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Fedora Core 5 "Bordeaux" Review


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A question.

I've restarted FC5 for a few times now and every time $top shows that there are 6 users

 

top - 19:44:03 up 10 min, 6 users, load average: 0.45, 0.77, 0.60

Tasks: 112 total, 1 running, 111 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie

Cpu(s): 10.0% us, 2.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 87.3% id, 0.3% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si

Mem: 515792k total, 506656k used, 9136k free, 17020k buffers

Swap: 1630556k total, 0k used, 1630556k free, 227380k cached

 

On Mandriva I had only one or two (if I had another session open).

So from where do these 6 come from? :/

Edited by solarian
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  • 1 month later...

Fedora Core 5 review - part two.

 

Two months with Fedora Core 5 - What a decline! :o

 

I communicated with wakish and he recommended me to write a second review of FC5. Now, I have tested the system for two months and, if you remember well, I was full of praise for FC5 when it came out. Now, after some real testing of the distro, my view has changed dramatically. Why? I will tell you.

 

I tried to install FC5 on more machines, from laptops to desktops. My experience was that especially laptops are problematic for an installation. Many times, the installer does not start in graphical mode and for the text-based install, you need to disable framebuffer mode - or you will get garbled text. Then, once it is installed, it is unable to detect the TFT display. A display that was detected by FC4 and Mandriva and Gentoo and Slackware and other distros at once. Even hacking Xorg did not help on one of my laptops. No chance.

 

Then I tried to place FC5 on my Yoper development box, too, but it was expected to be installed on the secondary harddisk, replacing my Debian partition. So far no problem. The only "tricky" thing was that I wanted to keep Yopers lilo on hdc and install the FC5 grub on hdd, switching the boot-selection with a hotkey later as needed (I need lilo to reside on hdc and a second bootloader for recovery in case something breaks). The default anaconda installer option did not give me any options. I went to advanced mode and there were only two options: installing grub in hdc or hdd5 (fedoras /root). I scratched my head. No chance to install it on hdds MBR. I decided to give it a try with hdd5 and launch an installation for the MBR later once I chrooted into the Fedora box. Said, done. /sbin/grub-install /dev/hdd was reported as a successful procedure. But after rebooting, I am only greeted by

 

grub>

 

Great! :lol2: Rebooted again, tried to fix it and found out that no grub.conf or menu.lst file existed. Why? I thought, well, let's be smart and fix this manually, thus I created the file myself, relaunched the setup B) and ... no go. Something broke badly anywhere. I forced a reinstallation of grub, no chance. So much for the ease of installation once you do something more complex. I NEVER had this problem with Debian, Slackware or Mandriva. :huh:

 

I went back to my main machine which had FC5 on the primary drive, thus perfectly bootable. It worked quiet well so far. Until I decided to install lm_sensors. lm_sensors doesn't work in FC5 for me, but it worked in FC4. Then I installed a cups update and my printers were all dead. Some four new kernels were shipped in less than one month and some made my system temporarily slower, less stable and weirdly behaving. Udev and hotplug were more than flaky at times although they were quite stable for me before I updated.

 

What the hell happened to Fedora?

 

I thought that this is not normal and checked the fedoraforum again thoroughly and... a whopping number of users that were very, very disappointed with FC5. Some reported that their X server died completely, many had printer problems, others had problems with Beagle, still others got a broken KDE, dead sound, the 64 bit edition is apparently completely crippled, twin-screens not working anymore, samba and sendmail problems and the list goes on. Further reading revealed that some developers are rather new to Fedora as it seems and those guys ship rawhide (testing) packages to the main fedora mirrors way too fast. The quality has dropped tremendously during the past weeks imho.

 

Then I thought that yum might get faster once the download frenzy is over, but it that did never happen. In fact, I think that yum was faster in FC4 than in FC5. Very weird...

 

I thought this will never happen, but I am quite fed up with Fedora right now. :o Never did I or others experience that many problems with a Fedora release (and I use RedHat since version 7.2!). It might still be a good platform for programmers and those who don't care about serious bugs because they consider them a nice puzzle to solve, but for me, this release has slowly but steadily become a real disaster. So much that I recently decided to roll all my machines back to Mandriva. :P

 

I thought it is only fair to let you know what I experienced with FC5, because wakish reminded me that some people consider my review as the "sole" truth (which it isn't of course).

 

Of course, others had no problems with FC5, but my problems were duplicated on five computers. That is more than enough proof for me that the Fedora team really needs to sit down and do its homework again.

 

[/rant]

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now you scared me!!

so much for a quiet and relaxating evening full of peace

eeeeeeek, I almost want to deinstall my FC5 now... but , but there's nothing I could put in place (scratches ehad)

damn!

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now you scared me!!

so much for a quiet and relaxating evening full of peace

eeeeeeek, I almost want to deinstall my FC5 now... but , but there's nothing I could put in place (scratches ehad)

damn!

:lol: If it works for you, then keep it. It still works for many, many people, but many people are also very disappointed. I think that is natural and mebbe FC6 will be way better again. And remember, FC4 never gave me real problems. ;)

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I'm sorry to hear of your bad experiences with FC5, arctic. Mine are still good. I'm hoping I'm not runnign into the same issues you did. I'll have to admit, that I had some problems too trying to install FC5 on my laptop. But with certain bootcodes I could avoid the problems. I had more issues with FC4 on those laptops then I did have with FC5. As for my desktop, its running FC5 to my satisfaction, so I will keep it on it for a now. Just hoping I don't run into the same issues you did. ;) After all, I decided to install FC5 after your "great" review of FC5.

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As you might have found out, my main concern is not really the fedora distro itself, but the quality of updates. ;) I find it rather shocking that updates break X or printers completely. Didn't they test the "updates" before releasing them? I am really confused and I'd like to know what is going on behind the scenes, but I don't have any time that I could spend on the fedora-project. :sad:

 

I will definitely check FC6, but I will stay clear of FC5 for now, which doesn't like me for some unknown reason.

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Mmm, I got that impression from your second review. I'm not having any problems with the updated packages with yum, so maybe it likes me more then you. ;) Just kiddin'.

I will at least be aware of any problems, thanks to you Arctic. Thanks.

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As you might have found out, my main concern is not really the fedora distro itself, but the quality of updates. ;) I find it rather shocking that updates break X or printers completely. Didn't they test the "updates" before releasing them? I am really confused and I'd like to know what is going on behind the scenes, but I don't have any time that I could spend on the fedora-project. :sad:

I forgot to mention on this, one of the big problems is they release these to

 

fedora-updates-testing.repo

 

Only not a lot of people use it, so they don't get as much feed back from a broad listening audiance :)

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I forgot to mention on this, one of the big problems is they release these to

 

fedora-updates-testing.repo

 

Only not a lot of people use it, so they don't get as much feed back from a broad listening audiance :)

Thanks for the information. I think that explains some of the recent troubles that Fedora has. :) Actually I NEVER hear of that testing repo and if I haven't heard about it yet, then 90% won't know of its existence either, I guess. Someone at Fedora should spread word about it imho, otherwise things won't get better. ;)

 

Hmm... feedback... that reminds me that I need to send some bug-report-feedback to my Yoper colleagues again. Only a rough four months till Yoper 3.0 will be released. Yay! B)

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Thanks for the information. I think that explains some of the recent troubles that Fedora has. :)

Yeah, the Developers ask on the Test list, but most of the people are running Rawhide and don't want to run stable + testing, I did for awhile and then just mv to rawhide ;)

 

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redha...a.testers/40132

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