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Fedora Core 5 Available 327

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the unannounced-announcements dept.
Jan Slupski writes "New release day today. Fedora Core 5 CD images are now available for download (i386, ppc, x86_64) on the ftp servers or via the torrent page." Linclips also has a short screencast on some of the default functionality.
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Fedora Core 5 Available More

Fedora Core 5 Available

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  • bug sorted? (Score:5, Informative)

    by LiquidCoooled ( 634315 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @12:35PM (#14957417) Homepage Journal
    It appears as though FC5 contains a bug which prevents none GPL modules (read nVidia) from being used.
    Has this been fixed in this one yet, or is it worth waiting a few more days for the fix to be rolled out?

    (It was identified too late to be pushed to the mirrors)

    Info about it is here [lwn.net].

    • Re:bug sorted? (Score:5, Informative)

      by osvejda ( 799137 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @12:49PM (#14957545)
      Fixed kernel is here. [redhat.com] It's not in official updates yet.

    • Re:bug sorted? (Score:4, Informative)

      by skogs ( 628589 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @01:02PM (#14957673) Journal
      I believe you will find that the kernel that is autocompiled beforehand will not accept the binary drivers...just like any other non-custom-built kernel that leaves out that option.

      Rebuild your kernel per directions found on several sites, install the drivers per nvidia's instructions...

      game. xgl. whatever.

      • Re:bug sorted? (Score:2, Informative)

        by gr8_phk ( 621180 )
        "I believe you will find that the kernel that is autocompiled beforehand will not accept the binary drivers...just like any other non-custom-built kernel that leaves out that option."

        You make it sound like it's supposed to be that way. IT'S NOT. FC3 and 4 both worked fine. You make it sound like Fedora decided to change policy on their default kernels. They didn't, that's why they've stated that an update will correct the problem. This is a bug introduced right before they created the images (commence con

        • bug...not really a bug. Just a two keystroke mistake. It isn't a bug in any program or anything. My appologies for not being so up on fedora's policies...its a simple reconfiguration. One that I wish more distros would auto-compile into the kernel, but sadly many don't.

        • Re:bug sorted? (Score:4, Informative)

          by MSG ( 12810 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @04:01PM (#14959250)
          Those responsible are "owning up" to the mistake. It's been discussed on the testing list, and corrected packages were made available to the testers. It's a sad fact that a bug was introduced in the kernel very late in the testing process. The first kernel update will correct the problem.

          Don't blow it out of proportion. Fedora Core is a distro for developers and hobbyists (which is why I use it). For that audience, this bug isn't anything more than a minor annoyance.

      • Re:bug sorted? (Score:5, Informative)

        by MSG ( 12810 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @04:11PM (#14959345)
        I believe you will find that the kernel that is autocompiled beforehand will not accept the binary drivers

        Normally, they do. The Nvidia drivers are broken because the spinlock macros were accidentally made GPL-only. The first kernel update will fix the problem.

        install the drivers per nvidia's instructions...

        It's probably better if you don't. If you read the Fedora Projects notes on 3rd party drivers [fedoraproject.org], you'll notice that Nvidia and ATI both break X in subtle ways, and may leave GL in an unworkable state, even after uninstalling them.

    • Poor testing (Score:5, Interesting)

      by gr8_phk ( 621180 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @01:04PM (#14957691)
      Never mind that they don't test with proprietary drivers. They applied a patch that affected the functionality of tainted kernels - normal development practice would natrually require *that patch* be tested with a tainted kernel regardless. Throwing a patch over and saying it's OK because the automated testing didn't find a problem is like saying "it compiled - ship it".

      So if I wait for 2.6.16 kernel on FC5 is that going to break with nVidia too? I saw a comment in the 2.6.16 story saying that doesn't work either (may have been distro specific).

      Damn people, I understood the 4K stacks thing - make a good decision for good reason and let nVidia catch up. This utter disrespect for drivers used by a large number of people is really unacceptable. Actually, when a disto fails to test with drivers used by a large portion of their userbase, it is the user who feels the disrespect. Please don't make excuses - that's disrespectful too. Just get FC6 right.

