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Red Hat Software Businesses Software Linux

Fedora Core 3: Worth The Upgrade? 498

Posted by timothy from the embarrassment-of-riches dept.
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."
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Fedora Core 3: Worth The Upgrade? More

Fedora Core 3: Worth The Upgrade?

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  • Screenshot tour? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fpga_guy ( 753888 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @06:45AM (#10818688)
    Sorry, but screenshots are not what this is about. Let's talk about features baby, I want substance!

    There's a lot more to an OS than the damn window manager!

    • Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by northcat ( 827059 )
      There's a lot more to an OS than the damn window manager!

      But thats what most newbies (who come from windows) seem to care right now...

    • Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Hammer ( 14284 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @07:40AM (#10818902) Journal
      A fancy-schmancy gooey during install may be nice or a BIG bother.
      The important is wether it works or not. I gave up on RH/FC with FC2. It insisted on installing and starting a whole bunch of shit that I explicitly unchecked. Examples:
      • install and start IR on an old server that neither has nor ever will have IR interface
      • install and start CUPS on a server that neither has nor will have access to a printer

      The reason "it has to be installed to satisfy dependencies". In previous RH/FC you could ignore those dependencies in expert mode. Now I spent lotsa time turning of stuff that didn't do anything (I wonder WTF the IR daemon actually does on a server w/o IR card???)
      Now I use Mandrake/slackware. I might try the new SuSE...

    • Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Slack3r78 ( 596506 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @08:05AM (#10819037) Homepage
      I sure hope it's a marked improvement over FC2. I downloaded and installed FC2 on a test machine of mine on the day of release, expecting great things, and ended up being so thoroughly underwhelmed that I'd replaced the load with something else inside of a couple of days.

      It's not that FC is a bad distribution, per se, it's just that I fail to see anything particularly special about it. At the time, I'd just discovered Dropline Gnome, which is an excellent desktop-oriented meta distribution on top of Slackware. But even so, Debian fits for the hardcore freedom types who want easy updates, with Ubuntu looking like it's going to fill the desktop end of that, Mandrake does well as a starter distro, Gentoo is great for the "1337" types, but where does FC fit in?

      It's supposed to be a desktop distro, as I understand it, but frankly, it palled in comparison to others when I tried it last. It's going to be especially hard to convince me otherwise now that Novell's recently introduced Novell Linux Desktop [novell.com] is out. It's SuSe based, but with a level of polish added, and quite frankly, is the most impressed I've been with a desktop distribution since somewhere around Mandrake 7.3 (ie: the first graphical installer that actually worked that I dealt with).

      Basically, what I'm saying is I fail to see where FC stands out above other distributions that would make me want to use it. Granted, after the general buginess I experienced with FC2, I may be biased, but the whole point is the fact that I wasn't having similar issues with the other distributions, so why should I have to put up with them with FC?

      • Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ajs ( 35943 ) <{moc.sja} {ta} {sja}> on Monday November 15, 2004 @08:54AM (#10819317) Homepage Journal
        It's not that FC is a bad distribution, per se, it's just that I fail to see anything particularly special about it.

        Best endorsement of Fedora I've ever heard! Hey, if you want the shiny-things OS go buy a Mac. If you're looking for the logical successor to the free Red Hat Linux distribution (which was never "particularly special"), Fedora is your choice.

        You CAN tweak the hell out of FC3 and get it to look and feel very pretty, but the important things to most long-time RHL and Fedora users are careful integration of new features combined with a smooth transition from previous releases. I get all of the above from FC3.

      • Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Kingpin ( 40003 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @08:55AM (#10819325) Homepage
        It should be the distro that "just works". I want an abstraction above my hardware so no Debian or Gentoo for me.

        Ubuntu is just the next new kid on the desktop block - just like Xandros, it's a lot of promise, but lack of finish.

        Although it's becoming fashion that we have to pay for Linux, I don't want to - so no Novell Linux Desktop for me.

        FC is based on 10 generations of RedHat releases, in my book that counts for quite a bit - even if it takes a little time for the releases to stabilize.

        I'll use it as a server OS, ie. no X. I don't have to pay. The installer is great. The packages plenty.

        • Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:3, Informative)

          by Slack3r78 ( 596506 )
          Here's the thing, most of the newer distros I've dealt with "just work." In fact, I specifically mentioned Dropline Gnome because DG 2.8 paired up with Kernel 2.6.9 is the most impressive thing I've seen when it comes to desktop Linux I've ever seen, going back to when I got into the scene around '98.

