Brief impression of Fedora Core 4 Test 2

[Finalzone]

I installed Fedora Core 4 Test on a separate hard drive. One thing that need to be improved is the Grub ability to autodetect previous Fedora and let users to use original grub.conf.

Installation:
- Anaconda recognized Fedora Core 3. Unfortunately, there is an issue mentionned.
- XFCE 4 is removed from installation as it is moved to Extra.
- Language settings is now moved to Add/Remove Applications
- Add/Remove Application have new options: Eclipse, gcj, language

First boot:
- For speed freaks, Fedora Core 4 Test 2 boot faster. It is about 30 seconds.

Desktop:
- GNOME: default theme is clearlook which is the successor of the old Bluecurve. It is incompleted because of the generic gnome icons.
- KDE: bluecurve is still the default theme. Apparently clearlook is for GNOME. We will see how final release will turn out

OpenOffice:
- It seems that OpenOffice runs smoothly on gcj removing the need to install Sun Java.

Package manager:
- yum is enhanced as the speed matched apt.
- yum is now well structured as it shows the number of package to be installed/updated or removed.
- It seems this version is just a preview for the incoming change that will occur on Fedora Core 5. System-config-package might be dropped for new package manager (tentatively called pup) . Apparently, Application/Remove Application will be "yumified"

Overall
- This test release is stable on my system. I noticed a minor issue when using yum command to see like duplicated command list. I haven't tested Eclipse yet.

[sej7278]

Interesting.

I've noticed a lot of complaints about yum being slower than apt, and it does seem try (tried Ubuntu Hoary last night). Good to see its being sped-up.

I was wondering what is new they could put into FC4, not so much has happened lately other than OpenOffice2 and xen (Gnome 2.10 is not much difference from 2.8)

Shame about Clearlook - I don't like it at all on Ubuntu, I always liked BlueCurve - especially being consistent through GTK/QT apps.

[ilja]

thank you for your review. Let's wait for the final version.

[Myra]

On Fedora Portal I read that was a bug and Bluecurve is back in Rawhide. It's great to read startup time is reduced! \o/ Also, I'm a fan of Eclipse, so that's great.