      That said, I'm downloading FC5 now ;-)

  • Linclips also has a short screencast on some of the default functionality.

    That screencast is in Flash, and we all know that Flash is evil.

    Thus, Fedora must be evil by extension.

    Fedora is the development branch for RedHat. If Fedora is evil, RedHat must also be evil.

    Microsoft is well known for being evil.

    We all know that RedHat is a competitor to Microsoft.

    Ergo, RedHat is the next Microsoft.

    QED

    (Yes, this is a joke. Laugh.)

  • Screenshots? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Orestesx ( 629343 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @12:36PM (#14957428)
    I don't believe there is any power way to evaluate a linux distro than screenshots, except for maybe it's logo.

  • Yowza (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MAXOMENOS ( 9802 ) <mike&mikesmithfororegon,com> on Monday March 20, 2006 @12:41PM (#14957463) Homepage
    We're up to *five* CD-ROMs now?
    • >We're up to *five* CD-ROMs now?
      That's only half a DVD.
    • It would be possible to triple the size of Fedora Core without even breaking into a sweat. And that's without even supporting multiple configurations of the same application (which they really should do) or rarer applications. If you want those, I reckon a 20 DVD pack would be necessary to be truly diverse.

      I would re-work the layout of the CD-ROMS, though - you need too many for a minimal install - and I'd also re-work how to pick what is installed. At present, it is unnecessarily tedious to pick out what y

  • Upgrading (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rik Sweeney ( 471717 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @12:43PM (#14957486) Homepage
    I new to Linux and am still running Fedora Core 3. Am I right in thinking that to upgrade to FC5 I have to basically backup anything I want to keep and reinstall everything? Is there no easier way of upgrading?

    • Re:Upgrading (Score:5, Informative)

      by /ASCII ( 86998 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @12:46PM (#14957514) Homepage
      No, all you need to do is get the CDs or DVD and boot from them - you will be presented with the alternatives of overwriting the current install or upgrading it to FC5. It is a very good idea to backup your data just to be sure, but I've never had any problems going from one RedHat/Fedora version to a newer one.

    • Re:Upgrading (Score:3, Informative)

      by MAXOMENOS ( 9802 )
      It depends. I feel a little better about upgrading my system because I keep all my important data -- photos, tax records, etc -- in its own separate ext3 partition that mounts to /home.

      If you've done that very basic and important step, then you can upgrade -- or even install a new system from scratch -- without fear. (There may, however, be a few hours of tweaking involved, to install printers and the like.)

      The same works for Windows, too, btw -- and can save you from losing all your data when XP destro

    • Err, I haven't used RedHat since FC3, but upgrading is normally accomplished by selecting the upgrade option when the installer finds an existing installation. That said, backups before major upgrades are *always* a good idea.

    • You should backup everything you want to keep everytime you do something major to your computer (such as upgrading your OS). Actually, you should backup your stuff on a regular basis anyways.

      I'm not 100% sure about Fedora, but I know other distros support upgrading while keeping all your programs and settings, so I'm pretty sure Fedora does too. The backup is just a recommendation in case something goes wrong.
    • There are three things you can do:

      First, Fedora has an "upgrade" (as opposed to "install") option in the installer that lets you upgrade from the previous version. Download the CD images for FC4, burn 'em, boot off the CD, choose "upgrade", and then do the same for FC5. That's the "supported" path.

      Second, it may be possible to just stuff the FC5 CDs in and upgrade directly from FC3 to FC5. Dunno.

      Third (and this is probably not the best choice if you're new to Fedora), you can usually upgrade via yum. Do
      • I make a point of not upgrading to the last update until the next new version is out. I just upgraded from FC3 to FC4 about 2 weeks ago. I'm not completely unhappy with FC4 but among other things, certain icons have gone missing in Gnome, virtually all the panel apps went missing, Gdesklets broke, the weather panel applet doesn't have forecasts for my area anymore and the pop email applets went missing. That last one was a bugger, as I have about 5 different addys I need to keep an eye on. I ended up with M
    • Backup, install, and spend the next fortnight tweaking your system back into shape. There is no other way. ;/
      (I've got FC4, and I'm *not* upgrading)

      Of course, if you've got all your documents etc. on a separate partition, you shouldn't run into really bad problems when installing FC5. Be sure to backup config files etc. that you may have put on the system partition.

