Fedora Core 4 Test 2--Plenty to Look Forward to in FC4
By: Bill von Hagen
Monday, April 25, 2005 04:05:31 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/5830/1/
Looking Forward
I am one of many who felt that Red Hat's abandonment of their desktop user community was treacherous at best. I see the logic in this from a customer support perspective--after all, answering questions from randoms who've coughed up the money for a Linux distribution at CompUSA can be time-consuming, but that's how you build market share. Assuming, of course, that this is the market that you want to be in. Since April 30, 2004, a personal black Friday for desktop Red Hat Linux users, only Red Hat's Enterprise Linux products have been supported by Red Hat, and Red Hat's focus is solely on the enterprise market.
To fill the void, Red Hat announced the foundation and sponsorship of the Fedora Project, whose goal according to their Web site is "to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software." On my screen, the subtitles read "To sponsor a project and people who will develop stuff that we can suck directly into future RHEL releases."
So why be so cranky? Every Linux distribution depends on the open source community. Frankly, the thing that torques me off most about this is the fact that I was a Red Hat user and advocate for years, holding up a dented little shield labeled "end-user support" and "winning over the desktop" whenever I was verbally abused by my Debian, Slackware, and other Linux friends who preferred to build their own Linux distributions and kill their own food.
But now I'm healing. I never called Red Hat for support anyway. Desktop users who want commercial support for Linux can still buy SUSE Linux, the Novell Linux Desktop, Mandriva, Linspire, Turbolinux, or a variety of other distributions. My fortune cookie yesterday said "Accept the things you cannot change."
RHEL 4.0 (previously reviewed on LinuxPlanet) was quite nice and a great update for enterprise Red Hat users. I even have an FC3 box around that I use to keep myself up to speed on what is certainly a popular distribution for both new Linux users and Red Hat Linux refugees. So let's look at the latest and greatest from Fedora, Fedora Core 4 Test 2, which is a test release, not a full-blown release or even a release candidate, but still has plenty to offer for any semi-experienced (or better) Linux user. Fedora Core 4 Test 2 is available for the x86, x86_64, and PPC architectures.
Installation
The Fedora Core installation process uses the Anaconda installer that is familiar to any Red Hat user. This has always done a great job of detecting hardware and probing its characteristics, and the latest generation is no exception. Like most modern Linux installers, the FC4 Test 2 installation process "just works." (Which, I hear, is a new, ironic slogan from Microsoft--hope I don't have to pay royalties!)
The first step of the installer, after pressing Enter to start in the first place, is a screen that offers to let you test your install media. I first saw this in FC3, and frankly, it's a good idea. There are few things more frustrating than going through most of an install before the whole thing goes south because you encounter problems reading a CD. I've continued past install errors such as not being able to read a package or two, but can you really trust such an installation? I certainly wouldn't for anything other than home use.
There were a few minor blips in the install process. There was a long, inexplicable pause at the step where it prompts for the keyboard type. Eventually the Next button appeared and the installation continued. I selected my favorite install type "Custom", selected "Everything" for my default set of packages, and everything installed smoothly. I always tend to install everything nowadays, assuming that my time is more valuable than any wasted disk space if I were to be selective and subsequently find out that I was missing some package that I wanted at a critical compilation or creative moment.
There are two interesting aspects of the FC4 installer that are worth discussing separately, one great and one simply to be aware of. The first is the fact that the default disk configuration for FC4, like previous FC versions, is to create logical volumes on your disks, rather than simply partitioning them into traditional physical and extended volumes. This is such a great idea that I don't see why every Linux distribution doesn't default to it. It eliminates one of the classic problems of ever-expanding Linux installations, which is what part of the filesystem hierarchy to migrate to a new partition when an existing one fills up. Figure 1 shows Anaconda's disk partitioning screen with a default logical volume/volume group setup.
The second point regarding the FC4 installer is simply that it has moved some of the default questions for the standard install to the firstboot wizard that runs the first time that you boot with your new FC4T2 installation. I don't remember whether this happened in the Fedora timeline, but it's still disconcerting. I'm used to creating a non-root user during the install process, and the fact that it wasn't present then made me wonder if something had gone wrong. Don't worry--you'll be asked to do this the first time you boot your fresh install, along with favorite setup/install-related questions like date and time configuration.
Speaking of starting up, I love the startup screen used by the last few releases of Fedora, as shown in Figure 3. It provides the best of both worlds for most users--a comfy scroll bar and friendly graphical display for people who don't really want to know the details of the startup sequence, with the textual blow-by-blow of the startup scripts only a mouse click or Alt-Key sequence away.
What's New?
Fedora Core 4 Test 2 brings lots of goodies to Linux users everywhere. Not only does it provide the latest versions of GNOME (2.10) and KDE (3.4.0) for desktop users regardless of your political persuasion, but it also includes a preliminary version of GCC 4.0 for the developers among us. Since GCC 4.0 was officially released in late April, I'm sure that the official release of FC4 will include GCC 4.0, which promises to be a true milestone for GCC, as it introduces a new optimization framework that promises better and higher-performance code than ever before.
