Fedora Core 1 has been out now for a few days now and many faithful Linux fans have already installed it. Red Hat’s Linux is still one of my favorite distributions because of one main reason: compatibility with Linux software. Red Hat is a market leader and following the market leader assures the least trouble for most users. But is this the case with Fedora Core?
Installation of the software went fine. I believe that Fedora’s installer is both easy to use and powerful and succeeds in satisfying both power and casual users. My monitor was in their database; it correctly found all the horizontal/vertical information, the Nvidia graphics card was auto-detected as well (only in 2-D mode), and loaded the OHCI driver for my TI Firewire PCI card. Later, the included GTKam utility worked fine with my husband’s USB Kodak DC265 camera too. The only problem I had with the installation was that the first time I booted to install the distro (with cold boot) X would die a few seconds after Anaconda would load. Resetting the machine and re-trying worked fine (with warm boot). The betas had the same problem too, but Red Hat Linux 8 and 9 did not have that problem at all on the same hardware.
The first boot went fine too, all services got up and running correctly, and creating new users also worked great.
Fedora Core comes with Gnome 2.4.0 (plus some 2.4.0.1 updated packages), Mozilla 1.4.1, Gaim 0.71, OOo 1.1, XMMS 1.2.8, KOffice, Gimp 1.2.x, gThumb 2.0.2 (pretty outdated version), Epiphany 1.0.4 and many hundreds of other packages. The distro includes most of what users would need for their home usage: Internet applications, office apps, games, some multimedia support, easy administration for most things via Red Hat’s preference panels.
New features include a graphical booting sequence which is really nice in my opinion (and it can be even better by integrating the booting sequence with the login and the Gnome loading procedure). There is also prelinking by default which speeds up application launching, and better ACPI support. It is 2.6-ready, has better support for laptops, an updated Bluecurve theme with more color selection (default background image is lovely) and bumped up security.
Fedora Core also comes with lots of server software like Apache, mySQL, PostgreSQL, a news server, an FTP server, SSH support and other advanced technologies that power users or administrators will love to get their hands upon.
Applications indeed start pretty fast and especially some third party statically-linked apps (e.g. Lost Marble’s Moho or Blender) load immediately. I have never seen Moho load so fast, not even on BeOS (which was its original platform).
And the niceties stop just right there. From then on, it was an uphill battle to get this OS up and running according to more modern specifications.
My disappointment started when I tried to upgrade Gaim 0.71 to 0.72. The third party Shrike RPM wouldn’t work because of pspell dependancy problems. Downloading pspell and compiling it manually wouldn’t work either as libpspell-modules were nowhere to be found in the newly compiled archive. So I decided to download the source of Gaim and compile it myself. All went fine with Gaim’s compilation except the MSN plugin wouldn’t load because gnuTLS that provides SSL to Gaim was not installed. I got to gnuTLS’ FTP site downloaded the source, only to ask me for libcrypt. Downloaded the source of libcrypt, only to ask me for the source of GnuPG. I downloaded the gnupg, compiled fine, went back to libcrypt, only to bail out badly with severe compiling errors. This is a simple user scenario that should have not happened, no matter whose fault really is. Now think what a newbie user coming from Windows-land would think about this whole –literally– usability fiasco.
But that was nothing compared to the rest of the problems I further encountered. I wanted to install the Macromedia Flash plugin and I first downloaded the tar.gz version which installs its two files via a bash script. Problem was, the script wouldn’t run correctly. It would tell me over and over again that the directory I was trying to install is not valid (I tried both the existing /usr/lib/mozilla and /usr/lib/mozilla-1.4.1, no joy). I wonder, didn’t Red Hat’s QA actually test common proprietary software that many of its users will want to install? I mean, by my estimation there are not more than 10-15 commonly-installed popular proprietary applications in this category, so it should be no big deal to test them all. Anyway, the story doesn’t end there. I read the script itself and saw that all it does is copy these two files (.xpt and .so) to the right directory and changes permissions with chmod 755. So, I did it by hand, logged out and back in again, and still none of my browsers would work with the plugin (plugins are enabled). So, I decided to download the Fedora and RH9 RPM just in case these would work (using Synaptic and apt, would not help out here either). Thankfully, the RPM GUI utility that comes with Fedora installed the Flash plugin and told me that it will need to also install some gcc libstd-c++ compatibility libraries. It asked me for the 3rd CD, I put it in, and then the installer bailed out. Fedora would not even install its own RPMs from its own db/CD. This is a well known bug from the second Fedora beta and I am very, very surprised that it is in the final too. Update: Here is the bug report and a preliminary fix for it as found on Red Hat’s bugzilla.
And no, it doesn’t end here. Just as a test, I went to the main “Add/Remove Apps” utility and told it to install the X11-vim application. Same problem, as you can see from our screenshots. It just wouldn’t install its own RPMs (third party RPMs that do satisfy dependencies and get installed via the command line DO work, mind you). It is poor QA, from all I can tell.
Then, it was Java’s turn. I installed the latest Java SDK (j2re1.4.2_05) and thankfully all went well (I can run Java apps), except again, the browser plugin. Konqueror was the only browser that did recognize the plugin and worked with it. The rest of the browsers completely ignore it (the java plugin’s link is correctly in place and I now understand that it works better if you install it for the current user on your ~/.mozilla/plugins/ but the trouble starts if you want to install it for all users).
And on top of all that, you frequently get RPM-locking (I found rebooting to be the only method to get RPM functionality back) an annoying bug which is with us since Red Hat Linux 8.
And then there is Samba which didn’t work. Samba 3 still doesn’t work for me via Konqueror or Nautilus (smb-client command line tool kind of works better), because it insists on connecting on my VMWare’s virtual IP address of 10.0.0.19 instead of my XP’s real 10.0.0.10 IP on my home network (even when I do “smb://10.0.0.10”). It manages to connect once every 10-15 efforts (and asks for my password a zillion times, for a shared folder that does not require a password) and even then I can’t do anything with the files. Mac OS X, Slackware and… Lindows don’t exhibit the problem connecting to that machine. Yellow Dog Linux also has the same problem, as it is Red Hat Linux-derived. I filed a bug months ago with RHL9 and it is still not fixed.
And then you’ve got all the little application bugs (which is nevertheless the distro’s responsibility to do QA on to make sure they work well): from the crashy RhythmBox, to the Python errors in redhat-config-network (screenshot), to the annoying KDE applets loading on Gnome’s desktop instead of following the freedesktop.org standard (it is details like these that destroy the overall impressions, no matter if I know ‘why’ some things happen the way they do), to KOffice going berserk when adding a spreadsheet and chart kpart on your presentation, to the Assistive Tech Support preference panel which makes Gnome want to log out when you click Metacity’s close button (another reported bug that’s still there), to Nautilus occassional crashes, to gtk/aspell’s own bugs via Gedit this very moment I am typing this (tells me it doesn’t know several words but when I check its “spelling suggestions” the words are in its list already) and other such annoyances. Granted, all OSes have bugs, but it is a different story to find 5-6 bugs in months of using an OS (e.g. in my OSX experience and even fewer bugs on my XP) and to find 15 of them in a few hours of usage as in Fedora’s case.
And then there are the actual limitations of the distro that are well known: no mp3 support, no out of the box serious video playback support, no included video editor for home movies. In fact, I can live with all the above problems, except the following one: multimedia performance. It is a different thing to not have multimedia support out of the box and to not have good performance on it even when the user takes steps to compensate for the lack of it. I compiled and installed the mp3 plugin for Fedora’s XXMS (download it from here or here), I installed Xine, Mplayer and Totem and worked fine for the most part but Ogg and Mp3 playback would skip with XMMS after using the machine for a while (quality would degrade with time). After changing the eSound back-end to OSS I got a bit better performance but still not acceptable. Playing Frozen Bubble and having XMMS on the background playing an internet radio station (so the disk was not really touched, plus DMA is on for all my drives) sound quality would drop to the floor. Sometimes, XMMS would skip even when loading new folders on Nautilus or when loading a new web page with Epiphany. This machine is an AthlonXP 1600+ with a Yamaha XG-754 PCI sound card and 256 MB of RAM. I expect more out of it, especially when my XP Pro does not skip on a way slower machine (dual Celeron 533 Mhz) or when Mac OS X manages just fine on a Cube G4 450 Mhz. The same AthlonXP machine also has Slackware and YellowTAB Zeta in it and these two OSes have no problems with media performance. Fedora Core has though even if its installation was fresh.
