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Red Hat Software Businesses

Fedora Core 2: Making it Work 220

Posted by CmdrTaco from the sad-that-you-need-a-tutorial-for-this dept.
Joe Barr writes "Linux.com is running a followup article by Ken Barber to his initial review of Fedora 2. This time he explains how to tame the GNOME and Fedora 2 problems he noted the first time around and get them both in working shape.."
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Fedora Core 2: Making it Work More

Fedora Core 2: Making it Work

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  • Very Cool (Score:5, Insightful)

    by XeRXeS-TCN ( 788834 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:31AM (#9620624)

    That is the best way to do things imo. Don't just complain about the problems that you encounter, like it's some sort of major flaw in the system, which discourages people from adopting it. Instead, work through your problems, and let people know that there are ways around the issues that you encountered. Every system has problems, but it is reassuring to people to know that many/most/all can be fixed, and that there are resources available to help.

    Kudos to Ken Barber for writing this follow-up.

    • Re:Very Cool (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:35AM (#9620670) Homepage
      Instead, work through your problems, and let people know that there are ways around the issues that you encountered.

      Most particularly, make sure you let the maintainers of the relevant package know your problems and also the solution if you found one. That way, the next iteration of the system might well have these problems sorted.

      I've been taking that approach in a number of projects I submit feedback to, not all of them open source, and it seems to work well.

      Cheers,
      Ian

    • Re:Very Cool (Score:5, Interesting)

      by xanadu-xtroot.com ( 450073 ) <xanadu.inorbit@com> on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @10:21AM (#9621148) Homepage Journal
      Don't just complain about the problems that you encounter, like it's some sort of major flaw in the system, which discourages people from adopting it.

      But if the "default" install is messed up to the point where someone's going to have to boot back to Windows to get to the Internet to dig through numerous Google searches to just have to boot back to FC to start working on basic issues, isn't the adoption of "Linux" already blown? If the people that work on Fedora are "expecting" Joe Sixpack to use it, but the person can't even play an mp3 without "yum xmms-mp3" (not that that is hard, but how would Joe Sixpack even know how to do that without booting back to Windows and running a bunch of searches)?

      I propose your logic is 100% backwards. Yes, it's REALLY DAMN NICE that the info is "out there", but should someone have to resort to digging through all that just to get their machine simply working when 90 bucks at the local Target later, they have a operational XP system? (assuming that they had a blank machine, of course, which they most likley did not)

      • Re:Very Cool (Score:5, Insightful)

        by the_crowbar ( 149535 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @11:25AM (#9621913)

        Do you honestly expect Joe Sixpack to install Linux? I think the problem is not that we need to make Linux installable by Joe Sixpack, but rather that we need to get OEMs to install and configure Linux.

        Have you ever met a "normal" user who could install Windows? Most installs of Windows are done by OEMs or from a specially tailored OEM install disc. If users had a special install of Linux that included support for all of their OEM hardware do you think they could install it?

        I think a more widespread adoption of Linux will start with business. You will have IT depts that start using it and eventually replacing Windows with it. Once the more technically inclined start to use it at work they try it at home. There will be problems, but who cares? As more people start to use Linux the answers to their questions will be posted to forums, discussion sites, usenet, whatever. The same way that Windows help has become so common.

        One last question: Why is there an impression that Windows is easier to install/fix than Linux?

        My opinion is that most users know how to speak "Microsoft". i.e. They know how to formulate questions that are worded in the common language used to describe the Windows environment. Back when I worked on a HelpDesk and fixed 100% Windows machines I was able to quickly locate answers to my technical questions. Forward 6 years to today: I still occassionally fix Windows PCs, but the majority of my work is on Linux. I can fix problems in Linux because I know how to speak the "Linux" language. I can do a Google search and get productive results because I know how to search for Linux specific answers.(I know Google has a Linux Specific search, but s/Linux/MacOS X/ and the point still stands)

        In conclusion, I don't think we need to make Linux so easy to install that Joe Sixpack can do it (he can already _use_ Linux), I think we need business to start adopting it. The masses will follow.

        Cheers,
        the_crowbar
        • I must disagree with your basic argument. Unfortunately this line of thought doesn't help. The truth is that we realy DO want Joe-Sixpack to have an easy install experience. The business users are, in fact, just Joe-Sixpack while at work. If its not easy to install/configure at home, why would we expect that somehow magically that a business folks would enjoy it any more?

