“After working with FC4 for more than a year, I decided that it is not time to upgrade my distribution. FC5 has been available for more than 7 months now and I did some testing on it. But instead of installing FC5 and then upgrading to FC6, I thought it would make more sense to upgrade only once.”
Im getting a 502 proxy error on the link.
Yea, me too. Maybe it needs batteries.
Hmm… no luck so far.
“502 Proxy Error” for all of us. Too bad.
EDIT: Too bad though. Liked to read it and see how it worked out for him. I can remember when I ran Fedora, back in the days of FC2. The upgrade to FC3 forced me into several days of hard work in order to get the small things to work.
Edited 2006-11-06 22:57
AUTHOR: It not only needs batteries, but new hardware too. My website went down twice since yesterday afternoon due to heavy traffic. I have updated the article since and will be upgrading my hardware tonight or tomorrow.
I will upgrade only once.
Mod point for the first person to get the reference!
Edited 2006-11-06 23:02
‘Allo ‘Allo!’s Michelle. Now where are those british airmen?
If anyone else cares to take part in our little game, he should get at least two more points for naming the character and the airmen, too!
René Artois, RAF Flight Lt. Fairfax, and RAF Flight Lt. Carstairs, You stupid woman!
Heheheh!!!
Since he concluded in the first sentence that “it is not time to upgrade my distribution” I wonder why he then proceeded to write an article about doing exactly that..
“After working with FC4 for more than a year, I decided that it is not time to upgrade my distribution”
It is easy to figure it out he meant to say:
“it is NOW time to upgrade..”
Isn’t it?
Fedora 6 rocks…it is the first distribution that I have seen where everything works out of the box and GNOME is really much more organized. I spent a weekend just fooling around with Fedora’s yum installing packages over my LAN. The upgrade tool is really useful also, keeping the packages up to the latest versions. I was able to also install WINE and Realplayer…it has been a while since I have used Linux so I was shocked how far Wine has come…even got iTunes 6 running on it…Fedore 6 is running on a crappy old Celeron that I have laying around…which is surprising quite useable with 256M of RAM.
Dano
I agree that it rocks. What rocks even more with it now is that all the extras repos. can be used during the installation. This is great and it allowed me to install pretty much all my applications via the GUI without having to pull up yum afterwards. I still had to install the Nvidia drivers using the Nvidia installer but I have come to expect that with Fedora. The system looks great and it performs well. Also bringing back the XFCE install option made me very happy. Desktop linux has definately come a long way. An interesting aside note the other day a person sent me an email wanting to know where the cool screnshot came from on my site. I told them it was Linux not Windows and they were suprised. How the times they have changed…
Well, I think the package management sucks compared to Debian and Ubuntu. When I first tried to install it, I configured the packages in the installer instead of Later and the installation failed because of package conflicts.
Installing without package customization worked but then downloading and applying updates wouldn’t work. A dependency window sat there for ages before saying that it had run out of mirrors for some random package. It kept doing that.
Starting add/remove programs wouldn’t work because another package management program was running. I suspected it was the updater program almost hidden in the notification area but most ordinary users wouldn’t have a clue.
Without an internet connection the add/remove programs wouldn’t run at all?! How do I install the rest of the programs from my six CDs?
These are things that are all to frequent in the Linux world. Even from my very small FC6 experience I noticed enough faults to make me recommend against ordinary users installing it. My friend, whose computer I’m reinstalling, will instead be using a not so legal W2K installation.
1. In the week following the FC6 release, the Fedora mirror service failed (due to excessive load) killing both the installer and the software updater. (“no more mirrors”, “ran out of mirrors”, etc).
Both work just fine now.
2. Please report the add/remove problem to bugzilla.redhat.com (unless you’re only interested in ranting).
3. Add/remove does -not- require an Internet connection. In-order to use a local disk/DVD/SMB/NFS/etc you need to manually disable the software update repository and point the “core” repository to your DVD/NFS/SMB/etc.
4. Windows XP, a 5 y/o old product has a huge list of known defects. Here’s a quick example:
– Install XP (w/o SP2)
– Remove IIS and all the IIS-related services. (using Add/remove)
– Install SP2.
– Try install IIS again. (again using Add/remove)
– IIS install asks for missing files.
– Point installer to SP2 CD (or extracted XPSP2xxx.exe directory) and locate
the missing files for it.
– Watch the add/remove software blow.
This is a know bug. It has been known since… well… SP1? Check the Internet.
If I follow your post, considering this bug I shouldn’t recommend XP to anyone.
– Gilboa
Edited 2006-11-07 15:15
Anybody know if FC6 will work with a ZyXel G-302 (Realtek 8185L) desktop wireless card?
I can tell you that debian won’t work with it.
So after all this time, the page loads successfully (although extremely slowly) and what do I get? Yet another “hey let’s show a screenshot for every stage of the anaconda installer” article. I happen to like Fedora, and like hearing about people’s thoughts and experiences with the releases, but wasting my bandwidth and time will only succeed in pissing me off.
Installed on an older IBM X series laptop, quite impressive. It had FC5 on; this was an upgrade. FC5 simply went in and worked, power and sleep and wake were all flawless. The upgrade to FC6 went fine, though very slowly – it took a couple of hours. The delay seemed not to be in copying the material over (this was an external DVD) but in actually installing once copied. But this is not a particularly fast machine. It would probably be faster on a current desktop.
OpenOffice is odd however – Base seems to be missing. OO also seems to have some problems on Etch. Wonder if this is Java related?
Agreed about Bending Unit’s remark on Internet – it seems to want to be connected to the Internet before it works at all from the graphical installer, which is really strange and rather irritating when you have just downloaded a DVD full of stuff.