The whole fiasco with installation and the broken RPM GUI engine has put me off from trying out nVidia’s 3D drivers. I think I will wait for Fedora-specific builds, if I decide to keep Fedora on this partition until then and I haven’t nuked it in the meantime to install something else.
On the distro’s credit I have to remark that the icons and themes look more polished and the mouse movement on X is very smooth and precise (something that most XFree86-based OS/distros lack as of 2-3 years ago when some mouse code got broken – freedesktop.org’s new X Server project is trying to address the problem, we learned). We learned that this is because of some specific enhancements to the Linux kernel made by the Red Hat engineers and also similar enhancements will bring better OpenGL performance too (haven’t tested it though).
Fedora has certainly a few new key elements, but none of them can be called important or really ground breaking for most users. It is a step ahead of RHL9 in some respects, exactly as RHL9 was to RHL8, but with way more bugs and problems. Fedora is barely evolutionary and not revolutionary. Innovation does not seem to be Fedora’s goal. We’ve seen it all before, we just got newer app versions and a nifty graphical boot this time around. But the bugs and the overall usability of the OS need to be further improved. It is in the details that Fedora (and most Linuxes in general) need to work out.
Fedora Core is a community-driven and Red Hat-managed and sponsored open source distribution project. This has its ups and downs. The project is open and everyone can participate, but on the other hand QA seems limited and abandoned by Red Hat. A shame really, but it is to expected with Red Hat having changed its focus to the Enterprise market.
There is not a chance that I would use Fedora as my main OS at this point. It’s got as many bugs as swiss cheese has holes, multimedia performance (at least with XMMS) and included multimedia feature-set is below par, application installation is a major pain in the rear, and there is no official support anymore for the bugs encountered throughout the experience. If this distro is just serving as a testbed for Red Hat’s ideas to see if they work and then move them to their Enterprise product, it just means that Fedora will always be in beta state, whether or not they announce them as final or not.
“The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software” we read on Fedora’s site and at least this version of the software is not polished enough or full-featured to be used as a general purpose OS for the majority of people. I do see some casual users switching to this free offering but not without going through some, initial at least, pain.
For the rest of us whose time is money, we will keep using Mac OS X or Windows XP and if we feel like using Unix/Linux, there is always FreeBSD and Slackware who at least they don’t pretend to be more than they really are. This might not be Red Hat’s product per se anymore, but with Red Hat having a prominent role in the development of Fedora and by releasing it in this state, it reflects badly on the company and I believe it does more damage than good to their image. I hope future releases are more polished.
Installation: 8.5/10
Hardware Support: 8/10
Ease of use: 6/10
Features: 7/10
Credibility: 6/10 (stability, bugs, security)
Speed: 7.5/10 (throughput, UI responsiveness, latency)
Overall: 7.16
i’ve liked eugenia’s reviews in the past, but this one is much more of a b*tch session than a review. to whit:
gaim upgrade – gratuitious usability gripe about something most users, especially new ones, would never do or would wait until the new version comes out through updates. dependency problems compiling some new version of some app are not unique to redhat. at least mention what problems there are, if any, with the version that’s included before ripping on the distro for something you did.
mozilla plugins – news to me. four fresh installs and three upgrades from RH9 didn’t break _any_ of my plugins anywhere. probably because i had the compat-stdc++ stuff either upgraded or installed (i always install everything). again, blaming the distro for something that’s not part of the distro is not completely fair. would you blame OS X for breaking some fink packages when upgrading to panther? i didn’t think so.
redhat-config-packages – i’ll give you that, it’s shite. but it’s been shite for a while and there is an update now in testing to fix the specific problem mentioned in the review. my gripe is that it is totally hardwired to physical cdrom media and can’t, TMK, even use .iso images, let alone network repositories. and when i did have cdroms, it wouldn’t even let me find or install, e.g., yum even though it’s there on disc1. fedora sorely needs something like that, but network-aware that’ll know about various fedora repositories and let you pick and choose from them. like synaptic.
rpm locking – god knows that’s been a pain in the arse since redhat 8. apparently it’s a problem in other rpm distros as well. so far it hasn’t done it to me in fedora, though.
samba – i’ve not seen the problem mentioned. i’ve been smb’ing fine between a FC laptop, FC desktop, XP laptop, and XP vmware guest. getting XP to work at all with samba is something i never did under RH <= 9 so that’s a big win.
perf problems – i suspect that may be a nv driver problem i vaguely recall seeing something about on the fedora mailing lists. i see no such problems on my 500 MHz laptop (with ati video) running GPS mapping software under vmware while playing oggs in xmms in the background. in fact, the performance improvement on that machine of fedora over RH9 is off the scale. i had more or less given up on vmware there, but now it’s fine. the drivers from nvidia.com do work fine on my fedora machines with such hardware. they also have shown only vast performance improvements over RH8 and RH9.
rhythmbox – it is crap. i tried pointing it to my 15,000 oggs and gave it an hour to think before putting it out of its misery. amusingly, it was grinding away while the prelink cron job was grinding away while i was also burning a dvd at 4x speed using the newly included dvd+rw tools. after all was said and done, the dvd came out fine in spite of everything going on. wouldn’t dream of trying that under XP, though OS X would likely handle it fine.
as for redhat support, read the frigging fedora mailing lists. all the same redhat people who’ve been working on RHL are there and actually engaged with their users/outside developers rather than working in private. a lot of the real bugs and problems you mention are being discussed there. hopefully with less rigid update policy, the fixes will show up much more quickly through up2date rather than having to wait for the next full release.
personally, i’m migrating all of my linux machines at work to fedora specifically to take advantage of the yum/apt support in up2date (i have a lot of custom software i manage with rpm). dvd+rw support and ruby 1.8 are also key new features as well as samba 3.0. sure, there are bugs, but so far i’ve seen fewer overall than with RH9 (and a lot fewer than RH8 which a lot of machines still run here).
tim
I have installed all the development packages in the install process. Maybe I missed something. Anyway the error message I recieved during compilation seemed to indicate an error in the source. I thought it must be something to do with GCC which I think is 3.3 in Fedora and stricter than previous versions.
Anyway I had other failures in other packages (mono-debugger) . It claimed to be missing binutils-dev (debian package) during configure. binutils is of course installed. I am going to try with SuSE 8.2 and see how that goes.
“Mostly because Fedora’s main DE is Gnome and all the tools are written wiht GTK+. KDE is there, but it has a second role, we like it or not.”
Yes, the DEFAULT is GNOME, but the default can easily be changed and unlike before KDE is installed by default and is not quite as crippled as it used to be. Furthermore, having the tools written in GTK+ is no big reason, Mandrake’s tools are also written in GTK+ and they have KDE as their default and GNOME plays second role.
Even if its not the default, I think it deserves more attention.
“Yes, I do like Gnome’s simplicity better than KDE’s bloatware.”
I have to totally agree with you on this, and thats why I was a big advocate of fixing this bug: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53772 with KDE’s super bloated context menus.
KDE’s interface is way too bloated in some areas, too many toolbar icons, unsensitive context menus etc. however codewise it is not bloated because it pretty much just uses Kparts and loads on demand.
But, I am very happy to see that KDE developers are more aggresive at quickly fixing usability bugs and adding acesibility features. Competition and its fruits are sweet
However, I think GNOME is too much the opposite of KDE, many of its parts lack essential features to me, thats why I go back to KDE after trying GNOME. For example, I can’t even change permissions of a folder and its subfolders, something that takes a single checkbox in KDE is not available in GNOME. In GNOME I would need to click each folder and file to change permissions. Making a usable and friendly desktop does not mean sacrificing such features, a balance needs to be struck and I think that KDE is too heavy on options in somea reas and GNOME is the opposite.
Also, I READ GNOMEDESKTOP.ORG, XFCE.ORG, ENLIGHTENMENT.ORG etc. I like both GNOME, KDE and many other desktops, I will not just stick to one because I like its developers or community, I will stick with it because the alternatives I have tried did not satisfy me.
Out of curiosity Eugenia, do you choose GNOME over KDE jsut because of the reasons you gave me. basically, do you choose it on technical merit only or something more, I am hoping the latter, but we are all people so its hard to jsut choose a preference for a product because it is better. Oftentimes how used someone is to it will be far more important.
Check this story out.
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/11/12/218245.shtml?tid=117&tid=123&…
Big story. You can remove this post here. Just wanted to point it out.
