Fedora 8 is GOOD
 

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.

It is really nice to see positive experiences now and then. Glad you enjoyed it, we all rather like our little distro.

BTW, would you please let us know when Linux is really ready? I am sure us folk who have been using it for years would like to be prepared for that mad influx of crazed Windows users. :)

Oh, as I said, I'd like to see better video driver so every 2D and 3D apps would work well. And some key apps like OpenOffice, video player, media center, voice/video chatting etc. would give a little better experience. I know Linux is ready for many already. But for many general users, it still needs sometime. That's an honest opinion of somebody who started using Linux since Redhat 6 :).

Welcome, and I'm glad you like Fedora.

Regarding video quality, if you have the livna repo installed try vlc. With post processing set at 6, it is the best thing I've ever seen.

I have noticed that an optimized winxp system and a fedora 6/7/8 system run at about the same perceived speed. Only I don't have to go clean Fedora up every couple month the way I did winxp.

If openoffice is a bit slow for you, try abiword. Not quite as full featured, but much faster here.

I had a good overall experience so far with F8 (CD upgrade from F7). While being a solid release, what actually struck me most was how smooth and well-prepared this release was. I remember release delays on earlier Fedoras. This time, not only they released on time, they even had a release counter on the Fedora web page 2-3 weeks in advance. Plus, some of the contributors had made CD-DVD covers, etc. Anyway, I'd like say thanks and send kudos to the Fedora team.

ATI Radeon X1600 - resolution issue - FC8
 

Hello Guys,
Happy New Year,

i have lately upgraded from FC7 to FC8 on an HP nx9420 intel core 2 duo with ATI Radeon Mobility x1600 with 256MB.

After many tries and work, i've made ATI driver work properly in FC7 and have the correct resolution: 1440x900.

I have tried many things, fglrx driver looks fine, it loads properly, no error messages, ATI driver the same,
my xorg.conf file has the correct (i suppose) resolution schemes,


[root@localhost Desktop]# fglrxinfo
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Mobility Radeon X1600
OpenGL version string: 2.1.7170 Release




but still,

i am working in 1024x768 resolution on my 17" widescreen :(

Can anyone help?

thank you in advance,

Dino

No idea about ATI but I do have a question for you,

What in the world would posses you to post this question in a thread that is over a month old in the review forum? The thread has nothing whatsoever to do with your question and with the title being what it is chances are very good the people who could answer you will just skip over this without reading it. Just something to keep in mind, after all, starting a thread isnt that hard.

Please start a new thread as your issue is not related to the above post.

Fedora 8 is not good but Beautigul
 

This is my sheer happy happy joy joy feeling from using Fedora 8. The installation system and detection of all (minus biometric/onboard webcam --- doesn't bother me though) my devices was absolutely brilliant, maybe Fedora 9 (They should call it "Pouncing Lion" .... Putting Windows down ... lol) could support more devices at first installation.
The best part for my right now is PulseAudio, after listening to music on same laptop with Fedora 7; this definately gives me good vibes listening to music on my laptop.

I would not move from Fedora any more (Could Fedora 9 also support windows games more like cedega does --- I am not paying monthly dues to play games on my system!).

:cool: :D

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to tell you I'm really impressed about the speed, ease of use and configuration of FC8.

I used linux about 5 years ago and only as a web-server, because I used to develop sites in php and mysql. At that time, the desktop environment wasn't like it is today. In the mean time I moved to ASP and then to .NET so I had to stick with Windows.

From time to time, I tried installing new distros as they appeared, but none of them impressed me like this one.

My home computer is an old P4 at 3.0 GHz and with 2 GB of RAM and a nVidia 6660 GT. I have Vista for about 1 year and I'm terribly disappointed about the performance. The poor old hardware isn't capable of running several applications (only as a home user, since I'm not doing developing from my home computer) using Aero Glass theme.

There is no comparison between Vista performance and FC8. And of course, compiz-fusion package really kicked me off.

Of course, there is a lot of work to be done and improvements, better support for hardware (my new n-draft wireless card based on an Atheros chip isn't running not even in G mode... maybe I'm not doing something correctly, but I'll find a way to solve this issue too), but even so, I really enjoy using Fedora 8.

Keep up the good work guys (and girls)

Have you tried wine?

yum install mysql
 

I'm trying to do a yum install of mySQL.

The latest version out now is mySQL 6.0 -- anyone know if yum would pick up the latest version?

Thanks in advanced.

The current version in the fedora repo's is 5.0.45

Maybe try the development repositories. But be careful using yum + devel on a stable install.

Best bet if you really need the absolute most recent release is to grab the sources as soon as they're released and compile yourself.

(But I'm of the opinion that a very very small percentage of people really - and I mean really - need the latest and greatest [this is true of most operating systems] and may even be better off with slightly older [i.e., stable and functional] stuff. Two cents.)