programs? Then look in the option menu and move the tabs in rhythmbox, so you can find a “quality” tab!
sorry, there is no quality tab in rhythmbox 0.8 see their changelog: http://www.rhythmbox.org/news.html
quote for 0.80: Remove quality column for now, it doesn’t work [Colin Walters]
believe me, i checked that before i put it in my review. i also don’t experince your samba-bugs.
regards,
christian
I haven’t been able to get FC2 to load under Virtual PC. If I try to use the graphical installer it crashes and reboots the virtual PC. If I use the text mode installer it works until linux tries to boot. I get to the root password before X starts up and then the virtual PC crashes. Anyone been able to get this to work with Virtual PC?
“haven’t been able to get FC2 to load under Virtual PC. If I try to use the graphical installer it crashes and reboots the virtual PC. If I use the text mode installer it works until linux tries to boot. I get to the root password before X starts up and then the virtual PC crashes. Anyone been able to get this to work with Virtual PC?
”
hey. read the release notes. it answers your question
What release notes? Where the hell are they?
I have the same problem with gpdf. Use xpdf instead. It worked without problems for me.
“What about having a little message box during firstboot, that says something like “fellow costumer. we can’t include mp3-support yadda yadda for patent issues. do you want to add these capabilities to your system?””
linking to patented stuff without a license is a violation of dmca in the US. this is why the redhat site doesnt talk about rpm.livna.org or document how to get around it. you have to read the fedora multimedia howto from tldp.org for esr to understand
What release notes? Where the hell are they?
Hmmm… perusing the fedora website, clicking on “Docs,” let’s see … wait, what’s this? The link says “Release Notes”! Golly!
As I am more of a kde guy I would be interested in the experiences people had with fedora core2 and kde.
Are there any problems or is kde supported as well as obviously gnome is?
Oh, and great to see that there are other 28 years old linux geeks out there that study history. ;-D
Release notes are here: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/2/i386/os/R…
The only mention of help for those running FC2 in virtualisations is the vdso=0 parameter mentioned in relation to VMWare. Whether this will help VirtualPC too I don’t know.
“:Whether this will help VirtualPC too I don’t know.”
it will. basically people should either go to the website or google for release notes instead of asking in here. its very very important to read that before installing the distro.
bugzilla.redhat.com
– 123895
– 122258
– 123869
This is frustrating, not nearly any home user/production quality
From a home user view, I wish that Bluetooth & DVB-TV works too
So I can’t agree with *any* Fedora review, that doesn’t go into the deep. You can’t review a distribution only by 1-3 days. You can’t find anything special. I thought Fedora is great after bug 1, 2 or 3 because I found a workaround
I really spend a lot of hours *testing* Fedora 2 since FC2-test2 Version
Because I wished I have a system that I can install on my friends PC’s to have a minimum “support” on these PC’s (yum is REALLY very good)
Sounds like your hostname may not be correct in /etc/hosts
just a guess though…
Ray
During Fedora Core 2 Installation (at least the graphical version), there’s a button on the lower left corner that’s clearly marked “View Release Notes” (or similar). The first CD also has it in text in different languages on the root directory called (unsurprisingly) RELEASE-NOTES-en.
Lots of important stuff in there.
Anybody got any reason why Fedora doesn’t have MPlayer or Audacity in the distribution discs??? I really like these programs over some of the choices in Core 2. Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe these programs are GPL’d so with the room on the fourth disc, why not add them. I know you can get these via apt and yum and the main sites, but I haven’t found a repository yet that has them updated for core 2 and previous versions give dependancy hell (via “rpm -ihv *.rpm” … or via “up2date”).
no, yum is not really very good. yum is really very much slow and outclassed by apt. yum is written in python, while apt is written in either c or c++. this isnt really a failing of yum except that interpreted languages take a severe performance hit compared to compiled ones. apt has also been around quite a bit longer and is exceptionally fast at figuring out package dependancy compared to yum.
