Journal ACK!!'s Journal: Fedora Core 3
You know I got this job you see and unlike the two previous jobs I was told I had to use a Windows laptop and could not put linux on it.
They gave me a sparc workstation so I did not have the real horsepower to run most of the blastwave.org packages.
I was stuck on a Windows workstation working in a world of Unix.
After getting used to it for a year and sticking with RH9 through two incarnations of Fedore Core, I took the dive. My home laptop needed an upgrade and Fedora Core 3 would be it.
So, I went through the linux installation which was cute and nice and boring. I did not have the diskspace for an upgrade so re-installed over my root partition but left my
The real key is the post-installation and three great gripes most Fedora users have:
1. No mp3 support, java and loads of other desktop crap users want.
2. No 3-D acceleration on some ATI cards.
3. No frickin' menu editing.
You know the first one is not a great big fat hairy deal to me know. It use to be something of a search but not anymore to get all the stuff "missing" from Fedora that usually is commonly installed on other distros.
http://www.fedorafaq.org/ Fedora Faq
Fedora Faq was a step by step pretty damn painless guide for me. Updating my packages through yum and following this Faq was painless and I had everything I ever needed to rock and roll with mp3 support, mplayer and java for example. The only thing I was missing were the win32 codecs for mplayer but that was simple to get.
The toughest part was something particular to me and my stupidity. Always consult Hardware Compatibility Lists before buying hardware if you use linux, period. I had to snag the madwifi drivers for m Netgear pcmcia wireless card. I can follow freaking instructions so getting it to work was pretty much reading and following directions.
Ok, on reboots and restarts with RH9 and such I had to reseat my pcmcia card before the usb hotplugging to recognize the card and the network settings to work. No such problems in Fedora Core 3. So upgrading has a bonus.
Being a Unix sysadmin I am not afraid of the command line and I am not scared to update via yum which I really kind of like but I miss a Synaptic style interface frankly. Of course ask and it shall be delivered. I found gyum which is barebones but hell it works. This should damn well come standard.
I find it somewhat annoying that RedHat disables DMA by default. But that is easy enough to fix.
The one thing is that this puppy Fedora Core 3 is sooo much faster than RH 9. I don't know if its the pre-linking or the new kernel or what. But it feels a hell of a lot snappier.
Evolution is really cool but the pre-filters slow pop3 downloads like mad and I disabled that crap. Suddenly getting my mail is 5x faster. Wow.
Firefox rocks as a browser choice and I usually like Epiphany.
I was understanding when RH 8 had not menu editing. I was annoyed when RH 9 did not. Now I am just pissed off. The Nautilus method of menu editing is not perfect or quite a reliable as KDE but even the KDE way has issues sometimes. It did work with a few bugs and pretty well if I remember right from the old Ximian Desktop 2 on my Suse 9 box I had at work at my last place.
Silly crap is what it is. I have to give Fedora props though it has not driven me nuts and I have yet to edit a desktop file with vi as root.
Why?
Unlike Suse that takes an everything and the kitchen sink approach or XD2 that stripped too much from the menus Fedora really sets up the menus very, very well.
Even though I know how to switch back to the browser version of Nautilus I am trying the spatial view and frankly it needs a shortcuts sidebar all Mac OS X finder style. Without that sort of thing navigating with Nautilus is kind of a pain of windows everywhere.
Network browsing worked as well as XD2. I liked the new changes for gnome 2.8 for handling media which is nice.
One of the few things outside of the minor desktop bits that seperate distros are the system tools. I really like RH's simple one tool for one config issue approach. While I would like a control center (Gnome kind of had one with start-here frankly if distros took advantage of it) the menu entries are so much better in their structure between Server/System Tools and such than say the contorted mess of Windows throwing everything in one place.
I know that Fedora can not be held responsible for X org intros of issues with the ATI stuff. But I did find that my particular ATI card the old piece of crap it is does work with 3-D acceleration btw, I just had the color depth set to high. So someone please find the time to come over and whack my silly self with a clue stick.
I love the updates that so many diversified projects have included from the latest version of gaim to the simple integrated grace of Rhythmbox back to the updates of Evolution. I had to install Abiword and gnmeric. Very surprised at the great amount of progress in Abiword. It finally handles the Word version of my resume correctly.
Though it is both the polish and speed that hits about Core 3. The graphical login is good and not completely useless slow crap that the preview stuff I saw in RH9. The desktop background is just kind of blah but the login and the general Bluecurve tweak. Very polished.
All the graphical tools well the stuff for users or samba and all the things I use have progressed. They have not made huge leaps and bounds but they have progressed.
The most frustrating side is this distro is on the edge of being one of the most professional and well put together distros ever but annoyances abound. Little things that poke you in the gut at every turn.
I like Fedora or RH or whatever. I have for awhile but that does not mean that I blind to its issues.
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