A review of the latest Fedora Core release, code named “Bordeaux”, the Fedora Core 5, which has proven itself to be one of the best Linux distributions out there was published by LinuxForums.org. OSNews’ own Fedora Core 5 review was published a few hours ago too.
Another Fedora Core 5 Review
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Please, is there a way to netinstall Fedora? Or a way to install it with just one CD? Number of CDs is what is keeping me from trying OpenSuSE and Fedora.
Edited 2006-03-27 00:48
You can install from a network server (FTP, HTTP, or NFS) and also from the hard disk. This is well documented in the installation guide.
I have One-CD remastered FC5 with GNOME, Firefox, Thunderbird, xchat, gaim, gcc/g++, kernel-devel,…
This CD is destinated firstly for Vietnamese Open Source Software (VNOSS) with the goal is bringing FC5 to anyone with ONLY ONE CD
If it’s interesting for you, I could give you url to try it.
for users who don’t use gnome/kde or other desktop environments, would they like FC5?
i found some distributions like ubuntu 5.10 felt slower in everyday use like browsing, file operations and so on.
currently i use mandriva (with xfce) as it seems to have a nippy core and things seem to happen faster. big files get copied quicker, browsing with firefox seems snanppier.
i wonder if anyone does benchmarking of core things like kernel, fs, network tasks for various distros? this data would be much more useful for people not interested in desktop environments.
I agree with you. when I run multiple programs which they have a similar binaries for windows, I notice that windows is way much more faster (but not safe of course).
I ran eg firefox 1.5.0.1 and Azureus 2.4, amule, 4GB network transfer over a dedicated NIC, while watching 1.4 GB movie on xine and my CPU became 100% whereas in windows it is just 70%.
Of course, if you give linux/GNU more time they will start to jump from solving bugs to tweaking for performance, a good example would be GNOME 2.14 which is a big leap in performance.
Overall, you will not be annoyed unless your CPU/RAM are >4 years old.
I ran eg firefox 1.5.0.1 and Azureus 2.4, amule, 4GB network transfer over a dedicated NIC, while watching 1.4 GB movie on xine and my CPU became 100% whereas in windows it is just 70%.
Yep, and the problem in this equation is… azareus (I say that about linux version, I didn’t even tried Windows one). Switch to any other torrent client and all your problems will go away.
My worst case test on opteron1.8-4GB RAM (with official torrent client (btw. calling torrent was reniced from a normal level)) was 150 opened torrents (all totaled to 200GB of data requested in about 400-500 files) (fiber connection to internet makes this possible), average downloading was 9.1MB/s and uploading 12MB/s (torrents were randomly clicked, but all had enough seeds). Machine was completely usable (ok, it was noticable slower but still snappy after software finaly loaded (loading was the slowest part and quite slow for the fact), sideline disk transfer does that to every computer). I could watch video normaly (both xine and mplayer), burning worked… After that I leaved this runing for one night. In the morning, desktop performed badly at first because complete desktop probably resided in swap. But after runing for a few minutes (or better as soon as I started using some piece of software disk went crazy for few seconds and started runing normaly) desktop was again snappy as ever. CPU never went over 60%, except in loading spikes.
Now back to azareus. The same machine performed really terrible when stress testing with azareus and 10 torrents where I was suffering from the same symptoms as you described. And with more time azareus was runing symptoms were worster. An no magic solution here (renicing or not). Desktop was simply terrible.
My advice. Don’t use azareus. And it really helps if disk where you’re downloading torrents is not the same as the one containing OS.
p.s. I haven’t tried amule.
Edited 2006-03-27 13:59
I always use my “ksysguard” or other process watching applications to pinpoint the problem I have when CPU goes 100%.
In my case azureus took only 4-7% (40% when checking the download for integrity, which only take 1 minute with 1400 MB file); the very interesting thing comes from mozilla firefox 1.5.0.1 ( and earlier versions ) which leaves your CPU at 40 % for as long as you leave it open and there is 10 web sites tabs open with normal amount of flash animations playing.