Alex:
Out of curiosity why was KDE just barely touched on this review? KDE is one of the leading desktop environments for Linux and it comes installed with jsut about any distribution of Linux by default, including in Fedora.
Erm… Okay. We must be using a different Fedora – I have to specifically choose to install KDE by putting a tiny tick in the appropriate box.
That is hardly what I would consider “by default.”
And despite the fact that I was a big KDE fan from 1997 through to 2002, I choose not to install KDE on my Fedora boxen. Why? Because I find that the Fedora/RedHat tools are aimed more towards Gnome. I also find Gnome to be slicker and neater for what I need it for.
One DE on the server makes life a lot easier for my users – sure, they are “unified,” however my users are concerned if they have too much choice!
I feel that it is appropriate to only review the Gnome environment if you are reviewing it from a default installation – since it is the default!
Erwos:
Give the user community some time to improve – it’s rapidly progressing with a merger of four major RPM repositories.
I agree – the real benefits of the community development has not had enough time to blossom. The Fedora Core release was extremely rushed – probably to make the most of hype and publicity.
The improvements over RH9 were small in number (relatively speaking – I don’t want to start a whole RH9 should have been RH8 debate again!) however they are welcome on my box. I find Fedora to be smooth, “pretty” and significantly more responsive than RH8. (Yeah, I bought RH9 workstation, but it never got high enough on my priority list to bother upgrading before FC1 was released!)
Maynard:
The dominant operating system in the world comes with neither DVD player, or movie codecs besides Microsoft’s own like wmv. It does not come with mp3 encoding capabilities either.
That’s right. It doesn’t come with an office suite, tonnes of games, server applications etc either.
The thing seems to be that we [OSS users] have gotten spoiled. We’re used to having things handed to us on a platter by the major distros.
I’m not saying this is wrong: I love the way that RH8 through FC1 has slotted right into the enterprise from a default install. Many kudos are needed!
But this efficiency has come at a price; people expect the distro to be everything for everyone.
It’s all about the target market – what was the target market of the RH8/9 product offering? The enterprise workstation. Not a games machine. Not a multimedia box. Hell, it’s not even pushed for servers, really! (How many serious servers need the footprint of RedHat/Fedora’s non-X installations?!)
Yes, in time, I would love to see some of the multimedia offerings available as a choice on the installation.
I’ve come to grips with RedHat’s “OSS Only” policy & can understand their reasoning.
What might be a nice compromise would be an extra (perhaps non-official) ISO (ala Mandrake), or even an option in “first boot” to “Install UnOfficial Packages” with links to the appropriate repositories and packages there. It could easily be integrated to provide the best of both worlds.
dv:
Yeah – compat-libstdc++ really should have been installed by default.
That one has puzzled me since RH8. Was there a rational reason mentioned for this decision? Did I miss something?
Only the poor souls that can’t get ADSL. I switched from Telstra cable to ADSL to escape their restrictive (and expensive!) plans.
Try living in “Region 2.” Competition hasn’t helped ADSL out here – the best plans for metro areas are as much as $50/mth more in Region 2 – if they even have the service available!
But let’s not get started on Telstra, shall we? I’ll rant too much for the 8,000 character limit! 😉
You could have downloaded it for free from your ISPs download site. (files.bigpond.com)
Erk! I was unaware of that. Well, lesson learned! (Bring on FC2! 😉
Actually, if it doesn’t count as part of my bandwidth, then the fact that the above option is available makes it viable for me to stay with Telstra. I mean, I don’t download mp3’s, divx et al.
(Even though I’m into OSS – which seems to be synonymous with piracy, at least to our federal government and ARIA)
> Promise’s support is abysmal …
They have just recently started helping kernel developers improve the opensource drivers. About time.
Hear, hear. Again, I would like, if not beg for, ATARAID support in anaconda. That factor will improve installations dramatically!
Dude don’t waste your time with 8.2. I would try out 9.0 since I have heard nothing but good things about it. Besides 8.2 rpms are hard to find IHMO.
“I could care less about Fedora. But after hearing about another Anaconda crash, it makes me wonder why the $*#% Debian is going to include it when there’s nothing wrong with its own installer.”
Progeny is the group doing the Anaconda port, independent of what is happening within Debian. Debian will have a new installer with Sarge which is currently in beta, and is not based on Anaconda.
Well I thought that was a pretty good review that showed what were the various fit and finish shortcomings that somehow some Linux people think are quite fine and to be tolerated. It was quite shocking to see all the stupid Linux fanboy criticism on slashdot of this article and Eugenia in particular. Is it any wonder that with attitudes like that Linux doesn’t improve in the usability department and that newbie users find it daunting to use? Then they wonder why more people don’t try Linux. You have my sympathies Eugenia against all the fanboy idiots on slashdot. Never mind that fact that Linux has a handicap in terms of the tons of commercial software that runs only on Windows, but instead they can’t even seem to fix basic OS level things and usability issues.
Sweetie, I should not have to read “unofficial FAQs”. It should just work babe, otherwise, it ain’t good enough.
What a baby. The RPM/Up2Date utility is their for a reason.
Want Gaim? : “up2date -i gaim” BANG! Gaim
Want Video?: “up2date -i mplayer” BANG! Mplayer
Hard huh?
I’ve been running FC1 for a few days now, and love it. I have had less problems than I have had with any other distro (I’ve been running with the penguins since ’96).
Here’s my two cents, hopefully someone finds them useful.
NVIDIA driver:
– Download the latest driver from the NVIDIA site
# export IGNORE_CC_MISMATCH=Y
# sh <Nvidia driver file>
– Just go with the defaults for all the questions. By setting the IGNORE_CC_MISMATCH flag, the installer will be able to compile the kernel module.
– Update your XF86Config file per the instructions in the NVIDIA readme file.
RPMs:
– RPM dependency hell is nothing new to FC1. Except for extremely basic packages, I have found that RPMs aren’t worth the time. Worse, they can make your system unstable by modifying files that are shared with other packages.
– For me, I build from source and install everything in it’s own folder under ‘/opt’. Then I create a script or a softlink in ‘/usr/local/bin’ that actually starts the application.
Boot time:
– I was able to speed up my boot-time considerably by turning off unneeded services. System Settings -> Server Settings -> Services will bring up the GUI to edit your services.
Hope someone finds this useful — Zach
I was very dissapointed in Fedora Core 1. I think I will take the CEO of Red Hat advice, I will use Windows for my desktop and Linux for my servers.
I can already see a bunch of red flags in that “review”.
The box I’m typing on now began its life running Red Hat 4.2. It’s been upgraded countless number of times, and it’s now on Red Hat 9. And it’s rock-stable solid. And the reason that it’s stable, and functional, is precisely because what I’ve been doing, for the last six years, was the exact opposite of what this “review”er did.
Notice that she began having problems when she tried to hack together an upgrade to some application. Lesson number one when running Red Hat: do not install any software yourself. Always use rpm, which checks in, keeps track of, and maintains, all the inter-library and inter-application dependencies. Once you begin flinging random libraries and applications into the system, some of which may or may not overwrite existing libraries or files, you’re well on your merry way to Linux’s equivalent of Windows DLL hell, when you’ve got ten versions of the same basic library installed in fifteen different directories, and you now have absolutely no clue whatsoever what you end up running when you start a given application. Which randomly crashes, I wonder why?
By the way, the same also applies to other Linux distros too, I’m sure. They all use some kind of a package management system, be it rpm or apt. The same principle applies in either case.
My box is very solid even though I have plenty of custom software installed which I’ve compiled and built myself. But the key difference is that all the software was installed by rpm. Rach time I upgraded to a new distribution release, the installer correctly detected that I have an application that has a dependency on an older version of the library. The installer then proceeds to load a compatibility library, in addition to the new, incompatible version of the library. After upgrading, I then recompile all my custom software and install the new RPMs, whenever I have some free time. Everything still works in the meantime, because all the dependencies are correctly satisfied.
Eventually, I get around to cleaning out my box, seeing which compatibility libraries can be removed. When I try to remove them, inevitable RPM complains because I forgot to recompile some application that still depends on the old library. After doing that, and when nothing no longer needs it, it gets removed by rpm without a peep.
I also see that the reviewer grabbed some random third-party RPM from some dark alley (strike 1). Unsurprisingly, rpm refused to install it due to missing dependencies (strike 2). The reviewer tried to fix the situation by, once again, grabbing a bunch of third party libraries, and installing them manually (strike 3). End result: a big, recursive mess (strike 4).
