[Wolves] linux fedora core 4

[James Turner]

On Friday 18 Nov 2005 13:48, Bobby Singh wrote:
> Hello,
>   I know fedora is a popular distrobution and a lot of people use  it.  I
> like kde hence did'nt install, but i have been using  ubuntu!?!

Both KDE and GNOME are available in Fedora and work fine.

> When i come across people with ubuntu i still find a  lot a happy fedora
> users. So why so popular; is it just a stable  mandrake with gnome?

Fedora is the successor to the freely downloadable versions of Red Hat Linux. 
In the olden days, Red Hat refused to include KDE in their distribution due 
to licensing problems with the QT widget set that it relies on. These 
problems have since been resolved and QT is now covered by the GPL and 
included in both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Core.

Whilst Red Hat were refusing to ship KDE, French company Mandrakesoft began 
shipping a Linux distribution which was essentially Red Hat compiled for i586 
(Pentium-class) processors or better (rather than Red Hat's generic i386) and 
having a KDE desktop integrated. Linux-Mandrake has subsequently diverged 
considerably from Red Hat and is now known as Mandriva Linux.

In the mean time, whilst the QT libraries were still tied up with a non-Open 
Source compliant license, the Red Hat Advanced Development (RHAD) Labs were 
heavily involved in developing GNOME in conjunction with the wider 
open-source community. Red Hat was one of the first distros to use GNOME as 
its standard/prefered desktop.

Although Red Hat was instrumental (according to some schools of thought) in 
much of the early GNOME work, their influence and contribution to GNOME tends 
to be more subtle these days. Some might argue that their early lead has been 
eclipsed by Canonical/Ubuntu.

> does it have good package mang? is it true about  the bad multimedia
> support?

Package management under Ubuntu and Fedora is good. Both provide a similar 
level of functionality and a wide range of packaged software, although Fedora 
relies on RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) which is generally considered 
inferior to Debian or Ubuntu's APT/Dpackage system.

Legal constraints prevent either Ubuntu or Fedora from shipping with support 
for certain proprietary codecs (such as MP3 audio, DIVX video or the CSS 
encryption used on most DVDs), although suitable third-party software is 
available for download for both distros.

> What post-install is needed to install and should have running?  I  
> know you  need 'YUM' are all the multimedia codecs available?

A vanilla installation from the product CD can be updated to the latest 
versions of everything using the command "yum update" (as root), similar to 
good old "apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade" under Ubuntu. An equivalent 
graphical tool can be launched from "System Tools", "Red Hat Network" off the 
"Start" menu.

Try these:

Packages for video support: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/news.html

Packages for MP3 audio support: http://dag.wieers.com/packages/xmms/
(The FC3 versions work fine under FC4)

No doubt Aq will disapprove of my recommending MPlayer! :)

Regards,

James