Submitted by “As a network professional, I have used various Linux-based systems for many years in troubleshooting and monitoring networks. However, Linux has never been my operating system of choice for my office desktop. Its limitations in other areas and often cumbersome installation and configuration, simply put, left it as a specialized operating system for specific needs. That is, until now. Red Hat recently released its latest free distribution of Linux, Fedora Core 6. I was so impressed with this release that I have replaced one of my two desktop machines operating systems with it. Here’s why you, as a networker, need to seriously look at Fedora Core 6.”
I’m just glad that FC is finally being looked at as a reasonable Linux distro again…I’ve been using it since 2 and it’s always been stable and secure for me, and ran perfect after installing all Proprietary stuff and yet it has this undying reputation of being broken and unusable just because it’s bleeding edge
I had need to put one of our servers on FC6, due to some features it had that I needed.
And it is as buggy as ever. However (and this is a big, honking, important, however…) of the five bugs that bit me on this server, four of them are fixed now, and the fifth has gotten attention. Two of the kernel bugs were fixed with the 2849 kernel released yesterday. And on the fifth bug, I have been asked by an FC bug assignee to recompile one of the packages with a different switch and report the results. I’ve not done so yet. My fault.
This is in stark contrast to what I expected, based upon recent experiences with Fedora.
All those statements that the Fedora guys have made about proving that FC is not just RedHat’s beta… might actually mean something. (They care again!!! Wohoo!!!)
I’ve been pleased with my FC6 experience, despite the bugs, which one can expect when one installs a cutting edge distro on the day of release. (Actually, the Sunday before. I was on a dealine.)
I’m pleased to say that I *think* that Fedora *may* be getting ready to *rock* again! 🙂
Edited 2006-11-14 01:18
Still not a finished user interface. They could have waited to get the newer icons out.
Come on, how are you going to use that as a downside to FC? It’s alot of work to get a complete icon set done end both Echo and Tango are installable if you just HAVE to have that bleeding edge feel to your install…not to mention they are quite abit ahead of the other bigname distros in getting their next-gen icon set out (namely Ubuntu)
While I’ve tried Fedora Core a while ago, I’m not sure those points were very Fedora specific, because it’s pretty easy to run those on most Linux distros.
I skimmed the points, but what does OpenOffice have to do with networking, aside from documentation of course.
I very rarely use a Word processing suite as it is.
One could argue the same points for SuSE linux. Or possibly for even buying OS X, as Remote desktop is available, Neo Office etc.
Well that was a pointless article, he basically described any and every distro out there ! ohh networking that must be difficult, nah not really just plug this cable in there, done !
Cass
“After installing Fedora Core, I selected “rdesktop” using “Add/Remove Software” to download and install the application. To me, this was the killer app for installing Fedora Core on my desktop. If I could access my Microsoft machines from a Linux box, a major hurdle to converting to Linux on the desktop was overcome.”
rdesktop has been available on most distros for years. I wonder how long it’s been since Greg last tried linux?
Well, I just installed FC6 on my semi-new system.
Generally it installed correctly and updating was easy enough.
But the widescreen support ain’t there.
The display settings are correct, 1440×900 and the X11 configuration file shows the ‘nv’ driver is being used.
But the gnome workspace is about 2/3 of the screen wide and against the right side of the screen.
I tried installing the latest nvidia linux driver, but it would not install.
That aside everything else seem to work correctly that I’ve tried. I have not yet tried to mount ntfs volumes, which would be desirable, even RO.
FYI, with FC5 on a server system, it was unstable and rebooted every night till I upgraded the BIOS. I had upgraded 6 months ago and noticed the new version.
But the gnome workspace is about 2/3 of the screen wide and against the right side of the screen.
I used to have a very similar problem running pretty much any Linux distro on my computer. The fix is to dig in your monitor documentation and find out what the Horizontal Refresh frequency is, then edit the xorg.conf file and change the detected frequency to the proper one.
Linux (and X) has come a long way in the 7 1/2 years I’ve been using it, but it still isn’t perfect. Give it a little more time though…
I used to have a very similar problem running pretty much any Linux distro on my computer. The fix is to dig in your monitor documentation and find out what the Horizontal Refresh frequency is, then edit the xorg.conf file and change the detected frequency to the proper one.
Thanx, I’ll give it a look.
It’s a core duo processor (a lowly E6300), guess it should not be i586. I’ll check that out too.
You may have run into the bug where the i586 rather than the i686 kernel is installed; this prevents the nvidia driver from working.
This article isn’t really focused on Fedora. All the things he describes are also available in SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu…
Basically all major distros are reasonable easy to install, feature OpenOffice, a remote desktop client, have some sort of packet management, basic networking tools and are free.
Better title would be “Someone’s view why Linux also makes a nice desktop OS”.
