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Fedora Core 6 Review

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Oct 25, 2006 03:17 PM
from the doing-shiny-before-function dept.
Businesses Red Hat Software Software Linux
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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  • 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?
    • 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, @04:04PM (#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.
    • 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, @03:25PM (#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?
      • 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.
    • 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 :(

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

    by wsanders (114993) on Wednesday October 25 2006, @03:28PM (#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.
      • With the non-free version of Mandriva, NVidia is always setup automatically and works out of the box with no effort. I believe that is also true of the non-free SuSe. The problem is that free distros (Free Mandriva, *buntu, Fedora, Debian, etc) can't do that, because the redistribution is not allowed that way by NVidia (unless I am wrong on that, and someone would care to elaborate). However... it is entirely possible that free distros can arrange a "click on this" and it is downloaded on the fly and con

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by coaxial (28297)
        There is just something about working from a commmand line and manually doing a lot of the maintnance and setup that the inner geek craves.

        I understand how you want to Know every bit of your machine, but frankly there's better things to do. Like actually working on cool stuff. These problems are solved. Don't go and reinvent the wheel and spend your time fiddling with trival things. There aren't enough hours in the day to spend so many doing that.

        I'm tempted to give the GF Ubuntu and try out FC6 (or ma
      • put FC5 on the gf's laptop without a problem (any points for converting her?)

        Can I get points for coveting her?
  • Anyone cached a copy before it died a slashdot death?

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

    by tcopeland (32225) <tom&infoether,com> on Wednesday October 25 2006, @04:02PM (#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, @04:12PM (#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.

  • 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.

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

    by spiritraveller (641174) on Wednesday October 25 2006, @07:14PM (#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.
    • And what camera might that be?

      My Olympus Camedia has worked with Linux fine since the day I bought it 3(?) years ago. It's one of those that just uses the standard USB mass-storage drivers, so you plug it in and it appears as a drive. Those will work on any modern OS with no trouble.

      Presumably yours needs a specific driver, which means that no one will be able to answer your question without knowing which camera you have.
      • I'm quite sure the entire Fedora series has had "out of the box" support for cameras. I know Ubuntu has, from the start.

        Unfortunately, all I've see so far, both from Fedora and Ubuntu, is "read-only" support for cameras. You can plug the camera in and transfer your pictures from the camera to the computer, but you can't transfer pictures from the computer to the camera (which is very useful when trying to fill up a flash card to bring to the store to have them printed). I never figured which device to mou

      • Would OSS software still be OSS if it's not updated every 10 minutes? In the typical lifespan of OSS software, Fedora 6 is already middle aged, it seems.

        What ever happened to all of the older, wiser Unix geeks that would install a piece of software, and run it indefinitely, so long as it worked?
    • 1) Actually, I run KDE with nVidia drivers installed, and I made it a point to ask people how the fonts look (since it used to be such a big issue with Linux newbies. When asked, numerous Windows users either said they looked nice, or they looked better than Windows.

      2) KDE can easily be changed to take us less screen space. If you ever decide to give up your career in trolling and start using computer software, I recommend you try DesktopBSD [desktopbsd.net]. By default, they size down the KDE taskbar, making it the same s
        • No problem just post me your email address I and will send you one.
        • As least with RH/FC systems, when Bitstream donated fonts in 2003, they have been just as good as any Mac where as Mac > Windows with regards to fonts.
          Before that, they were horrible.

          http://linux.softpedia.com/screenshots//Fedora-Cor e_2.jpg [softpedia.com]

          • I hope the text in that screenshot is not meant to be an example of how text is supposed to look. The letter spacing is all wrong. I don't know what you've done to achieve that, since FreeType is generally pretty good even if you compile it without hinting support (to avoid Apple's patent, if you live somewhere where it is valid).

            The anti-aliasing on the larger fonts was okay; about the standard I've seen with Windows, but not as good as the sub-pixel AA enabled by default with OS X.

    • Re:Why linux sucks on desktops.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by MobyTurbo (537363) on Wednesday October 25 2006, @03:53PM (#16584446)
      1. Fonts. Linux weenies delude themselves that fonts under Xorg are just fine nowadays. BZZT. Compared to XP with cleartype the quality of font rendering in Xorg is laughable. Importing the XP fonts into a Linux system makes no difference, because they just do not look as good.
      That's because the freetype library cannot use patented algorithms that are used by Windows and Macs. Recompile your freetype library with the patented stuff enabled and you can get it to look identical. Incidentally, I don't find the usual auto-hinting that is in most distros all that bad - so that's what I use nowadays. The Deja fonts now included with many distros are excellent actually, I like them better than MS core fonts.

      2. Klunky UI's. Both Gnome and KDE are horrible in terms of wasting screen space. Also the UI's just don#t look as clean and polished as XP. I see rough edges on widgets, and various other things that makes UI's look cheap.
      That problem is because you are using environments that imitate Windows, if you want something that doesn't use much screen space by default the *box wms such as fluxbox (I don't use 'em, but you might like them) use much less screen space than Windows and Mac, and actually look pretty nice. Another you might want to look at is fvwm-crystal, that's the coolest theme I've seen for fvwm - and it doesn't at all look like plain fvwm, transparency and decent performance at the same time!