The following table shows the versions of some of the most popular GNU/Linux software packages found in the Fedora Core 4 Test 2 release. Of course, updates to almost everything in this list are already available, as discussed later in this review. For those new to Linux, this table lists the versions of the Evolution mail client, the binutils, GCC, GDB, and Glibc packages for compilation and debugging, the GNOME desktop system and its graphical underpinnings in the X Window System, the Perl, Python, and Ruby scripting languages, the Open Office desktop office software package, the Linux kernel itself, and the yum and RPM package management systems.
| Package | Version |
| binutils | 2.15.94.0.2.2-1 |
| Evolution | 2.2.2-1 |
| Firefox | 1.0.3-2 |
| GCC | 4.0.0-1 |
| GDB | 6.3.0.0-1.15 |
| GIMP | 2.2.6-1 |
| Glibc | 2.3.5-1 |
| GNOME | 2.10.0-2 |
| KDE | 3.4.0-5 |
| Kernel | 2.6.11-1.1226_FC4SMP |
| Open Office | 1.9.93-1 |
| Perl | 5.8.6-5 |
| Python | 2.4.1-1 |
| RPM | 4.4.1-9 |
| Ruby | 1.8.2-7 |
| X Window System | 6.8.2-27 |
| yum | 2.3.2-1 |
As you can see from this list, it doesn't get much more up-to-date unless you roll your own Linux.
Figure 4 shows the default FC4T2 desktop after logging in. As you can see from this figure, there are some fundamental changes to the menu layout used by GNOME 2.10, which (among other things) has broken the contents of the old Computer menu into two menus: Places (which deals with access to folders, devices, and so on) and Desktop (which deals with general desktop-related tasks such as administration, setting preferences, locking the screen, logging out, and so on). IMHO, the new GNOME menu organization is an improvement to previous GNOME menu layouts. YMMV. Flames cheerfully ignored.
One bizarre thing about the FC4T2 release. The first time I select any of the menus from the top of the screen, there's a delay of 10 or so seconds until any selected menu displays. I saw this on several test installs, and at first thought that GNOME 2.10 was doing some weird menu computation. However, I didn't see this on other GNOME 2.10 systems such as Ubuntu's 5.04 (Hoary) release, and therefore think that this is just a bug waiting to be fixed.
Audio and Video Support
Though beloved of developers, Fedora Core provides most of the tools that standard desktop users would want to use. I would say "all of the tools," but someone would inevitably say, "Hey, it doesn't provide xman or the Mxyzptlk window manager, you clueless loser." Therefore I hide behind weasel words.
That said, FC4T2 includes up-to-date versions of Helix Player, Rhythmbox, XMMS, gnome-cd, kscd, xcdroast, and the Sound Juicer CD ripper. It also includes things like k3b, an excellent and easy-to-use CD and DVD burning utility. One thing missing from Fedora Core is MP3 support, which was also missing from the last few Red Hat releases due to a combination of legal paranoia and corporate greed. The MP3 music format and some aspects of its encoding (compression) are owned by Thompson Multimedia and Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. So Red Hat (and now Fedora Core) doesn't ship with MP3 support. This means that I have to waste time going to http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=140 or http://www.gurulabs.com/goodies/downloads.php to get MP3 support for XMMS with every new FC release.
Don't the greedy boneheads at Thompson Multimedia and Fraunhofer Gesellschaft see that they are poisoning their own water supply by causing the Open Source community to develop better, and free, codecs like Ogg Vorbis? The MP3 patents (like Unisys' GIF patents before them) are a driving force for software evolution, except that in this case the species that don't deserve to survive are thoughtful enough to kill themselves off.
For video and television fans, FC4T2 provides Totem and TVTime, both great applications. Xine is available for previous FC releases in the online fedora-extras repository, and should be available for FC4 by the time FC4 is officially released. Figure 5 shows the k3b application's primary interface on a simple FC4T2 desktop.
Updating FC4 Test 2
As you'd expect from any test release or release candidate, the packages that make up FC4t2 are constantly being updated. Traditionally, Red Hat offered the Red Hat Network and its underlying up2date application to decipher what's on a system, locate updates, and apply them in the right sequence using RPM. However, entire civilizations have risen and fallen in the time that it takes most up2date updates to complete.
Fedora Core still provides RPM and up2date for those with unlimited time on their hands, but for the rest of us, Fedora Core offers yum (Yellow Dog Updated, Modified) from our PPC friends at Yellow Dog. Yum has been around for the last couple FC releases, and has some problems in FC4T2, but it's a huge step in the right direction. For Debian or Ubuntu fans, it's almost as good as having apt-get! For everyone else, it's great!
The versions of up2date and yum provided with FC4T2 are still on a shakedown cruise, though it's sometime difficult to tell the difference between problems in packages and package repositories and problems in the applications themselves. My original attempts at using up2date reported that every available package update was size 0, so I couldn't actually update anything. Yum reported problems with unsigned packages and unresolved dependencies, both of which I could work around (for the most part) using yum's groupupdate feature. However, updates are necessary and frequent for test releases, pre-releases, and actual releases--caveat emptor!
As a test release, Fedora Core 4 Test 2 shows just how good FC4 will be when it's officially releases. Should you punt FC3 and upgrade? Frankly, not on your primary system unless you don't need the guarantees of an official, complete release. Aside from various minor problems, the only problems I encountered that I felt were extremely serious were those in updating the the system. Fedora has some great mailing lists and forums where early adopters can get assistance from Fedora's huge community of friendly, knowledgeable devotees. It's easy to see why Fedora Core is a popular distribution, and FC4 should be great when it gets here! I'm going to wait for the official release before I upgrade my FC3 system--but I'll definitely try the next test release or release candidate on one of my scratch boxes.