Fedora Core 5 Review

Although earlier I mentioned that I might hold off until next week, I have some time spare given that I only have one exam rather than two (sigh of relief), so before I start, I'll give you the specifications of the machine:

Dell Dimension 8400 consisting of:

19inch TFT Screen
ATI Radeon X300 PCIe w/ 128MB
925X Chipset Motherboard
512MB RAM
SATA 160gig HDD
DVD Recorder, Dual-Layer
Creative Audigy 2
60gig EX-HDD, connected via USB2
3.2Ghz Intel Pentium 4 w/ 1MB Level 2 Cache

Accessories:

Apple iPod 5G 30gig
HP Photosmart M307

Just some notes on my configuration:

1) I have Hyperthreading enabled; which means that Fedora selected the SMP kernel.

2) To successfully install Fedora, I needed to change my controller settings from RAID Autodetect/AHCI to RAID Autodetect/ATA as LVM2 didn't seem to be to happy with AHCI.

3) ATI and for some customers, Nvidia, drivers don't work nicely with SELinux set to 'anal retention' setting which Fedora is defaulted to; depending on your level of paranoia, most will find that SELinux for a single home computer as an over kill, so either changing the setting to permissive or disabled will resolve those issues.

4) ATI Drivers sourced from rpm.livna.org (Nvidia ones are available as well)


My Background:

I am a student currently studying at university, after many years of 'finding myself' - yes, clue the laughter; yes, I admit, I had a Photoshop, more correctly, an Adobe and Macromedia addiction, but hopefully with a positive Linux experience, I will be able to break that habit of a lifetime, and realise that I don't need to have expensive applications to get what I need done.

The Review:

After flogging the university bandwidth for a couple of hours, I finally dumped the 5 iso images onto my removable hard disk and skipped back home - well, more like riding home, hopeing not to get hit by a car.

To make this a fair comparison I ran Maxtor's software, PowerMAX and ran their low level formatter - it took a few hours, and completely cleared by hard disk, I rebooted (applied the setting as mentioned in the preable), and proceeded to install the software - I stuck with the default partitioning scheme, the use of LVM2 and terms used in the installer seemed to fly right over my head, so I thought best not to fiddle with things I know nothing about.

I then cherry picked up my through the packages and installed those things that interested me (I installed a few more packages afterwards using yum) - the installation was fairly snappy - I should have used the DVD iso, but then again, being a trained disciple of Murphey, the chances of something buggering up is exponentially higher as soon as the installation is made slightly more convenient. No use going into further detail, and installer is an installer.

The computer rebooted, snappy reboot and went through the usual rigmarole of setting up a user account, testing the sound car with that oh-so-cool guitar strum, and configured the desktop settings to 1280x1024 - anything less than that is the equivalent of sitting behind a screen reader designed for a elderly person with 20% vision.

Logged in, and found that the system was very snappy, no longer the 'lets go off to get a cup of tea and a biscuit' - or in Mac language, GNOME and more correctly, Fedora Core 5, is now 'teh snappy'. Once loaded I wondered the total ram usage, and it sits at around 95-98MB, give or take a few kilobytes; compared to Windows XP and MacOS X, its not too bad.

Fedora Core 5's initial kernel disallowed non-GPL kernel modules to be loaded, so rather than give an inaccurate review I held off until the kernel was released, download and upgraded the driver to the ATI driver provided off livna - the reason for this, there has been some major directory structure change in Fedora which the installer of ATI is unaware of, also by using the RPM off livna, you avoid the problem of having your OpenGL library over written by ATI's proprietary implementation.

Once installed I rebooted and found that teh snappiness was more or less the same, no noticeable quirky behaviour or graphic distortions so I guess everything install and configured nicely.


Accessories:

As mentioned earlier I have two accessories; a digital camera and ipod - not exactly a techno-gizmo collector, but pretty much representing what the average person may have on their computer.

The digital camera was plugged in, switched - the camera screen informed me that it was establishing a connection - I loaded up F-Spot Photo Manager (installed separately), and clicked on import, selected my camera from the drop down list - which unknown to me, is uses the PTP protocol - anyway, the application successfully scanned and displayed available photos on the device, I selected them all, and clicked on import.

