arctic Posted July 28, 2005 Report Share Posted July 28, 2005 A very personal review – Fedoracore 4 We still haven't any Fedora 4 review - so I will post one: After a long time of weighting the pros and cons of upgrading to my laptop from Fedora 3 to Fedora 4, i finally decided to give number four a try. So here is what impressions I got with the current release of Fedora. Installation: My laptop is nothing spectacular. 1,2 Ghz ESC lappy with 30 GB hdd and 256 MB RAM and a 64 MB Nvidia graphic card, a cd/dvd combo drive, wlan and a standard Realtek lan card. I first tried an upgrade, as Anaconda asked me if I want to perform one. From past experiences, I do know that upgrading an existing Fedora/RedHat release can result in total chaos, I nontheless gave it a try. Maybe Fedora improved on this task. After some minutes, my lappy was updating all packages but it took the machine more than one hour to finish the upgrade. And after reporting a successful upgrade, the machine rebooted and... broke. Nothing worked. I tried to get the beast running again with the fedora rescue-cd but to no avail. This test failed miserably. But I have to be fair: almost every distro that I tried had problems with upgrading and it seems to me that rpm based distros are especially vulnerable in this department. So I restarted the install-process and did a clean install. This time, i encountered absolutely no problem. Everything worked instantly. Fedora as everyday workbox: First of all, I do not use Fedora for anything else than listening to music, watching some videos, designing, word-processing, webbrowsing, emails, burning data and photo-import/manipulation. No server stuff, no samba. Just things that the average user would do on his box, too. When the system booted, it was extremely slow, slower than fedora3 (and fc3 wasn‘t a formula one), so this got me a bit disappointed. When you run Fedora, you know sooner or later that they willnever give you a base install with only the most important services running. So, unless you do not know enough about system services, you will have a slow computer. Being already experienced with Fedora (I had started with RedHat 7.2), I knew which services I could disable without risking anything. This is – of course – an easy task, but for a newcomer, it would cause some head-scratching, I guess. After adjusting system services and disabling SELINUX (I forgot to disable it during the installation), the system ran a lot faster. Quite acceptable. Now, the desktop is very clean and the menu is less cluttered than in previous releases. Fedora has reduced the number of apps that are installed by default, which is nice. But a lot of stuff is missing – as usual – in the audio/video department, but I don‘t blame them for it. Ubuntu and others are not any better and I guess everyone knows that the mp3 support and wincodecs are not included by default due to licensing reasons. The default applications are the usual stuff you find in any Gnome 2.10 or 2.8 desktop. The only surprised was the inclusion of Open Office 2 beta. Usually i tend to say: don‘t include beta stuff in a final release, but after testing it for several weeks, I found that it is stable enough for everyday work and: Fedora constanly launches updates for Ooo, so you will have 2.0 final in a hurry once it is released (current version is 1.9.117 for FC4). Firefox was surprising, too. Not because it offered something positive but an extremely long loading time. I tried to tweak Firefox a bit but it didn‘t help. Later I realized that gnome 2.10 plus Firefox eats up more ram than I expected, so the only solution would be increasing RAM or using e.g. Xfce as default desktop. USB-devices were recognised and photos imported in a hurry. Media playback wasn‘t buggy at all, so this seemed to be quite an adequate Fedora release. Not bad... Now I was tempted: how big would the difference be between one of my desktop pc‘s and the lappy regarding boot-time, loading of apps and stability? I throw the cds into a 1,4 ghz pc and go through the installation process (and this time, I remember to disable SELINUX :) ) which took roughly some 35-40 minutes. Again, I modified the number of services that are running by default and rebooted – and it really began to fly. It currently boots at roughly 40 seconds from start to end and it has proven to be stable. More stable than any Fedora release I had used so far. And yum is really faster. The only thing that I cannot understand is why they haven‘t added yumex, the graphical front end for yum into the default install. That would please newcomers to no end. But apart from such minor stuff, this seems not to be a simple „testbed“ for RedHat anymore but a mature distro by itself. If anyone ever thought about testing it, go ahead. I can assure you that taking a look at FC4 is worth the time. I know, this is a very short and not very detailed review but maybe somebody will find it a little bit interesting. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lowe Posted July 28, 2005 Report Share Posted July 28, 2005 Nice review, to be honest i think it deserved it's own topic since this one is so old. Redhat and fedora kernels were always bloated, i don't think that's something that will ever change. I still consider fedora too buggy as a main desktop OS, every new fedora release is the same something is fixed and something is broke. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted July 28, 2005 Report Share Posted July 28, 2005 NO secret, I enjoy fedora/rh very much! :) Booting faster: http://www.improvedsource.com/content/view/13/2/ http://www.improvedsource.com/content/view/14/2/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted July 28, 2005 Author Report Share Posted July 28, 2005 Booting faster: http://www.improvedsource.com/content/view/13/2/ http://www.improvedsource.com/content/view/14/2/ <{POST_SNAPBACK}> i read that topic some weeks ago but i decided that i have no real interest in recompiling the kernel. :) if it ain't broken, don't fix it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted July 28, 2005 Report Share Posted July 28, 2005 Nice review, to be honest i think it deserved it's own topic since this one is so old. Redhat and fedora kernels were always bloated, i don't think that's something that will ever change. I still consider fedora too buggy as a main desktop OS, every new fedora release is the same something is fixed and something is broke. