TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

After a dismal turnout with Fedora Core 3, I downloaded the ISO for this distribution with much trepidation, and only a little glimmer of hope that whatever caused such catastrophic failure of my system previously would have been addressed since the last release.

Thankfully, either due to diligent work by the Fedora team or a bug fix by the Nvidia Linux Driver team, I was quite pleasantly suprised to find that this release of Fedora does actually work.

Install:

Redhat's Anaconda installer hasn't really changed all that much from the Redhat 6.x days, so there's really nothing new to report here. I did notice that (like the default desktop) there's a new, somewhat smoother overall theme to the installer called "Clearlooks".

It certainly gives the installer a more polished look. A new option on the "custom install" menu is "Eclipse" (more on that later). Not much else was noteworthy on my install, except that the first time I tried to install FC4 it didn't know what to do with my spare harddrive (it previously housed FreeBSD).

I imagine this has more to do with the way FreeBSD handles partitioning than anything else, since when I wiped the drive the install went off the second time without a hitch. One thing to note is that I did not enable SELinux by default at the warning of another user who said it gave him video issues.

My next test for any distro is to try and install the official Nvidia 3D drivers for my card. If a distribution is going to fail, this is usually where it happens. FC2 and FC3 gave me trouble with this, so I was leery about how FC4 would handle it.

Thankfully, the drivers installed just fine and the next time I booted I was greeted with the familiar Nvidia bootsplash and a glxgears score of 9,000+. I then proceeded just for fun to install Doom 3 (with the Resurrection of Evil Expansion Pack), Neverwinter Nights, NingPo Mahjongg and FuhQuake.

All went well, except for a sound problem in Doom 3. The default sound driver for that program was Alsa, and my speakers gave me buzzy, crackly noise over the in-game music.

I tried a few things in the OS itself but sound worked fine on all programs other than Doom 3, so I finally switched the sound driver inside the Doom 3 "System" menu to OSS rather than Alsa. Bingo. All was well after that.

Package Selection:

There are a few new additions to FC this time around that merit mentioning. One is "Native Eclipse", which is a version of IBM's integrated development tool generally used for Java development.

The thing that makes the Fedora Core version unique is that not only does it come preinstalled with plugins that allow you to use it to develop C and C++ applications, it also is implemented with an entirely open-source Java stack using GCJ.

This doesn't really afffect me any since my job is working with the Sun proprietary Java stack, but for those of you out there who prefer "Open-source or nothing!" here you go. Also, since the plugins are included you can enjoy this very well made IDE in other languages as well.

Gnome is coming around nicely. The version included with FC4 is very polished and uses the "Clearlooks" theme I mentioned earlier. My only complaint (and this is probably a Gnome-specific problem rather than a Fedora one) is that Gnome still requires me to right click and select "eject" to eject discs rather than just auto unmounting them when I press the button on my DVD drive. I'll probably get lots of messages telling me how to fix this.

Most Annoying Feature:

For once (and this is a high complement) I really don't have much to complain about here. Fedora Core 4 has restored my waning faith in the Fedora project as a venerable no-cost distribution for general-purpose use. After some bumps with FC2 and FC3, they seem to have finally stabilized the distro on my machine, and even got me to give Gnome another chance as a desktop environment. Bravo, guys.

Who's it best for?

Fedora has always been sort of an all-purpose Swiss army knife of sorts. It has good developer tools available on the distro DVD, its 3D support for Nvidia is good enough for my gaming needs, and although it's pretty big to download (an entire DVD), it has a good overall selection of software available.

Fedora probably won't win over any complete newbies with ease of use, but if you're at least familiar with another Linux distribution you should have no trouble getting into this one.