Fedora Core 4 Available

Limburgher writes "As of a few minutes ago, the torrents listed at duke went live. Nothing on the main site yet, however. The more people get on the torrents, the faster they will be. You all know the drill." Update: 06/13 19:07 GMT by T : Also in Red Hat-related news, halfbyte_hosting writes "CentOS 4.1 is now on the mirrors and ready for download."

Upgrade path

[learn fast]

Is it easy to upgrade from FC1 to FC4? I have a semi-production server that's running on FC1, and I don't want a clean install.

This is not an off-topic question. The response to this question will make a legitimate point about the FC model.

Re:Yet again...

[Nighttime]

I have a email with a date/timestamp of 2005-06-13 15:36 (BST) officially announcing the availability of this release. This story is timestamped 16:11 (GMT), how are /. jumping the gun?

Two major Core 4 fixes

[Anonymous Coward]

The load times are definitely faster and it's nowhere near as dark all the time.

Tracker busted.

[bogado]

The tracker did not handle the masses of people going after him, it is upto now not accepting any conections. This shows that a trackless BitTorrent is really needed.

Re:Fedora Core 4 is great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes,
But Windows XP came out (I think) before all of the nForce2 malarky. This gives it a large dis-advantage. Until recently, I would always have a nightmare trying to install debian on to an nForce2 board. I would need to install a separate network card to start it working. I still use the nvidia graphics driver.

You may correctly claim that this is one advantage that linux distro's have over windows due to the regular(ish) updates. But most hardware ships with windows drivers. The same cannot be said for Linux.

Re:Fedora Core 4 is great...

[Rei]

I've been very pleased with Fedora 4t2, which I've been running for a while, with apt4rpm instead of yum as my package acquisition method. My only real complaint is that when they say that you can use reiserfs but they don't support it, they mean that "it doesn't work".

I figured out some tricks to make it work, though: boot with commandline "linux reiserfs selinux=0". That'll stop the installation of the init package from failing like it would if you left of the selinux=0 line (and no, disabling selinux during the install setup doesn't work). Then, after boot, you'll get a grub error. Boot instead with a boot disk. Copy your kernel image (not move - you need it to be rewritten), delete the original copy, and then copy it back. Your system should be bootable. At least, this all worked for me. :)

Re:Fedora Core 4 is great...

[rpdillon]

Well, then Red Hat is taking all the steps you would like! They're slowly (but surely) spinning off Fedora Core into its own foundation, ever more differentiated from Red Hat the company.

Good for them, I say. I have the opposite opinion to yours, which is I actually *like* having a few corporate desktop-centric distros out there to balance out the huge collection of Free distros. Anyway, give them a couple of years. I expect Fedora will eventually be quite similar to Debian at some point - not nearly as tied up in corporate image as it becomes more the product of a non-profit foundation.

Re:Fedora Core 4 is great...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have systems running FC3 and OS X Tiger. As easy as Tiger is to use, I can till you i still that Fedora is easier to configure. I still cannot get direct printer support with Tiger with my Samsung Laser Printer. I have to direct it through my Fedora box as a postscript printer. Similarly, the SMB browsing in Tiger is quite clumsy to use. You have to remember the name of the server and shares. I'm surprised apple has not done much in this area.

Re:I beat the Slashdot effect

[capt.Hij]

auto-detected everything in my laptop. Didn't expect it not to, as previous Fedora Core releases did so.

I was a very happy RedHat and then Fedora user until I tried to install FC3. I hope that FC4 does better then its predecessor. When I did the install for FC3 it clobbered my system. It appeared that it did not correctly configure itself for my scsi controller.

All I can say is thank you St. Anthony [americancatholic.org] because my backups saved my derrier that day. I am now a very happy gentoo user who synced and updated my system this morning like any other Monday without tempting St. Anthony too much.

It is nice not to have to download 4 cds every four months and hope that I won't need the backups!

Re:Release Notes

[LnxAddct]

Considering the intensive amount of quality assurance that goes into each fedora release, I wouldnt worry too much about it. I've been using it since Core 1 and have yet to be burned. Its nice having all the latest and greatest stuff, while also having it all integrate together, but also having an OS that I feel comfortable running on my laptop or servers.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Fedora Core 4 is great...

[udderly]

I hear a lot of people complaining that FC sucks, but that hasn't been my experience. I've been using FC1 since it came out to run backups on an internal network and over vpn. It often has more than 30 concurrent connections. Currently it has been up for 178 days w/o reboot.

WM Strife.

[ionicplasma]

XFCE has been moved to extras.

It's funny to see how a lightweight yet potentially pretty WM wouldn't be the first choice for producing a desktop OS. Why not include it with the distro?

Re:the mirrors are populated long time ago...

[juhaz]

The mirrors were populated quite a while ago because the original release for FC4 was supposed to be a week ago.

They were NOT open until today 14:00 UTC however, because there were some stupid legal issues, something to do with legal team needing to check the release name "Stentz".

Here's a good question

[portwojc]

I want to know what hardware Fedora supports. Like which RAID controllers, Ehternet cards, video cards, and Etc are supported. Where do I find this information at?

Is there a list out there somewhere that is easy to look this up on or do I have to dig around for every little piece?

I checked the Fedora FAQ and nothing popped out as a definitive list. Just base hardware requirements.