          In addition, Joe-Sixpack represents a grass-roots level potential for evangalizing and adopting Linux. This will, in turn, blossom i

          • I am not saying that I do not want Joe Sixpack to be able to install Linux, just that once the corporate desktop is running Linux Joe Sixpack will be as well.

            I also question your idea that business users are Joe Sixpacks at work. In a business environment it is the responsibility of the IT dept to handle computer related issues. At home Joe Sixpack must make those decisions (and deal with the consequnces) for himself.

            I think that once business moves the home market will follow. Do you think Dell, HP,

        • Re:Very Cool (Score:3, Insightful)

          by geomon ( 78680 )
          Have you ever met a "normal" user who could install Windows?

          Nope. As the parent poster points out, most users get their OS installed at the time of purchase. Less than 1% of the non-research staff at a national laboratory in the US installs their own OS.

          That means that probably a smaller percentage than that install their own OS at home. I get quite a few requests from colleagues to help rebuild their home machines (and I get nice presents at Xmas time as a result).

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @11:59AM (#9622305)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Getting it to work? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by blanks ( 108019 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:36AM (#9620672) Homepage Journal
    "This time he explains how to tame the GNOME and Fedora 2 problems he noted the first time around and get them both in working shape"

    Am I the only person who dosen't want to "get them working" and just want them to work out of the box?
    • It does seem like that would be the expectation for a distro billed to be easy for newbies.

      • is it really for newbies? (Score:5, Informative)

        by zogger ( 617870 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @10:16AM (#9621075) Homepage Journal
        I more think of fedora as a distro more for advanced or intermediate hobbyists than for newbies. It's close to being ready out of the box for joe everybody, but not quite there yet, and even then, if they follow their roadmap, will always have testing/unstable aspects to it, done on purpose. It's for people who don't mind and want to be beta testers, people in the linux enthusiast community. It's supposed to be one step ahead of the official redhat "stable" version, and even the redhat stable version is just now being touted officially as suitable for a corporate desktop with professional IT admins on staff, not for the home user, not yet anyway. I use fedora, and I know I'll have to tweak some stuff when I get it and install it. It's still pretty dang good though, I haven't run into any show stoppers yet with it,any that really concern me anyway, and I'd consider myself only barely above newbie status, especially on the command line and being able to diagnose and repair/modify things. Media playback for all the formats gives me the most grief. Fixing the MP3 "problem" was easy, geting other propietary media formats to work cleanly is another issue entirely. I don't have a lot of USB or wireless, etc, so I can't comment there.
        • Maybe not, but if you ask someone for a good entry-level distro they will most likely respond with something along the lines of Mandrake or Red Had/Fedora. Maybe we should find a new desktop to recommend.

    • Re:Getting it to work? (Score:5, Informative)

      by thenextpresident ( 559469 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @10:02AM (#9620910) Homepage Journal
      Yeah, but it's not as easy as you think. Heck, even Microsoft can't do this with Windows. About the only company that does this is Apple.

      • Re:Getting it to work? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by FlyGirl ( 11285 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @10:20AM (#9621124)
        About the only company that does this is Apple

        Yeah, but to be fair, it's comparitivly easy to get software to work out of the box when you pretty much control all the hardware as well.

        Not to say that that isn't a valid business plan, just wanted to be sure we're not attacking the fedora people compared to the apple people for failing to succeed at what is clearly a more difficult job.

        • Re:Getting it to work? (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          That used to be MS argument about Windows flaws. "We don't control the hardware". Well, how about Pocket PC? MS controls the hardware spec and their software still sucks!
        • Except that many of the problems with fedora (eg mp3 support) have nothing to do with the hardware.

          There is 'suppport hardware out of the box' which is hard. But then there is 'work out of the box given supported hardware'. Linux in general, along with fedora, is terrible at this. There are projects attempting to solve these issues, but none are usable yet.
    • Am I the only person who dosen't want to "get them working" and just want them to work out of the box?

      understandable, and no i'm sure you're not.

      but really, if you find these problems with fedora then the answer (at least for mean time) is simply to install a different distro instead.

      i very much doubt you would have any significant issues installing mandrake 10 community/official for example.
    • Especially since Fedora is the bone thrown to those of us who used to pay RH for a desktop distro! So much for being "behind the product." But then again, it's not really "product" is it? So who really cares if it works? RH calls it "bleeding edge" obfiscating them of any real liability for a working distro. "Hey, we told you it's development. Want a working distro? Buy our Enterprise-because-the-little-end-user-doesn't-hav e-deep-enough-pockets Workstation Edition."

