For this article, I chose to take a slightly different approach than the standard "Linux distribution review". As I have written not just one, but two reviews of Fedora Core 2 for this site, I want to base my review of Fedora Core 3 on my experiences with its direct predecessor. Update: FC3 shots here.
I want to work out the development that has happened between these two versions of Red Hat’s community operating system. This will be – as all my reviews before – mainly a desktop-centric review, simply because that’s how I use Linux most of the time nowadays.
Red Hat uses a time-based development schedule for Fedora, that means every six months we will see a new version of it. The other approach would be a feature-based schedule, that’s the way Debian handles its releases, for example. This means that Debian stable releases differ greatly from one another and are easily discriminable, whereas the advancements in Fedora are often much more subtle and it may be even difficult to distinguish the particular versions at first glance. So, today, I want to look at the differences between Fedora Core 2 and 3.
There are some obvious differences: Fedora Core 3 sports version 2.8 of the Gnome desktop (vs. 2.6 for Fedora Core 2), a newer Linux kernel (2.6.9 vs. 2.6.5), a newer version of the X.org server (6.8.1 vs. 6.7), a newer OpenOffice.org (1.1.2 vs. 1.1.1), it includes the final 1.0 version of the Firefox browser and Thunderbird 0.8 (vs. Mozilla 1.6), and much more. Naturally, almost every program got updated some time during the last six months. The question for me is: what kind of benefits do I get from these "slightly higher numbers"? Do they even legitimate a six-month release cycle or should it be longer, let’s say nine or twelve months? I know of course that Fedora’s six-month release cycle is consistent with what Red Hat wants to achieve with it: deliver a bleeding-edge Linux distribution to enthusiasts, also as a testbed for new technologies likely to be included into Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux (like the 2.6 kernel or the SELinux enhancements). Note that I don’t want to judge this: I certainly wouldn’t use Fedora as my primary Linux distribution if it had stability issues, for example. To sum this up: I think that Red Hat does a decent job at balancing between including new features and keeping Fedora stable. I guess I would prefer Debian stable or something like FreeBSD on a mission-critical server (or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for that matter), but Fedora is certainly stable enough to be used on a desktop. Still, although a lot of people like the six-month cycle because they get all the new goodies delivered twice a year, some do complain that this cycle is so fast that a new version is released only shortly after they finally settled the issues they had with its predecessor. Personally, I am quite happy with the fast pace of new Linux versions. In conclusion: in this article, I don’t want to criticise Red Hat’s development model, instead have a close look at its consequences regarding two particular releases.
The first and most obvious difference between Fedora Core 2 and 3 is the layout of the standard desktop. The Fedora team finally chose to use the standard Gnome desktop, with two panels, the main panel on top of the screen and another one (mainly for the window list) at the bottom. In Fedora Core 2 (and before that), Red Hat always costumised the standard layout, showing only one panel at the bottom. I definitely prefer the standard Gnome layout: I don’t care if the main panel is on the top or at the bottom, but I think it’s far more concise to have shortcuts to programs and "general stuff" like the clock separated from the window list. That’s one thing I always disliked in Windows (and KDE, but here you can at least change it). The "Show Desktop"-icon is in the left corner at the bottom, you cannot ever miss it because you can basically slam your mouse pointer there and it will hit 100%. Same goes for the "Applications"-menu on the top left corner. This is definitely an improvement over Fedora Core 2.
Integration of the Gnome desktop also happened in an evolutionary way. OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird, probably the three most important non-Gnome-applications in Fedora Core 3 (I have not installed KDE) now use the Gnome file dialog, OpenOffice.org’s design has been slightly changed and feels now a bit more "bluecurvy". On the whole the system feels even more integrated and consistent than Fedora Core 2. These are only small changes, but welcomed ones.