I wonder why?
# rm /var/lib/rpm/__db*
# rpm -q blahhhhhh (any text will do)
# chown rpm:rpm /var/lib/rpm/__db*
.. Not exactly user friendly, but it will save you a reboot.
Thank you for copying and pasting posts from Slashdot.
>Out of curiosity Eugenia, do you choose GNOME over KDE jsut because of the reasons you gave me.
Email me if you want a more elaborate explanation.
I think some variables are not in Redhat’s hands though. Rhythmbox does have issues, at least, the version they shipped. A new one came out which fixes the issues most people complain most about. Flies with my 4600 song collection now.
For mp3 I nstalled libmad, mad and gstreamer-mad. I have mplayer for movies, although I prefer to use gstreamer-player. Have to get a proper set of gstreamer packages for that, or make my own.
I have learnt to live well with rpm. I used to do the ./configure; make; make install thing, but I hate having to follow apps to uninstall. Now I just use rpm. whether it be by checkinstall or by properly building the rpms from spec files. It help the system be more manageable.
I do not mind too much about bot time. It is not much slower, if at all than Windows XP on the same machine when booting.
This is a free distro. Unfortunately, US patents disallow MP3 support as well as xine from being distributed. Fedora is still associated with Redhat, and therefore follows their policy (which has good reason: we don’t need to give people excuses to kill Linux companies).
When I installed fedora, the first thing I did was add the third party repositories to my yum.conf. Then yum update. I used yum to install *everything* on my box, except for Mozilla Thunderbird/Firebird ( of which there are third party RPMs that don’t need a repo – they’re not dependent on anything at install time ).
( btw, right at this moment yum update is running, and fetching new updates:
Dependencies resolved
I will do the following:
[update: libexif 0.5.12-0.fdr.2.1.i386]
[update: perl-DateManip 5.42-0.fdr.2.a.1.noarch]
[update: irssi 0.8.6-0.fdr.13.1.i386]
[update: apt 0.5.15cnc1-0.fdr.3.1.i386]
Is this ok [y/N]: mmmmm yes go ahead my eager slave. )
I have JAVA running Azureus, but not in my browser; I didn’t bother. From the last time I installed it though, the instructions on the site are more than adequate (literally copy and paste, or almost). I just don’t use JAVA in my browser.
As for the reasoning that this distro is not a new release … you’re all wrong. It is *just* beggining. The fact is that the community isn’t, or rather wasn’t large enough: Everyone has started rebuilding their repo’s for Fedora, and will continue to do so from now. *Now* we have the community needed to make Release 2 good. The MLs are literally exploding now.
We are having several repo’s merging into our unofficial solutions. That should solve the shortage of packages. Aside from that, the official Extras and Alternatives repo’s are going to rock.
I have to admit though, Release 1 was premature, but they were faced with a problem: There was no community, or not much of one to speak of.
How to solve that? Release 1. Now, our MLs are freakishly active, and we are solving problems quite fast. We even have a (rather extensive) list of packages waiting QA testing.
Btw, most of the redhat-specific config tools will probably be undergoing an overhaul from what i hear: much has changed ( kernel 2.6 etc. ). Perhaps the much awaited GNOME-tools can replace them? ( speculation and preference of my own ).
Oh joy! :
Completing update for libexif – 5/8
Completing update for perl-DateManip – 6/8
Completing update for irssi – 7/8
Completing update for apt – 8/8
Updated: libexif 0.5.12-0.fdr.2.1.i386 perl-DateManip 5.42-0.fdr.2.a.1.noarch irssi 0.8.6-0.fdr.13.1.i386 apt 0.5.15cnc1-0.fdr.3.1.i386
Transaction(s) Complete
[root@aerie kevin]#
Now … that wasn’t so hard was it? And who ever heard of irssi being in Core fedora releases … And that was the way I upgraded from test 1 -> test 3 -> Core 1. each upgrade was 20 minutes or so. No issues. Just reboot, select new kernel. That was it. Gaim is … something of a sore point though. I don’t find anything new in 72 that i need though, and if i do … I’ll make RPMs and submit it
(fedora spec of course)
As for that RPM freeze … afaik it was fixed. never bothered me. Then again … i use yum, not the ugly hack that is apt-rpm. yum is clean, and purpose built for rpm. try using it.
A tip: yum -C <operation> will be significantly faster as it relies on local cache; no need to check servers.
Does anybody ever actually take the time to figure out why a particular distro runs clockwork on one machine and on another it’s a complete disaster? How can there be this much of a discrepancy?
I have xine/totem, mplayer/gmplayer, xmms-mp3, alsa, crossover-office, vmware, wine, Nvidia drivers, firebird, thunderbird, xmms-alsa etc. all running here.
the hardest of the lot to install was alsa: 15 minutes, mostly spent waiting for someone to get back to me in #fedora while they were doing something.
and alsa works nicely. one bug though: if audio dies frequently, reduce the main mixer’s volume to ~80-95% and it works perfect ( i think this is specific to me though – happened on other distros too ).
all the mentioned software was in .rpm format, except for VMWare and Crossover. alsa rpms were not in yum though (i don’t have the other repos listed) i am sure they’re in other repos.
sorry to post again and again … keep forgetting things.
What did you have to do to get your Crossover-Office/Plugins to work? It installed perfectly fine, but I cannot get anything to install to it. Even IE 6, which is a breeze to install in RH 9… now hangs and sends the processor to 100% for twenty minutes. I then have to kill the process and I have done this ten or so times.
Any help/suggestions would be greatly, greatly appreciated.
KottonmouthKing; i would imagine the great differences in opinion about a particular Linux distro has many factors from user experience, user discretion, user expectations, and Hardware, OEM manufactured computers were built with Windows in mind, and some OEMs are built with some pretty cheap components, and last but not least FUD is spread in BBS boards…
some of those Slashdot people can me pretty mean and rough around the edges since this review was posted at slashdot i would bet a bunch of em came in and bashed Eugina for it, i won’t bash her for a difference of opinion as i respect her opinion and her website…
i am using Fedora Core-1 right now and it runs great for me, my only real peeve is the mp3 issue but since it is a legal issue…..well nothing i can do about it–except install some software to remidy the problem, hopefully a xmms-mp3-1.2.8 plugin will be released soon so users can get the stock xmms-1.2.8 that comes with Fedora Core-1 to play mp3s’…
Linux is not perfict, and there is no perfict and ideal distro, all i can say is if you want to use Linux is just find the Linux distro that works best for you. i been a Redhat user since 7.1 and i think Fedora is a fine distro, Fedora may not work for everybody but it works for me just fine…
if i had to choose between Linux and Windows i would certainly choose Linux (without a doubt)…
HappyTrails :^)
To be fair to Redhat and Linux in general, this Fedora Core is not a product, it’s an open source community process. It can’t be judged in the same way as you would judge a product.
IMHO Eugenia made a great point in her review. Fedora will not make a good choice as anyone’s primary OS with these kind of quality problems.
I’m disgusted with the instant flame war that breaks out whenever someone gives a reasonable negative opinion of a Linux distribution. If Microsoft (or to a lesser extent Apple) released such a flaming pile of poo, it would make national headlines. In order for Linux to make a real impact, people will need to be realistic. I’m sorry, but I won’t use Fedora, and have no intention of doing so (as long as their releases are so poor). I’ll stick to Mandrake and WinXP for my two machines.
Software is imperfect. Period. I realize that. However, it’s no execuse to make life difficult. In order for Linux to make it mainstream (Linux being inserted in place of any distribution), it needs to provide simpler interfaces for the common user. I believe many of the current distros are attempting to work on this, however I think they are way behind.
Why do I run Mandrake on my second computer? One, it’s free. Two, I like to mess around with a *nix like OS.
So let’s give Eugenia a break, and take her review for face value. A subjective review that may not say what everyone wants it to say, but needed to say.
Thank you Eugenia!
Though it hurts… much of what’s said here is true. I imagine that with more volunteers these bugs should be worked out soon. If we can address these, then the next Fedora will be amazing. Don’t get discouraged!!
Plus, I don’t like the fact that Mr. Bruce Perens is now trying to start “Yet Another Rendition of Linux” http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,61166,00.html?tw=wn_…. Why doesn’t he just rally all this industry support around Fedora? Fear of a dominant Red Hat perhaps? I don’t know what his motives are with this project. It seems counter-intuitive to me to want to start another community desktop project when we already have Fedora, which has a good foundation and good philosophy, in my opinion.
