Fedora Core 3: Worth The Upgrade? 498
Chris writes "With new features such as SELinux, GNOME 2.8, KDE 3.3, Evolution 2.0, Remote Desktop, Helix Player, and of course Firefox, it may be worth your while to make the switch. At OSDir our screenshot tour of Fedora Core 3 takes you through boot, installation, desktop, taskbar, menus, configuration, and the new features of this new release. Our Core 3 screenshot tours have taken you through Test 1, 2, 3, and now the final release. Check it out."
You are better off to wait. (Score:0, Informative)
[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
d
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
pkgpolicy=n
distroverpkg=redhat-release
tolerant=1
ex
retries=20
obsoletes=1
gpgcheck=1
# PUT YOUR REPOS HERE OR IN separate files named file.repo
# in
It is a little empty compared to the preconfigured Fedora Core 2 and 1.
Re:Size? (Score:5, Informative)
Lack of Java rpms and other stuff (Score:5, Informative)
Are they using two different development teams for Fedora the way RedHat did for the x.1 and x.[02] releases?
Can't stand it (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not talking of booting into X and doing things in there. I'm talking just getting to a login prompt and attempting to sign on.
I'll go back to slackware before I load FC3 again
Re:Size? (Score:5, Informative)
This article contains next to no useful info (Score:5, Informative)
I run Fedora Rawhide on my laptop. This would be the equivalent of say, Debian Unstable. So I have a good idea of what FC3 offers...
- Bluecurve theme finally covers everything.In particular, Firefox and OpenOffice look like every other KDE or Gnome app.
- If what I've seen in the RHEL 4 beta is the same for Fedora, partitioning now uses LVM by default. There's a new GUI LVM config tool called 'system-config-lvm' in Rawhide to provide the post-install disk resizing. Additionally, online resizing with ext3 should work and, if you use RHEL, be supported.
- Firefox and Thunderbird.
- SELinux turned on, including policies for locking down Apache, Bind, and NIS. A GUI config tool is provided for this.
- There's apparently improvements to yum which I'm not sure about. Personally, I'm a fan of up2date, which can use directories full of packages (without needing index files) as one of its sources.
- Udev.
- HelixPlayer is now included by default.
- Bash 3 - not much difference for me, apart from the new inbuilt range system that obsoletes the old 'seq' command. If you call it as
Re:Lack of Java rpms and other stuff (Score:5, Informative)
That saiud, the Java Packaging Project (which includes some Red Hat staff) have repositories for FC.
I experienced some problems with Fedora Core 3 (Score:5, Informative)
My system has both EIDE devices and SCSI devices. If I use eg. my EIDE cdrom drive I cannot use my SCSI cdrw drive anymore as this system seems to use the ide-scsi emulation layer per default. The SCSI cdrw is only detected by Nautilus if I put a cd into it (I don't like these autostarters)
I tried to build ReZound http//rezound.sf.net/ [slashdot.org] but it failed to compile
Neither does Audacity
When compiling MPlayer it fails to build with GUI and it fails to play sound if you playback a video
These are problems which I don't have with my other SuSE system (on the same machine)
JAVA: I don't like to have gcj installed instead of a real JVM
MP3: none of the installed sound tools can play or record MP3 files
The eth0 device is automatically detected but the DSL configuration doesn't configure eth0 to be used with pppd. As a result the kernel tries to start eth0 but fails and the pppd connection starts afterwards. This unnecessarily slows down the boot process.
Re:Worth the upgrade? (Score:5, Informative)
You have SELinux turned on. I've set mine to "Warn" until I understand it just a bit better. If you didn't turn it on, keep reading.
Once SELinux is disabled, run these in order:Should fix you up. The reason AFAICT is that the NVIDIA driver is not aware of udev, which FC3 now uses.
BTW, NVIDIA released a new driver the evening FC3 was released - go get that too : 1.0-6629 [nvidia.com]
Soko
Re:Worth the upgrade? (Score:3, Informative)
Something to think about (Score:2, Informative)
if you want stable releases of everything, 3rd party apps(that aren't free software) and corporate support, go get novell, suse, mandrake, slackware, whatever, but don't bitch about FC.