          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 b

      • Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:3, Informative)

        by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
        There is nothing special about Fedora except that it just works.
        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 serve

  • Size? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by News for nerds ( 448130 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @06:47AM (#10818696) Homepage
    Everytime I see those Fedora releases I'm overwhelmed by the DVD size download. Why don't you make a stripped down version with the CD size a la Firefox?

    • Re:Size? (Score:5, Informative)

      by prefect42 ( 141309 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @06:49AM (#10818701)
      AFAIK a minimal install only uses the first CD. A default workstation install uses three, but barely touches the last. I don't know what a default desktop install uses.
      • If it's anything like the old redhat releases, it'd annoyingly only use the third CD if you're not using a US keyboard or region. Pain in the arse to download the whole third CD just because one single region-specific package is on it... Can't remember which .RPM it was though, sorry...

    • Re:Size? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cerberusss ( 660701 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @06:51AM (#10818704) Journal
      I'm overwhelmed by the DVD size download

      Well, don't download the DVD in the first place. Download the three CDs with the .torrent file that's provided.

      • Re:Size? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        So where's the 1 CD version?

        Surely they can do what Microsoft can with their bloated Windows XP?

        Damn multi-CD distros not using the fact we're *gasp* usually connected to the Internet and can download what we want.
      • The issue here is that it does require 3 CDs worth of downloading. It would be nice if they could provide a single CD install with the most common stuff an then the ability to download extra iso's of programs if you so wish.

        While a lot of people won't care about it, those with lesser connections do.
    • The stripped down version is CD 1, which allows you to do a "minimal" install.

      Fedora is a testbed for RedHat Enterprise Linux. As such, it tends to have a lot of cutting edge tools, which get tested and refined into things that are worth putting into RHEL. That's how RedHat justifies doing this completely "free" release but providing to consumer grade support.

      The result is not bad. Patches are fast, feature additions are fast and furious, and they do seem to be listening to complaints in their bugzilla qu

  • Talking of Remote Desktop (Score:5, Interesting)

    by iamnotacrook ( 816556 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @06:54AM (#10818714)
    Theres a feature which works remarkably well under Windows XP, much faster and seamlessly than most remote X window logins. I'm not surprised they want to call that feature by the same name. Strange considering that network transparency is supposed to be X's strongpoint.
    • this is the same protocal, and can connect to windowsXP hosts. this is RDP not VNC or remote X

    • Re:Talking of Remote Desktop (Score:4, Insightful)

      by l3v1 ( 787564 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @07:16AM (#10818804)
      much faster and seamlessly than most remote X window logins

      Unfortunately (i.e. for Windows) that's not all someone wants from remote sessions. What I want e.g. is to allow many users concurrently logged on and using the machine through different X sessions, happily and joyfuly, and without needing to pay for a bag of licenses for being able to accomplish all this.

      I'm not surprised they want to call that feature by the same name

      Just a name won't buy them fame. What already has brought that fame was the possibility to have graphical truly multiuser remote sessions long before MS started to think about adding network support.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Besides, terminal server has been out for years, if that's what you need.

          No, it's not :) Windows "developing" (as in evolution :) ) pretty pricey terminal services solutions in the last decade won't make me switch my ways of thinking about the capabilities of *nix/Linux network solutions.

    • It's not a Fedora thing at all. It's part of Gnome 2.8 and it works very well.
    • My favourite part about the Remote Desktop the fact that it's like screen(1) in that I can start an application and then leave it running while I disconnect from it. Then when I have moved to another location I can connect and the application is running right where I left it.
    • From the screenshots it looks like they're using vncserver/vncviewer to accomplish this.

      My understanding is that this requires that you use the Xvnc X server, and then probably attach to it locally via a regular X server. This is probably NOT accellerated at all for particular hardware, and requires that you run two X servers (which has to add at least a little overhead).

      I contemplated this setup at home so that I could seemlessly access my X session from another windows-based computer at home if the KVM

    • Theres a feature which works remarkably well under Windows XP, much faster and seamlessly than most remote X window logins. I'm not surprised they want to call that feature by the same name. Strange considering that network transparency is supposed to be X's strongpoint.

      Odd, I consider it just the reverse.

      Using windows built-in tools, it appears to be impossible to share just one application window.