Some of the changes of Fedora Core 3 are not really visible but " under the hood". The inclusion of SELinux is one of them: while I do not know how the security of my system is enhanced (i’m too lazy and just not interested in it), I generally accept these security-stuff as "good". SELinux was quite a beast to include, it was originally planned for Fedora Core 2 but was disabled because there were too many problems with it. Well, now it works and it works quite well. However, I had a problem with SELinux: after setting Fedora Core 3 up, I could not change the DocumentRoot for my Apache Webserver. The DocumentRoot (the path where Apache searches for the actual HTML-content) is set to /var/www/html by default. I tried to change it to /home/christian/Desktop/Web, because that’s where my websites are stored and got an error that DocumentRoot could not be changed. I initially felt that this would be something security-related and tried turning off the firewall and disabling SELinux. I was right: I noticed that I could change the DocumentRoot when I disabled SELinux. I changed the policy for Apache (that was a simple matter of one click in the Red Hat’s security-configuration tool) and I was set. So, I would not call this a bug, it was probably intentional. Still, I guess there are more people than just me who store their websites in their home-directories (and that makes sense to me for everyone who needs a local webserver that does not actually serve websites to the Internet). So I’d expect more people to have a problem here. I also encountered the first real bug in Fedora Core 3 within the security stuff. Red Hat’s configuration tool, system-config-securitylevel, crashes for me now. It worked in the beginning (otherwise I would not have been able to set the policy for Apache after all), but now it just crashes after the root password dialog. I tried removing it and reinstalling but it just repeatedly crashes. I will file a bug for this one. Overall, I’d say that the inclusion of SELinux went quite well and it was probably a very wise move on Red Hat’s side to disable it in Fedora Core 2 and test another six months.
The other big change "under the hood" is Project Utopia. And here Fedora Core 3 shines: I constantly had problems with the USB memory stick I bought in September. When I plugged it in, an icon appeared on the desktop and I was able to use it. But as soon as I unmounted it and unplugged it, I knew that I would have to reboot to plug it in again. When I just plugged it in again, nothing happened. No icon on the desktop appeared and it was not there under /mnt. I even tried to mount it via the terminal but then it always said: " Resource busy". Sometimes it even didn’t let me unmount it and just kept saying that it was still busy. With Fedora Core 3, I can plug stuff on and off and rarely have problems. Rarely, because I experienced a minor problem one time. I bought a 60GB USB2.0-disc recently and normally, it really "just works". One time, it didn’t correctly unmount, said " Resource busy". I plugged it off, plugged it back in and no icons appeared on the desktop. The disk, however, was there, under /media/usbdisk. My verdict: Project Utopia was a very important innovation for Linux and, while it still may have small glitches, it is an invaluably important step on the way to "Desktop Linux". I expect this to work perfectly in Fedora Core 4.
When I look back, the most horrible problem I had with Fedora Core 2 was that Gnome PDF-Viewer did not display pdf-documents correctly. As I have to deal with those very often, this was very disappointing. This is solved in Fedora Core 3: I have not experienced any problems despite having thrown a good 30 pdf-documents at it during the last two weeks. I’d count this definitely as an important step forward especially concerning business desktop use of Fedora Core – pdf is just essential!
Firefox and Thunderbird still default to English even though I chose German as the preferred language when I set up the operating system. I recently read that the reason for this is a problem in the Mozilla i18n (the internationalisation). It seems that it does not work the way it works in other applications. Well, this situation has not improved and should be adressed soon (and I guess by the Mozilla team, not by the Fedora team).
Then I mentioned a problem with File-roller. It did not start when I right-clicked a file and tried to "Create Archive". This has been solved. Another small point for Fedora Core 3. And there are small Gnome adjustments – I guess a lot of people were waiting for an easy way to turn off the spatial behaviour of Nautilus. Well, now it’s there! Another small visible change is the new MIME-system. That’s a pure Gnome change and it’s better than the old one, for sure. An improvement over Fedora Core 2, one that does not seem to be important, but really makes your life easier when you have to deal with it.
