TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Let me say that I've been a begrudging fan of Redhat-based Linux distributions for a long time, if for no other reason than they used to be the only distros that had decent hardware support and "just worked".

They also happened to be the only distros I was completely familiar with tweaking. Over the years that has changed, and so have Redhat-based distros.

The most recent incarnation of Fedora Core, version 2, is for the most part a vast improvement over the buggy and sometimes just plain unusable FC1. Note I said "for the most part" because there are some real whoppers of problems in this release that leave me asking more often than not "WTF were you people THINKING?!?!!"

Install:

Let me first say that before I could install this distro I had to wait 8 hours to download the FOUR CDROMS that it comes on. I have been a critic of Redhat's bloat in the past, but Fedora Core 2 is the biggest distro I've ever seen.

I could have downloaded the ENTIRE Debian Woody software archive to 4 CDs and had a lot more useful a collection of software. But I digress. The installer for FC2 is almost identical to FC1 and Redhat 9, so if you've seen one you've seen them all.

There is one thing I'd like to note, however. In the course of a normal install I did have an error message come up about "Unable to align" my harddrive. I ignored it with no ill effects, but it was odd, since I've never seen that error before in any Linux installer including previous Redhat-based distros.

I deselected most everything I could and still ended up with 2.8 GB of programs, half of which I will never use and will more than likely delete if I keep FC2 on my harddrive much longer. However, this is an old gripe and will probably only get worse in the next release.

Package Selection:

Aside from a new 2.6.5 kernel, the GNOME desktop environment is standard, which would usually bother me but since FC2 uses Redhat's Bluecurve theme for everything, you really can't tell the difference between it and KDE.

This is definitely a good thing as GNOME's default layout has been known to cause seizures, vomiting, and irritable bowel in lab monkeys.

One notable addition from FC1 is the GNU Nano text editor. This is my favorite editor for quick console text editing (screw you, Vi zealots).

I am very glad they finally added this by default. I mean, geez people, it's only 32K. It's not like you couldn't hide it among the rest of your 3GB bloat.

Most Annoying Feature:

This is probably a toss-up between two of the most utterly STUPID mistakes I've ever seen in a Linux distribution, and one gross documentation oversight. The first is that for some reason unknown to the sane world, the maintainers of the Fedora project decided to add a line to the kernel that limits the stack size of memory to 4K. Now, just what does that matter, you may ask? Allow me to enlighten you.

Not only is Fedora the only distro that does this (and for good reason) but most video card drivers REQUIRE a stack size of over 8K. For the layman, this means that once you install FC2 and install the latest 3D drivers, your computer will freeze and force you to hard reboot every time it tries to start up X Windows.

But wait, there's more! Since Fedora Core 2 decides that it knows best and tries to boot into X automatically each time it boots, you CANNOT DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT unless you happen to have a LiveCD or another Linux distribution you can boot to and edit your '/etc/inittab' to default to runlevel 3 instead of 5.

Even if you do this, however you must then download and install a patched 8K stack version of the kernel provided by another company ( here), then restart your computer and boot into the patched 8K kernel, then reinstall your video drivers. Frustrated yet? I was. And I'm an expert at this.

UPDATE: As of the following Nvidia driver release to Fedora Core 2, Nvidia has been gracious enough to unscrew whatever it was Fedora screwed up and subsequent drivers should work fine regardless of stack size. Way to go cleaning up other people's messes, Nvidia.

As if the kernel thing wasn't bad enough, the makers of GNOME decided in all their...uh..wisdom to make their file browser, Nautilus, open EVERYTHING YOU CLICK ON in a NEW WINDOW. This wouldn't usually be a problem since you could just turn that feature off if you didn't like it, right? Wrong.

They've also decided to force their ..."wisdom"... on everyone by making the feature unchangeable unless you download an arcane utility here that they should have included with the program to begin with. A bug is a feature you can't turn off. If you're going to make some holier-than-thou decision as fundamental as how you browse files, at least give the users the choice to do it they way THEY WANT TO.

Finally, the maintainers of Fedora decided for some reason about which most people aren't very clear to change the program that renders the X Windows environment from the old standard Xfree86 to the new fork X.org.

I for one do not know why major distros are suddenly dumping one for the other, but it has something to do with licenses. Whatever the reason, I wouldn't care except they NEVER BOTHERED TO MENTION IT and when I went in after installing my new video drivers to do some required fine tuning, the configuration file that I'm used to seeing, "XF86config", did not exist. I was thoroughly confused.

Thankfully the same fellow who pointed me to the patched 8K kernel also pointed me to the X.org configuration file, called "Xorg.conf". It's set up the same way, but named something different.

It would seem to me to be common decency that when you change something as fundamental as the X Windowing system you'd at least explain this to your end users. The average joe would not only be completely bewildered by the aforementioned kernel problem, they'd give up if they were used to editing the 'XF86config' in older versions of Redhat only to find that it doesn't exist in this one. Bad form, Fedora.

Who's it best for?

Definitely NOT the average user, since the average user can't (or wouldn't bother to) boot into another Linux, mount a harddrive partition, edit a text file, install a patched kernel, boot to that kernel, and reinstall new video drivers just to get the OS to work.

If, however, you're either used to that sort of thing (manual Debian users or Gentoo users) then once that's done it's not really a bad Linux distro. The 2.6.5 kernel does make things respond a little faster (I finally found a distro that made me notice it) and the package selection is okay, if definitely bloated.