Fedora Core 2: Making it Work 220
Joe Barr writes "Linux.com is running a followup article by Ken Barber to his initial review of Fedora 2. This time he explains how to tame the GNOME and Fedora 2 problems he noted the first time around and get them both in working shape.."
Very Cool (Score:5, Insightful)
That is the best way to do things imo. Don't just complain about the problems that you encounter, like it's some sort of major flaw in the system, which discourages people from adopting it. Instead, work through your problems, and let people know that there are ways around the issues that you encountered. Every system has problems, but it is reassuring to people to know that many/most/all can be fixed, and that there are resources available to help.
Kudos to Ken Barber for writing this follow-up.
Re:Very Cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Most particularly, make sure you let the maintainers of the relevant package know your problems and also the solution if you found one. That way, the next iteration of the system might well have these problems sorted.
I've been taking that approach in a number of projects I submit feedback to, not all of them open source, and it seems to work well.
Cheers,
Ian
Getting it to work? (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I the only person who dosen't want to "get them working" and just want them to work out of the box?
The problem being? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the topic of out of the box (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:wow, quite a statement (Score:5, Insightful)
I like Gnome a lot, but I really hope KDE sticks around for the forseeable future.
Re:wow, quite a statement (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it was a pretty low-level barb at the GNOME community from someone who prefers the "other" religion. And his quote, "I find myself far more productive in KDE than in GNOME these days." makes me think that he might actually move back and forth between the two camps based on the current feature-to-wart ratio.
Neither GNOME nor KDE are perfect. You pick the featureset that coincides with your personal philosophy or needs or free help-desk fount.
For years, when Unix newbies asked me, "What should I run, *BSD, or Linux, or ... " I would always answer the same: "Find a nearby knowledgable friend, and run what s/he is running. The ability to get advice from someone who has done it is orders of magnitude more significant than the fine details of OS internals.
Re:Relativity (Score:3, Insightful)
His complaints should be directed at this organization, not Windows. Switching operating systems will not fix their support tech's apparent inability to present a cogent argument to his budget people.
Ill give you another problem (Score:3, Insightful)
I bet I pulled in a few "Floppy's are useless" goers... I have a couple of PPro machines that neither have USB or can boot from a cdrom. Thanks.
Re:MP3 support (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Getting it to work? (Score:1, Insightful)
In this sense, Windows doesn't "work out of the box" for me either. It needs just as much selecting my preferences instead of the system ones as any Linux system does. Like changing the stupid explorer.exe to open new windows when I double-click on an icon, instead of overwriting the current one. Like changing the colors, damn I hate that blue screen.
Re:Ill give you another problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Desktop readyness? (Score:5, Insightful)
I quite like spatial mode, for instance. I actually use graphical file managers now. Before with non-spatial Nautilus and Konqueror, I thought they were cute but never actually used them. The command line was far faster.
review? what review? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Getting it to work? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but to be fair, it's comparitivly easy to get software to work out of the box when you pretty much control all the hardware as well.
Not to say that that isn't a valid business plan, just wanted to be sure we're not attacking the fedora people compared to the apple people for failing to succeed at what is clearly a more difficult job.
I have one beef with big distros these days (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not interested in downloading every single linux app that was ever conceived. Christ... look at knoppix! Pretty much has everything I need, on one CD. If I were to install linux for the purpose of being a production server, i'd be sure to download and compile everything from source anyways.
Love,
Zaq
Re:Getting it to work? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Desktop readyness? (Score:3, Insightful)
Me too - the first thing from Gnome that I've ever liked. It's even better than my memories of the MacOS 8.6 finder (Spatial Nautilus' inspiration, I assume).
From what I have read elsewhere and this article, I suspect that anyone imprinted on the MS explorer browser-style navigation will hate it and find it hard to use with the deeply nested directory structure they are used to.
What? You Were Expecting It to Work? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Very Cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you honestly expect Joe Sixpack to install Linux? I think the problem is not that we need to make Linux installable by Joe Sixpack, but rather that we need to get OEMs to install and configure Linux.
