OSNews Rates Fedora Core 1 Mild Disappointment

JigSaw writes "OSNews has reviewed the Fedora Core 1 Linux distro, but the author personally found lots of usability problems and bugs with the distro, making Fedora Core a trying experience. The writer puts the blame on poor QA of Fedora Core 1 done by its community, since Red Hat has shifted focus to Enterprise, with Fedora serving merely as a testbed for them."

unofficial #fedora FAQ

[jroysdon]

Those from the #fedora IRC channel on irc.freenode.net have started an unofficial FAQ.

I highly suggest browsing through the various issues others have had, before you decide to upgrade from RH or try a fresh install.

fedora.artoo.net [artoo.net].

Forget about using gnuPG for gaim...

[MarcoAtWork]

recompile using the mozilla nss and nspr libraries (there was a post on the gaim mailing list about how to do that) which is much easier to get to work.

Now, if anybody could find out how to compile galeon 1.2.x with Mozilla 1.4 or, better, 1.5 I'm all ears, I've tried the CVS version and no dice (and no, I'm not moving to Galeon 2, which is FAR less useable than galeon 1.2, I'm wondering if the developers actually -use- the thing)

Re:Usability Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

apt-get install gaim
emerge gaim
urpmi gaim
pkg_add -rv gaim
etc...

learn how to use the very basic tools before complaining that you can't get the damn thing done. you don't need to compile gaim to get it to work on windows, and you don't need to compile it on unix.
2 years ago i was exactly in your situation. 1 month later i finally realised how fool i was. in 1 month time probably you will realise it too.

Re:unofficial #fedora FAQ

[jroysdon]

BTW: We the FAQ contains info for nVidia [artoo.net] and RhythmBox [artoo.net].

You'd think the guy would at least try RedHat's suggested support mechanism: irc://irc.freenode.net#fedora [irc] where we link to this unofficial FAQ and will help users solve these problems.

Folks there have been solving these questions as they pop up. Sometimes there is no fix, sometimes it turns out to be something stupid in FC1 that shouldn't be that way, but it is a .0 release, and there often are work-arounds or fixes.

Gaim

[Espectr0]

If she would have read Gaim's page, she would have learned that gaim needs mozilla's NSS and NSPR to get ssl support for the msn plugin.

Thank you

[crush]

Eugenia is obviously interested in banging the same old drum again and again ..... some of these points were made to her the last time she reviewed RH9 and RH8 and yet she appears incapable of learning that RH is _not_ going to come with MP3 support until the IP situation is sorted.

She was also told that she should use official RPMs and yet she continues to ignore thsi.

I used to look at OSNews occasionally, but I think I just won't bother as it's irritation without information.

(Oh yeah ... Debian is my primary OS in case anyone is wondering).

Good job Fedora Core.

Re:Usability Issues

[optikSmoke]

I'm looking forward to a nifty Linux distro that's easy to use and that I can sink my teeth into without having to jump through hoops.

I would suggest you try Mandrake 9.2. It is by far the best linux distro I've ever used. It is extremely powerful (software installation is made easy by urpmi and urpmi-based tools, similar to apt-get), and it can run de facto "industry-standard" RedHat software with ease (since it was originally based on RedHat). And, as of the latest version (I've been using it for a couple of releases on my desktop system) it is quite user-friendly. The 9.x releases have been good, but 9.2 truly is excellent in the usability department IMHO.

Re:Use it properly.

[reaper20]

Not in the default desktop installation -- yum however is included, with the /etc/yum.conf already setup. Even the little up2date applet (the blue one that turns red) comes out of the box talking to yum.

There's no need for apt on a Fedora installation at all.

Re:Use it properly.

[reaper20]

Replying to myself... Linux.Ars [arstechnica.com] did a short intro to Fedora here [arstechnica.com], though it is not a full review.

If you need help installing it, checkout the #fedora unofficial FAQ [artoo.net], it answers 90% of people's questions, and if you're new to Linux, we have thread [infopop.net] at Ars that should help you along.

If you want to know how Fedora is, you should probably ask people that use it, it's unfortunate that such a good release is mired with the typical anti-Red Hat sentiment. What's next? "OMFG Red Hat is sleeping with my wife!"

