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Fedora Core 6 Review 205

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the doing-shiny-before-function dept.
luna6 writes to tell us that they have posted a pretty thorough review of Fedora Core 6 with the installation procedure and even a few work arounds for the couple of bugs encountered during the process to help users get up and running smoothly. From the article: "To sum up Fedora Core 6, I will say that once you have it set up properly FC 6 runs very impressively. I had the impression that FC 6 may have been rushed, just because of the handful of minor bugs that appeared. The mixup of arches, i586 & i686 was weird and the first system update having a update conflict was a glaring error, even though it was easy to fix. Setting up the Nvidia drivers was way more problematic than it should have been. I should also note that Mandriva 2007 worked from the start with AIGLX and their 3D drake worked flawlessly. With that stated once the minor problems were fixed, Fedora Core 6 worked as well as any Linux distro I have tried and the visuals were second to none. Well except the default icons...but we have something to look forward to in FC 7 now don't we?"
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Fedora Core 6 Review More

Fedora Core 6 Review

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  • Does it support WPA-PSK out of the box? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rob Simpson ( 533360 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2006 @04:24PM (#16583956)
    SUSE does, Ubuntu does not. SUSE only requires a couple clicks and entering the network ID/password, while even the instructions for getting WPA running on Ubuntu are daunting [ubuntu.com]. How does Fedora compare?
    • Which is nice, but when I installed SUSE 10.1 the package manager didn't even work, and I couldn't install updates [linuxforums.org]. I'd rather have working package manager than WPA-PSK. Yes, I know it's fixed, but how do you put out a .1 release that doesn't even have the package manager working properly?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Erwos ( 553607 )
      It _should_. Fedora Core 5 did, but I never got it working, due to the weirdness of the Broadcom drivers.

    • Re:Does it support WPA-PSK out of the box? (Score:4, Informative)

      by pyros ( 61399 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2006 @05:04PM (#16584612) Journal
      That Ubuntu Wiki makes it look a lot harder than it really is. The wiki doesn't make it obvious that the paragraph after the first three apt-get commands is where the process ends for 95% of users. In most cases (if your wifi chip is already recognized and working) you can install network-manager-[kde|gnome], start the Notification Area applet, select your network from the list, enter the credentials, and you're done. The rest of the page is for manually setting up all the wpa stuff that Network Manager handles for you.
      • Does that mean it uses apt-get to download and install the network manager?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pyros ( 61399 )

          Does that mean it uses apt-get to download and install the network manager?

          yeah. It's not installed by default because it doesn't work in 100% of the conceivable situations (static IP, you want a network connection before you log in). I think it should be installed but disabled by default, but I'm not in charge.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by miro f ( 944325 )
      sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome doesn't seem too daunting to me

      if you don't like the command line you can even install it through synaptic

  • Reviewer = idiot (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25, 2006 @04:25PM (#16583992)
    For example he complained that a package conflict he saw "totem-xine conflicts with totem." was an example of the distro being rushed out... He missed the fact that totem-xine is a non-free package (patented codecs) distributed by a third party repository which he manually configured.

    In other words, a new linux distro has failed to prevent someone with the root password from shooting themselves in the foot. NEWS AT 11.
    • xmms-mp3 and things like that make sense to me. But in my experience (on FC5) totem and xine fight like three-year-olds. What does the totem-xine package do?

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by forrestt ( 267374 )
        Fights like a schizophrenic 3 year old.
      • In Debian there's 2 packages, totem-gstreamer and totem-xine. Whichever you install determines which backend totem uses for it's codecs, I would assume that FC does something similar and that's why one conflicts with the other.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by suv4x4 ( 956391 )
      In other words, a new linux distro has failed to prevent someone with the root password from shooting themselves in the foot. NEWS AT 11

      I'm freaking out, man! News at 11, news at 11. Everybody points to the news at 11, but where are they!? WHERE! I feel so desperately uninformed and news-deprived :(

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hdparm ( 575302 )
      I didn't read TFA but as I'm seeing the same thing, I think it's the issue with livna (that's what I enabled) or some other third party repo (actually bug in a way totem-xine is packeged). It can be unchecked in the pup window and rest of the update goes fine. gstreamer plugins (ugly and nice ones) work perfectly, so totem can now be used for pretty much every media format without too much hassle. FC6 looks rock solid to me - Fedora community and Red Hat have created outstanding product.

  • Setting up the Nvidia drivers (Score:5, Funny)

    by wsanders ( 114993 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2006 @04:28PM (#16584050) Homepage
    >> Setting up the Nvidia drivers was way more problematic than it should have been

    And yea verily as the sun shall rise in the East and the Pope is Catholic and bears crap in the woods, yea verily the setting up of the Nvidia drivers shall be way more problematic than it should be, thus is it written, amen.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kelson ( 129150 ) *
      Well, since TFA is slashdotted, I can't tell whether it mentioned this already. There is a well-known third-party yum repository at rpm.livna.org [livna.org] which provides packages for those highly-demanded but legally/philosophically rejected packages, like MP3 and NTFS support (patents), NVIDIA Drivers (closed-source), etc.

      With livna added to your yum config, installing the drivers is as easy as yum install kmod-nvidia and restarting X.

