FC8 Review

[icdoctor]

Hello All,

I downloaded the FC8 DVD and installed it on my 2.6Ghz P4 512M machine. The install went well, no issues. I selected a basic install with Gnome desktop, xen and a few other basic packages. After the install I did a yum update and a final reboot. Now it's was time for a test drive. Here is my review:

During the login I was nagged about logging in as root, this is annoying.
The audio MP3 is not working.
yumex was not installed.
OMG the keyring has got to go, I did a SFTP to another server using nautilus and received a popup asking for the password for every directory i opened.

I know these are all minor issues but here is the big one.
The desktop is laggy, kinda like running windows vista on a 286 processor.
Since I installed Xen, the system was running the xen kernel. I thought this may be the problem, so I edited grub.conf and set it to 2.6.23.1-49.fc8 and did a reboot. This didn't make a difference the system is still laggy.

Now I remember why I moved away from Fedora about 15 months ago. It just has to many issues for me. Centos/RHEL5 for server and Ubuntu for a workstation is the better
choice.

Just my 2cent

icdoctor

[bob]

Thanks for expressing your opinion. Are you interested in working through the problems or just ready to head back to elsewhere?

As info, I had some problems with the initial install myself, but within 48 hours it had become my default desktop and I haven't looked back. There's a sense of satisfaction in figuring out the minor problems, although the speed issue can be a pain - fortunately I didn't have that.

A few hours ago I installed the latest version of Mint -4.0 and had it completely configured within an hour. Frankly, it's much easier and more complete than Ubuntu; perhaps that's one you should explore. While I'd be tempted to recommend it to anyone trying linux for the first time, I'm hooked on understanding the distro, not just having it all work.

[bob]

A couple of things you should understand from your prior experience with Fedora. 1). Fedora's FOSS, so don't expect .mp3 support out of the box. 2). The default software updater is PUP and installer is Pirut. Yumex, while an excellent tool, is not the default graphical interface but is easily installed if you prefer it.

Oh yes, about being 'nagged' about logging in as root. Ubuntu doesn't allow it by default at all, as you know. If you do want that option, I'd again suggest Mint, which at least gives you the choice.

[J. E. Bennett]

Regarding the speed issue, I've found that for my computer KDE runs way, way faster than GNOME under F8. The heck if I could tell you why, but KDE is using about half as much RAM than GNOME, on average, and chewing up much less processor time.

[bob]

Really? I've always found the opposite! Guess it's up to the components on the individual machine as to your results. There's also Xfce4 and a lot of other options that can speed things up. These days though, newer machines are so blindingly fast that I can't keep up no matter what the DM.

[J. E. Bennett]

Really? I've always found the opposite! Guess it's up to the components on the individual machine as to your results. There's also Xfce4 and a lot of other options that can speed things up. These days though, newer machines are so blindingly fast that I can't keep up no matter what the DM.

Really! I was rather surprised myself, as I've been a longtime XFCE/Fluxbox fan for the light system usage. I've only got 512MB of RAM, so I have to make them count. ;)

[bob]

LOL, I'm also a 512meg'er. Got to free up the credit card and do some serious upgrading one of these days.

[Dies]

LOL, I'm also a 512meg'er. Got to free up the credit card and do some serious upgrading one of these days.

Definitely, you should go with something like this.

http://www.perceptivepixel.com/

[bob]

I think he's at least running a gig, huh? Kinda beats compiz.... :D Well, aside from the bill for Windex every month, I'd sure love to play with that one.

[Dies]

I think he's at least running a gig, huh? .

Probably a gig or two with an ATI card :D , though you should still give it a try, it should run ... maybe just a little slow. :p

Did you happen to see how many videos that beast was playing at one time ? :eek:

[name_user]

Currently I am running FC6. I plan to skip FC7 and then install FC8 when it's ready, because I don't want to backup data, and then start everything from scratch every 6 months. However, by seeing so many negative reviews for FC8, particularly with the problems of installation. I am hesitating to install FC8. I guess Fedora is more interested in catching speed than quality. I may hold on FC6, and wait to see FC9, or other distros that turns out to be better.

[DCOH]

I have been using F8 since the first test release running with 512 megs of memory and have had no problems with install or with the speed of the gnome desktop. I don't try running compiz mainly because the unichrome driver don't work to well with 3D and I have no use for it anyway, but everything else works and there has been no problems setting F8 up on a couple of different computers.

[PhillyFloyd]

Once I calmed down and remembered it is Fedora after-all, a free OS, I realized it really wasn't that bad --- it is good to see people are expecting a flawless release ... I think it goes to show how much Fedora has grown up that people EXPECT things to work flawlessly...which is great ...

