Fedora Core 2 Dud or Dodo? 595
darth_silliarse writes "Linux.com have posted an interesting review Fedora Core 2, which includes reference to the now famous Windows/Fedora Core 2 dual booting "feature". My favorite quote "Unfortunately, all of FC2's admirable qualities cannot save it from its congenital defects. These range from annoyances such as broken audio drivers to the abomination known as Gnome 2.6, and are serious enough to make the Fedora Project's second litter of pups unsuitable for any use other than as laboratory animals." Quite a indictment don't you think? My fav distro is SuSE but I'm interested to hear others views about this review..."
The author has already admitted a mistake (Score:5, Informative)
A slight correction from the author
"After it was too late to change this review, the Abiword and Quanta packages magically showed up in my package manager! I don't know why I couldn't find them when I looked for them, but they ARE included.
So the only thing still missing from my list of missing packages above is Audacity. My bad."
A lot of work arounds, but worth it (Score:5, Informative)
* sound probelms -- horrid noise, each time sound played
* yum problems -- probably repository overload on the day after FC2 was available
* couldn't find many packages -- see below
* general KDE flakiness -- zero screen savers available
* annoyances -- could not find a way to get it to 'default' anyone's login into KDE (manual change required, each time)
Even though I'd selected "Everything", many, many packages were not included. I searched high and low for gcc -- yes, gcc. No sign of any compiler.
So I re-installed by 1) Manually selecting "everything", but 2) leaving out Gnome desktop, altogether.
Everything I've checked now works. KDE of course is the default. Sound works just fine. All packages are where they should be -- found gcc, et al.
Now it's a real joy to run FC2. Just get a copy of Synaptic and load all the "wrong-license, pattent-issues" packages. BTW, this all occurred on my Averatec 3150H. The only remaining annoyance is the touch-pad mouse doesn't click-on-tap like it did with FC1. No problem, here, though, I plugged in a USB mouse and it just worked, scroll-wheel and all!
Re:A lot of work arounds, but worth it (Score:5, Interesting)
Chris
Re:A lot of work arounds, but worth it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A lot of work arounds, but worth it (Score:3, Insightful)
Chris
Re:A lot of work arounds, but worth it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A lot of work arounds, but worth it (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, had it not been for Mandrake I'd still be using Windows. But Mandrake made the transition very easy (an essential part was detecting and mounting my NTFS partitions automatically, as my music was on one and working without music is a bore). Now after a year I don't even dual boot anymore.
With this experience I could probably now switch rather easily to a better respected distribution among Slashdot crowd (Debian and Gentoo seem to be the distributions of choice here), but the thing is, I don't want to. While I do enjoy working with my computer, I don't enjoy working on my computer, that is spending too much time configuring things. Granted if I'd use my box as a server I'd want to do it. But I don't, it's a desktop plus a developement platform for small LAMP/JSP work. And for this purpose it excels. (pun not intended ;-) If all you need to do is for example get Apache (with mod_perl/mod_php) and MySQL up and running, it's a matter of couple urpmi's (via CLI or GUI) and clicking a few buttons in MDK Control Center to get the services running (and naturally making sure your firewall is properly set). And you're done! Granted, I haven't tried Debian or Gentoo but I have a feeling this isn't quite as simple with them (please do correct me if I'm mistaken).
Another issue at least for me is those mentioned "wrong license" packages. While I do understand that for example mp3 support may be (is, even) a legal issue, it doesn't change the fact that most of my music is in the format. When I tried RH9 it really wasn't difficult at all to get Synaptic running and install mp3 support for xmms - however, in my oh so humble opinion, it's annoying and wastes my time. And PLF repositories for Mandrake are godsend, if you need software that's legal status isn't quite clear (not to say pirated though).
So yes, I at least am very happy with Mandrake. And yes, I'm very glad (and not even a bit offended) that it was reccommended to me (not in Slashdot, though). Diversity (even with distributions) is a good thing, right?
Mandrake really IS a superb distro (Score:5, Interesting)
I have tried Debian (horrendously dated - even SID), gentoo (arcane and too time consuming) and I KEEP ON GOING BACK TO MANDRAKE. I wanted to love FC2...believe me. I ran FC1 and thought it was okay, but not as good as Mandrake 9.2
I tried FC2test3 for several weeks and FC2 final for a couple and just flat gave up. I run Mandrake 10 official now on an HP zd7188cl laptop and on a custom-built Athlon desktop. I LOVE IT! Everything I need works great. Once I figured out how to optimize my urpmi server configs and get the reliable package repositories in place, upgrading for security fixes and adding new software is a snap! (I do it using the command line urpmi app which is just as easy as apt-get). The only thing I wish Mandrake would do is make the package manager gui apps unified (not one to remove and one to install - that's ridiculous) and make it as user-friendly as Synaptic is.
One of the biggest frustrations I had was trying to get Crossover Office 3 running properly under FC2. I have it under Mandrake 10 with absoulutely perfect and very responsive performance. Not so under FC2, with many many issues. And yes, I spent lots of time on the valiant work-around efforts documented by the Codeweavers team. They even scripted in disable functions for problematic aspects of FC2, but it didn't really work.
Long story short, you can try other distros, but you'll always keep on coming back home. I thought it would be cool to give gentoo a shot and I hated it. Similar idea but much better execution is Arch Linux. That is worth your time! Try arch and you may love it. Even in beta it is remarkably stable.
I _am_ going to give Suse 9.1 serious consideration for business use - and if I love it, for my desktop at home. BUT, it will really have to live up to the hype to move me off of Mandrake now that 10.0 official is out.
Another thing about Mandrake and "slashdotter distros" - Mandrake can be used for the most complex of server environments and yet out of the box is the best desktop experience around with minimal fuss. THAT is what makes Mandrake different from "handholder" desktop distros like Linspire and Lycoris that are for the casual user that doesn't want to know the CLI exists.
PS > Bluecurve is FUGlY!
Re:A lot of work arounds, but worth it (Score:4, Informative)
Tried Gnome -- recently (Score:4, Interesting)
I really appreciate the seamless consistency of KDE. It really annoys me to work in the inconsistent environment that is Gnome. I don't have time to fight the environment to make it look/feel the way I need it to (i.e. consistent).
For example, if you have clients -- say a CPA firm -- and they express how sick they are of Microsoft, and would you recommend an alternative (when this first happened to me, I tried to pinch myself and wake up, then picked my jaw off the floor). Now imagine what you're going to recommend: Gnome? No way in hell. Not when KDE offers magnitudes greater user-friendliness (read: consistency). Come on, be honest.
Gnome is written by geeks, for geeks. A lot would have to change for that to not be true. Even Novell, who purchased Ximian, aren't touching the SuSE formula (i.e. KDE is still the default).
Re:A lot of work arounds, but worth it (Score:3, Informative)
dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/
maybe the topic poster should learn to read a little before going "fedora sucks, i can't dual boot"
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:5, Interesting)
But I guess, Fedora is cutting edge, so you get the bugs on it.
Personally, I've seen too many bugs in all the new distros, Gentoo, Mandrake (which had serious nforce driver issues), Fedora.
Mandrake 9 and SuSE are the most cleanest, stable and need less config time to setup.
I think install reviews need a "configuration" section, how much did you need to configure to get rid of annoyances or to get applications working. If you had to google or read a forum to fix a bug on install, the distro goes from 100% to 90%.
Maybe Linux distro's for desktop use needs quality control? It's half way through 2004, and the current batch of distros (bsd included) are configuration messes. WTF happened?
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Ideally this hardware database would include things like the binary nvidia and ati drivers, but since there are licensing issues it seems unlikely. I'll never understand why they don't want people redistributing their binary drivers. What do they have to lose from it? It would just cause more people to actually use their drivers. Do they not want people using their drivers or something?
