Fedora Core 5 “Bordeaux” is officially released! Please download using the official mirror list or through Bittorrent. The release notes give a comprehensive list of changes. There is also a Fedora Core 5 Tour with some media. Additionally there are some screenshots courtesy of OSdir.

As a warning to early adopters: Some issues in the kernel may require immediate updating (use yum) and the Gnome 2.14 has a great deal of odd behaviour. There are some installation notes to help (based on Test3, updates soon available). Please see my Personal Fedora Core 5 Installation Guide. Stanton Finley also hase some installation notes available, although a bit more than needed for a desktop, they are still a good resource. I imagine the fedora-list mailing list as well as the forum websites will soon start providing support.

An incremental review compared with FC5-Test3 will be available in a few days. Current focus will be to install and get things working first!

Fedora is a good distribution with many problems, but they won’t be fixed without more users! Please download, use and enjoy!

Posted in: Distributions, FC5, Fedora,

According to the Fedora-testing mailing list, Fedora Core 5 will be delayed till March 20.

Due to circumstances outside of our control, we’re going to be unable to keep to the scheduled date of March 15th for the release of FC5 and instead are going to have to make the release date Monday, March 20th. While unfortunate in some ways, this gives us the opportunity to pull in the final GNOME 2.14 tarballs which should be available on Monday assuming the changes are suitably minor.

Jeremy Katz

This is nothing too surprising and seeing as this is only 5 days, there is plenty of time for some finalizing improvements. Gnome 2.14 will be available Marth 15 and since the 2.13.4 beta is already in FC5-test3 I don’t imagine there will be drastic changes (although Gnome developers are a odd bunch).

This gives me more time to prepare for this release as well. My preliminary Personal Fedora Core 5 Installation Guide has been public for a few days now (comments appreciated).

Posted in: Distributions, FC5, Fedora,

This is my personal basic evaluation of Fedora Core 5 Test 3 (FC5-test3). Since I had recently installed and tested FC5-test2, most of my observations will be based on the differences between these 2 beta releases. Upon initial investigation there are not significant changes since the last test release.

Installer

I installed using the ISO images on disk to a spare 8GB partition in the same way I did for FC5-test2. For the most part Anaconda (the installer) has not changed much from test2. The partitioning defaults were still the same and still rather quirky.

Installer: Software Selection

There has been a slight improvement in the package installation menu since test2. A simplified screen lets you just install the basics and skip all manual package selection if you so choose. The four basic included choices are: “Office and Productivity”, “Software Development”, “Web server” and “Virtualization Xen” (which is not selected by default). These may be over generalized groups, but should be adequate.

At first this may seem odd, but it makes perfect sense for those users who will either plan to run massive updates (thereby replacing most packages anyways) and also for people who plan to selectively add software as needed (ex: minimalistic server configuration). In any event I chose to manually select packages. The odd thing about Fedora is what is selected as defaults. The K Desktop Environment (KDE) option is not selected. Why? I always recommend new users try out both Gnome and KDE.

There is still neither Install Everything or a disk usage estimate - a really necessary option. From my very basic research, I do not think that these are trivial options. Since the installer has moved to yum based design, more work will have to be done to support what was originally available. In the end I used about 3.8GB.

Gnome provides a menu option Add/Remove Software directly from the Applications main menu. I was pleased to see this as many users had requested a simpler immediate way to install new programs. However this crashed everytime I ran it, the same thing happened when I ran pup directly. For whatever reason a reboot fixed this. Reminds me more of MS.

Again, the default services installed and running were unnecessary. I’ve noticed many new names since FC4 services. I plan to research and investigate each one before FC5 final to better understand what is necessary and what is new (or just cool).

Software Setup

The initial login screen was very polished. There was a cursor problem in test2 which is fixed with a shiny animated cursor that is very attractive.

As usual Gnome is the default installation. The login was quite speedy. They seem to have modified the menu layout yet again! Simple example: I want to open a terminal. Typically this is in the System Tools, but it was not there. No problem, I’ll use the Run dialog to launch either an xterm or a gnome-terminal. However the Run dialog is also missing!!! I did finally find the Terminal at the bottom of Accessories. Why? This reminds me of MS Windows putting the Command Prompt in Accessories. Go figure.

I tried the Beagle(?) Search app again, but it still would not run the daemon when selected.

Firefox 1.5 is available but I could not get the Flash plugin to work correctly. I know this is a problem with SELinux, however in my limited usage so far, I don’t find it useful to keep SELinux active. Although I tested everything against SELinux Enforcing Mode for most basic applications.

No major changes to KDE, which means it still looks odd. I played around with the Switch User option which as it turns out really does not have much to do with KDE. They simply lock the current session and create another login session on another console terminal (ex: Ctrl-Alt-F7 is standard, so the next user will be on Ctrl-Alt-F8). I’ve seen power users doing this for years.

Hardware Support

As always with every new distribution release a newer kernel is included which will typically improve support for most hardware.

I am having some serious problems with the Nvidia driver and have not got it to work at all. There has been quite a great of discussion on the fedora mailing lists regarding this issue. When investigating the driver, I noticed that the kernel-devel RPM places files in /usr/src/kernels instead of /usr/src. While this may sound like something inconsequential, I have personally seen over years how people tend to hard code values to known locations. (Correction: This has always been the case, normally I have the kernel source installed hence making the kernel headers unncessary).

Power management (ACPI) has slightly improved. If I try S3 (Suspend) the system goes to sleep properly, however when I wake up from S3 the video failed to re-initialize. This is actually a positive change from FC5-test2. Getting the video to work is only a matter of drivers and some tricks. Since I don’t even have the Nvidia driver working, I don’t know all of the possibilities. When I tried S3 after a reboot with SELinux disabled, the system woke up perfectly! When I ran command line S4 (hibernate), the system also works 100% perfectly as it did in FC5-test2. Finally a proper working suspend AND hibernate working out of the box from Redhat/Fedora release!