      Almost every linux/unix install has ssh, which makes it trivial to remotely launch an application

  • Lack of Java rpms and other stuff (Score:5, Informative)

    by suso ( 153703 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @06:56AM (#10818723) Journal
    As I found out the hard way over this past weekend, they left out all the java and java related rpms that FC2 had.

    Are they using two different development teams for Fedora the way RedHat did for the x.1 and x.[02] releases?

    • Re:Lack of Java rpms and other stuff (Score:5, Informative)

      by Nailer ( 69468 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @07:10AM (#10818779)
      Are you sure FC2 included Java packages? Such items are usually included on an extras CD, but shouldn't be part of FC unless their licensing permits them to - unlikely to be the case with the 2 popular closed-source JVMs.

      That saiud, the Java Packaging Project (which includes some Red Hat staff) have repositories for FC.

  • Windows HDD Killing Bug? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 15, 2004 @06:57AM (#10818726)
    Can anyone confirm whether or not this version still has the bug which makes NTFS partitions unbootable without some serious recovery work? I nuked my system with FC2 and would not like to deal with the same issues again if I decide to try FC3.

    Also, have they got IEE1394 working yet? It wasn't turned on by default in FC2, I know, because of some bugs..

  • Worth the upgrade? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by smartin ( 942 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @06:58AM (#10818731)
    I upgraded from Core 2 on the weekend and in a word, yes. It's very polished, all of my complaints with Core 2 seem to have been fixed, specifically burning CDs. It even recognized my firewire DVD burner and was able to burn a data dvd on the first try. The only nit so far is that the NVidia drivers (downloaded from NVidia) don't work. Appearently there is a work around for this and I am sure that it will be corrected soon.

    • Re:Worth the upgrade? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Soko ( 17987 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @07:14AM (#10818793) Homepage
      The nvidia failure can be due to 2 things:

      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:
      [root@rsd800fc3 ~]# modprobe nvidia
      [root@rsd800fc3 ~]# cp -a /dev/nvidia* /etc/udev/devices
      [root@rsd800fc3 ~]# chown root.root /etc/udev/devices/nvidia*
      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
    • I was in the exact same boat. CD burning never worked in FC2, unless I wanted to manually run mkisofs and cdrecord from Bash. It works fine in FC3 with the built-in CD/DVD Creator, and with K3B.

      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 scre
  • I realise I'm going against the more-windows-than-windows trend these days, but I really don't want fancy install screens , pull down menus and all other eye candy junk when I do an install. I just want a nice clean simple text based interface that asks me what I want to install then just gets on with it (ie like Slackware). A friend on mine tried to install mandrake 10.1 but because he was a wierd video card and mandrake (apparently) insists on using a GUI installer he kept getting unexplained crashes. Wel
    • The irony is he only wanted the linux box as a samba server anyway so the GUI side was a complete irrelevance!

      I was just wondering, if all he needed was a samba server, what reason was there for choosing Mandrake?

      And anyway, if you don't like it don't use it. There are plenty of other distros to try.
    • As the other replier stated you can install without the GUI, in fact when I installed Mandrake 10.1CE on my recently aquired (for free) Gateway 2000 G6-266 (pentium2 266mhz with 32mb edo ram) it automagically loaded the non-gui install without giving me an option to choose. Took forever to install compared to my other boxes, but it finished without a hitch.
    • Hate to reply twice, but in RH8 you could use the "linux text" option from the cd to install without the GUI, IIRC. I don't know if you can still do this with Fedora though, since I use Gentoo.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Whatabout reading?

      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

  • Phew! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by RWerp ( 798951 )
    GNOME 2.8? KDE 3.3? Evolution 2.0? Firefox? http://www.pld-linux.org/ [pld-linux.org] got there first...

    • Re:Phew! (Score:3, Funny)

      by LnxAddct ( 679316 )
      SElinux? Kernel 2.6.9? Improved Wireless utilities? A ton of other things including a professional and consistent feel despite the desktop environment being used? Fedora got there better;)
      Regards,
      Steve

  • Can't stand it (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gambit Thirty-Two ( 4665 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @07:00AM (#10818741)
    I installed it on a fresh xeon 2.6ghz and I was abhorred at the slowdown. FC2 was a LOT faster than this is.

    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

  • This article contains next to no useful info (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nailer ( 69468 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @07:07AM (#10818769)
    Frankly, a whole bunch of numbered image files does not make for a Fedora review. Personally, I can't even bother sorting through them all.