      If they ever get resolved then things might be different.
      I have the feeling that nothing will satisfy you except for bug-compatible Windows emulation, and even then you'd find something to critique.
    • 1. Fonts. Linux weenies delude themselves that fonts under Xorg are just fine nowadays. BZZT. Compared to XP with cleartype the quality of font rendering in Xorg is laughable. Importing the XP fonts into a Linux system makes no difference, because they just do not look as good.

      You're joking, right? Cleartype looks blurry and awful. I've yet to see a Linux distro that has fonts as painful to read as "Cleartype", just as I've yet to see a Linux distro with fonts as sharp and clear as the standard Windows f
    • I'd say so...

      warden root # uptime
      16:00:49 up 532 days
    • Don't know what the hell you're talking about. I've never had this issue and I've been running Linux systems of various flavors (RH v5.0+, Fedora Core 4+ primarily) for years now. I have not had these 'scheduled reboots' at 49.7 days on any of these systems, and up until the latest ones, these have been shitty systems or substandard by most comparisons, especially for the duty of a file server and windows domain controller. The only reason my system comes down is for power outages, and that's only because I

      • We have a whole slew of Debian PCs in our lab, and for the most part they run fine. One of our newer clusters just experienced some weirdness, but we tracked that down to my jobs (I'm creating hordes of minions in an attempt to develop artificial consciousness so that they'll write my dissertation for me) overheating the CPU. The solution, of course, was to edit the BIOS to raise the maximum allowable operating temperature... :)

        P.S.: It wasn't my detective work that figured out the problem. Thanks Andrew!

    • Re:Have they fixed this issue yet? (Score:5, Informative)

      by tyler_larson (558763) on Wednesday October 25 2006, @04:51PM (#16585190) Homepage
      There is a nasty bug in Linux that makes the computer reboot every 49.7 days. The worst part is that this bug has been around for more than 10 years...

      You're think about Windows 95 and NT, not Linux. Windows drivers used the number of milliseconds since boot as the primary timekeeping mechanism. When that wrapped around to zero, some drivers crashed. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216641 [microsoft.com] for more information on this bug.

      Even though all of Microsoft's own code now properly handles the 49-day boundary, third-party code is still a problem on Windows systems. Most programs still use GetTickCount() as their primary sub-second timer, which returns that 32-bit milliseconds since boot. In fact, it was this very thing that shut down the LA air traffic control center some months back.

      This has never been a problem with Linux. Linux doesn't use milliseconds as any internal time representation. Instead, it uses either the timeval structure, or jiffies. Jiffies are 100ths of a second, whereas a timeval is a set of two numbers representing both seconds since 1970, and nanoseconds in the current second.

      Note that jiffies (in 32-bits) wrap around after 497 days, which used to cause a benign bug where the uptime display would wrap around to zero after that time period. No crash, though.

      What good is a million eyes looking at the code if they are attached to half a million idiots?

      I dare say they're not the idiots, here, sir.

    • That's funny, because Ubuntu/Kubuntu don't support WPA-PSK out of the box, so I had no luck getting it installed and connected to my home network.

      Fortunately, it was a LiveCD and I could roll back to a stable, working system just by ejecting the CD and throwing it in the trash. Maybe next upgrade cycle Ubuntu will be usable...
    • I have to agree that the article is poorly written, but it's nothing a good proofreading would be able to fix. The entire thing reads like a fourteen-year old wrote it in five minutes.

      From the embarrassing lack of agreement between nouns and their modifiers all the way to "on accident" and the previously mentioned spelling errors, this review was garbage.

      I'm not trying to be a dick here, but sometimes I think it's important to point out the more obvious pitfalls of "user generated content".

    • Re:running it now and... (Score:5, Informative)

      by arth1 (260657) on Wednesday October 25 2006, @06:37PM (#16586320) Homepage Journal
      Here's my mini-review:

      - 64-bit version that actually installs without errors - great!
      - selinux enabled (and not permissive) out of the box - great!
      - very quick installation - great!
      - gnome 2.16 - great!
      - enabling yp doesn't actually start ypbind at bootup - not so great
      - setup requires you to set up a user under /home despite using yp - not so great
      - with two network cards with dhcp, the second will overwrite the configs of the first - not so great
      - dhcp client not sending hostname to dhcp server - not so great
      - bluetooth servers enabled by default and crash on shutdown on system without bluetooth - not so great
      - beagle started in slurp mode by default kind of throws any security advantage out the window - not so great
      - vnc started by default - not so great
      - acpi services enabled by default on system without acpi - not so great
      - X crashes if you click the button for enabling effects - not so great
      - no choice for popular packages with alternatives (like vim/nvi, firefox/seamonkey, bash/ash/ksh) - not so great
      - loads and loads of selinux warnings during normal operations, with logs growing to a gigabyte within a couple of hours - not so great
      - update and install apps hang every now and then, and have to be killed - not so great

      All in all, I like it better than the latest SuSE and Ubuntu, and I can see this being a good alternative for people who don't want to roll their own or use a lower-level approach like Gentoo. It still needs some polishing, though - especially in the networking and hardware detection setup. And I recommend setting this up on a trusted LAN only, as it seems to me to run too many services that may be helpful for newbies but spell potential trouble on untrusted networks.

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