LinuxTimes feature a two page review of FC3, along with screenshots.
A great desktop OS: Fedora Core 3
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
where “screenshots” means ONE screenshot of the basic gnome desktop in a different language.
Fedora’s Gnome 2.6 in FC2 is stable as a rock if I compare to Fedora 3.
Nautilus in FC3 crashes so much, this is really really annoying!
Another point is, that I must use a vanilla kernel, because Fedora’s Kernel (especially the AC patches) is incompatible with 3rd party drivers (for example AVM ISDN Capi driver)
NetworkManager is in a beta/alpha state. Sometimes, network connection is lost.
No, sorry Red Hat, I went away from Microsoft because I don’t want to be a beta tester anymore.
Installed Slackware again, after spending lot of times with FC2 & FC3
One strong point from Fedora/RedHat: server packages are really good and yum worked great for me.
If I don’t need 3rd party drivers for some hardware, Fedora is a good server with good default configurations.
Yesterday I did a home movie in Windows XP Movie Maker. It saved the file in WMV9 format. Then I could not view it in Mac OS X machines in our office, but I could view the film in FC3 – only downloaded the Windows codecs from Mplayerhq.hu and unpacked them into /usr/lib/win32, and Totem could understand and play my file.
Fedora is really smooth in my daily work as a web programmer. Of course, there may be problems for other uses, but for me is already very good.
i’ve deleted fedora core 2 and installed a fresh ubuntu linux
distro
the main problem with redhat distro is that i can’t upgrade
my system without burn 3 cd….
In our organization we have representatives from Russia, Korea, Taiwan, China 🙂 So we need to be able to input everything in one common manner. IIIMF in Fedora is a great help.
Ubuntu’s nice, I really liked it. I hope that Hoary will have IIIMF as planned.
If you are a software whore, like I am, Ubuntu is a dream come true. By unchecking some boxes in synaptic, you have access to twice as much software as you can get from combining all of the many 3rd party Fedora RPM repositories.
Plus Ubuntu starts up MUCH faster.
I have been using FC3 sence the first RC. I havn’t had a single crash, and Im not sure why I have heard that it is so unstable. I also don’t agree with the author’s statement that Fedora is not an out of the box solution. It is very usable in stock form, but like all linux distros you can extend basic functionality as you see fit. I’m really enjoying it as my main desktop OS.
I would like to ask though… I have a Old Sub-notebook computer (600mhz Sony) running a HD install of Knoppix. How fast would FC3 run on there, compared to Knoppix? It would be nice to have the same system on both, but I have read that FC3 is way to resource hungry. Any thoughts? Suggestions?
Below that you do anything to get a minimum comfortable system.
That’s why I understand the guys that complain of slow performance. I once had a 233MHz MMX on which these OSs never felt right.
Now I have settled on Athlon Barton 2500+ with 512MBs of RAM, and performance is very good. It’s better to leave the under-powered computers behind, or revamp them with IceWM or even XFce.
That said, I expect Ubuntu to be lighter and faster than Fedora, for GNOME systems. If you install Ubuntu and them Xfce, you are set.
This is just a suggestion not really an argument. To play pretty much ANY movie or audio format on ANY system (including OS X), go to http://www.videolan.org and download VLC. That will take care of ya REAL GOOD.
What is the problem with some Ubuntu users who definitively want to start a flamebait and hijack this topic?
Fedora Core 2 was good. Can’t remember having any problems with it, except the HUGE installed size.
I have had quite a few issues with FC3. My new laptop doesn’t have hardware volume control. Software volume control in FC3’s ALSA sucks, big time. The sound quality is absolutely horrible and the lowest volume setting is way too loud, I can’t set the volume low enough. Another VERY annoying problem is that I can suspend my laptops (apm and acpi) but they never wake up! I’m not alone with these issues, check the bugzilla.
FC3 has a certain “beta” feeling to it, I hope FC4 will be better.
It installs easily (Anaconda is quite a tested tool now) but I have some unstability problems with it:
-Mozilla seems to stop responding to my clicks sometimes (it comes up with an error saying that the form doesn’t exist).
-KDE apps crash A LOT
-The braindead graphical package manager from RH8 is still there.
-Yum checks plenty of things before even checking if the file I am requesting is in the repository (often they are not)
Apart from that everything else seems to work alright. I don’t think it will last long on my work computer though (it replaced Mandrake 10.1, once CentOS 4 is out I am moving to that).
I’ve had Firefox crash on me a few times, and Totem does NOT work out of the box. Setting up the server apps is not going well (although this isn’t a desktop issue — it’s a newbie issue).
I’m using KDE, and overall I like the look and feel of the system. It’s not, however, very user-friendly on the back end.
Fortunately, the Fedora Forums seems to provide a lot of good feedback.
Makes a great Server too! Mine runs Team Speak, Squid, and is my itunes music server and it runs flawlessly with no hassle.
Agreed. I’ve used Fedora and Red Hat Linux for years and they’re both great distributions.
I now I much prefer Ubuntu over Fedora, but that doesn’t take away from Fedora’s strengths. Ubuntu means “humanity to others”. Let’s respect the Fedora users and not force our preferences down their throats.
Ubuntu also means “I am what I am because of who we all are”. Ubuntu would not be what it is today if it were not for Fedora. You can be sure that Fedora will be similarly inspired by Ubuntu, in much the same way that GNOME and KDE inspire and motivate each other.
aren’t reviews just ADVERTISEMENT anyways??? I think Ubuntu has a lot of merit in comparing it with Fedora Core. I’ve personally had better experiences with Hoary Hedgehog than FC3/2.
