An Ubuntu User Takes Fedora 10 for a Test Drive

I agree 100% . I really wanted to like Fedora . I love the theme , speed , layout , etc . – but the package manager sucks . Why in the name of God does every second distro have to have a different package manager when synaptic is tried and true . First I had to resort to the command line just to add the necessary repos for nvidia , then no glx gears – install mesa demos . Just a minute , bring up some obscure livna utility to enable nvidia . Glxgears errors out , but I thing Nvidia is finally working so I do a system update .Wow , guess what ? More freakin’ errors on top of more errors . File X is trying to replace file Y . No options to choose x or y . No straight forward way to do anything with this package manager – the whole thing just cops out . I fail to see one advantage this has over synaptic . If synaptic is good enough for Debian it sure should be good enough for the half as stable fedora , but yet again the public is testing their half baked distro . I’m bringing up gparted very shortly to permanently fix the problem . Goodbye Fedora , don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out .

I have noticed that in many cases people tend to be distro enthusiasts based on their initial experiences with Linux. I, for example, started with SUSE and as much as I want to love and appreciate Ubuntu, find it just doesn’t press the right buttons for me. Like your experience with Fedora, I have just not managed to find any Ubuntu love. I know it’s good. I know it’s easy. I know it’s one of the best, but I still keep coming back to the one I started with.

Mandriva no problems? No cups support installed by default.
I dunno why some distros behave like that in specific hardware configurations, I cannot stick to one distro in particular cuz, what works in one pc, does not in another.

Hi there! I’ve been an Ubuntu user since 2005 and have successfully deployed it as a Windows replacement. Still, i love the fedora concept and want to see it succeed too. As such I’ve installed fedora 10 and with the help of this tutorial (http://www.my-guides.net/en/content/view/125/26/http://www.my-guides.net/en/content/view/125/26/) I have managed to have a working installation. It’s not as easy or straightforward as Ubuntu, I’ll give you that, but still kudos for their work. Take care, God bless.

I use both Kubuntu-8.04, 8.10 and Fedora-9, 10 (x86-64). I prefer apt-get and yum to the graphical interfaces. Adept has become worse in the 8.04 –> 8.10 transition. Packagekit is also bad.

Restricted drivers, mp3 support etc on Fedora is easy. The word for that is ‘rpmfusion’. Fedora will NOT provide spoon feeding on those matters.

Even Kubuntu-8.10 grub does not see Fedora-10. Is this an upstream issue?

The sda-sdb switch by grub is a known bug.

Fedora-10 is better than *buntu-8.10 as far as X is concerned. I tested them on many graphic cards.

But apt-get is still ahead of yum.

I think you have some difficulties in adapting to Fedora-10.

Best

A. Mani

Funny I plugged in Lenny RC1 in dual boot W2KP,enabled all the non free ,clicked on the nvidia drivers and all Works, DVD movies Mp3,no such luck with F10, just to much trouble to get things working, takes more skills than I have!

Pretty funny post.
I just would like to remind you that Fedora doesnot include non-free softwares.

Why?
Did you ever think about it?
Can you remember why you choose to move from Windows (i guess you used MS’ OS some time ago) to a Linux based OS?
Do you think you achieved you goal?
Do you think you’re free today?
Do you think providing non-free software on your distro is the way to promote free softwares?
You should think about it.

Now, few words to help you to understand why we’re different.
- No non-free softwares because it’s the law.
- No non-free software because we think it is the right way. Because we also think that using non-free software everytime you don’t find free ones is wrong, and it only lets companies like nvidia know that whatever they choose to do (ie to free or not the code) you will use it.
So what’s the point?
Why whould nvidia change?

Then, all what you described is your misunderstanding of Fedora.
Why compiz doesn’t work out of the box?
Why flash, and other media as well? Because, you choosed to use non-free software, and help them to keep on doing there business (buying nvidia, using flash, mp3, …)

Finally, I would say that you’re just a common Ubuntu user : you say you really want to be free, and repeat it proud and loud to everyone.
But you want it, if and only if it doesn’t cost you anything (i don’t talk about money, but about what you have to do), if you don’t have to fight for it.

Basicly you don’t care about free software.

I was sure it was just me until I read your post. Maybe it still is, since I can’t say that ANY of the current distros I’ve tried are actually very user friendly and the community has been anything but nice unless you bow and scrape.

For some, if not most, of the Linux users out there, I could be your grandmother, I’m that old. Unlike most people my age, I’ve been using a computer since BEFORE you could purchase an IBM Clone 8086. I was a sysadmin on an IBM 3081-D mainframe when I was at university and wrote my own software and drivers for many a year, since the hardware manufacturers only provided you with a book telling you about the hardware and what commands it understood.