    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. /dev only includes devices that actually exist in your system. This is kinda nice. e2labelas deprecated, as there's now a whole bunch of ways to uniquely refer to devices rather than just their label. This is good for people who hot plug a lot of devices.

    - 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 /bin/sh, it runs as Old School Bourne shell.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @07:22AM (#10818831)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Actually, the parent could be improved too... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Nailer ( 69468 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @07:28AM (#10818852)
      Cause it had nothing negative to say... so here's the bad stuff about Fedora, from someone who uses it, knows it well, and still likes it moe than other distros:

      - Lack of a good GUI config tool installing packages. Ideally, system-config-packages should use up2date (rhn/yum/apt/dir) repositories to pull its packages from. Synaptic's the closest thing, but it only works with apt repositories.

      - As painful as it seems for the Gnome guys to either test this out or believe anyone who says so, most users disable spatial Nautilus. This should be done by default. However otherwise the Gnome on FC3 feels great, particularly the file associations and launcher editing tools.

      - Garret no longer works for Red Hat. Hence the new wallpaper for FC3 is kinda ugly compared to previous masterpieces.

      - Needs a default sudoers file that allows particular groups of commands (but not all) to be run with root privileges by paricular users. I checked this into bugzilla so it should be there for the next release.

      - General Linux stuff. Eg, I'd like the re-architected X servers fd.o are proposing - where X sits on top of OpenGL drivers - the only driver necessary to run a card. This involves replacing the current X drivers tho. It'll happen, but it'll take a long time...

  • Documentation? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by barcodez ( 580516 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @07:07AM (#10818770)
    Seriously, this is the first thing I check nowadays when evaluating software. If the documentation is bad you can wasted days, weeks, months trying to resolve problems - frankly I value my time too much. So can those in the know profer some opinions on the quality of the documentation?

  • I experienced some problems with Fedora Core 3 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 15, 2004 @07:13AM (#10818788)
    FC3 is really fast on my Athlon 1.4Ghz Thunderbird and it has really good font rendering but I experienced some hurdles:

    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.
    • i will attempt to address some of your gripes.

      mp3s: yes by default fc cannot play mp3s. this is due to patent issues and those same issues are the reason that fc doesnt include ntfs support either. honestly fc isnt for the normal home user, never was. if you want mp3 playback you can use the apt/yum repositories from either rpm.livna.org or freshrpms.net, your pick (they may not be fully populated yet, but if not they will be soon).

      mplayer: mplayer can be downloaded from both of the repositories mentio
    • I tried to build ReZound http//rezound.sf.net/ but it failed to compile [...] Neither does Audacity

      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 an
    • To address most of your problems:
      Fedora Core 3 Installation Guide [mjmwired.net]
      MPlayer Fedora Guide [mjmwired.net]

  • Evolution 2.0 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fpedraza ( 757989 )
    Included in FC3, has less features than the 1.4 series and it's not (IMO) nearly as beautiful. Is it possible to downgrade? Has anybody tried?

  • upgrades are stupid and pointless (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @07:26AM (#10818847)
    What is the point of upgrading, really? I mean, if the software offers a substantial, useful upgrade, then go for it. However, if you're just doing it for more widgets and later version with minimal changes, what's the point?

    There's a negligible difference between Mandrake 10.x and Debian Sid or Sarge. One is supposedly cutting edge, while debian gets hell for being 'behind'. The only 'behind' I see is that debian doesn't tend to set everything for the user up automatically - good or bad, your call. That's all

    I really see in new releases of distros like mandrake and fedora - more automation and 'seamless' operation for the newbie type. That's all good, I guess, if you're looking to get Windows-like acceptance and saturation one day, but I guess it's not for me. Hell, I don't even use hotplug because it irritates me. *g*

  • Stability (Score:5, Interesting)

    by roalt ( 534265 ) <slashdot.org@ r o a l t . com> on Monday November 15, 2004 @07:28AM (#10818854) Homepage Journal
    I'm pretty interested in the stability of this release: FC2 was one of the worst, even with all yum updates. Okay, it works okay for desktop usage (I still use it), but as server or as workstation it crashes a bit too much.

    I really-really hope that we can get stability back from version 7.2-7.3 which were still the best 'red hat' releases when it comes to stability.

    • Re:Stability (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Alan Cox ( 27532 )
      FC2 is basically straight 2.6 - the earlker 2.6 has had a few problems as you'd expect from new code. 2.6.9 is getting pretty solid now. It tends to depend what drivers you run more than on core load.

