[TriLUG] Re: Review: Fedora Core 1 is a Mild Disappointment

[Lance A. Brown]

karl thiele wrote:
> 
> Folks have to assume this is accurate, what do you all think? How rough 
> around the edges is Fedora going to be? Just how much "fixing" are we 
> going to have to do?
> 
> http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5111

I upgraded from Red Hat 9 w/ Ximian XD2 to FC1 on my home desktop 
November 12th after using BitTorrent to download the ISOs.  I mounted 
all the iso's via loopback and copied the RPMs onto my hard drive so I'd 
have the install archive available all the time.  Then I made a boot CD 
from the included isolinux image since I don't have a floppy drive in my 
computer currently and used it to initiate the upgrade.  The upgrade 
went smoothly using the Hard Disk method to access the iso images 
directly instead of burning them on CD as well.

After upgrading I went through and 'rpm -e'd the remaining Ximian RPMs 
and replaced them with corresponding FC1 RPMs.

AFter that I installed Yum and started using it to manage my RPMs.  I 
*like* yum, and FC1 has a LOT of support for it.  The official FC1 
download site at http://download.fedora.com/ supports yum, for example. 
  I also have yum configs for FreshRPMs and a couple other sites that 
provide add-on RPMs for FC1.  Very nice.

There have been a few problems.  The two most annoying were:

I use sawfish instead of that abomination of a window manager known as 
metacity.  With sawfish, the Desk Switcher panel applet misbehaves and 
places the viewport with it's top-left corner at the point in the 
desktop where you clicked instead of placing it over the entire desktop 
like you would expect.  This was bugzilla'd quickly and a fix was found 
in libwnck.  I've got an updated RPM that corrects this if anyone needs it.

The other one had to do with Samba.  My girlfriend's computer is 
networked to mine and she access her homedir via samba.  After upgrading 
she could NOT get into her homedir regardless of what I did to the samba 
config.  Finally, I removed the 'valid users = %S' line from the [homes] 
section and she could get in. :-(  This has been a standard bit in Samba 
for years and I have no idea what is broken in the Samba 3.0.0 RPMs for 
FC1. :-(  So, for now it's out of my config until I have time to 
diagnose the real problem.


Other than that, I'm mostly pleased with it.  I installed RPM versions 
of the NVidia video and ALSA audio drivers without problems, and am 
regularly updating my RPMs using yum.

All in all, I'm pleased.  I've not run into the problems cited in the 
review with RPM dependencies, etc. but I use yum to handle that so I 
might not.  I had no problems installing XMMS MP3 support, etc.  I think 
the reviewer was swilling NyQuil or something when he tried FC1.

My FC1 RPMs are available at http://www.bearcircle.net/RPMS/

--[Lance]

-- 
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