I’ve used an old pentium-1 clone based machine running RH-6.1 as a file server for years before the boot drive finally gave out. I always pointed at it as a shining example of what a reliable machine with a good operating system should be, in my attempts to lure my husband away from his M$ and the corporate world bent. He needed to use what everyone else was using. Linux wasn’t compatible with a lot of the software his company used. It isn’t compatable with ANY of the state sites where we live. You NEED ie7 to use any of the state and federal sites anymore. That was why I wanted to get Linux. I own a machine that will run XP and even Vista and whatever the new doze is. Still, I can’t see spending what M$ wants for software. If I can’t access the sites anymore, then I might as well get Linux.

I’ve been without that old Linux machine for a couple of years now. The boot drive was dead, so I migrated the file serving to my everyday box. Sadly, all the household boxen were doze based — until a few weeks ago. I finally knuckled under and decided that my current operating environment was in dire need of updating and M$ was NOT the way to go. Well, RH has taken a turn for the commercial and seems to really be what you BUY when you want a server farm.

That left me with a few possibilities.

I’ve done RH and Mandrake installs in the past, when I was running a computer repair and consulting business, so I guessed Mandrivia, or Mandrivel as I laughingly call it, was one possibility. I was very familiar with the RedHat packaging system and thought it head and shoulders above compiling everything from scratch. I’ve been getting lazy in my old age, you see.

Sticking with RPM based systems, there was Fedora, or Floppy Hat as I call it. I DO own a red fedora even though I’m not a member of the Red Hat Society. That’s actually a women’s social organisation, not a computer user group. I was intimately familiar with two old incarnations of RH, 5.2 and 6.1, as well as Mandrake 7. Fedora is RedHat’s Oldsmobile or test platform.

Then, going to the classics, there’s Debby and Ian’s flavour, debian, or old stodgy. They made advances since I last saw them and it looked like maybe I should, just MAYBE, give them a try.

After that was the big up and comer over the last couple of years, Unbutu, or Boo-Boo.

I’m writing this from one system with Mandrivel and I have another box next to me running Floppy Hat. In BOTH cases, neither OS feels good to me. These ARE Operating Systems, not environments, as all M$ products have proved to be. Unfortunately, NONE of the systems I’ve tried are passing muster. It was only a couple of years ago — yes, that’s an aeon in computer years — that I administered a Linux box and, NO, it was NOT running a current system or kernel. It WAS up to the job it was doing and still would be if the drive didn’t die.

After experiencing different variations on the same theme, I have to say that I feel like Ben Franklin lecturing the continental congress when I say, “The Linux community has traded its freedoms for security.” Therefore, it deserves neither freedom NOR security. Honestly, people, how many times am I supposed to be happy to type my password in one sitting?

Don’t get on me about being rooted, about viri, trojans and so forth. Don’t start about security. I’m administering the system – IN MY HOME, behind two firewalls, one hardware and the other software. I’m installing, configuring, setting up and otherwise doing sysadminly things on the box. By the fourth sixteen character, upper-case, lower-case, numeric and special character password entry I was fuming. At the tenth, I was screaming at my husband and he wasn’t even home.

I think Linux has been suckered with their security bent. The NSA gave them a gift and they went and used it? Are they NUTS? If they hope to become more widespread, they need to loosen up some. I can see the need for a regular user to have to either logout or switch users to administer to the system. Forcing me to NOT log in as root is asinine. I do not want to do everything from a text screen. I do not want to type my password more than once to log on. If someone wants to be stupid enough to run as root, let them. It’s a learning experience. Then you have the rest of it with SELinux…. Grr…. RTFM? How many books do I need to digest just to set up a simple home network? WHY do I have to invest twice what a M$ operating environment costs in BOOKS just to set up a FREE system? I could understand 6.1’s lack of readable documentation. I explained it away as growing pains. You can’t do that today. Things should be more intuitive. They aren’t and the documentation today is just as sketchy or WORSE than it was back in 1999.

I started about a month ago, trying to install debian Etch and a Half, or Etch 4.6. It extended into trying — TRYING — to install Etch 4.7 and finally a failed 5.0. Oh, I got the machine to boot and install, but never from the CD. I had to use a network install to get things going.

That wasn’t too bad I suppose. Howvever, the installer is for the birds. Boot parameters didn’t work as described in the pitiful thing that passes for an installation manual — ASSUMING it was covered at all. Then, in keeping with the worst of UNIX traditions, there are NO examples, terminology changes over and over again, sometimes in the same sentence. As an example, hda becomes sda and then hd0. Cut me a break! Think of what you want to call it and leave it that way! You can name it what you will, but let me understand the device in question as I read about it. I can apply the nomme du jure in my mind when I administer it! Ubuntu refers you to the debian manual. Grand….

Once it was running, I was screaming with how many times I had to type my password to do simple things, like edit my xorg.conf file, because the thing DIDN’T detect my monitor properly and refused to give me anything but a 640×480 resolution, only to find I was going to have to create the file, because the file was EMPTY of anything but entries like: Monitor “ConfiguredMonitor”

If it were configured, I’d be at the native resolution and looking for a way to make things appear BIGGER, by switching to a SMALLER resolution!

Come on, people! To configure a system, you NEED to be logged in as root! Grr….