One thing remains: multimedia is still just a big mess in Fedora: aside from the patent issues and therefore the exclusion of mp3, DVD, Flash, and a lot of other formats, there are basic problems that relate to the Gnome desktop and GStreamer in general. Software sound-mixing still does not work on my machine (which is a laptop with a simple AC’97-soundcard that cannot do hardware sound-mixing). GStreamer has a ton of plugins to handle all kinds of multimedia formats, but it still… err, sucks, to say it directly. Some videos only play the sound while the screen stays black, some videos don’t work at all. I usually end up installing Totem-xine or MPlayer. Then I also still use xmms sometimes, and of course Rhythmbox. Gaim no longer really crashes when another program is using the audio-channel, but the sound still does not play. System sounds are completely disabled. These are all not Fedora-, but Gnome-related problems, still I have to adress them because they account for a major drawback in Fedora usability (I experienced most of these with Ubuntu too). The only real improvement over Fedora Core 2 (and a very welcomed one) is that Rhythmbox now no longer crashes when you move the slider to get to another point in a song. So, while the application now works reliably, it lacks so many useful features compared to iTunes, it’s not funny. I was really hoping for a 1.0 series of Rhythmbox in Fedora Core 3. I miss the "Quality-column" (I want to rerip the stuff that I did with 128mbps and I don’t know what it was), I miss the "Last added" playlist from iTunes, Tag-editing is still not available, and iTunes’ "let-me-manage-your-library"-feature is just too cool. I am not even dreaming of CD-burning… So, basically, while I don’t want to diss the programmers (this is probably a lot of hard work), and while I am very pleased to at least have a music management program in Fedora, there’s a long way to go to get to a competitive level. And while I’m at it: Sound Juicer still doesn’t offer the single most important feature, setting quality. It’s a shame. This program is a posterboy for a modern, nice-looking, HIG-ified Gnome application. Still, it’s simply unusable for me.
A new addition in the multimedia arena is the Helix Player: I can’t put this one to good use. In fact, it annoyed me greatly that just about the only time it wanted to do something was when I clicked (yeah, right!) an rpm-file in Firefox. Now this is retarded! I could probably accept this feature in a Debian-based distribution that doesn’t really use rpm-files for package management. But in Fedora? Come on, I certainly do not want to "listen" to my 3rd party packages, *g*. Besides, I remember that I never installed Real Media Player in my Windows years, I loathed that piece. The Helix Player is probably as much better as the old Real player than Mozilla was in comparison to the old Netscape. And I probably have to welcome the fact that Fedora Core now includes a player that is integrated with the browser. Still, rpm-packages probably mean something different to a user of an .rpm-based Linux distribution than to. let’s say, an average Windows user.
When I reread the passages about multimedia in my older articles I have to say that I was probably to mild. But maybe that’s also because I used iTunes a lot recently and it just was a slap in the face for me how good it is. Overall, I am quite content with multimedia in Linux, I accept the limitations that patented file formats impose. I just feel that this is probably the section where "Desktop Linux" is lacking the most as of today.
Final verdict: Fedora Core 3 is a nice improvement over Fedora Core 2. The visible differences may be mostly subtle but if you examine the distributions more precisely, you see the work that was put into the newer version. I’d say that (although I also used Fedora Core 1 and 2 regularly), Fedora Core 3 is the first real version of the Fedora project. With Fedora Core 1, Red Hat just released something that was probably originally planned to be Red Hat 9.1. Fedora Core 2 had the change in the kernel version from 2.4 to 2.6, which was probably huge and had to draw some problems. Fedora Core 3 finally is where Red Hat wanted Fedora to be. A lot of new technology to play with, bleeding edge Linux software, and still a very stable, polished operating system. I guess one could say that it has the kind of "personality" that Red Hat wanted it to have. Decent job, Fedora team!