when apt updates with the apt repositories only a single zipped file is needed to download for each site, it contains all the package information needed to solve dependancy problems. when yum updates with repositories, it has to download a header file for every single package availible on that site.
apt is orders of magnitude faster at resolving dependancies and at downloading updated package list information.
just to prove what a POS yum is i did an experiment one day. i ran yum to install some package, then i turned around and downloaded an rpm for apt, installed it, updated it, and installed another package (Which i knew to be larger and require more dependancies) before yum was done downloading all the package headers. when it finished i removed it from the system. i am not alone in this, all of the members of my local LUG feel the exact same way once someone shows them apt for redhat/fedora after they have been using yum.
i honestly feel that the only reasons yum is the default is because redhat seems to have an overall attitude of if it is written in python it must be good, and that anything that comes from the debian project must be avoided. apt is simply better in all respects with only one exception.
apt doesnt deal with 64bit and 32bit lib packages being installed on the same machine (ie you cant install 64bit glibc along side 32bit glibc, apt views both as just glibc for now). this issue only affects amd64 users and i am certain it will be fixed relatively soon.
Don’t know about audacity but I’ve seen several repositories with FC2 mplayer rpms. Check freshrpms and Dag’s repositories. There are others too.
not sure on audacity, never used it, never installed it that i can recall.
as for mplayer (as well as mp3 support for xmms and other media players) redhat doesnt ship with them because the actual legality of it is cloudy. anything for which the legality of it is the least bit cloudy, redhat errs on the side of caution.
i would just use an apt repository with the software you want. rpm.livna.org has the packages that used to be associated with fedora.us before redhat and fedora joined forces (and redhat made them get rid of any packages with a cloudy legality). also there is freshrpms.net (but i have heard the livna rpms are of a higher quality. i cannot really comment as i have not had any issues with either)
my pc is a 1GHz AMD with 512MB RAM and i tried out Suse 9.0 a month or so ago and also found it unbearably slow. debian though is pretty fast. testing also has all the up to date software. maybe you should check it out.
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/
Custom Installation (Minimal): 900MB
Uh, no thanks…
“Anybody got any reason why Fedora doesn’t have MPlayer or Audacity in the distribution discs??? I really like these programs over some of the choices in Core 2. Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe these programs are GPL’d so with the room on the fourth disc, why not add them.”
gpl is copyright. it doesnt invalidate a patent for the software unless the patent owner permits it be used under gpl code.
mp3 and dvd codes have patent right in them. no amount of free implementations can work around that.
http://home.gagme.com/greg/linux/fc2-tips.php
rpm.livna.org had the older rpms. you can rebuild them if there is no mplayer rpm for fedora core 2
I got burned by the whole dual-boot bug. I reacted stupidly (panicked), and made it a lot worse. IF YOU HIT THIS BUG, GO READ THE FORUMS BEFORE TRYING *ANYTHING* TO FIX IT. I’ve also heard about some people having problems with 3rd party bootloaders.
Back to the story…
I thought it was just a bootloader issue, so I reinstalled my old Linux (Libranet). I still couldn’t boot Win2K, so I then tried doing a Win2K repair. That didn’t work, so I tried reinstalling Win2K (including reformatting the HD). Still didn’t work. Tried doing FIXMBR from the Win2K repair console. Still didn’t work. After doing some more research, I tried reloading FC2 and following their fix instructions. It still doesn’t load. At this point I’m going to try using a drive utility to completely wipe the drive and then try installing Win2K. Hopefully that will fix it. If not, I guess I’m buying a new HD.
From what I’ve read, the problem is that FC2 corrupts the geometry table of the drive. Linux doesn’t use this table, but Windows (2K and XP) does. Do SUSE and Mandrake have this bug? Funny that I haven’t heard about it there. Either way, I can’t understand why they chose to release with this bug. It was known beforehand and they decided to release anyway. Sure sounds like a blocker to me.