THEN, Etch didn’t have ANY of the current libraries. It was like working with a system YEARS out of date. They were so out of date, I couldn’t even download and compile a CURRENT version of FireFox. I dare say Lenny will probably be using the same browser version when the next incarnation, SID, hits. Let’s not talk about what they call it. It is NOT what I want to be using. I was accustomed to seeing the firefox logo, not Ice Weasel’s.

Let’s not go into trying to get the box to share a file. I STILL don’t have the network running so that the doze boxen can see the Linux boxen, although the Linux boxen can and do access the doze boxen easily enough. I set up a file server in RH-6.1 and maintained it for years, but I can’t get a simple peer to peer network running with SMB and even the log files aren’t where I expected to find them — assuming I found them. To make matters worse, neither Linux box will share its files with the other. You can see them, but not access them.

So, I figured I’d try Unbutu. When I asked for help, because it refused to load the kernel during the boot for the installation — the live CD worked flawlessly — I got snotty responses from what I can only describe as children. One went so far as to tell me to buy a better computer so I could run Boo-Boo, yet I hear that Linux is best when used with older hardware. Come on, I have a 1.4G Athlon and a 1.8G Sempron. What more does Linux want? With a user community like that, who needs Unbutu. That sort of attitude is the complete antithesis of the meaning of the name. Still, I tried.

I FINALLY got Boo-Boo up and running — on my own with NO help from what was once a VERY friendly community but no longer seems to be — only to run into the same user UN-friendly, “Root logins are NOT permitted,” and screamed. I couldn’t get my display to run right. The nvidia drivers refused to load properly. I stopped trying. Boo-Boo went Bye-Bye.

I loaded Fedora. Except for a facelift, it was very much like installing RH-6.1 again. I smiled – until it was time to reboot. You’d think they’d let you get the disk out of the drive. It only got worse from there. With Floppy Hat, you have to edit the configuration files to be able to do anything. Grr…. What use is a GUI if you have to do everything from a command prompt? Then, there was a fraction of the software I expected to see loaded.

Then I ran into the rpm dependency problems. You’d think that after ten years, TEN, they’d have that fixed. debian’s debs work, why don’t rpms?

I decided to try Mandrivel on this box. Getting it installed was a job and a half. Again, I had to use a netinstall. Not that I minded, but it would have been nice if the files that were in the ISO that resided on the drive and were confirmed good with the file check routines, at least loaded the files. There was more than one failed install attempt because a file refused to load. At least I was able to get through the install. With Boo-Boo and debian, if the files failed anywhere in the install process, the installer halted without telling me why. I had to use the text installer to see what file failed to load and when.

With Mandrivel, I have GIGs worth of downloads that I did, downloads that didn’t work unless I broke them up into smaller sets — MULTIPLE downloads. How many times do I have to type my password?

I have to set up the system, configure it. I have a secure password. Correction. I HAD a secure password. Now its as few characters as I can make it. In Floppy Hat, that’s ONE character for a user login and six for root. In Mandrivel, the user has NO password, but root’s is six characters. I can’t remember what Boo-Boo enforced. As for stodgy, or debian, forget it. Any system that can’t even remain a working system after downloading and installing software from it’s built in installer and boot again, doesn’t deserve to be run. I tried — for DAYS — to get it running smoothly. Every day I had to reinstall it because something ELSE didn’t work, after I installed software. No matter how many configuration files I edited, the software refused to run.

I’m still fighting to get a system I feel comfortable with running smoothly. Right now, I’ve about had it with Mandrivel. After this latest spate of updates, ALL the software I added after installing — over TWO GIG in downloads — is gone. I wouldn’t know about it, except things started to not work. I’d click on something and the cursor would start to bounce, telling me it was loading, then not do anything. Nothing spawned. So, I figured it needed a reboot. I mean, it was up for two whole days. A miracle. I mean, my old box stayed up until the power failed, so why should I expect any less of this one. When I rebooted, the drive still reports the same full status, but I can’t find ANY of the apps. Where did it all go? At least I can read the DOS and doze drives on this system. On the Floppy Had box, I have to be root to read them.

Floppy Hat. I am so disappointed. I expected more of you and got considerably less. Same for Mandrivel. Maybe I’ll try Boo-Boo again, but you can forget debian. Tell me, can I ask that SMB be installed, assign the shares, enable file sharing and expect other boxes to see them under Boo-Boo? Or am I going to have to try for hours to configure it and STILL not have it working properly? I don’t want to work from my file server anymore. I can’t afford a separate box as a file server. I’m on a fixed income these days.

Floppy Hat is a joke, debian hasn’t figured out it’s 2009, Mandrivel is as bad as windoze and the people I’ve been in contact with in reference to Boo-Boo left me thinking I should go back to M$. At least I didn’t have to read a library of books to get the stuff they produced to work as designed. I read all the books a decade ago. I don’t want to have to buy another set for the new stuff. Can I expect Boo-Boo to work?

W