Almost done with this article, I will summarise what I believe are the main problems that have to be solved for Fedora Core 4: even better integration of Firefox into Gnome (including a working i18n during setup). It would probably be best to let Firefox replace Epiphany and make it the standard browser for Gnome. While I think that Evolution is a very good mailer, I would love to see Thunderbird included into Gnome. I want that "small" mail program, I always used Outlook Express and not Microsoft Office’s Outlook. So I guess Thunderbird would be a worthy addition to Gnome, as a direct competitor to Outlook Express. It is, contrary to Evolution, available for Windows too, that would make the transition from Windows to Linux a bit easier. Then I’d love to see a good HTML editor in Fedora, read Screem or a HIG-ified Bluefish. You might go with gedit, but it would have to be improved a lot (and I’m not sure if it was even meant to be a fully-fledged HTML-editor). The colours for syntax highlighting in gedit are just ugly. A simpler approach to adding multimedia capabilities to Fedora would be very welcomed. Maybe a single meta-package would do the trick, one that would add mp3 playback to xmms, Rhythmbox, Helix Player, Flash and Java for Firefox, mp3 encoding via lame, DVD and video playback to totem, all that with one click. Even though yum shapes up nicely, it’s still lagging behind apt-get in speed. I certainly had a better experience with adding/removing packages and updating my system with Ubuntu. Synaptic for Fedora? It will not happen, because the Fedora team has put too much work into yum (and it certainly has technical advantages over apt-get for Fedora that I don’t know of). Still, the situation in Debian is much nicer, Fedora should try to find a single, central method for adding/removing and updating packages. And put more development resources into Rhythmbox, the program wants to compete with iTunes and it still has a long way to go in this respect. That’s it. I’m still quite content but not really happy with Desktop Linux, but I am excited about the development speed. Who would have thought that Fedora Core 3 would be that polished two years ago when Red Hat 8.0 was released? Now I just have to figure out if I want to keep Fedora Core 3 or switch back to Ubuntu. But that’s another story…
About the Author
Christian Paratschek, 28, Linux enthusiast and regular contributor to osnews.com. View his other articles on his website.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
” I constantly had problems with the USB memory stick I bought in September. When I plugged it in, an icon appeared on the desktop and I was able to use it. But as soon as I unmounted it and unplugged it, I knew that I would have to reboot to plug it in again. When I just plugged it in again, nothing happened. No icon on the desktop appeared and it was not there under /mnt. I even tried to mount it via the terminal but then it always said: ” Resource busy”.”
I struck similar problems from time to time with MDK, but discovered a workaround that saves me from rebooting.
type as root: “fuser -m /dev/{device}” (e.g. /dev/cdrom)
This will show you the PID(s) still running on that device, so it’s then just a simple “kill {PID number}” (e.g. kill 1435). You should then be able to mount it again.
Hope this helps
Anyway, back on topic…I downloaded and tried FC3_x64 but had dramas installing additional software, so I’ve gone back to MDK_x64 for now. When the repositories build up enough to make it worthwhile I’ll give it another try.
I have to admit that the inclusion of new versions of software is always welcome but, what about of new software that is really missing. What about a cd recorder software for gnome just like K3B. What about Gnome-PPP. This one is missing even in any fedora software repository. Those are basic programs for day by day use by anybody. And there are much more that i can’t remember now but that misses for someone else for sure.
Hi Christian!
Some thoughts… During the installation
The use of the Gnome panel configuration is great. My girl friend asked me some time ago: “Why do I have to click on the red hat to shut down the computer”. Ouch. This is as bad as MS Windows handles it (in means of usability).
Web browser: Personally I don’t want to use Firefox. I use Epiphany, it’s better integrated and faster (the program itself, not the web content rendering). I don’t know why there are no packages for the plugins. Don’t get me wrong: Firefox is a good browser that I use at my work (Windows machine), but it does not “feel” in Gnome.
Another thing is that the new Evolution is a big step forward. Unfortunately the sync of my Palm IIIx destroyed a part of my adresses. This worked in previous versions
I had to re-enter some of my adresses, the new dialogs are great. But they suffer from the same problem in FC3: Dialogs in english. Printed lists in english. I thought I did a german install 
So that’s not a big problem for me, but for my mother, for example.
A plus for FC3 is that it recognized my Synaptics Touchpad. The bad thing is: This was in the first install. The second install I forgot to plug out my USB mouse. Now I don’t know how to (automatically) let FC3 let recognize that I have a touchpad that has special functions. Even kudzu couldn’t help me.
Then there are few problems left. For the general desktop user hard to solve: I’ve got a mail with a MS Word document. But the file type was “.DOC”, so FC3 didn’t recognize the document – I had to rename it.
OpenOffice: Great steps forward. But I had a real crash with data loss (using Insert — Graphics in Impress).
Another problem I have: the guys from RedHat mentioned that the inclusion of NetworkManager will ease the use of wireless networks. But how to activate it? I tried to start the daemon (and all my network connections were gone), there is no panel applet. The packages (NetworkManager and NetworkManager-gnome) are installed.
Just my thoughts. Thanks for reading. Otherwise: I love Fedora
One thing left: Did you realize the existance of the great wallpaper graphics?