Have you ever met a "normal" user who could install Windows? Most installs of Windows are done by OEMs or from a specially tailored OEM install disc. If users had a special install of Linux that included support for all of their OEM hardware do you think they could install it?
I think a more widespread adoption of Linux will start with business. You will have IT depts that start using it and eventually replacing Windows with it. Once the more technically inclined start to use it at work they try it at home. There will be problems, but who cares? As more people start to use Linux the answers to their questions will be posted to forums, discussion sites, usenet, whatever. The same way that Windows help has become so common.
One last question: Why is there an impression that Windows is easier to install/fix than Linux?
My opinion is that most users know how to speak "Microsoft". i.e. They know how to formulate questions that are worded in the common language used to describe the Windows environment. Back when I worked on a HelpDesk and fixed 100% Windows machines I was able to quickly locate answers to my technical questions. Forward 6 years to today: I still occassionally fix Windows PCs, but the majority of my work is on Linux. I can fix problems in Linux because I know how to speak the "Linux" language. I can do a Google search and get productive results because I know how to search for Linux specific answers.(I know Google has a Linux Specific search, but s/Linux/MacOS X/ and the point still stands)
In conclusion, I don't think we need to make Linux so easy to install that Joe Sixpack can do it (he can already _use_ Linux), I think we need business to start adopting it. The masses will follow.
Cheers,the_crowbar
Re:MP3 support (Score:3, Insightful)
Then why complain? Windows users up until windowsXP (or was it 2k?) had to actually get on the internet and get winzip. And to this day people still have to download software they want like codecs! oh the humanity! Making poor users type words in search engines. I would rather have users jump though the hoop of typing yum install xmms-mp3 than one day read the slashdot thread "fedora has been sued by company who made recent deal with MS".
For all the hundreds of applications Fedora comes with by default that MS doesn't provide by default can't we allow them to not include about 4 or 5 things?
Re:Relativity (Score:3, Insightful)
The in house windows update server should be free. Microsoft doesnt charge for it, its not very resource intensive and works pretty well.
Disk Imaging is not just a Windows problem, regarless of OS I would want a standard image in any environment I worked in.
MS Office can easily be scripted to install off of a network share.
Printer drivers should be setup on the print server, then the client just selects the server and printer and they are set.
Windows has a lot of flaws but bashing it for this poor management on these simple problems is stupid. It would be like someone bashing linux because you couldnt script changes to multiple machines (duh, shell script).
Not all windows admins are cram school dummies, just like not all linux admins are leet hackers who know everything.
Re:Very Cool (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope. As the parent poster points out, most users get their OS installed at the time of purchase. Less than 1% of the non-research staff at a national laboratory in the US installs their own OS.
That means that probably a smaller percentage than that install their own OS at home. I get quite a few requests from colleagues to help rebuild their home machines (and I get nice presents at Xmas time as a result).
Sucky review (Score:3, Insightful)
First off, his original review of it links to a "scathing criticism [computerworld.com] of Gnome 2.6" which says that Gnome 2.6 blows because:
Then the FC2 review says that FC2's "admirable qualities cannot save it from its congenital defects." What defects? Well, he doesn't like a bug in the 2.6 kernel's ALSA drivers, a bug in OpenOffice.org 1.1.1, the fact that Gimp 2.0 is missing color management... hey wait, these are all complaints about the open-source software that's included with FC2. Where are the complaints specific to FC2? He doesn't have any.
Then I'm amused that his latest article says that to "fix" FC2, install KDE instead of Gnome. Gee, that sounds more like Gnome-bashing than a constructive review...
Guess what? I *like* FC2. It's much more up-to-date than other Linux distros like SuSE, and package management (especially with the automatic updater) is much easier than with other distros such as Debian (for whom "stable" is ancient, "testing" is fairly outdated, and "unstable" sometimes means "not backwards-compatible with the old version"). I want to be able to run the latest code without fears of hosing my system. Fedora Core lets me.
And I like Gnome, too. It has a much more professional look than KDE, and its settings are much more streamlined as well. KDE suffers from feature bloat and an overabundance of options to configure even the most trivial aspects of the user interface. I don't want to be able to tweak everything; I want to be given an interface which looks sharp without *requiring* me to tweak anything.