I know you are a troll but you can get fedora minimal – another distro if you are really concerned or remove stuff after installation
For mp3 it is legal. DMCA covers encryption circumvention. MP3 is widely and wildly available and there are no encryption mechanisms. If they had MP3 support unlicensed in the distro it would be copyright violation. Thus, they link you to it and you can be the one violating the copyright and not them.
DVD is another story since it has CSS encryption. You won’t see Fedora or any other distro linking to a website that will fix your DVD playback. Why? because thats not copyright violation its encryption circumvention and they will get owned via the DMCA.
what about “switch user” ? Is there any simple solution for it ?
One thing puzzles me – if this guy likes consistency so much, why he prefers Gnome over KDE? 🙂
There’s something like that on Mandrake. Not sure what its called, or if its even available for Fedora.
I upgraded my old laptop (P2 300Mhz, 128megs) from rh9 to fc2. Well, actually I reinstalled since upgrade crashed repeatedly. I tried using cds and network. I dont’ remember what the problem with cds was but network install crashed without any apparent reason and filled the screen with random letters (wtf?).
So I reinstalled. That worked better. But using gnome is just painful, I mean, even more painful than before. Opening a gnome-terminal takes ages. Switching between two gnome terminals also takes ages but while I wait I can at least watch the screen redraw.
I mean, wtf are they doing? Things get slower with each new release. I remember doing actual work on a P1 100Mhz 48 meg laptop running rh5 and it worked just fine, except that back in those days netscape’s (4.something) table rendering wasn’t too good, but otherwise it was just fine. Admittedly I wasn’t using gnome on it but WindowMaker (which I always seem to go back to after trying something else). All these new and shiny DEs are just too slow for me, even on a fast machine with a lot of memory.
Another idiotic thing is doing the rpm transactions in one huge step instead of many small ones in the installer. The result is that you need to have a lot of memory or your machine will be swapping swapping swapping swapping swapping…
And wtf is the thing with stuffing all the oss found on freshmeat and sourceforge into the distro? The minimum install without X is ~500M. I have linux running on my ipaq with networking, ssh client&server etc and it’s around 8M.
I’m glad others are complaining about these things too. There’s been quite a bit of discussion on fc mailing lists lately.
FH: I’ve experienced similar slow problems on startup in the past when I had IP address problems. If I remember correctly it was when I could not resolve my IP address to a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) or vice versa. Make sure your hostname and IP address can both resolve to each other. GNOME (and perhaps KDE as indicated by your comments) does not handle IP address problems very gracefully and the side-effect seems to be that everything slows down to a crawl.
I think this will happen on every distribution but you may have noticed it on FC2 I don’t think the installer asks about network configuration anymore and you probably run a greater risk of starting with a bad configuration as a result.
Yum slowness has nothing to do with either Python or dependency analysis, I believe. IIRC, Yum delegates all dependency analysis to RPM directly through an API. Thus, if the dependency analysis is slow, it’s RPM’s fault, not Yum’s. This also seems like a better way to do the dependency analysis, IMHO, as you’re using the same algorithm as RPM itself, not trying to create a parallel algorithm that may conflict at some point.
Now, Yum is slow, but I think that’s the fault of downloading all the RPM headers as separate files rather than as a whole new single header file, wildly compressed, like the way Apt does it. This also points out that Python isn’t your problem either. The problem is that Yum makes sooooooo many more individual network requests for what are generally small files. Whether it’s Python or C driving that process makes virtually no difference. It’s all about network bandwidth, latency, server side busyness (that’s the biggest problem I have seen, frankly, but the multiple requests compound it).
Anyway, I use Yum, but I do wish they would correct the performance of it. Those changes are larger algorithmic changes, not simply rewriting it in C.
I have not yet installed Fedora 2, but had recently the same problem with Debian Sid (with 2.6.5). Like you, couldn’t boot XP, couldn’t reinstall XP, tried FIXMBR, used fdisk & cfdisk to format my HD and create partitions and still failed to reinstall XP. The next thing I did was a base Debian Sid install, execute the command dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 to wipe the mbr which finally cured the mess.