      Of course, you might want to wait until the root exploit in NVIDIA's driver [slashdot.org] is f
      • With livna added to your yum config, installing the drivers is as easy as yum install kmod-nvidia and restarting X.
        ...and dinking around with your /etc/X11/xorg.conf for a few hours to get OpenGL acceleration, if your experience is like mine. In fact I still haven't got the xv extension working.

        Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it works smoothly for some.

    • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by yo_tuco ( 795102 )
      "...bears crap in the woods..."

      Uh, Polar Bears don't.

      • They do on LOST ! /4 8 15 16 23 42

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        They should - after all, polar bears are just rectangular bears under a coordinate transform!

        I'll get my coat...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by aug24 ( 38229 )
      The pope bears crap in the woods? Why? Why would he bear crap? And where would he bear it to?

      Justin.
  • Anyone cached a copy before it died a slashdot death?

  • Posting this from FC6 (Score:4, Informative)

    by tcopeland ( 32225 ) <tom AT thomasleecopeland DOT com> on Wednesday October 25, 2006 @05:02PM (#16584586) Homepage
    Looks pretty nice; the startup screens are whizzy, Rails and PostgreSQL and Eclipse run fine, everything seems snappy. Besides:

    $ uname -r
    2.6.18-1.2798.fc6PAE

    w00t!

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Erwos ( 553607 )
      I'm also running FC6 on my home print/storage server. I wish I had something to cry joyously about in this area, but it's more of the same - which I think is a good thing. My firewire RAID transferred flawlessly over, and once I figured out that, yet again, SELinux and Samba don't play nicely together, sharing was a breeze. I keep wishing I had one of those fancy VT/Pacifica chips so that I could experiment with the virtualization tools, which look particularly nice. I never really understood the hate some

  • Article Summary (Score:3, Funny)

    by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2006 @05:12PM (#16584732)
    I can give you the article summary, and you can save yourself a click:

    "Error establishing a database connection"
  • For the FC6 DVD, I've been getting about 20KB/s download with only very occasional short spikes of 50-100. Over the course of 8 hours, my sharing ratio varies between .5 and 1.0. So far this is the slowest major distro torrent ever.

    I don't know the cause, but I kinda wish they had a separate trackers for the US, Europe, and Asia at least.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kelson ( 129150 ) *
      Odd -- I was getting ~70KB/s when I left for work this morning. This was on the i386 DVD torrent.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by init100 ( 915886 )
      I downloaded the i386 DVD yesterday night, and it took just a few hours. I was consistently getting between 200 and 300 kb/s, which I would consider quite good. I really don't understand why you would want separate trackers, since that would create disjoint swarms that wouldn't take advantage of each other.

  • What were the editors thinking?! I'm flabbergasted that this didn't make the front page. It certainly deserved the space more than the gaim article.

  • I tried to install updated nVidia drivers for my Fedora Core 4 partition a while back. It didn't work. I followed the directions exactly, but X wouldn't start up. This makes me wonder, with nVidia being one of the most common 3d accelerators in PCs, why can't the update manager download and install these for you? I don't see why I should have to go through a complicated (for a newbie) multi-step installation procedure just to update video drivers. For a time, Linux support was one of the advantages tha

  • Desktop Effects very cool (Score:3, Interesting)

    by spiritraveller ( 641174 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2006 @08:14PM (#16586642)
    Just turned on the wobbling windows and workspaces in a cube. I thought this required some fancy new video card. My card and the machine it's connected to are at least 5 years old.

    But it worked out of the box!

    This is good stuff.
  • Skip FC and go straight to CentOS. You get the real bin-compatible RedHat without having pay monstrous money for it, and you don't have to worry about all the little niggling things the FC releases screw up. I gotta say, the first time my newly-installed FC box undid a route I added manually on the command-line, I wasn't a happy camper. The constantly broken package dependencies, the constantly broken upgrade paths, the constant hassles getting video working.. good grief. I really wanted to believe, but it'
  • What is the best distro for a small home server? I'm tired of doing a full re-install every year because FC is no longer supported.
    • Debian stable, IMHO. It works, the upgrades are flawless (at least in my experience), and while on the desktop it may lag behind other distros, on the server end where you rarely need cutting edge software, it works great.
    • There are lots of good choices. Debian is one of them. Ubuntu is also a popular choice, and you might consider Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) because Canonical has pledged 5 years of support for this release. You can rest easy knowing that you'll be getting security updates well into the future.
  • Is there any way to upgrade without a re-install and without the DVD?

    I know that with CentOS, you can do something like 'up2date metapackage' and that will perform a full update of your system to the latest version.

    Is there anything similar to this for FC6 ?
  • Joy - can't update any servers because of this. Doh!
    • It's a shame they didn't leave the mirror list in the same place. I ended up manually editing my yum repositories and selecting a still-operating mirror that's relatively close by.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Builder ( 103701 )
        This is why I was saying in the discussion about FC6 yesterday that Fedora is just _not_ a production system, despite what some members of the project say :)
  • Boring. Boring. BORING!

    I want to hear praise for my beloved distro!

    Not smelly little nVidia problems!

    Not patent-encumbered .mp3 files!

    WHY I LIKE FEDORA (comments/corrections welcome):

    * Ubuntu mangle upstream like Satan's little bitches (case in point: compare Dapper's Gnome logout dialog with Zod's implementation). I *like* vanilla Gnome. Leave us poor "vanilla GNU/Linux" people alone! Go modify your artwork and plug some gaping holes if you have to, but FFS...

    Fedora generally works closer with

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