IMHO, it was a hard hitting but fair review. It is good to see that ELQ is back in her old form, willing to dish out constructive criticism when needed. Although some people are offended, I am sure that if there are some Fedora programmers, they’ll take this criticisms on board and ensure that future version don’t make the same mistake. With that being said, I have a few other things to say:
1) We have Linux fanboys get all hot under the collar over the fact that ELQ is willing to compare Fedora against Windows, MacOS X and other commercial operating systems. On one hand we have these people who say that Linux is ready to take “Microsoft on”, and yet, they want special treatment when there is a review. What is it? is Linux ready to step up to the crease and hit a 6 or is it going to go back to the pavilion? (yes, that is cricket terminology).
2) When I started to use GNU/Linux many moons ago, the main attraction I liked about it was the mantra, “it will be released once it is ready”. There has been a move in the opensource community from that goal to one where “release the code on time and at any costs”. Fedora should have stayed in beta until January. There should have been atleast another 2-3 release candidates fixes the bugs ELQ bought up. The worst part about these bugs is that they’re in VERY common parts and occur in the default configuration. Sure, I could understand if ELQ had configured it way outside the target spectrum, but the fact remains that she is using it, on a standard PC with a default install. These things should not happen.
3) Linux is never going to be adopted as a desktop solution outside the corporate setting until such time we have people who are willing to make constructive criticisms, like ELQ, without the huge backlash we’ve seen in this forum. It is time for some linux fanboys to realise that GNU/Linux isn’t perfect and that what is required is MORE constructive citicism NOT less. By simply ignoring these issues, you make yourself no better than Microsoft or any other commercial software vendor.
Well Put! I couldn’t agree with you more.
Sounds like Eugenia imagines that Fedora is a product, but it isn’t. Redhat is not offering a desktop solution at this time, but in the future they probably will and that’s why they are supporting this project by hosting it on their server. In this regard Redhat is saying to the open source community that Linux needs stronger infrastructure in order to base a successful product line on the desktop.
Bruce Perens is apparently going to put together a Linux product rather than help strengthen open source infrastructure. So if you are going to judge anything critically than judge UserLinux, but not Fedora because it is not a product and should be classified as an open source development project.
Since it is difficult to support all of the Linux software, a product would only include a subset of what is available. On the other hand, Fedora encourages all of the Linux software as well as development software to be deployed. And let the best ideas compete.
I had small problems getting my cdrom drive to work, but it turned out the problem was DMA was enabled when it should not have been. To fix this I ran “hdparm -d 0 /dev/hdc”. This bug was in all distros I tried, but the people in #fedora on irc.freenode.net helped me find out what the problem was. If you are having any kinds of problems with it you can go in there and get help. The people are very nice and know what they’re talking about. They also have links to other site’s that may answer your questions.
In order for Fedora to improve, it would have to have thousands of more software applications because it’s all about this development software reaching the users that never made it into the distributions. Hopefully Fedora will be judged successful if it encourages more development to take place and more ideas to compete.
Later on some vendor will take a subset of those ideas and create a Linux product out of them.
It’s stable and works for me everyday for email, web browsing, irc and playing audio cds I buy from the store.
Apt, yum and up2date are used to upgrade to the latest software with a minimum of fuss.
After downloading the images, mounting them and puting them on an old celron 400 running Red Hat 9, I booted from a floppy and did a graphical network install on a p4 2.4 shuttle xpc box. Everything I’ve tried so far works great.
For Samba 3,I made manual entries for the other machines on my network in the /etc/hosts file. After that, everything worked great. The hosts file has been around for a *long* time and works well for a small number of machines.
Sounds like Eugenia imagines that Fedora is a product, but it isn’t. Redhat is not offering a desktop solution at this time, but in the future they probably will and that’s why they are supporting this project by hosting it on their server. In this regard Redhat is saying to the open source community that Linux needs stronger infrastructure in order to base a successful product line on the desktop.
Yes, but on the other hand, people are going to look at Fedora as an alternative to SuSE and Mandrake. The whole point of Fedora is for the community to develop that “core” and for Red Hat to “add value” by creating their Enterprise products on top of it.
Sure, you could say, “who cares if people don’t use it”, well, if people don’t use it, then the whole point of having a community focused core basically becomes meaningless.
There is a difference between making a distribution of a decent quality and making one of commercial quality. What ELQ bought up were VERY obvious oversights that should have been picked up in the QA process. I am sure ELQ doesn’t expect perfection but good lord, the problems she experienced should have stood out like a sore thumb during the testing process.
Bruce Perens is apparently going to put together a Linux product rather than help strengthen open source infrastructure. So if you are going to judge anything critically than judge UserLinux, but not Fedora because it is not a product and should be classified as an open source development project.
What? so criticising Fedora isn’t fare because it is “community focused”? Look at Debian, and I can assure you, having used it for a while, the chances of getting the problems faced by ELQ on Debian is low to almost non-existant.
Now, I am not saying Fedora should be THAT conservative, however, they should have waited till 2.4.1 and GTK 2.4.x to be released, extensively tested it until the only bugs left are *REALLY* obscure ones are left, aka, “my computer crashes when I hook my toaster up to the USB port”.
Since it is difficult to support all of the Linux software, a product would only include a subset of what is available. On the other hand, Fedora encourages all of the Linux software as well as development software to be deployed. And let the best ideas compete.
If they can’t support all of it, cut down the package list to something that is more manageable then let the package monkeys out there create the necessary things people want.
It is like SuSE Linux and their 5000 packages. Sure, it is nice, however, how about getting those packages WORKING firt. XCDRoast not properly setup by default, number of games in the games menu not launching. If you do the default “slim” install, you won’t have any problems, however, once you do the “everything but the kitchen sink” install, you end up getting into areas that are “uncharted”.
“Linux is not perfict, and there is no perfict and ideal distro”
Amen. I just think it’s curious how emotional people get over all this. I find myself getting annoyed if somebody is ragging on SUSE, but why? SUSE’s not perfect. I had a hideous Nautilus crash on SUSE. GNOME literally took over my desktop somehow, superimposed itself right over KDE. I had to uninstall GNOME in between a continuous stream of error messages. I couldn’t have made it do that even if I wanted to. And this is my favorite distro lol
Doesn’t mean that SUSE (or Gnome or Nautilus) sucks though either.
I guess it’s like Pinhead said in Hellraiser II: “…he is in his own Hell. Just as you are in yours.”
I’ve used ASP Linux, RH 8, RH 9, MDK 9.0, MDK 9.1, SuSE 8.2… I’ve only had Fedora Core 1 on my computer for 36 hours but I’ve had the chance to do two installs and an upgrade install from RH 9.
Fedora has a few bugs, but with very little effort (apt-get / Synaptic) I was able to do a lot of things that were broken in Red Hat 9. Fedora’s Samba browsed my network in Nautilus as soon as I logged into Gnome 2.4, which looks a lot more polished than 2.2. I grabbed MPlayer and Xine in Synaptic and they worked – which they didn’t in Red Hat 8 or 9.
I can’t stress enough how fast and easy everything is with Synaptic. I noticed a lot of you complained about dependency issues. I didn’t think Fedora had more dependency issues than most other RPM distros I’ve used.
A couple bugs… in gnome the panel applet command line doesn’t work. You can’t type in the field, so I’m looking forward to an update for that. Also GKrellm has shown my CPU useage spike for one or two 10 minute periods, although my Athlon T-Bird 1.2 system didn’t feel like it was under load. My system does feel slightly more responsive than it did with Red Hat 9 (Red Hat 8 felt very sluggish). I was happy to see it load an Athlon optimized kernel in the install.
So far this is the distro that, with the exception of a couple patchable bugs, everything has just worked. I would consider swapping this for any other RPM-based distro out right now a serious downgrade.
I can comiserate with the article. I’ve been using Red Hat since Hedwig and cut my Linux gnubie teeth on this distro. Red Hat and now the ‘lack of’ have always left me feeling a little short every release except for 6.2 and 7.2, but FC1 really dove off the cliff.
I don’t have the time to play with a buggy stapled together OS. This is why I left Windows. And to pay for the Enterprise edition, when Red Hat even says Linux isn’t ready for the desktop is well uhem ludicrous. I feel my investments into Red Hat software have been fruitless and a WASTE OF MONEY!