Obviously Redhat and Knoppix among others already have such a hardware autodetecter, but they were all coded from scratch and they're all distro specific. If someone created a distro neutral decentralized hardware autodetecter and this autodetecter was used by every distro, manual Linux hardware configuration would be a thing of the past.
Even if you installed new hardware after the installation, it would be as simple as running a command like And knowing distros like redhat, there'd be a graphical tool to do that. There's nothing stopping a system like this from existing in Linux. It just seems no one with the skill wants to code it up. Linux coders focus on unimportant things like bloating KDE with features and overzealously making GNOME's defaults easy to use. Who cares? People can't even run your Desktop Env if they're goddamn hardware doesn't work.
Learn a lesson from Mac OS X. I installed OSX on a formatted hard drive a few days ago and not a single piece of hardware had to be manually configured. It was ALL done for me. I know it's a bad comparison because Mac only works on very select hardware, but there's nothing stopping *nix from creating this hardware database and becoming the Mac OS X of the x86 world.
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, that would be because every computer that is capable of running Mac OS X came from a single company, the same one that put out the OS. You could just as easily say the same thing about Sun.
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:4, Interesting)
FC2 detects all my usb devices (mem stick, dvd burner, usb key) and even automounts them without any problems.
OSX 10.1 wouldn't even detect a standard USB CD Burner. In addition my buddy replaced his cd burner on his G4 with a faster cd burner and he could no longer do the following:
1) Boot of CD
2) Install Apps from CD
He was able to use it to play music and read burned data cd's and burn cd's. Quite a bit of lost functionality.
Basically what I'm saying is that OSX is very Apple Centric, using third party stuff usually doesnt work and that Linux is way ahead of OSX in terms of compatibility because it has to. It runs on standard x86 hardware, and has support better than the latest Windows out the box these days.
Hell Windows needs fifty different drivers for a Intel EtherExpress 10/100 NIC, Linux can use one.
Hardware configuration (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with hardware databases is the issues are frequently combinatorial. So you get bugs like
"PS/2 port with xyz touchpad and the IRQ is shared"
or
"Specific VIA mainboard and >1Gb of RAM and certain PCI devices"
or
"SCSI card A vanishes but only with this BIOS option and this other card present"
and thats the tip of the iceberg.
It isnt "10 mac configurations versus 10,000 PCs" its more like n^lots.
There are other things that make it more complicated - for example installing the Nvidia binary drivers might make you an accessory to a copyright license and patent violation (remember IBM has granted the RCU and other patents for *GPL* use....). There are probably ways to deal with that and keep lawyers happy.
As far as the programs go, kudzu is built on top of pretty portable detection libraries that should be entirely reusable. A lot of the detection has also moved into general upstream kernel handling now that modules has PCI identifier tables. That means the intelligence for a lot of PCI driver loading is now outside vendor tools and extensible.
I'm all for a bottom end free-software cross vendor library to do the work.
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:5, Informative)
Here is somethign that came out on xp. There are also other NT based operating systems this effects. The premise is all the same and go back to the lba not being writen to the drive properly. that is why sometimes setting the lba mode in the harddrive from auto to lba would fix the issues.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
and if you want to know a little more about it look here also
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?s
What is interesting to note, that when it does happen, it will happen when somethign was set up out side the users control.. eg. when set up at the factory before being shiped. some people have been inside thier bios and maybe even have reinstalled thier windows os wich would have fixed it. thats why it isn't being nailed down to a specific setup or anythign. It is common that microsoft products have all kinds of errors simular to this especially when iunstalling former products like windows 2000 or 98 (or even stuff microsoft doesn't know about) and dual booting. I understand the hubub about it happening but i don't understand the additude that this is only a fedora issue or that it is only a linux issue. This happens (or could happen) at any time when ever anything was installed as a dual boot and windows NT style operating system is involved. Microsoft in another article blames it on the older product not knowing anythign about the new product and that is why. Needless to say there are and have been workarounds f or quite a while
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
that linnk will demonstrate what i'm saying
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:4, Insightful)
Although this bug is severe, it is recoverable and no data should be lost.
Just because there is some hacky workaround does not mitigate that fact that a major distro released a poorly tested product with a highly visible and data threatening bug. If this bug passed then the natural thought is 'what else is wrong with it'. When people see issues like this they will immediately be more sceptical of the quality.
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:3, Interesting)
Now should this bother you more or less?
They knowingly released fedora core 2 with what I would consider a "show stopper". I don't even duel boot my linux machine but the idea that RedHat was willing to release this as gold when this bug was present indicates release schedules are more important than quality to them. For me that is a philisophical gap that can not be bridged. I know for certain that I am not upgrading my FC 1 system
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether or not the article author knew how to fix the problem isn't terribly relevant. If someone is making their first shot at installing a Linux distro in hopes of eventually moving away from Windows, and the first thing it does is hose their MBR, they're not going to be happy campers.
BTW, if you're going to use Google results to make a point, it helps to use search terms that don't require you to already know the solution and the website it's on to find... the solution.
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Then it is YOUR job as a Linux geek to steer that friend to a newbie friendly distro. Fedora isn't one, it is a cutting edge research and development distro. Don't be confused by the fact it has pretty eyecandy because they are cooking that for eventual rolling into RHEL. It would be just as daft as giving a newb Debian, Gentoo, Slackware or OpenBSD. Instead give them Mandrake, or one of the other newbie friendly distros.
But beware, ALL of the 2.6 kernel based distros are currently dealing with the dual boot problem. Fedora gets the abuse heaped upon them because a) a lot more people seem to be running it and b) every week slashdot seems to hold a 'hate redhat day' event.
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:5, Informative)
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:5, Informative)
It bites very few boxes because almost nobody uses C/H/S nowdays unless they force it in the BIOS
One of the other problems with testing this sort of bug is that Windows XP gets upset if you try and reinstall it 100 times.
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:5, Funny)
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:4, Insightful)
Fedora does suck; this is not an acceptable error for a release to have -- a devel release candidate, sure -- but not a full release.
Re:dual boot bug is not that big of a deal (Score:4, Insightful)
for dualboot use it would maybe suck ...
i don't see a direct connection between dual boot and business use
could you enlighten me????
To paraphrase Steve Ballmer: Developers. Developers developers developers developers developers developers!
No, but seriously, developers often do multi boot for various reasons, not he least of which being that they are testing things they have written for multiple platforms. Yes emulation is another possibility, but still. And system administrators often dual boot since whereas they can do most of their work in Linux there are still corporate apps written in Java by brain dead mofos who use windows and make their apps only work in IE with MSJVM. So they work in Linux, then boot to Windows to apply for vacation time or fill out their project timesheets or some such things :).
SuSE good, but still not there (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:SuSE good, but still not there (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a hard pill to swallow when you're a developer: you want to get your shiniest version out there. But these people have yet to learn the hard way some of the rules of successful software development:
- don't break something that currently works;
- don't replace a working feature or application with an untested one;
- don't make software that runs only on the latest hardware, unless doing so is a specific target;
- do fix bugs first, and worry about everything else afterwards.
danrees is quite right to say no distro has it perfect. RH used to be very good, but 8/9/FC have run away with the idea that they have to have the latest and flashiest everything, regardless of whether it works or not.All the current users want is the equivalent of RH9 with the bugs fixed. That may be asking a lot in some cases, especially 3d party packages like The Ghastly Mess Formerly Known As Perl, which (in the distro-supplied version) crashes and burns apps using the UTF-8 locale, or the braindead networking behavior in KDE's desktop.
Unless the bugs get fixed before work starts on a new release, we're going to lose some potentially important adherents. C'mon guys, if you can't test it because you don't have the hardware, take it out and don't use it.
This bug is not restricted to fedora 2 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This bug is not restricted to fedora 2 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This bug is not restricted to fedora 2 (Score:5, Informative)
Further comments from users in the same bur report indicate that this bug still exists in the official mandrake release. Perhaps this is a most subtle bug, that both fedora and mandrake believed
they had found a workaround for.
