MadPenguin posted a review of FC4 with screenshots.
A quick look at Fedora’s progress toward Core 4
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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So, is the point of this screenshot to show that translucent windows in X is currently just a hack?
http://www.madpenguin.org/images/reviews/fc4t2/gnomedesktop2.png
Maybe in Fedora, and even then only with xcomposite turned off.
You can easily get true transparency with Xorg (>=6.8 for at least semi-stable composite, if I remember correctly) but it seems few binary distros (if any) ship it with composite on.
The author has missed some valuable informations.
The installer, from what I can tell, has not changed for the last few releases of Fedora and I guess there’s really no need.
There is some changes inside Anaconda.
– Langage selection is moved to Add/Remove packages.
– XFCE installation is no longer available
– Inclusion of free java (including Eclipse)
EXT and XFS file systems are working of course. It’s shocking that this isn’t fixed yet, as it’s been an issue for some time, but I must admit that I’m not familiar with the mechanics of it all, but I would think ReiserFS would be high on the priority list since many are using it in production environments now.
The problem has nothing to do with Fedora team. That issue is for these file system developers and SELinux. Also, the author forgot to mention that Fedora Core use Logical Volume Management(LVM) since Release 3.
Speaking of media players, Fedora Core 4 will come pre-crippled for MP3 playback. This is nothing new for Red Hat and is quite easy to remedy.
The author should specify why MP3 support is not included in Fedora Core. For those who don’t know, MP3 license is not compatible with GPL.
Red Hat can toss up2date for all I care at this point. It’s never worked as advertised
up2date is designed for RHEL. Fedora team is currently working on its replacement that will be possibly available for FC5. Yumex is a frontend for yum developed by a Fedora users that is closely watched by Fedora Team.
You notice the background from console application is transparent, not the border.
I think they may be a bit confused on the GCC4 issue…
MadPenguin said: “According to some recent benchmark tests that were performed on 32 and 64 bit systems, GCC 4.0 compiled faster and produced a smaller binaries than 3.4.3 in some situations such as kernel compilation, but only marginally on the 32 bit side, and 64 bit tests lagged.”
Whereas if you actually visit the review in question (http://www.coyotegulch.com/reviews/gcc4/):
“Is GCC 4.0 better than its predecessors?
In terms of raw numbers, the answer is a definite “no”. I’ve tried GCC 4.0 on other programs, with similar results to the tests above, and I won’t be recompiling my Gentoo systems with GCC 4.0 in the near future.”
Otherwise, it’s disappointing to hear that up2date doesn’t work properly – I would have thought the package manager would be the focus of a lot of work, not a sort of afterthought.
I don’t care whether KDE compiles or not. Fedora isn’t a KDE distro – so who cares? They obviously don’t…
Surely you’d use Mandrake or Kubuntu instead if you wanted a slick KDE environment?
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=335&slide=3…
Otherwise, it’s disappointing to hear that up2date doesn’t work properly – I would have thought the package manager would be the focus of a lot of work, not a sort of afterthought.
up2date is not really a package manager. Its only purpose is to update packages, nothing else..
Add/Remove Pacakge is the real package manager. It is currently broken because it does not include additional packages. It will be replaced by a revamped version on FC5 that will use python Api from yum.
Thanks for clearing that up Finalzone.
I don’t think the review made that clear at all – they did go on about it at some length. Of course keeping packages updated is pretty important as well as installing/removing them…
I’m using fc4 test 3 and its the most stable test release i’ve ever used, so far not even a screen twitch. no bugs what so ever.
Speed improvements appear to be real, maybe its just my perception, but startup/shutdown feel quicker.
This is exactly why I have stuck with Redhat/fedora through the years, there is ALWAYS an improvment with each release. Things don’t get worse they get better. Almost everything people used to complain about has been fixed by now. the rest of it appears to be getting worked on.
Keep up the good work
i really love that wallpaper with red-hat girl
…noting to do with default background. Anyone knowns where to get it (except installing FC4)? 
X.
Does it mean I can not compile any KDE applications (Ex: Amarok), KDE themes..etc on FC4????
no mention of things that lay under the hood: xen, gfs…
he wrote only some gcc phrases which he hear anywhere
“Speed improvements appear to be real, maybe its just my perception, but startup/shutdown feel quicker.”
Is this with or without SELinux enabled during installation?
