Fedora Core 4 review

[Nobber]

I didn't mean to imply that Andy thinks Fedora sucks as a whole - which is why I made a point of saying "distro release" instead of just "distro". However, I still think that contributing to a book that focuses on a particular distro release you find especially disappointing must leave you with mixed feelings. Eh? (Disclaimer: IANAA - I Am Not An Author!)

[Marrea]

Re the point that has been made about Fedora not being suitable for newbies, I wouldn't agree with this. Why? For the simple reason there are more books on Red Hat/Fedora than any other distro so there is a vast information resource for people to refer to. My main distro is SuSE, but I also used FC2 for some time and I found it just as easy/easier to use than SuSE - purely because I had so much documentation readily available.

I've been using Linux for over two years now, but I still regard myself pretty much in the "newbie" bracket.

I haven't as yet tried FC4 because I'm having difficulty installing it. My video card (Trident Cyberblade in a Toshiba laptop) doesn't like it and I am suffering from the "frozen white screen" at the beginning of installation. I believe there are workarounds but I have not yet had time to try and sort this out. But I'm very anxious to give FC4 a whirl as soon as I can.

[M-Saunders]

For the simple reason there are more books on Red Hat/Fedora than any other distro so there is a vast information resource for people to refer to.

True, although there are a lot of books on assembler, and Oracle, and TCP/IP, and VMS (if you look hard enough!). But that doesn't mean they're easy things to use... Still, just to chip in my two Space Credits: IMHO, Fedora's config tools are initially sweet in that they're small and do one job, but I agree with Andy and co. that they should've improved as the years roll on. Tighter integration between them would be welcome.

Whacha going to do, eh? (If Natty wakes, obscure eastern pop music fans)

M

[Marrea]

There's a particular book called "Linux for Non-Geeks" which largely deals with Fedora and I found I could for example download and install programs simply by following the detailed instructions set out there without really having to understand too much about what exactly was going on. It's very much in the style of
1. go to such and such a website
2. navigate to such and such a page
3. click on the icon at the top of the page
4. click on the file called such and such
5. save it to your desktop.
Etc., etc. A real idiot's guide if you like. Perfect for newbies.

I have fairly limited requirements from any Linux distro, as I only use stand alone "personal desktop" machines for web-surfing, e-mail, office and music/video programs, so I can't really comment on some of the more advanced features which you guys are far more knowledgeable about than I am. But then a lot of newbies probably don't want to go much further than the things I use Linux for, and I think Fedora is perfect for those.

[A-Wing]

I kinda see Fedora as a great office desktop and a good development platform. We use it on our servers (hosting servers) but it is heavily cusomised with security enhancements and packages.
I think the reason why the php4 - 5 upgrade was delayed was due to the fact that many PHP4 scripts originally didn't work in PHP5 (we still use PHP4 on our web servers), now many projects have made their scripts compatible the PHP5 upgrade makes sense. The late MySQL upgrade however I have no idea, on our SQL servers it was the first thing I rebuilt with previous Fedoras.
Maybe they did spend too much time patching everything to make it work with GCC4 and too little time with new features. Its a pity 5 is going to be delayed so long as I have been looking forward to that since I heard some of the included features.
In hindsight I'd say that Fedora 4 does seem more of a intrum release, getting the technology ready to work for 5.
I think I need to let my wife to be (on Saturday) try it to gauge a proper ease of use

[AudioMove]

<rant>
Ive been using FC4 for awhile now, been using FC since since the beginning was using RH before that. I most say i found the review was a bit harsh i also got from it that it wasnt newbie friendly enough when its not supposed to be. With FC quick release schedule which is about to end i think you cant expect what you normally would see in a new distro release so you gotta balance it up against FC3 and how long its been since.

I think compiling against GCC4 is great and it may not be much now regarding performance but it most of been one massive job and should be given some serios credit for that. I dont think updates of php and mysql as their the norm and i dont really count them as their expected.

Regarding extras i luv the idea and hopefully i dont know wheather it would be possible but if everything could go in their one day to make all application and plugins easily available like mp3 support etc would be great so peeps would just have to grab everything from their and i dont really see getting stuff from extras a problem or a bad thing that should go against fedora as most peeps use repos like dries, freshrpms etc...

Anyway summing up FC4 is a good release and they've also done alot of work on the boot time which helps. I dont think anyone using FC4 will be jumping back to FC3 any time soon and with the quick release cycles that most mean something.

</rant>