  • Relativity (Score:4, Informative)

    by Daengbo ( 523424 ) <daengbo@gmail. c o m> on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:36AM (#9620680) Homepage Journal
    I liked this part:
    Getting FC2 to a state of usability in a home or office environment requires a great deal more labor than I believe should be required. However, my complaints were put into perspective last week when I visited a classroom to start getting it ready for summer term. I walked in on a cursing, overworked desktop support tech who was griping loudly about the inordinate time it takes to install and patch Windows on a roomful of computers -- in an organization that will not pay for disk imaging software or an in-house Windows Update server. "You don't need Microsoft Office installed on these, I hope?" he asked through a fog of sweat and frustration. I acknowledged that I did not. Then he wanted to know if I needed HP printer drivers installed, with a cynical groan about how it would "only take a few more hours." I used to supervise people who support Windows on the desktop. I had forgotten how bad Windows really is. Suddenly my gripes about Fedora seemed petty

    • Re:Relativity (Score:3, Insightful)

      by transient ( 232842 )
      in an organization that will not pay for disk imaging software or an in-house Windows Update server

      His complaints should be directed at this organization, not Windows. Switching operating systems will not fix their support tech's apparent inability to present a cogent argument to his budget people.

    • The guy could of used g4u [feyrer.de] and saved himself a lot of time. It's a open source ghost like program. It doesn't do partition resizing yet but for lab installs of 20 identical machines it works great. But like others have said, he really needs to push the admin into giving him some sort of budget for imaging... sheesh

    • Re:Relativity (Score:3, Insightful)

      by slash-tard ( 689130 )
      Anyone can manage a network poorly.

      The in house windows update server should be free. Microsoft doesnt charge for it, its not very resource intensive and works pretty well.

      Disk Imaging is not just a Windows problem, regarless of OS I would want a standard image in any environment I worked in.

      MS Office can easily be scripted to install off of a network share.

      Printer drivers should be setup on the print server, then the client just selects the server and printer and they are set.

      Windows has a lot of fla

    • Buying a single SCO Linux license: $699 and termination of redistribution rights for GPL'd software due to participation in a GPL violation.

      Administering a classroom of Windows machines: your sanity.

      Posting a quoted paragraph from the article with four (4) words of your own and getting modded +5 informative: priceless.

  • The problem being? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lachlan76 ( 770870 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:37AM (#9620686)
    So....If I understand the article right, to make Fedora Core 2 good, you need to install packages, change some gettings for gnome, and adjust the sound properties? If you use Linux, you have to expect that you'll need to add programs, and change settings, just the same as windows.

    • Re:The problem being? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by moorg ( 537751 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:59AM (#9620889)
      So....If I understand the article right, to make Fedora Core 2 good, you need to install packages, change some gettings for gnome, and adjust the sound properties?

      As long you don't quit on the spatial mode Nautilus as quickly as the author you don't need to make any changes.

      Personally, I always rearrange the GNOME panels from the default Red Hat/Fedora layout to the default GNOME layout (Applications, System menu on the top panel). But that's my preference, and certainly not something I should shake a stick at the Red Hat/Fedora guys.

      Perhaps the author would enjoy reading The Spatial Way [bytebot.net] then debate the merits rather than pull a "my desktop doesn't look they way it used it, it must be broke".

  • wow, quite a statement (Score:5, Funny)

    by BigGerman ( 541312 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:37AM (#9620687)
    " the best way to mitigate the myriad problems in GNOME 2.6 is to include KDE in your install"
    Article with a built-in troll!

    • Re:wow, quite a statement (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ajs ( 35943 ) <ajs.ajs@com> on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:47AM (#9620768) Homepage Journal
      Indeed, but I'm starting to see the wisdom in this. Keeping KDE around is good for the user, but it's also good for Gnome. KDE came first, and from day one has always pushed Gnome to BE and to BE BETTER.

      I like Gnome a lot, but I really hope KDE sticks around for the forseeable future.

    • Re:wow, quite a statement (Score:5, Insightful)

      by YankeeInExile ( 577704 ) * on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:48AM (#9620777) Homepage Journal

      I think it was a pretty low-level barb at the GNOME community from someone who prefers the "other" religion. And his quote, "I find myself far more productive in KDE than in GNOME these days." makes me think that he might actually move back and forth between the two camps based on the current feature-to-wart ratio.

      Neither GNOME nor KDE are perfect. You pick the featureset that coincides with your personal philosophy or needs or free help-desk fount.

