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."
Screenshot tour? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lot more to an OS than the damn window manager!
Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:3, Insightful)
But thats what most newbies (who come from windows) seem to care right now...
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: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?
Re:Kitchen Sink (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a geek. I like to tinker, but I still want a working computer where I can run an installation program, and everything is configured for me, ready to go. I don't want to have to manually grab all sorts of packages to make my machine usable.
My employer develops embedded software in Linux. My manager pays me to develop software, not install operating systems. We're a small company and don't have time to have somebody roll something out for the developers to use.
Since I'm the software developer most familiar with Linux, the questions come to me when something doesn't work. Because of this, I gave Fedora Core 3 a shot, and it seems that the other developers like it. We're now standardizing on it, because:
1. I can show somebody else how to start the installer, and they can figure it out on their own (assuming a new PC, no special partitioning)
2. It includes everything we need
3. Everything (mostly) has a consistent look and feel
4. It's easy to keep up date (once apt-get comes out for FC3, if it's not present already)
5. For the most part, it just works! (Lindows doesn't work well, despite it's claims, as one of the developers found out.)
It just has to work and install the software that we need to get our work done.
-- Joe
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?
Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:3, Insightful)
I would disagree with that. There are distributions with different approaches and different trade-offs, but "better"? No.
Plus, it has been acknowledged as a testbed for RH Enterprise distro's, so you can't exactly hope for rock solid stability.
I don't see how that follows. If, by rock-solid stability, you mean "nothing ever changes", then yes, you're correct. If you mean "software works out of the box," then I can't agree. I have yet to find anything in FC3 that behaves out of specification. The problems I've had have been related to the performance of spam checking in E2 (not a stability issue); the brokeness of the NVidia binary driver (not an FC3 issue, and not even SHIPPED with FC3); and the lack of portability of some FC1-2 apps (again, not an FC3 issue).
I have yet to see a (OS-wide, or application-specific) crash since I loaded FC3 (saw some under FC3test3). Actually, that's a lie. What's more accurate is that I've yet to see a crash in a component that shipped on the FC3 media... other things I added, HAVE crashed once or twice.
Other than people who are forced to keep Red Hat legacy systems[...]
I am not forced to run FC3, and it suits my needs. Your milage may vary, and that's fine.
Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Freedesktop.org's HAL, while still immature and definitely not without bugs, essentially turned Linux into a completely different OS from a desktop perspective for me. The nasty supermount hacks are replaced by CD automounting that works like it should, hardware autoconfigures itself, config files are handled on their own. It's really amazing how different my ease of use was after a simple system update.
As far as NLD goes, the only thing you have to pay for are the Red Carpet updates, the OS itself is free for download. I'm sure free updates will spring up from the community much like they did with RH, and the distribution itself is so polished that it really does add to the sense that FC is somehow lacking something. And it's based on a history of SuSe releases almost as lengthy as FC's.
Re:Screenshot tour? (Score:3, Informative)
Debian is nice but you have to use unstable and testing if you want anything that is up to date.
Mandrake is nice also URPMI is a great tool. I recomend it highly except I did not feel all that comfortable when using it without X.
Fedora I like. YUM is a good tool for updating and installing software. I have found it super stable. I have had no real problems with it. It is free and comunity driven. Suse is also a good distro for desktop and servers. I find it odd that you are dissing Fedora because it just works.
Re: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:Beef? You Want Beef? (Score:3, Informative)
alias net-pf-10 off
alias ipv6 off
Not absolutely sure if the second line HAS to be there, but the first one does.
Size? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Size? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Size? (Score:2)
Re:Size? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Size? (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.
Re:Size? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Size? (Score:5, Informative)
Mod parent +1 blasphemy (Score:5, Funny)
reason to download several gigs of things I don't use, such as emacs
Without emacs your computer will crash.
Re:Size? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not everyone has high-speed internet you know.
Re:Size? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Size? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Size? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Size? (Score:2)
While a lot of people won't care about it, those with lesser connections do.
Re:Size? (Score:2)
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 quite well and fixing them ASAP.
