Fedora

Fedora is the new consumer-oriented (i.e., free) distribution. It is my distribution of choice for most purposes, since it is extremely well organized and easy to maintain. It is not, however, perfect.

Fedora Core 5:

:

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 ).

Core 4:

Desktop Notes:

  • 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?
  • still crashes around 30 seconds into normal use (and the connector still doesn't work.)
  • Gnome 2.10, sure, but without the clever bits: , TomBoy, wireless-applet, etc.

:

  • 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.

Repositories:

To get support, 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

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 this (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.

Core 1 and yum

Here's an updated yum.conf that points to updated Legacy repositories:

http://penguinsolutions.org/fedora/yum.conf

Resources:

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