Fedora Core 3: Worth The Upgrade? 498
Chris writes "With new features such as SELinux, GNOME 2.8, KDE 3.3, Evolution 2.0, Remote Desktop, Helix Player, and of course Firefox, it may be worth your while to make the switch. At OSDir our screenshot tour of Fedora Core 3 takes you through boot, installation, desktop, taskbar, menus, configuration, and the new features of this new release. Our Core 3 screenshot tours have taken you through Test 1, 2, 3, and now the final release. Check it out."
Size? (Score:5, Interesting)
Talking of Remote Desktop (Score:5, Interesting)
Worth the upgrade? (Score:5, Interesting)
Phew! (Score:2, Interesting)
Vanilla GNOME? (Score:1, Interesting)
Looks a lot better, at least in my opinion.
Re:SuSE (Score:4, Interesting)
You have no idea how quickly I switched to RH8.
Re:I don't want pretty menus on install (Score:2, Interesting)
Evolution 2.0 (Score:2, Interesting)
upgrades are stupid and pointless (Score:3, Interesting)
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*
Actually, the parent could be improved too... (Score:5, Interesting)
- 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...
Stability (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
No (on my PC) (Score:2, Interesting)
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)
Re:Talking of Remote Desktop (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
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:buy CDs (Score:3, Interesting)
I need a new server OS soon, and I'm a bit fed up with RedHat's obsolescence program - ie every time I install a RH OS, its obsolete in what seems like a few months.
Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
no justification (Score:3, Interesting)
So, every time I wanted to install something I had to spend hours looking up shit on rpm.pbone and hoping I could find all the packages it needed to solve the dependancies. Even with urpmi (which is inarguably better than basic RPM) it was not uncommon for the installer to get completely stumped and either give up or just mangle the OS. The times I tried to upgrade gnome resulted in my having to perform a complete reinstall over the mess it made of my desktop. and because I use an encrypted userland it NEVER shut down because of the way it (and last I tried, RH) deals with encrypted partitions (although that's another unrelated point I mention it because I find it hilarious they've apparently been given a bunch of money to develop a "secure linux" - good luck France, you're gonna need it.)
With ubuntu "upgrades" are about two clicks and a lotta downloading away. If you're on a broadband link I doubt you'd ever have to reinstall, because the package installer is so very reliable. It's not perfect, but compared to RPM it's like running linux in seven league boots.
Re:Can't stand it (Score:5, Interesting)
> FC2 was a LOT faster than this is.
Odd. On my Athlon 2200, FC3 seems about 50% faster. I'm fairly light on memory though, so it could just something like that.
c.
Re:I experienced some problems with Fedora Core 3 (Score:3, Interesting)
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 mentioned above so you dont have to compile it if you dont want to.
java: so install java rpms?
ide/scsi issue: dont know what to tell you on this one, i dont have a scsi cdrom drive to test with to see if i can come up with a work around.
network: set a static ip on eth0 and see if it works that way, horrid work around i know, but it should speed up boot time as it wont be looking for a dhcp server.
cant help you with rezound nor audacity, i can try them later and see what happens for me, but offhand the only thing i can think of is that they might have build dependencies you dont have installed or they might not like the version of gcc on fc3. what sort of errors do you get?
Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:2, Interesting)
Took my laptop back to FC1 after trying FC3 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Red Hat is apparently no longer cool (Score:2, Interesting)
I have 13 PCs of varying snapshots of historical technologies and there's NO version of any distro that works with all of them properly.
Fedora Core 3 says in the release notes it was compiled for the latest and greatest P4 processor. Well, that leaves 80% of current users out.
Normally, in a situation like this I would suggest Gentoo since you can choose your installation arch from the installation CD, but until they find a way to safely auto-append all the config files without user intervention, I can't say it's perfect. (It's faster than the roadrunner on speed, tho!)
Re:Stability (Score:3, Interesting)
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 FC2 but still the FC1 kernel since when it booted FC2 wasn't out.
So it certainly can be pretty solid.
Re:Can't stand it (Score:5, Interesting)
We're working on it [redhat.com].
Re:Size? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Size? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Beef? You Want Beef? (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing you may want to try. If you are not on an IPv6 network, you may want to disable IPv6 in
Even though this is still for FC2, this site still has some good information:
Unofficial Fedora FAQ [fedorafaq.org]
Re:Kitchen Sink (Score:3, Interesting)
Major, major annoynance: people comment on those god damned installers like they install their OS every day! What the hell is wrong with them?
For Christ's sake people! Use the minimum install (no GUI), wget and install apt-get or yum and then install whatever you want. What exactly is not to like about this simple procedure?
Mostly good (Score:2, Interesting)
The install went smoothly. Everything looks nice. I had no errors or odd messages on first boot. I've been using Redhat since before Fedora and I have to say that the system is evolving nicely over time.
Here is a true testament to how things have improved: I ran a fresh install, logged in, loaded OpenOffice Writer and printed a document to my printer without having to ever configure or look at any printer settings of any kind! As a long-time GNU/Linux user, that really WOWed me. Wrestling with the printer had always been a right of passage on any new install.
I have run into a few things that annoy me...
1. NVIDIA driver trouble - lots of people are having them. The video driver will not load at boot time. I have to boot at runlevel 3, load the driver manually and then switch to runlevel 5. I could just load it with a custom script at startup but I think this issue will be resolved soon, so I'm just going to live with it for now.
My NIC suddenly stopped working. I'm not sure if it was because I booted into a different OS and then switched back or what. I installed the closed-source NForce driver for the NIC and the integrated sound. The NIC works fine, but for some reason the open source driver still gets loaded. I can't figure out what is loading it. It's not hurting anything though. Similarly, both sound drivers were being loaded. I'm still using the open-source one because it's working fine but I can't figure out how to get the nvidia one to stop loading.
2. SELinux and ntpd - There's a bug in the SELinux policy that prevents ntpd from doing it's job. Supposedly, it's fixed but I'm waiting for the fix to be officially released. I suppose I could learn a little about SELinux policies and fix it myself but there is only so much time in the day.
3. OpenOffice.org - printing Envelopes arg! Printing envelopes has been a pain in my ass on every system I have ever used, regardless of Hardware, OS, or Word Processing software. Not really a FC issue.
4. USB 2.0 storage device in a system with only USB 1.1 controller - doesn't work. It's recognized, but not loading the usb-storage driver. The same hardware works with a different OS and the device works with FC in a box with a 2.0 controller. Had this same problem with FC2, btw.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with FC3. Considering, I jumped on it the day it was released, I've had very few issues.
-Jason
Re:Stability (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:upgrades are stupid and pointless (Score:2, Interesting)
Not worth the upgrade... (Score:2, Interesting)
Worth The Upgrade?
No.
I usually upgrade my distro only when the libc/XFree/any core library start to become really obsolete.
I changed my slackware 3.x for RedHat 6.2 when too many application needed libc6 instead of libc5 and XFree was compiled for libc5 so it was not reentrant/thread compliant.
Then, I upgraded my RedHat 6.2 with RedHat 8.0, for almost the same reason: get XFree 4, new libc6 and mozilla started using gtk2, i guess, so I had to recompile it myself but I had not enough horse power to do it.
My last upgrade was with Fedora Core 1 and at work I still have a RedHat 9 that can run most of the actual software.
So I guess Fedoca Core 3 is not really worth an upgrade for me.