Screenshots

[boarder8925]

Here are some sites with screenshots of Fedora:

http://www.dark-hill.co.uk/fedora/ [dark-hill.co.uk]
http://anyweb.kicks-ass.net/linux/fedora/index1.ht ml [kicks-ass.net]

Re:What a shock

[Soko]

Oddly enough, last weeks linux.ars [arstechnica.com] had a cursory look at Fedora Core 1. Go check it out.

Soko

My take... three gnome bugs, otherwise good so far

[ChangeOnInstall]

I've got Fedora Core 1 running at home, and soon will be upgrading the RH9 machine at work. Java and Eclipse seem to work fine (which is the major requirement for me). Fedora appears to me to be exactly what I would have expected from a "Red Hat 10" distribution.

Now for my three issues:

#1. GTK/Gnome file selector *still* sucks. We all already knew that, and yes it's going to be fixed in the next GTK. But I wish RH had seen fit to do what the folks at Ximian did, and at least pretty up the existing one and make it somewhat usable. Those "Home" "Desktop" and "Documents" quick access buttons in the XD2 version make things much nicer.

#2. No menu editing. Again, it's a Gnome problem, and is due to be fixed in the next Gnome (2.6), I believe. Unfortunately I just read a mailing list posting indicating that they while they were fixing the menu architecture, they weren't all that concerned with providing editing capability. I'm not certain I understand what's going on here though, as I wish RH would just support the same menu-editing functionality found in Ximian Desktop 2. It's not great, but at least it's possible.

#3. Using the RedHat network configurator, I changed the hostname of the machine from localhost to something a little more personalized. It failed to add the new hostname to the /etc/hosts file, and as a result all my GConf stuff (I think) got corrupted to the point that Gnome couldn't start without displaying a few error messages every time. I added the entry manually, and would up having to delete all the gnome/gconf config data in my user account to make Gnome happy again. This issue ought to be easily enough resolved, and I'll be reporting it as a bug.

Other than that though, it's very nice. As far as I can tell, it's an all around improvement over RH9. I can't wait till these last few rough edges get smoothed out.

Re:Usability Issues

[shaitand]

Actually no, Mandrake does not follow the standards for things like the filesystem. Mandrake rpms will not usually install properly on redhat and redhat on mandrake... some 3rd party rpms will but not all.

You'll have alot more trouble finding an apt repository for Mandrake as well. If you actually read through the book that comes with it and attempt to follow along step by step you'll soon find many things don't work as described, everything from packages that aren't in the default install to commandline switches/flags that are incorrect or don't exist. 90% of the howto documentation out there that applies to redhat stuff (which is a VERY significant portion of all documentation onthe web that is not maintained at the offical sources) DOES NOT apply as is in such a manner it can be followed by someone who does not already know the material or know which outside sources to go to for the correct info.

Lots of things won't work out of the box, the hardware detection is HORRIBLE, the installer is primative. Oh yeah, and the control applets are user friendly, but only because they offer so few options that 90% of users will never be able to get what they want working correctly.

Other than that, Mandrake kicks ass! Seriously RH9 was thrice the beginner distro that Mandrake ever was!

I like Fedora So Far

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using Fedora right now. Once I did a fresh installation I've had no problems. Found my hardware, very stable, much faster than RH9 and so far everything I've added has worked fine. It is kind of a pain getting all the mulitmedia stuff, I would gladly pay Redhat if they included that.

uptime
19:38:16 up 3 days, 54 min, 3 users, load average: 0.02, 0.04, 0.04

I would suggest giving it a shot. If you do find a problem, file a bug report.

Re:Gaim

[ChipX86]

Actually, NSS/NSPR *or* GNUTLS work just fine. We offer a choice. The reviewer just didn't really install things right, and I imagine was a bit impatient. This was a Gaim issue. It never should have been brought up in a Fedora review. We will be releasing Fedora RPMs of Gaim for 0.73 anyway. The reviewer can be patient ;)

This is why it's good to ask. We don't bite.

Fedora works great

[pridkett]

So I've learned to take anything that OSNews writes with a grain of salt, their articles aren't exactly up to any sort of journalistic integrity standards. So that probably biased me from the start.