“If I could access my Microsoft machines from a Linux box, a major hurdle to converting to Linux on the desktop was overcome.”
Guess how thrilled he’ll be when he hears about VNC and Samba… Just kidding…
Edited 2006-11-13 22:40
Fedora’s the OS of choice as long as your primary internet connection isn’t wireless…..
That’s funny seeing as FC5 and FC6 are the only distros to work with my Broadcom chipset as expected by bcm43xx, and I’ve only heard good things of ipw2200 and madwifi (or whataver the atheros one is) from friends
try ubuntu… follow my tutor at http://tusharg.blogspot.com your card will work!
As always, this is a driver problem. If you select equipment that is supported you would find that wireless works fine including wpa. Both intel and broadcom works fine. True you have to get some firmware for ipw2200, but that’s not worse than the situation for other more widely spread OSes.
It is annoying that there are a lot of hardware that doesn’t have good drivers for Linux, but the only way to change that is to vote with your money and never buy something unless it have Linux drivers, and make sure that the shop and the manufacturer knows about your your decision.
The problem is that many people that try out Linux do so on equipment that never was bought with running Linux in mind. Somehow, I don’t see people bashing MacOS-X, because it doesn’t run on their old dell.
Why should Apple get away with that but not Linux distros.
While I agree with your view of checking for compatibility beforehand (and before complaining bitterly), FC6 did not like my Netgear WG511T…kept seeing it as an Ethernet device, hence it didn’t like me trying to do wireless things with it.
Not to start a flamewar, but Ubuntu 6.10 recognized it and configured it from the get-go. I really liked FC6, but I don’t have the time I used to have to track this stuff down…ymmv.
I completely agree. My card is prism based, and the card that fedora detected kept throwing back operation not permitted whenever I tried to set the wireless settings (via iwconfig, and their network config app). Same problem with ndiswrapper. Turns out some of the modules they had loaded by default were interfering with them. I had to unload/blacklist these modules for wireless to work (dont recall which ones at this point, it was something to do with encryption on one of them).
Even more shots here: http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/?q=node/4
OpenOffice is a multiplatform application with versions that run not only on Linux but Windows, OS X, Solaris and FreeBSD. So you don’t need a Linux-based operating system to run OpenOffice, but it integrates with Linux quite well.
What the author talks about here has surprisingly little to do with Linux as such, since it would have to be Gnome og KDE integration one would desire concerning OpenOffice.org
My bet is that OpenOffice works equally well on any equally well working Gnome or KDE installation, be it Linux, Solaris or BSD. The ‘trouble’ here seems to be that this is not what the author is impressed with, although I like this fact, true about so much open source software, more than anything…
I installed FC 6 on a Mac Mini almost one week ago, and yes it is very nice, but honestly, I haven’t got any special vibes from it. It mostly feels like a slow version of Ubuntu. I also enabled ‘Desktop Effects’ and that really screwed things up. It cut off half of my desktop and gave the remaining visible part a pink/purple hue. All in all, once I was able to disable the desktop effects, it has been a fairly nice distro.
For me Fedora is far from over… I dont feel any excitement when it was released, the way i used to feel when it released its core-1-2-3. Ever since i have moved to Ubuntu… i value the slik distros more, cause Ubuntu doesn’t start too many unwanted services and doesn’t install unwanted packages…
Fedora is good for new people, cause it comes with tones of apps pre installed.
I used to download and upgrade Fedora in early days… now I still have not checked what Fedora 6 contains!
It really needs to distinguish itself from Suse, Mandriva… from complete Linux distro packs… It used to defacto once upon a time…
So good luck Fedora people…
Disappointing review from a “network professional’s” perspective. Starting out being surprised with OpenOffice.org’s MSOffice compatibility, then being surprised about rdesktop, iptraf and mrtg, and being impressed with general package manager functionality… none of which is unique about Fedora 6. Someone discovering Linux, I’d say – still a good thing!
FC6 is a really nice distro, but i have some objections.
My primary internet connection is wireless, i’m using an integrated broadcom-based wifi card (using bcm43xx) on my laptop, and it’s working fine. The problem is when i’m using a pcmcia broadcom-based card with the same drivers – i’m getting a kernel panic when i’m trying to ifconfig it up, so it seems the drivers are still in “experimental” stage (as stated in the readme files anyway).
Next thing, the sound driver for intel-hda is somewhat broken when it comes to use earphones(!). It is rather funny to know that you have to recompile the kernel if you want to use them… (it’s not only me – http://tinyurl.com/y2tlut).
When I put the system into suspend mode, it won’t come back. I’ve turned off suspension until i come up with the solution.
The last thing is that it boots reaally loong (at least on my laptop).
So take that in mind when choosing fc6.
