Fedora Core 3: Cruising The Bleeding Edge - page 4

Life in the Fast Lane

I tried the Personal Desktop, Workstation, and Custom installation options. Personal Desktop and Workstation installed with all manner of unnecessary services running:

• nifd and mDNSresponder, which are for Howl clients on Zeroconf networks.
• mdmonitor, for software RAID monitoring and management.
• netfs, client for NFS, Samba, and Netware.
• nfslock, portmap, rpcgssd, rpcidmapd, and rpcsvcgssd, which all pertain to NFS (network file system.)
• xinetd, for no good reason.
• pcmcia on desktop systems.

None of these should be running by default, and Fedora is old enough to know better. Moral: do careful package selection at installation. If you're going to install more than one Fedora system, use Kickstart to replicate the installation and save yourself some steps.

Odds and Ends

The Gnome menu editor vanished in version 2.0, and it looks like replacing it is a long way off. Judging by the number of posts on various lists and forums, I would say this is the #1 missing feature for Gnome users. You can still edit the menu configuration files manually in /etc/xdg/menus and ~/.config/menus.

Fedora still comes with only the ext2/ext3 filesystems. Yes, you can add ReiserFS, XFS, or JFS.

Update: Initially, I wrote that you had to re-compile the kernel to add support for these filesystems. Thank you, sharp-eyed readers, for pointing out that Fedora does support all the major Linux filesystems without a kernel re-compile. You can indeed mount ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS partitions with the stock Fedora kernel. You can also choose one of these at installation--you have to pass in boot parameters when you boot the first installation disk, such as linux xfs. Then XFS will appear in the partitioning menu as a filesystem choice.

Multi-boot users will run into problems from Red Hat/Fedora's use of disk labels. For example, if you dual-boot Red Hat 9 and Fedora, some partitions will not mount because they have the same disk labels. You'll see this in /etc/fstab as LABEL=/home or LABEL=/. The solution is to change the disk labels with e2label. Or better, do away with disk labels and use the /dev/hd* name, like a normal Linux.

To sum up, don't use Fedora if you want perfect, trouble-free computing. (Come to think of it, don't use computers if you don't want troubles.) For pretty good performance on the bleeding edge, Fedora does just fine.

Resources

There is a lot of excellent community support for Fedora. Here are some good starting points:
Fedora.redhat.com
FedoraNEWS.ORG
Fedora Extras Home Page