Talking of Remote Desktop (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Talking of Remote Desktop (Score:2)
Re:Talking of Remote Desktop (Score:2)
Re:Talking of Remote Desktop (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Talking of Remote Desktop (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Talking of Remote Desktop (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's not
Re:Talking of Remote Desktop (Score:2)
Re:Talking of Remote Desktop (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Talking of Remote Desktop (Score:5, Informative)
Screen is not graphical but instead a pts (pseudo-terminal) multiplexer. Meaning a background process sits inbetween your pts port and your real terminal. "Screen" accepts all output (logs some fraction and dumps history-overflow), such that the underlying applications have no ability to determine whether there's a physical terminal at the other end or not. By accepting all input, it prevents applications from pausing once 2k of stdout has been queued but not sent/accepted. It's similar to redirection output to
Another feature of screen is similar to "virtual desktop". Since you have a multiplexer, "screen" allows a single physical terminal to switch between multiple pts channels.. So if you have a dial-up-modem (direct terminal, not TCP/IP), you can have dozens of different "windows" with different applications running in each (multiple vi windows, several command prompts, several log files, etc). If the modem hangs up, you dial back in, and type "screen -r", and you're back as if nothing had happened. You're alternative was to run all applications with "nohup myapp myargs" and if the modem hung up, then stdout would be redirected to a file.. This way you don't lose the output or have an interruption in say a slow compilation. But the problem is that you can't regain interactive access to a something like vi window. (Course, text editors have their own recovery capabilities).
So the original poster was trying to say that they wanted these incredibly valuable features in a graphical form. vnc and rdesktop allow a user that has their network connection broken to be reconnected without the underlying graphical applications ever being made aware of the interruption. With X and a static IP-address, there are time-out issues. And more commonly we move to different machines or different access points and thus necessarily can not recover a graphical session with X.
X was designed as client-server with state. It is this state that necessarily prevents it from acting like VNC or rdesktop. "screen", vnc, and rdesktop keeps it state on the machine with the running application. X keeps the state on the machine with the physical monitor/keyboard/mouse. I believe the original idea of this design decision was to distribute resources. The application server only performs tasks related to function, not display. Graphics becomes simply the ability to handle events and send graphical commands to a network access point. The terminal is then responsible for all resources related to interpreting graphical commands. This is similar to the postscript paradigm. postscript is a series of "logo" like commands (draw a box from this point to this point), and the printing resource determins how to render the fonts/color schemes, etc. Unlike postscript, however, X graphical commands aren't encapsulatable into a portable relocatable format since there is bidirectional communication going on.
Another particular of X is its peer-application structure. To run X, in addition to the terminal software and the physical applications, you need a font-server and a window manager. While this is great for pluggability (and even clusterability; running a single-threaded graphical program across 4 different machines), it necessarily provides greater latency for even simple tasks.
vnc merely adds a multiplexing layer to the back-end of X or windows, just like screen. So vnc necessarily adds a layer of overhead to the graphical process. More importantly there is an impeedence mismatch between the graphical transport of vnc and that of X. X is designed to send postscript-like graphical commands (draw a square of this size fi
Re:Talking of Remote Desktop (Score:2)
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 on my linux box was in use already, but I decided it probably wasn't worth the pain especially with the extra overhead and probable loss of accelleration.
Now, since Fedora is aimed at business users maybe the loss of accelleration is no big deal. For a server they would probably be accessing the server remotely anyway.
The problem with X11 is that the seamless network interface works real well in one direction - launching a remote application on your local screen. What it doesn't do well is taking a remote application already attached to a remote screen, and moving the window to a local screen - at least not without some support for this built into the individual application. You can always kill the app and re-launch it, and for many well-built apps this is fine since they'll checkpoint on a SIGTERM and launch gracefully.
On the other hand, if you have an app which doesn't save state open on one computer with 12 unsaved open, and you want to continue browsing from a different computer, then you're kind of out-of-luck unless you have something like vnc.
Re:Talking of Remote Desktop (Score:3, Insightful)
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 over a secure connection, and that application's window will be a native part of the desktop as far as window decoration goes[1]. Ssh also makes it rather trivial to tunnel an x application through many firewalls.
