Fedora Core 6 Test3 released

Posted Sep 15, 2006 12:24 UTC (Fri) by genius (guest, #19981) [Link]

Microsoft will port Office to Linux. Yeah right!

First of all, Microsoft won't kill its Windows franchise like digging its own graveyard.

Secondly, M$ won't bother to port millions of lines of code if u could run Office with VMware, or Wine.

Thirdly, if you have Vista, would you still want Linux? With the 4 pillars of Vista, there's no need for Linux ever.

Last and most importantly, it's outdated. The low end will be filled by Office Live and Works Online, and no one could possibly want a full blown AJAX Office suite. Imagine all the traffic it causes!

And this ex-IBMer is leading the famed OSDL! My ass!

I think this guy is desperate in keeping his job.

Cheers!

Posted Sep 15, 2006 17:34 UTC (Fri) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link]

I have beta 1 installed at home, as beta 2 was unable to detect the i810 graphics card on my Dell computer there (but it installed just fine on the Dell at work which uses a Radeon). :(

The betas are proving to be good overall - I'd prefer some packages to be more up-to-date, as compiling from source defeats the purpose of using a package-managed system, but overall it gets good marks from me.

From a hardcore technical standpoint, it's still non-trivial to use any filesystem other than ext2 or ext3 for the root partition. That is bothersome more than fatal. I wouldn't care so much if there was, say, an "expert mode" on the installer that allowed you access to options that are not considered "fully tested". In fact, that would be great. It would keep newbies away from options they're not necessarily safe with, but allows more experienced users more flexibility. I doubt this has changed in beta 3 and clearly won't change before core 6 is released, but I would regard this as a must-have for a future release.

From an insane package collector standpoint, RPM is still fragile when you have extremely large numbers of packages. The odds of normal people ever encountering the problem is low, but it has proven a major problem for me. Eventually, with enough upgrades on a large enough number of packages, RPM simply freezes. When this happens, you have to delete the __db files and rebuild the db. I usually reinstall a clean copy and latest RPMs when this gets to the point of being daily. However, there is no sane reason why it should. At worst, there should be a way of unloading the database into source, deleting the database entirely and then reloading from source. This is essentially what the reinstall is doing.

Lastly, I've run into problems where updating packages fails because of dependency failures. The normal one is where package A depends on a new version of package B that hasn't been released yet. (If it hasn't been released, even as a development version, then how is the developer for package A able to build for a dependency that technically doesn't exist yet? Fedora's great, but I wouldn't have thought the Time Lords were into package management.)

Another, more serious, dependency problem is when Yum mis-sequences the dependency chain and tries to perform operations which depend on something else happening first but has been scheduled later. This generates phantom dependency errors - errors that don't physically exist but are acted upon because Yum is convinced they do. Again, this is not likely to occur on "normal" systems - it's something I've seen only on horrifically over-installed machines, which usually means anything I'm running at home.

Given the rarity of these bugs, I can't deduct too much for them. On the basis of that, and on the basis that I'm 100% up-to-date on the development bins for core and extras (which is the only fundamental difference between test 2 and test 3), I'm going to say Test 3 probably merits an 8/10 for basic user experience and 7/10 for advanced useage. Which is not bad for a beta, especially when you consider that I'm a nitpicker and Really Brutal to Operating Systems.

Posted Sep 16, 2006 11:57 UTC (Sat) by Guhvanoh (subscriber, #4449) [Link]

<begin quote>

Notable Features of Fedora Core 6
=================================
* Support for installation from multiple repositories at install-time,
including access to Fedora Extras for network installs
* GNOME 2.16.0
* KDE 3.5.3

<end quote>

KDE 3.5.4 was released August 2nd 2006, a full month before this test release. GNOME 2.16.0 was released September 6th 2006, just over a week ago. For a distribution that claims to offer "the best combination of stable and cutting-edge software that exists in the free software world", I find this sorely lacking and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The version of KDE included was released May 31st 2006, more than three months ago. I realize that Fedora is focused on GNOME and not KDE. But for this to happen... Maybe, it is way past time for me as an active KDE user and Fedora/RedHat user since RH2.1 to look for a distribution that better suits my meeds.

Posted Sep 18, 2006 17:23 UTC (Mon) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link]

Tried installing over the weekend. install crashed, dumping masses of characters to the screen, whenever it tried to detect if there was another Linux partition. Again, I'm using essentially the same code on other boxes by repeated updates, and the distro looks great. I'll report the problem with bugzilla, but frankly I've not been impressed with this process before. I've reported konqueror bugs in the past, including all necessary traces, and the bugs are still easily repeatable, several versions on.

For any Fedora folk reading this, I do regard Fedora as one of the best distros out there. There are areas which urgently (IMHO) need fixing, but there are workarounds until those bugs are fixed. Because Open Source is about a "can-do" attitude, I have some responsibility in providing fixes myself, but observing the discrepancy between latest source version and latest Fedora version on a fair few packages, I'm not sure who, exactly, would benefit if I did fix anything.