Some things I liked -- I liked not having to reboot again after the install, and the initial setup guide ... that was a nice change ;-) built in iwl3945 works like a champ ... IcedTea is the next best thing since Long Island Iced Tea ... AWN is really nice ... I guess this distro tried to introduce too much new perks at once ... so it took some getting used to, but in the end, wasn't a big fan of wlan0 being the new standard for wifi ... I can't get eth1 to configure manually as a wifi interface ... but NetworkManager works ok, just cant use encryption which is a known bug ...

In a month once all the patches are out --- it is really a great distro .... compiz was a pain, but I expected that this time since they shipped baseline rpms with the default install ... but I got it working .... grsync is really cool, not sure if it is new, but I use rsync a lot at work ... so a frontend is just great if for nothing else to see what the final command will be choosing the options via the GUI ... way too many options in rsync ;-)

So after a deep breath, a night's sleep, and a few glasses of amaretto, it really wasn't that bad ... I mean, it's FREE .... come on already

[name_user]

I was referring to a thread which might have more then 6 pages now discussing about the problem with reboot after installation. So many people have the same problem. That scares me as a not so skillful user. Indeed it's free, and I should not complain. However, I have to wonder why those obvious bugs were not identified in beta testing. You are lucky and installed successfully on numerous machine. I am not sure if I would be the lucky one.

[PhillyFloyd]

If you want stability over features stick with F6 or F7 for now until the community has time to fix all the problems ... it is unrealistic to think that Fedora should arrive in its final form perfect ... MS and Apple has billions to sink into development and testing and they release OS's on a much larger time frame...Fedora is every 6 months or so and is basically a testing ground for RHEL .... I don't think it was ever meant to be this perfect OS for first-time Linux users ... Ubuntu is more that ... I see Fedora as the desktop OS for those who used RH or are RHEL users who want more features ....

If you want stability keep Fedora 7 --- if you think about how often other OS upgrades come out, and compare it to Fedora ... it is amazing they come out with what they do ....

[pete_1967]

If you want stability over features stick with F6 or F7 for now until the community has time to fix all the problems ... it is unrealistic to think that Fedora should arrive in its final form perfect ... MS and Apple has billions to sink into development and testing and they release OS's on a much larger time frame...Fedora is every 6 months or so and is basically a testing ground for RHEL .... I don't think it was ever meant to be this perfect OS for first-time Linux users ... Ubuntu is more that ... I see Fedora as the desktop OS for those who used RH or are RHEL users who want more features ....

If you want stability keep Fedora 7 --- if you think about how often other OS upgrades come out, and compare it to Fedora ... it is amazing they come out with what they do ....

Yeah, always funny when people start ranting how latest version is crap because this or that doesn't work and conveniently forget for example that Microsoft started planning and developing Vista in 2001 (Longhorn that time) at a cost of over $10 billion and still it isn't bug free.

Of course it would be nice everything always being perfect but unfortunately that has nothing to do with reality.

[starstatras]

Personally I had no problems whatsoever upgrading from f7 to f8, the upgrade process worked fine and when i came back to my pc I had fedora 8. Everything worked perfectly from the word go. Speed is great on my 2.2ghz athlonxp with 2gb ram and a 128mb Geforce 6600gt (much faster than vista was or even xp). Only problem I had was a few dependency problems installing compiz fusion (which I thought was meant to be included as default) which was easily solved and it now works and I have no issues with the speed. I would (and have done) recommend fedora to people who haven't ever used Linux before, because in my experience it is easy to use and stable, and has infinitely better names than Ubuntu

[PhillyFloyd]

I agree -- once I actually calmed down and read the release notes and updates ... it all went very very well, and I installed with the Gnome Live CD on my work PC today, I was amazed with how fast the install goes with the liveCD ... I never used that method before, always used the DVD ...

Compiz works very well right out of the box ... I recommend doing:

yum install compiz-fusion ccsm compiz-manager compiz avant-window-navigator

Then add:

compiz-manager inside your startup sessions as well as avant-window-navigator

Fonts are very crips and clean, and AWN is like a wet dream for me ... I spent so much time in previous builds get kdocker, or another dock app to run well ... it always looked ghetto ... AWN looks so sleak, it was a nice surprise as I did hear much about it prior to release

I admit I am a huge F8 fan right now ... of course, everything is working ... now I jsut need to get on compiling cisco-vpnclient ;-) ... I can't use vpnc on my network because you need to enter text after you connect ... is there a way to get vpnc to not just output the MOTD -- eh thats for another thread

[barf]