Ne'ermind that X is multiuser. RDP is limited to one. X, without any add on tools, seems a lot more capable of client/server setups, while under windows you need additional commercial software to do so.
RDP has some nice features -- bandwidth usage is a lot more efficient, while under X even the low bandwidth proxy is not as efficient. And some people find it easier to setup then X.
Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. For what I use it for, X seems to be more "polished".
That is my opinion.
Slightly OT: Reading how windows is so much better then linux in the usability department only leads to my disappointment down the road. I end up using the rare MS Windows machine, and I find a cut & paste problem, or something ends up near impossible to do, etc. I keep expecting the greatest thing since sliced bread, and I find that windows is just another OS, still flawed in its latest release.
[1] Cut & paste beyond plain text is still a problem though.
Lack of Java rpms and other stuff (Score:5, Informative)
Are they using two different development teams for Fedora the way RedHat did for the x.1 and x.[02] releases?
Re:Lack of Java rpms and other stuff (Score:5, Informative)
That saiud, the Java Packaging Project (which includes some Red Hat staff) have repositories for FC.
Windows HDD Killing Bug? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, have they got IEE1394 working yet? It wasn't turned on by default in FC2, I know, because of some bugs..
Re:Windows HDD Killing Bug? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Windows HDD Killing Bug? (Score:5, Informative)
It's no problem however if you follow instructions on this [lwn.net] page.
Re:Windows HDD Killing Bug? (Score:3, Insightful)
Worth the upgrade? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Worth the upgrade? (Score:5, Informative)
You have SELinux turned on. I've set mine to "Warn" until I understand it just a bit better. If you didn't turn it on, keep reading.
Once SELinux is disabled, run these in order:Should fix you up. The reason AFAICT is that the NVIDIA driver is not aware of udev, which FC3 now uses.
BTW, NVIDIA released a new driver the evening FC3 was released - go get that too : 1.0-6629 [nvidia.com]
Soko
Re:Worth the upgrade? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Worth the upgrade? (Score:5, Informative)
Soko
Re:Worth the upgrade? (Score:2, Informative)
The NVidia driver is only a real problem because of "UDEV" or whatever it's called. I guess it's supposed to dynamically load all the drivers at boot time, but it won't load them unless they were a part of the initial driver installation. If your machine is hanging at "Configuring Kernel Parameters" on the boot screen, run the FC3 rescue CD, mount your root filesystem and do (or whatever your favorite editor is)
Locate the line that points to your current FC3 installation, remove "rhgb", and change the 5 to 3, so that instead of trying to load the graphical boot and go to runlevel 5, it will put you in a runlevel 3 terminal. Save your changes, exit, remove the CD, and restart your machine. Boot into FC3, and you should be at your terminal. Log in as root, and do this:If you want, after that is finished you can edit your
Now if only they would include kernel source in a default installation, it would be almost perfect.
I don't want pretty menus on install (Score:2)
Re:I don't want pretty menus on install (Score:2)
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.
Re:I don't want pretty menus on install (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I don't want pretty menus on install (Score:2)
Re:I don't want pretty menus on install (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:2)
Re:I don't want pretty menus on install (Score:3, Informative)
The first splash screen on boot from the CD says "Press F1 for options". Press 'F1' to access a (text) screen where you can read that typing "text" will start the installer in text mode.
And this is all explained in the Installation Documentation from all Mandrake releases.
I know that reading is an arcane science. However, you should try it.
Peace
Phew! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Phew! (Score:3, Funny)
Regards,
Steve
Can't stand it (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not talking of booting into X and doing things in there. I'm talking just getting to a login prompt and attempting to sign on.
I'll go back to slackware before I load FC3 again
Re: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:Can't stand it (Score:5, Interesting)
We're working on it [redhat.com].
This article contains next to no useful info (Score:5, Informative)
I run Fedora Rawhide on my laptop. This would be the equivalent of say, Debian Unstable. So I have a good idea of what FC3 offers...