Re:Worth the upgrade? (Score:2, Informative)
The NVidia driver is only a real problem because of "UDEV" or whatever it's called. I guess it's supposed to dynamically load all the drivers at boot time, but it won't load them unless they were a part of the initial driver installation. If your machine is hanging at "Configuring Kernel Parameters" on the boot screen, run the FC3 rescue CD, mount your root filesystem and do (or whatever your favorite editor is)
Locate the line that points to your current FC3 installation, remove "rhgb", and change the 5 to 3, so that instead of trying to load the graphical boot and go to runlevel 5, it will put you in a runlevel 3 terminal. Save your changes, exit, remove the CD, and restart your machine. Boot into FC3, and you should be at your terminal. Log in as root, and do this:If you want, after that is finished you can edit your
Now if only they would include kernel source in a default installation, it would be almost perfect.
Re:Worth the upgrade? (Score:5, Informative)
Soko
Re:Windows HDD Killing Bug? (Score:2, Informative)
Red Hat is apparently no longer cool (Score:5, Informative)
Judging by the 50 posts thus far, Red Hat/Fedora appears to have fallen out of favor with the averaging posting SlashDot reader. Nothing but a string of complaining, despite most being unfounded or flatly wrong.
Fedora Core 3 is a terrific GNU/Linux distribution. On one hand, it contains only Free software. No proprietary, patent protected, or closed source. Everything included is safe and the principled users of software can be at ease.
On the other hand, it is very polished. There are no dark corners of breakage, everything Just Works(TM). Network, video card, printing, CD burning, fonts, office applications, PDF viewing, email, file browsing, graphics, etc. All the little niggles of versions past (not just Red Hat either) been resolved to result in this super clean and functional distro.
As a Red Hat user since 5.0, Fedora Core 3 is the first version I feel is good enough for a non-geek Windows user to try. There won't be any surprises. Much of this is simply the development of GNOME 2.8, but Red Hat (ok, the Fedora Core team) has done an excellent job IMO of refining the base, too.
Now I'm sure posters can (and will) lament the downside. Fedora Core 3 will not be found perfect, featureful, fastest, most flexible, most standards compliant, most free, or the most usable. But across the board, FC3 is the best at fulfilling a balanced set of these qualities.
Re:Size? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Windows HDD Killing Bug? (Score:3, Informative)
Fedora Core 3 is surprinsingly buggy (Score:2, Informative)
- If you deselect Gnome and select KDE instead when doing a custom install then Fedora will boot straight into TWM because
- If you deselect the graphics tools you'll not be able to print from OpenOffice (in some cases?). Fedora recognized the Epson C40UX printer but when you try to print nothing happens (not even an error dialog). After turning the CUPS log-level to debug I found that CUPS was trying run a script called "ijgimp..." (don't remember the exact name) but that script doesn't exists. Seeing the name I installed gimp plus all addon packages and now printing worked...kind of because the output was heavily distorted. Messages on the web say the printer works out of the box with the "stp" driver on older Fedora Core versions but "stp" is not selectable in CUPS anymore it seems so printing doesn't work for me now.
- ISDN is very broken. During the boot process I get a "failed" when Fedora tries to load the ISDN modules for the Fritzcard ISDN yet when I then call "/etc/init.d/isdn start" after login the modules load fine...except that I get a weird error in the log that says udev cannot find an appropriate sysfs class for ippp0. Also when I now configure a ISDN dialup connection using redhats tool and click "activate" the connection is up but the status in the tool still says "deactivated". There also doesn't seem to be a tool included that makes it possible to easily connect or disconnect from the system tray, I had to create my own icons on the desktop calling isdndial and isdnhangup.
- In a different case installing Fedora Core 3 on my Toshiba Satellite M30 requires the addition of a modeline in xorg.conf to make X11 work properly on the WXGA 1280x800 screen. Also I have to add "psmouse.rate=40" (again, I would have to go look to get the exact name) as bootparameter to make the touchpad work properly.
All of this was right after installation even before I was able to really use the system.
I've used RH since about 6.x and went through all the versions up to Core 3 but after installing that one I really feel like I've been kicked in the balls. I know that this is supposed to be the "hacker" version used as a testbed for RHEL but the outright shoddy level of QA suprises me. They had three test releases and a bug as grave and visible as the Gnome/KDE/TWM one doesn't get noticed? If anything Fedora Core 3 reminds me that Linux still has big (!) issues on the home desktop and is still very hard/impossible for the newbie to install.
Re:I don't want pretty menus on install (Score:3, Informative)
The first splash screen on boot from the CD says "Press F1 for options". Press 'F1' to access a (text) screen where you can read that typing "text" will start the installer in text mode.
And this is all explained in the Installation Documentation from all Mandrake releases.
I know that reading is an arcane science. However, you should try it.