What you think of F 8 has a lot to do with your hardware.
I've got an Acer laptop (aspire 5020 which is 64 bit) F 8 installed with a few problems mainly to do with getting the X server to work (what is the issue with identifying the monitor?) and getting the wireless lan to work. I cussed a bit and poked and prodded it and finally got a display, many of hours later we got the BCM cutter to fire up the WLAN (even wrote a liitle how-to to help others).. Then with some help form Firewing got my desktop cube working. Then when the kernel gets uptdaed to 24.3-34 its busted. eth0 is now something.bak and the device is really my wlan card, wlan0 is gone, so I have no network to download the fix (when ot comes out). Cant roll back to kernel 23.1-42 'cause the X server don't work no more with all the other upgrades. So as an owner of this particular laptop I'm seriously pissed, I spent several mandays getting it to work and with one upgrade you broke it (and looking in the forums I'm not alone). This should never happen, I mean that from a QA and engineering point of view. :mad:
BUT
A desktop I upgraded to a quad core 64 bit Phenom and SATA drives with a wide screen LCD panel is as perfect an a install as you could wish for. So owners of this type of machine will be really good advocates for Fedora 8. :)

I know Fedora is a testing distro but upgrades are supposed to improve things not break existing things :(

[Nokia]

Compiz works very well right out of the box ... I recommend doing:

yum install compiz-fusion ccsm compiz-manager compiz avant-window-navigator

Then add:

compiz-manager inside your startup sessions as well as avant-window-navigator



For sure, a kernel upgrade without the proper video modules would render even the most pessimist happy for having a crashing X due to some apps trying to start "automagically" at startup. Yet, each one has a karma :D

[nitwit536]

My review:

I'm actually a debian user, but wanted to test something else for my new laptop. At some point, I ended up installing Fedora 8.

Installation:
Quite smooth!

First time desktop impression:
Looks more professional than Ubuntu for example (I hate that brown theme).
Quite responsive.
Loved the integration of SELinux.
It was possible to see the bootup scripts loading. Not spectacular, but nice.
OpenOffice.org should be the standard office suite ...

Package installation:
As aptitude user, this was hell for me. At least at first.
Pirut isn't bad, but I learned to know Yum Extender. A far better one. I would suggest that you make yumex the standard one...
Also, there are far less packages in Fedora. It could be helpfull if the fedora site would point to some other repositories. Or just mention the site FedoraFaq...

Second impression: Using the system
My router at home is a quite old one. It doesn't support IPv6.
I knew a way to go around it in debian (using dhcp3 conf file), but the file wasn't there at fedora. After searching, I found that once you have connected to a network, if you start the network configuration and fill in the correct dns and save it, the system uses the dns filled in ... Which was nice.
Compiz isn't always working fine. If you start Matlab with compiz on, for example, it works very slow. But I guess that this problem occurs in every linux distro using compiz.
Burning CD's doesn't work (http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=184698) . Which is a bummer. I don't know if it's fedora, the linux kernel or the program. I haven't tested it with another distro.
IcedTea worked perfectly with the project I was working on. Just imported the project written in Java 6 and it worked!
Another impression I have is: less control over the system than debian (cfr. commandline usage etc). Also with debian you won't get a "WOW" impression, it's packages are somewhat old (in stable), but it's solid as a rock! But like I said: this could be an impression.

Conclusion:
Nice setup.
The package manager isn't aptitude (or derivated), but gets close. Package includes: mostly very new, but not a lot of them...
Couldn't get my writer to work..
Compiz is giving some problems.
To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised. It gets harder and harder to chose the right distro.

[bob]

Nit, first of all, Welcome!

FedoraFAQ can't be directly linked due to the FOSS nature of Fedora. We have to go through non-linked 3rd. party repositories to get 'dirty' codecs, etc. It's okay to link here at FedoraForum.org, since the Forum is an independent site and not directly a part of Fedoraproject.org. All pretty unusual, I suppose, but that's how it is.

I'm very surprised that you were unable to burn CD's. I've never had a problem with K3b, Brasero or Gnomebaker. You should install those if you haven't already. Through the livna repository, there's also some .mp3 burning options, etc.

OpenOffice is the default on the DVD, but due to size limitations it was not included on the Live CD. Easily added from the repositories, of course.

Yum/yumex/pirut/pup are the default options for updates and installing packages, but Smart and Apt/Synaptic are also available to you if you prefer. Again, search Yum or Yumex for all your options.

So, the distro is really one that 'grows' on you. There's a balance between 'cutting edge turmoil' and stability. Things can and do break from time to time but the support here at the Forum will generally be able to solve things. You also learn a lot from the glitches, which is why I end up booting Fedora so much more than the distros that don't require any tweaking. Hope you decide to hang around awhile and thanks for the review!