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Fedora Core 5 Review 40

Posted by Hemos from the whether-to-install-or-not dept.
Mark writes "A full review of the latest Fedora Core release, code named "Bordeaux", the Fedora Core 5, which has proven itself to be one of the best Linux Distributions out there. "
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Fedora Core 5 Review More

Fedora Core 5 Review

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  • I dunno, Gentoo works just fine for me. *BSD works just fine for a lot of others, etc, etc.

    "best" is like what a kid would write.

    Why not say "rated the highest at $BLAH" or "was the best amongst competitors at doing $BLAH".

    At least qualify what it was best at.

    Tom
    • And Mandriva 2006.0 works best for me. FC5 is "best" only because it is the newest release.
    • Hmmm. I wonder what OS *he* runs.....

    • Re:"best" out there? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Simon80 ( 874052 )
      It's a huge stretch to call that a review - I would rate such a clump of words a preview at best. It irritates me just to read it and contemplate the limits of the author's writing ability. I mean, he basically pastes a bunch of screenshots down, states the obvious, picks on trivial things, and makes sure to avoid anything that actually matters, like how it compares to other distributions that bundle GNOME 2.14, or whether it fixes common pitfalls in other distros. It's sad to note that this guy probably
    • "Best" implies that nothing else meets or exceeds the item being described. What the submitter actually wrote was "one of the best," which indicates that he considers it to be in the top tier of distributions. It makes no statement as to whether Fedora Core (or FC5 specifically) is better than Gentoo, Mandriva, etc. -- for all we know, he could consider them also to be in the top tier. (Have you ever tried to count the number of Linux distributions out there? There's plenty of room at the top.)
  • This review seems to be nothing but a set of screenshots that illustrate the OS in one moment or another, meaning that it is just one of the many similar ones out there.

    "Thanks to the Gnome Theme Manager it is also very easy to change and modify your desktop theme." As if this was some sort of a new boombastic feature :-)

    I am still waiting for a review which can explain a non-Linux person [such as myself] why the GUI is so slow. My guess is that the video card's hardware acceleration is not used. Ot
    • How is THAT supposed to NOT anti-attract a newbie?

      Apparently by forcing the graphics card companies to open source their drivers, much in the same way that the peace protesters prevented the war in Iraq....

      Oh wait.

    • I am still waiting for a review which can explain a non-Linux person [such as myself] why the GUI is so slow. My guess is that the video card's hardware acceleration is not used.

      Take a look at http://kororaa.org/static.php?page=static060318-18 1203 [kororaa.org]. It is a Live CD that is showcasing the latest developments of 3D accellerated GUIs.
      Just burn it, put it in your drive and boot your rig - how more newbie-friendly can it possible get ?

      PS: Here's a list of supported graphics cards: http://kororaa.org/release [kororaa.org]

    • I am still waiting for a review which can explain a non-Linux person [such as myself] why the GUI is so slow.

      Probably because people experienced enough to write quality reviews don't think the GUI is "slow".

      I'll note that GNOME is substantially faster than in any previous release, in terms of application startup time and rendering. A number of applications have been heavily optimized, in addition to the GNOME/GTK+ libraries.

      How is THAT supposed to NOT anti-attract a newbie?

      It's a bug. It was introduced in

    • Thanks to the Gnome Theme Manager it is also very easy to change and modify your desktop theme ... As if this was some sort of a new boombastic feature

      Anyone who has had the misfortune to muck about with gconf will see that it IS a new boombastic feature - if it works. Being able to export gpanel icons (eg.log on icons for 27 cluster nodes) to other users even on other systems will be a major step beyond the single user non-network aware aproach gnome started with.

  • Single page version (Score:5, Informative)

    by Shawn is an Asshole ( 845769 ) on Monday March 27, 2006 @08:52AM (#15001945)
    For those who don't like to click through 5 pages to read an article, here is a link to the print version [linuxforums.org].

  • Soooo... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LarsWestergren ( 9033 ) on Monday March 27, 2006 @09:17AM (#15002055) Homepage Journal
    When are we going to see some real in-depth reviews of released operating systems on Slashdot? As usual, most of the "review" is a bunch of screenshots, mostly of the installation and the startup. Is that going to persuade anyone to stay or switch?