>>Sounds like your hostname may not be correct in /etc/hosts<<
I thought that might be it too, so I commented out the FC generated one, and put the stuff in there manually.
It still doesn’t explain why XFCE worked fine, and Gnome and KDE were as slow as hell.
This page should give you what you need
http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/wlan/install.php
…overall I agree. I did, however, seem to have deeper issues with my hardware during installation. I have a WDC 120GB hard drive and when I accept the defaults for a workstation (or any install I believe) and allow the configurator to do the partitioning… inevitably I get a BAD error that one of the files cannot be written (disk too full or hardware failure).
I manually partitioned the disk serving up 5GB chunks to the various system directories, and leaving the remainder for /home. This worked fine (since nothing installs to /home).
It happened with both ext3 and reiserfs. Seemed MUCH worse (happened earlier) with reiserfs. Now, however, my machine is up and running with a bunch of smaller reiserfs partitions.
Once it was up and running I tweaked a few things, added some basic multimedia software and away I went. Works like a charm (except for that darned gst-thumbnail consuming CPU cycles issue)!
I really like FC2: it looks great, feels good and runs smoothly! It won’t replace my beloved BeOS and my Mac with OS X yet, but I am keeping it around and following the future development of FC for sure!!!
Mike
PS – sorry I do not have more info about WHY I was getting the failures.
I’ve noticed that for some reason Gnome speed was much more dependant on the hostname being correct than other window managers.
The other thing I noticed is if I shut off IPv6, it decreased boot time as well.
Ray
if yum is using rpm to do the dependancy calculations then that means the situation is worse than i thought. apt does the calculations within itself and it is insanely fast. doing the equivalent through yum is sometimes 10-100 times slower when using a cached copy of the header info for both (which apt does automatically, but yum wants you specify it on the command line).
until you stated it, i had always heard that yum does the dependency calculations within itself. given how insanely slow it is at accomplishing this task, i am more inclined to believe that this is the case, otherwise redhat’s own tools would feel quite a bit slower and this slowness would also affect apt as apt uses the rpm libs to do the final install of the packages.
for now i will conceed the point about apt being done in c/c++ because someone just told me he thought apt was written in perl (and if so, then that really says alot about how poorly the algorithms in yum were thought out, but after i make this post i am running off to check on all of this information i am not 100% sure about)
one thing that is definately for certain, the design considerations for yum are not for users in the real world. apt will always download and install the packages faster than yum because yum is written for people on low latency high bandwidth connections. for everyone else who isnt sitting 2 hops away from a repository, apt blows yum out of the water. apt-get update && apt-get install is way faster on broadband than yum install, let alone the speed comparason on dialup.
right now apt is by far the better tool, and it is written the “redhat way” by using redhat’s rpmlib. like i stated before, the only arguements that i can see against it are that it isnt done in python (which seems to be the language of choice for EVERYTHING redhat is doing nowdays beyond kernel development) and that it stems from the debian project. there is no other real arguement that should be keeping redhat from shipping with both (i personally think they should ship both and drop up2date as it has always been buggy in gui mode, although i have never had any problems with it from the command line)
so my post in short: yum is made for networks with a local yum repository (which is why its author doesnt think it can do any wrong, as he is at duke university and runs duke’s yum repository) and machines with beefy cpus (so that the dependency calculations finish sometime the same day). apt is made for everyone else who wants to just upgrade or install new packages. up2date gui mode is just a complete joke (i have never had any single peice of software just plain lock up on as many different machines as this utility).
Last night I finished downlaoding the Fedora 2 Core CDs and proceeded to install Fedora on my 2nd hdd (newly created partions. Before was an NTFS drive. Was removed under windows, Admin Tools).