—
Red Hat can toss up2date for all I care at this point. It’s never worked as advertised
up2date is designed for RHEL. Fedora team is currently working on its replacement that will be possibly available for FC5. Yumex is a frontend for yum developed by a Fedora users that is closely watched by Fedora Team.
up2date is really just plain horrible. I know that it is designed for RHEL and its not a package manager but it just flat out doesnt work and crashes sometimes. The Fedora Project community really needs to push for the application Yumex as yum matures. Alot of new users of Linux (the ones using Debian based distros like Ubuntu) enjoy the ease of managing packages with the likes of Synaptic via apt-get. Ubuntu also has a update manager based on Synaptic. I currently use Synaptic via apt4rpm with FC_3 but I don’t know how long the normal repositories will support both apt4rpm and yum.
I haven’t myself tested FC_4 but I can’t wait until the final release before I upgrade. On that note, the ability to upgrade the distro with _yum_ will be a welcome addition.
(or net install — I don’t want to download 4 cds everytime)
Overall, I believe Fedora is the really stable and solid bleeding edge distro…
NOTE: The above is a review of Fedora Core 4 test 2 and not the final test release…
“he Fedora Project community really needs to push for the application Yumex as yum matures”
The replacement that is being developed is called pup. read fedora-config-list archives for details
“I currently use Synaptic via apt4rpm with FC_3 but I don’t know how long the normal repositories will support both apt4rpm and yum.
”
There is no plans to discontinue support for APT. so if you prefer apt4rpm and synaptic go ahead and use it except on multi lib archs where it doesnt work
” On that note, the ability to upgrade the distro with _yum_ will be a welcome addition.
(or net install — I don’t want to download 4 cds everytime) ”
Though its not supported, you can still use yum to upgrade.
http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Upgrading_Red_Hat_Linux_with_yum.h…
and you do not require 4 cd’s. only two cd’s are required for the personal desktop class installation
Can anyone explain me why its used yum as default package manager instead of the more fast apt ? I see yum is too slower than apt and dont see any advantage
greets
What is the default font used in those screenshots (desktop, and terminal)?
that’s the way the console in gnome has always handled a “transparent” background. i don’t think it’s an attempt at the new x.org stuff.
yum can handle multiple architectures, something required for AMD64 (AMD64 + i386), while apt doesn’t support it.
Hello,
i a newbie and i want to work with apt ( especially synaptic ) but i wasnt able to figure out what to put into my sources.list so that i can install/update everything with synaptic.
Thanks!
Please tell me what is slow about yum? Maybe the first yum versions where slow, but with the current metafiles it’s fast + it support mutliple arch. which apt doesn’t
There is some legacy apt information here:
http://www.fedora.us/wiki/FedoraHOWTO
http://rpm.livna.org/configuration.html
Since it seems the support for apt will be dropped, maybe you can try smartpm instead, it has a similar gui to synaptic:
http://fedoranews.org/blog/?p=573
Up2date works fine here. The only problem it has is that mirrors might be slow or do not have the available updates yet. But it is quite easy to instruct up2date to only use the Fedora servers and then updates are fast and easy. I can’t comment about the internal design of up2date because I haven’t looked at it but I guess multi-threading could be much better — the window redraws only every second which is noticable.
“Speed improvements appear to be real, maybe its just my perception, but startup/shutdown feel quicker.”
Is this with or without SELinux enabled during installation?
I do not think SELinux should have any significant impact (as compared to e.g. eliminating even one single unnecessary services) on the total startup time.
I wonder if the panel, at the bottom of the screen is the standard panel layout. In Gnome the “Programs”,”Places” and “Desktop” menus normally are at the top of the screen. At the bottom you have a panel for open applications.
Probably would have been better to do it the standard Gnome way. This would of course had made the desktop look a bit different if you switched to KDE that only uses one panel by default. But on the other hand they could have tweaked KDE to use two panels instead of removing one from Gnome.
By only having one panel, there will be very little room for open apps now that there are 3 Gnome menus. A top and botton panel also makes much better use of Fitts law.
i a newbie and i want to work with apt ( especially synaptic ) but i wasnt able to figure out what to put into my sources.list so that i can install/update everything with synaptic.
Try out yum with FC4. You will be suprised to find it runs as fast as apt now. I actually like the new yum better than apt. I am writing this on FC4 test 3 now and it really rocks. Very stable so far.
>Since it seems the support for apt will be dropped, maybe you >can try smartpm instead, it has a similar gui to synaptic:
This sucks bigtime. Why drop synaptic when there is no real replacement. ……
Maybe I will go back to Ubuntu. I kind of liked FC4 though ( all that good Java stuff )
On my box yum is ALWAYS doing some stuff it did a second ago (setting up repos and reading metadata) before it is doing what i want it to do and it is no way faster than apt.