Peace
Re:could linux BE any more secure? (Score:5, Informative)
In the end, what this gives you is a system where, if a process using a properly configured SELinux has been taken over (0wn3d), it can't do anything other than screw up it's own job, unless it figures out how to fool SELinux.
Re:Windows HDD Killing Bug? (Score:5, Informative)
It's no problem however if you follow instructions on this [lwn.net] page.
FC3 on my laptop (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I experienced some problems with Fedora Core 3 (Score:3, Informative)
Well, that's hardly Fedora's fault. You could always port those packages and contribute back the changes... Many packages end up relying on compiler or library features that they should not. I've had problems compiling some pacakges that don't play ball with the newer glibc because of this. These projects should be appropriately spanked and given patches.
When compiling MPlayer it fails to build with GUI and it fails to play sound if you playback a video
I'm running mpalyer and mplayer-gui as provided, what did you need to compile your own for that SRPM wasn't sufficient for?
JAVA: I don't like to have gcj installed instead of a real JVM
gcj has nothing to do with the JVM not being present. The JVM is not present because it's not free. Talk to sun about releasing it under an OSS-compatiable license.
MP3: none of the installed sound tools can play or record MP3 files
This is, of course, old news. Red Hat stopped shipping anything related to MP3 a long time ago due to patent concerns. You can always get the mp3 goodies from elsewhere, but Red Hat won't ship them and hasn't since RH9 (possibly as far back as 8, I'm not 100% certain).
Your other comments are quite interesting, and I'm not trying to say that the above aren't problems, it's just that I think you want to keep some perspective on these issues which don't all have trivial solutions.
Not really at all worth the upgrade on Desktops... (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know about you, but i don't expect my desktop to run slower, my disk IO to chug along and my drivers and system to be stuck in DLL hell.
Suse 9.2 on the other hand was much more refigned, less "bastardized" (all the redhat focus on gnome) and much quicker.
Ofcourse i'm the unlucky SOB with a ATI 9800 pro card expecting support under X.org on a 64bit platform.
However Solaris 10, Windows 2003 x64 and Windows XP 64 all run flawlessly, quickly and have a polished feel to them compared to FC *.*
Call me a troll if you want, i'm just utterly dissapointed in the fedora releases for anything but a server - and even then i'm not fond of Redhat'isms.
Another year? sure... but by then Microsoft and others will have polished & tweaked and nailed the market.
Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:3, Informative)
Freedesktop.org's HAL, while still immature and definitely not without bugs, essentially turned Linux into a completely different OS from a desktop perspective for me. The nasty supermount hacks are replaced by CD automounting that works like it should, hardware autoconfigures itself, config files are handled on their own. It's really amazing how different my ease of use was after a simple system update.
As far as NLD goes, the only thing you have to pay for are the Red Carpet updates, the OS itself is free for download. I'm sure free updates will spring up from the community much like they did with RH, and the distribution itself is so polished that it really does add to the sense that FC is somehow lacking something. And it's based on a history of SuSe releases almost as lengthy as FC's.
Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:3, Informative)
Debian is nice but you have to use unstable and testing if you want anything that is up to date.
Mandrake is nice also URPMI is a great tool. I recomend it highly except I did not feel all that comfortable when using it without X.
Fedora I like. YUM is a good tool for updating and installing software. I have found it super stable. I have had no real problems with it. It is free and comunity driven. Suse is also a good distro for desktop and servers. I find it odd that you are dissing Fedora because it just works.
Re:Size? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Size? (Score:2, Informative)
I am guessing that we will see a similar version of CD burning in the near future from some distros.
Nautilus already has this.
Re:Evolution 2.0 (Score:3, Informative)
My observations where over a cable modem so YMMV.
Keep in mind that SSL doesn't like packet loss so if your network was experiencing any problems...
some details (Score:2, Informative)
Coral Cache Link (Score:3, Informative)
Coral Cache Link [nyud.net]
Re:Well, I'm not happy (Score:4, Informative)
I always thought that making your hard drives the masters and your CDs the slaves was the preferred arrangement? At least, that's what it said in one of the readmes in the kernel source last time I checked.