/hda
/hda1 –>Windows XP 10Gb
/hda2 –>Games, Docs etc–>30Gb
/hdb
/hdb1 –>/boot 76Mb
/hdb2 –>swap 512Mb
/hdb3 –>/ 4Gb
/hdb4 –>/home 1.2Gb
Fedora installed fine but when I tried to boot into Windows from Grub (hd0,0 norootverify chainloader+1) Nothing would happen. After some searching on the net I found the easiest way to comabt this was to go into my BIOS (AWARD) and change /hda to boot using LBA instead of Auto. I now can boot into Windows and Fedora.
Hopefully this will be usefull to anyon out there that had similar troubles
Pretty good review and I’m surprised by the comments, they actually have to do with the good/bad of fedora, usually distro reviews have comments like this:
I tried <distro> but <enter my distro here> is way better! try it instead!
Admittedly there were hacks and bugs involved in getting FC1 to see your iPod (rescan-scsi-bus.sh), but at least it could be made to work.
From what I can tell Firewaire has been removed from FC2 completely.
I love Fedora and appreciate their work, but this is not release quality.
er, it was a kernel issue, not a Fedora issue. And it will be fixed with an updated kernel very soon.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-May/msg00908….
Works with all distributions.
Firewire will be back soon :
http://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/fedora/core/updates/testing/2/i386/
try kernel-2.6.6-1.383 and check if it do the trick.
Hmmm. Even though I love the Bluecurve look of FC, I just can’t get used to any other distro than Mandrake. I don’t know what it is, MDK just feels more “finished” to me. And I’m not talking about looks, but about inner workings. Bluecurve is better than Galaxy, I think.
There are tiny irritations in FC as well; I find the menu cluttered and almost unusable (really, FC developers, take a look at the ‘new’ MDK K Menu, it’s an improvement). And another thing is that some file extensions don’t seem to be linked to an application. Sorry that I cannot give any examples, I tried Test 2 some weeks ago, cannot recall exactly.
Still, I’m confident the FC team will overcome these difficulties one day, and they already have the good looks!
Nice review, liked reading it.
About the new Gnome file-dialog, ok it is nice and the bookmark feature is splended.
But speaking about consistency wouldn’t it be very consistent with other file-dialogs to include a text-field in which one can type the path?
Or is it just me and am I missing something here.
I liked the review.
Fecora its a great distro, After using for several months FC1 I installed FC2 2 days ago and now I have mp3 support, Java, flash, DVD, mpeg, in only 2 days, awesome, and I can mount ntfs partitions.
BTW, anybody know something about the possibility to write to ntfs partitions?
In the file dialog press CTRL+L.
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/fedora2.html
This BUG Is NOT in Mandrake 10 Official. Stop spreading bullshit.
http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7959#c27
This bug has NOT been fixed in Mandrake 10 Official.
http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7232#c3 (2004-05-13)
still valid
Those of you worried about the bug you can install without being bit by it.
http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/
It requires you to write down the CHF in rescue mode
then reboot and install with this:
Example: linux hda=14593,255,63
So not only if you already installed you can fix it with sfdisk but now you can avoid it entirely with an install option.
This is a nasty bug that is a pain in the ass but I wish this stuff was in the release notes.
maybe i write a follow-up in like, 2 months. then i can probably go a lot more in-depth. i admit, it was early for a review, but hey, everybody’s waiting for info about the distro right now that it is still fresh.
thx for all comments!
christian
Thanks. Now I’ll have give it a try. Checked the local compusa, and the netgear 54G bridge costs more than than a 108G router. Bastards! Why can’t they implement wireless linking/chaining/bridging on wireless routers?
Thanks again for the link!
I ran into the partition table issues, and decided to restore from backups and wait until I had a better understanding of what was happening. Then I read the LWN article, which explained what I had been seeing much better than much of the misguided advice that I had seen elsewhere.
Today, I wrote down CHS values that fdisk reported under my current Linux setup. Then I booted up the Fedora Core 2 CDROM and used ‘linux hda=15017,255,63’ to install. Everything worked. No complaints from either FC2 or my previous Linux setup. So I’d like to confirm that this technique does indeed work.