    How about once posting a review that include some mentions of
    - security
    - stability (including doing some major upgrading)
    - hardware support
    - performance as: server, office workstation, development environment, multimedia/htpc

    I realise it is difficult to go in-depth on all these topics, especially with a recently released OS version. But perhaps we could set the standards a little higher than a few "ooh, shiny" screenshots?
    • Like time to log on, time to get OpenOffice running, FPS of Quake III, time to manipulate a large file with the Gimp, . What about some other "tests" like how hard is it to install CodeWeavers software to get certainWindows programs working, ripping a CD and then burning a CD.

      I agree screenshots are nice, but I'd prefer to see data that something runs faster or more stable, or is easier to install/use.
    • When are we going to see some real in-depth reviews of released operating systems on Slashdot? As usual, most of the "review" is a bunch of screenshots, mostly of the installation and the startup.

      Well, as you can probably guess, it is not only harder to write such an in-depth review, but it also takes more time. So by the time such a review would be released, it would not matter anymore, because FC5 would be close to its end-of-life.

      Also, such review would be biased anyway: Hardware support? what hardwa

  • For the love of gods, someone please tell me that Fedora have fixed the long standing disaster that is yum and up2date. Is it so much to ask that the default setup is changed to apt? I'm tired of Yum's idosycracies. It's gotten better, but as of 2.3.2, yum has no local cache search, no download resuming, and still bombs out if it can't contact a respositiory.

    Naturally of course, a yum "dist-upgrade" type feature is likely never going to happen, despite the fact that Fedora is now in five CDs.

    • Re:Yum? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Shawn is an Asshole ( 845769 ) on Monday March 27, 2006 @09:51AM (#15002235)
      Is it so much to ask that the default setup is changed to apt?

      Yes it is. Apt doesn't support multi-arch, which unfortuantley is required if you're running a 64 bit processor (Real, Macromedia, etc need to wake up and relesae 64 bit versions...).

      You can use apt, several repositores still support it. Apt is still included in Fedora. In my experience, though, yum seems to handle conflicting repositores better.

      I'm tired of Yum's idosycracies. It's gotten better, but as of 2.3.2, yum has no local cache search, no download resuming, and still bombs out if it can't contact a respositiory.

      That is a major anoyance. Espcially if, like me, you're stuck with only dialup being available. It seems to be a little better in this release than previous, but it still needs work. Is it really so much to ask to be able to cache the repo data? Yes I'm aware of -C.
      • I think the latest versions of apt do support multi-arch. Apt is much faster than yum. What the cool kids are using now, though, is smart [labix.org].

    • Re:Yum? (Score:4, Informative)

      by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Monday March 27, 2006 @09:55AM (#15002256) Homepage
      1) If you had read the patch notes, or even the FA, you'd have realized that up2date has been replaced with pup. No, I'm not going to tell you the difference. You'll just have to figure it out for yourself.

      2) Fedora also comes on DVDs, you may have heard of that. Also, for anybody with at least one other nfs capable server at home mounts the image over the network. It's the only way to fly.

    • Re:Yum? (Score:4, Informative)

      by HaydnH ( 877214 ) on Monday March 27, 2006 @09:56AM (#15002263)
      I'm officially requesting /. change it's name to /FUD!

      "yum has no local cache search, no download resuming..."

      The local cache for yum is located in /var/cache/yum/, if the file is already downloaded it will not download it again, it will only redownload the repomd.xml file again and continue. A useful distinction is the progress bars "###" & "===", the first is reading and the second is downloading.

      yum is very strict on how to handle errors and personally if I was getting a kernel upgrade (or something else important) via yum I would definately want it to be careful! This is mentioned in the YumTodont [duke.edu] - the discussion [duke.edu] linked from the YumTodont gives some good insight on the topic aswell.

      Haydn.
    • Yum doesn't resume downloads, but does keep files on hand and won't re-download the same version. As for dist-upgrade, if you want to updrade a fedora distro, download and upgrade the fedora-release package, then yum upgrade. Done. I don't like up2date any more than you do, but I love yum. Please RTFM next time. :)
  • Hopefully somebody posts a review that actually tells me how Fedora Core 5 is different than 4, and how that is a good/bad thing. This just shows me some screenshots while some dude prattles on about how the window manager loads faster. Does anybody actually have anything interesting to say about Fedora Core 5? Is Gnome better in this version? Is it functionally better in any way?

    • Re:Not quite meaty enough. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Shawn is an Asshole ( 845769 ) on Monday March 27, 2006 @10:05AM (#15002320)
      Does anybody actually have anything interesting to say about Fedora Core 5? Is Gnome better in this version? Is it functionally better in any way?