      For years, when Unix newbies asked me, "What should I run, *BSD, or Linux, or ... " I would always answer the same: "Find a nearby knowledgable friend, and run what s/he is running. The ability to get advice from someone who has done it is orders of magnitude more significant than the fine details of OS internals.

    • Re:wow, quite a statement (Score:5, Informative)

      by HermanAB ( 661181 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:53AM (#9620836)
      No, that is not a troll. If you want to have an easy to use Linux system, then with Fedora, you have to select the 'Install Everything' option. With Mandrake, you have to select all available desktop managers and games, network client and network server options.

      The reason for that, is that you then get all the libraries on your machine, making future installs much easier.

      It is also important that you plug everything you got into the machine before you begin. If you want USB support, then you have to plug some USB device in before you start the installation.

      All of that is pretty obvious to old hands...

      • Re:wow, quite a statement (Score:5, Informative)

        by pyros ( 61399 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @10:27AM (#9621213) Journal
        Wow, you're totally wrong. All three available systems (system-config-packages, yum, and apt) resolve dependencies, so installing 'Everything' just to make sure you have all the libs you might need is complete overkill and a waste of space. If you can't convince yourself, then you could just manually select every lib, and leave out all the stuff you don't need on a home desktop (like all the rwho, rdate, rdist, rsh, rlogin, ypbind, NFS server, etc). If you don't have any Qt/KDE libs installed, and use any of the three mentioned installation systems, you could just, for example, run `apt-get install quanta` and it will install all the Qt/KDE libs for you.

        Regarding the "plug everything in first" command, I haven't seen that hold true in a while. I haven't had anything connected to the USB bus on my laptops the last few times I've installed RH/FC, and plugging in a USB mouse later on always works (in fact I can hotplug it and have both the external mouse and the touchpad working simultaneously, with full wheel support and everything). Plugging in a PCMCIA WiFi NIC always seems to cause boot problems after the install because it tries to bring it up but it can't because the PCMCIA stuff hasn't been loaded yet. What difference do you think it would make anyway? The installer uses Kudzu for hardware detection, which is what is used every time the computer boots (unless you manually disable the service, in which case it's your own fault that hardware detection doesn't work after install).

  • Up2date (Score:3, Informative)

    by ObsessiveMathsFreak ( 773371 ) <obsessivemathsfreak.eircom@net> on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:41AM (#9620717) Homepage Journal
    FC2's up2date utility is vastly improved from prior versions, and no extra configuration is required to begin using it.

    Well he's right about one thing. Up2date dosen't need any extra configuration as it does not in fact work, at all. It just connects and crashes. Bad Newbie!! It's back to the command prompt for you!
    • ehehe I also noticed the gui updater crashes *every* time.... just use apt and/or yum like a normal person
      • Did either of you search bugzilla.redhat.com or file bug reports? The up2date tools work quite well for quite a large number of people.
    • I wonder if you waited long. The only problem I've had with up2date since FC2 is if I minimize it and bring it back up later, the window will be blank until a graphic changes (like the progress bar moves) then the text returns. It looks like a crash but it does its thing behind the scenes. The gui is too slow for me anyway, I don't like clicking next all the time so i just "up2date --update" and be done with it. If you have it set to skip packages (like kernel) then you'll need to issue -f like "up2date -f
      • If you're running it non-interactively from command line anyway, why bother with up2date at all, instead of yum?
        • Because yum is slower to get updates from fedora.redhat.com mirrors. I got an update for the latest kernel about an hour after release but didn't see the yum headers get downloaded until early the next day.

  • GNOME / KDE flamewar (Score:5, Informative)

    by scarolan ( 644274 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:42AM (#9620723) Homepage
    Not to start a Gnome / KDE flamewar here but we have twelve users on linux workstations and they all do just fine in the custom Gnome environment provided with FC2. They all came from using Windows and there was not a steep learning curve at all. I personally find the nautilus spacial browsing really annoying though, and even moreso that the only way to turn it off is to dig way down in the gconf editor.

    • Re:GNOME / KDE flamewar (Score:3, Informative)

      by Plug ( 14127 )
      Or, issue the one line fix:
      gconftool-2 --type boolean -s /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser true
      That could even go in someone's .profile on a networked setup, so there would be no further administrative overhead.

  • On the topic of out of the box (Score:3, Insightful)

    by emo boy ( 586277 ) <hoffman_brian.bah@com> on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:43AM (#9620732) Homepage
    I would like a partition manager built-in like Mandrake and Suse. Is that too much to ask?