If that would go away it COULD be faster than apt, but right now you just didnt told the whole truth or there is a trick
i am not aware of.
> Why drop synaptic when there is no real replacement. ……
smartpm IS the real replacement for apt+synaptic (well, one of the possible replacements).
Which Fedora Core 4 Test do you use?
3 with all Updates ( incl. Kernel )
But it doesnt seem to be endorsed by RH. And it has its own dependency-checking so it introduces redundancy and possible consistency problems.
And more importantly: I dont like it 🙂
APT is not default because it is not compatible with multilib support (64-bit/32-bit mix) in Fedora. Yum/up2date supports it. Yum is much faster in Fedora Core 4 Test 3 btw
> But it doesnt seem to be endorsed by RH.
Nor was apt ever.
> And it has its own dependency-checking so it introduces redundancy and possible consistency problems.
Ditto for apt, if you mean redundancy/consistency problems over existing yum infrastructure.
I really don’t see how the situation with smartpm is different from apt+synaptic (you seem to keep some misconception of “less” and “more” supported — I think they’re both equally not supported ATM), with added benefit of support for so many repository formats in smartpm.
> And more importantly: I dont like it 🙂
That I can’t and won’t argue with. 🙂
How mature, ReiserFS is clearly not officially supported, and Fedora encourages ext3 for a reason. I simply can’t take people like that seriously, and what’s with the endless bitching about mp3 support, we all know the issue at hand – it’s not like Fedora is doing this solely to piss you off. They are doing it because it would be in violation to the mp3 patent license not to mention the GPL (same issue apply currently to Mono btw.).
So please just review it for the fine platform it is, I would like to see another distro that rolls out SELinux, Exec-shield, Binary hardening, gcj compiled OpenOffice.org2, native eclipse, a firewall by default.. and the list goes on and on.
RedHat and the community is doing a fine job, and I for one am very happy with the FC4 offerings.
You are right. What i wanted to stress is that apt was at least in extras and that fedora should agree on some kind of good GUI package/repository management. The need for something better than system-config-packages is there ( by the way, how do i tell that programm to not use the CDs but FPT/HTTP? ).
Have a nice Pentecost monday!
This is taken from the spec file
[i]
# gcc 4 workaround
%patch200 -p1 -b .gcc4
%changelog
* Wed Apr 13 2005 Than Ngo <[email protected]> 6:3.4.0-5
– add more fixes from CVS stable branch
– get rid of unneeded gcc4 workaround in konqueror
* Wed Mar 16 2005 Than Ngo <[email protected]> 6:3.4.0-0.rc1.7
– apply gcc4 hack (Dirk Müller) to avoid konqueror crash
[i]
Looks like the only reason was konqueror,
Ricer3/jfs are because of thier devel’s not supplying a patch to work. Not Fedora/SELinux.
yum is a lot faster this time around.
mp3 support, why bother discussing this, its getting old
Lovechild listed serveral features, here are some more Xen, GFS, cman/dlm/gnbd-kernels
how difficult is it to get eclipse et al working with sun’s jdk? for those of us who need to develop for that?
can yum resume downloads yet?
can yum restart services yet?
how does yum deal with user edits to config files?
will it be possible/easy to update from fc3 to fc4 with yum?
Its very easy. it uses the alternatives system (same as jpackage.org and sendmail/postfix )
I was under the impression that since Xen is currently disabled in the kernels and we are nearing release, Xen might not be supported out of the box.. much in the same way SELinux was for FC2.
Xen has it’s own seperate kernels to install, much like:
gnbd-kernel
dlm-kernel
GFS-kernel
kernel-xenU
kernel-xen0
I’m not sure if it will be “released” with 4 or not, but I would say that there is a good chance of that, if you want to use it, you will have to install it after the fact would be my guess. I do know that on a box I’m running rawhide and Xen, everytime there is a kernel update (almost daily), there have ben Xen’s to follow up.
This is a pretty good how-to, if you want to play around with it.
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraXenQuickstart
can yum resume downloads yet?
Yes.
can yum restart services yet?
Yes. This is a policy decision.
how does yum deal with user edits to config files?
you are supposed to drop .repo files in /etc/yum.d/repos.d/. Yum has always supported user edits to configuration files.
will it be possible/easy to update from fc3 to fc4 with yum?