I've been running Fedora Core 1 on my Thinkpad A31 laptop since last Thursday and I'm quite pleased. There were some hiccups because the upgrade from RH9 crashed hard, mainly because I had two many external RPMS installed (had previously upgraded to gnome 2.4 on RH9). So, after moving some data, I did a fresh install and it appears to work just fine.

Some of the great highlights of the distro:

Sleep on the Thinkpads work. I don't have to do the funky virtual terminal dance after my monitor goes off.

Speedstep stuff is part of the distro. This is also nice to not see my battery get sucked to nothing when I unplug it.

The wireless support is improved. Redhat-config-network works quite well for switching profiles between home and school.

Although it doesn't ship with stuff like MPlayer and a good MP3 player, rpm.livna.org has YUM and APT repositories to fix this no problem.

The revisions to blue curve are quite nice, it gives it a nicer look that isn't so sterile.

Supposed the NPTL backport improves Java app performance. Ecplise seems zippier, but it could be delusion. Actually, most everything seems a bit zippier, probably because the OS is no longer compiled for 386s.

Flash installed without a problem, no idea what Eugenia is complaining about.

Java works just fine in the browser too. Maybe she didn't read any of the documentation that came with her Whizbang GeneroBrowser 0.1rc2 or whatever she uses.

The issue is that Fedora isn't meant to be bleeding edge and she is thinking that it is. If you want bleeding edge use Gentoo. Personally I can deal with a nice middle ground between Debian and Gentoo and Fedora fits that nicely.

Dissapointment? Fedora runs great on the laptop

[Bruha]

I dont know what that guy was smoking but please let me have some.

My laptop has been a PITA with Mandrake 9 and 9.1 SuSE 8.2 and Redhat 8x and 9..

Install Fedora

ACPI works
Mouse works and it's shutoff button above it.
Broadcom 54G wireless works with Linuxant's driver

I couldnt be happier with this setup.

Now my only concern is one email on the list about patches for security will not be high priority and if you want quick patches to purchase RH WS or ES..

We'll I'm not using it for work just personal. And frankly redhat should still provide fedora patches especially security ones ASAP. Otherwise it will give MS more fuel for their security FUD.

now to order a pizza from the couch via my linux laptop!

Re:It's bad because...

[nzkoz]

Where are you getting this crap from.

Fedora's leadership page [redhat.com] clearly lists redhat employees as technical lead, and taking up all the positions on the technical committee. Just because the slashtrolls say redhat's ditched it doesn't mean it's true.

FC1 clearly needs work, but it is moving along.

[jbn-o]

I find that FC1 is not yet ready for the masses, but I arrive at that conclusion from a different angle than Eugenia Loli-Queru's--I'm using nothing on the system but what was supplied to me on the FC1 discs. I have no interest in doing things I can't do with non-free software (and a lot of things I can do with free software don't interest me either). I don't care about Flash or Java, and I'd rather play Ogg Vorbis files/webcasts than MP3s. I'm testing this on a 840.015MHz Pentium III (according to /proc/cpuinfo) with 768MB RAM.

Unfortunately, FC1 is still not something I can fully recommend to my friends who aren't so technical. I don't think it was a good idea to release the OS with the Add/Remove Software panel program not working and the RPM database being flaky. I keep bumping into problems with these two aspects of the system when I try to fix something in a way that can be easily removed or upgraded via RPM.

Some things I wished were a part of the default install for a workstation user include an OCR program (GOCR [sourceforge.net], for instance). I think OCR support is important and I'm not wedded to any particular OCR program, but GOCR (or JOCR) seems to be compatibly licensed and offer easy-to-use CLI access. With more users and more programmers, GOCR will become a better program for OCRing. The Add/Remove Software panel problem and the RPM database problem Loli-Queru mentioned make installing additional packages more difficult than they should be.