    • Re:Upgrading (Score:2, Informative)

      by curmudgeous ( 710771 )
      I've built many linux machines over the years (with several different distros) and I've learned through experience that best practice is to keep system files and user data on separate volumes. Either create a dedicated partition for /home or use another physical drive entirely. I've had too many upgrades go bad and didn't have the time or patience to poke around to find the cause, so the quickest and best solution was to format and start over. Just my 2 cents.
    • Some people report no problems with upgrading, others report many problems.

      Fedora and Redhat have never been intended to be forever upgraded like Debian or Ubuntu have, so it's always a little risky. If you're talking about a production level machine that's doing critical work you rely on every day, I wouldn't trust an upgrade at all. If it's just your desktop where you store some MP3s or whatever, it's not a big deal to try the upgrade.

         
  • Would this distro work for an old laptop - UMAX 233MHz 256MB 3GB? I have one lying around and was thinking about creating a wireless terminal to check email and possibly display pictures. A basic Core 4 installed fine but the UI wasnt very responsive sometimes. Thx for your help.

    • NetBSD may be a better choice for older hardware, as it consumes less resources than recent versions of Linux. Note that this is not an anit-Linux troll, much of that extra resource hungriness seems to come from the added functionality rather than superfluous bloat - and despite my personal preference for NetBSD, I'm considering putting FC5 onto my PowerBook, as there appears to be support for Java on PowerPC Linux.

      • You can probably compile GCC4 and Classpath yourself to get the same Java support FC5 has for NetBSD. On the other hand, you can use DSL or some other lightweight Linux distribution that runs like a champ on a Pentium 233 MHz.

        • I'd read that IBM have a port of the Sun JDK for PowerPC Linux. While GCJ and Classpath are progressing fast, I don't think they're quite ready for all the Swing and Tomcat/JSP based stuff that I'd like to do. The Swing classes at the very least are still a bit patchy. However, both projects have come on in leaps and bounds in the last couple of years, and along with the new Fortran 95 compiler I'm looking forward to the next few releases of GCC4.

    • I'd be interested in the answer to this as well. I tried Ubuntu on an older Dell Latitude running at 233mhz, and although it was well supported, it was pretty slow (although everything on it seems slow, I guess)

      -Scott
    • A good one for older hardware is VectorLinux [vectorlinux.com]. The standard edition uses icewm and Rox filer, which is nice and fast.
    • I'd recommend not using GNOME for it if you want to do everything easily. Probably the easiest thing to do is get Ubuntu and do a Xubuntu installation (this will give you an XFCE desktop; it's good looking and still not a resource hog). Basically, just pop in an install disc and choose to do a server installation, which after rebooting will give you a terminal. Login and then do:

      sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
      sudo apt-get install gdm

      This will give you a desktop and a login manager. The Ubuntu [ubuntu.com]

  • selinux (Score:3, Informative)

    by typical ( 886006 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @12:45PM (#14957504) Journal
    Someone on the target webpage asked how to disable SELinux. I don't really feel like making an account on that website, but you should edit /etc/sysconfig/selinux.
    • I'm not sure if this is still the case, but SELinux and the nVidia graphics drivers do not seem to get along either. I had this problem in FC4.

    • Re:selinux (Score:2, Informative)

      by LnxAddct ( 679316 )
      Or disable it in the installer by clicking "Disable SELinux" when prompted, you can't miss it. If you happen to miss it, just go to Desktop->System Settings->Security Level from gui and disable under the SELinux tab. New users don't like editing config files, Fedora will let you disable SELinux through the gui.
      Regards,
      Steve
      • Fair enough.

        I've been using RHL and Fedora for a long time, though, and never bothered to learn the GUI. The GUIs always change and shift around -- first there was the Tk control-panel back in the day, then system-config, then a sequence of other utilities. If you learn some of the GUI, you wind up having to relearn the thing down the road. The config files stay in the same place over the years.
  • There are some pages: installation guide [mjmwired.net], installation notes [stanton-finley.net] which should be valuable starting points.

