If you’re a Fedora user the end of May means one thing… time for a new release! This year was no different as the Fedora project continued its aggressive six month release schedule. Fedora 7, code named “Moonshine”, is the latest version of the Red Hat influenced Linux distribution. Read the Fedora 7 review. Meanwhile, this Red Hat Magazine article details how to “remix” Fedora.
In-depth Fedora 7 Review; Community Remix
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Excellent review, and the remixing article is pretty nice as well.
I use it daily because it provides software updates to standalone programs like Pidgin unlike some distros that will only do security updates after they go stable.
I use it daily because it provides software updates to standalone programs like Pidgin unlike some distros that will only do security updates after they go stable.
That’s intriguing. But I haven’t yet found more information about this. Are the updated packages in the official Fedora repositories? Is it that all major packages get updated or just the ones that have maintainers willing to do the extra work?
Information on how updates are treated is available at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAQ. An important difference to some other distributions is that Fedora updates can and does include new features on many occasions as opposed to just security and bug fixes.
These packages updates are available as part of the official Fedora repository. Of course not all packages are updates to the latest versions unlike the development branch to provide some amount of balance between new features and robustness.
I just upgraded to Fedora 7 last week. It’s a very good release and Yum is fast! I decided to replace with Pirut with Yumex and the GUI package management experience is much nicer.
I use it every day for school and work. I like to run XFCE instead of Gnome so i have more memory available to run applications. I installed codecs for mpeg, mp3, realaudio, flash, and Windows media. They all play well. The only thing I miss is the ease of getting and installing Windows games. I tried pirut and yumex but I just found it easier to open up a shell and run yum to update my system.
weird. I find using things like pirut and ubuntu’s add/remove applications far easier than either OSX or Windows’ methods of having to hunt down applications and run installers OR drag n drop
Instead of pirut and yumex, I use either smart or synaptic. Not sure why I’ve got both loaded, though
… fast user switching, which is done very nicely, and certainly helps me and my wife share the home machine more effectively. The design is extremely intuitive, I didn’t have to teach my nontechnical wife how to use it. While it’s somewhat similar to the XP version, it has a cleaner feel to it than the XP implementation.
i like that feature and im the only one that uses my computer. i think i just like seeing my name in the panel
Does anyone have noticed network latencies after a fc7 install? It takes longer before webpages are loaded in any browser, firefox included.
I am not having this problem with the stock kernel. Though I compiled a custom version with ipv6 disabled and a few other things like tux-on-ice for hibernation.
Hmm must be a local phenomena tied to my hardware. Other than that nothing wrong with fc7:-)
For me F7 was a non-starter as it broke Suspend/Resume on my laptop. Apparently it did so for many people. It seems the kernel people cannot resist rewriting working subsystems all the time.
You should start here:
http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/quirk/quirk-suspend-index….
It’s the drivers, silly. Mostly the wireless and video drivers. The core suspend/hibernate subsystem is like the conductor of a symphony orchestra full of drivers. Everybody has to tune to the fricken oboe, no matter how out of tune it is, because that’s just the way oboes work. Too many damn oboes in the kernel.
/* Disclaimer, this distro might not live up to everyones expectations. So be warned if you install it on grandmas bit defender:-) */
I was quite happy with my Ubuntu feisty install. Tried fc7 when it came out but had as said problems with network performance. What the hack let’s install fc7 and see if the defaults can behave this time. I decided to leave the network settings for what they where and let the box decide ipv4/ipv6 and ip-address, gateway, hostname and so forth. Turned out to work quite unexpected good. Webpages are loaded quick as on any other linux platform.
Pseudo nvidia raid0 worked, both SATA 80GB disks where seen as one 160GB.
NVIDIA driver from livna (great repo btw) installed correctly.
Netscape browsers and thunderbird are protected as default by SELinux.
Cups-pdf works
etc etc
Nothing to complain about this great distro 8/10 (no 10/10 because there isn’t such thing as the perfect OS, no 9/10 because there’s allways something to evolve).
Edited 2007-08-09 13:07
any reason why this is “in-depth” review?
standard listing of installation steps with first impression about newly installed system far from anything detailed. Plenty of these crappy reviews after any new release of any distro. Only difference is that more popular distros will get more of this sort of useless, pitiful productions.
For me Fedora 7/KDE was yet-another-good-Fedora release – an improved F6. (though, being a Fedora-extra member makes me a bit biased
)
P.S. Hopefully the reviewer will take the time to report the revisor problem in bugzilla.redhat.com.
– Gilboa
And I mean that in a good way.
Fedora came into my household because it was the only one of a half dozen distros that managed to recognize a second SATA hard drive on a just released motherboard chipset (Debian did so after a kernel update).
Here are some of my impressions:
Good hardware support.
I don’t like Gnome, but you can get a passable KDE with Bluecurve, and setting the shading on the taskbar to the system colors.
Fedora enables SELinux, which can be something of a pain setting up a Samba server. Even with SELinux disabled, Samba is less trouble on Debian.
Fedora generally is fast with the security updates, faster than any other distro I have worked with.
Fedora is getting more Debian-like with its updates. Two examples include major (2.6.21-2.6.22) and minor kernel updates, along with a significant update of KDE to 3.5.7 (from 3.5.6).
Package management on Fedora 7 is faster than on 5, a lot faster. That said, I don’t much like Yum or Pirut. Fortunately, there is APT for RPM and Synaptic, although their Debian counterparts are faster. Debian’s Synaptic also provides more information.
There is also a lack of package granularity. You can’t really pick and choose what KDE program to install. If you want KMail, you have to get the rest of the KDEPIM.
While I may try Debian testing on my Fedora machine in about six months, I will stick with Fedora for now. It works, and looks good. Those are major pluses.
btw. The Livna repository is a Godsend.
I don’t like Gnome, but you can get a passable KDE with Bluecurve, and setting the shading on the taskbar to the system colors.
I can recommend xfce4. Makes the whole experience perceived faster.