Have a nice day,
Christoph
nice additions, thx.
maybe we should have written this together too? *g*
firefox-epiphany: well, i guess firefox should be as integrated as epiphany. but maybe that’s entirely impossible, because firefox still wants to be a cross-plattform application. i don’t know…
wireless: i don’t know. m laptop doesn’t have wireless and i still don’t need it. but this firmware-crap is really a problem. i do hope, the hardware manufacturers release these files for a better inclusion into linux distribution.
nice day to you!
christian
I agree with the auther, It would be a good idea to replace Evolution as the default PIM in Gnome with Firebird, Thunderbird and Sunbird from Mozilla. Not that Evolution is a bad program, in fact I think it is very good, but it would be easier to migrate from Windows to Linux if they used cross platform programs. I think that it is this crossplatformness that have been a key factor in the success of OpenOffice. Why not do it for PIM programs as well.
Evolution is very similar to Outlook so most windows users would probably not have any problems, but bosses and admins gets worried as it isn’t quite the same program. E.g. will palm synchronization work the same way. And when its time to upgrade the likeness might change,…
Another solution would of course be to port evolution to windows.
I have played with Ubuntu and Fedora Core 3 quite a bit for the last week or two. I had some annoying problems with Fedora:
1.) Pain installing the nVidia drivers, requiring a workaround (disabling the x-server during bootup and making symlinks for nvidia /dev entries in /etc/udev/devices).
2.) Pain finding repositories that were up to date for FC3, so I could install the missing packages that make a Linux desktop usable (some packages were much much harder to find for Fedora than they were for Ubuntu).
3.) Annoying bugs (java crashing firefox, no sound in mozilla mplayer plugin, etc.) I never did get java working in Firefox using FC3.
Ubuntu had none of these major headaches, largely due to the superior quality of the repositories for it.
In fact, using this wiki, Ubuntu was relatively painless when it came to setting up multimedia stuff:
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/RestrictedFormats/view?searchterm=f…
Redhat really needs to have some kind of supplemental restricted or non-free repository that works better with Fedora. They also need to cut down on the annoying bugs. It is a shame, because there were many other things about Fedora that I really liked.
For now however, Ubuntu is just way less of a hassle.
Quote from the article:
“The inclusion of SELinux is one of them: while I do not know how the security of my system is enhanced (i’m too lazy and just not interested in it)”
He then describes being unable to change the DocumentRoot in apache.
Then another quote:
“Overall, I’d say that the inclusion of SELinux went quite well”
Dude, the problem you had was exactly what SELinux is about. IN general, I´d say that if you have no idea what something is, you are hardly qualified to say it works well, (or bad).
I have been getting a few kernel panics in FC3 when shutting down. That is certainly not supposed to happen. Also, the whole machine locked up one time when closing an xterm. WTF?
Sound is still a sad chapter and so is video. Helix player hasn’t been able to play anything I have. Rhythmbox locks up when scanning my music.
Still, I continue to use it as my primary OS.
it includes the final 1.0 version of the Firefox browser
<pedantic>Actaully it’s the preview version of 1.0, aka 0.10.1</pedantic>
Haha, it says ‘Linux enthusiast’ at the bottom, right under his ‘I’m still (..) not really happy with Desktop Linux”
It’s my impression too, I use Ubuntu, it’s fine, for being free and mostly community-based (Debian), really an effort worth appreciating.
Still in some regards it can’t give to me what Windows gives me, while in others it’s way ahead (easy to have a secure installation, lots of packages etc). I guess, like everything in life, it’s a tradeoff. But it gets more easy for me every month to use Linux more exclusively. Less painful. Using mostly Openoffice, Firefox, Thunderbird and Gaim, it doesn’t really matter which platform I’m using (That’s a good thing about most OSS-projects too – easy portability).
And Linux HAS two killer apps for me already. They’re called Pingus and Slune, and are not available on Windows!
> Actaully it’s the preview version of 1.0, aka 0.10.1
11/12/2004 : Firefox 1.0
btw, FC3 also have KDE 3.3.1 :
http://fedoranews.org/blog/index2.php?cat=3
“A new addition in the multimedia arena is the Helix Player: I can’t put this one to good use. In fact, it annoyed me greatly that just about the only time it wanted to do something was when I clicked (yeah, right!) an rpm-file in Firefox. <snip> Come on, I certainly do not want to “listen” to my 3rd party packages, *g*.”