    • I would like a partition manager built-in like Mandrake and Suse. Is that too much to ask?

      Yes, because NTFS has patents on it which restrict Red Hat from including any legal open source tools to do NTFS resizing (at least in the U.S.A.).

  • awesome timing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BitchAss ( 146906 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:43AM (#9620734) Homepage
    I literally *just* finished installing FC2 on my lappy. I'm running 'apt-get dist-upgrade' right now :)

    I'm pretty happy for the most part - it's more responsive than FC1 - the menus are very snappy. I'm having a weird problem - none of my mail clients will check an IMAP account - weird, non?

    • broadband arrogance... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Chemisor ( 97276 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:54AM (#9620840)
      > I'm running 'apt-get dist-upgrade' right now :)

      I wish people would stop gloating over their broadband connections...
      • Hey - I'm at work. I'm moving into dial-up country in 3 weeks.
    • I'm having a weird problem - none of my mail clients will check an IMAP account - weird, non?


      A complete guess, but could your firewalling rules be blocking the port on which IMAP runs? That's the sort of thing that gets changed with a new distro. You could try running 'nmap -sT localhost' or netstat while the client should be connected.

  • quote of the article (Score:5, Funny)

    by next1 ( 742094 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:47AM (#9620760) Journal
    And with all of the work, it's still a lot less annoying than keeping a Windows system running

    classic.

  • neat (Score:5, Informative)

    by falkryn ( 715775 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:48AM (#9620776)
    Nifty timing, since I just finished installing Core 2 on my box a few minutes ago. Not much in the article that informed me as such though.

    I seem to notice an emerging pattern with Fedora releases though. RCs, avoid them all, they won't work properly, unless you really do want to do bug testing (not a bad thing). Final releases, avoid them too, at least for about a month or so. Let the updates filter in, and then you should be good. Plus, that gives a good amount of time for the 3rd party apt/yum repositories to starting filling up, which they seem to be doing rather nicely lately (though of course not on a par with debian, but good none the less).

    • RCs are broken? Releases are broken too? Need the updates just to get a usable system? Sounds to me like they're taking the whole just-like-Windows thing too far...
    • What happens when the community stops testing the RCs and doesn't install the newest version is you get a whole lotta not testing happening. The whole reason these issues in FC2 made it through to the release is because not enough people tested. I remember one thread in the mailing list that basically went like this.

      A:"My video card doesn't work."

      B:"What kind is it?"

      A:"XXX-YYY."

      B:"Don't we support XXX-YYY? I thought we did."

      C:"We should, we didn't get any reports of any problems in testing."

      B:"A, What

  • Fedora 2 - Slow DNS problem (Score:5, Informative)

    by fforw ( 116415 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:52AM (#9620818) Homepage
    After installing Fedora Core 2 I had the problem that DNS queries out of Mozilla e.g. were rather slow (several seconds) while
    nslookup www.google.de
    seemed to work okay.

    the solution to this problem was that FC2 enables IPv6 by default which led to the noticable delay. After adding:

    alias net-pf-10 off
    to /etc/modprobe.conf to switch off IPv6 everything was fine.

  • KDE advocacy (Score:5, Informative)

    by Alioth ( 221270 ) <no@spam> on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:53AM (#9620821) Journal
    I note how he says 'switch to KDE'. Since RedHat 8's 'Bluecurve', I've always preferred KDE - the 'Bluecurve' theme seemed to work really well with it (and at the time, KDE had some vital features that Gnome didn't - for example, it gave you feedback when an application was launching: I tried my Dad with the default RH 8.0 Gnome install and he'd double-click large apps a dozen times and get many instances because Gnome didn't have the little application loading feedback that KDE has).

    I don't know whether Gnome still lacks this UI feedback, but if it does I'm not surprised that little touches like that made the article writer use KDE instead. And of course, Konqueror is an excellent browser.
    • Well, yes, I think it's nice that both GNOME and KDE have got to the point where now the only reason one can give for a choice one way or the other is going to be along the lines of "it feels nicer" or "I prefer the icons" or "it has this one minor feature I really like".

      Having played with GNOME on a fresh Debian set-up over the past week, I still prefer KDE, though only because I prefer the feel of it, and I've got my KIOSlaves working nicely for working on remote systems.

  • Installing FC2 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Zorilla ( 791636 )
    One day, I was drooling over the screenshots of Bluecurve from Fedora Core 2 and finally decided to install it. After using Mandrake 10.0 (and currently SuSE 9.1), it seems I still can't get used to the extremely fragmented set of config tools that come with GNOME and the system.