And it you really want to understand whats going on, i encourage you to go searching the parted mailinglists over the last 4 months or so, for a discussion as to where the problem actually lies.
-jef
Re:This bug is not restricted to fedora 2 (Score:3, Insightful)
Why people like to rag on fedora 2 for this bug, i have no clue.
You noticed the GNOME-bashing too? They go together. Red Hat is the target of huge amounts of bile from KDE zealots, because they work on GNOME. They also get it from Debian loons too, for being the biggest linux distro, and doubly so for being a community project that doesn't spend years arguing over trivia before finally releasing stone-age packages.
Fedora is a crackingly good distro... easily one of the best, and it is a significant dri
Re:This bug is not restricted to fedora 2 (Score:4, Informative)
Stopped using it when my update crashed.... (Score:3, Interesting)
SUSE is also put together well; it also manages updates fine. I recommend that to all my friends. (Unless they have exotic hardware, in which case they are more interested in Gentoo's performance)
I wonder how many RedHat users switched to other distros since FC1?
Re:Gentoo v. Debian ? (Score:5, Informative)
I have Samba 3.0.2 on a box here and it's been working great.
In fact, in my first "desktop Linux experience" since Caldera eDesktop 2.4, I installed Gentoo & KDE. Just "emerge kde" and then go to sleep. ON a reasonably fast machine, it didn't take too long.
My sound card Just Worked. nvidia-drivers? Worked. I followed the "Desktop Guide" on www.gentoo.org (under "Other Docs") and everything went quite well.
Dual-booting with Grub is possible, but I just got a KVM and put Windows on a seperate machine. Kind of hard to get to your Samba server when you've rebooted it to use Windows.
I have no desire to try Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise, SuSE (I used to be a SuSE guy, too) or anything else. I have been very happy with Gentoo. If I went anywhere, it'd probably be to OpenBSD/FreeBSD.
But Gentoo is here to stay in these parts..
Re:Gentoo v. Debian ? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've recently made the switch from Debian 'sid' to Gentoo, after frustration with certain Debian policies. I'd previously built a dual Opteron workstation with Gentoo, and found it worked so well that I rebuilt my Pentium 4 workstation with Gentoo as well.
It took 24 hours to completely recompile everything -- base package, KDE, office suites, development tools, Samba -- on a 2.8GHz Pentium 4. I didn;t find this terribly onerous, and the end result is a very clean, fast system. In spite of what some people say, I do see a significant difference in having my code compiled to the hardware it runs on. Heck, I was able to use -ffast-math for the major numerical packages -- try doing *that* with a precompiled distro. :)
I was a Debian user for several years; I still have a dual Pentium 3 and a Sun Ultra 10 running Debian 'sid'. I've used (even paid for) Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, and Slackware over the years. And Beyond the time spent compiling, gentoo has been the most pleasant experience yet.
The nice thing about Linxu is that there are so many distros, giving everyone what they want. For me, at this time, Gentoo works very, very well.
umph... (Score:5, Funny)
Those of us who administer systems need a fast, easy way to edit configuration files. We know where most of those files live, and can usually type them in to the File Open dialog a lot faster than we can get to them via the browsing tool. But my favorite tool, gedit, is no longer suitable for that purpose, because, as you can see from the screen shot at right, there is no longer any way to type a filename into the File Open dialog!
REAL MEN use VI from console to edit configuration files! Only wimps use gedit to do that!
Re:umph... (Score:5, Insightful)
Real men configure systems in vi on serial consoles or in ssh sessions. There ain't no File Open dialogue on a headless box. I suppose with X there can be, of course....
Re:umph... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:umph... (Score:4, Informative)
Drag and drop (Score:5, Insightful)
There seem to be two things in Gnome 2.6 that annoy people - the spacial mode in nautilus (which is configurable anyway) and the file selector. I'd dearly like to see the whole file selector business go away and be replaced by a nautilus window of the right kind of files in the right location (where location is relevant)
After all why should someone have to learn *two* ways to select files ?
Re:Silly to perform system configuration under X (Score:3, Informative)
What? You can most certainly run a program as root on an X session that is runnning as another user.
All you need is for root to have the magic cookie of your session.
% man xauth
FD 2 not so bad (Score:5, Interesting)
The main problems I have had are the lack of MP3 support out of the box, and no default inclusion of niceties like flash, nvidia drivers, and java (I know they are not open source but a quick-download utility to get them separately would be nice). Even some OSS software like K3B is not included by default even though I chose KDE packages at install time.
On the good side, it was stupidly simple to setup (I love gentoo but bootstrapping has never been fun and an SATA system I setup required some prestedigitation to get running) the up2date utility is simple to use and has that nifty icon tray to alert you when there are new updates. It has all the standard development utilities in relatively recent versions and while I am not a regular Gnome user the desktop seems quite polished with good fonts default out of the box.
In summation, it certainly ain't perfect, but I haven't found any real problems to complain about either. While I'll stick to Gentoo on machines that I want to develop on, Fedora seems fine for a workstation that is easy to maintain.
why is Gnome 2.6 an abomination? (Score:3, Insightful)
please, all the linux zealots constantly say how they like choice, well you have a choice with how naut lays it out for you.
Re:why is Gnome 2.6 an abomination? (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that you can't manually type a filename into the "file open" dialog box would be more than enough for me to call it an abomination. Looks like the GNOME usability "experts" delivered another brilliant masterpiece which the developers and users will now spend the next six months defending as the only way software should be.
Meanwhile, KDE has a "file open" dialog box that not only lets me type in filenames, but lets me type in URLs and transparently open remote files. Now that's usability!
Re:why is Gnome 2.6 an abomination? (Score:4, Informative)
Ctrl + L will open the filename box, with autocomplete and all.
Some people just don't know how to read. Someone who writes for linux.com should keep up on this stuff. He's not an everyday user (I guess).
Why I can't stand the Gnome 2.6 file selector (Score:4, Interesting)
It's useless. Let's see...nowhere in the dialog box does it say to use ctrl-L to open a text box (I've played around with gedit before, out of curiosity, and I didn't know this keystroke until I read it in this thread). Ctrl-L also means extra typing, and you can't access the rest of the open dialog while the ctrl-L box is open.
Of course, the ctrl-L box is the only way to go to a directory without having to click your way through the filesystem (an extremely slow task) or type part of a file's name and have the file selected, which makes the two most important features of a file open dialog useless.
Here are some other horrible ``features'' of the Gnome 2.6 file selector, which are mostly inherited from the previous one:
No way to create your own filter. You're stuck with the ones that come with the app.
The file listing is purely vertical, which wastes space and makes navigation a pain (and what's up with the modification dates?). The above complaint about no filter creation only makes this worse. Conversely, the preset location panel is way too big, also wasting space.
I'm sure I'll think of more things I hate about this file dialog after I post this, but I think this is enough...for now.
I'll also add that I'll not be happy until the Gnome devs just decide to completely ape KDE's file selector. I love using KDE's file selector, and IMO, it's what every other file selector should base itself on.
Re:why is Gnome 2.6 an abomination? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:why is Gnome 2.6 an abomination? (Score:3)
Your point is that in gedit you open a different dialog (open location).
Re:why is Gnome 2.6 an abomination? (Score:5, Informative)
All we need now is a decent webdav server that handles userids properly.
Re:why is Gnome 2.6 an abomination? (Score:4, Insightful)
Either one of these addresses this single point that everyone seems to be bashing 2.6 for, all the while ignoring that Gnome 2.6 is actually a decent amount faster than 2.4 ever was.
Myself, I like the spatial concept now, even though *at first* I was rather turned off by it. The key was I spent a few days using it and trying to understand it as a concept. Once you "get it," spatial is a great way to work, which does *not* require "new windows everywhere for everything" you open.