This is a server-side issue with the Apache configuration. Most Apache webservers are set up to associate the .rpm extension with a RealMedia stream of MIME type audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin. If this happened on an Internet site, you need to ask the server administrator to configure Apache such that .rpm is linked to MIME type application/x-rpm.
Any time the RealMedia plugin is installed in Mozilla or Firefox, it automatically links .rpm and audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin. However, if the web server says .rpm is application/x-rpm, you’ll be able to download the file instead of the browser firing up the Real plugin.
Being a desktop oriented distro, one has to wonder why they decided to start so many services on boot too. Ubuntu is nice in the regard (altho it’s not enough debian unstable compatible for me).
I really like the feel of fedora, but I feel like the author about the multimedia stuff, it’s such a pain to get everything to work.
I don’t dabble with Linux now but when I did, I used to use a program called Eclipt Roaster or Eroaster. It’s a gtk App and was really easy to use. It just worked too, I could never get K3B working but this worked every time for me. You can write data CDs, music CDs and ISOs. Really cool little App. Nice and simple.
http://eclipt.uni-klu.ac.at/eroaster.php
http://sourceforge.net/projects/eroaster/
you’re right, it was firefox 0.10.1 from the installation cds. but one of the first updates that came through up2date was firefox 1.0, so i guess they wanted to include it, but there was not enough time to QA ist enough, so they sent it out as soon as it was tagged “ok”
christian
i admit that i don’t know much about selinux.
but: i said that the inclusion of selinux went quite well. and that is probably true, not because i had a problem with it, but there was no outcry from the community after fc3 was released. so, contrary to the betas of fc2 that had horrible selinux problems, fc3 seems to have a good selinux implementation.
regards,
christian
I read somewhere that the preview version of firefox 1.0 was more stable than final.
once again: i did not say that it works well or not, i just said that the introduction into fedora went well (after testing it for six more months). there’s a difference that you probably do not understand.
but why do i even answer? your posting is pure flamebait. write something yourself, or criticise what you don’t like in an appropriate manner. or just do us all a favor and keep your mouth shut.
christian
You need to start the “NetworkManagerInfo” process, which will then add itself to your gnome session. It spawns and controls the lifetime of the NetworkManager panel applet. If you’ve got session-saving turned on (which I believe it is by default), then you shouldn’t need to run NMI ever again.
NetworkManagerInfo dishes out stuff like what wireless networks you’ve connected to to NetworkManager, that’s per-user configuration information. NetworkManager won’t use a wireless network both NetworkManagerInfo is running and until you’ve explicitly clicked on it at least once in the applet.
i agree with the article: meta-packages for proprietary software is a good way forward. i have liked this ability in ports-type systems and also derived distros which make it easy to pull in 3rd party software like flash, nvidia, realplayer, dvdcss etc … i even saw one distro which said “click here” to pull in microsoft fonts. excellent!
this is the way out of the proprietary licensing dilemna.
yeah, we heard that one before, email us when you have something better to say. Until then, go play elsewhere.
Because :
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html
It’s fun, free (both ways) and well managed (unlike Debian).
Please tell to us what else you hate and what you like,
and what you think about how another persons look,
maybe say about politics, religion also and donot
forget about computer games .etc
we will listen you for sure.
p.s You care about Indian children , so help them . Go to
Mumbai and give your money it will be more usefull.
ok, ok. you win, linux is dead
I don’t feel like explaining it all …
> NONE, so run back to your atheist temple.
What the…?
Wondering if by default you have hardware GL accel on FC3. I have Vaio VGN-A290
I see here that the primary use of fedora seems to be desktop orientated. But what now when some companies are developing server applications that have Fedora as OS specification.
How are updates handled, do one get feature changes or is it security only?
Ever since redhat the base install using the regular installer has been around 1GB, is this the case with fedora aswell, because when I install a server i don’t won’t all those x-app, printing utils.. etc. that wasn’t deselectable in the install? You had to remove somewhere around 150 packages to get a usable solution.
When working against a enterprice software provider it’s almost impossible to get further specs than kernel-this and libstdc++-that.
Is it really a working solution to run a server application on this desktop distribution?
c.
From what i remember from fedora 2, synaptic works. Just yum install synaptic.
There you go.