Other parts of FC1 I find mildly annoying, but not showstoppers: the up2date registration screen seems pointless to me now that it appears you don't need to register to get FC1 updates from the default location. I'm not sure why I was asked to supply an extant RHN ID or create a new one. To the uninitiated user, this could come off as peculiar to the point of wondering if their system is legitimate (at least until they see that updates are available to them). Focusing unfocused windows by clicking on their titlebar seems to make the window stick the mouse (and the cursor turn to the plus pointer). This was unexpected and not pleasant; because of this behavior I inadvertantly move windows a lot.

Unlike Loli-Queru, I would not have expected other packages to work seamlessly with FC1 out of the box (as Loli-Queru expected Flash to work). I figure those packages will come along as more people use the system.

One thing that could make bug reporting easier is if there were simpler categories in which to report errors. Novices are unlikely to know that something odd on the display (like the visual noise I get when moving windows around) is an XFree86 issue as opposed to a Linux kernal issue or a GNOME issue. To get helpful commentary from users, I think it would help to not have to know all the layers of a typical GNU/Linux installation. But this means more people crawling through bug databases reassigning bugs to the proper place. I'm not sure how to best handle the problem, but I think making bug database entry simpler and easier to do ad hoc is a step in the right direction.

Overall, it's an interesting system and I plan to give FC some more tries before I decide to go with another distribution. I'll continue to use RH9 or Debian as my day-to-day GNU/Linux distribution until FC3 or FC4 is out.

Happy hacking.

Re:Usability Issues

[optikSmoke]

Hmmm, despite the obviously trollish nature of you post, I'll try to answer a few of your .... ahem.... reservations with Mandrake.

On the subject of filesystem "standards": Mandrake has always followed the RedHat "lump-everything-under-/usr" "standard" :).

On the RPM issue, I meant third-party, NOT system RPMs. RedHat's system rpms don't really work because it seems Mandrake has gone to a much saner Debian-style naming system for their packages, which basically makes urpmi (an apt equivalent) work better. Besides that, they are different distributions: you can't really expect many system-level rpms to be interchangeable. Any third party RPMs I've tried for Mandrake work (this includes things like Mozilla binaries, Sun's Java, codeweavers wine (long ago), and some other things I can't recall). I'm sure there are third-party rpms out there that don't work, too; but I haven't found any that don't also have source packages.

You say I'd have a lot more trouble finding an apt repository? That doesn't really matter; Mandrake comes with urpmi and their own large repository; which works just as well (or better; it's officially supported!). There are also other URPMI sources for Mandrake that provide anything else you'd probably want, this site [zarb.org] will help you configure them easily, and pclinuxonline.com has a list of around 6 of them. No need to use apt, it's got urpmi!

As for docs, I haven't used them extensively but what I have had to use seemed up-to-date (though honestly I can't really make an informed opinion about this). I have always found the configuration panel to present a useful amount of options; it would be overkill to go much further than they did (and in some cases I think it could be simplified).

As for hardware detection, what exactly didn't it detect for you? (This is an honest question). Anyone I have heard talk about it says it has great detection, and indeed it worked perfectly on both my desktop and laptop.

I have used RedHat on and off between Mandrake (RedHat used to be my distro of choice). RedHat always seemed to be a little behind in terms of its software selection and user-friendliness (which was why I switched in the end). What was the latest version of Mandrake you have tried?

As a final PS: You seem to be getting pretty worked up over this. Did Mandrake do something to you? Relax, really; it's just a distribution :)

I installed Fedora over RedHat 9, here is my story

[josevnz]

I downloaded the Fedora ISOs two days ago; I though "well, my company is evaluating buying RedHat ES for their servers and maybe I can still use Fedora on my personal computer or my laptop, so I can see what is comming" so I gave it a shot.

Here is what I found:

First the good things:
- The installer is much better and gives you the option to upgrade from RedHat 9 to fedora.
- The Video configuration is much more responsive. It got some problems with my NVidia drivers, but it managed to start again without much effort (though the acelerated drivers were deactivaded).
- The OS is much responsive. The Java apps ran faster and i was able to run more things at the same time using the same equipment (Its an old 800Mhz 512MB of ram Dell desktop machine).