Now I can get on with testing and (maybe) migration.
I really prefer Mplayer as my video player, but I think it would be good if these repositories, compiled support for the extra codecs that we need.
I wish I could just drop the win32codecs, quicktime, real codecs in a directory and they would work. But they don’t, you have to compile Mplayer yourself which I haven’t yet done.
BTW about Totem, I wish that could give you the option of using Mplayer as the backend. I often set the options -framedrop -vop pp when playing a video because my PC is underpowered. I have not been able to find such features in XINE, and therefore XINE based playback is unusable to me.
To the author of the article, I think XMMS is not installed by default because Rhythmbox is instead.
Also for anyone who use KDE with FC2, has the Bluecurve KDE theme been updated in FC2?
“Hmmm. Even though I love the Bluecurve look of FC, I just can’t get used to any other distro than Mandrake. I don’t know what it is, MDK just feels more “finished” to me.”
That theme is available…
And a version with crystal icons can be found here:
http://crystalgnome.org/
“Also for anyone who use KDE with FC2, has the Bluecurve KDE theme been updated in FC2?”
yes. obsolutely
Hi I just got done installing fedora core 2 and the red hat updater works for me. I dont know what people are having trouble with? Right out of the box redhat update was able to connect yum to a channel.
Also yum update stalled on me and I have not been able to do yum update it hangs when dowloading kdelib-devel?
Nice review.
Fedora Core 1 is good and so is 2.
It was the Linux that allowed me to trash the “other platform” for good.
Troy
This is my first time posting because I am very disappointed by this review. It’s really superficial. The thing that really hurts is that nobody can get a good feel for a distro after a couple days. Call it an installation review if you want / first impressions if you must.
One thing that especially bothered me was the reviewer says he only loads windows to update the virus definitions. Does he think the virus program is running in the background in windows when he’s running linux?! There’s no point in updating that crap if you’re not using it. And if he is using it than he shouldn’t say he isn’t.
Let’s get more substantive here people. At least Eugenia’s take on the gui consistency and widgets is unique. (I also tend to agree with her a lot). This is just not a very good review and a waste of time for Osnews readers.
good review !
I think the author has some software to use in Windows XP sometimes. And virus update for WinXP is to make sure it won’t break during his work in it. Blaster virus has been able to break every copy of WinXP that is connected to Internet.
I think Crystal is eye-candy, but you can’t work many hours in such a festival environment 🙂 Bluecurve has more a calm and “corporate” feel.
Xenix wrote:
>I’m running fedora Core 1, but going to switch to Fedora Core >2 when I get my cd-r’s, and I have never encountered the bugs >people have complained about.
I installed FC2 yesterday *without* burning any cd-roms, just download the cd-iso:s to a partition you won’t format when installing (has to be ext2/ext3), mount the first iso on loopback, extract vmlinuz & initrd.img, add them to lilo/grub and reboot choosing that entry in lilo/grub – it starts installing ;-).
Worked nice for me…
I installed FC2 recently, but next day after installation Gnome (Nautilus) put stroken pencils over all my desktop icons, claiming they are not writable (they are!).
This bug also affects newly created users, when the machine gets shutdown and booted again (not just rebooted).
The only thing I did was changing fstab, some yum updates and installs.
Anyone has an idea what could go wrong?
You can’t install NVIDIA Graphics drivers version 5336 without recompiling the kernel.
> You can’t install NVIDIA Graphics drivers version 5336 without recompiling the kernel.
Is that because of the 4k stacks?
Yep, NVIDIA said they will release a new driver to fix this.
It is not first time NVIDIA have a driver issue with Red Hat based kernel. 4k stacks issue just expose a bad programming. Beside, there is a new kernel for Fedora Core 2 with 8k stack enabled on this website :http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/wlan/full/downloads-fc2-kernel….
Hopefully in the future NVIDIA driver will be able to detect if kernel runs either with 4k or 8k stacks.