Fedora ※

Fedora is the consumer-oriented (i.e., free) flavor of RedHat. Throughout the years it has been (on and off) my distribution of choice for desktop purposes, since it is extremely well organized and easy to maintain.

It is not, however, perfect, and I am a bit weary of its semi-annual release cycles, which are more prone to breakage than Ubuntu.

Legacy content follows.

• Fedora Core 5

  • Toshiba M100 - First impressions.
  • Toshiba Tecra 8000/8100 - Installs and runs without a hitch with SELinux disabled. Suspend/resume seems to work, but still somewhat inconsistently. Cisco Aironet, Audio, all OK.
  • VMware, Desktops - Flawless installs. The minimal server install is a great way to get started (provided you’re used to managing boxes via the CLI).

• Fedora Core 4:

  • Updated Core 3 install on two desktops flawlessly
  • All the package manager’s prompts to insert a CD are named “untitled window”. And it asked me for the same CD time and time again. Is this dumb or what?
  • Evolution still crashes around 30 seconds into normal use (and the Exchange connector still doesn’t work.)
  • Gnome 2.10, sure, but without the clever bits: Beagle, TomBoy, wireless-applet, etc.
  • [Toshiba/M100]:
    • CPU speed scaling worked (but no hibernation or suspend options visible, or enabled on the default install)
    • Built-in Wi-Fi support sucks (the ipw2100 Wi-Fi card is listed but as a standard Ethernet interface, and cannot be configured via the GUI). Had to download the card’s firmware, install it manually, edit the relevant ifcfg-ethX file to set the interface type to Wireless and reboot. For how long are we going to put up with this idiotic nonsense?
    • Inserting a second battery freezes the machine – hard. A major bug that I had come across earlier on other distros, and the kind that some kernel developer ought to be flogged over.

To get MP3 support in Fedora Core 4, install gstreamer-plugins-mp3 from the following yum repository:

$ cat /etc/yum.repos.d/livna.repo
[livna]
name=Livna.org Fedora Compatible Packages
baseurl=http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/RPMS.lvn
gpgcheck=1

Fedora Core 3/4 and Apache‘s UserDir:

• Symptom: getting 403 Forbidden errors on ~user pages.
• Cause: mod_userdir will not work out of the box due to SELinux paranoia.
• Cure: do chcon -R -t httpd_user_content_t public_html/, or, if you’re running a development box, use system-config-securitylevel to disable SELinux on httpd and reboot. Yes, welcome to the wonderful world of runtime paranoia.
• Stupidity Rating: 20/20. It should at least be mentioned in the default httpd.conf.

Fedora Core 1 and yum

Fedora Legacy repositories require manual updates to your yum.conf.