  • Fedora Mirrors (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Brian The Dog ( 879837 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @12:54PM (#14957593)
    Am I the only one that thinks it is awesome that playboy.com mirrors the distro? They should have 'customized' it. (Special backgrounds, prepopulated bookmarks, etc.)

    • Re:Fedora Mirrors (Score:5, Informative)

      by Secrity ( 742221 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @01:38PM (#14958047)
      Playboy.com also mirrors Firefox, Thunderbird, Apache, FreeBSD, and CPAN. Playboy uses FOSS in it's operation and wants to give back to the community by providing mirrors.

    • Re:Fedora Mirrors (Score:2, Insightful)

      by LnxAddct ( 679316 )
      Most major sites that run Fedora to host their website, also mirror it. Kernel.org and Playboy.com are two of the largest sites that I can think of off the top of my head that run Fedora in the back and mirror it, but there are plenty of other huge sites running it as well. It really is a good distro, zealots tend to spread sensless FUD about it though.
      Regards,
      Steve
    • Yeah. You can always say that you downloaded 3.3GB off stuff from playboy.com today, and didn't have to pay a dime.
  • silly question, but I'd like to know what kernel version, hardware support, etc. is included. perhaps a link would have been nice. but, i dumped fedora a while ago for ubuntu.

    • Kernel version (Score:4, Informative)

      by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@ y a hoo.com> on Monday March 20, 2006 @01:48PM (#14958150) Homepage Journal
      Fedora 5 comes with Kernel 2.6.15 with Red Hat patches. The latest official kernel is 2.6.16, which includes some important bugfixes. At the time of writing this, Fedora Core does NOT have 2.6.16 in the development tree, so it may be a few days before this upgrade is available.


      Just as a personal note, I compile my own kernels, using the vanilla kernel patched with Andrew Morton's patches first, then with whatever of Red Hat's will still apply cleanly. Andrew Morton's -mm patches adds a lot of extremely useful functionality, for me, so that's my patchset of choice. (There are some nice real-time patches out there, too, but they're generally not compatible with other patchsets, making them a pain.)

  • Zen (Score:2)

    by skogs ( 628589 )
    This comes with the virtual machine support now I believe. I look forward to wiping my current win2k install and installing virtual machine.

    I like the idea of being able to do some extensive testing on virtual machine setup, run win2k, run FC5, run gentoo, and probably ubuntu too. All at the same time.

    Very slick.

    I look forward to it.

    • If my memory serves me correctly, Xen needs either special virtualization support from the guest OS (meaning you can pretty much only run Linux as the guest OS) or special virtualization support from the CPU (On the way from both Intel and AMD, I belive), so you'll probably have to wait a bit before you can use Xen and Windows.
    • I don't think Xen can currently run Windows.

      Well, it can, but you need to re-compile the windows kernel with a special patch that Xen can't give you. Since you probably don't have the source to the Windows kernel, this is totally theoretical. This may change when CPUs have proper support for virtualisation (assuming you have a new CPU)
    • Xen [wikipedia.org] has been included since Fedora Core 4. So it's not that new of a feature. :-)

    • Re:Zen (Score:4, Informative)

      by Shawn is an Asshole ( 845769 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @03:15PM (#14958885)
      You currently can't run Windows under Xen as Xen requires the OS to be modified to run under it. Until the new CPUs with virtualization are out you can't use Xen to run Windows.

      Right now, though, there is a good free (beer) alternative: VMWare Player [vmware.com]. I've been using it with a Win2k guest and it works great. A bit sluggish on Athlon XP's (2500+) and lower, but it feels almost native on an Athlon 64 (3200+).

      To create a disk, install qemu and use the following command to create the disk:

      qemu-img create -f vmdk disk.vmdk 15G

      To create your *.vmx file use VM Builder [dcgrendel.be] (it's a webapp).

      Open the VMX file in VMWare Player and install Windows normally.

      To install VMware Tools, just download an old version (tar.gz, not the rpm) of the Workstation or the betas of the Server. There is a "windows.iso" file in the archive that has everything you need.