This has always been possible but will not be supported.
http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Upgrading_Red_Hat_Linux_with_yum.h…
MP3 is *not* incompatible with the GPL, neither is Mono. MP3 has patent issues and the GPL is a copyright license. Patents have *nothing* to do with copyrights. MP3 is not supported because of a free-as-in-beer issue and *not* because of free-as-in-speech issues. It *is* possible to implement MP3 in a free-as-in-speech manner by licensing it!
And who cares after all, Fedora has other packages that are *really* incompatible with the GPL, e.g. Apache. This proves once again that free-as-in-beer is more important than free-as-in-speech, as expected. Is anybody surprised? I am not. Get your unlicensed MP3 stuff elsewhere, if you wish.
Right, G. W. MP3 is not there bacause RH will not include paid items in a zero dollar product. It is not convenient. Distributing MP3 encoder/decoder costs money per copy.
That is why there is Vorbis.
Xmms is missing from FC4. What a pity!
yum is slow:
[root@turtle ~]# time yum -C update
Setting up Update Process
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
No Packages marked for Update/Obsoletion
real 0m1.866s
user 0m1.286s
sys 0m0.203s
1 second is too much time out of my day this yum thingy is slow. </sarcasm>
That means its not slower than apt. If its slower it can’t be slower by more than a second so please either know what you’re talking about or dont spread rumors for other people to parrot.
There is also the -C switch which means cache if you have 48 repositorys in your config then it might take a while so use -C when doing searches and stuff.
Yum has many improvements, and for the first time a case could be made that it is better in many areas than APT. Like I said earlier the thing about fedora is when someone complains, someone fixes it. New GUI is in the works that will do things like install all same family packages, for instance checkmark Development and all the libs will get installed. It will be yum aware and update/cd aware. Like I said before. people complain about something on fedora the next release or release after usually fixes the problem. It always gets better.
oops I used the -C switch in there:
real 0m2.860s
user 0m1.197s
sys 0m0.181s
That was without it and using the fedora.redhat.com mirror. It might take 10-20 seconds if you use the mirror URL link instead, but that is probably faster when you actually need to d/l something as it searches for mirrors.
“Xmms is missing from FC4. What a pity!”
its not in core but it is extras
yum install xmms
“MP3 is *not* incompatible with the GPL”
you are wrong. it is incompatible with GPL and here is why. GPL license cannot be restricted by software patents. GPL license says that any patented software licensed as GPL should be distributed in the same terms as GPL.
“MP3 is not supported because of a free-as-in-beer issue and *not* because of free-as-in-speech issues. It *is* possible to implement MP3 in a free-as-in-speech manner by licensing it! ”
even if Red Hat did buy a MP3 patent there is NO way to implement it as GPL’ed software. If that would be the case everyone can pool in money, buy in a single patent and be free of MP3 or any other patent issues forever. That is not the case
“And who cares after all, Fedora has other packages that are *really* incompatible with the GPL, e.g. Apache. This proves once again that free-as-in-beer is more important than free-as-in-speech, as expected”
patents are incompatible with GPL in a manner that none of the GPL’ed software could ever contain patents that restrict them. Apache is incompatible too but we dont need to be worried because we arent writing GPL’ed modules for Apache. There is a clean boundary.
“This proves once again that free-as-in-beer is more important than free-as-in-speech, as expected. Is anybody surprised? I am not.”
you got it wrong. Fedora Project only includes software that is compatible with Free software definition. Mp3 patents are against this definition while Apache is not. Apache is still Free software (free as in speech) while MP3 is NOT free as in speech. If Fedora project can include any free as in beer software then we can very well include Realplayer which we dont
Thanks for the -C. I missed that. It speeds it up quite a bit.
But do you have to use yum makecache everytime you want to use an uptodate cache?
That means its not slower than apt. If its slower it can’t be slower by more than a second so please either know what you’re talking about or dont spread rumors for other people to parrot.
So true. Hard to believe some people managed to nitpick on that. Oh well/
I’ve never even heard of makecache before so I guess you don’t need it. I just do ‘yum update’ atleast once a day so that is ‘current’ enough for me that i use -C alot without problems.
there should be packages/xml data in /var/cache/yum/
I’ll look into this makecache thing though maybe there is an advantage and i’ll throw it in cron.
The revised BSD license is compatible with GPL but thats not the point. The point was that any restrictive software patents are not compatible with Free software licenses and MP3 cannot be implemented as Free software regardless of whether Red Hat pays the royalty. so Fedora cannot ship an Mp3 decoder ever
Actually, Windows XP system requirements is much lower:
300Mhz processor
128MBs of memory
1.5GB of hard disk space
and it only comes one 1 disk
Have you ever installed it on that, w/ just 1.5GB, you have very minimal space to install anything else, and since winxp comes with just about nothing on that 1 disc, your pretty much left with notepad/solitar/ie/outlookexp
and it just works.