The software imported the photos without any problems - one thing to remember, however, these photos are not automatically deleted as they're transferred, so if you want to reclaim this space, you'll need to manually do so.

After importing the photos, I gave the software a good look around; including the edit function, rotating photos, checked out the slideshow function, and what I can say is this; this isn't a iPhoto killer, but what it is, is a iPhoto replacement/equal; if you're sitting there wanting something like that on your machine, F-Spot does whats required, and what more, its actually a practical use of mono.

Once that was setup, I proceeded to get my iPod up and running - having backed my music, copied it back to my hard disk, I loaded Rhythm Box, unknown to me, Rhythm Box doesn't support iPod transfering and maintainance - a great player none the less, but let down in the area of device support.

I installed the GTKPod front end from another source; it was compiled for FC5, but the release was more recent than what was included with Fedora Core 5. That was sourced from Freshrpms.

One disappointing thing I think that Fedora testers didn't take into account was the use of HAL and how it dynamically creates directory, meaning, its not aways possible to direct an application to a given directory and assume it'll work every time - so I guess there needs some work in reference to libgpod and HAL developers working together.

I added the music from my music directory to gtkpod, and just for kicks, I deleted the music off my iPod and the database to see how well it actually works. Once done, I clicked on sync, and saw the files being copied accross; it was all copied successfully, I unmounted the device, and everything worked as expected.

So about the only thing I guess that disappointed me was the need to have two seperate applications to accomplish a task when one should do it quite nicely - another thing that also fustrated me was the lack of testing when it came to Banshee media player, and the fact that they shipped a version known to crash on SMP systems (Hyperthreaded ones are considered SMP) - although not the end of the world, it would be nice that when there is a bug, to promptly provide an update via the usual channels.


Applications:

I'm not going into detail as to every application included with Fedora Core 5, but I will talk about the applications that I use on a regular basis:

GIMP - it has changed a reasonable amount since the last time I used it - well, more like launch it, stare then run away screaming at the horrific UI which was thrown at me. GIMP 2.2.10 thats included seems to be very stable for what I need to use it for, and as for its integration into GNOME and the operating system over all, it appears now as an application for your platform rather than something that appears to have been a rushed port.

OpenOffice.org - I went the full monty, and not only installed OpenOffice.org, but the database module as well; things have definately changed since the last time I used it; which would have been measured in atleast years, given the last time I tried it was OpenOffice.org 1.0.1.

Like GNOME, the loading times were so attrocious, you could head off, get a cup of tea, boil the water, come back to find that the application had just finished loading - today, however, totally different story, clicking on the icon will bring up the word processor in a matter of around 7 seconds - thats about the same level of speed for Microsoft Office 2004 on Mac, or Wordprefect on Windows.

I also gave the spreadsheet a good working out, in reference to calculating the real exchange rate for my assignment, and it seemed that everything worked as expected, the graph was created with as much ease as one would expect.

Evolution 2.6.0 - Loaded, and configured it as my default email and usenet client; for a usenet client, it is pretty good for what I need, and as for email, I never really had too many problems with it; overall the stability has improved and it loads alot faster than when I last gave it a test run.

Apart from that, everything worked as expected, GAIM worked out of the box with the providers I use, XChat seems alot more stable than previous experiences, I've since updated from the standard 2.6.0 to 2.6.2 using the package provided on the xchat website.


Conclusion:

Over all, Fedora Core 5 seems to be alot more of a solid distribution than the last time I ran it (FC3), they finally got rid of that nasty up2date that seemed to hang at the worst possibly opportunities - when you're 98% of the way there.

The applications also seemed to be tested alot more than previous releases, and the speed as improved substantially, especially with GTK; whether its due to the compile, cairo or some other mystical voodoo I don't understand, what ever the case, the improvement is great.

Over all, this is probably the best distribution I've tried; if you're looking for an easy to use, no fuss UNIX-like desktop, look no further than Fedora Core 5; it provides good balance of what we the consumer love the best, the most up to date software, stability whilst at the same time providing prompt support (except for that Banshee issue, but I have a feeling most are happy with using Rhythmbox without too much fuss).