Another weared thing with CPU usage was comming from Network transfer or any process that uses the disk subsystem, where it records ~40%.
Looking at “Resident Memory” from ksysguard will show you that firefox is the only weared leaking applications of all of these I described in my previous reply. Closing tabs does not free memory!!
I advice all people to watch closly their processes to be aware of how efficient programs work; and please report them online.
By the way if you go to Edit>Options “Content” tab>Load Images and uncheck load images firefox CPU drops to 8% down from 40% with the same amount of opened tabs (10).
I have been reading stuff in the Perl and Tcl communities that some things seem to be off with FC5.
I guess we will have to watch and see.
I admit that speed is the only thing that caught my attension in this distro (in comparision with RHEL); but everything else about it is basically broke. I use RHEL 4.3 AS, and it is very easy to install things which are a big deal with fedora like nvidia proprietary drivers and other software that needs compiling. Xine was horrible to install too, whereas in RHEL it is a piece of cake.
Definitely, it cannot be a desktop OS, because the kernel source was not installed and configured and because maybe 1/2 of desktops are equipped with nvidia chips, and because nvidia drivers are the best ones ever written for linux.
Server-wise it is an excellent distro. with no comments.
> I use RHEL 4.3 AS, and it is very easy to install
> things which are a big deal with fedora like nvidia
> proprietary drivers and other software that needs
> compiling
What’s so tough about using ‘yum install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia’?
Unfortunately “xorg-x11-drv-nvidia” won’t be able to support my monitor with following specs:
1920x1200x24bit@60Hz VerticalRefresh. Besides running the syntax “yum install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia” will simply not work; there should be some missing configurations or other packages.
But, I am sure they will get it solved by time.
> Unfortunately “xorg-x11-drv-nvidia” won’t be able to
> support my monitor with following specs:
> 1920x1200x24bit@60Hz VerticalRefresh.
Why wouldn’t this? This is installing the nVidia proprietary driver.
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia is the Nvidia binary drivers. You are right it isn’t available on the default repositories because Fedora is all open source. The Livna project has packaged the nvidia drivers and lots of other non-free stuff.
The quick way to setup livna repositories do:
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-5.rpm
Currently, you need to use the livna-testing and updates-testing repositories because the kernel which came with FC5 broke some external modules like nvidia. The update kernel is still in testing.
yum –enablerepo=livna-testing –enablerepo=updates-testing install kmod-nvidia
While you are it, you can install gstreamer-plugins-ugly which includes the gstreamer codecs from MP3 and other non-free formats.
I have tried to do this, but if I do a yum list, it shows that xorg-drv-nv is the only one available and installed. How do I get it to show the actual nvidia driver? (xorg-x11-drv-nvidia)? Also, how can we get yum to show the latest kernel (2.6.16) ?
FC5 DVD Covers – http://586z.no-ip.org/~foxkm/FC5
Edited 2006-03-27 15:10
If you want them now, enable the testing repos for Livna & FC. Update to the new kernel with ‘yum update’, then just ‘yum install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia’. Otherwise, wait for a couple of days when these are pushed out to the main repos.
Edited 2006-03-27 16:14
To me this isn’t so much a review as this guy’s experience installing it and his seemingly novice impressions of the OS and the experience.
I found the prior OS news article more interesting.
Here is a nice page that shows ‘What Has Changed Since Fedora Core 4’
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc5/#id3145844
JJ
You can now enjoy enhanced multimedia support with version 0.10 of the Gstreamer media framework. This milestone release brings major improvements in robustness, compatibility, and features, over previous versions of Gstreamer. The Totem movie player and other media software in this release have been updated to use the new framework.
O’really? Fedora now comes with MP3, DVD, AAC, MPeg2, DivX, Quicktime, WMA, WMV? Ogg and Theora are already handled by Helix – which btw won’t play Real Audio so what’s the point of shipping a crippled player?
What do you mean by “major improvement”?
When they speak of major improvements they’re not talking about codec support at all, though you should know it’s not that hard to install those on a Fedora system.