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> $ du -h /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-1.1398_FC4 1.9M /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-1.1398_FC4 That's bloat? ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lowe Posted July 28, 2005 Report Share Posted July 28, 2005 Bloat = Services that are not needed. Applications that are not needed. Not to mention the slow start up it suffers from, my archlinux box starts up so fast it's kind of scary and that's with apache, php and mysql too. Fedora isn't a bad distro, it's just heavier than the likes of arch and gentoo. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted July 28, 2005 Author Report Share Posted July 28, 2005 Bloat = Services that are not needed. Applications that are not needed. well, this is imho very relative. some admins are quite happy that those services are already running so they don't have to activate them, while some home-users hate this. you have to keep in mind that fedora is still the development-base for RHEL, so... much of this "bloat" is necessary for running secure and effective servers (like selinux). and as you don't boot servers that often, the boot-time is not really relevant in that case. if you want to make fedora compete with archs or slacks speed on a home-pc, you can reconfigure fc a lot (as proven by the link cybrjackle has provided) so that it boots in e.g. less than 30 seconds. and you can strip down the system like hell if you want. a real base system e.g. is not 600 mb big (as shown by the installer) but only around 200 mb, which is more than acceptable for a running server-system, i guess. after all, fedora has mainly another target audience than arch or gentoo (although they are also used for servers but not as much as redhat/fedora). so things WILL differ between the one and the other distro. ;) compare e.g. a "normal" gentoo installation to dsl... which distro is bloated then? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lowe Posted July 28, 2005 Report Share Posted July 28, 2005 No the bloat is not necessary for running a server, i consider mines fast, stable and secure but mines doesn't have any bloat. Selinux = overrated and buggy. I have no idea why fedora and redhat are considered great for servers, they're not any better than arch, debian or even gentoo. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted July 29, 2005 Author Report Share Posted July 29, 2005 redhat is considered great for servers because there is actually a company that will support your servers for three years minimum. okay that costs you something but... that's business. about selinux: it is totally unnecessary for desktop usage but it is not unuseful for servers imho a it manages some vulnerabilities that are hard to lock e.g in /tmp afaik. so if you have a server running and once it crashes, you will get fired, i guess you will take every extra tool to make the beast more secure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spinynorman Posted July 29, 2005 Report Share Posted July 29, 2005 Nice review, to be honest i think it deserved it's own topic since this one is so old. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I agree. B) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted July 31, 2005 Report Share Posted July 31, 2005 No the bloat is not necessary for running a server, i consider mines fast, stable and secure but mines doesn't have any bloat. Selinux = overrated and buggy. I have no idea why fedora and redhat are considered great for servers, they're not any better than arch, debian or even gentoo. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> How is SELinux overrated and buggy? Is that statement from using it on a server side and trying to crack your box, or are you simply fuding? You have no idea why redhat is considered great for servers? Seriously, is that a real comment? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lowe Posted July 31, 2005 Report Share Posted July 31, 2005 How is SELinux overrated and buggy? Is that statement from using it on a server side and trying to crack your box, or are you simply fuding? You have no idea why redhat is considered great for servers? Seriously, is that a real comment? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Selinux from what i've read causes more problems than it's worth. Care to enlighten me why redhat is Sooo great for servers then? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted July 31, 2005 Report Share Posted July 31, 2005 How is SELinux overrated and buggy? Is that statement from using it on a server side and trying to crack your box, or are you simply fuding? You have no idea why redhat is considered great for servers? Seriously, is that a real comment? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Selinux from what i've read causes more problems than it's worth. Thats fair, so you don't know. Care to enlighten me why redhat is Sooo great for servers then? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> REAL SUPPORT ISV Support RAID LVM SELinux 5 years of upgrades and security fixes. Industry Recgonized Global File System Directory Server Cluster Suite Platforms: Intel x86, Intel Itanium, Intel EM64T, AMD64, IBM POWER series Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted July 31, 2005 Report Share Posted July 31, 2005 It's just still riding on the coattales of its past is all. It was the first distro to grasp the corp rung and hang on. Linux is linux...can anyone argue that? There's nothing rh can do that any other distro can't. If you know enough to run sel, then you know enough to run it on any distro. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted July 31, 2005 Report Share Posted July 31, 2005 support? what's that? true about RAID, ISV, LVM, and Directory Server though... it does it quite well and easily Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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