Initial Reactions to Fedora Core 5 164
Ki writes to tell us that he has put up a short review of Fedora Core 5 which covers the install and general first impressions to the new release. The author highlights several quirks in the installation and a few problems getting down to business, but overall the Fedora team seems to have made some very good progress.
Re:My initial reaction... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.centos.org/ [centos.org]
Re:My initial reaction... (Score:3, Informative)
The initial idea was Fedora was the testing ground for Red Hat Enterprise and that for actual work, you'd use RHEL and not Fedora. By its very design Fedora is supposed to be a fast-moving, cutting edge distro.
-Charles
Re:Can someone... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can someone... (Score:5, Informative)
They could indeed borrow things from other distos, and they do. It's the entire point of collaborative software. However, each distrobution has its own particular style and way of doing things; ultimately, it comes down to user preference in most cases. For example, Slackware is your rock solid, never-fail distribution for servers and tinkerers; Ubuntu is your user friendly, easy-to-use distribution with great support for mom and pop; SuSE and RHEL are for corporate machines requiring easy administration and solid integration with existing technologies; Gentoo and LFS are for those intereeted in learning about the core of the system (and for masochists with lots of time).
It all boils down to preference and application. Successful approaches are shared for the good of all.
Re:Good grief! (Score:3, Informative)
Beware! (Score:4, Informative)
1. No NTFS support: If dual boot, you will not be able to read your Windows partitions.
2. No MP3 support (it's been like that for a while.)
3. No support for propietary drivers: I've been told that this is more of a bug than an intended feature, but I haven't heard any certainty to support either side.
4. No ReiserFS
It's also missing the Tango Icons, Anjuta, and a few more apps. They aren't necessarily deal breakers, but with a 5 cd download, you'd expect them to be there. Lack of MP3 support is by design, although a lot of people really aren't aware of it. Items 1,3,4 can all be resolved by compiling your own kernel, but not everyone enjoys doing that, - and with a newly released distro, you probably shouldn't have to. I can understand no NTFS and MP3 support for patent issues, but why no ReiserFS?
Here is a link to one of the reviews [beranger.zoom.ro] that I came across. You should probably check the Forbidden Items List [fedoraproject.org] as well.
Re:Can someone... (Score:3, Informative)
The answer is that these days, most large distros aren't dramatically different so far as I can see. There are slight differences in taste, with respect to choices of default sofware and configuration options, but not so far that you can't configure one to be equivalent to the other. They differ in preferred desktop (Gnome vs. KDE), preferred file system (ext3 vs. Reiser), but these hardly matter. They have different default UI themes. Ubuntu comes preconfigured to rely heavily on sudo for administrative work, if you believe in that sort of thing. All these distros have enough mindshare and resources behind them that practically anything you want is very likely to be available on all of them.
Fedora is, of course, a "bleeding edge" distro, which means you'll run into a few more problems, but nothing that people who want that sort of thing can't handle. Mandriva concentrates on working for most users who just want to have their OS working "out of the box". It's nicely polished, with well thought out defaults and a good selection of reasonably up to date software that works pretty well togeter. It's very impressive. Suse is pretty much the same, but it might be a better choice for corporate use, if you anticipate wanting to use Novell products to manage your Windows and Unix systems. Ubuntu is an innovative debian based distro; it has Debian's ideological purity without its dowdy conservatism. On the other hand, I've found its possible on Ubuntu to configure/upgrade yourself into a bit of a mess, for example you can amuse yourself getting captive-NTFS to work after a kernel upgrade, but people who ask questions like yours don't feel the need to have the latest kernel.
Re:My initial reaction... (Score:3, Informative)
Correction: version 5, which shipped with a very broken beta libc.
Re:Good grief! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My initial reaction... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What I get from the article... (Score:2, Informative)
set your root password
now you can login as root...
Re:Beware! (Score:3, Informative)
Oh really?
It looks like it's there to me. You can easily install FC to reiserfs by putting reiserfs (or XFS) at the boot prompt.
Isn't NTFS support a little shaky still? I know reading works pretty good, but writting is still incomplete.
Re:Beware! (Score:3, Informative)
(4) is due to the fact that Red Hat is on the forefront of Ext3 development, and will not support ReiserFS due to the fact that, quite frankly, it sucks. It lacks proper SELinux support[2], it fragments easily, it and been unmaintained upstream for a long time.[3]
[1] http://www.fedorafaq.org/ [fedorafaq.org]
[2] Its Extended Attribute support, required for POSIX ACLs and SELinux contexts markings, is nothing more than a working kludge, using a hidden ".reiserfs_priv" directory entry and subsequent inodes therein for these things.
[3] I can't find the link at the moment, but Hans Reiser has mentioned on the LKML that ReiserFSv3 is "obsolete" and people should use the still-not-production-quality ReiserFSv4.
Re:yum sucks (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. Proper package management is one of the most complex things in modern software if done wrong. Never compound it all by making a package cocktail.
Besides, it's not the package format that makes compatibility. That's trivial. It's the underlying tree of software, where everything is put and how that is difficult. By advocating a single, compatible 'format', what you're actually advocating is a single distribution. Which would be stupid and unworkable for reasons I won't go into here.
So there you go kids - never stray from your vendor's repository unless you really really need to. And then only if you know what you're doing.
Re:Beware! (Score:3, Informative)