The major improvements in Gstreamer 0.10 include better playback, better audio and video syncronization and more. I won’t go into details here, check the Feb 2006 issue of http://www.gnomejournal.org/archives/.
Fedora Core doesn’t ship a crippled player, it ships a very good one that uses a plugin-based framework to support a wide variety of codecs.
> Fedora Core doesn’t ship a crippled player, it ships a very good one that uses a plugin-based framework to support a wide variety of codecs.
You really must stop apolgizing for deficiencies in Linux. Just admit Linux isn’t meant for joe-user’s desktop. Stop telling us how wonderful Linux is at multi-media when clearly it isn’t.
Edited 2006-03-27 05:20
You really must stop apolgizing for deficiencies in Linux. Just admit Linux isn’t meant for joe-user’s desktop. Stop telling us how wonderful Linux is at multi-media when clearly it isn’t.
OSX isn’t meant for joe-user’s desktop because it does not not ogg vorbis, theora, realplayer format, flash, wma and wmv out of box.
Windows does not support joe-user’s desktop because it does not have real, quicktime, ogg vorbis, theora, flash out of box.
I just pointed out how silly that quoted logic is. Better stop assuming that mythical joe-user’s is utterly stupid. Teach them how the system works and he/she figured out later.
Edited 2006-03-27 05:42
Don’t forget that windows does not support DVD playing, either. You have to install specific software! Oh my!
Besides: add the freshrpms repo and
yum install gst-plugin-ugly
>>”…stop assuming that mythical joe-user’s is utterly stupid. Teach them how the system works…”
Of course, the typical user is as smart or smart than the typical OSNews reader. But, that’s not the point.
This is: Little incentive exists for a current Windows or Mac user to make the effort required to learn to use unfamiliar programs in order to do the same things they already do on Windows or the Mac. Arguing that you only need to teach them how to use Linux is a waste of time, because those students seee no reason to come to class.
So what if a linux distro ships with a variety of open source programs that duplicate the functionality of proprietary programs? People who use proprietary operating systems can already do everything those open source programs can do.
OSX ships WMP, Real by default
When you buy a Dell or HP, Real/Quicktime is shipped by default.
Plus show me how many sites use Ogg and Theora?
Yes the Joe user is getting smarter but there’s still a huge chasm to cross when using Linux.
I’m outa here for good. You guys can all drink the same koolaid and sing the GPL song around the camp fire. I’m off to live the second half of my life.
It’s been mostly fun on osnews – until you linux fanboys took it over – why the hell can you just stay on Slashdot and LinuxToday?
OSX ships WMP, Real by default
Incorrect. None of them are installed by default.
When you buy a Dell or HP, Real/Quicktime is shipped by default.
Those are vendors/PC builders not Windows OS maker. Try again.
Plus show me how many sites use Ogg and Theora?
Ever bothered to google them? Other than independant bands listed on http://www.vorbis.com/music_links/ and many Linux distros websites, mainstream medias such as CBC/Radio-Canada, Radio France International, KPFA to name a few use them.
Yes the Joe user is getting smarter but there’s still a huge chasm to cross when using Linux.
Care to clarify what Linux distro? How about a 10 years old in Elementary school able to configure e-mail using Fedora Core 3? http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/5561
I’m outa here for good. You guys can all drink the same koolaid and sing the GPL song around the camp fire. I’m off to live the second half of my life.
For many readers, that is a good riddance especially where you got humiliated with the facts I presented to you.
It’s been mostly fun on osnews – until you linux fanboys took it over – why the hell can you just stay on Slashdot and LinuxToday?
Resorting to call anyone that succesfully refuting argument “fanboy” is a sign of humiliating defeat.
For many readers, that is a good riddance especially where you got humiliated with the facts I presented to you.
Babe, no use getting stressed.
I have my issues with Linux as well, but I’d say that mp3 support and the likes is hardly what I would put as a major issue.
Like you said, people, if they need support, have been downloading third party applications for Windows for years when they require support for a file unsupported by Windows Media Player.
