Last week I installed Fedora Core 5 on two aging but serviceable systems: my eMachines desktop (2GHz Celeron, 768MB RAM) and a Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204 notebook (1GHz Celeron, 512MB PC100 RAM). The desktop had previously run Fedora Core 4 while the laptop had been running Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) for a few months and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 Update 1 prior to that.
One of the claims made for Fedora Core 5 is that it was built to boot faster and run faster than the previous release. I’m very pleased to say that it’s true and the difference on my laptop is especially noticeable. Those of you who are running older, slower hardware or tend to heavily load you systems will definitely be happy with FC5. It is significantly crisper and more responsive than Ubuntu Breezy Badger and RHEL 4 as well.
I’ve never been happy with anaconda, the Red Hat installer. The new version of the graphical installation is certainly prettier but it still lacks the fine grained control of what software packages are to be installed that other distributions do offer as an option to experienced users. Also, as I quickly learned installing to my laptop, there is no “minimal” installation and, as with previous versions, no matter how much I strip down the installation anaconda will add cruft. Things that are not truly needed which I didn’t ask for do get installed. I still have to list my installed packages when I’m done and remove things. I know that corporate customers who build single purpose servers generally are unhappy about this and Red Hat may want to look at allowing a truly minimal build in the next release and/or in RHEL 5. The good news is that for the less experienced user building a typical desktop the anaconda installation is straightforward and downright easy. Hardware detection is certainly excellent and other than my printer (easily added) everything was correctly recognized and installed by anaconda.
The new Fedora offers two options for the desktop: Gnome and KDE. Gnome remains the default choice. The totally minimal twm is available as part of the X installation and you can just install that and then add other window managers or desktop environments from Fedora Extras after the initial installation. Note that anaconda will install significant parts of Gnome if you install any of the graphical system administration tools in any case, Choices in Extras are pretty limited too, but XFCE 4 and a handful of lightweight window managers are offered and will be recognized by gdm or kdm (the graphical login) session choices after they are installed.
The main tool for managing software packages is yum. While yum is excellent Red Hat/Fedora’s graphical front ends to yum have always been weak. The often buggy and horrendously slow up2date has been replaced by pup (short for package updater) which has a much simpler, cleaner interface. However it seems to have problems with resolving dependencies, particularly when it recognizes non-Core software. I was floored, though, that it couldn’t resolve a dependency needed by evolution, a Core package. I found pup pretty but unusable. Running yum update from the command line does provide me with the tools to resolve issues pup simply cannot handle.
The new package manager, pirut, is a huge improvement. It not only recognizes Fedora Core packages, but also knows about Extras and can be easily configured to recognize third party repositories as well. For example, a simple click on a link on the home page of the popular FreshRPMs website adds the freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm package to your system. Suddenly pirut knows about little things like DVD and mp3 support packages which Red Hat cannot include in Fedora without violating U.S. law. It’s pretty easy to add your own custom repositories as well, something I’ll cover in another article.
Several bugs in Gnome and one particularly annoying Firefox bug have been corrected in the newer versions provided by Fedora Core 5. I have found new application bugs, though, Epiphany, which was rapidly becoming my favorite web browser, doesn’t correctly handle subtopics or nested topics, something it did just fine in the release provided with Fedora Core 4. I imagine as I work with the new versions of other packages more I’ll find other bugs to report as well. Gnome continues to lack a menu editor and you still have to manually edit files to add customized software packages which don’t update the Gnome menus automatically. Gnome menu editors exist for Gnome 2.14. Fedora just doesn’t include one probably because the one I tried, gnome-menu-editor, remains somewhat broken . Even simpler window managers like WindowMaker offer that basic functionality. KDE is still, by far, the most polished and functional desktop environment. KDE also still consumes the most resources which is why I was hoping for more improvements in Gnome. The internationalization/localization support I need isn’t available in simpler window managers.
There are a huge number of updates already available to FC5. If you’re installing from a magazine or purchased DVD or set of five (yes, five!) CDs you still will want to make sure your system can be attached to a high speed connection somewhere to get your patches and bugfixes.