  • Oh, great, I've just upgraded from FC2 to FC4 ... and now there's an FC5?? Technology marches on....
  • One of the main features I'm looking forward to in FC5 is the inclusion of Beagle (a personal information search tool written in Mono). I currently use Beagle in Gentoo, and I have been quite impressed. It doesn't seem to suck up my processor like most document indexers (unless I pass the variable BEAGLE_EXERCISE_THE_DOG=1), and it handles a lot of formats. I've tried getting Beagle to work in FC4, but always ran into issues (mainly had to do with mono). What I'm really hoping is now that Beagle is so e

  • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • FWIW, Red Hat has always liked to be on the Bleeding Edge of Linux, but in their own way. (e.g. If GNOME 2.x isn't ready to ship, make quick patches around the problems and ship it.) This tended to get them into a lot of trouble, because their OS would have all kinds of idiosynchrasies and inconsistencies that other distributions didn't exhibit.

      RedHat decided to address the matter with the Fedora branch. Fedora is a perpetual beta of RedHat's enterprise product. By releasing this beta, RedHat is able to get

    • Fedora is a hobbiest OS (Score:4, Insightful)

      by skogs ( 628589 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @01:42PM (#14958088) Journal
      This is a hobby OS. It is the developement tree for RHEL. What is so hard to figure out here? It is not a beginner distro, it is a testing ground for new ideas and functions. The entire point is to test things, and separated by name so that people like your professor cannot sue RedHat when something doesn't work as it should.

      Point release version numbers don't really apply to something that is perpetually beta. There are dozens of Fedora based distros...ever notice that they all make changes/mods for better security/hardwaredetection/userinterface/etc..

      I know this is a flame, and some fedora fanboys will mod be down for this and flame me, but please...do look around> this is a perpetual beta. If you want the 'good stuff' pay for it, or download something that has another couple of steps of tweaking built in.

      • Re:Fedora is a hobbiest OS (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Nermal ( 7573 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @02:45PM (#14958619) Homepage
        While it's true that Fedora is a proving ground for new technologies, it's a mistake to say that it is in "perpetual beta". Rawhide, the development branch of Fedora, is in perpetual beta. Fedora Core is the stable branch of Rawhide. If it's not stable then something is wrong. So while on the one hand Fedora is not intended to be enterprise-grade and I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the GP, on the other it does have its own test process and its own devel/stable release cycle.

        Also, Fedora doesn't have point releases because point releases are old-fashioned. There's no need to wait for bug fixes to accumulate before making them available anymore because tools like Yum can be used to make them available immediately. New features are added every six months or so in a new major version, but it serves the same purpose as what used to be called a point release. The only difference is in the numbers.

  • FC5 mirror (Score:4, Informative)

    by Yenya ( 12004 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @01:05PM (#14957702) Homepage Journal
    The Fedora Download page, which is according to the announcement message supposed to redirect you to one of the mirrors, does not work - it redirects to ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com [redhat.com] which is (of course) busy. So let me allow to advertise my mirror - if you are in Europe, I have still about half a gigabit of bandwidth free at

    ftp://ftp.linux.cz/pub/linux/fedora-core/5/ [linux.cz]

    -Yenya

  • Upgrade via yum is easier (Score:4, Informative)

    by Cosine0 ( 466566 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @01:08PM (#14957728)
    Just download and install fedora-release.xx.rpm
    Next, "yum upgrade"
    And you don't even have to reboot...
  • Is anyone seeing any data coming from the BitTorrent seeds yet? (17:39 GMT)

    At the moment, I can't see any peers who have data, and the seeds don't appear to be sending data yet. The amount of seeds is slowly rising though...

  • Cent OS - Free RedHat (Score:3, Informative)

    by gatzke ( 2977 ) on Monday March 20, 2006 @02:24PM (#14958435) Homepage Journal

    Remember, you can get the free version of RedHat from CentOS

    http://www.centos.org/ [centos.org]

    No silly annual payments just to get support.

    I personally use knoppix / debian since RedHat started charging for support.

    People need to know CentOS is out there.

  • Bought on DVD (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20, 2006 @02:26PM (#14958459)
    If like me you don't have broadband, you can get it from budgetlinuxcds.com on DVD for only $5

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