Bottom line: its not perfect, and the thing that would put me off installing it on a main machine would be the package management. But I was very pleased by the ease of having everything on the laptop just work, and if its on a machine you are setting up for someone else and there will not be a lot of installs and uninstalls, its very worth considering.
I found that pirut didn’t work for me at all in FC5 – don’t know if that is also because I am not online. Anyway, no matter what the distro, I always use Smart package manager. It works best for me.
Fedora is really experimental mostly-unstable desktop OS(?). It has crappy and limited package management system, it’s insecure by default (just take a look at all these unneeded services lying aroud) – having SElinux switched to “ON” doesn’t mean you are automagically protected from threats.
It can be somewhat usable to Desktop users because “Look it works – I have mouse pointer moving on X-Windows”, but it is NOT recommended for any serious production environments.
Recommendation: if going to production – stay away from FC.
jeraklo: Stating “Fedora is really experimental mostly-unstable desktop OS” is somewhat unkind – I refer you to the recent interview with Fedora Project Leader Max Spevack at /. He writes:
“We strive to produce a quality distribution of free software that is cutting-edge, pushes the envelope of new open source technology, and is also robust enough that it can be relied on for server or desktop use.”
They might be failing to reach that goal (I have not tried FC6, last FC I used was FC3 which was pretty good at release time). But that is their goal.
Kevin
I got your point, but still think FC team’s goal can satisfy only un-aware people: mixing cutting-edge technologies and in the same time recommending it for server use is a known way to disaster.
Just being able to run server software doesn’t mean the quality of system as a whole is appropriate for production use.
Again: FC is NOT for production use.
(and will never be regarding project’s goal)
Ignoring the obvious flame bait, Fedora is -not- experimental, it’s cutting edge. Fedora-devel (Rawhide) is experimental. Fedora was never designed for production servers (RedHat has RHEL for that), but it’s -well- suited for testing and software development (me and all my coworkers are using it…), office and home desktop work.
As I’m currently using RHEL (4), Slackware (10.1), Debian (unstable) and playing around with Gentoo and Ununutu, I can’t really say that in my experience neither FC5 nor FC6 is less stable then either of them. (Except Slackware and RHEL – but both are different by design)
I will concede that Yum is dog slow compared to (sl)apt-get, but that’s another matter altogether…
– Gilboa
Edited 2006-11-07 15:30
For years people have been saying yum is slower than apt-get. My experience seems to tell the same. However, it seems there is no detailed comparison between the two. If someone with enough knowledge can do an objective investigation that will help both apt-get and yum and the distributions behind them.
Thanks for the idea leon. I have been testing Ubuntu linux as well for some time now. I will do a comparison with apt-get and yum in the near future.
I last installed apt-get on FC3 and the performance different was ~5/1.
In most cases apt-get update && apt-get -y dist-upgrade finished before yum managed to complete the “primary.xml.gz” stages.
– Gilboa
Edited 2006-11-08 09:33
Let me correct myself.
I just finished installing FC6 on two of my workstations (one private and one at work) and FC6’s YUM+fastestmirror combination speed is nothing short of amazing – I’m talking about a 3/1 performance improvement compared to FC5. (with or w/o fastestmirror on FC5)
Yes yum still eats memory and CPU like there’s no tomorrow (apt, being C based, eats much less resources), but if you have a modern machine (>1Ghz CPU, >= 512MB) yum’s performance are fairly close to apt.
– Gilboa
Well, it’s mixed bag as usual.
I have 3 FC boxes (x64), one FC5 and two FC6. One FC6 was fresh install and the other was an upgrade from FC4. My workstations are mostly used for scientific tasks.
The upgrade was almost flawless, several packages showed some bad dependecies, but nothing that an uninstalling and reinstalling of those packages could not resolve. I was happy that Openoffice pyUNO was reintroduced oficially since FC5 (I never understand why it was missing in FC4-x64, it was present in FC4-x86).
The fresh install was a little odd, several compatibility packages (such as xorg-x11-deprecated-libs, that Matlab requires, even in its last version) are not anymore included, and I don’t understand why they are not kept. The upgrade from FC4 did not have this problem since the compat packages were kept during the upgrade. I could install the package in FC6 by installing the FC4 RPM.
In general, I’m very pleased with this upgrade that shows important enhancements with Gnome and KDE, Konqueror and Nautilus are even faster to shows the thumbnails of directories filled with a lot of graphics files. In particular, in FC4 nautilus (in list view) hanged when a lot of PNGs were present.
And to the comments about the instability of FC… I have ubuntu at home in my laptop, and FC is by far much more stable. But I know that the comparison is not fair since the use is different but anyways I have to spend too much time tweaking the OS in ubuntu to make it more usable: the support of the touchpad is just too bad and if you try use a secondary monitor, XOrg became a nightmare. In FC, apart those compat packages, I never have needed to tweak the OS.
I installed xmms as well. It will NOT play mp3 format sound files however.
Due to patent licensing, and conflicts between such patent licenses and the liceses and the licenses of application source code, mpeg-1/2 audio layer 3 (mp3) support has been removed from this application by Red Hat, Inc. We apologize for the inconvenience.
> I installed xmms as well. It will NOT play mp3 format sound files however.
Like most of the previous Fedora Core releases, this is fixed by the “xmms-mp3” RPM, which whilst not on the install media for the reasons the Fedora folks gave, it *is* available in a third-party repository, namely livna – 2 commands get you there (as root):
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm
yum install xmms-mp3
Hope that helps…the livna repo is near-essential if you need anything multimedia – includes ATI/Nvidia 3D drivers, mplayer, xine with DVD support, unrar and unace to mention just a few.