General Fedora disappointment

[robertje]

I am a newbie, an academic working at a university, have used regular Unix, not the most ignorant user in the world, 15 years of LaTex experience, and I tried to install FC4 on a Dell Latitude D600.

After installation, I have no access to my NTFS partitions (I fixed this). My wireless doesn't work, and none of the online guides seem to get the ndiswrapper fix correctly installed. Sound is not working either. Fonts look weird (but well, XP also needed some modifications to get it looking OK). The modem doesn't work. Laptop power saving features do not seem to be enabled. Also, streaming audio and MP3 does not work...

Can you relate to my feelings of disappointment?

[princeofpersia]

Hi,

Have you partitioned the hard drive correctly? The manual option (using Disk Druid) works just fine and keeps the existing NTFS partitions as they are. Secondly, using the GRUB loader you can boot into Linux or XP. My wireless doesn't work in FC4 as well, and I am working on it. There are just too many different suggestions on this forum. My sound worked fine straight out of the box. Try to play around with different video drivers. I tried the generic ones, but the screen used to be blurry. Then, I installed Toshiba video drivers for some laptop other than mine and it works just fine. By default, MP3s won't be played. I guess that was the case with FC3 too, you wil have to install some other stuff to get it working. I know, it can be disappointing to install Linux (just coz so many things can break). But, its been a learning process for me. I have installed Redhat Linux and Fedora so many times on a desktop, no probs, laptops are problematic, especially to the wireless stuff!

[tajidinabd]

ok well i suggest u start posting specific questions about ur problems to get them solved for u. I see this ur first post and u are complaining how Fedora is disappointing. for instance ur wireless u have to post the chipset of the wireless card for ppl to help u. type lspci in a shell to get that information. i will agree power saving in Fedora is disappointing. Just so u know come with specific questions and ppl will help u. :)

[tajidinabd]

MP3 will never work out of the box with fedora due to legal reasons so u will have to do tweaking to get it working. suggestion u look at the Fedora FAQ to get the answers about MP3 playback.

[BrokenKingpin]

I am a newbie, an academic working at a university, have used regular Unix, not the most ignorant user in the world, 15 years of LaTex experience, and I tried to install FC4 on a Dell Latitude D600.

After installation, I have no access to my NTFS partitions (I fixed this). My wireless doesn't work, and none of the online guides seem to get the ndiswrapper fix correctly installed. Sound is not working either. Fonts look weird (but well, XP also needed some modifications to get it looking OK). The modem doesn't work. Laptop power saving features do not seem to be enabled. Also, streaming audio and MP3 does not work...

Can you relate to my feelings of disappointment?

I suggest SuSE Linux for laptops, Fedora for Desktops. I have a compaq presario laptop and everything worked awesome as soon as i installed SuSE on it. didnt have much luck with fc on it tho.

[chrisbs]

I suggest SuSE Linux for laptops, Fedora for Desktops. I have a compaq presario laptop and everything worked awesome as soon as i installed SuSE on it. didnt have much luck with fc on it tho.

Hmm... I have tried all the major distributions on my Compaq Presario laptop and so far FC4 has had the best out of box experience. The only two things I really needed to do was wireless (ndiswrapper for the broadcom chipset ... or madwifi for my pcmcia dlink card). And I had to setup the CPU Freq stuff correctly (needed to use acpi_cpufreq).

The only thing I don't have working is the modem and I never use it so I haven't tried.

Back to the original poster - I'm sure if you list your specs people could help you out.

--Chrisbs

[snoze]

No way!
my laptop rocks with fedora4. I am telling u I really had any goodluck with Suse, so finally I am back with Fedora 4..

[snoze]

MP3 will never work out of the box with fedora due to legal reasons so u will have to do tweaking to get it working. suggestion u look at the Fedora FAQ to get the answers about MP3 playback.


try to install also xmms mp3 suoooprt rpm and see the results..

[gkuhlen]

Is SUSE a commercial product only? Can I d/l it in ISO from someplace?

[chrisbs]

Is SUSE a commercial product only? Can I d/l it in ISO from someplace?

Yes (commercial product) No (Iso install) Yes (ftp install) - but you have to install over the net to do it... here is the webpage : http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/downloads/suse_linux/index.html


SUSE LINUX can be installed free of charge directly from the FTP server. It contains:

* 32bit and 64bit version
* over 3,500 software packages incl. server and developer tools
* the full software packages that are also included in boxed retail version

Before you start, please read the installation guideline:

* installation guideline 32bit version
* installation guideline 64bit version

Japanese installation instructions are also available.

The path to the installation directory is:

* ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/current/ for 32bit
* ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/x86_64/current/ for 64bit

If you want to install SUSE LINUX on several hosts in a network, download the entire installation directory together with all subdirectories. After you export these data to the local network with NFS, you can install SUSE LINUX on any client in the network.

Important note:
Download the files only if you can export the data to your local network with NFS! If you do not have this possibility or want to install SUSE LINUX on one host only, perform the FTP installation as described above. It is not possible to generate installation CDs from a complete download.

[erroneus]

I feel your pain. I remain somewhere between a newbie and an old-hand. I've been using Linux for a long time really. Originally, I was unpacking tarballs, compiling code and all that, but the more "advanced" the promises of Linux become, the more I have become dedicated to the idea of being "an experienced user." As such, I want to avoid hacking and patching as much as possible so that I can more closely identify with the people I want to use Linux.

People want it to work and they don't want it to be hard.

You know, that said, MS Windows ain't no cake-walk either. It seems that unless a hardware configuration is particularly well-seasoned, Windows isn't going to work out of the box either. Fortunately, hardware vendors take care of that problem for you most of the time by pre-tweaking and pre-loading all of the device drivers and special software needed to make the features work. To make a fair comparison, try wiping your hard drive out and installing Windows from scratch and see how well integrated things will be. I think you might be shocked to find that if your hardware is really new, almost nothing will work out of the box, especially the modem, the video and the wireless.

This does not take away from the disappointment, I know, but it does help you to appreciate the lay of the playing field. If you bought your laptop from a vendor who pre-loaded Linux to it, I think you'd find that your first experience would be considerably better.

But please post again and let's address the problems point-by-point. I think all of your issues have been discussed and solved in some way. As for me, I'm still waiting for an easy fix for the Suspend to disk and Suspend to RAM functions... I'm pretty tired of hacking and tracking. I want to install an RPM and forget about it.

[gkuhlen]

Thanks for the information. I will file it away. I am due for a new system and will try it then.