- Bluecurve theme finally covers everything.In particular, Firefox and OpenOffice look like every other KDE or Gnome app.
- If what I've seen in the RHEL 4 beta is the same for Fedora, partitioning now uses LVM by default. There's a new GUI LVM config tool called 'system-config-lvm' in Rawhide to provide the post-install disk resizing. Additionally, online resizing with ext3 should work and, if you use RHEL, be supported.
- Firefox and Thunderbird.
- SELinux turned on, including policies for locking down Apache, Bind, and NIS. A GUI config tool is provided for this.
- There's apparently improvements to yum which I'm not sure about. Personally, I'm a fan of up2date, which can use directories full of packages (without needing index files) as one of its sources.
- Udev.
- HelixPlayer is now included by default.
- Bash 3 - not much difference for me, apart from the new inbuilt range system that obsoletes the old 'seq' command. If you call it as
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Comment removed (Score:2)
ACLs (Score:2)
- When listing a dir, 'ls' shows a + next to the permissions on files that have ACLs.
- The command 'getfacl' shows a files ACLs, and 'setfacl' allows you to change them.
- The GUI to change them doesn't exist. There's an entry in Bugzilla for 'ability to see / edit access control lists' though.
Documentation? (Score:5, Insightful)
I experienced some problems with Fedora Core 3 (Score:5, Informative)
My system has both EIDE devices and SCSI devices. If I use eg. my EIDE cdrom drive I cannot use my SCSI cdrw drive anymore as this system seems to use the ide-scsi emulation layer per default. The SCSI cdrw is only detected by Nautilus if I put a cd into it (I don't like these autostarters)
I tried to build ReZound http//rezound.sf.net/ [slashdot.org] but it failed to compile
Neither does Audacity
When compiling MPlayer it fails to build with GUI and it fails to play sound if you playback a video
These are problems which I don't have with my other SuSE system (on the same machine)
JAVA: I don't like to have gcj installed instead of a real JVM
MP3: none of the installed sound tools can play or record MP3 files
The eth0 device is automatically detected but the DSL configuration doesn't configure eth0 to be used with pppd. As a result the kernel tries to start eth0 but fails and the pppd connection starts afterwards. This unnecessarily slows down the boot process.
Re: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:I experienced some problems with Fedora Core 3 (Score:3, Informative)
Well, that's hardly Fedora's fault. You could always port those packages and contribute back the changes... Many packages end up relying on compiler or library features that they should not. I've had problems compiling some pacakges that don't play ball with the newer glibc because of this. These projects should be appropriately spanked and given patches.
When compiling MPlayer it fails to build with GUI and it fails to play sound if you playback a video
I'm running mpalyer and mplayer-gui as provided, what did you need to compile your own for that SRPM wasn't sufficient for?
JAVA: I don't like to have gcj installed instead of a real JVM
gcj has nothing to do with the JVM not being present. The JVM is not present because it's not free. Talk to sun about releasing it under an OSS-compatiable license.
MP3: none of the installed sound tools can play or record MP3 files
This is, of course, old news. Red Hat stopped shipping anything related to MP3 a long time ago due to patent concerns. You can always get the mp3 goodies from elsewhere, but Red Hat won't ship them and hasn't since RH9 (possibly as far back as 8, I'm not 100% certain).
Your other comments are quite interesting, and I'm not trying to say that the above aren't problems, it's just that I think you want to keep some perspective on these issues which don't all have trivial solutions.
Re:I experienced some problems with Fedora Core 3 (Score:3, Informative)
Fedora Core 3 Installation Guide [mjmwired.net]
MPlayer Fedora Guide [mjmwired.net]
Evolution 2.0 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Evolution 2.0 (Score:3, Informative)
My observations where over a cable modem so YMMV.
Keep in mind that SSL doesn't like packet loss so if your network was experiencing any problems...
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*
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.
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:Stability (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Stability (Score:5, Funny)
FC3 also fails to ship shrek 2, the new Eminem album , and MS Windows source code.