Hardware Support: Peripherals

My All-in-One Card Reader detected perfectly but worked differentely from both FC4 and FC5-test2. However I was able to the access both SD and Compact Flash but I have to double click on their icons first. Which is another nuisance with the mounting/automounting system. When I insert a data CD it does not show up automatically on the desktop, but it does for an audio CD. Of course this can all probably be modified, but these defaults seem rather odd for a new user.

Conclusion

For the most part important things changed mostly towards the right direction between test releases, however some quirks were only replaced with other quirks. Some things I know are more problems with the individual components (ie. odd Gnome characteristics) but even so the Fedora team should try harder for consistency.

For the most part I’m happy. I disagree with some of the decisions made as how to best improve this distribution, but I still find it highly useful and my primary desktop. The progress made since FC4 is mostly in the background (hardware, system, administration, etc.) so visually I do not feel much has changed, but almost everything works as I would expect – and many things much better than FC4.

As a beta release, FC5-Test3 seems like very solid release candidate. Granted there are many bugs and oddities to address but I think they are manageable. For the time being I will try to spend as much time as I can with this release to best prepare for FC5 and to create some useful personal notes for installation. I expect a draft in a week or two, but I still have lots to learn.

Posted in: Desktop, Distributions, FC5, Fedora,

The third and final beta release for Fedora Core 5 has been announced. The Bittorrent is available, however I don’t see the main FTP or any release notes available yet. (Other mirrors do work).

Highlights include:

• Package selection within the installer has been reenabled.
• Rebuilt again on later gcc4.1 snapshot for performance and security
• Hibernate should be functional on a wide variety of hardware again
• GNOME 2.13.4 development release and KDE 3.5 general release
• Xen Virtualisation software and yum package manager are now well integrated within the Fedora installer. The installer interface is more streamlined. Remote logging and improved support for tracebacks is included.

FC5-test2 seemed to be moving in the right direction. For the most part things should not be much different, but even incremental changes can have serious effects.

I plan to thoroughly test this release, and update all my documentation and procedures to see how much things have changed. According to the schedule, we should see a final Fedora Core 5 on March 15.

Posted in: Distributions, FC5, Fedora,

I just downloaded Mozilla SeaMonkey to test out. For the interested, I have some instructions and commands near the end of this post. However this post is more about confusion in Mozilla’s choice of naming for their products.

I don’t care to re-tell the whole story about Netscape, Mozilla and Firefox, but let me be clear that these folks have had the most abysmal track record when it comes to names. Currently the Mozilla project claims the following for SeaMonkey:

The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to deliver production-quality releases of code derived from the application formerly known as “Mozilla Application Suite”. Whereas the main focus of the Mozilla Foundation is on Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird, our group of dedicated volunteers works to ensure that you can have “everything but the kitchen sink” — and have it stable enough for corporate use.

The truth is that sometimes for corporate users and maybe more-so for personal users stability may not be as valuable as name recognition. Simply put a web browser should be known as just that, not code names or monikers. Before the “Mozilla Application Suite”, it was known as just Mozilla. And Firefox (technically Mozilla Firefox) is living on its third name designation (prev. Firebird, prev. Pheonix). I understand the issue with trademarks and branding, but I question if so many names is healthy for Mozilla’s wider adoption. Additionally Firefox and Thunderbird are available through mozilla.COM - the Mozilla Corporation, not to be confused with mozilla.org - the Mozilla Foundation. Of course this move was necessary if any of these groups wanted commercial success of their products.

The way I see it (objections welcome) is that the Mozilla “People” want everyone to think in terms of their flagship products: Firefox Browser and Thunderbird Mail Client. Ideally they would hope the Firefox would somehow imply “web browser” and a similar effect for Thunderbird even though for most people this would not be blatantly obvious (ie. can you guess the purpose of Microsoft Internet Explorer?). The Mozilla folks wouldn’t mind if people forget that Mozilla is (was) also a browser and mail client, so naming it to some funny project code-name (that they really don’t care if people use) would be logical.

Of course this is all just a lot of time wasted (mine included) instead of focusing on better products. I’ll keep using Mozilla whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it, but if they want a true corporate presense this is one of the many factors they need to overcome.

I hope this will be one of the last names thrown around from this group.

---

SeaMonkey Installation to /opt

This assumes you have either the mozilla or the firefox RPM installed. These commands are for FC4, but should apply to all distributions.

Note: SeaMonkey will properly work with your ~/.mozilla profile directory.

All commands executed as root of course, start with: su -

Installation

# wget http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/seamonkey/releases/1.0/seamonkey-1.0.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gz
# gunzip -c seamonkey-1.0.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gz | tar xf - -C /opt/
# ln -s /opt/seamonkey/seamonkey /usr/local/bin/seamonkey
# cd /opt/seamonkey/
# mv plugins plugins_seamonkey_default
# ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins plugins

Removal

# rm /usr/local/bin/seamonkey
# cd /opt/
# rm -rf seamonkey

Usage

As your own user (not root):

# cp -ar ~/.mozilla ~/mozbkp_pre_seamonkey
# seamonkey &

Currently using, it seems significantly faster than Mozilla 1.7.8 and much more responsive than my Firefox installation in FC4. Usability seems the same, however I have not validated added memory or resource consumption (knowing Mozilla, I know it will be a bigger resource hog).

Posted in: Linux, Philosophy, Software,