    I swear, there's three different menus synonymous with "preferences". Not that you could reorganize the menu to make more sense to you, it won't let you change it. I hope the system-config tools adopt a layout such as YaST and hope

  • MP3 support (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mr_Silver ( 213637 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:56AM (#9620856)
    I understand the reasons they do it, I respect the reasons they do it -- but in all honesty, I think it's a pretty silly idea to make users jump through hoops so they can listen to their MP3's.

    We complain about Microsoft bundling stuff within Windows -- but it's got to the point where a user expects a certain number of applications to come with the Operating System and I would consider MP3 support to be one of them.

    Sure, I know it's a no-brainer to install it afterwards but if Fedora's goal is to encourage mass market adoption, then they should consider that an individuals first impression counts - even more so when something they take for granted isn't there from the beginning.

    • Re:MP3 support (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Extrema Type ( 173543 )
      If I am not mistaken, OGG support is default on installation. RedHat isn't afrait of the RIIA, only of the MP3 patent holders.
    • http://www.lycoris.org [lycoris.org] may be the answer (once the next version is released this month.)

    • Re:MP3 support (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Pros_n_Cons ( 535669 )
      I understand the reasons they do it

      Then why complain? Windows users up until windowsXP (or was it 2k?) had to actually get on the internet and get winzip. And to this day people still have to download software they want like codecs! oh the humanity! Making poor users type words in search engines. I would rather have users jump though the hoop of typing yum install xmms-mp3 than one day read the slashdot thread "fedora has been sued by company who made recent deal with MS".
      For all the hundreds of appl

  • Ill give you another problem (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @09:57AM (#9620865) Homepage Journal
    ... how about Fdora Core 2's boot disk image is 6MB... how the HELL am I going to fit that on a floppy?

    I bet I pulled in a few "Floppy's are useless" goers... I have a couple of PPro machines that neither have USB or can boot from a cdrom. Thanks.

  • Desktop readyness? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @10:09AM (#9620975)
    More like, how to get FC2 to the state this particular individual prefers it. Certainly some of the stuff in there is little more than personal taste and is definitely not a reflection on Fedora or Gnome.

    I quite like spatial mode, for instance. I actually use graphical file managers now. Before with non-spatial Nautilus and Konqueror, I thought they were cute but never actually used them. The command line was far faster.

    • I quite like spatial mode

      Me too - the first thing from Gnome that I've ever liked. It's even better than my memories of the MacOS 8.6 finder (Spatial Nautilus' inspiration, I assume).

      From what I have read elsewhere and this article, I suspect that anyone imprinted on the MS explorer browser-style navigation will hate it and find it hard to use with the deeply nested directory structure they are used to.

  • review? what review? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by doktorstop ( 725614 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @10:11AM (#9620998) Homepage Journal
    First and foremost, I am totally in favour of review, comparisons or anything that gives an insight into the different distros, compares them of just plain discusses them. With this said, does any half-page with a couple of screenshots deserves to be called a "review" and being widely advertized on Slashdot? Dont's think so. The author took the time to install FC" (great!), had a couple of problems (dont we all), did not even test anything else than Gnome and made this into an article? Now give me a break! Mentionning NVidia drivers was nice... a couple of allegetly missing programs - great! And ... that is all? I teach 7,8 and 9 grade students... any of them could write something like that, and to be fair, they wouldnt get more than "good" for this. For an article in LinuxMagasine.. this is a disgrace. "This time he explains how to tame the GNOME and Fedora 2 problems he noted the first time around and get them both in working shape.." (from Slashdot)... where are the explanations? Ask ten "Joe SixPacks" to install FC2 and run it for half-a-day.. you will get a noce combination of non professional users opinions... summarise the discussion going on on FC2 newsgroups.. you will get a long list of problems, complains and solutions.. but, for God's sake, don't just post a page of non-interesting, plain stupid "experiences" and call this a review! "

  • system bell problems (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pomakis ( 323200 ) <pomakis@pobox.com> on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @10:15AM (#9621065) Homepage
    I upgraded to Fedora Core 2 just yesterday (from Core 1), and encountered and resolved some of the known problems (such as IPV6 being enabled by default, etc.). However, there's another problem that I haven't managed to resolve yet. My system bell no longer works. If anybody else has encountered this and knows the solution, please let me know! I'd appreciate it very much. FYI, I'm using fvwm as a window manager, so KDE-specific solutions such as "Control Panel --> Sounds --> ..." are useless to me.

