Fedora Core Revisited

[TrakerJon 0]

Ok, I admit I've been a little hard on Red Hat in the recent past but I have to say that the final release of Fedora Core makes a passing grade. I used to use Red Hat 7.3 until I found Mandrake was more reliable for a workstation user. My biggest complaint with Red Hat 8.0, 9.0 and the beta releases of Fedora Core were that Sun's Java VM wouldn't work with the Mozilla browser. After relentless bugzilla reports and complaints they've resolved the issue (make sure you install the jre 1.4.2_3 rpm and the plugin symbolic link as root) with the final release of Fedora Core. Including Open Office 1.1 was a good move, Red Hat update seems to work without issue and the OS appears to respond quicker than the beta releases as well.

 

I'm a little disappointed with Mandrake's 9.2 release, they hosed up their install since 9.1 leaving out Mozilla and other formerly default applications along with tool bar links and such. I hate having to manually install apps that should already be included. Looks like it's a tough call to choose between the two now.

[Dapper Dan 0]

Mdk 9.1 and 9.2 are the reasons I changed to RH 9. Mdk 9.0 was a great release. Since Mdk 9.2 has come out, I read a few posts here and there about how much it is loved, But mostly I hear of problems that users are suddenly having with 9.2 that we weren't having with 9.0. In my opinion, Mdk 9.2 has a way to go before it is truely ready for prime time. I'm holding off on Fedora as well for similar reasons.

I'll probably go with Fedora when I feel comfortable with it. Also with Fedora, you can use yum or apt-get rpm.

[Admiral LSD 0]

I've seen what Linux is like beyond Red Hat and there's nothing Red Hat or Fedora can do to make me want to go back, I'd be taking too much of a step backwards.

[Dapper Dan 0]

Admiral LSD, I don't want you fall over backward in your chair or anything, but I downloaded the Gentoo cd (livecd-2.4.20-kde-gnome-distcc-07-15-2003.iso)

and have been impressed by it. I also downloaded the "bare bones" (livecd-2.6_11-29-2003.iso) which I only tested as a recovery disk. I haven't had a look at the Gentoo website yet, but will today with the intention of testing it on my experimental box very soon. Any advice before I begin?

[Vermyn 0]

My advice on Gentoo... do a stage 2 install if you have the time. It will take a lot of time to download/compile all of the packages (unless you have broadband) but in the end... the performance gain over any other Linux distro is HUGE. I now swear by Gentoo... especially their documentation and support community. I've left Mandrake and Red Hat behind for Gentoo and I'm very happy I did it. I think Gentoo runs at least twice as fast as Mandrake does on this machine!

[Dapper Dan 0]

I was checking the portage trees and am very glad to see IceWM and very surprised to see Icecc, the IceWM configurator. I have high speed cable. When I start the install, how does it address partitioning. Say for instance, can I tell it to keep my /home? Does it ask and give options here? Sorry Traker Jon. I didn't mean to highjack your thread. I'll start a new one..

[Admiral LSD 0]

The trouble with the Stage 2 or 3 installs (particularly if you use the GRP along with them) is that while they may save you a bit of time you'll lose a bit of the flexibility (though admittedly this'll come out in the wash in the long run as packages get upgraded and recompiled with your custom flags) that makes Gentoo such a great distro. Stage 1 may take a while (anything up to a week for me although part of that is down to having to pull the packages down through a 56k connection. I can get it down to about 3 days if I carry the distfiles over from my previous install) but you have control over virtually every aspect of the process making Gentoo second in flexibility only to Linux from Scratch.

[Vermyn 0]

Admiral is right about that, but I've never had the time to let my machine warm over long enough for a stage 1 install (36 hours!). I went with stage 2. Even with stage 2, the performance difference between Gentoo and other distros is outstanding. I also love the package management. I absolutely, positively will *never* go back to RPM-based distros or apt-get utils. The performance gains are just too good.

[PC-Janitor 0]

Quote:

I've seen what Linux is like beyond Red Hat and there's nothing Red Hat or Fedora can do to make me want to go back, I'd be taking too much of a step backwards.

There's a lot of drool on the floor here, I'd love to do the Gentoo jive, in fact I have a DVD with 1.4 on it sitting in front of staring at me with it's scary (you'd-better-get-someone-to-hold-your-hand-before-you-try-and-install-me) eye.

Still the only thing that's stopping me is a spare machine, I've pretty much commited this one to experimenting with LTSP www.ltsp.org and there's a really 'simple to keep up with' branch of Fedora called k12LTSP that was all neatly packaged for schools initialy. Still I am probably being a bit Neanderthal about settling for the simple option, I should probably grow up and get a Distro that wll teach me to be a Man ;(

[PC-Janitor 0]

Big woops, I was playing around with FreeDOS trying to transfer files off an old Compaq 386 when I tried to install FreeDOS on a bit of spare disk on my 60Gb drive using... wait for it... fdisk.

 

Gentoo topic continued here - sorry for interrupting the thread