Thank heaven for Slackware and I do purchase each release. 🙂
By your descriptions, it sounds like you should have given “Ease of use”, “Features”, and “Credibility” grades of less than 5 instead of the generous marks you did give them.
It’s not libcrypt, it’s libgcrypt. Gaim can use mozilla NSS as well, provided you set the ld path right. Libgcrypt failed to compile on me too. I thought it has to be a gcc3 problem, but then again. It’s a shame gnutls depends on libgcrypt and libgcrypt is spaghetti code which doesn’t even compile.
I think a newbie-user from Windows land wouldn’t really care between Gaim v0.71 and Gaim v0.72…
Most of the problems you mentioned are related to installing/upgrading packages – something which most Linux newbies are pretty reserved about.
.. stop crying and install this :
http://people.redhat.com/~katzj/redhat-config-packages/1.2.7/redhat…
(with rpm -U)
work fine for me and still thinking that FC is a great distrib !
Running Fedora fine, upgraded from RH9. Piece of cake, but then again, I’ve been useing linux since there was a distro called craftworks and RH was still pre “4.0” series.
Review – typical of the home end user and probably correct. Those of us a little more knowledgable won’t have any problems, or when we do, we can fix them ourselves. YUM is a nice addition – and so far the machine has performed well and hasn’t required a reboot (In fact it never has).
Since debian is another “community supported project” and it is very stable and useable. I don’t foresee fedora as having any more issues than debian, or slackware. Well supported community efforts have put together some very high quality Linux distributions.
Probably a smart thing for the “Fedora” community to do is to create a “bleeding edge/raw hide/don’t say we didn’t warn you” and a more “mainstream/this will work/the reviewer of this artcile will like it better” version. That way those of us that can handle the quirks that come from being a constant beta tester have something to test, and the community will have a stable release for the rest. The above suggestion will also give redhat an extra layer of testing.
I downloaded and installed FC1 immediately upon release. Previously I used Redhat 9, but I opted for a clean installation rather than an upgrade just to make sure it worked from the start. Like many have reported, I also had the hanging X after installation was completed and had to reset the PC and then it magically worked (must be frightening to newbies who expect stuff to ‘just work'(tm)). So far the experience has been good. It is certainly nothing earth-shattering, but the updared packages makes for a very snappy system compared to RH9 and the improve Bluecurve is pleasant to look at. I do, however, have 2 problems:
1. For some odd reason smbclient is not verbose as it has been in all other GNU/Linux distributions I have used. It does not report average throughput on file transfers and does not echo settings when you change them (ie: >prompt does not return “prompting is now turned on/off”). I find this very annoying and have not been able to alter it to behave like previous versions. If anyone knows how to do so I would be very glad for the solution.
2. I have had no success installing Mplayer using YUM and the Livna repository. I see very little mention of this (apart from that someone in this thread also mentioned it) and the suggestion to use “up2date -i mplayer” doesn’t seem to work either.
I think your right when you say distro’s need to do more testing. Fedora worked well for me & I’ll be upgrading to Fedora’s next release. I would love to use Mandrake but it doesn’t recognise my monitor & gives me blurred fonts. If Mandrake could get the driver support that Redhat has & properly support Gnome I think it could be a winner. Until that day I’ll keep using Fedora/Redhat.
Too many comments to read, so this is a redundancy warning. =)
The article is pretty accurate in stating the most obvious problems. However, after fixing some initial problems, the system runs stable as a rock for me and the performance is just outstanding. I had not yet problems installing third party applications, though I just tried Gaim 0.72 and it indeed doesn’t work. I’m sure this will be fixed by the next release of Gaim.
I also have nothing to complain about multimedia. My Vorbis media isn’t skipping the slightest and I just did the stress test: Playing both OGG and an MP3 file simultaneously while starting and playing Enemy Territory (which in itself is already stressing my poor P3 1000) and had not a single skip in all of the three sound sources. Now the interesting question would be, whether my or your observed behaviour is the exception.
Oh and Rhythmbox is rock solid for doing what I do with it (playing my ripped music albums). Of course bugs are expected in such an early development version and it’s a clear goal of Fedora to be a testbed for such development versions.
I think what we’ll have to get used to is, that Fedora, while in fact beeing in direct competition to Windows and OS X, is _not_ a finished end user product but more like a breeding box for developers and users who like to get in touch with latest developments (aka enthusiasts).
The quality assured and (hopefully) bug free versions are the Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases, of which none exist (yet) for the general home user, because Red Hat thinks, that it can’t really deliver for this market (yet), to which I would agree (yet). Before it would really start to make sense for Red Hat to develop such a release, I think the software wouldn’t just need some more polish (see Gtk still lacking the “real” file selector, see GStreamer not yet beeing ready, etc. You can’t release a snapshot of the current Linux desktop and expect it to be satisfying user needs for the next three years. It doesn’t “just work”, yet) but Linux itself also needs more backing by hardware and software vendors. And to get the latter, the plan of Red Hat is to bring Linux on the corporate desktop (for which it works really well already) with their Enterprise Linux products. We’ll just have to see how it turns out and meanwhile, there just isn’t any Linux home user product from Red Hat for anyone but developers, enthusiasts and people who want to learn something new.
There are still SuSE, Mandrake, Lindows, etc. I don’t think they really deliver to the promise and some of them aren’t completely Open Source though (which, to me, elliminates all advantages of using this alternative plattform).
Personally, I love Fedora and I’m very excited to watch it’s further development. I also hope that it will contain a few less embarassing bugs in the next releases though.
We could all help in making sure this becomes a reality… After all, everyone is the QA of Open Source projects.
I had many troubles getting a working RH9 installation on my laptop (HP ze4318ea). Then I tried to install FC1 and all I had to modify was the acpi=on setting in grub.conf and removing the speedtch.o driver (which is only half working to to a missing ppp plugin file) and I was set. I don’t like the graphical boot, but you can remove it. Being the first release, it is ways better than I thought. YMMV.
A fix for this bug has long been available, and I am very surprised that it was not included in FC1.
if you get the problem, it can be fixed by running:
rm /var/lib/rpm/__db*
Bugfixed RPMs are available from ftp://ftp.rpm.org/pub/rpm/dist
Both these solutions are given in this bug report:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=97002
No problems whatsoever with Java (rpms via http://www.jpackage.org), Flash (Warren Togami’s semi-official rpms from http://macromedia.mplug.org/), add-ons from http://fedora.us and mp3 and multi-media from http://rpm.livna.org
The way to work-around the IMO rare stale-locks problem with RPM is “rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db.* ; rpm -vv –rebuilddb” after stopping/killing all package utilities. No reboot required.
I install Fedora last weekend and i dont have the troubles you explain… I install the flash plugin (the tar.gz) with no problems…
With yum install mplayer and search in google for the xmmms-mp3 plugin, download and all work fine…
I install apt for non-oficial repositores and install more software with no problems and by now all work very very fine.
Are you sure you are not install a beta?
PD: Im from spain and my english is very poor sorry
This review is one of the worst I have ever read on OSnews, and I’ve read some bad ones. First of all, don’t install shrike rpms in yarrow. There’s a reason for the version change. There are yarrow gaim 0.72 rpms avalable from freshrpms. Look it up!
Please don’t blame yarrow for your mistakes. Yes, yarrow has its issues, including a buggy up2date and redhat-config-packages as well as lack of multimedia support. But you create more issues and blame yarrow for your lack of research.
“The reviewer’s expectations were too high. You’re not supposed to compare Linux distributions with Windows or OS X.”
Oh? In that case you can’t ever claim that Linux is/will be ready for the desktop.
“Comparing Linux distributions with other Linux distributions is the only fair way to review Linux.”
It’s also a great way to make the review completely irrelevant to non-Linux (as in would-be) users. This is not a Linux fan-boy site, this is OSNews and it’s all about comparing different operating systems.
/Lennart
I´ve been using Redhat since version 7.1 and immediately decided to jump ship when Redhat split its market. I installed Debian Woody yesterday and I just finished compiling sound and USB support into the 2.4.22 kernel. I´m sure I could have installed Fedora Core 1.0, but I was so irked by the changes Redhat made that I decided to switch to another distribution—at least for my home distribution. (Ironically, I am leaving Redhat on our production machines for the time being.)
I guess I´ve outgrown Redhat anyway. It´s also nice to be able to do: apt-get install openoffice.org There just seem to be more Debian packages out there.
