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LinuxElectrons is proud to bring you an updated Fedora review on Fedore Core 1.Fedora Core Release 1 Review
Fedora is a new open sourced community based distribution. The distro, or project, as defined on Fedora's website, is sponsored by RedHat. In fact, Fedora is heavily influenced by RedHat, it is based on RedHat 9 (Shrike). The latest release, termed Fedora Core 1 (code name=yarrow), is packed full of the latest open sourced software available.
For Fedora to be successful its needs a strong community. To have a a strong community, you need relationships. The community maintains relationships using Internet technologies. There are four worldwide catharsis's to maintain the dialog. They are; Bugzilla, IRC, CVS and mailing lists. Some might argue that the CVS repository is not a form of direct communication, but nonetheless, it conveys information that is vital to the success of the community. If you ever wanted to be part of the Open Source movement, here is your chance.
Obtaining Fedora Core 1 is trivial pursuit if you have high speed Internet access. RedHat provides ISO's and rpms via ftp. There are also plenty of worldwide mirror's too and BitTorrent. The total project consists of six 650MB cd's. Three are source rpms. The other three make up the install and binary rpms. If you think you have download or CD problems, verify the md5sum's against the md5sum file provided. Here is an example, “md5sum yarrow-i386-disc1.iso”. The md5sum program will output a long number that you should compare to the number provided inside the file MD5SUM. If those two numbers match, you have a good download. You might also want to browse through the release notes to check errata against your hardware configuration.
Feature Set
Linux Kernel 2.4.22
Gnome 2.4
KDE 3.1
Evolution 1.4
Mozilla 1.4
Open Office 1.1
GCC 3.3
This is only a very small subset of the enormous amount of feature's that are packed into this project. The above feature set provides Linux users with a rich, high performance desktop that is second to none. From just browsing the web to writing the next killer application, Fedora will provide a stable foundation to accomplish your computing goals. The complete package set can be found here.
Installation
The installation was uneventful (how an install should be). Here are some screen shots I took with my digital camera.
Fedora recognized all my hardware on both machines that I installed except my displays. One machine was a Dell Latitude Cpx750 laptop (PIII 750), the other a dual Pentium III with a VIA chipset. The laptop had an entry for me choose the correct display (Dell Laptop 1024x768). However, the desktop install did not have my monitor listed (ViewSonic A90f+). There was an option for a ViewSonic A90, but the frequency range is slightly slower on the A90f+. It was an easy fix, since I was provided the opportunity to override the settings, but I had to track down the frequency ranges at the ViewSonic website.
As expected, Fedora had no problems detecting my cpu's and installing the appropriate kernel on each machine. The dual cpu machine received the i686 SMP kernel and the laptop got the i686 non SMP kernel. With previous RedHat kernel's, custom kernel compiles required one to edit the Makefile to select the correct cpu type for compile. This kernel provides the correct gcc -march settings per the cpu selected in the .config. The kernel also has the NPTL (Native POSIX Thread Library) feature back ported from the Linux kernel 2.5. The NPTL offers significant performance benefits for multi-threaded applications.
Fedora now sports a graphical boot. X gets loaded as soon as possible to provide the means necessary. The graphical boot screen in Fedora Core looks totally professional (the black color looks washed out). As always with Linux, you can turn this feature on and off. In the graphical boot screen you have the option to “show details”. This screen just displays the kernel boot messages in a graphical format. This is very useful for debugging. This is a screen shot I caught with my digital camera.
Another worthy inheritance that can be found in Fedora is anaconda and the redhat-config set of configuration and management tools. RedHat has had years to perfect these tools with countless installs. IMHO, this is what separates a real distro from a wannabe distro.
Software Management
Software management takes place in two forms, a gui and the command line. The gui is started from the panel menu -> System Settings -> Add/Remove Applications. Currently, this application is broken in Fedora Core Release 1. When it does work it will only install digitally signed rpms. For unsigned rpms you have to drop to the command line and manually install an rpm. Unfortunately, you go from child's play to the archaic command line. The problem is, who wants to memorize all the rpm command line options to install software. RedHat removed gnorpm (Gnome) and kpackage (KDE) software management tools in version 8. Gnorpm and kpackage provide that happy medium between the two extreme choices RedHat has chosen. Hopefully we will see these two packages return with Fedora.
In the mean time, I've enabled kpackage in the source rpm and have successfully built and ran kpackage. Grab this spec file . You will need to install the source file to compile. Once you have obtained the source file, install with “rpm -i kdeadmin-3.1.4-1.src.rpm”. Now use this command, “rpmbuild -ba kdeadmin.spec” (you must be root). This will build binary and source packages then install. Here is a window shot of kpackage and a screenshot of redhat-config-packages.
Keeping up to date should be a lot easier with Fedora than with RedHat's RHN. There should be numerous repositories available instead of standing in line at RedHat to get official fixes and updates. People in the IRC channel #fedora on FreeNode are using a variety of methods to stay up to date such as apt, yum and up2date. Even with the test releases you are still able to register with RedHat and get updates. The official stance on keeping up2date is located here.
Multimedia
Multimedia is lackluster compared to other distro's. However, this is due to cost and respect for others intellectual properties. Fedora cannot play MP3's or DVD's out of the box. With that said, a quick Internet search should yield some repositories for you to download packages that will provide Xine (DVD) and XMMS (MP3) playback devices. Also another web site is here.
Desktops
I've been a big fan of KDE for several years now. I've always tried the latest Gnome desktop with which each new release from RedHat and I've always switched back to KDE within an hour. Gnome 2.4 in Fedora is a pleasure to use and seems snappier than previous versions. For those of you keeping track, in my last review I was using Gnome. Well, I swtiched back to KDE. I was going through konqueror withdrawls.
By default the GDM login manager is used. This is a very pretty login screen. However, if you use KDE you are presented with only one logout option. When using Gnome you have three logout options, login as different user, turn off computer and restart computer. RedHat determines the login manager to use by a script at /etc/X11/prefdm. To switch over to the KDM login manager, edit the file /etc/sysconfig/desktop and add this line, DISPLAYMANAGER="KDE". This will provide three choices when logging out of KDE.
Nautilus
OpenOffice 1.1
Wrap Up
The Linux community will benefit tremendously from Fedora. With RedHat's expertise and knowledge combined with a strong community we should expect nothing less than a high performance desktop. So far, this has been the case. IMHO, this is the perfect strategy for RedHat. They have been battling two extremes, the corporate server market versus the bleeding edge desktop users at retail. These two camps are at odds with one another, corporate wanting slow gradual changes and retail wanting the bleeding edge feature set. Fedora is the ultimate compromise and one community in which I'm a willing participant.
LinuxElectrons also has forum's where you can post and get answers to your Fedora Core questions if IRC is not for you.
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