Sure it does
XP is also 4 years older, it SHOULD use less hardware. In other news win3.1 uses less CPU than longhorn.
Fedora comes on less than a CD, it can come on a 5MB boot image, that makes it better than XP right? Cause everyone knows less disks=better even if it means half the software and $0 the price right? Does XP come with office on that 1 disk? how about Visual Studio’s? No? hmm How about database software? No database software? Well then it MUST have something as simple as an AIM, Yahoo, IRC, client.
I see. I seem to have taken his last paragraph out of context, since he mentioned the Apache license’s GPL-incompatibility.
Don’t feed the trolls =-/
how does Rahul get that “unused” where IP should be, can we actually spoof our address on this site? Someone should fix that before someone starts impersonating.
@Rahul @ Red Hat:
Sorry to say, but this is NOT true. GPL forbits additional restrictions BY COPYRIGHT HOLDERS. GPL forbits that a copyright holder imposes further resitrctions – if he does, he cannot use the GPL. And it forbits additional restrictions by people who want to create derived works – they cannot impose further restrictions without breaking the license.
Again, GPL is a COPYRIGHT license and NOT a patent license. If the authors says “MY work is GPL’d, exercise all your rights that touch MY Copyright”, then IT IS OK even if third party rights are involved. If there are patents involved that belong to third parties, all licensees have to respect BOTH licenses and BOTH licenses are valid. Patents do not even touch copyrights!
If your argumentation were correct, you were unable to include XPDF because Adobe forbits cracking secure PDFs in its specification. Therefore XPDF is imposed by an additional restriction because I cannot exercise my GPL right to modify XPDF in every way I want because if I would produce a PDF cracking feature for XPDF which is very easy, I would break Adobe’s restrictions but not the XPDF author’s license.
Is this a problem? NO, it is NOT because this restriction does not come from the Copyright holder that wrote the GPL’d software, but from a third party. If it were a problem, you would have to remove PDF support immediately because there are in fact external restrictions.
Obviously, you have XPDF included and that is not a problem for you even though there is a restriction from a third party. What does that show? It shows that your argumentation is INCORRECT and that MP3 is excluded because of free-as-in-beer issues!
Furthermore, it does not matter anyway because we all know that the first thing many users are doing is installing MP3 decoders from third parties. If excluding MP3 helps you to make a free-as-in-beer product, everything is fine and everybody gets what he pays for! By the way, what about JPEG? Will it also be removed? It has patent restrictions by Fortinet, you would have to remove it, as well as PDF.
”
Sorry to say, but this is NOT true. GPL forbits additional restrictions BY COPYRIGHT HOLDERS. GPL forbits that a copyright holder imposes further resitrctions – if he does, he cannot use the GPL. And it forbits additional restrictions by people who want to create derived works – they cannot impose further restrictions without breaking the license.
Again, GPL is a COPYRIGHT license and NOT a patent license. ”
read the GPL. if you include patented stuff within GPL nobody except the author can distribute it.
”
If your argumentation were correct, you were unable to include XPDF because Adobe forbits cracking secure PDFs in its specification. Therefore XPDF is imposed by an additional restriction because I cannot exercise my GPL right to modify XPDF in every way I want because if I would produce a PDF cracking feature for XPDF which is very easy, I would break Adobe’s restrictions but not the XPDF author’s license.
Is this a problem? NO”
look again. Fedora includes poppler and not xpdf which doesnt support decrypting pdf’s
” It shows that your argumentation is INCORRECT and that MP3 is excluded because of free-as-in-beer issues!
”
your premise was wrong and so is your conclusion
“Furthermore, it does not matter anyway because we all know that the first thing many users are doing is installing MP3 decoders from third parties. If excluding MP3 helps you to make a free-as-in-beer product, everything is fine and everybody gets what he pays for! By the way, what about JPEG? Will it also be removed? It has patent restrictions by Fortinet”
whether JPEG patents are enforcable or not is determined by the legal team. Fedora project is not only concerned about free as in beer but also in free as in speech software.
KDE is built without “-fvisibility=hidden -fvisibility-inlines-hidden” options → http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/devel/kdelibs/admin-visibility…
G.W., instead of being an idiot, why don’t you read the damn GPL? Specifically this clause.
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.