Fedora Core RC3
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| PaulFerris Dec 31, 2004 3:23 AM EDT |
I've been using RC3 now on a laptop for about 2 weeks, and have to say that although it's a bit on the sluggish side for bootup, it's very polished. This article points to a ton of software for it (the DAG site referenced is chock-full of stuff). Worth reading if you're a recent redhat or fedora user. --FeriCyde |
| mvermeer Dec 31, 2004 9:43 AM EDT |
Yes, I just installed FC3 over Christmas at home, and I am impressed as well. Extremely polished. I bought especially for the purpose a "new-old" computer, 900 MHz Celeron /256MB/20GB (Anybody want a W98 license, little used? :-) and it looks great. This was a great leap from RH6.2. Pluses: - Very smooth install (in spite of my cheeplinux CD's not passing the media test) - Very mature and complete desktop application set: OOo, Evo, Nautilus, FireFox, ... - Well integrated. E.g., how many people are aware that OOo can be made to use the Evolution address book in order to do mail merge? - There's no end of more or less obscure but amazingly useful-looking applications, if you know how to google for them... most of them on dag. Already the world of LAMP is a universe onto itself (Moodle!). - Great looking! Minuses: - On my intel815 video acceleration is buggy and must be turned off (xorg.conf). - Getting the sound to work is still the usual battle with device file permissions. I gave up and play sound as root :-( - I had also trouble printing. The gimp-print drivers for my Canon BJC-4300 are buggy (printing at double width) and I had to select the (non-recommended) BJC-600 driver. Ah well. - The "modem lights" applet still doesn't work properly, in much the same way as in RH6.2. I had again to enter my own, very same connect and disconnect scripts: wvdial and killall wvdial. But all in all, Linux has come an incredibly long way. And today this article gave me the push to add dag to my yum config. I'm having a lot less "extras" rpm's now :-) - Martin |
| sbergman27 Dec 31, 2004 9:55 AM EDT |
I am running FC3 and although I intend to stick with it, as FC suits my tastes pretty well, "polished" is not a word that I would choose to describe it. Try plugging in a USB storage device and then unplugging it. Do it a few times. hald will stop recognizing it and a reboot is required to get it working again. (Restarting hald and associated services does not work.) This occurs whether or not you right-click "unount" the device. Try to install it on a machine with a Dell (LSI) raid controller that is *not* brand spanking new. (Oops. They We left out the driver! Sorry! It is not our policy to reissue iso images. Try FC4-test1 when it comes out. Better luck next time.) The advansys driver is also missing, but there is at least a valid reason for that. I've had a linksys card suddenly stop functioning, requiring a reboot. (This card was rock solid stable befor the FC1 -> FC3 upgrade. I also had sshd mysteriously stop listening for connection requests on the same machine. On another machine, Anaconda "forgot" to update the bootloader. (Oops!) While I do use FC on servers, it really *can* "EAT YOUR BRANE", depending on your technical expertise, and yes, luck. Please understand that FC3 is still my favorite distro to date. There are many great things I could say about it. "Powerful in the hands of someone who can work around its brokenness"? Certainly. But "polished"? Not in my experience with it. |
| mvermeer Jan 02, 2005 12:45 AM EDT |
Perhaps I should have qualified that by "polished" I meant the look and feel, and behavior, of the desktop *after* any issues have been resolved. Note that these are mostly luxury issues. A few years ago the i815 issue would have been to get it running at all, accel or not. Of course they are annoying, and for newbies without a google-capable friend, fatal. But given the breadth of what it is trying to support and the sheer number of items on a typical desktop, I will hang on to the word "polished" to describe the feeling it gives me. And I have been helping to set up a neighbor's Mandrake 10 installation, and trust me, the issues are as many, just different ones :-( One more annoyance that I found -- but a reported bug that will get fixed -- is that in the default configuration, but with auto-spell check turned on, OOo will try to spell check every word in your document against every language in the known universe. Especially when loading a Finnish document: Finnish spell check isn't yet supported, so *every* word is legally mis-spelled. It loads all the dictionaries (600 MB of them!) and after several minutes of thrashing triggers an "out of memory: killed process" error. It took me several hours to hunt this one down. The workaround is to disable under the "options" menu all languages you're not interested in, i.e., most of them. - Martin |
| PaulFerris Jan 02, 2005 2:44 AM EDT |
Wow! Funny you should say that, I'm watching OOo internationalization download on my update screen on my RC3 laptop right at this very moment! Figures :) On a side note, anybody know how to have it automatically save all of the rpms downloaded on an update so that you can easily spool them to a new build on another machine? The rpms land in /var/spool/up2date, but are blown away on a regular basis. Now, I can copy them right after an update session to a saved directory of some kind, but that seems kind of clunky... --FeriCyde... |
| mvermeer Jan 03, 2005 4:28 AM EDT |
Paul, I suppose that if you use yum, they are not arbitrarily deleted. "yum man" says: "Note that packages are not automatically deleted after they are downloaded." You have to run "yum clean packages" for that. - Martin |
| sbergman27 Jan 03, 2005 5:04 AM EDT |
Yum saves the rpms in /var/cache/yum. Up2date saves them in /var/spool/up2date. -Steve Bergman |
| PaulFerris Jan 03, 2005 6:07 AM EDT |
I just copied them after a recent update from a bare-metal install -- it made a VMware install / update a breeze, but it, again, is kind of clunky. You run "up2date" again and it clears the old rpms and starts fresh, giving you a delta from one state of upgrade to another. You have to remember to copy/restore them if you're propogating them, which I guess is likely more my not RTFMing more than anything -- there has to be a switch that says "archive these puppies" -- oh well :) --FeriCyde |
| mvermeer Jan 12, 2005 12:22 AM EDT |
Another problem I appear to be having is that my ssh-agents are multiplying like rabbits. Anybody found a solution to that? (no, abstention doesn't cut it :-) |
| PaulFerris Jan 12, 2005 3:46 AM EDT |
mvermeer: I'll keep an eye out for this -- I've only got two running atm -- I have no idea why they're using it -- there must be some private key store somewhere that they're accessing through X is all I can figure. |
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