Fedora Core Talk

[jdong]

Hey,

Being my distro-junky self, I leeched a FC4 test3 DVD and am currently playing with this OS off in a chroot. Overall, I'm impressed with what I see.

• New theme. Clearlook, I think it's called. Much more soothing to see than Bluecurve
• GREAT SPEED IMPROVEMENTS -- With GCC4's help, Fedora Core 4 feels snappier than Ubuntu. Especially when you try to use heavy Python programs (like YUM), you can seriously feel the difference. In fact, you can feel this during Anaconda, where "checking dependencies" takes less than a second on my system where it used to take at least 10.
• Extensive use of LVM. Anaconda's auto partitioner (like in Core 3) insists on setting up LVM's for every partition it makes. In addition, there's a GUI LVM configuration tool after setup, for performing those tasks with LVM's. Great work. Never have to regret a partitioning mistake again (huh? /var holds the RPM database too? oops...)
• Openoffice.org 2 beta is very stable quality (build 104 currently) and Redhat stays on top of updates very well.
• Virtually all packages in repos up-to-date. Look at Redhat's history, for example, of how quickly they introduced Firefox 1.0.4 as an update for FC 3 and Rawhide. Can't beat that.
• Up2date works well now. Before, up2date was ultra-slow, not to mention half of the times it can't resolve its own dependences. This seems to be virtually resolved now.

In conclusion, Fedora's come a long way since Core 3 to bolster this new release. This is going to be an excellent distro. I've yet to do any Xen testing, but this may be my distro of choice until Breezy

[poofyhairguy]

[*]New theme. Clearlook, I think it's called. Much more soothing to see than Bluecurve

Doesn't Gnome have that? I think thats what I use in ubuntu...

But keep it comming. Love learning about other Linuxs without trying them.

NOTE to others:

This will not turn into a Fedora vs. Ubuntu thread. We have too many of those. Don't even post if you have something negative to say.

[tread]

How dyu run x in a chroot? I tried, but I couldn't .. even when I allowed other hosts to run in my xsession and setting the DISPLAY variable in the chroot.

Am I making sense?

[jdong]

How dyu run x in a chroot? I tried, but I couldn't .. even when I allowed other hosts to run in my xsession and setting the DISPLAY variable in the chroot.

Am I making sense?

Completely unrelated question, but you can find the answer on Debian's AMD64 32-bit chroot page. The short answer is that you have to bind the two /tmp's together (mount --bind /tmp /chroot/tmp), because X's Unix Socket needs to be shared among the two.


I'm getting ready to test Xen now

[Lovechild]

Also new with the lastest glibc and GCC4 is FORTIFY_SOURCE which is enabled by default on all Fedora compiled programs, this protects against buffer overflow attacks even spots them at compiletime.

With SELinux policy improvements, Exec-shield and the default firewall, I think we can proclaim Fedora Core 4 one of the safest out of the box desktop Linux distros.

Aside that FC4 ships GNOME 2.10 and Fedora Extras is deployed by default, which means Fedora finally has a repo like universe.

Also in the FC4 cycle Evince as been introduced as the default PDF viewer and might I add, it rocks hard - hopefully this will be proposed for GNOME 2.12,

Overall I think FC4 is look really good, and it's running just fine on my desktop.

[Optimal Aurora]

Hay I was and am downloading Fedora core 4 test 3 and I was wondering has anybody here heard of any problems with compatibility or stability? I know its a test version so it most likely is unstable, but I am just curious.

[Quest-Master]

I've never tried Fedora.. sounds like a good time. So, yeah, could anyone comment on how stable it is at the moment? I'm considering giving it a try.

I can't wait till Breezy comes out though. Speed improvements with GCC4 will be awesome.

[Lovechild]

Hay I was and am downloading Fedora core 4 test 3 and I was wondering has anybody here heard of any problems with compatibility or stability? I know its a test version so it most likely is unstable, but I am just curious.

For my money, being the development branch, FC4 is working quite nicely - I haven't really encountered any crippling bugs except the fact that RedHat consistently breaks the danish translation for redhat-menus in every release cycle and they aren't responsive to bugs on it. I mean they did it for FC3 and now for FC4 (my bug has been hovering for like a month now without even a review).

But day to day work seems fine, I've used it ever since test1 and it's been quite nice. In the sense that it might have had days where booting was a problem (mostly SELinux issues) but it never ate my data or my soul.

And FE is working very nicely, no complains over the quality of RPMs from me, I currently have AbiWord, GNUmeric and Freeciv installed and running without issue - the Extras team did good work, lots of applauds.

[jdong]

Day-to-day FC4 work is pretty much OK. Packages pulled from 3rd party repos, like DAG, will have to be RPMBUILDed from spec/src due to ABI incompatibility.

There are also some YUM/up2date quirks that need to be worked out (currently, OOo isn't compiled against the right libgcj)

[KiwiNZ]

How was the hardware recognition and support ?
I have used all the Fedora releases to date . Core three gave me a lot of issues .I havent tried Core 4 test 3 yet , trying to be a reformed distro junkie is hard , but I am trying .