[Gllug] Fedora or Fed-up

[Stuart Children]

Nick Richards wrote:
>> What success/disaster have people had with Fedora Core 2 as a desktop
>> system ?
> 
> Make sure to add the livna.org etc. yum repositories to get mp3, dvd
> etc. and everything'll be fine, or at least that's what I've found. If
> you're a redhat 9 user I'd strongly suggest the upgrade, it's better.

Indeed. http://www.fedora.us/ + http://rpm.livna.org/ are repositories 
specifically tailored to work together and with Fedora Core. Together 
they cover a good number of packages that the standard user will want. 
The majority of packages are in fedora.us, which will (at some point - 
hopefully soon) become the official "Fedora Extras". livna.org contains 
things which are of questionable license (mainly due to patent concerns) 
and so RedHat can't distribute themselves or offficially associate with.

The only things that the above repositories fail to currently handle for 
me are a few obscure things which you can forgive them, and various Java 
packages - which are problematic due to their redistribution issues.

Regarding Fedora Core itself, I'm a happy user both at home and my work 
desktop. My only criticism is that doing an upgrade to FC2 gave me a 
couple more issues than I've typically had to deal with after an 
upgrade, but nothing that didn't take long to sort out. Obviously you 
won't have these concerns with a fresh install. The general system 
definitely continues to improve, and I would certainly recommend it for 
a desktop system.

I can definitely feel an improvement of the 2.6 kernel over 2.4 on my 
home desktop. I was pleasantly suprised at the lack of issues with this. 
Eg: the dxr3 module I self-compile just worked with even less work than 
under 2.4. OTOH there are various bits of hardware for which support 
under 2.6 is currently an issue. Firewire being a prime example. I think 
also some IDE tape drives? For a relatively standard desktop you should 
have no problems.

HTH

-- 
Stuart
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