TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

As I've noted on forums in the past, the Fedora project has failed to excite me for a long time.

I wasn't really looking forward to trying out this latest iteration. As much as Fedora claims to be the "bleeding-edge" distribution they rarely if ever innovate anything, unless you count "new ways to make me want to amputate my eyeballs with a cheese grater" innovating.

That's not mentioning my spotty history with compatibility in previous versions.

I'll be up front and say the scales were not tipped in this distribution's favor from the beginning.

Install:

I downloaded the Fedora 7 i686 "Live" CD first, not the DVD. I wasn't impressed so I decided to take the time to download the DVD. You'll see comments about both interspersed throughout the rant. Unless I specify, anything I say applies to both releases (particularly bugs).

Apparently Fedora 7 uses the same kernel as Ubuntu 7.04, which meant I had to hack my Parallels VM to get it to boot. To see exactly what I had to do, look at the rant for Ubuntu "Feisty".

Even then X Windows kept trying to start up, only to subsequently crash. This went on about 6 times before an error popped up and it dumped me to the command line. Wonderful start.

I logged in as root and ran "system-config-display". This showed me an X Windows configuration dialog where I changed the display settings to "vesa" 1024x768. I was then kind of stumped as to what to do next, since I didn't know how to launch the installer from the root console.

The CD solved that one for me. About 30 seconds after I configured the display X Windows and the LiveCD environment booted up on its own. Strangely enough, as I was writing this rant it even logged itself in, bringing me to the LiveCD desktop. I found this kind of unsettling.

The new desktop theme and installer graphics are quite nice looking. The strange blue DNA from previous releases is now hot air balloons.

The installer asked me the usual questions (time zone, root password, partition options) and I was off.

There was no option to choose what got installed and what didn't. When I tried the LiveCD I assumed that was because there wasn't enough room on the single CDROM to give many options. The DVD didn't give me the option either, however, disproving this hypothesis.

The installer seems to be mimicking the behavior of Ubuntu, where you just set a few options and let it go on its own. I'm not sure if that is necessarily a good thing.

It's worth noting that I'm glad Fedora offers the option of a single-CD download with version 7. It shows they've begun to consider the plight of those of us with less than stellar internet connections.

The installer got all the way to the end of its "Copy files" run and then the screen went blank. I wasn't really sure what was going on, but my CPU and harddrive showed activity so I decided to wait it out.

I continued to wait it out for about 5 minutes. The CPU and harddrive activity stopped, but the screen was still blank. I decided to restart.

Reboot seemed to go fine and brought me to the Fedora bootstrap program where I configured my username and other last minute chores. Another reboot brought me to the configured system.

The system once rebooted gave me the same X Windows issues as the LiveCD and DVD. I'd see a blank screen with the X Windows cursor for about 5 seconds and then garbage as it rebooted itself 6 or 7 times.

I once again ran system-config-display which brought me to a desktop, which promptly errored out and told me there was already an X server running. This tipped off a series of garbage, restart, garbage, restart again, so I rebooted Fedora once more.

The next boot worked better. I was brought to a graphical login screen and proper desktop. I also had to manually choose my network connection, just like in Debian and Ubuntu. I don't know what setting these distributions are using by default, but it annoys me.

My CDROM was once again not recognized properly, so I decided to scrap the idea of running this on my VM and boot up with Rig 2. Things went considerably more smoothly from then on.

INSTALL ATTEMPT 2: With Rig 2 I had no X Windows errors and the install from the LiveCD went off without a hitch. Whatever problems the new kernel had with my VM and ATI card did not seem to exist with an AMD64 and Nvidia card.

When I say "without a hitch" I'm actually sort of lying. I still had the "screen goes blank and computer shows only harddrive and CPU activity" error that I reported on the VM.

The system (not surprisingly) comes with very little multimedia ability whatsoever. WMV, MPG, and MP3 support were not installed. There was also no scanner software in the default selections.

Software Selection:

AbiWord is present rather than OpenOffice and there are no graphical applications other than the GIMP. I find this kind of odd, considering other single-CD live distributions (such as Ubuntu) are still able to include OpenOffice and a full array of grahpics apps. It makes me wonder where all that extra space went.

Pidgin (formerly GAIM) is installed as well. I was unable to use either the LiveCD or DVD as a source for the Add/Remove Packages program. It kept looking for a remote mirror and erroring out when it couldn't get online. Hmm. Seems like I've had this trouble before with another Fedora release.

Who's it best for?

If you're looking to run Fedora 7 with Parallels inside Mac OS X, I'd advise against it. It's not a very easy install and it offers nothing that Ubuntu 6.10 Dapper won't give you.

If you want to run this on PC hardware and have a Pentium or AMD64, your install experience is much smoother. If you have a Core Duo or Core 2, I'd look somewhere else, since that's what my laptop uses and it takes a dump during boot.

Other than some pretty graphical theme changes, I could tell nothing particularly new about Fedora 7. They took "Core" out of the name, which is ironic since this release gives you exactly that by default. It leaves no chance for pre-install configuration of packages, even on the larger DVD version.

As usual, if you don't have an internet connection to flesh this distribution out with the proper multimedia and 3D support, it's going to be useless for those kinds of activities.

The lack of OpenOffice may not be a burden to those who prefer AbiWord, but for the rest of us that scratches Fedora 7 off the "useful" list entirely. Thus is the plight of the non-broadband-blessed.