Something to think about (Score:2, Informative)
if you want stable releases of everything, 3rd party apps(that aren't free software) and corporate support, go get novell, suse, mandrake, slackware, whatever, but don't bitch about FC.
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)
Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Linux (Score:5, Funny)
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)
Judging by the 50 posts thus far, Red Hat/Fedora appears to have fallen out of favor with the averaging posting SlashDot reader. Nothing but a string of complaining, despite most being unfounded or flatly wrong.
Fedora Core 3 is a terrific GNU/Linux distribution. On one hand, it contains only Free software. No proprietary, patent protected, or closed source. Everything included is safe and the principled users of software can be at ease.
On the other hand, it is very polished. There are no dark corners of breakage, everything Just Works(TM). Network, video card, printing, CD burning, fonts, office applications, PDF viewing, email, file browsing, graphics, etc. All the little niggles of versions past (not just Red Hat either) been resolved to result in this super clean and functional distro.
As a Red Hat user since 5.0, Fedora Core 3 is the first version I feel is good enough for a non-geek Windows user to try. There won't be any surprises. Much of this is simply the development of GNOME 2.8, but Red Hat (ok, the Fedora Core team) has done an excellent job IMO of refining the base, too.
Now I'm sure posters can (and will) lament the downside. Fedora Core 3 will not be found perfect, featureful, fastest, most flexible, most standards compliant, most free, or the most usable. But across the board, FC3 is the best at fulfilling a balanced set of these qualities.
Re:Red Hat is apparently no longer cool (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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)
Not really at all worth the upgrade on Desktops... (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know about you, but i don't expect my desktop to run slower, my disk IO to chug along and my drivers and system to be stuck in DLL hell.
Suse 9.2 on the other hand was much more refigned, less "bastardized" (all the redhat focus on gnome) and much quicker.
Ofcourse i'm the unlucky SOB with a ATI 9800 pro card expecting support under X.org on a 64bit platform.
However Solaris 10, Windows 2003 x64 and Windows XP 64 all run flawlessly, quickly and have a polished feel to them compared to FC *.*
Call me a troll if you want, i'm just utterly dissapointed in the fedora releases for anything but a server - and even then i'm not fond of Redhat'isms.
Another year? sure... but by then Microsoft and others will have polished & tweaked and nailed the market.
Coral Cache Link (Score:3, Informative)
Coral Cache Link [nyud.net]
You can upgrade without the .iso/.torrents (Score:3, Informative)
Read these good instructions on how to do this yum upgrade [brandonhutchinson.com].
I plan on following them later this morning and so I won't be part of the bottleneck downloading the
Re:SuSE (Score:2)
Re:SuSE (Score:4, Interesting)
You have no idea how quickly I switched to RH8.
buy CDs (Score:2, Offtopic)
Ubuntu is a fantastic distribution, easy to install and with good support. It's a single CD which they will send you free for the asking and, because it uses debian, you can order an assload of easy to install software on 7Cds for about ten bucks. I don't have broadband either but I do if I take my laptop into town, but even with all that free bandwidth it's still cheaper just to order the CDs [easylinuxcds.com] (even at a couple MBps it takes HOURS to download seven CDs!)
Re:buy CDs (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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:SuSE (Score:2)
And anyway, I was on 33k, it was easier to go and borrow a book from the library that had the cds for a proper distro than it would have been to download all the stuff I wanted.
I use Gentoo now anyway, the setup process doesn't matter that much to me anymore.
Re:could linux BE any more secure? (Score:5, Informative)
In the end, what this gives you is a system where, if a process using a properly configured SELinux has been taken over (0wn3d), it can't do anything other than screw up it's own job, unless it figures out how to fool SELinux.
Re:Well, I'm not happy (Score:4, Informative)
I always thought that making your hard drives the masters and your CDs the slaves was the preferred arrangement? At least, that's what it said in one of the readmes in the kernel source last time I checked.
Re:How to turn off font antialiasing (Score:3, Informative)
Go to Preferences -> Fonts
Pick "Monochrome" for Font Rendering.
Antialising just plain sucks if used on modern LC displays
Maybe you should pick "Subpixel smoothing" instead.