Nothing is this review is FC6 specific, nor even fedora specific. He would have had the same experience if he had tried FC5, or possibly FC3. I think it was the 3d eye candy that really worked.
There is not a bad word about FC6 on this article, but strangely, nobody is saying that it is an ad just as the Xserve article of inforworld …
Perhaps that´s because it was an honest (if somewhat uninformed) review as opposed to that over optimistic praise disguised as a review…
sed ‘s/professional/amateur/g’
>>the only way to change that is to vote with your money and never buy something unless it have Linux drivers<<
Good luck with that. I have twice bought hardware that was advertised to work with linux, only to find out that it does not actually work with linux.
The latest was a ZyXel G-302 card. It had a penguine on the board and everything. I spent hours trying to get that to work but it won’t.
Years ago I bought a win-modem that was advertised to work with linux, it was a dragon “something” it would not actually work either.
Yawn. I didn’t even bother to read it. I’m getting pretty tired of the “use FC6, it’s great” but lacking in substance reviews, of which there have been many. We use FC3 extensively, and I don’t really expect that many of the issues that make that so poor to go away (mostly non-Desktop related, and don’t get me started on RPMs). I _have_ just downloaded it, and will confirm that FC6 is still lacking, but what I already know is that Debian/Ubuntu solutions are much better put together.
If you want to review FC6, please bother to do so properly, not just some superficial screen shots. That goes for any other distro.
I tried Fedora Core 6 for a couple of days, I was unimpressed. Nothing that much better than FC5. I think I’m just going to stick with SuSE 10.1 until Microsoft completely corrupts it, or goes on a suing spree, then I might go for another distro; Ubuntu or the current incarnation of Fedora Core.
that the review is lacking/nonrelated. But I find FC6 a very nice and reliable distro, with all the packages that I need (your needs might be different). There is a big difference on usage policy of non-open drivers among FC and Ubuntu/Suse, and everyone should follow their ethical principles. Fedora’s point of view is very close to mine and therefore I have no issues with the lack of support for certain file formats and hardware. I don’t need high end graphic card (no games/video/graphic design) so i just use plain intel chipset, and no need for mp3’s since i don’t listen to music on the computer. This probably doesn’t work for most people, but they shouldn’t bash on FC just for remaining true to open source.
Greetings,
I appreciate the comments posted here and wanted to clarify the article on Fedora Core 6.
The article was targeted to network administrators that do not use any form of linux for one reason or another, or only use it for specific applications (mainly CLI based) such as MRTG, DNS, Snort, and so on.
With that in mind, I was not reviewing FC6 for those with extensive linux experience. Rather, my goal was to reach those who haven’t given linux a try, or those (like me) who have utilized linux primarily for network services but, for various reasons, have not used it fully in their roles as network administrators.
In that sense, I was trying to expose linux to a wider audience who don’t know about Open Office, rdesktop, etc. and who don’t realize that a wide array of network administration tools like nmap come bundled in a distribution. Hopefully those may now give linux a try.
I chose FC6 because I have been a long time Fedora and Red Hat user, but again mainly for applications mentioned above. After installing FC6, I believe that this distribution is user friendly enough for “marginal” or non linux users to try, without the burden of needing more advanced skills for package download and installation, kernel recompiling, etc. That’s not to say it’s the only distribution that is so, but since it was just released, it was timely to review this distribution.
So, actually, my goal was to expose linux to a wider net admin audience, and I was impressed enough with this distribution that I felt FC6 can do that. Thanks again for the feedback!
Sincerely,
Greg Schaffer
Thank you for your clarification about the reading target and thumbs up on you discovery of linux as a network management tool.
– yum (it’s actually reason 1 – 5)
– less stable than Debian and Slackware
– sluggish, sluggish
– too few packages in terrible rpm
– officially only ext2 and ext3 support for fs
1- Ther are better tools then yum, however yum is not THAT bad
2- Couldn’t tell haven’t tried either, didn’t have to. FC6 (and FC5 and FC4 …) have been very stable for me, which I can’t say for Ubuntu (disclaimer: modest hatdware platform)
3- Subjective opinion based on …?Care to back it up with numbers?
4- Again just your opinion, while I am not a fan of rpm since when that was a pro or con for a distro? One should judge an OS based on how well it fullfils its intended use, not on the number of available packages
5- You can install FC on any kernel readable FS, however most of us do prefer ext2 and ext3 to say rfs which is ditched by suse too.
– less stable than Debian and Slackware
So? There is a reason why wikipedia, sourceforge and kernel.org use Fedora Core instead. For them, Fedora Core is stable enough while being cuttier technology.
– too few packages in terrible rpm
Highly subjective. rpm is not that bad because it is just a file format much like deb. If you don’t find a FOSS package available on Fedora, be a contributor.