ALL distributions benefit from ALL other distributions. Slackware, redhat, mandrake, debian, ubuntu, arch, fedora, etc! All of them benefit from work done on the others, are based on others, inspire others, and are inspired by others. What a wonderful world
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=173&slide=1
Fedora is like 3 years old and I don’t see any community supporting it. Now Ubuntu has a big community. Sometimes people don’t like Ubuntu because it does not support KDE yet, but that will change soon, though I prefer GNOME. 🙂
I installed Ubuntu recently, but ended up formatting the partition and giving the space to my FC3 install.
There was nothing that special about Ubuntu. I thought that having a 1 CD install would be nice (and result in less updates to download). But it was like trying a stale version of Linux. xfree, not xorg? 2.4 kernel? All they need is a sound that starts during Gnome startup “I’m living in the 70s” for that feeling of nostalgia.
Another little thing, why the poo brown background colour? If I wanted to see lots of that colour I would smear…. nevermind.
Ubuntu ran marginally faster than FC3 on a P3-450 MHz with 640 MB RAM. Not really enough to be noticeable though.
So back to my up2date, stable, trusty Fedora Core 3 installation.
Ubuntu is definitely a step in the right direction, but it isn’t for me, and it isn’t for everyone. So in a thread about FC3, do not sing praises for Ubuntu. And I will not sing praises for FC3 in a thread about Ubuntu.
PS: Synaptic is awesome. All FC3 users should download it.
“But it was like trying a stale version of Linux. xfree, not xorg? 2.4 kernel?”
As far as I know, Ubuntu always had 2.6 kernel. It is not difficult to believe, as they aren’t even one year old yet.
And many people that like the latest features, upgrade Ubuntu Warty to Ubuntu Hoary.
I’m now with GNOME 2.10 (almost), GTK+ 2.6.1 and Xorg. The whole system is as fast as I have dreamed, but this machine is good as I said in a previous post.
I did try Fedora, twice, but I was never as lucky as with Ubuntu. Remember that I don’t care about RedHat, please.
Mandrake 10.1
I’ve tried many distros including FC2 and FC3. Sorry, but they don’t compare favorably with Mandrake. To say FC3 has a good desktop is simply overlooking a numer of things like control panels, menus and more.
Try Mandrake. It runs “out of the box”. Tweaking not required.
I just blew away my Ubunutu install for FC3. Originally I had FC3 on there but just had to try Ubuntu because of all the hype around it. Biggest mistake on my desktop and was nothing more than hype. 1 cd install is nice, too bad all the apps were outdated. Apt-get and apt-cache didn’t have anything up to date either. Not to mention all the packages I had to install just to get other packages or programs to compile. It was too incomplete.
With FC3 everyying was installed, one simple command on yum updated everything. Packages were recent. Compiling programs from source worked fine because FC3 had them installed already. One thing I didn’t like about FC3 was packages I told it not to install, like CUPS, samba, and emacs but decided it wanted to install anyway.
The third CD is not used much.
It’s a choice between using the internet and stay up-to-date using Ubuntu, a distro that’s a bit more hardcore, or using Fedora and its 3 CDs that don’t get updated much.
Or as Eugenia and others propose, use Mandrake. 🙂
I run 5 system all with FC3. The first is installed with “everything” and I use yum daily to update it. THe packages downloaded are put into my own local yum repository which I use to update the other systems. I run a lot more than desktop apps on these system though. Commercial apps such as Oracle, DB2, Websphere MQ etc all work far better on FC3 than FC2.
A the Fedora programme is a test bed for then next releases of RHEL then I think that RHEL4 will be pretty rock solid from day one.
Lastly, I have tried a lot of other distros (Mandrake, SUSE, Knoppix etc) and FC3 just seems to find all the H/W that I have (3 home built systems, 2 laptops) better than the others. But that is just MHO
I like the way the topic says ‘with screenshots’ yet I could only find the one….
HP 2.8Ghz P4 + 512mb + 40gb HD 7200 rpm
FC3 – open a terminal = 5 SECONDS!!!!!
you must be joking
All other menus = churn churn – flop down the screen.
Reinstalled xfld – whew – all back to normal.
Sometimes people don’t like Ubuntu because it does not support KDE yet, but that will change soon, though I prefer GNOME. 🙂
Given the state of KDE in Fedora, you can hardly say they support it either. They have some more or less broken rpms, but if you want KDE to work like its developrs intended, you will have to compile it from the sources. E.g. they they have left out useful tools like kuser, one of the few tools that makes it simple to admin Linux, samba, and e-mail user in an LDAP directory, and Gnome in Fedora offer no substitute.
You can do an install or upgrade in any modern Fedora / Red Hat or similar distro without needing to burn/ obtain any CDs.
Create an installer boot floppy or if upgrading without a floppy, copy the installer initrd & kernel into GRUB’s boot directory and tell GRUB to boot them.
When the installer begins type “linux askmethod” instead of just “linux”, it will now ask where to find the install media (e.g. NFS, FTP or HTTP) and it works fine with raw ISOs, it will loopback mount them automatically.
I haven’t used CDs since Fedora Core 1, in fact some machines no longer even have optical drives. No need.
[quote]Given the state of KDE in Fedora, you can hardly say they support it either. They have some more or less broken rpms, but if you want KDE to work like its developrs intended, you will have to compile it from the sources.[/quote]
try this:
http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/
After reading the previous posts, I wonder why Fedora trips up on things like KDE, considering the fact that it’s based on RedHat (one of the oldest distros around).