Fedora Core 5 Review

Mark writes "A full review of the latest Fedora Core release, code named "Bordeaux", the Fedora Core 5, which has proven itself to be one of the best Linux Distributions out there. "

just a set of screenshots

[gr8dude]

This review seems to be nothing but a set of screenshots that illustrate the OS in one moment or another, meaning that it is just one of the many similar ones out there.

"Thanks to the Gnome Theme Manager it is also very easy to change and modify your desktop theme." As if this was some sort of a new boombastic feature :-)

I am still waiting for a review which can explain a non-Linux person [such as myself] why the GUI is so slow. My guess is that the video card's hardware acceleration is not used. Other reviews [ http://www.stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_5_instal lation_notes.html [stanton-finley.net] ] were more helpful, and explained that this distro is not shipped with nVidia's or ATI's drivers. Moreover [taken from the above mentioned link]:

"The kernel that ships with the Fedora Core 5 release iso images is not compatible with third party 3D graphics acceleration drivers."

How is THAT supposed to NOT anti-attract a newbie?
Is there somebody who can explain things in a simple way?

Single page version

[Shawn is an Asshole]

For those who don't like to click through 5 pages to read an article, here is a link to the print version [linuxforums.org].

Re:just a set of screenshots

[fizze]

I am still waiting for a review which can explain a non-Linux person [such as myself] why the GUI is so slow. My guess is that the video card's hardware acceleration is not used.

Take a look at http://kororaa.org/static.php?page=static060318-18 1203 [kororaa.org]. It is a Live CD that is showcasing the latest developments of 3D accellerated GUIs.
Just burn it, put it in your drive and boot your rig - how more newbie-friendly can it possible get ?

PS: Here's a list of supported graphics cards: http://kororaa.org/releases/xgl/xgl-cards [kororaa.org]

Re:Yum?

[Shawn is an Asshole]

Is it so much to ask that the default setup is changed to apt?

Yes it is. Apt doesn't support multi-arch, which unfortuantley is required if you're running a 64 bit processor (Real, Macromedia, etc need to wake up and relesae 64 bit versions...).

You can use apt, several repositores still support it. Apt is still included in Fedora. In my experience, though, yum seems to handle conflicting repositores better.

I'm tired of Yum's idosycracies. It's gotten better, but as of 2.3.2, yum has no local cache search, no download resuming, and still bombs out if it can't contact a respositiory.

That is a major anoyance. Espcially if, like me, you're stuck with only dialup being available. It seems to be a little better in this release than previous, but it still needs work. Is it really so much to ask to be able to cache the repo data? Yes I'm aware of -C.

Re:Yum?

[grasshoppa]

1) If you had read the patch notes, or even the FA, you'd have realized that up2date has been replaced with pup. No, I'm not going to tell you the difference. You'll just have to figure it out for yourself.

2) Fedora also comes on DVDs, you may have heard of that. Also, for anybody with at least one other nfs capable server at home mounts the image over the network. It's the only way to fly.

Re:Yum?

[HaydnH]

I'm officially requesting /. change it's name to /FUD!

"yum has no local cache search, no download resuming..."

The local cache for yum is located in /var/cache/yum/, if the file is already downloaded it will not download it again, it will only redownload the repomd.xml file again and continue. A useful distinction is the progress bars "###" & "===", the first is reading and the second is downloading.

yum is very strict on how to handle errors and personally if I was getting a kernel upgrade (or something else important) via yum I would definately want it to be careful! This is mentioned in the YumTodont [duke.edu] - the discussion [duke.edu] linked from the YumTodont gives some good insight on the topic aswell.

Haydn.

Fixing Flash

[Kelson]

For anyone trying to use the Flash plugin on Fedora Core 5, you may have noticed that it only shows images, not text.

It turns out that Flash has hard-coded the font paths and is still looking in /usr/X11R6/lib, but the new R7 X server doesn't use the X11R6 paths anymore. (The same problem will happen with any distro that uses X.org's new modular X server)

You can work around the problem [hyperborea.org] by creating /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 and symbolically linking to /etc/X11/fs and /usr/share/X11/fonts.

mkdir -p /usr/X11R6/lib/X11
cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11
ln -s /etc/X11/fs
ln -s /usr/share/X11/fonts

Also, if you have SELinux running in enforcing mode, you need to allow text relocations on the Flash library.

chcon -t texrel_shlib_t /path/to/libflashplayer.so

With any luck, Macrodobe will fix both of these in an upcoming version of the plugin.

I found the solution in the comments on a Mozilla bug report. Remember, Bugzilla doesn't allow direct links from Slashdot, so if you really need to read the bug discussion, go to bugzilla.mozilla.org and search for bug 317655.