Should I install FC2 ???

ShadowChaser · #1 13th September 2004, 02:09 PM

Hello all,
I have a question my buddy just got and AMD64 PC and he really wants a great OS for it.. I recommended FC2. But the problem is i start googling and i hear horror storys about stuff like can't get Sound to losing Win2000 partition. And all sort of problems with KDE... the thing is that he is very new to linux and i'm not sure if FC2 would be right for him. Granted alot of the horror storys were base on FC2 test 1 and 2 but is the final any better? Please let me know what you think...
regards,
SC

***ewdi*** · #2 13th September 2004, 02:13 PM

can you list your hardware?

also set LBA in HDD setting at bios setup before installing dual boot so it wont messed up your mbr block

ShadowChaser · #3 13th September 2004, 04:55 PM

Well it's and AMD64 3200+ the motherboard is an ASUS K8VSE 512 ram ddr Pci Creative Labs 512 sound card.. Thanks for the LBA info! So do you think I should Install it or try a different Distro?
Again Thanks for Any and All Info.
Regards,
-SC
Penguin Power

zg0000 · #4 13th September 2004, 09:06 PM

I've been using it for a little over a week now. I'd definately recommend configuring yum to use the Dag and Livonia rpm repositories. During the last month I've installed Mandrake 10 amd64, Suse x86_64 and finally Fedora 2 x86_64. Definately the happiest with Fedora so far, although thats more to the fault of the other two, featurewise Fedora is still (IMHO) a little immature, but Mandrake updates where broke (badly, I know how to use Mandrake very well) and Suse performed too slowly on my system (the whole point was to take advantage of some of the speed gains!).

Fedora also has done a lot of things right, which is why I'll be sticking with it.

ShadowChaser · #5 13th September 2004, 10:15 PM

Thanks Zg0000 have you had any problems with RC2 that i should take into consideration? i'm kinda nervous when it comes to the redaeon X800 pro video card though.

zg0000 · #6 14th September 2004, 02:31 AM

Well I haven't been able to get the kernel to upgrade using the Fedora updated RPMS, but I suspect it has something to do with the SATA drivers (I'm using an SATA drive). Unless I'm missing something, the configuration tools really bite and theirs no central place to launch the 20 or so modules. But really, I'm pretty satisfied. If I could I'd be using Mandrake, with their control center and hardware support. But as it is, Fedora has the best 64 bit support and honestly they are heading the right direction in general. If they'd just drop up2date and YUM, use urpmi (its *fast* and I've never had a dependency issue with it, unlike Yum) or at least apt!

Rosa137 · #7 17th September 2004, 01:11 PM

I seem to be able to install ok, but when I reboot at the end - I don't get past BIOS (ie it doesn't make it to grub) at BIOS it says "Error loading operating system". I am using an nForce 3 motherboard which has an nVidia and Silicon Image SIL 3512 controllers. The nVidia controller looks like IDE drives, whilst the SIL look like scsi drives during installation ie they are hde hdg and sda, sdb drives. I can install and partition, either manually or automatically, force the /boot onto any drive. Unfortunately my horrible Win2003 works, which makes me think I need to know more. For software I simply go for the personal install at present. Anyway, if someone has amde this work I would be interested. If I work this out I will put the answer here.

Rosa137 · #8 28th September 2004, 12:18 PM

I never completely solved this, but... I had a giga-byte board with 2 controllers each able to access 2 SATA hard disks. If I disabled either of the two controllers, then Fedora Core 2 worked ok. Thus I decided that that was enough and used the other disks for something else.

sust · #9 10th October 2004, 05:19 AM

I am not so sure about FC2 being faster...
I have a Compaq A64 machine(only way to get one in the govt)
It's a 3400+ hammer with 1 GB of RAM and some variant of Asus NF3-150 mobo and it's not as fast as I was anticipating.
At work, we do a lot of Matlab number crunching and I honestly thought that the A64 would beat the tar out of the P4 3.2 in my lab, but the A64 was surprisingly a little bit slower.
Strangely enough, I get a ton of core dumps when I run matlab also. I suspect the core dumps have something to do with my A64's lower performance.
Now I havent tweaked the kernel or done anything special. All I did was install the x86-64 version of FC2 and then run my Matlab processes. I should probably look into those core dumps, but I am only a newbie linux user so Im not sure how helpful the core dumps will be for my beginner skills.
I have recently purchased and installed the x86-64 version of Suse 9.1Pro and I hope to see if I can verify if Suse is indeed faster out of the box. According to Anandtech, Suse seems to be doing better straight out of the box than FC2.
I also wonder if the FC3 team has worked on performance numbers in the x86-64 dept.

dorian · #10 11th October 2004, 10:57 PM

Hello,

i just wanted to mention, that FC2 is really great, when it comes to installing x64 under linux. I like the easy to go structure. I would really recommand you to give it a try (even vmware did work smoothly with the binary-kernel!).

As to using Windows-Partions: If you have a NTFS-Partion you need to recompile the kernel for NTFS-support (or install the captive-driver for NTFS, this is supposed to work without kernel-NTFS support). No problem i am aware of with the FAT FS.

Hope you enjoy the journy...

cu
Dorian