    (Oh, and "xset q" shows "bell percent: 50 bell pitch: 400 bell duration: 100", so that's not the problem)

  • I have one beef with big distros these days (Score:4, Insightful)

    by zaqattack911 ( 532040 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @10:32AM (#9621291) Journal
    It would be really nice if all of these 5cd linux distros agreed to make sure a "minimum" but useful install can be had if one were to only download the first bootable CD.

    I'm not interested in downloading every single linux app that was ever conceived. Christ... look at knoppix! Pretty much has everything I need, on one CD. If I were to install linux for the purpose of being a production server, i'd be sure to download and compile everything from source anyways.

    Love,
    Zaq
    • Maybe many linux users are a bit spoiled... but I'm quite sure that everything on these 5cd linux distros are used by quite a few people. Old schoolers like me hate to have to look for some apps (like mc) on the 'net, while the said app has always been included in the "large" distros. Even relatively new users may be bitten when they firstly try to compile some software from source and find that some necessary tools are not installed. It is the same reason why it is often better to choose the packages by

  • What? You Were Expecting It to Work? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jcwinnie ( 672576 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @10:51AM (#9621517) Homepage
    There was a recent burst of bug reports about the Gnome Control Center under Fedora Core 2, to include this statement [redhat.com], which is absent from the Front Page of fedora.redhat.com:
    Fedora Core is intended for enthusiasts, hobbiests and developers, and should not ever be used in a production environment. If you require a solution which is intended for production environment I recommend contacting Red Hat sales to inquire about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and a Red Hat Network subscription. Fedora Core is a development platform which is bleeding edge, and tracks technology advances. It is not ever intended to be used in business production environments.
    Would it be more honest to include the above disclaimer at the Fedora site and when announcing any distribution of Fedora Core?
  • The only problem I had with FC2 was ACPI ... sucking. I just don't think its far enough in development to get dropped into a major release like Core 2. I had to turn it off and go back to APM for the time being. I give the guys working on it a huge two thumbs up, and I commend them for their work on it. I think it just still has a way to go.

    Flame away!

  • My experience with FC2 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DigitumDei ( 578031 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @10:52AM (#9621529) Homepage Journal
    Well having just installed FC2 myself and being a complete and utter n00b at linux, I have to say that as far as desktop readyness goes I was most impressed with FC2. The install wen't pretty much without a hitch, everything worked for my desktop purposes, and unlike any windows install, by the time the install was finished I had a full office suite. Incidentally I always have problems connecting my XP machines to the network properly (none huge, but enough that they don't connect first time), yet the linux box was connected and talking to the internet without me even setting anything up!

    Now if I had been installing a machine for a secretary or office worker, I would have been essentially finished within 2 hours. Unfortunately this was to be my movie/music player, attached to my tv. Two weeks later I finally managed to watch a dvd without a glitch.

    For a standard desktop install: FC2 - 1 XP - 0
    For a multimedia box: FC2 - 0 XP - 1

    Disclaimer, these are my experiences and obviously a different person with different hardware would most likely have a different outcome.

  • acrobat (Score:5, Informative)

    by Pros_n_Cons ( 535669 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @11:08AM (#9621712)
    I haven't seen anyone mention this and I read all the modded up comments but this part of the article:

    "For some reason, Adobe's official Acrobat Reader binaries have never worked in any version of Fedora, at least not for me or my students."

    Has a fix, DaG's repository has acroread on it. He said he configured yum sources though he must have missed dag which for me has some of the best goodies. uncomment :
    [dag]
    name=Dag APT Repository
    baseurl=http://dag.freshrpms.net/redhat/fc$release ver/en/$basearch/dag
    http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/freshrpms/pub/dag/redhat/ fc$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
    Then type 'yum install acroread'

  • Better solution (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tedgyz ( 515156 ) * on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @11:19AM (#9621834) Homepage
    Just boot into run level 3 (command line only).

    No more whining about which desktop is best.

    Now you can whine about which shell is best.

    Personally, I was overwhelmingly thrilled with FC2. I was especially thrilled when I learned up2date was working, and free! I am a happy RH7.2 user looking for an upgrade path. I have found it in FC2.
  • The title of this article sounds almost like anti-Fedora/RedHat FUD. It impiles that supposedly Fedora 2 "doesn't work" out of box. I don't know about others, I didn't have to do anything special to "get my Fedora to work" other than changing some settings to suit my needs. Everything that I use works just fine. I have been really happy with all Redhat Linux releases starting with 6.0 many years ago. However, it seems like there has been a constant and still ongoing RedHat bashing campaign in the community,
    • I haven't had any issues with FC2 at all. I'm a die hard RedHat person, having used 4.x back in the day, through 7.3, then finally going to FC1 (I wont touch 8 or 9).