The only thing holding back Linux is boxed software from the big names – apart from that, everything is more than adequate for the end user; my mother, technophobe number one is able to use Slackware with KDE quite nicely; and I’m sure, given a few minutes to get to know the new desktop, the average user could easily navigate the default Fedora 5 default desktop without any problems.
O’really? Fedora now comes with MP3, DVD, AAC, MPeg2, DivX, Quicktime, WMA, WMV?
Some of them, yes.
Others you can do yum install gstreamer-universe from gstreamer repository
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/download/fedora5.html
or yum install mplayer from livna or freshrpms (livna also contains complete gstreamer, so in livna case you don’t need gstreamer repos).
To include livna repositories just do this as root:
rpm -Uhv http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/5/i386/livna-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
Ogg and Theora are already handled by Helix – which btw won’t play Real Audio so what’s the point of shipping a crippled player?
So what is the point of shipping as you say CRIPPLED Windows Media Player or CRIPPLED Apple Quicktime?
They don’t play shit by default either. In fact Quictime (mac version) doesn’t play shit even if you spend weeks on it.
What do you mean by “major improvement”?
It is all in framework mostly beside the bugs being squashed. But for obvious reason you can’t understand this fact.
Edited 2006-03-27 14:23
As per the reviews, FC5 has raised the bar for a Desktop OS.
“SuSE and Ubuntu will have to try harder this time to beat this Fedora.”
“I can confidently say that Fedora Core 5 is the best desktop GNU/Linux distribution available at the moment.”
Wow those are strong words, surely the new generation of Linux desktop OS are getting more usable, stable and faster.
Looking ahead we have NLD coming, Novel has already proclaimed that the delay of Windows Vista is going to help NLD the most and that NLD is going to be the best Desktop OS for enterprice.
Second release I am waiting for is Dapper, if Mark has gone out of his way and delayed the release by 6 weeks, it better be a very polished and stable distro. Ubuntu has always featured well as compared to Fedora Core. Lets wait and watch how does Dapper compare to FC5.
Keeping my fingers crossed.
* On my 2.6ghz,1gb ram FC5 takes 1min15s to boot while w2k only takes 46s.
* Firefox launches in less than 2 secs on my freshly booted w2k (without the fastlaunch tray icon) and often more than 4 seconds on a freshly booted FC5 (the same hardware).
* When I rapidly resize firefox on FC5 the graphics are lagging behind in a clunky manner. This is not a problem with FF ofc, but it rather reflects the poor 2d gfx and windowing performance of fc5 (or possible my gfx driver in fc5, not sure). Anyway, on w2k it resizes smoothly regardless of how fast I drag the mouse to resize FF.
* My soundcard (Creative Audigy) didn’t work in FC5. Made me feel like I was installing slackware in the 90ies. This soundcard always works out of the box after I have installed w2k.
* Selecting either “Add/remove software” or “Package Updater” in the Gnome FC5 menu resulted in “Unable to retrieve update information” and then these apps just quit.
* On my 2.6ghz,1gb ram FC5 takes 1min15s to boot while w2k only takes 46s.
And if you want to run anything after 46s can you do that? Or when you change the usb port that mouse is plugged into do you have it instantly operational? If I wanted to I could start X as fast as possible, I could probably go down to 20 seconds but what’s the point?
Rest of the points is quite valid, I wonder what was the reason for modding this comment -2 o.O
As I pointed out FF starts _faster_ on a freshly booted w2k on my machine than it does under fc5 on the same hardware. As for switching the usb mouse/keyb, that’s no problem on my version on w2k. Maybe I have some service pack you don’t have or something?
Anyway, don’t get me wrong; I love Linux and I think Fedora is a great project. I have installed and tested each release since FC2 but I want to _use_ it too not just play with it; and I was totally hoping that FC5 would deliver a little bit more than this..
I didn’t deny that Firefox starts faster on Windows, just that Windows loads some stuff after loading GUI. For me it’s been always slow and unresponsive for 20-30 seconds after supposedly being completly booted. Some services that Windows doesn’t start before its shell are required for various apps so they load slower because they have to wait for them. In Linux systems X is started at the very end of booting process.
