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Fedora Linux, Core 1

A First Look

Peter J. Hutnick

Sunday, November 23, 2003

My first experience with GNU/Linux was when I bought Red Hat Linux 5.1 and installed in on my, then aging, 486 in parallel with Windows 95. I've been a generally happy Red Hat user ever since. I've strayed to Debian, Slackware, back to Debian and most recently to Gentoo. Mainly on secondary machines. I always come home to Red Hat. My primary computing environment is Red Hat version 9 with a bunch of FreshRPMs bolted on.

I, like many, find myself in an uncomfortable position given Red Hat's policy shift regarding Red Hat Linux. If you haven't heard, the current version will be the last.

So, I'm trying to figure out what my next desktop is going to be. The Debian-based UserLinux sound pretty good. Except that it doesn't exist yet. As I said, I've used Debian in the past. It has a lot going for it. I am all for the Freedom aspect. I wouldn't hesitate to install the stable branch on a server. For a desktop, however, there doesn't seem to be a way to hit the sweet spot of stability, performance, and contemporary packages.

Now, Red Hat Linux isn't just going to go away. It has become the Fedora Linux project. The Fedora Website explains that this is a transition form a product to a project. Whatever.

I'll admit that at first I was frustrated with Red Hat. No one likes change. And I felt like Red Hat was dumping their previously free version on the community. The same community that wrote most of their system in the first place.

Today I downloaded Fedora Core 1 and I'd like to share my initial experience and impressions.

The initial part of the install was very familiar. The only difference I noticed outside of the cosmetic was that it didn't ask me to set up a non-root user or set firewall settings. It detected my existing RH 9 install and offered to upgrade it. I chose to do a fresh install.

The package install went badly due to some bunk CD-RWs I had. To Fedora's credit I was able to burn some CD-Rs on another system and substitute them mid-install. The selection of packages was not glaringly different from RH 9.

The first surprise was after the kernel messages. It went into a graphical mode for the runlevel initialization. A small border around the screen had a hide button and an abbreviated version of the startup messages. The larger, middle portion of the screen displayed the text messages as introduced in Red Hat 6.0 (with the green [OK] and red [FAILED] messages). Out of curiosity I clicked the hide button. It switched the screen to a smaller rectangle in the middle of the screen similar the those used by GNOME and KDE on startup and displayed those abbreviated versions of the startup messages. At this point the mouse stopped responding. X started and brought up a final configuration dialog. I couldn't proceed without the mouse so I cycled power.

The next boot went fine. I added a user and set the firewall settings.

I selected KDE at package selection and unselected GNOME. KDE came up fine. Look and feel is nearly indistinguishable from RH 9. Menus, icons; same. The wallpaper is a little different. The Matrix screen saver is missing.

My crystal sound was not detected, but in never was under RHL either. The Security Level Tool has no way to open a port for VNC. The print tool couldn't print to the printer on my other system. This did work under RHL.

On the upside my wireless Ethernet, which can be a real bear, came up automagically.

Another plus is that pico has been dumped in favor of GNU nano. For those who don't know, pico (which is the editor component of the pine mailer) is not Free in the GNU sense. (See this article.) Nano is virtually indistinguishable from pico. A quick ln(1) and you'll never know the difference.

Poking around I found a utility called Screen Resize & Rotate Finally, I can change the resolution and color depth of my screen without restarting X.

Much to my surprise, up2date works. It connected to a Red Hat server (xmlrpc.rhn.redhat.com). Unlike RHN in the past, it did not require any user ID. It updated glibc and Mozilla.

I'm composing this in OpenOffice.org writer 1.1.0 on my shiny new Fedora system, over VNC. (I finally just turned iptables off.) High points from the package list include: Mozilla 1.4.1, Kde 3.1.4, OO.org 1.1.0, glibc 2.3.2, and gcc 3.3.2.

The jury is still out. This release is a little shaky. What remains to be seen is if subsequent versions will be more stable, or if they will all be beta-ish in advance of a stable Enterprise Linux release.

I find this page telling. To paraphrase: Make a choice between RHEL and Fedora. Your choice will be RHEL.

For more information on Fedora, check out:

Red Hat Linux Fedora Unleashed or Red Hat Enterprise Linux & Fedora Edition

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Original text and images Copyright 2003–2006 Peter Hutnick. All rights reserved.
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