Re:Talking of Remote Desktop (Score:5, Informative)
Screen is not graphical but instead a pts (pseudo-terminal) multiplexer. Meaning a background process sits inbetween your pts port and your real terminal. "Screen" accepts all output (logs some fraction and dumps history-overflow), such that the underlying applications have no ability to determine whether there's a physical terminal at the other end or not. By accepting all input, it prevents applications from pausing once 2k of stdout has been queued but not sent/accepted. It's similar to redirection output to
Another feature of screen is similar to "virtual desktop". Since you have a multiplexer, "screen" allows a single physical terminal to switch between multiple pts channels.. So if you have a dial-up-modem (direct terminal, not TCP/IP), you can have dozens of different "windows" with different applications running in each (multiple vi windows, several command prompts, several log files, etc). If the modem hangs up, you dial back in, and type "screen -r", and you're back as if nothing had happened. You're alternative was to run all applications with "nohup myapp myargs" and if the modem hung up, then stdout would be redirected to a file.. This way you don't lose the output or have an interruption in say a slow compilation. But the problem is that you can't regain interactive access to a something like vi window. (Course, text editors have their own recovery capabilities).
So the original poster was trying to say that they wanted these incredibly valuable features in a graphical form. vnc and rdesktop allow a user that has their network connection broken to be reconnected without the underlying graphical applications ever being made aware of the interruption. With X and a static IP-address, there are time-out issues. And more commonly we move to different machines or different access points and thus necessarily can not recover a graphical session with X.
X was designed as client-server with state. It is this state that necessarily prevents it from acting like VNC or rdesktop. "screen", vnc, and rdesktop keeps it state on the machine with the running application. X keeps the state on the machine with the physical monitor/keyboard/mouse. I believe the original idea of this design decision was to distribute resources. The application server only performs tasks related to function, not display. Graphics becomes simply the ability to handle events and send graphical commands to a network access point. The terminal is then responsible for all resources related to interpreting graphical commands. This is similar to the postscript paradigm. postscript is a series of "logo" like commands (draw a box from this point to this point), and the printing resource determins how to render the fonts/color schemes, etc. Unlike postscript, however, X graphical commands aren't encapsulatable into a portable relocatable format since there is bidirectional communication going on.
Another particular of X is its peer-application structure. To run X, in addition to the terminal software and the physical applications, you need a font-server and a window manager. While this is great for pluggability (and even clusterability; running a single-threaded graphical program across 4 different machines), it necessarily provides greater latency for even simple tasks.
vnc merely adds a multiplexing layer to the back-end of X or windows, just like screen. So vnc necessarily adds a layer of overhead to the graphical process. More importantly there is an impeedence mismatch between the graphical transport of vnc and that of X. X is designed to send postscript-like graphical commands (draw a square of this size fi
Re:I experienced some problems with Fedora Core 3 (Score:3, Informative)
Fedora Core 3 Installation Guide [mjmwired.net]
MPlayer Fedora Guide [mjmwired.net]
Re:Documentation? (Score:2, Informative)
You can upgrade without the .iso/.torrents (Score:3, Informative)
Read these good instructions on how to do this yum upgrade [brandonhutchinson.com].
I plan on following them later this morning and so I won't be part of the bottleneck downloading the
Re:Size? (Score:1, Informative)
Huh? If you don't know what he's talking about, how can you say what it is or isn't?
You can download the VS.NET 2003 command line compiler, albeit only shipped with static libraries to link against, and the WinDbg debug UI. All the docs are online. What else do you need?
Re:Red Hat is apparently no longer cool (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:2, Informative)
A) It just works
B) Have tools to make configuring easy
C) If needed, (Very Very Rare), you can get support from Vendor.
D) Updates and installation are easy and quick. No configuring from source, you don't have to worry about configuring the source *Just Right* when your updating your customers server, you don't have to worry about having everything the customer needs compiled in and downtime is very minimal. The majority of the time, if you need to do anything, all you have to do is 'service program start'.
Also, many companies do not have very good tracking of what features or services were added and when. Especially over time, as the support department Alters/Tweaks it via support requests. It is must easier to keep track of "Sepecial Cases"
In short, both Redhat/Fedora and Suse make excellent distros for business types. The rest for the most part appeal to the "Geeky" types for one reason or another.
Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:1, Informative)
It doesn't compile.
Re:Size? (Score:2, Informative)
OR
OR
If you are using the GUI, there is a services screen that works just like your friendly Windows utility.
Re:How to turn off font antialiasing (Score:3, Informative)
Go to Preferences -> Fonts
Pick "Monochrome" for Font Rendering.
Antialising just plain sucks if used on modern LC displays
Maybe you should pick "Subpixel smoothing" instead.
Re:Beef? You Want Beef? (Score:3, Informative)
alias net-pf-10 off
alias ipv6 off
Not absolutely sure if the second line HAS to be there, but the first one does.