nhusted
19th May 2005, 11:35 PM
System Specs:
Athlon64 3700+
MSI K8N Neo4-F Motherboard
1GB PC3200
2x 15GB WD HD
1x 120GB WD HD
Nvidia 6600GT
16x16 DVD-RW
Dual boot with WinXP using WinXP boot loader.
Review:
I originally started using Redhat back in the 6.x/7.x days after I had access to their original "Linux Undercover" book. I felt it would be an interested experiment and proceeded to install the operating system. Back then it wasn't quite as user friendly as it is today but it was still fun. After a while I ended up installing windows full time on my home system until recently when I decided to give Linux a shot again after I upgraded my hardware. Needless to say, I was in for a surprise.
Before Fedora Core 3 I ended up trying RHEL4. Through the local university I receive free up2date service and ISO downloads. That however didn't work out to well. The packages were behind fedora and caused serious issues trying to update the operating system to fit my hardware. I got to a point where it worked, but not without odd graphical glitches. I then decided to try Fedora.
My first attempt was installing Fedora Core 4 Test 3. That, however, didn't turn out how I wanted it too. I finally decided to go with Fedora Core 3. The installer booted up fine and like every other linux installation on this machine I needed to set the kernel parameter 'ide=nodma'. For some reason the ide controller has issues with DMA on Linux. I'm not sure if it isn't fully supported yet by the latest kernel, but in all fairness the Nvidia SW IDE drivers BSOD windows on startup so it isn't a Linux issue. After the kernel parameter was entered Anaconda booted up and ran fine.
I did a custom install and pick and pecked at my packages. I installed Gnome only, VIM, elinks2, and a few other things. I did not install openoffice due to the fact I was going to download abiword later (I don't like how bloated open office is). After everything was said and done the install was going to take up about 2.7GB of space. Not to bad considering all the libraries, the development tools package, and the usual desktop acutriments I installed. It is on par with the general windows install and contains a heckuva lot more. The install took around 30 minutes (no dma and all) and used all 4 CDs.
After the install I booted into rescue mode. I then took my first stab at using yum. I downloaded the yum.conf from fedorafaq.org because I'm lazy and proceeded to update my kernel. Everything there ran fine, I then used the command on the faq to update my nvidia graphics drivers and made the needed changes to xorg.conf. After the reboot I did the usual initial Fedora setup and dived right into GNOME.
I loved the theme and background, but I had more urgent needs to attend to. I quickly jumped in to updating the system. Little did I know I was in for a bit of a headache. I ran yum and procceded to watch the update. It started to chuck along and then got to the test transaction phase. Around an hour or two later it was still at the test transaction phase when I got back to my computer. Something was definently wrong. I rebooted and then proceeded to update the packages hand by hand to try and avoid the problem. I did a bit of searching while this was occurring and it turns out the shadow-utils package halts the system upon install. That rather annoyed me that some how a major bug like this slipped through the test package into release, mainly due to the fact it wasted a bit of my time that night. After I found out this useful piece of information I did an update excluding that package and everything ran fine.
After the system wide update I wanted to install a few few of my personally useful applications. Using yum I easily installed mplayer and the associated applications, xmms-mp3, abiword,kernel-ntfs, and java. I enjoy the ease of use that yum provides. It is a very handy way of updating the packages. The only downside is that currently I couldn't get it to automatically install some plugins just for firefox without wanting to install mozilla as one of the dependencies. That's only a minor issue though.
All in all I am enjoyed Fedora 3 and found it very easy to use. I am avoiding any of the graphical anomalies I had in RHEL4 and it is proving to be a nice personal desktop system. I would recommend it to anyone who doesn't want to fuss with gentoo and likes the ease of use and quality of redhat's products.
Ratings:
Installation: (5/5)
Ease of use: (4.5/5)
Features: (4/5)
Quality of program: (5/5)
Overall: (9/10)
Athlon64 3700+
MSI K8N Neo4-F Motherboard
1GB PC3200
2x 15GB WD HD
1x 120GB WD HD
Nvidia 6600GT
16x16 DVD-RW
Dual boot with WinXP using WinXP boot loader.
Review:
I originally started using Redhat back in the 6.x/7.x days after I had access to their original "Linux Undercover" book. I felt it would be an interested experiment and proceeded to install the operating system. Back then it wasn't quite as user friendly as it is today but it was still fun. After a while I ended up installing windows full time on my home system until recently when I decided to give Linux a shot again after I upgraded my hardware. Needless to say, I was in for a surprise.
Before Fedora Core 3 I ended up trying RHEL4. Through the local university I receive free up2date service and ISO downloads. That however didn't work out to well. The packages were behind fedora and caused serious issues trying to update the operating system to fit my hardware. I got to a point where it worked, but not without odd graphical glitches. I then decided to try Fedora.
My first attempt was installing Fedora Core 4 Test 3. That, however, didn't turn out how I wanted it too. I finally decided to go with Fedora Core 3. The installer booted up fine and like every other linux installation on this machine I needed to set the kernel parameter 'ide=nodma'. For some reason the ide controller has issues with DMA on Linux. I'm not sure if it isn't fully supported yet by the latest kernel, but in all fairness the Nvidia SW IDE drivers BSOD windows on startup so it isn't a Linux issue. After the kernel parameter was entered Anaconda booted up and ran fine.
I did a custom install and pick and pecked at my packages. I installed Gnome only, VIM, elinks2, and a few other things. I did not install openoffice due to the fact I was going to download abiword later (I don't like how bloated open office is). After everything was said and done the install was going to take up about 2.7GB of space. Not to bad considering all the libraries, the development tools package, and the usual desktop acutriments I installed. It is on par with the general windows install and contains a heckuva lot more. The install took around 30 minutes (no dma and all) and used all 4 CDs.
After the install I booted into rescue mode. I then took my first stab at using yum. I downloaded the yum.conf from fedorafaq.org because I'm lazy and proceeded to update my kernel. Everything there ran fine, I then used the command on the faq to update my nvidia graphics drivers and made the needed changes to xorg.conf. After the reboot I did the usual initial Fedora setup and dived right into GNOME.
I loved the theme and background, but I had more urgent needs to attend to. I quickly jumped in to updating the system. Little did I know I was in for a bit of a headache. I ran yum and procceded to watch the update. It started to chuck along and then got to the test transaction phase. Around an hour or two later it was still at the test transaction phase when I got back to my computer. Something was definently wrong. I rebooted and then proceeded to update the packages hand by hand to try and avoid the problem. I did a bit of searching while this was occurring and it turns out the shadow-utils package halts the system upon install. That rather annoyed me that some how a major bug like this slipped through the test package into release, mainly due to the fact it wasted a bit of my time that night. After I found out this useful piece of information I did an update excluding that package and everything ran fine.
After the system wide update I wanted to install a few few of my personally useful applications. Using yum I easily installed mplayer and the associated applications, xmms-mp3, abiword,kernel-ntfs, and java. I enjoy the ease of use that yum provides. It is a very handy way of updating the packages. The only downside is that currently I couldn't get it to automatically install some plugins just for firefox without wanting to install mozilla as one of the dependencies. That's only a minor issue though.
All in all I am enjoyed Fedora 3 and found it very easy to use. I am avoiding any of the graphical anomalies I had in RHEL4 and it is proving to be a nice personal desktop system. I would recommend it to anyone who doesn't want to fuss with gentoo and likes the ease of use and quality of redhat's products.
Ratings:
Installation: (5/5)
Ease of use: (4.5/5)
Features: (4/5)
Quality of program: (5/5)
Overall: (9/10)