I seem to be having opposite problems. I had a hardrive crash on XP so I bought a new one and found out about Fedora. I have used loads of linux ditros in the past but never considered them desktop ready. This is the first time I have run only Linux and no dual boot.
So far I have had no problems. Installed nicely and most things ran straight out the box (as it were). ONly problems I had were with my ATI card not in 3d acceleration mode, fixed quickly by grabbing ATI’s own drivers. I can’t seem to get Java working though. OR rather I can’t type java at the prompt. ALso I have been using Mozilla 1.5 on XP so I had to remove the 1.4 version and grab 1.5 RPMS (fedora ready) from Mozilla.org. No problems there.
I am running my business on Fedora now. I now have a decent accounts package…my accounting has been terrible. I also now have a project management tool. As well as OpenOffice which I have been using for about 2 years now on Windoze.
I have also downloaded a demo of Crossover Office. So far I have run MS OFfice 2000, Adobe Photoshop, Internet Explorer 6 installed via internet and Dreamweaver MX. All run perfectly. I am very impressed. Would be more impressed if some of these were native Linux. So I shall be purchasing this. It’s not a lot. Works out at about £35.
I am also an avid gamer. So for linux games I have installed Americas Army, Wolfenstein: enemy territory and I also have Neverwinter Nights running. All work perfectly. I have also installed Transgaming’s WineX but not impressed so far. But for a couple of quid a month it may be worth it in the end. Only game I can run without 3d is Simcity 4.
I think you have to remember with Linux is you get more than just an operating system. If you were to purchase a computer with Windoze don’t forget it will be all setup ready to run on that particular machine. Also you won’t get any of the extras. It would cost an absolute fortune for the stuff you get with it. I have installed XP from scratch and I have had my fair share of problems. Network cards being one of them. And then you have to install all your applications seperately.
Equally if you were to purchase a computer with Linux preinstalled I would expect it would work without problems.
I can’t run MP3 files either but oh well never mind. Trivial really. They can be converted to OGG files if neccessary. I have already converted some of my cds to ogg. The CD Juicer program is excellent for that. Even names the files and creates subdirectories based on artist and album.
As I said I am having the opposite problems and am loving every moment of it. Very impressed. The icons are much nicer than they used to be. So much more professional.
I think that everyone is forgeting about us poor souls that no have an internet connection.
WE WANT A FULL DISTRO AT ONCE.
with mp3, video player, flash, etc etc etc
Come on! We are the 3rd world too!!!!!
Someone is given a whole operating system for free. Rather than value the thousands of hours that go into making it, this person rants and raves about small issues that are easily correctable. When I started playing with Linux years ago, we had bigger problems than whether a flash animation was working. Yet we march ahead against all odds.
This is our baby. Take care of it and of the developers that make it happen.Many of us still spent coutnless sleepless hours working on this out of the goodness of our hearts. We need constructive criticism, not hystrionics of the kind exhibited by that reviewer.
Thank you for listening and caring.
I’ve already all my personal dual workstations to FC1, and when I’ll finish 24x7xnnn testing it, I’ll start moving all my workstations and servers (that don’t run Slackware…)
Now.
I’ve got nVidia drivers working (export CC=gcc32), flash working (rpm -ivh compat-libstdc++* from the *FC1 CD*), java working (Same old JSDK I’m always using), and MP3 working (RH9 rpm), (with Athlon SMP optimized Kernel/Xine/MPlayer/Mozilla 1.5 compiled from source.)
I personally love it and I found all the problems to be minute and easily solved… but that’s me.
Gilboa
I have actually had very few problems. Fedora is definitely more responsive and the themes and icons are more polished. I have been using yum and up2date to install and update software without a hitch. Excellent job RedHat!
-G
Wiped off the RH9 install and did a clean install of FC1. Found all hardware, was easy to get mp3 playback, mplayer, xine etc.
One glitch: The RH9 install would let you change the type of video card and amount of video memory. RH9 always mistakenly detected my nvidia TNT card as having 4 MB, and I would simply change it to 16 MB. There was no option for this during the FC1 install, and therefore it limited me to 1024×768 (I always ran 1280×1024 under RH9). I had to manually edit the XF86Config file, which wasn’t a big deal for me but for someone just starting out….
I’m running Fedora 1 now on several systems and do in fact like it quite a bit. Eugenia has pointed out some valid complaints in her review with which I agree.
Fedora Core should “just work”. Most of the people reading this site are geeks, not newbies. We geeks are used to dealing with symbolic links and jumping through various hoops in order to make things work on our linux systems.
Look at all the technical advice offered in the comments to Eugenia’s Fedora review. One could write a Fedora FAQ based upon the information contained in these comments. But again, most of these things should just work, one should not need to be a linux geek or to consult an FAQ to get Fedora Core to work properly.
That is what I am hoping to see with the Fedora project, more community involvement, and a Fedora Core that will be rapidly improved.
i just upgraded from redhat 9 by clean install last night. I am very impressed with fedora. i really like using yum to upgrade. i just entered the livna site into yum.conf and all functionality was back for mp3 dvd etc… and way more than i ever had before. samba worked great for me. i really liked the new config interface and i didn’t even have to use swat (which i don’t like because you have to start a server to use it). boot time was very fast after i disabled all the default servers that i didn’t need (i mean who really needs the chinese letter server
except if you are chinese). i use a dual monitor and i didn’t even need the special config rpms from matrox to use it now.
the only problem i agree with the reviewer on is rpm locking. while using yum i got locked up a few times and this is a problem which needs to be fixed.
How fast do the prelinked KDE applications start?
Fedora is an incomplete, kludgey, and patched-together POS that is an embarrassment to Red Hat.
No wonder people were so concerned about RH’s product when they said they’d be dropping the desktop user.
I read about everyone’s expectations, that somehow FC1, is a desktop distribution. I don’t know if Red Hat ever put any real effort into being a desktop OS. As an individual who chose to pay for Xandros, all I can say is that you can wait, hope, volunteer, and try to get FC1 to be a desktop OS, but in the mean time look at Xandros to see how good it can be with a linux desktop.
http://fedora.artoo.net/faq/
This answers many, many questions I have seen in the article and comments.
If it matters, I have Fedora Core 1 installed with Java, Flash, mp3 everywhere, and zero undocumented problems (yes the gui package installer is borked…a fix is on the way.)
ded
“I think what we’ll have to get used to is, that Fedora, while in fact beeing in direct competition to Windows and OS X, is _not_ a finished end user product but more like a breeding box for developers and users who like to get in touch with latest developments (aka enthusiasts).”
that might be the primary goal, but if it’s not usable, it doesn’t make sense at all, because i don’t think that even the enthusiasts are willingly to bugfix their whole installation to have a usable product.
it as well doesn’t rule out that usability (for private users) should play an important role in the development process, also and especially because the red hat enterprise desktop (or suses offers etc.) is certainly not the last word in terms of ease-of-use and features, and also because it might not be clever for red hat to leave that potentially biggest market to players like lindows, xandros etc. as well as, from the bigger picture, linux for the desktop needs the active contributions of big players like red hat to mature-which brings us to the next point:
“The quality assured and (hopefully) bug free versions are the Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases, of which none exist (yet) for the general home user, because Red Hat thinks, that it can’t really deliver for this market (yet), to which I would agree (yet). Before it would really start to make sense for Red Hat to develop such a release, I think the software wouldn’t just need some more polish (see Gtk still lacking the “real” file selector, see GStreamer not yet beeing ready, etc.”
the old henn and egg-dilemma-you might take the lack of polishment as an excuse not to engage in this market, or (like smaller players with much less cash do) as a task that needs to get tackled, as a reason and motivation to change that status quo. with the same reasoning, linux wouldn’t have made it in the serverroom also…
“You can’t release a snapshot of the current Linux desktop and expect it to be satisfying user needs for the next three years. It doesn’t “just work”, yet) but Linux itself also needs more backing by hardware and software vendors.”
maybe not, but that’s not a reason to not even start to work on it (see above). as for the backing, it’s the same…
“And to get the latter, the plan of Red Hat is to bring Linux on the corporate desktop (for which it works really well already) with their Enterprise Linux products. We’ll just have to see how it turns out and meanwhile, there just isn’t any Linux home user product from Red Hat for anyone but developers, enthusiasts and people who want to learn something new.”