      14:37:45 up 66 days, 5:47, 1 user, load average: 9.80, 10.33, 12.20

      Thats FC2 on a big FTP server that's still being hammered by FC3 downloads.

      14:34:34 up 447 days, 4:38, 2 users, load average: 0.07, 0.02, 0.00

      Another box thats better secured so hasn't had to have a kernel update recently - running

      • Re:Stability (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Pros_n_Cons ( 535669 )
        Also I believe sourceforge switched from Debian to FC2 to serve up those TB's of data. That should show Fedora is pretty stable. Atleast more stable than It's given credit for.

  • Something to think about (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    before people start complaining about stability and features, FC is a developer oriented experimental type OS. it's not meant to be as "polished" or have as many neat stable features as other distros, this is a test platform.

    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.

  • No (on my PC) (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Val314 ( 219766 )
    i had Fedora 2 on this PC (and Fedora 3 Test2) installed, both worked fine, but Fedora 3 final refuses to boot.

    i have tried an upgrade, fresh install (ereased and recreated all partitions), nothing helped. it stopped everytime at different points in the boot process.

    PC is a P4C 2.8 GHz, i865PE, 512 MB Ram, Geforce 4Ti so nothing really special about it

    this my be isolated to my PC or not, but stuff like this stopps People from trying Linux. (i'm not really sure if i should re-install Fedora 2)

  • Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Linux (Score:5, Funny)

    by Proudrooster ( 580120 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @07:44AM (#10818925) Homepage
    Last week Jon Stewart started the Daily show with this (It summarizes nearly every Linux/Windows thread on Slashdot):
    If you're ever looking to start a fight.
    If you're ever looking to just to get into a real riotus situation, where you are sure violence must happen, just shout "I love a Linux based system that can plug into USB, but doesn't have the RAM of my ass!"

    I don't know what any of it means, but clearly other people do and have very strong opinions about it. You put the Google people next to the MSN search people and the whole f*cking thing explodes.
    Jon Stewart Daily Show 11/11/04 (It's still on the Bit Torrents, if you want to see it.)

  • Red Hat is apparently no longer cool (Score:5, Informative)

    by digitect ( 217483 ) <(digitect) (at) (dancingpaper.com)> on Monday November 15, 2004 @07:51AM (#10818948)

    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.

    • Couldn't have said it better myself. We Fedora Core (1,2,3) users that are happy never, or seldom, complain.
      We all use our distro of choise and are quite happy with it. If you're not happy with distro X then change to Y or Z. Don't blame the distro-maker for a distro that don't fit YOUR individual needs.

      Remember that this is our strenth, not weakness; the flora of choise!

    • Re:Red Hat is apparently no longer cool (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RichDice ( 7079 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @08:41AM (#10819244)
      There are no dark corners of breakage, everything Just Works(TM).

      Whenever someone says this about a distro, it is apparent to me that they have nice shiney happy friendly hardware. So many times I have taken a friend at face value when they've told me about the sweet time they're having with some new random distro (Ubuntu, most recently) and so I go off and spend an hour installing it... and then a weekend fucking around with rescue disks trying to recover some semblance of functionality out of my Laptop From Hell.

      Try saying this instead: It worked for me, but your mileage may vary.

      Cheers,
      Richard

  • FC3 on my laptop (Score:3, Informative)

    by FrostedWheat ( 172733 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @08:44AM (#10819261)
    I installed this over the weekend on my slow 333MHz laptop, and I have to say it's really quite nippy. Definitly faster than FC2.

  • Not really at all worth the upgrade on Desktops... (Score:3, Informative)

    by cybrthng ( 22291 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @08:47AM (#10819280) Homepage Journal
    I've given FC1, 2 and 3 a try on everything from my XP2400 to my Athlon64 3400 and its grossly over-hyped and grossly under polished for a desktop system.

    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.

  • Coral Cache Link (Score:3, Informative)

    by Abjifyicious ( 696433 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @10:03AM (#10819848)
    Since the site is getting bogged down and nobody's posted one of these that I've noticed, here's a

    Coral Cache Link [nyud.net]

  • You can upgrade without the .iso/.torrents (Score:3, Informative)

    by BrianWCarver ( 569070 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @10:45AM (#10820230) Homepage
    If you are already running Fedora Core 2, then you can use yum to upgrade to Core 3. (yum is like apt.)

    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 .isos.

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