My problem with mouse was the fact that simple change of usb port that my mouse is connected to makes Windows look for drivers again and I can’t use my mouse for about 20 seconds. I’m using a laptop so I just plug it in random port every time I want to get some work done.
When you sum it up Windows doesn’t really start that fast and FC is the slowest booting distro in my experience.
Windows will get me to the login prompt relatively quickly. But I’ve found that after logging in, there is still a bit of a delay before the system is completely usable.
I find it far more frustrating when I think a system is ready to use but it’s still thrashing away with startup stuff, than just waiting a few more seconds to start interecting with it.
It’s especially bad on some people’s systems with all the godawful programs they have running at startup. From aim, to msn messenger, to office’s little menu bar thing, to norton anti virus, to a whole lot of spyware. But most of that isn’t the fault of windows.
* Firefox launches in less than 2 secs on my freshly booted w2k (without the fastlaunch tray icon) and often more than 4 seconds on a freshly booted FC5 (the same hardware).
You may want to test kernel from updates-testing repository [1]. It incorporates John Reiser’s “map the vDSO intelligently” patch
[2]
[1] http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2006-March/msg01491…
[2] http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-March/msg0063…
For me (linux newbie) the overal impression is much worse than FC4. FC5 can’t even find my USB Audigy2NX card.
No display acceleration (R9800).
Both package management utilities are failed to retrieve a package list.
yum [anything] just print “core [1/3]” and hangs for some reason.
I don’t want to compile kernels manually, etc.
With FC4 i never experienced these problems. I just installed it and it works perfectly except the stuttering Audigy2 sound.
Why i need to replace the kernel of just-released OS?
Edited 2006-03-27 09:43
I am contemplating of buying M-Audio Revolution 7.1 sound card but I am worried that it won’t run on Fedora Core 5. Has anyone got this sound card and managed to get it running on FC5?
I installed Fedora Core 5 last night on my laptop hoping to have some better luck getting my wireless card working. I’ve been using Dapper for over a month and it’s great besides that little (not so little) fault.
Ubuntu is going back on their immediately.
Not only did the wireless card not work in Fedora, it wasn’t even detected. And there were a number of other hardware problems i didn’t have in Ubuntu.
So that’s my experience. I haven’t used Red Hat since 8.1, and I won’t be using it now. I appreciate the work, their new UI themes are nice, but no thanks.
c’mon, get real, you have to tweak a default win2k install a whole lot more than you have to tweak a default fedora install. you can install fedora + audio/video codecs in 1 or 2 hours. do that with win2k (including office, firefox, trillian/gaim, painting app, p2p, etc etc etc – it’ll take you more than a day).
and win2k does NOT boot faster – no, it just shows the desktop faster. but when it has shown the desktop, it is just on 1/3 of the total time needed to get ready and start doing something usefull. don’t be fooled by this trick! when KDE and Gnome show their desktop, they’re ready. put a cpu meter on your desktop in gnome/kde and windows – and see when it stops at 0 – THEN check the boot time.
and then think about the fact linux boot time gets shorter, windows gets longer with every release.
and remember, windows gets slower after a month of use, linux does not.
FC-5 install/update went perfect here.. and I’m pretty picky. Just wanted to say, good job Fedora team.
btw; Also use XP a lot and it isn’t ready to use when the screen is visible. I’d say FC-5 and XP has about the same overall boot time with like services.
It’s all geared up towards GNOME…
Anyone tried KDE? is it well integrated/fast/etc..?
I’ve installed FC5 on various computers, and i only enconuntered serious problems in one. Overall i’m happy with it, and it performs faster and boots faster than XP in my machine. It’s not perfect, but quite good.
Now i’m just waiting for livna to release OpenGL accelerated drivers for my Radeon X800XT, and a repository to try XGL, and i would be very happy
What’s up with the bubble theme? It makes everything so ugly. I hate it. The boot up screen has them. The gdm screen has them. The gnome logo has them. They are everywhere but are soooo ugly. This is the first time I could not stand to look at a distro. I’m thinking I just want a plain “brown” look at my desktop. My advice, next time get some real artists and drop the bubbles.