ccixx
26th November 2007, 03:05 AM
Hello,
I just installed FC8 on my machine (Core2Duo 1.8Mhz, 1GB RAM, 250 SATA, ATI X1650 Pro with 256 Mb RAM, ASUS P5LD2-C mainboard with Intel HD Audio and Marvel Yukon Gigabit Ethernet, 22inch Topsync LCD monitor) and I want to share my brief impression.
Installation: FC8 is simply the best distro in this area. I will not mention how simple yet powerful (beautiful and informative too) Anaconda is. Rather, I'd like to point out some little details I like: remove all linux partitions option (good for dual boot and distro hopping), set/unset clock to UTC, disabling IP6 and packages selection. However, I also noticed that Anaconda still installed default packages that I unselected. It did install additional packages I selected though. I give Anaconda 4.5/5.
Look and Feel: Default theme is good for me. I have no particular comment on this. 4/5.
Hardware support: Very good. Almost everything works out of the box except my LCD monitor and ATI video card. My LCD monitor is not configured with correct resolution (1680x1050) using Xorg's vesa driver. I assume moving to Xorg 7.3 will fix that since it does when I installed the latest sidux 2007-04 with Xorg 7.3. For ATI video card, installing ATI driver from livna is very simple. The "yum install kmod-fglrx" even changed xorg.conf automatically and added a little nice app called "livna display configuration" (Note to livna's maintainer: somehow, I had to install livna display configuration by download the rpm directly from web, yum cannt find this dependency when installing fglrx from livna's testing repo). After installing fglrx, LCD resolution problem is also fixed. Unfortunately, I still could not enable Compiz after trying all possible fixes posted here and compiz-fusion's forum. But this is ATI to blame, not FC8. So, I'd like to give 4/5.
Package management: Yum is much better now. Indeed, I think it is nowhere behind apt-get for general users. Yes, it is a little bit slower (e.g., I don't know what is "running transaction test" thing for? and slower repo?) but yum's never disappointed me so far. GUI for yum is a little different. Both Yumex and Pirut randomly hang (especially when multi-tasking). Luckily, both did not break anything when I "force quit" them. Yumex has other problems too. At some point, when I clicked on "Group View", it just immediately quited without any explanation. Worse than that, when I "force quit" Yumex, it seems the lock on /var/run/yum.pid will never be released, therefore preventing me from using yum. However, let's not forget that command-line yum works really well. So this part gets 4/5 from me too.
Applications: All basic applications like firefox, pidgin, OpenOffice, SCIM, Totem, Rhymthbox and service manager, etc. work well. I heard that some people did not like codecbuddy but I think it is good (giving me free mp3 decoder) and fair (asking you to buy mpeg2 decoder). If you don't like it, then livna is there, quick and easy. I would like to comment on video and audio parts a bit. Video quality in Totem is not very good comparing to any apps in XP. However, my my mp3s are played with little higher quality than in XP. For me, the best applications in FC8 are Eclipse and virt-manager. Seriously, FC8 did very good job in integrating bit and pieces to provide me a very solid dev environment. And virt-manager with kvm works really well. If not for gaming, I already dumped my Windows XP. 4/5 for this too.
General performance: I'd like to compare FC8 to XP (dual boot) only since I used both for the last couple of days. I feel things (booting, firefox, etc.) are equally fast in both OSes except that OpenOffice does feel slower than Microsoft Office. Really, I dont need XP anymore, if not for game :). I'd like to give FC8 4.5/5 on this.
Overall, I really think Linux is very close to ready. Just better video driver, a little more polished, Linux will be the only system for me. And I am really looking forward to FC9.
Thank Fedora Team and all Linux volunteers.
I just installed FC8 on my machine (Core2Duo 1.8Mhz, 1GB RAM, 250 SATA, ATI X1650 Pro with 256 Mb RAM, ASUS P5LD2-C mainboard with Intel HD Audio and Marvel Yukon Gigabit Ethernet, 22inch Topsync LCD monitor) and I want to share my brief impression.
Installation: FC8 is simply the best distro in this area. I will not mention how simple yet powerful (beautiful and informative too) Anaconda is. Rather, I'd like to point out some little details I like: remove all linux partitions option (good for dual boot and distro hopping), set/unset clock to UTC, disabling IP6 and packages selection. However, I also noticed that Anaconda still installed default packages that I unselected. It did install additional packages I selected though. I give Anaconda 4.5/5.
Look and Feel: Default theme is good for me. I have no particular comment on this. 4/5.
Hardware support: Very good. Almost everything works out of the box except my LCD monitor and ATI video card. My LCD monitor is not configured with correct resolution (1680x1050) using Xorg's vesa driver. I assume moving to Xorg 7.3 will fix that since it does when I installed the latest sidux 2007-04 with Xorg 7.3. For ATI video card, installing ATI driver from livna is very simple. The "yum install kmod-fglrx" even changed xorg.conf automatically and added a little nice app called "livna display configuration" (Note to livna's maintainer: somehow, I had to install livna display configuration by download the rpm directly from web, yum cannt find this dependency when installing fglrx from livna's testing repo). After installing fglrx, LCD resolution problem is also fixed. Unfortunately, I still could not enable Compiz after trying all possible fixes posted here and compiz-fusion's forum. But this is ATI to blame, not FC8. So, I'd like to give 4/5.
Package management: Yum is much better now. Indeed, I think it is nowhere behind apt-get for general users. Yes, it is a little bit slower (e.g., I don't know what is "running transaction test" thing for? and slower repo?) but yum's never disappointed me so far. GUI for yum is a little different. Both Yumex and Pirut randomly hang (especially when multi-tasking). Luckily, both did not break anything when I "force quit" them. Yumex has other problems too. At some point, when I clicked on "Group View", it just immediately quited without any explanation. Worse than that, when I "force quit" Yumex, it seems the lock on /var/run/yum.pid will never be released, therefore preventing me from using yum. However, let's not forget that command-line yum works really well. So this part gets 4/5 from me too.
Applications: All basic applications like firefox, pidgin, OpenOffice, SCIM, Totem, Rhymthbox and service manager, etc. work well. I heard that some people did not like codecbuddy but I think it is good (giving me free mp3 decoder) and fair (asking you to buy mpeg2 decoder). If you don't like it, then livna is there, quick and easy. I would like to comment on video and audio parts a bit. Video quality in Totem is not very good comparing to any apps in XP. However, my my mp3s are played with little higher quality than in XP. For me, the best applications in FC8 are Eclipse and virt-manager. Seriously, FC8 did very good job in integrating bit and pieces to provide me a very solid dev environment. And virt-manager with kvm works really well. If not for gaming, I already dumped my Windows XP. 4/5 for this too.
General performance: I'd like to compare FC8 to XP (dual boot) only since I used both for the last couple of days. I feel things (booting, firefox, etc.) are equally fast in both OSes except that OpenOffice does feel slower than Microsoft Office. Really, I dont need XP anymore, if not for game :). I'd like to give FC8 4.5/5 on this.
Overall, I really think Linux is very close to ready. Just better video driver, a little more polished, Linux will be the only system for me. And I am really looking forward to FC9.
Thank Fedora Team and all Linux volunteers.
