Review: Fedora Core 1 is a Mild Disappointment (OSNews) [LWN.net]

Review: Fedora Core 1 is a Mild Disappointment (OSNews)

Posted Nov 20, 2003 6:15 UTC (Thu) by horen (subscriber, #2514)
Parent article: Review: Fedora Core 1 is a Mild Disappointment (OSNews)

Early last week I upgraded my at-work/home workstations from RH/9 to FC/1. The installation was faultless.

Gaim: My RH/9 rpm (v0.72) stopped working because of the pspell problem; easily solved by doing a "forced" upgrade to the FC/1 rpm (v0.71)
Kernel: My current 2.4.22 "hand-rolled" worked fine, as did the "out-of-the-box" nptl version. "Hand-rolling" an nptl kernel, however, proved to be difficult, but not insurmountable.
VMware: Required vmware-any-any-update45, which generated the vmmon and vmnet modules.
Win4Lin: The kernel and mki-adapter patches from NeTraverse worked fine.
Up2date: Once I edited the URLs, it worked fine.

I don't use every single program included in the distribution; never have. And some I even <gasp!> compile from source. Where possible, I prefer to keep "system" programs as distribution-rpms, and "user" programs as source.

What has been most revealing to me is the Fedora-List mailing list. It is alive and full of Q&A material, as well as food-for-thought (re: the "Fedora as Production Server" thread). This high-volume/high-quality list, together with the freely-available Up2date repository for fixes and new packages, marks Fedora Core 1, for me, as a clear "winner".

I expect a brand-new, $20,000 automobile to work perfectly; they rarely do. I expect a commercial software package, like Win4Lin/5.0 ($99) to work perfectly; it does. My expectations of "perfection" with Fedora Core 1 were with regard to installation (in my case, upgrade) and compatibility with my 3rd-party software; it did, it is.

If the author of the review is disappointed with FC/1, he can, as we say, "eat across the street".

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