I think the main reason for these complaints is the fact that geeks spend 5 mins playing with the new Nautilus and then dismiss it because it's different from what they're used to. Same idea - how many geeks that work with XP instantly switch their setup to the classic style start menu after about 30 seconds, even though the new style start menu is laid out in a much more efficient and logical manner?
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Try to burn a CD with Fedora Core 2 (Score:3, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried FC2, and don't plan to.
That said, it isn't a trivial process, and XP didn't handle it with ease. XP had major bugs with its integrated CD writing software, ones that resulted in data loss. I'm guessing it might have even been a driver issue, because I've helped out people that used different burner software but still had odd problems like entries showing up, but actual files that aren't "found" attemp
Huge step forward, maybe a little too much (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Huge step forward, maybe a little too much (Score:3, Informative)
I have separate partitions which when changing distro, or reinstalling, I can simply mount as /,/usr,/home, etc. It's basically the equivalent of having a C: and a D: drive in Windows using partitions.
Its a .0 release - give it a break (Score:5, Insightful)
FC2 is is the first "mainstream" Linux 2.6 distro, but even the other distros that went 2.6 show similar problems (the XP booting issue isn't a distro issue but a kernel issue, and the problem was created by MS, not Linus).
In the RHL timeline, this is the rough equivalent of 10.0, though in terms of new tech, it is probably the equivalent of RHL 5.0 (which broke everything, but forced the world to move on from all that legacy kruft that distros were accumulating).
FC2 is the first step out of the shadow of legacy for this distro. Everything under the hood is shiny and new - and yes, it has bugs. It's a
Re:Its a .0 release - give it a break (Score:3, Informative)
Bzzzt! Mandrake 10.0 Official was released to MandrakeClub members on April 14, far before Fedora Core 2.
Also, Mandrake 10.0 Community was released on March 4. And yes, the Community Edition most certainly counts--if you didn't count it, then you'd have to not count Fedora Core, as it's the Community Edition of RHEL.
Let's not forge
Hey, Fedora's not that bad! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a nice system with not much overhead in the default install. You have to tweak it a bit but you can have a solid platform wich is easy to use for all daily office tasks such as browsing, printing letters and so on.
RedHats Bluecurve theme doesn't match my taste but it works great for mom and dad since it's clean and descriptive. It's also an up to date system with Kernel 2.6.5 and Gnome 2.6.
Like it or not but spatial filenavigation is the ONLY way my mom is able to keep her stuff together. She was totally lost with Windows Explorer.
One has to keep in mind that Fedora is a pretty young project, too and that there was apparently some trouble in the community communication with RedHat. The booting issue is a real pita but let's not forget that it is actually a WinXP problem. This won't make anyone more happy if he lost his Windows partition, I know but it's still the truth. So let's not be too harsh with Fedora!
Article is a troll (Score:5, Insightful)
As other posters have pointed out, the dual boot problem is not specific to Fedora, but for some mysterious reason everyone is insistent on picking on Fedora.
Much of it is factually wrong:
He doesn't even check his own system before claiming that Quanta and Abiword are not present. His evolution troll is so bad that the editor felt the need to add a note -- Correction: The author didn't look closely enough. Evolution has handled cryptographic signatures and message encryption correctly for a long while now.
Notice how almost all his "Fedora sucks" items are acually cribs about the component software! Like OO.o, gnome, evolution, and Gimp. If this idiot doesn't like these software how the f*** is it fedora's fault?!
His gnome troll is the worst of all. This is one piece of Free Software that dares to innovate on the desktop, and every release gets flamed to death by fools who have never used it at all. I won't bother with a point by point rebuttal, that's already been done in Open Letter to Nicholas Petreley - Crack Pipes for Everyone! [linuxworld.com].
The author is just trolling for publicity, just like our friend Ken Brown of the AdTI. What I don't understand is why /. falls for it.
Re:Article is a troll (Score:3, Insightful)
Poor Critique of Gnome 2.6 / Poor Review (Score:5, Insightful)
Typical linux.com Review (Score:4, Interesting)
(Heh, Slashdot is way more factual
FYI, I have been using FC2 for about a week now. I'm a KDE / fluxbox user so I have no opinion on Gnome. After starting from scratch (previously was using Red Hat 9), my poor 200 Mhz / 128 Mb RAM PC is working much better. Everything else I have installed (Java 1.4, RealPlayer, MP3 support for XMMS, prboom, Timidity and so on) has been fine, no issues.
I "upgraded" my RedHat 9 workstation to FC 2 (Score:3, Interesting)
- X11 (got it to work by editing scripts)
- CD-RW drive
- Mouse (it works again after manual configuration)
- USB digital camera
- printers
- email (mutt/imap)
- sound
All this stuff worked correcly before the upgrade. However, MATLAB still works! The upgrade feature (at least) is totally screwed up. I think this machine is going to get Gentooed very soon now. To be fair, the system seems to be reasonably stable and also quite responsive (unlike RH 9). Not as responsive as my other systems using kernel 2.6 and Gentoo/Mandrake,though.Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Long time Redhat user says goodbye (Score:3, Informative)
FreeBSD "ports" includes 11,000 pieces of third party software. That's more than Debian and it's kept up-to-date and is easy to remain up-to-date. The other *BSDs have fairly large repositories too, NetBSD pkgsrc numbers some 4,000 packages.
My favori
Integrity? (Score:3, Insightful)
A Lousy Review (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd complain about the article's journalistic standards if it had any.
Like so many "reviews"; the topic article is simply one man's diatribe about how a specific product doesn't meet his individual needs. The writer spends more time complaining about Gnome 2.6 than anything else -- and many of those complaints are "taste" issues, based on personal preference, not technical merits.
The beauty of free software is choice . Why trash a product because of personal prejudices, when you can simply try something else? Or, in the case of the reviewer, actually learn how things work, so you can change things to your liking. I run Gnome on one of my workstations; I strongly dislike the spatial browser -- but rather than complain, I changed a setting, and now it works the way I want! Sure, KDE can be "eye candy" heavy at times -- but I turn features off, or, better yet, install a lighter GUI like XFCE on system that don't need the bells and whistle. All this review tells me is that the reviewer is incapable of learning, growing, or changing.
I don't use Fedora, though I have used Red Hat in the past. The choice of distro is very personal and application-specific. I do software development and scientific research; I want bleeding edge and fast performance, so I'm running Gentoo. My wife's laptop, on the other hand, has Mandrake and Windows on it. My servers run Debian.
Freedom is about choice.
A bit early, wouldn't you say? (Score:4, Insightful)
FC2 has been out for almost 2 weeks. Considering a major migration to the 2.6 kernel, which still has a host of compatibility issues with a bunch of programs (particularily sound drivers, what with there being a move from OSS to ALSA). I'd say give it a little bit of time. Yeah, the test versions are supposed to iron out these kinks, but in this world, I don't think that the beta test really gets underway until the official release comes out.
The fixes will come. apt and yum repositories will get better. The dual boot problem will get fixed.
Quit your bellyaching and have a little bit of patience. If you really have a problem, I recommend that you either start contributing to the project (It _IS_ open source, you know) or you march right into Red Hat's office and demand your $0 back.
Fedora - my experience (Score:3, Informative)
Everything installed as expected and works as expected. I have not been able to get my NVidia card to work in 3D mode, but my ATI card was detected and set up correctly by Core 2.
One of my machines had to be in Japanese. Core 2 performed this installation without a hitch (which is a lot more than I can say for SuSE 9.1. It failed miserably).
I don't normally like RPM based distributions, but Core 2 has been fine so far.
I realize that there are some bugs people have run into, but everything has worked great for me on my machines. SuSE 9.1 was a disaster on both of my machines (old packages, Japanese installation fails to find any packages to install, sound didn't work, several programs core dumped on me, etc.) so maybe after that experience, anything that worked would look good.