Overall, even with all the nits I’ve picked, I find Fedora Core 5 to be a very satisfying and much improved version of the popular distribution. Red Hat and their Fedora Project engineers have been quick to resolve bugs in the past and I am certain FC5 will improve as new updates become available. The improved performance in the new version far outweighs any bugs I’ve found in applications and this is one release I can recommend.
Nice review, just wanted to inform you that the link to Fedora Core 5 misses an 'r' in the href - cheers.
Good catch! I've made the correction. Thanks! -CMM
Good review, thanks. The lack of a menu editor (come on Havoc ole boy, try just once listening to actual users instead of your own fevered imaginings) can be solved by downloading the Alacarte menu editor, a nice third-party app that will be included in the next Gnome release. gnome-menu-editor was based on Smeg, the original version of Alacarte.
Good review - positive on this (very good) distribution, but also honest on the parts that need improving.
Hi, nice review. I wanted to point out that Gnome 2.14 is likely the reason your FC5 system feels 'crisp and more responsive' as compared to Ubuntu Breezy Badger and RHEL4. It's the very 1st improvement mentioned in the release notes (http://www.gnome.org/start/2.14/notes/en/rnusers.html). When I upgraded from Ubuntu Breezy to Dapper, I noticed the same performance boost.
Just want to give credit where credit is due....
thanks for the review!
Dave
Part of the improvement may be Gnome 2.14 but I feel there is performance improvement in KDE as well. Speed of booting (prior to X starting) is definitely not related to Gnome. I believe you have pinpointed one area where perhaps credit best belongs to the upstream developers but that is not the whole picture.
Fie on the FC5 installer. I performed a netboot (look for boot.iso to perform a network installation) and ran into a number of irritating problems.
1. It would not update my FC4 installation on a multi-boot machine because there were other Linuxes installed, so FC5 gagged on the presence of other / partitions. And it forced me to restart the entire installation, wasting about 20 minutes' of work, instead of allowing me to simply change to a new clean installation. Stupid.
2. The net installer STILL doesn't present a list of mirrors to choose from, you have to dig up the information yourself. At least it gives you multiple chances to figure out the exactly correct magical filepath incantation, and believe me if you haven't done this before you'll need lots of tries
3. It activates SELinux by default, unless you do a custom installation, so you have to disable it during the post-install, which means rebooting one more time
4. Soundcard detection gives you no second chances- if you click 'no I did not hear the sound' it gives up, so you have to fix it later after installation
5. When it comes to the bootloader configuration, it STILL doesn't recognize other Linuxes, and doesn't even have the wit to name Windows correctly ('other operating system'). Come on, folks, other distributions have been correctly and automatically configuring GRUB for multiboot for years now
5. Nautilus STILL starts up in spatial mode, may the devs be infested with the fleas of a thousand camels, but at least the option to change to browser mode is now in the prefs
6. Still no menu editor. As another poster mentioned, thank goodness for Alacarte.
After installation it's the familiar old nice Fedora. If they would bring the installer into the 21st century that would be ever so luvverly.
Thanks for your comments, Carla. As I said in the review I have never been happy with anaconda. In place upgrades have always been somewhat to very broken. I didn't do one -- I had planned a clean install from the start -- so I couldn't comment. I'm not surprised by your results nor I am surprised that multibooting is still broken. I was lucky in that my install must have found a fast mirror immediately.
Alacarte is now in Fedora Extras and I did try it and found it horribly broken as well.
You know what? I have yet to find any distro I can't nitpick to death. The choiced Red Hat/Fedora made with SELinux and Nautilus are just that: choices that you and I may not like. They aren't bugs. Anaconda, OTOH, is buggy. I still think that once it's installed and working Fedora is one of the nicer distros out there.
Great review. I just want to add that FC5 have a much better support for USB devices.
I wondered how to get the Shell menu item back on the desktop context menu. I learned about pirut and alacarte here, clicked on "Available packages" and got it installed quickly. But how do I find the desktop context menu? Is it available in alacarte customization, or am I stuck editing a file (and if so, which one)?
Found it, cleverly hidden in the Fedora Core 5 release notes:
To get the context-menu "Open terminal" shell menu item back, install the package nautilus-open-terminal .