Now the bad things:
- I had to reinstall the OS without upgrading; Upgrading broke my printer support (though it got fixed after the reinstall). Also my old GNOME desktop configuration broke. If you can, install from scratch (I have my home directory on a different partition so it wasn't that bad).
- GCVS doesn't work with Fedora. There is a nasty compilation error that prevents it from compile.
- Mozilla is pretty unstable. It crashed today at least four times.
- Firewall builder has some compilation problems.

Luckily I'm the type of user that doesn't need the RedHat support for trivial problems, so their support is not appealing to me (I can survive buyin the WS edition for $179). But now with RedHat saying that they will not support RedHat on the desktop (use Microsoft Windows they say) makes me wonder how good will be WS for application development without an appropiate desktop support (how good or bad the GUI support like GNOME or KDE will be there?).

I'm used to browse the web, chat and read email from Linux; At my work I don't use Windows at all (got OpenOffice, evolution, Jedit and Vi to do all the stuff I require). It is sad to install a Windows license to later log on your Linux server to do development or to administer it.

Don't get me wrong here; I've been a supporter of RedHat in the past (bought their CDs, become a RedHat Certified Engineer), but what incentive I have to report bugs / contribute code / support a 'beta' distribution like Fedora if I'm not going to receive security updates (they state that kind of support is not guaranteed and if the broken app doesn't get a patch then it is removed from the distro).

RedHat needs to come with more information about WS on the desktop, a better support structure for Fedora (security patches, quality control) or their user base will probably move to another distro (why support two flavors of Linux, lets say RedHat and Suse / Debian when they offer support for the desktop and the server).

I wish Mac OS X boxes were cheaper, probably that's an option to consider ;)

Re:Expected Outcome

[dslbrian]

I don't think this is quite true... the "enterprise" includes desktops.

As a "enterprise" user I can say that RedHat isn't targeting us. A few weeks ago, looking forward, I would have liked to tell our IT guys that we could migrate off our dog slow HP and Sun boxes to new faster commodity hardware running RH. They might have bought into it for the $50/year or so that the personal "non-enterprise" RH editions cost, but not anymore. RH doesn't have personal editions anymore, it has "enterprise" with a bunch of server crap that we don't need or want (no we don't need 500 workstations each running an apache server, we just need a base workstation OS).

Sure RH has a workstation enterprise edition, but on the new 64-bit AMD hardware it rings in at $792/box!! Check it out [redhat.com]

Sorry but at $792/box we are not even going to touch it. At $50/box/year mabye, over that - forget it. Not only that I wouldn't want to touch RH given the rate they EOL their OSes. Heck, I thought I was relatively ok with the 7.2 box I was testing stuff on. Like a blur here comes RH8 (which was a radical change), then RH9, then whoops EOL, sorry you missed it...

Re:bummer - Just Say No to being RedHat's Testbed

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Checkout Backports.org [backports.org]
They're new -and looking to add mirrors.

They seem to be focused on testing and integration - with caveats and solutions for problem dependancies.

You're running Debian stable, because you prefer the stable Debian tree. It runs great, there is just one problem: the software is a little bit outdated compared to other distributions. That's where backports come in. Backports are recompiled packages from testing and unstable, so they will run without new libraries (wherever it's possible) on a stable Debian distribution.

Re:Only to be expected, really

[Tet]

What is laughable is that Eugenia still had those old RPM dependency hell issues. You would have thought they would have been solved by now, or that somebody would have created a decent desktop based on a base distribution with decent package management tools.

Sigh. I know I shouldn't feel the trolls, but what the hell. Repeat after me: Debian has exactly the same dependency problems as every other distribution. Exactly the same. Anyone who believes otherwise just doesn't understand the issues. It comes about because you're mixing vendor packages with third party packages. There's nothing the vendor can do to fix a broken 3rd party package, yet everyone still blames RH. Quite why is beyond me. It's nothing to do with dpkg being better than RPM (it isn't), or apt being better than up2date (perhaps it is, perhaps not, but the two are broadly similar, and the difference between them is slim if any). Debian doesn't tend to see this as much simply because there are virtually no third party packages for it. Also, Debian has a documented package naming convention, which will go some way to minimizing these problems for the few 3rd party packages that there are. Note that Fedora also now includes a package naming convention, and so is on a par with Debian in that respect.