Finally, I like Gnome 2.6 quite well, and after using the new spatial nautilus for a week or so, I think I like it that way better.
Take more than 5 second glance (Score:3, Interesting)
My favorite quote - How can you be happy about the review making not only Fedora but linux in general look bad.
broken audio drivers - I am yet to see a distro that has 100% working audio drivers.
abomination known as Gnome 2.6 - If you dont like it that is what other desktops like KDE are for.
I'm interested to hear others views about this review... - This review sucks. It may have some good points, but there is nothing in Fedora Core 2 that cant be avoided or fixed.
My Review (Score:5, Informative)
He calls Gnome 2.6 and "abomination" and calls FC2 "Fedora Project's second litter of pups unsuitable for any use other than as laboratory animals" without even clarifying why or who his intended audience are. Not to mention his use of puppies in use a lab animals is sickening.
Fedora Core 2, as is Gnome 2.6, has an intended audience. These are first-time users of Linux in Enterprise settings. The aim is to present desktop computing in an easy-to-use fashion without a steep learning curve. Fedora does this well by presenting only the most commonly needed features. Does this mean Fedora or Gnome 2.6 are featureless? Not at all. Most of these features are just underneath the surface, something any geek or tech would be able to find out by RTFM or asking around.
Take his example of the new FileChooser: he says one can't type the file name, but one can just by pressing l, similar to how it is with almost all browsers. You can even do tab-completion with it.
Or take the case of Nautilus spatial browser. I think using it as default is genius! New users don't have folders 5 kilometers deep nor $HOME directories 4 kilometers wide. Most users will just want a place to store documents, pictures and audio/video files. When the time comes that they need to see the folder hierarchy, they can switch to explorer view.
The reviewer's problem is he has a bias for some other distribution and against Fedora (or possibly RedHat), in particular, and continues to paint his review accordingly. Let's leave shoddy journalism like that to Ken Brown.
Then there's the problem of breaking dual-booting when using WinXP. This problem isn't particular to Fedora and, in fact, the Fedora community have already come up with solutions to said problem.
Another issue is Fedora breaking things by introducing technology. Unfortunately, new technology can and most often do break old stuff. If it weren't for RedHat, the widespread use of gcc 2.95 and gcc 3 would've taken months longer.
NVidia is aware of the changes made to the Fedora kernel and are even now in the process of developing new video drivers. Fedora kernel hackers do things for a reason. If people insist on criticizing their choices, at the very least have some technical arguments to back up your case. They (FC devs) don't do things to make life harder for people, you know.
For enterprise users, I think FC2 is a great candidate. It's stable (for all 5 of the different platforms I've put it on including HP Vectras and eVectras which are common in enterprises), feature-complete and simple and easy enough to learn. For technical people (like me), I have to say I like it! I like the way configs are stored in
My experience with FC2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, on my laptop I didn't have the boot problem, but it did mess up my partitions and I had to fix that with other tools which was a little nerve racking because I thought I might lose data. Firewire didn't work and required loading the kernel module and I didn't know how to do that and I think most newbies wouldn't either. The interface was pretty ugly as they make kde and gnome look the same with the ugly gnome theme they gave it. But that's a small thing and not really a complaint, just an annoyance. Also, the 4k stack issue with nvidia was a pain, but I think nvidia is to blame on that one. All these hiccups I wish I knew about before I installed it. I guess I didn't read the release notes as well as I should have, but I think those are big issues and shouldn't have been buried in the long release notes.
So what did I do? I switched over to mandrake 10 and the past couple of days have been better. For reasons that were my fault the first time, but unknown to me the second time, I have reinstalled it twice in a span of about a week or so, but I'm determined to get it going so I don't care. I've only gone into windows to get an email address these past few days. I've never been this comfortable with linux this much on any other distro, so I think that says something good about mandrake.
To me, it seemed they rushed fedora. I've always felt that a strong point with linux has been they don't rush things like microsoft does. However, with respect to fedora, I think they were more focused on the release date than releasing a stable and robust product even after two release canidates.
On a side note, I've taken that old machine that wouldn't run FC2, loaded mandrake on it, and now I'm installing gentoo from a stage 1 on it. It's still bootstrapping and I'll know in..oh..a few days if it goes well.
This post isn't meant to start a flame war or entice fedora advocates to tell me what an idiot I am because I couldn't get it to work. At this point in the history of linux and especially red hat, I expect a little more. Thankfully, I've recieved that from other distros including mandrake, knoppix, and suse (and hopefully gentoo
the problem with mainstream linux (Score:4, Insightful)
In the *old* days. When a Linux user had a problem with a program in a linux distro he/she fixed it, and sent a patch so that others could benefit from the fix. This resulted in these systems contiually getting better (the opposite of OS rot windows users are so familiar with).
Now that non developers are increasingly using these distros, there is a lot more complaining but, not an associated amount of fixing going on.
People seem to forget that the majority of the development on any of these distros is done for free (read Joe/Jane developer working in his/her free time). The professional developers working for RedHat, Mandrake, etc... are mostly building config tools.
The result of this, the developers who actually build the apps get more and more abuse, without a cooresponding amount of help. We've already seen many developers drop out of projects for this reason.
I would suggest the author and others who feel as he to think about this. If you want to make linux better without (actually doing it) writing code, encourage the developers. Let them know about things that don't work so well. If you want a new feature, try offering a bribe. Say, "I'll mail some beer to whoever implements
Just my 2 cents.
I'm switching, although SuSE has problems, too (Score:4, Interesting)
First problem was that it totally botched configuring the boot manager. It took out my RH9 entries from grub.conf, but failed to add any entries for FC2. My guess is that it was confused by an entry I had for a test 2.6.0 kernel I had compiled to play with when contemplating just updating RH9 to 2.6 myself.
I don't recall all the other specific problems I had, but basically I spent all day tracking down and fixing little things that didn't work, after I fixed the bad grub.conf.
The most annoying is that it does not install the policy stuff. This causes RPM to give an error about some missing file every time you install an RPM. This error seemed to confuse up2date, because that hung every time it went to install RPMs. Yum was also broken. I had Yum installed from Fedora Legacy, and apparently that is a later version than the one in FC2, so FC2 does not update it, but it does update some libraries that Yum depends on to versions that Yum doesn't like. So, you have to "rpm -e yum" by hand, and then install Yum from the FC2 disc to get a working Yum.
After doing that I tried to use yum to bring things up to date, and that failed because of a dependency problem with php-manual. php-manual depends on a specif version of php, and so yum could not update that version of php. Again, I suspect that this came from Fedora Legacy.
I also gave FC2 a try at home, as a fresh install on my second disk. It handled most of my hardware, except for my soundcard. I have an Asus P4PE with onboard sound. It is supposedly supported by ALSA, but no sound plays.
There were a few other minor problems, but none of the total hell from the RH9 upgrade test. Still, I am pretty unimpressed by the state of disorganization of the overall Fedora project. For example, there's no obvious mention of Fedora Legacy on Redhat's Fedora site. The Fedora.us site contains a bunch of useful information also not on the Redhat site.
So, I figured that if I am going to have to install from scratch (which I can do--I've got good backups of all my data), I might as well take a look at SuSE. I bought 9.1. So far, my test installs have gone OK, except for one major problem: it doesn't work under VMWare! As soon as the kernel starts loading during install, the keyboard goes away. I was going to try it with a USB keyboard to see if that made a difference, but I can't even get VMWare to boot when I have USB 1.x support in my RH9 system. (RH9 has serious USB problems. It works great mostly with USB2 devices (although occasionally I've had to reboot to get a disk to show up as a /dev/sdX device, even though it is showing up on lsusb)), but sometimes fails to load the USB 1.x modules, so they need to be loaded manually. However, when I do that, things that use USB get very slow to load).
However, tests on my second disk worked fairly well with SuSE, with two problems.
