[Wylug-discuss] Redhat Fedora Core 4 - First Impressions

[John Hodrien]

On Sun, 19 Jun 2005, Rob Hall wrote:

> Just thought I'd share my experiences with Fedora Core 4 - apologies for
> the crossposting.

I'll chip in with my own, and assume anything I'm saying is a difference of
experience, not a disagreement with Rob.

> The CD set was easily downloaded from one of the mirror sites (don't
> even bother with the Redhat site - its like having dial-up all over
> again!) and they all checked out with sha1sum so no bothers there.

;)  I managed to get it earlyish from Redhat, and had a nice sustained
1Mbyte/sec from them.

> I am not using my usual set up so I'm not totally comparing like for
> like in this review. I am using a 1.6Gb P4 with 1Gb RAM and a 120Gb
> Seagate PATA drive with a Radeon 9600 graphics card and an Intel Pro 100
> NIC and Soundblaster Live 5.1 sound card in it.

2.4 P4 512Mb 80Gb Maxtor PATA Nvidia Ti4200 AC97.

> Installation started well with the usual choices (language, keyboard
> layout etc.) and I chose to upgrade my FC3 system.

I installed clean which probably accounts for a fair few differences.

> I am not that precious about it really because I have home directories on a
> different partition and a second HDD formatted as vfat which I share with a
> Windows installation.

I had one large predominantly empty LVM VG, and my previous FC4test install on
a normal partition.  Installer refused to make a new logical volume as I
didn't have any free physical volumes.  Idiot installer.  So I wiped the
FC4test install and installed in a regular partition, shuftying it all over to
LVM after the install.

> Bizarrely the estimated time fluctuated wildly and promised me initially
> an estimated 60 minutes and then within 5 minutes had shot up to a
> Windows-esque 120 minutes and it wasn't until nearing the end of the
> upgrade that it dropped dramatically. The whole process took under 60
> minutes - not bad I thought but a little longer than normal. It is still
> fantastic though when you think that it can take 3 hours or more to get
> Windows to the same state with apps and everything else installed.

I installed over NFS, and went from CD boot to the firstboot screen in 20
minutes.

> One strange thing was during the installation of Open Office, I noticed
> that all the languages under the sun were being installed and quite
> hefty packages they were too. I hope that Linux and Linux apps aren't
> going to suffer from the bloatware syndrome that M$ have got running
> through their packages.

Not here.  I chose the workstation install:

openoffice.org-writer-1.9.104-2
openoffice.org-calc-1.9.104-2
openoffice.org-core-1.9.104-2
openoffice.org-impress-1.9.104-2
openoffice.org-graphicfilter-1.9.104-2
openoffice.org-xsltfilter-1.9.104-2
openoffice.org-draw-1.9.104-2
openoffice.org-math-1.9.104-2

> In use, it feels very similar to FC3 although the latest version of
> GNOME has a few refinements such as a Desktop menu. It is not laid out
> in a particularly logical manner although anyone who has used GNOME for
> any time will soon get used to its little quirks!

I find evince a very nice document viewer.  I had quite a few problems with
USB under FC2/3 whereby it'd sometimes work with my cardreader and sometimes
not.  So far with FC4test + FC4 it's worked everytime.

> I was a bit surprised that they have chosen OpenOffice 2.0 Beta as the
> office suite - I would have been happier with a fully stable release
> although so far it hasn't proved to be any trouble and if anything feels a
> bit quicker in operation than previous releases. I like Open Office and I
> feel that it is now a real alternative to the big guns in the office suite
> stakes. Maybe I can push its use at college!

I agree it feels quite a bit quicker, and I've not had any stability problems.
I have been caught out with people unable to open the documents in older
versions though.

> Strangely, now when I play CDs, the CD player makes a hell of a racket
> which it didn't previously so I need to look into this.
>
> Another peculiar thing is that it lost my local printer but it only took
> a couple of minutes to fix. However, if you had a lot of printers
> connected then this could be more problematic.
>
> All in all, not a bad experience. It doesn't appear on the face of it to
> be as big an upgrade as from FC2 - FC3 but the word is that the stuff
> under the bonnet is a lot more improved so time will tell. I am looking
> forward to getting my replacement motherboard so I can try this out
> properly.

Upgrading from FC2 I thought it was a nice little upgrade, as hal/hotplug/udev
wasn't sorted out by then was it?

I suspect we'll notice more of a difference in the long term with FC4, as
they've finally sorted out the fedora extras, which hopefully will mean a
broader package base.

The only other problem I've had is that the rhn-applet-{tui,gui} doesn't work
for me, never showing upgrades even when yum shows them as being available.
This worked fine in the last test release.  I've also found X can crash if you
switch to a VT before gdm has kicked into life (with the livna nvidia
drivers).

Once they've truly sorted out a way of doing an online upgrade between
versions (or produce something 'unversioned' that's a little less cutting edge
than rawhide) I'll be happier.

jh

-- 
"Woman was God's second mistake."                    -- Nietzsche