arctic Posted March 18, 2007 Report Share Posted March 18, 2007 Preview - Fedora 7 Once again I have decided to write a (p)review. This time, it is the upcoming Fedora 7. Note: It is not called Fedora Core anymore. More on that later... For this test, I grabbed the Fedora 7 test2 live-CD. First booting on one of my Semprons proved to be no problem. I was greeted with a very, very nice looking grub-screen, featuring the balloons of the new graphical theme. After booting the system, I did not hesitate for long and used the live-install option from the menu. some 15 minutes later, the installation with anaconda was finished. Straightforward as always. Anyone who has used anaconda will feel familiar with the newest anaconda version, which is intuitive and imho very stable. The only "problem" I ran into was at the end of the installation. Anaconda asked me, if I want to reboot. Sure. I cklick "yes" but nothing happens. Ooops. Okay, I restart using the Gnome-menu entry. My new shiny system... Although it is reported that Fedora works on improving boot-time, I didn't notice a lot in this department with f7t2. Some 42 seconds to load. But honestly, who cares, if it loads in 30, 40 or 60 seconds? All distros I have tested so far boot fast enough for my tastes. But I guess that the results in the "pimp up my boot-time" process will be visible when they release t3 or f7 final. We will see. Once rebooted, the rest of the configuration is done (adding users, etc.) One thing that I like is the improved timezone-selection. Previously you had to select a tiny spot on a huge world map. Now, it first zooms into the map for making the selection easier, then it automatically points with an arrow to the nearest city for the timezone-setup. This makes it easier for these with bad sight (e.g. many older people) to know where to click. It may seem like a minor improvement but these small things improve the usability a lot. Once I am logged into Gnome, I notice several new things: The screen resolution is perfectly detected on my widescreen monitor (Debian had some problems here) and set to 1440x960@75 MHz. In the upper Gnome-panel, there is a fast-user-switch tool which can be configured nicely in its look and behavior. Some configuration (users and groups) needs to be done by root, while the basic user config can be altered by the user himself. There is also another nice tool: it is now possible to adjust laptop monitor brightness with one mouseclick. Cool. Then, there is the new preferences dialogue in Gnome-System menu. Much more organized than its predecessor. Nice. The wobbly windows eye-candy is there again for those who love it/want it. There are also some new apps: An energy-monitoring tool that collects stats about energy usage (it crashed on me, not surprising on a test-box), and a SELinux troubleshooter. Some releases ago, troubleshooting SELinux was not a very pleasant task. Okay, now it ain't pleasant either, but it got a hell of a lot more comfortable now. Detailed explanation what got reported on which applications and why. Two thumbs up for that one. The desktop look is nice, the globes seen in grub are there again, flying above some clouds. Although the wallpaper is a bit too bright for my tastes (reminds me a bit of some Corel-Draw ad), it fits the overall look and feel. There is also the new echo icon theme, which replaces bluecurve as the default icon-set. It is quite okay, but far from perfect. IMHO some icons are too hard to recognize.From a usability point of view, the default gnome and bluecurve icons are better. From an "eye-candy" point of view, echo is the winner. Package Management The Fedora project has merged the core and extras repositories. Now there is only one big repository left. This is also reflected in the distro name. Fedora 7. No more "core". The new repo works as expected very well. I tried to upgrade my box but - tada, first crash on the rawhide distro - pup crashed and I was greeted by bug-buddy. No problem. I used the command line with yum for upgrading. No intention on reporting a bug before I have downloaded the 280 new packages that awaited me. Upgrading took some time (as expected, it was some 350 MB for download) but it worked as expected. Although yum is slower than apt-get, it never ever failed on me. A very reliable tool, although I must admit that I had rarely encountered a package manager that refused to work. The rest of the apps is well known. Openoffice, evolution, firefox, gaim, ... you know the applications. So, what can I say: I must say that I am really looking forward for this new release (although there are still a lot of bugs). Fedora is getting better and better with every release and this release is also remarkable as the core system was not solely build by Red Hat technicians this time. This is the first Fedora release where the community contributed almost half of the core-system. Although Red Hat has still a significant voice over the direction fedora takes, Fedora 7 is a great showcase for what can be achieved if a cooperation between community and company is done the right way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reiver_Fluffi Posted March 19, 2007 Report Share Posted March 19, 2007 Yay for boring weekends Thanks for the heads-up, will no doubt be upgrading come April (IIRC) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaraeez Posted March 19, 2007 Report Share Posted March 19, 2007 Thanks... As a matter of interest does FC still have the time zone bug - where by selecting London would always end up with 'Guernsey' (same time difference & no disrespect to Guernsey but it's no London is it!) ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted March 19, 2007 Report Share Posted March 19, 2007 But honestly, who cares, if it loads in 30, 40 or 60 seconds? I do, more than you know! :| although I must admit that I had rarely encountered a package manager that refused to work. Try Yast :P Thanks for the review. One thing I'd like to know is: - is it still so darn hard to install proprietary drivers (nvidia) and codecs (mp3, video, ...) on Fedora? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reiver_Fluffi Posted March 19, 2007 Report Share Posted March 19, 2007 Try Yast :P Thanks for the review. One thing I'd like to know is: - is it still so darn hard to install proprietary drivers (nvidia) and codecs (mp3, video, ...) on Fedora? I agree with you on Yast, that put me off using Suse. I wouldn't say that installing propretary drivers was difficult at all. You just need to set up a couple of unofficial repos (I use livna for kernel modules, freshrpms for everything else) and you should be sorted. Unlike Suse, Fedora just doesn't include the proprietary stuff, it doesn't try to cripple it, IIRC Suse used to do this with mp3 and other codecs? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neddie Posted March 19, 2007 Report Share Posted March 19, 2007 Nice one, arctic. Just one question - who would you recommend this new Fedora to (once it's officially released)? Is the target audience pretty much the same as Mandriva's, or is there some feature / focus which you would say makes it stand apart from other distros? I've heard that they usually include newer / more experimental things than other distros, would you say that's true? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted March 19, 2007 Author Report Share Posted March 19, 2007 As a matter of interest does FC still have the time zone bug No idea. I will have to check this later. (I live in a different time-zone. ;) ) - is it still so darn hard to install proprietary drivers (nvidia) and codecs (mp3, video, ...) on Fedora? As Reiver said, it is not THAT hard. At least not much harder than in e.g. Ubuntu or Slackware or any other distro when it comes to drivers that require a kernel recompile. Multimedia support is added easily. All you need is basically to enable the livna repo (and perhaps freshrpms for some minor things) but that's all. The rest is a simple installation using pirut or yum (whichever you prefer). This guide will not change a lot when Fedora 7 is released afaik: http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Fedora_fc5#How...ltimedia_Codecs About Yast: Well, as I said: I had rarely encountered a package manager that refused to work. :P Yast had broken my linux three times. After that, I was done with SUSE. But that is a different story. who would you recommend this new Fedora to Uh... tricky one... The new Fedora will be again a multi-purpose distro. But: They will ship 3CD versions for the desktop afaik (separate Gnome and KDE centric CD sets), a special server-CD set and an installable Live CD. Fedora is imho still a distro for the power user, although it is easy to install. It CAN be used by "normal" users, no doubt there. But they will have to accept that they will not get all multimedia stuff by default. That is fedoras policy and this won't change as I see it. So, if users are absolutely unwilling to enable repos for installing multimedia-things or other proprietary stuff, then fedora will perhaps not be the right distro for them. But for those who are not afraid of the cli, fedora should be pretty interesting. I've heard that they usually include newer / more experimental things than other distros, would you say that's true? Yes. If I would have to rank the distro for different users, it could look like this (max: 5 points): newcomers 3.5 / 5 experienced users 4 / 5 power users 5 / 5 administrators 5 / 5 developers 5 / 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FX Posted March 20, 2007 Report Share Posted March 20, 2007 Uh... tricky one... The new Fedora will be again a multi-purpose distro. But: They will ship 3CD versions for the desktop afaik (separate Gnome and KDE centric CD sets), a special server-CD set and an installable Live CD. Fedora is imho still a distro for the power user, although it is easy to install. It CAN be used by "normal" users, no doubt there. But they will have to accept that they will not get all multimedia stuff by default. That is fedoras policy and this won't change as I see it. So, if users are absolutely unwilling to enable repos for installing multimedia-things or other proprietary stuff, then fedora will perhaps not be the right distro for them. But for those who are not afraid of the cli, fedora should be pretty interesting. Alot of distros are like that. Fedora is not out of the loop with that. So that isn't even an issue far as I am concerned. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted March 20, 2007 Author Report Share Posted March 20, 2007 Alot of distros are like that. Fedora is not out of the loop with that. Do you mean the CD sets or the codec thing? I presume you mean the latter one - in this case you are right, many distro do not ship with the codecs included. But some do, like e.g. Startcom Multimedialinux, which is one of the lesser known but imho very good distros for newcomers to linux. Well, bottom line is: Fedora is a multi-purpose distro that fits many but not all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted March 20, 2007 Report Share Posted March 20, 2007 IIRC Suse used to do this with mp3 and other codecs Yes, they ship a modified (read: broken) version of libxine. They still do in OpenSuSe 10.2 . It fscks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted March 29, 2007 Report Share Posted March 29, 2007 It rocks like usual... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gul Dukat Posted March 29, 2007 Report Share Posted March 29, 2007 I've tried Test-1 and at the moment I using Test-2. Overall I pretty excited and can't wait for the final release. I have encountered some minor bugs, but hey it's still a Test-version. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted March 29, 2007 Report Share Posted March 29, 2007 https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test...h/msg00562.html F7t3 is out :) Test it while it is hot. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gul Dukat Posted March 30, 2007 Report Share Posted March 30, 2007 https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test...h/msg00562.html F7t3 is out :) Test it while it is hot. Thanks for the tip. Forgot all about it. :o Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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