Fedora Core 4 Test1: Features Over Stability

Following the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 last month, the developers of the world's most prominent Linux distribution have been freed of the immense responsibility that goes into producing a quality enterprise-class operating system and were once again able to experiment with cutting edge software releases. That's because, for the Red Hat engineers, Fedora Core 4 is the start of a new release cycle on the road to RHEL 5. The distribution will go through the usual testing phases and stability checks, before several interim releases (speaking from the RHEL's point of view). Then about a year and three releases later, Fedora Core will likely be declared a well-tested and solid base on which to build the Red Hat's flagship product. This gives us an exciting opportunity to peek at the innovations that will be part of our every-day computing lives in the not too distant future. Your writer was unable to resist the temptation and decided to check out the hot-off-the-presses Fedora Core 4 Test1 (FC4T1).

Fedora Core 4 Test1 couldn't possibly be any more bleeding edge. Although it is based on a stable Linux kernel 2.6 11, it includes beta or RC releases of GNOME 2.10, KDE 3.4 and OpenOffice.org 2.0, as well as several experimental releases of important packages, such as LVM2, RPM and yum. On top of it, all packages have been compiled with the yet-to-be-released GCC 4.0. Other "firsts" include Java packages for developers, the Eclipse IDE (also a development version), and support for the PPC and PPC64 architectures. All this should give much entertainment to even the most hardcore beta testers out there. We downloaded the DVD ISO image for the x86_64 architecture and installed it on a computer built on top of an AMD64 3500+ processor (2.2GHz), K8N Neo2 (Socket939) MSI mainboard, and 2 GB of DDR SDRAM.

If we still had any doubts about just how experimental this test release was, they were quickly gone as soon as we completed the installation and rebooted the system. First, we noticed a high number of Python-related errors during the boot. Then, instead of the usual configuration dialog ("firstboot"), we were dropped straight into a GDM login screen (at 800x600 pixel resolution), with the only available account being the root account created earlier. Those Python errors came to haunt us soon afterward, as we were unable to launch many applications (included most of Red Hat's configuration dialogs) and could not connect to Red Hat Networks to check for updates. Evolution crashed during account configuration and OpenOffice.org wouldn't start at all. To add insult to injury, opening Firefox greeted us with: "There ought to be release notes for Fedora Core 3.90 here, but there aren't. In the meantime, we bring you this ASCII art hat."

To sum it up, the x86_64 edition of Fedora Core 4 Test1 is broken. It is not completely unusable, because the GNOME desktop came up nicely and Nautilus also worked (and, as one of the testers on the Fedora Test mailing list remarked, "the console was very fast"). But surely, there is more to personal computing than file management! In a desperate attempt to improve the experience and to find something positive to write about, we tried a few things, such as "yum update" (which failed too, reporting several unmet dependencies), and visited the mailing list to see whether other testers have fared better. But apart from further bug reports about grub-install, which insists on installing GRUB into the Master Boot Record, and the usual failed media check during installation, we were unable to find a panacea for the half-broken operating system.

Nevertheless, some of the individual yum updates turned out to be improvements. The Python problem was solved by 'yum update gnome-python2', which meant that the Red Hat utilities, including Red Hat Networks, were working again. A new version of Nautilus was also available - this one was slightly better because we were able to complete the initial account setup, although it still crashed shortly afterward. But no amount of package updates were able to bring OpenOffice.org to life; it stubbornly refused to start without giving away any clues as to the reason for its behavior. Of course, the rawhide tree is undergoing a large amount of updates daily, so a fix might be available by the time you read this. But it became rather clear during our brief experimenting that, as development releases go, FC4T1 is more like a very early alpha, with many broken or non-functional packages and unusually sluggish desktops, both GNOME and KDE.

One group of people who are likely to be excited about the new features in FC4 are Java developers. Included in this release are the Ant "make" facility (version 1.6.2), GCJ GNU compiler for Java, Tomcat (5.0.30), the Apache Struts Web Application Framework (1.1) and even the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (version 3.1.0) with a several popular plugins. This comes at the expense of a number of long-standing open source applications that were "relegated" to Fedora Extras and will no longer be part of the core system. AbiWord, Gnumeric, KOffice, Exim, Sylpheed, Tuxracer and XEmacs are among the affected packages, so users who need them will need to get them from the "extras" repository from now on.

Fedora Core 4 is undoubtedly the most ambitious Fedora release to date. The developers are going through similar pains as they experienced during the first test release of Fedora Core 2 over a year ago, which introduced kernel 2.6 and SELinux functionality into the distribution. That release was also barely usable and even the final product wasn't the most bug-free distribution in the world. It took another 8 months of solid debugging before a much improved and stable Fedora Core 3 was released. I suspect that we will see a similar pattern here. If you are a tinkerer who takes pleasure in navigating Bugzillas, and who routinely builds RPM packages from CVS sources, then you will likely enjoy this release. As for the rest of you, save your blank CDs and DVDs for FC4 Test2, or for another distribution.

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