[16]Fedora Core 5: A review from an ex-maintainer

I've been putting this off long enough; finally I got around to upgrading my network to FC5, specifically, 1x Server, 2x Workstations and a laptop (one workstation, this one, still to do).

Review

The Good

Fedora Core has always been a slickly presented distro, and even though they do make some odd choices occasionally, it features pretty much everything you could want out the box, proprietary stuff excluded (but that's what Fedora Extras is for).

Much of the default bloat of FC4 seems to have gone, in favour of more targeted installs, with finer grained initial setup choices. It seems faster too, and the improved SELinux policies means I can actually run in "enforced" mode without too much difficulty.

Silly "legacy" stuff has been purged; notably stuff to do with Red Hat Network. That damned redundant "update" icon won't be missed. Every package related utility has been Yum'ified now, so legacy stuff like up2date, system-config-packages, and apt-get have gone, in favour of pirut, pup, and yumex.

Samba's smbfs magically transmogrified into cifs (I haven't been keeping up with that side of things), and there's what is presumably Linux's answer to Spotlight called Beagle, although I haven't had a chance to play with it yet.

The Laptop, which is a 64bit Turion, required a clean install, since the previous distro (FC4) was the 32bit version. Apart from one small niggle (see below), install and setup went very smoothly (and incredibly quickly). This is the first time I've ever actually seen a 64bit OS in action, and I have to say it's a bit of a culture shock. The difference in speed and responsiveness is just shocking. The proprietary fglrx ATI graphics drivers produced framerates in excess of 1100 fps on the Radeon Mobility X700 (running fgl_glxgears, in FBO mode, using the default window size), and a 1M digit run of superPI produced a score of 38s on the 2GHz Turion. That matches my P4 machine, which runs 1.6GHz faster!!!

The Server, which is a MiniITX 533MHz VIA C3 (Samuel II) based system, coped admirably with the upgrade, and without any further tweaking, already seems to be running faster than before, although (being a Server) there were a couple of SELinux policies I had to turn off (for Privoxy and leafnode). I'll get around to casting a Bugzilla vote soon.

Finally!!! Fedora has an official RPM release of the current Firefox and Thunderbird packages, and are keeping up with new releases. For reasons I never investigated before, they always lagged behind by an obscene amount, which I found incredibly irritating.

The Bad

On the laptop, the X.org Radeon driver just doesn't work. At all. Period. However, I can console myself with having over 1000 fps using the proprietary driver from ATI. Unfortunately this driver is unavailable pre-install, so I'm forced to do a textmode install, which works, but is still a small disappointment.

NNTPCache, which I used as my Usenet proxy before, segfaults under FC5. The project seems all but abandoned, with links that point to domain holding companies, etc. Additionally, I discovered that NNTPCache likes to "phone home" without any notification! and although the source is available, the licence seems rather BSD-like, what there is of it, since it's ridiculously incomplete. AFAICT this is Freeware, not FOSS despite the availability of sources.

I did Email the developer, without response, and since I've already got a full load of projects on the go, I simply don't have time to mess around with this. Overall, I'm not impressed, and simply switched to leafnode rather than pursue the matter any further.

My oh my, how Fedora loves to "depreciate" things. It was the same with Red Hat, but since Fedora began it has accelerated tenfold. Now I'm no Luddite ... well maybe I am actually, but the rate of changes in the Fedora project is quite staggering. It's nice to have "bleeding-edge"; it's also nice to have something you can use for more than 5 minutes before it's "depreciated". Case in point: when you right click on the Desktop, you used to get an entry "open terminal" in the drop-down context menu. It was probably the single most used function I ever used in the X environment. Now ... it's gone apparently; striped out and sent to "extras" as some kind of plugin??? This is what I mean by "odd choices", although this may be an upstream issue at Gnome, rather than Fedora.

Yes I know that is the nature of Fedora's game, and that I can keep my old distro and just use Legacy for security updates, but still ... I think it is moving too fast. Christ - FC2 was ahead of the proposed Longhorn, 2 years ago. By the time Vista finally (ever???) comes out, FC27 will be like something out of a science fiction movie.

Also, and despite my praise of the the new fine-grained install approach, the removal of the "minimal" and "everything" install options is not helpful, and just causes much more work than necessary, especially on servers, where you really want the smallest possible subset of applications.

Next gripe; FOSS multimedia support is outstanding, but if you want support for proprietary formats then you're going to have to work for it. Fedora have a Debian-esque policy WRT non-Free components, that I accept, but nonetheless find annoying at times. This isn't new, and yes I am free to go with another distro if I don't like it, but it does seem a bit like Hobson's choice.

The Ugly

Mirrors still b0rked - I've totally given up allowing Yum to select mirrors, since so many of them seem completely unresponsive. Just set the URL permanently on Duke, and be done with it.

Add/Remove software (pirut) is not set up to default to using the original install sources, which for most people will be the discs you burned them on. This is fine if you have a fast link, or even any kind of (working) network connection to upstream, but what if you need to add/remove in a network isolated environment? There is a fix, that involves adding the media as repos to Yum, but this should have been spotted by QA loooong ago.

Lastly, and this is not Fedora or even Linux specific, but commercial software developers are excruciatingly slow at supporting 64bit architectures. We've had the popular AMD64 platform now for three years, and both Windows and Linux 64bit versions available, and yet Macromedia still do not have a 64bit version of Flash player, and Sun (having produced a 64 bit version of Java) refuse to produce a matching ns-plugin for it because "Mozilla have not released 64 bit versions of their software". How bloody stupid can you get - I'm running 64 bit Firefox right now??? To release a massive SDK and runtime package of 64bit Java, but omit a tiny little plugin, based on such a lame excuse, has got to be the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.

Conclusion

Fedora Core continues to lead the pack with version 5. It may not be as user/proprietary friendly as SUSE, but its development rate is staggering, and it is truly "bleeding edge". There is no question that the Fedora people work incredibly hard getting this distro out on such a regular basis, and that effort shows, with a highly polished and deeply functional Operating System, that will stand you in good stead for ... at least another 6 months ;)

Slated.org rating: 95%

###### Disclaimer:

In the interest of full disclosure (and for those who didn't already know), I should point out that I was a maintainer on the Fedora Project up to FC3, and will probably continue again with this release ... if I can ever work out how the new "Extras" system works :)

Or in the words of David Cary Hart, the current (24th May 2006) maintainer of the leafnode package:

"The Fedora Extras build process is terribly complex. I'll get to it. Meanwhile, I rebuilt leafnode 1.11.5 for Fedora Core 5. It is available here."

[17]http://www.tqmcube.com/leafnode.php