In the reviews i’ve seen of FC3 so far everybody has neglected to mention that the HD is partitioned in Lodgical volumes by default. This was non trivial to setup before.
Works great too!!. I’ve added a second HD to my PC and simply grown the ‘/’ partition.
Hehe.. well, I guess they both work, but what patches am I getting, feature updates or pure security related.
(Of course I’m thinking debian stable here but some newer apps would be nice)
Until Linux is able to play media content without breaking ALL of the copywrite protected laws it will remain in the back room.
Yeah Darius, thats why linux settopboxes are flourishing. Don’t confuse the desktop players with playback across the board for Linux. Equator, Sigma, and other chipsets don’t have this ‘ripped DLL’ problem.
It used to be that RH really only put moderately stable software in their dist, they did a pretty decent job of not including versions with horrible issues. Fedora though seems to be more typical of a “bleeding edge” distribution and it’s including new versions with all their problems.
As for your sound, you should research it. I highly doubt it’s truly unsupported… Either OSS or ALSA probably has some driver somewhere for it; I’ve got a couple of machines with AC’97 variants (AC97 actually isn’t the sound, there is a multitude of sound codecs used and called AC97).
> Of course I’m thinking debian stable here but some newer apps would be nice
This is not exactly the point.
Sarge will be out in a couple of months. Sarge will be something like FC2. And still no amd64, apt still is not bi-arch (amd64 & i386), no selinux, no xorg, confusing system tools, …
Don’t even try to compare to FC3…
> feature updates or pure security related
both but mostly security related.
Get FC2, add nothing new, and sell the result of this “big” labor as : Mandrake 10.1.
No thanks.
Yeah… like, the package installer/remover GUI Mandrake has that fedora has not… (by the way, which installer is to be used on Fedora? Yum? Apt? Up2date? Rpm? God, so many choices…)
And like… Mandrake plays mp3 out of the box, and adding more multimedia apps is so easy… and the speed? Oh, Fedora, talk about bloat and slowness…
And… Mandrake has that cool partition manager tool, allowing me to create/delete/move partitions… what partition manager Fedora has? Oh it hasn’t one…
Please. Mandrake is so much better than Fedora, it’s almost unfair.
Victor.
“I have had several crashes of FireFox 1.0 Final.
It crashes more than IE ever did, so much for ALL
the EYES in open sources.”
Perhaps it needs your eyes. Have you sent a bug report?
“FIX THE CRASHING IN FIREFOX, come on where are ALL
the EYES looking at the CODE?????
This is the whole problem, OpenSource is too arrogant
to fix REAL problems.”
The real problem in this case is that you seam to be the only one with serious problems. To most people Mozilla behaves quite nicely.
In open source just like in closed source problems that happens to many people, or pose serious security problems have a tendency to get fixed first. The difference is that in open source, impatient people with programming skills have a chance to do it themselves to the benefit of the community.
This is no more arrogant than Microsoft or Sun denying their paying customers timely fixes to serious security problems, sometimes for months.
Fedora core 3 is an instable distro by default….
hey look we have the latest xorg toy
hey look we have the latest selinux patches
ecc ecc ecc
from my point of view,fedora will even be a stable distro because every 6 months there’s a new toy that must be tested.
and if you decide to not upgrade in 2-3 months you will have
an unsupported linux.
yes for that troubles there is a fedora legacy but who can assure me that i will receive a proper support ?
now let’s take ubuntu… this distro unlike fedora assure me that i will have maximum
support for 18 month and if you want extend support for
other months you can always pay few bucks at canonical Ltd.
1.) Pain installing the nVidia drivers, requiring a workaround (disabling the x-server during bootup and making symlinks for nvidia /dev entries in /etc/udev/devices).
The udev feature just expose s the flaw of Nvidia driver thus it is not utopia fault. Nvidia team is aware of that issue and are probably working on that problem. After all, they did a good job when their driver had an issue with 4 stacks.
2.) Pain finding repositories that were up to date for FC3, so I could install the missing packages that make a Linux desktop usable (some packages were much much harder to find for Fedora than they were for Ubuntu).
Check out http://www.fedorafaq.org for find repositories or even a custom yum.conf. Fedora.us is behind the schedule though.