1. nearly every distro goes in the corporate-market (even xandros)
2. this strategy might well backfire, especially after the announcement of userlinux by bruce perens)
“There are still SuSE, Mandrake, Lindows, etc. I don’t think they really deliver to the promise and some of them aren’t completely Open Source though (which, to me, elliminates all advantages of using this alternative plattform).”
so help accerlerating the development of app. tools and programs instead of canceling it!
“Personally, I love Fedora and I’m very excited to watch it’s further development.”
me too!
kind regards.
Eugenia is (almost) right. Let’s see the conslusions:
1. Fedora’s role is the public beta testing (of RedHat’s tryings).
2. Fedora will be (always) in beta state.
3. We don’t know about the updates or security fixes.
4. Future. Next release will introduce kernel 2.6 with the same amount of bugs (beta testing starts again)
So, Fedora is not the right playgroung for you. It’s pure RedHat business (ie. community beta testing, which can be sold later as an enterprise product).
“There are still SuSE, Mandrake, Lindows, etc. I don’t think they really deliver to the promise and some of them aren’t completely Open Source though (which, to me, elliminates all advantages of using this alternative plattform).”
Um, just out of curiousity, which of these are you not considering Open Source cause if you’re talking about Lindows, then here you go:
ftp://130.94.123.237/
http://www.linuxparatodos.net/emagazine/modules.php?name=News&file=…
I have no interest on people who try to find excuses for Fedora’s poor QA and secondly,. I do not read portuguese, or whatever language that is.
I’m sure part of the QA problem has something to do with the transition to the community-based model, another couple of releases and we should have a much more refined distro. I’m planning on keeping a close eye on Fedora.
http://www.beau.org/~jmorris/linux/whitebox/
this is intresting would be nice if the guy/gal had more help ??
🙂
It is Spanish for your information, I do not speak Spanish but I can see it is by looking at it. I am sure considering that you should be net savvy, with all the information you give on this site, that there are translation services out there. Infact many browsers have options in their menues that say “translate such and such to such and such.”
Happy reading:
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr?url=http%3A//www.li…
I do not expect to not get modded down as I am sure you will wish to after you read what that other person posted, I see you do not like people that do not agree with you. That is fine, I just was showing you that I used common sense and found a way to read what at first I could not. Common sense goes a long way in finding information that you once did not know, works in many situations, including just using a computer.
Operating Systems really are unimportant in learning… don’t learn the OS, learn how to use a computer, then the OS doesn’t matter. But then again, this is my opinion, others may not share it, oh well.
Another thing, people say “I use a computer as a tool and don’t want to learn it.” What tools are out there that take no learning? I would not want some inexperianced person using a blow torch or an electric arc welder. I would not want someone who doesn’t know how to shoot a gun to use it without being taught. I myself would not want to use a tool without learning how to use it. Even a hammer would need very simple learning, as those without knowing how to use a hammer could potentially smash a finger, or put a nice dent in something on accident. So yes computers are tools, complex tools even, and yes tools need to be learned,
I’d like to see a review of an OS maybe after a month or two of use on a machine sometime, can that be arranged?
Dont know why you gave it a 6.5 for security. Not once through your article did you address the issues of security? Afaik, during the install it prompted (and insisted) the user create their own personal account (non-root). As for the rest of the security, it’s appears to be standard like past RH distro’s (besides the annoying part of always installing sendmail as a running daemon- grin).
It is not 6.5 JUST for security, but also for bugs and stability, so please don’t change the facts. And fedora had a lot of bugs, so even if security might be getting a 9 or 10, the rest of the credibility parts were on the floor.
Slackware
After installing xfce4 (redhat 9 rpms), and restarting X-server, I cannot see an entry for xfce in gdm. However, in gdm sessions, there is a script for xfce. Xfce is installed properly as i can open manually from terminal.
Does anybody know a fix for it?
I am a linux newbie and just started using linux about a week ago. Last time (few years back). I did try to install Redhat 5, but failed. As i remembered, the CD dont even have an installer/guide. Then last week, I think back, why not give a try again. Maybe this time its easy already. And to my suprise, Fedora really rocks! It detect all my devices and including my Logitech Wireless Keyboard+Mouse. At first I’m having problem with mp3,divx, and so on, but a simple search on google give me all the solutions. The new GUI is really nice and fast and its all anti alias. Good job for Fedora Team!. Now my Fedora have Crossover with Office XP and Photoshop installed(got cracked version from the net, really easy to use), Sysnaptic, MPlayer, and running FFSearch (SMB & FTP crawling) on Apache,mySQL,and Perl.IMHO, linux is not ready yet for Desktop users (dont care whatever IBM said
). If me as a newbie can settle most of the problem, I dont think why not for the regular linux user. There is still one problem I cant solve it which is Samba. Somehow I can’t access any PC sharing on SMB. I did checkthe SMB service, and it running well. Anybody have the same problem with me? Mind to share?
I still don’t understand people who make attempts to have one-click-OS without any understanding how it goes. Windows is allready such OS: go and use it. Linux is sophisticated and knowledge based thing. And well documented, too. RPM based distributions are trying to be “user friendly” as Windows is. But on that case it loose on common understanding of linux as operating system. Understanding costs time spending on learning. Easy way is to go on web and put many questions about library dependencies mismatch while the manual for that lays on man pages, howto’s, README and etc. I respect people that became into experts trying to describe pictures on desktop, really…
I don’t know why you’ve got so many problems … I installed Fedora Core 1 yesterday, and everything works fine. Granted, I still need to install a few plugins, but I think the problem might be with your setup.
SMB works faster than anything I’ve ever seen. If you have problems, try browsing LAN using konqueror and lisa.
I’ve downloaded NVidia srpms, built rpms, installed them and got it working just fine … the whole thing took not more than 5 minutes.
I think you should try to write objective reviews and not salt them with your frustration.
I have been using Fedora Core since it first release to the public, and all I can say is it really rocks. I try all of the major distributions when they first come out, and of all I have tried, Fedora Core 1 is the best. BTW, I have Mandrake 9.2 on 3 cd’s if anyone wants it.
Installation was very simple, even with a dual boot setup. There are minor problemes, as there are with any OS, You just need to do a little research and fix up the quirks.
The first thing to do is get yum working correctly and do a yum update. The yum repositories were changed so you will need to update your yum.conf file. I have a working yum.conf file on my site at:
http://home.insightbb.com/~jmjones/
Although I do not agree with everything in theis review, I do agree that Fedora Core 1 has some things that could have been more polished, but nothing that cannot be worked around. Overall, it is a great distro.
Let’s figure: most (95%) of the applications are not made by Red Hat. It’s impossible, for a single company, to create all that. Even Microsoft, with all their money, doesn’t have such a huge applications number as can be found on a Linux distribution.
All these apps are buggy (like all software, after all), being in constant development. If by “lack of QA” you mean that Red Hat shouldn’t include these apps in the distro, then you’re wrong. Including an application in the Linux distribution will firstly improve feedback and bug reporting and ultimately increase the will of developers to continue working and improving the software:
Take Gnome, for example. Do you think it would have reached thus far without being included in virtually every Linux distribution? There are hundreds of developers involved in lots of different areas of the project and they work in their free time and usually for no profit; if their project is not being used, then they eventually lose interest. Really, this is happening. When, on the other hand, their project is being used by thousands of people, then they receive feedback, appreciation, donations maybe and this ultimately reflects in the quality of their software. You can’t contradict me on that.
I’m a Linux user for about 7 years now and I have watched the evolution of some great applications and let’s be honest, shall we: things are improving. I used Mozilla since 0.8–compare that to 1.4 or Firebird! 0.8 was crashing 5 times per day while 1.4 would stay on for weeks.
Now let’s get to the quality of commercial OS-es. And so, let’s take Windows. The core itself is okay. Real good multimedia indeed, user interface is stocked in the kernel itself which explains why it is that fast (well also let’s be honest about this: probably all hardware vendors favor Microsoft and this explains the good HW support and particularly fast multimedia). However when it comes to application quality, you will find that IE is crashing too (and sometimes, depending on the Windows version, the whole system goes down with it ;-). OutLook is a bunch of security holes and responsible for my 20M daily inbox. Word sometimes wouldn’t read documents created with Word, or if you save them as HTML they’ll look right only in IE. And almost always (as if some weird mind-reading algorithm has been implemented) it will reformat your documents exactly when you reached a final state, turning hours of your work useless. Where’s the big QA?
I think open source is better because developers actually use the software they make. Do you think Microsoft is using Word or FoxPro or even Visual Basic? I seriously doubt it..