First, it has the same soundcard problem FC2 does. I thought it might be a 2.6 kernel problem, but Knoppix with 2.6 finds it fine and plays sound. Doing some experimenting, I have determined that the snd-intel8x0 module simply does not work right. However, the i810-audio module works (which is what Knoppix uses). So, all I have to do is let SuSE configure my soundcard, and then change the module loading stuff from snd-intel8x0 to i810-audio. (That didn't work on FC2 because the kernel shipped with FC2 doesn't include that module. I have to rebuild the kernel to enable OSS...another strike against FC2, since I want to be able to use the kernel from the distro). (Another thing they didn't configure into FC2 is Firewire. Enough computers nowadays include that that I don't understand how they cannot include modular Firewire support).
The only other SuSE problem I saw in my tests was X configuration. Even though they have an entry for my monitor (Gateway
Re:I'm switching, although SuSE has problems, too (Score:4, Informative)
It works fine if you pass vdso=0 to the installer and add it to grub.conf.
Note to Asus/Pentium 4 FC2 users (Score:3, Informative)
There are patched CD images out there (since the install CD boots using said problematic kernel), and you can work around the problem on already-installed systems (if you upgraded by just using apt/yum) by using the SMP kernel instead of the uniprocessor one.
A satisfied Fedora user... (Score:5, Interesting)
The fonts look great. The mime handlers are set up right so I get sensible options to handle files that I download from a web browser. Thunderbird comes integrated with gpg.
Nautilus is just bizarrely fast - and I rather like the spatial thing. Spatial nautilus is terrible for just browsing a filesystem, but for doing real work like moving files around it's great. (And if you want to just browse, select "Browse filesystem.") I can type smb://wherever from the "run" dialog and have it browse windows servers. Great stuff.
And in general, Gnome 2.0 is very nice looking and user-friendly. It opens my files fine, it has software to to just about everything I use a computer for. For the first time ever, a newly installed distro has the feel of a computer that a real expert worked on, installing all the interesting plugins, getting stuff properly integrated, doing the little tweaks that I always had to do myself (Or more likely never bothered to do and just put up with minor inconveniences).
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I want a distro that I can install and just use. The only real customization I've had to do was manually install gdesklets and beep-media-player and get lm_sensors working. (The latter failed because my sensors aren't supported under 2.6 kernels yet.)
With yum, between the main repository and freshrpms, I have just about anything I might want to install.
Compared to my gentoo-using friends, I feel almost guilty about how easy it is to use, as if I was a Windows user or something.
It's just a fine distro, in my opinion. It reflects the hard work of a lot of generous people, and this review is unreasonably mean-spirited.
Sarge anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
An alternative perspective on FC2 (Score:5, Interesting)
I am becoming a firm believer in clean installs rather than upgrades because upgrades so often just don't work. No operaing system provides everything you need, so people routinely install third-party software and even on MacOS X (which is touted as being far simpler and far more unified, hence far better for the desktop user) I have not yet known anyone to be able to avoid problems with system upgrades. Clean installs also offer people a chance to do something they too often never do: make backups.
Some of the major issues I've come across: touch-click trackpad support is gone (where you can touch the trackpad twice in succession as an alternative way of clicking the left mouse button). I never knew how much I missed it until I tried a friend's Apple iBook running MacOS X which does not have it and has no readily apparent way to turn this on. I thought this feature would be there in FC2 final release (it wasn't there in prereleases) and it apparently isn't there. I've been told that this is a Linux kernal feature so if I want the feature back I would have to become out of sync with kernel upgrades supplied by the Fedora Core project and lose the ability to easily upgrade my kernel via FC's up2date. I don't care how easy it is to recompile a kernel once you've gotten the swing of it, I've got much more important issues on my plate and, while I appreciate the software freedom aspect of the Linux kernal, I value my time; I value being able to get on with what I use a computer to do. I'm looking to make things easier on myself, not introduce more maintenance.
The sound system in GNU/Linux is still not unified and smoothly working. I still can't be sure that I can simultaneously play bzflag while listening to some Ogg Vorbis files (or a streamed downloaded) with XMMS or Rhythmbox. On other systems (like later versions of NeXTSTEP and most if not all versions of MacOS X), sound is easy to use and simultaneous sound sources work right out of the box. This is one area of desktop usage where I am content to dissuade letting a thousand flowers bloom (in terms of what is shipped to the end-user) because I would prefer instead to have a single simple (no-setup-needed, it just works right out of the box) sound system. But I don't know (or care to learn) the technical details which prevent this from working smoothly. I figure that this is something that should be provided by any distribution. Recording sound is also a mess: the GNOME sound recorder program still crashes in such a way that no Bug Buddy is brought up to help me easily submit a crash report to the developers and there are way too many sliders on the sound volume panel to know what I want to do without having to learn grotty details about something I should be able to just use. I doubt this situation would remain acceptable if measured against its competition on other operating systems.
I understand that some users want e-mail and calendar integration, so Evolution looks like an attractive program. I think more users want trainable spam filtering and I don't see where Evolution 1.4 (the version of Evolution I got with FC2) provides trainable spam filtering. So Evolution is a non-starter for me. I'll take Mozilla mail or Thunderbird over Evolution because I don't co
Fedora Core 2 is Excellent (A+++!!) as a Server (Score:5, Insightful)
The only slight gripe is that I had to manually find and run the mail conversion scripts so that I can see my mail in IMAP again, since Cyrus-IMAPd uses its own format separate from the former UW-IMAPd.
I'm much happier with Cyrus-IMAPd than I was with UW-IMAPd, and I was even able to get IMAPs and SMTPs up and running with instructions that I found on Google. I'm actually considering Fedora Core 2 as an upgrade path to the ye olde Exchange 5.5 on NT4 at work, since it runs so well at home.
Fedora Core 2 Kerberized and SASLized pretty much everything, making it much easier to set up secure services than it was in previous RedHat versions (though, I haven't tried Fedora Core 1, nor will I probably ever). No more need to recompile everything to get TLS, SSL and other things in IMAP, SMTP, HTTP, and other services
Why just pick on Fedora Core 2? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm confident that in a couple of months, once the 2.6.x kernel has been weened from the developers... and all of the issues get worked out at the distribution level... it'll be a clear winner.
On the flipside of the coin, I've installed FC2 on about a dozen machines and have actually found that some hardware that didn't work in any previous distribution release, now works great in FC2. For me, FC2 works quite well on a variety of hardware and I am confident that as some of the minor issues are resolved, it will just get better and better.
I don't know if this is just a mis-perception, but I feel that the Fedora Core team is taking even bolder steps to mainstream Linux than Red Hat was... and Red Hat has always been aggressive in promoting new software technologies. I see this as a good thing. Without that pushing, Linux would not continue to improve and mature at the impressive rate it has enjoyed thus far.
Using Fedora Core 1 and now FC2, I can actually start to see the not too distant future where Linux has a good fighting chance at, dare I say it serioulsy?... the DESKTOP MARKET!
While it is true that FC2 isn't perfect, no new major release (new kernel, new releases of the desktop environs, etc) is born perfect... and it is unrealistic to think any will or even should. Regardless of the amount of people submitting bugs during the test-releases, in the real world an initial production release is just the next step in shaking out the bugs. It is that way even with Microsoft and Apple... even if they don't want to admit it. The difference is that our community is more open about the bugs and as a result, most of them get fixed and fixed faster.
In summary, quit picking on the fruits of Red Hat simply because you have some resentment about their change in marketing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and their success in the marketplace. If you want to debate those, do so directly. I don't expect everyone to love them, but give them the fair shake you give everyone else... and have realistic expectations. Long live Linux.
GNOME sucks - read why! (Score:5, Informative)
Such editorials are hard to take serious since they are build up on basicly NO deeper knowledge of the matter. Most people I met so far are full of prejudices and seek for excuses or explaination why they prefer the one over the other while in reality they have no slightest clue on what parameters they compare the things.