3.) Annoying bugs (java crashing firefox, no sound in mozilla mplayer plugin, etc.) I never did get java working in Firefox using FC3
Which version of Firefox do you use?
Don’t forget that is the third week after FC3 release compared to about 2 months Ubuntu.
“And like… Mandrake plays mp3 out of the box”
thats only because mandrake isnt a US based distro while fedora is
” what about ubuntu ?”
SELinux integration is enormous amount of work which has been done by the hard work of redhat devels. Please dont ridicule this if you dont understand the impact
“yes for that troubles there is a fedora legacy but who can assure me that i will receive a proper support ?”
volunteers. Remember Linus was just a volunteer doing kernel development before he got hired. we dont really need to question the sincerity of those volunteers who have got Linux where it is today
Why were you struggling with the Gnome PDF viewer when you can go straight to Adobe for Linux version?!
Windows users don’t use a Third-Party viewer so why should Linux users.
Adobe Acrobat is a third-party viewer because it is not a part of either Windows or Linux.
I have digital camera (Olympus Camedia 2040Zoom), which works through usb-storage. and i have different sized memory cards. When changing cards, i had similar problem (I have been using mostly Mandrake before.) Following worked (on MDK):
umount /mnt/camera
(switch off the camera, change the card)
modprobe -r usb-storage
modprobe usb-storage
(switch the camera on )
mounting the camera (by hand or automagically)
and no need for reboot (not sure if this is correct way)…
About Fedora. I have to admit that i’m impressed how easy was the installation of FC3. I bought a new laptop (HP) couple of weeks ago. Tried to install MDK 10.0 (official). It didn’t work. Tried SimplyMepis, it installed ok, worked, but i managed to break that.
Tried FC3. Wow. It worked… Basically everything. Well, i’m not sure about cd-burning, haven’t tried it yet.
It’s not have been all good.
mp3s. – well… freshrpms… 🙂
KDE – i understand that it may not be first priority of the development team, it wouldn’t hurt to include some (good, like gwenview) third party kde packages? Isn’t there space on the fourth cd???
Are you talking about Ubuntu or about Debian ?
> Fedora core 3 is an instable distro by default….
Just stupid. FC is not for critical mission. That right. Anyway, FC work pretty well here.
$ uptime
19:52:07 up 4 days, 3:10, 11 users, load average: 2.86, 2.24, 1.86
$ cat /proc/stat
cpu 7281257 26579597 1649923 112906 32390 31444 17245
cpu0 7281257 26579597 1649923 112906 32390 31444 17245
intr 642927589 357101934 553545 0 0 0 0 0 2 213529991 0 0 0 1928600 0 5324286 6404764 6663251 46210474 0 5210742 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
ctxt 375960060
btime 1100878908
processes 11699533
procs_running 7
procs_blocked 0
Many servers use Fedora. SourceForge will switch from Debian to Fedora.
> hey look we have the latest xorg toy
> hey look we have the latest selinux patches
> ecc ecc ecc
This is the _best_ way to improve free software.
Other distribs are free to benefic the work done by Fedora. This is why a “love” Fedora.
This is not the Fedora touch :
– “wait for some else do the job and then use it.”
The udev feature just expose s the flaw of Nvidia driver thus it is not utopia fault. Nvidia team is aware of that issue and are probably working on that problem. After all, they did a good job when their driver had an issue with 4 stacks.
Not true. I have used udev on Gentoo, Debian Sarge, and now Ubuntu… and I have never seen this problem before until I installed FC3.
thats because you use nvidia packages which cover up this flaw which hasnt happened with the newer udev and kernel packages that fedora ships. nevertheless its a fault of nvidia for which a update is expected from them shortly
thats because you use nvidia packages which cover up this flaw which hasnt happened with the newer udev and kernel packages that fedora ships. nevertheless its a fault of nvidia for which a update is expected from them shortly
Even if this is the case, then the Fedora team, realize how popular these drivers are, should not ship their distro in such a way that breaks these drivers. I call that hubris.
the breakage happens upstream and kernel developers wont wait for nvidia to play catchup
the breakage happens upstream and kernel developers wont wait for nvidia to play catchup. its not intentional breakage either. quit whining. if you choose to use proprietary blobs of code the burden is on you because fedora has a clearly stated goal of supporting only free and open source software