Thanks

Re:Fedora Core 4 is great...

[doofusclam]

It does seem nice, but I can't understand why they have the same samba/firewall problem they had in fc3 (which I run on 2 machines at home).

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc4 [redhat.com]

Is it possible to install FC4 over FC3 without losing my manually installed additions?

What about multimedia?

[ratta]

The last time i have tries Fedora it was really poor about multimedia... I know about patent problems, but i could barely play an mp3 with the crappy helix player from Real let's not even talk about playing an (undencrypted!) DVD!!!!! I think that been able to play most widespread audio and video formats (with Xine or Mplayer) should be a key point for a moder linux distro.

Yes, the installer is easier than Windows XP.

[Nailer]

That's insightful? Moderators, and the poster above: have you ever done a full install of Windows XP and Fedora?

Could you explain to me how Windows XP could possibly be easier?

1. The Windows installer starts as a 32 bit command line application for partitioning, EULA, loading driver disks, with a reboot into a GUI once a base install happens. It uses F8 and F5 to do things. Fedora uses 'next'. Windows is getting a full GUI installer in Longhorn when WinPE comes out. It doesn't have one now.

2. The Windows XP installer asks for many more than 3 inputs. You forgot partitioning, EULA agreement, that disk thing I mentioned above, and a bunch of other stuff. The things you did mention are weird - eg, I select my time zone by scrolling through a drop down list box of time zones sorted by GMT offset. Not even geography. Not even FC4 'click where you are on this map'.

3. The defaults are a lot less secure too - non non admin user, Run As doesn't work for all programs, the firewall lets in ports where known worms live by default (see the Register analysis of SP2 for a complete list). Obviously, there's no MAC implementation enabled by default either (SELinux). And most network services still run as SYSTEM. So post-install you're either gonna have to lock it down, or fix up the mess.

FC4is okay so far

[mauriatm]

I used FC4-test3 for about a month just for testing purposes, and from the few hours I have used FC4-final, it doesn't look there are that many significant changes. The Release Notes and the "Installation Guide" are pretty good starting resources for some issues.

One major trouble I had was GCC4, playing around I found that many had problems compiling under GCC4, so I am wondering if many of the repositories (when they come online) will compile with GCC4 or GCC3.x? ... As a personal choice, I installed GCC3.4 to /opt and found it useful to keep a second compiler around for now. ... If anything, I imagine that many OSS projects will be forced to start looking into supporting GCC4.

As for speed and amazing things, not much really. I did notice that ACPI worked great on my A7V8X-X, which had been bugging me from FC2,3. I don't know how "amazing" the newer Gnome, OOo and other updates are.

SELinux took a huge enhancement and is integrated much tighter. No doubt some will find this annoying, but should be easy to disable.

I was disappointed some things moved to 'Extras' (xmms,xfce), but that's not necessarily bad. I would hate to have 6 cd's to download instead of 5.

Overall okay release so far. I'm sure there will be plenty of issues soon to arrive! There are some general installation notes I have on my website [mjmwired.net].

Re:Fedora Core 4 is great...

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair XP is only a mess with SATA if you're doing RAID, otherwise it's straightforward.

However it asks you a damn sight more than 3 things. From memory (I deal with unattended installs mostly):

1) Enter to boot from CD - 1 input.
2) Disk partitioning alone takes at least 3 inputs and that's only if you're not changing partitions at all and already have suitable FAT/NTFS ones setup.
3) Product key.
4) Network setup, if your DHCP then its a bit easier. Computer name, workgroup/domain. Admin pass.
5) Location settings, if you're not in the US then about 4 inputs for location and keyboard, if you are then 1.
6) User for windows.
7) Skip all the end crap.
8) Activation. Various amounts of input from 0 (corp) to a shitload ending up with phonecalls to MS. Worst case sit around until next day cos their activation servers are down (yes it happens).

You now have basic XP installed. Even if you slipsteamed SP2 into the build disk you are going to need drivers and apps. So add onto the end hours of buggering about finding good applications.

3 inputs? I don't think...

Is laptop support there yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been running FC2 & 3 on my Dell 600m and it has never worked 'right'. Thermal/power management have been a pain to setup and never really work properly, and USB device management has always been a pain.

Does anyone who has been running the Beta's know if the laptop support is better?

Re:Pardon me, why use fedora?

[EvilStein]

I believe that Whitebox Linux has gone stagnant and has mostly been replaced by CentOS.

SATA support?

[BRSQUIRRL]

I wonder if this release has better support for installing to SATA drives. FC3 choked on my nForce3 SATA controller, and I didn't feel like mucking around with a newer kernel at the time.

Re:Release Notes

[AKAImBatman]

Sorry, but you're full of it. There is nothing FUD about my post unless you really think that OOo 2.0, GCC 4.0, and other features are well out of Beta. (Hint: They're not.) Fedora has done a pretty good job of keeping things internally consistent, but that doesn't mean that it's for everyone. Or that all of the features are in place. (e.g. One of the most frustrating RedHat experiences I ever had was when I realized that the GNOME Desktop folders were stored in different places across every version, and that user specific shortcuts either didn't work, or worked in a broken kind of way.)

While I like Apple's designs, that doesn't meant that I have anything against Linux. Fedora is what it is, and users have a right to be warned when they are dealing with a potentially hot potato.