If people do like the gance ICONS over the functionality then it's quite ok but that's absolutely NO framework to do such comparisons.
I do come from the GNOME architecture and spent the last 5 years on it. I also spent a lot of time (nearly 1 year now if I sum everything up) on KDE 3.x architecture including the latest KDE 3.2 (please note I still do use GNOME and I am up to CVS 2.6 release myself).
Although calling myself a GNOME vetaran I am also not shy to criticise GNOME and I do this in the public as well. Ok I got told from a couple of people if I don't like GNOME that I simply should switch and so on. But these are usually people who have a tunnelview and do not want to see or understand the problems around GNOME.
Speaking as a developer with nearly 23years of programming skills on my back I can tell you that GNOME may look polished on the first view but on the second view it isn't.
Technically GNOME is quite a messy architecture with a lot of unfinished, half polished and half working stuff inside. Given here are examples like broken gnome-vfs, half implementations of things (GStreamer still half implemented into GNOME (if you can call it an implementation at all)) rapid changes of things that make it hard for developers to catch up and a never ending bughunting. While it is questionable if some stuff can simply be fixed with patches while it's more required to publicly talk about the Framework itself.
Sure GNOME will become better but the time developers spent fixing all the stuff is the time that speaks for KDE to really improve it with needed features. We here on GNOME are only walking in the circle but don't have a real progress in true usability (not that farce people talk to one person and then to the next). Real usability here is using the features provided by the architecture that is when I as scientists want to do UML stuff that I seriously find an application written for that framework that can do it. When I eye over to the KDE architecture then as strange it sounds I do find more of these needed tools than I can find on GNOME. This can be continued in many areas where I find more scientific Software to do my work and Software that works reliable and not crash or misbehave or behave unexpected.
Comparing Nautilus with Konqueror is pure nonsense, comparing GNOME with KDE is even bigger nonsense. If we get a team of developers on a Table and discuss all the crap we find between KDE and GNOME then I can tell from own experience that the answer is clearly that GNOME will fail horrible here.
We still have many issues on GNOME which are Framework related. We now got the new Fileselector but yet they still act differently in each app. Some still have the old Fileselector, some the new Fileselector, some appearance of new Fileselectors are differently than in other apps that use the new Fileselector code and so on. When people talk about polish and consistency, then I like to ask what kind of consistency and polish is this ? We still have a couple of different ways to open Window in GNOME.
- GTK-Application-Window,
- BonoboUI Window,
- GnomeUI Window,
Then a lot of stuff inside GNOME are hardcoded UI's, some are using *.glade files (not to mention that GLADE the interface buil
Re:GNOME sucks - read why! (Score:4, Insightful)
And Fedora Core 2 comes with GTK 2.4, deprecating GTK_COMBO and a host of other widgets. With glade generating code that directly references private internal data structure of said widgets, assuming of course that they'll never change, makes fixing such applications even more problematic.
Fedora Core 2 was the only dist that worked for me (Score:3, Interesting)
I recently decided to migrate my girlfriend to a more user friendly linux distro. She had been using Gentoo for quite a while, but it was left up to me to do all the manual configurations, software updates, and installs. I wanted to give her something that she could use herself until she became more familar with the inner workings of linux....thus began my inadvertant testing of 3 major linux distros and one minor one.
First I tried mandrake. It had the repetation of being the most user friendly and I was told that the more recent releases had solved many of the instabilities that I had seen when I first tried it years ago. The install went flawlessly all hardware autodetected and drivers installed. I was simply tickled to death. But that did not last long, mandrake proved to be completely unstable and would hard lock several times a day. Also some "essential" programs for her would crash at the drop of a hat. K3b for example crashed everytime mp3's were dragged into the conversion window. Before it's mentioned all the hardware, ram, etc. was completely tested and perfectly ok. So mandrae flunked royally.
Next I tried Suse having heard many good things about it. Suse was the worst of the distros I tested. On the first install I fell victem to some weird, but not completely uncommon bug that resulted in modules compiled against a different version kernel than the kernel installed being used. Due to how slow the network install is this was a major PITA. Hardware detection was pitiful as well. It set my video card up with vesa drivers any attempt to change the driver to the proper one resulted in a hard lockup. Also sound did not work properly and my integrated NIC (every other distro possessed the module for it) was not supported by the install requiring that I pull a NIC out of another box and put use that instead. Furthermore, Suse has it's own way of doing things, so my knowledge of standard linux configuration was virtually useless.
Being fed up with the "user friendly" distros I was going to opt for a lesser known distro called Arch Linux which would take some amount of setting up, but had a binary package management based on apt that would make the installation quicker than reinstalling Gentoo. Installation was fine, most hardware was fine, standard use of config files....seemed promising. But the sound simply wouldn't work. Oddly enough Arts worked fine and all KDE system sounds worked, but not one media player would cooperate. No matter whether I used arts or tried to tap directly into alsa. Since this was Arch's only drawback, I spent quite a bit ot time trying to debug the setup but eventially admitted defeat. The weirdest thing was that it was somewhat sporadic. I would get it working, but at reboot it would fail again....or even just suddenly give out. A desktop with no sound simply isn't acceptible, so I moved on.
My last attempt was going to be Fedora Core 2. At this point I was irritated enough so that I was very close to just installing XP. Afterall I knew it would work and would probably only crash once a week or so...sort of a middle ground from the previous distros I'd tried. The reason Fedora was my last attempt was because I had tried it years before and it left such a sour taste in my mouth (dependency hell) that I had refused to even consider it up to this point. In short I had very low expectations. However, all devices were detected correctly during a painless and trouble free install. it had a clean interface and most importantly, everything *just worked*. The addition of Apt-get, synaptic, et al. Completely cured the dependancy troubles I had seen previously. Overall besides a few minor annoyances such as lack of default mp3 support and nvidia lagging with a full dri driver for the vid card, it was simply refreshing.
So I recognize that everyones experiences can vary. I don't claim that Fedora Core 2 is perfect for everyones particular setup, but for me it was not just a nice fit...it was the ONLY distro that fit at all.
On a side note, before
My rant, what I hate about linux. (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I love Linux, I love open source. They are beautiful concepts, they are beautiful ideas. I setup Linux systems everywhere I can and use Linux myself. I've setup experienced users, new users, servers, etc. I've written open source applications. Believe me, I'm not an anti-Linux guy in any sense.
Disclaimer2: Insert disclaimer 1 again here. Some of the suggestions and things I'm going to mention are implemented in windows. I do NOT want Linux to be just like windows. Simply because some features are in windows which make it more user friendly isn't a knock on linux... which has numerous features that make it superior to windows. There are areas in which windows is ahead of the game, mostly because of the outlook I'm trying to throw off with this disclaimer. These are good ideas and implemented in some fashion in most gui's not just windows. They aren't windows behavior, they are features we are missing and ignoring out of stubbornness, lets fix it.
Disclaimer3: There are exceptions to everything. There are apps already which have portions or some of the ideas I'm laying on the table in them already.
1. Distro Installers
There are still distributions without Graphical installers and without hardware detection. Now there are plenty of reasons for having good text or curses based installers. Explain to me again what the benefits of NOT having a graphical installer are again?
There are a lot of poor hardware detection implementations out there, and we've all been burned by them. But I believe the open source community is powerful enough that bad implementations will either be dropped or fixed to the point that they are good implementations.
So explain to me again what the disadvantages are of a good hardware detection system that allows manual overrides in every instance but doesn't require them are again?
1. Application Installers
The same that is true for distros is also true for all applications. I hear you all crying this or that package management frameworks solves this problem. NO it doesn't. Package management is a great and useful piece of the puzzle.