      Most of the Redhat bashing comes from Debian users/developers (I am going to get modded troll for this, I know) from my experience. I do not see any other group of Linux users so hellbent on bashing Redhat users.

      Just an observation, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who has seen this...
    • blown out of proportion? the 7.x compiler issue caused major havoc for the datacenter where I worked even though no kernel compiles were done. i Still consider myself a great redhat fan, but let's not pretend it's all been peaches. There's been major releases of RH that never should have been pushed out the door as production grade products, and business users have to take that into account. Clearly Fedora is for people who want to have fun testing for RedHat, which is just fine for some.

  • Linux distro integration (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @03:01PM (#9624363) Journal
    Before you laugh, hear me out...

    I think there's a compelling marketplace in providing integration services with a major Linux distro.

    For YEARS, Linux has had good and proper dependency checking and network-based installs. (EG: Apt-get, up2date, yum) But, when I go to install America's Army, I end up with this weird binary thingamajig installer that's 100% in-house, and unique to that package.

    Thus, to get everything working properly, I spend another 2 hours hunting down weird error messages with google, before I can get it working right.

    And then, when an upgrade happens, I get to do it all over again. (sigh)

    But, what if something like the Dag repository were to come up with something that allows a commercial or 3rd party vendor to:

    1) issue a certificate for an install of software to a user,

    2) easily download/install the software via Yum,

    3) handle dependencies so the install is always smooth and quick.

    Here's how I picture this might work: (I'll use yum in examples, any of the network-based installers would be fine)

    A) I set up yum with this commercial repository by copy/pasting a few lines into /etc/yum.conf.

    B) I buy XYZ product for Linux. I can choose to download a binary installer, or I can simply download a certificate.

    C) If I choose the certificate, then I would issue "yum install packagename".

    D) Part of the install process would ask me for the certificate to verify that I do, indeed have rights to install the package on this particular machine.

    I think there's a tremendous business model here! I know I would almost KILL to have some packages install this way, and having this kind of service would be a boon to Linux adoption and deployment.
  • Just installed Fedora Core 2 on my works Toshiba Tecra M2, dual boot under grub with XP. I have to say it was about the easiest GNU/Linux install I've been through... although up2date seems to be hanging as I write this. Oh well :)

    A big thumbs up from here, anyway. NB: if you want WiFi on one of these, blag a supported card from somewhere - the built-in Intel 2200g has no GNU/Linux support yet (but they're working on it).

  • Sucky review (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Brian Kendig ( 1959 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @10:57PM (#9628593)
    Man, what a sucky review of FC2.

    First off, his original review of it links to a "scathing criticism [computerworld.com] of Gnome 2.6" which says that Gnome 2.6 blows because:
    • it opens folders into new windows, instead of reusing the current window
    • there's no way to change individual colors in desktop themes
    ... and that's it. Two pages of a "scathing criticism" of Gnome 2.6, and that's the best the author could come up with.

    Then the FC2 review says that FC2's "admirable qualities cannot save it from its congenital defects." What defects? Well, he doesn't like a bug in the 2.6 kernel's ALSA drivers, a bug in OpenOffice.org 1.1.1, the fact that Gimp 2.0 is missing color management... hey wait, these are all complaints about the open-source software that's included with FC2. Where are the complaints specific to FC2? He doesn't have any.

    Then I'm amused that his latest article says that to "fix" FC2, install KDE instead of Gnome. Gee, that sounds more like Gnome-bashing than a constructive review...

    Guess what? I *like* FC2. It's much more up-to-date than other Linux distros like SuSE, and package management (especially with the automatic updater) is much easier than with other distros such as Debian (for whom "stable" is ancient, "testing" is fairly outdated, and "unstable" sometimes means "not backwards-compatible with the old version"). I want to be able to run the latest code without fears of hosing my system. Fedora Core lets me.

    And I like Gnome, too. It has a much more professional look than KDE, and its settings are much more streamlined as well. KDE suffers from feature bloat and an overabundance of options to configure even the most trivial aspects of the user interface. I don't want to be able to tweak everything; I want to be given an interface which looks sharp without *requiring* me to tweak anything.

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