      I've been using it for about two weeks and I think it's a good improvement over FC4. Everything just seems to work better, though KDE is still seems broken (looking forward for kde-redhat to support FC5...). The new version of Gnome actually feels usable. Older versions to me (Athlon 64 3200+, 2 GB RAM) always felt very sluggish but 2.14 feels much faster. I always try new released of Gnome but end up switching back to KDE after the first week. This is the first release of Gnome I don't feel like switching from. I'm actually liking it.

    • I'm running FC4 on my file server and FC5 on my desktop. I have to say that Gnome 2.14 is HEAPS faster, nautilus is much less crash-prone. I know you can stick Gnome 2.14 onto any distro really but with FC5 its nicely integrated out of the box. Also, the new gnome-bar thingy is fabulous. Like google deskbar on steroids. Integrates well with desktop search which seems to use less than half the resources for equivalent windoze products. Config menus seem much better organised.

      Apart from that the underlying st
    • Hopefully somebody posts a review that actually tells me how Fedora Core 5 is different than 4

      It's packaged with MySQL 5, which was enough incentive for me. Being a Linux newbie, I was getting all sorts of errors trying to upgrade MySQL. Upgrading the entire OS was easier.

      Plus the boot screen looks cool. That's important. ;)
    • Hopefully somebody posts a review that actually tells me how Fedora Core 5 is different than 4

      Newer version of Gnome -> 2.0.14
      Internal support for Mono and stuff like f-spot.
      New theme.
      Uglier background that looks like Fedora Bubbles.
      Uglier startup screen that looks like Fedora Bubbles.
      No more xfce4 on base install. You need to install from yum.

      Man, someone was really colour blind when they picked the new default them for FC5. The first thing people see after installing FC5 is the most god-awful desktop
  • For those doing a FC4 to FC5 upgrade, here are some notes [blogs.com] that may be helpful.
  • So, if it really is, how come it's so badly tested? Has anyone tried the bundled GNOME Bluetooth apps? The BT Manager, to be specific? No? Well, I could tell. Because it will crash immediately upon startup. Am I really the only one that's using BT in linux?

    It works just fine on my dualbooted Slackware Current (on the same machine, of course).

  • Fixing Flash (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kelson ( 129150 ) * on Monday March 27, 2006 @04:23PM (#15005395) Homepage Journal
    For anyone trying to use the Flash plugin on Fedora Core 5, you may have noticed that it only shows images, not text.

    It turns out that Flash has hard-coded the font paths and is still looking in /usr/X11R6/lib, but the new R7 X server doesn't use the X11R6 paths anymore. (The same problem will happen with any distro that uses X.org's new modular X server)

    You can work around the problem [hyperborea.org] by creating /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 and symbolically linking to /etc/X11/fs and /usr/share/X11/fonts.
    mkdir -p /usr/X11R6/lib/X11
    cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11
    ln -s /etc/X11/fs
    ln -s /usr/share/X11/fonts
    Also, if you have SELinux running in enforcing mode, you need to allow text relocations on the Flash library.
    chcon -t texrel_shlib_t /path/to/libflashplayer.so
    With any luck, Macrodobe will fix both of these in an upcoming version of the plugin.

    I found the solution in the comments on a Mozilla bug report. Remember, Bugzilla doesn't allow direct links from Slashdot, so if you really need to read the bug discussion, go to bugzilla.mozilla.org and search for bug 317655.

  • Nah (Score:2, Funny)

    by webfiend ( 112579 )
    You know what? I just got done tweaking a fresh Ubuntu install to my satisfaction about an hour ago. I *really* don't feel like trying another distro for at least 12 hours.
  • From the article: "The first thing you see when you boot on the CD, is a graphical Grub menu." And screenshot says there is standard SYSLINUX boot prompt...
  • Well, I've been using Fedora 5 for a couple of weeks now myself, and this is what I have to say about it:

    I've found that for the most part I hate all X related desktops, and I've tried a few... enlightenment, gnome, kde, afterstep... I hate them all.

    The gnome 2.14 with fedora 5 is fabulous... It's got enough eye-candy to make it pleasant, with a minimal feel that is just usable.

    The memory footprint of the standard fedora 5 seems to be smaller than fedora 4, and things seem snappier.

    The Hardware compatibilit

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