But EVERY application should also have both a text mode and Gui installer. This installer should default to options for the most ignorant who want to "next next next finish" through an install and have moderate and advanced mode options (moderate allowing the user to choose things like static locations, various sensible configuration overrides. Advanced allowing setting of things like buffer settings, number of child processes, anything to do with pipes, and settings only developers and programmers will make sense of).
Personally I see the need for a general scriptable toolkit for making these installers that should be out there from the start. It would check to make sure there are packages for all the major distributions available as well as a source package. User downloads the installer, installer downloads the appropriate package for their distro. The installer gives an option of Internet or local directory containing the install files or this can be preset in the installer script.
Basically I mean an install shield wizard type of thing that auto detects if running from he cli or gui and is 100% statically linked for it's own libs.
Some type of central application for removing programs is also needed, this can just read the list from the package manager if needed but should have a simple wizard type uninstall.
Wizards are not the root of all evil, crappy wizards that don't allow flexibility are the root of all evil. It's an important distinction. I believe wizards are good idea that is generally poorly implemented. Neglecting one class and knowledge level of user or another.
3. Hardware detection after install.
That's right, your not done with hardware detection after the base install. Most distro's neglect this. For a lot of things which are automatically setup they act as if a system is static and doesn't change.
My take on Red Hat as a distro (Score:3, Interesting)
When I first tried out linux I was swapping between RH and Slackware and I couldn't really find too much of a difference, but this rpm thing looked like it had more potential in it than slack, so I settled on RH.
To begin with the distro was simple, the installer was pretty basic and the desktop was unutterably bad (I was escaping win98 after a disappointing abandonment of the ageing Amiga 1200) and I rarely used it outside of work servers.
Things were markedly improved by the arrival of the first Gnome desktop in RH, even though it was pretty rough and largely useless. I like that a lot of the ideas they were having about desktops back then are still in Gnome, but operating far far better now
I well remember the RPM dependency hell and getting to a point of being able to work around it for most things, the pain of glibc transitions, the 2.2-2.4 jump, rpm binaries that deadlock wildly and all the other little niggles that people jump on RH for. It is by no means perfect.
However, over the period of time I have been using it, RH has become significantly more useful and capable. It is still my platform of choice for server machines, even though I do find the RHEL/Fedora split quite frustrating as a sysadmin on a budget that wants something a little more reliable than a autorebuilt srpm, but without the 24x7 onsite hugging price tag. To be honest I'm half wondering if Bruce Perens' latest efforts at an Enterprise Debian might not be the long term best solution, but we will see. For now RH9+Progeny and RHEL3 are working well together for me and are both supported for a few years to come, so it's not too bad.
Anyway, to Fedora, specifically to Fedora Core 2. I was really quite excited by the plans RH announced for Fedora, it sounded like it was going to end up taking the massive advantage that Debian has, apt, and taking it on community project style. It would free the world from dependency hell by using the weight of the RH legacy and the various excellent third party RPM sites (fedora.us, livna, freshrpms, dag, etc.) to produce a RH like distro with a package list to rival Debian. I am disappointed they haven't really achieved that in any noticeable way, but I understand that changing Fedora from RH's internal Red Hat Linux efforts to a large, distributed development team has got to be hard. I hope they can get there, preferably before the third party sites tear each other apart (you guys! stop fucking with each others packages!).
I've been using FC2 since it was released, both as an upgrade from FC1 and as a fresh reinstall on a box previously running FC1. I like it. I really like it, I am very happy with the direction the Gnome/Freedesktop/XOrg types are pushing things, stuff like hotplug/fam/hal/dbus that is making the machine vastly more aware of itself, which I expect to see spreading beyond the desktop. There are things gone from gnome since the 1.x and 2.2/2.4 days that I miss and would like back, but there are way more things I'm glad to see gone. Spatial nautilus? Love it, I don't like that it opens a bazillion windows, but since they are very easy to kill, two thumbs up. The fact that everything stays exactly where you put it is even better. This *must* be implemented for metacity such that it handles windows with similar aplomb. I know people don't like the spatial concept, but they can turn it off and stop whining
It's nice to see distros making the 2.6 plunge, it's been a very easy transition from 2.4 I think, way easier than some of the previous major changes
So, given that RH Linux and now Fedora have been the platform for my work for the last 6 years, I think it's fair to say that I'm pretty happy with them, even though I did have to defect to Debian at home for the masses of software (but I'd skip back to a Fedora install if it could offer a similar bulk).
Keep going Fedora people, if you build it, they will come
Cheers,
Re:Why is it that I *LIKE* Gnome 2.6? eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what's nice about this Linux thing most folks around here start using it for in the first place - you have a choice.
Re:Stop knocking Gnome 2.6 (Score:5, Insightful)
The reviewer mentioned the new file requester. That is retarded. Let me copy-and-paste a post I made on this topic over at FedoraForum.org [fedoraforum.org]:
Some googling (certainly not the included GNOME "documentation") let me know that hitting Ctrl-L while in a file requester will pop up a text entry gadget, with tab completion.
Ain't that obvious and user friendly? I can feel my productivity soar through the roof!
NOT THAT IT F-ING WORKS OR ANYTHING!
1. Today, I'd sure like to edit
2. Start gedit.
3. Choose to open a file.
4. As per the tradition of usability downward spiralling, I can't see any files beginning with a period. Being a GNOME user, I'm considered too stupid to be allowed to see things like that. There's no (apparent or documented) way to change this. Ooooh, a purdy little house icon!
5. Oh yeah, the intuitive Ctrl-L. I get a text entry gadget, type ".ba", I get a drop-down list of pattern matches and choose ".bash_profile". Great, this feature (choosing a file) should of course be in the main file requester.
6. I click on "Open".
7. Of course nothing opens when I click "Open". That would probably go smack in the face of the GNOME2 Human Interface Guidelines. The text entry box disappears, and my "Home" directory is reloaded in the main requester list.
8. Maybe
9. Nothing happens.
10. I click "Cancel", curse the f-ing idiocy that seems to rule GNOME development today, and decide to take a look at how far KDE has come these days. Ooooh, a purdy little house icon!
(Seriously, I'm getting tired of this. GNOME is getting slicker and faster all the time, but these steps forwards are always followed by twice the number of steps backwards.)
Re:Stop knocking Gnome 2.6 (Score:3, Interesting)
I should have written "includes GNOME 2.6". FC2 doesn't depend on GNOME, and it includes alternatives, which makes the review picking on FC2 for this even more irrelevant.
Re:Stop knocking Gnome 2.6 (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, the file requester is retarded. The reviewer mentioning it is not necessarily a symptom of retardation.
Re:Stop knocking Gnome 2.6 (Score:5, Informative)
Might need the gedit 2.6.1 package as well, since gedit does some mods to the stock file dialog. Ciao, don't be bitter now.
Re:The File Open dialog box (Score:5, Insightful)
But if you don't want to do that, you can always use the CLI, so look, you still have choices!
This is absolutely absurd. GNOME should provide a seamless GUI to run on top of X and a UNIX-like kernel. This means not having to using a command prompt for ANYTHING. After all, GNOME is mainstream; if your goal is to just have a pretty environment, you don't need GNOME, you just need a bunch of xterms open in some lightweight window manager.
But that's not your average user's goal; your average user wants to be able to get his job done without using terminals or memorizing keyboard shortcuts that have no mouse alternatives. Thus, it's a major step backward when useful functionality, like a filename box, is removed from a standard dialog. Because that's just one more stupid usability issue that makes GNOME a pain to use. Workarounds are not the answer.
Re:I'm dual booting windows and FC2 without proble (Score:3, Insightful)
Your experience isn't necessarily indicative of all or even *most* people's experiences with FC2. I mean, I've been running Windows 95A, 98SE or 2000 Pro continuously since 1995 with a ton of peripherals and software without any viruses, worms, corrupt registries or other problems besides the occassionally rare crash (especially since 2KPro). By your logic, I should blast everyone on S