Fedora 3

Anyone install yet? I used to be a RH junkie, but discovered the even more clicky nix OS mandrake. I saw that they included Firefox, personally I can't wait till it is included with Mandrake.

well, if you had a real os you could just install it, but since mandrake sucks so profusely, I can understand you intense excitement :twisted:

I'm a sucker for the new distro of the month, so I'll probably install this dude tomorrow. I've already got the ISOs, but I like to be a good bit-torrent citizen and let my share ratio get to at least 2 before I kill the bt client (and reloading the OS on this machine will definitely kill the client).

so far, so blah. actually, I have already had one issue with SELinux bite me in the ass, so I turned that off completely. it's not like it doesn't tell you, right there in the installer, to only use it if you know it won't mess up any of your stuff, so I should have known better. but I wanted to be adventurous!

also, the issue I always used to associate in my mind with konsole, I now have with gnome-terminal on FC3. specifically, if you're using nano in a gnome-terminal window, and scroll down or up through a long document with the arrow keys, it won't redraw all the parts of the window it should, so you end up looking at jumbled garbage. makes it very tough to edit files that way. my fix so far? I'm using konsole! there's nothing quite so annoying as having to load up the qt/kde|gtk/gnome libs when you're in the other DE.

oh yeah, and I've managed to hard lock the machine 2 separate times trying to start lm_sensors. that's not cool.

and finally, they don't have a kernel-source rpm on any of the install discs! how the heck did they manage to forget that?!? so that puts the whoa-ho on a lot of driver compilation (read as: no Tux Racer for me until I get the nvidia drivers installed).

It's reading stuff like this the really turns me off to Fedora. It seems like it is really unstable. Maybe I'm reading more into it than is really there though. I read several reviews about FC2 almost all of which said to avoid it in favor of FC1. FC1 was touted as the more stable version while FC2 was more of the development distro for RedHat, and wasn't as stable. FC3 seems to continue this behavior, at least by what I'm reading here and other places. Too bad too. I personally have sworn off RPM based systems for personal use, so I'm not likely to use it anyway, even if it was touted as the best distro on the planet -- although I might be more willing to try it in that case.

Is this (very subjective) view of FC3 accurate? Is FC3 better or worse than FC2? Have you had enough time with it to form an opinion?

I dealt with FC2 enough to switch to Mandrake, hows that? ;-)

what a pain in the ass. from the FC3 release notes:

In order to eliminate the redundancy inherent in providing a separate package for the kernel source code when that source code already exists in the kernel's .src.rpm file, Fedora Core 3 no longer includes the kernel-source package. Users that require access to the kernel sources can find them in the kernel .src.rpm file. To create an exploded source tree from this file, perform the following steps (note that <version> refers to the version specification for your currently-running kernel):

1.

Obtain the kernel-<version>.src.rpm file from one of the following sources:
*

The SRPMS directory on the appropriate "SRPMS" CD iso image
*

The FTP site where you got the kernel package
*

By running the following command:

up2date --get-source kernel
2.

Install kernel-<version>.src.rpm (given the default RPM configuration, the files this package contains will be written to /usr/src/redhat/)
3.

Change directory to /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/, and issue the following command:

rpmbuild -bp --target=<arch> kernel.spec

(Where <arch> is the desired target architecture.)

On a default RPM configuration, the kernel tree will be located in /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/.
4.

In resulting tree, the configurations for the specific kernels shipped in Fedora Core 3 are in the /configs/ directory. For example, the i686 SMP configuration file is named /configs/kernel-<version>-i686-smp.config. Issue the following command to place the desired configuration file in the proper place for building:

cp <desired-file> ./.config
5.

Issue the following command:

make oldconfig

You can then proceed as usual.

It's reading stuff like this the really turns me off to Fedora. It seems like it is really unstable. Maybe I'm reading more into it than is really there though. I read several reviews about FC2 almost all of which said to avoid it in favor of FC1. FC1 was touted as the more stable version while FC2 was more of the development distro for RedHat, and wasn't as stable. FC3 seems to continue this behavior, at least by what I'm reading here and other places. Too bad too. I personally have sworn off RPM based systems for personal use, so I'm not likely to use it anyway, even if it was touted as the best distro on the planet -- although I might be more willing to try it in that case.

Is this (very subjective) view of FC3 accurate? Is FC3 better or worse than FC2? Have you had enough time with it to form an opinion?

not really enough time yet. I will say this: newer versions of everything. firefox and thunderbird included now (though I was already using them both), with firefox the default "preferred application" web browser. mozilla is still here, though. I don't want to have to hassle with the kernel src.rpm, but I'm sure there will be a kernel-source rpm on freshrpms.net soon, if not already. I dunno; considering the gnome-terminal weirdness, FC3 is pretty underwhelming so far.