After trying Ubuntu 8.10 for two days on my Macbook, which proved to be a success, I now take Fedora 10 for a spin. Read on to see how my two days experience was with this Linux distro.
Before we start
Fedora is a popular Linux distro (ranking number 4 on Distrowatch), sponsored by RedHat and developed by the Fedora Project community, with a 4-6 month release cycle. Actually, it may be considered a “beta” version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat’s supported distribution with a release cycle of 18 month.
Red Hat recommends Fedora for developers and highly-technical enthusiasts using Linux in non-critical environments. I’m neither a Linux developer or highly-technical when it comes to Linux, but at least I’m enthusiast.
Because both Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10 use the latest versions of Gnome and Nautilus, they look quite similar.
What’s different
Editor’s note: Bogdan is the resident Mac geek, and has just started using linux. This article is not an in-depth comparison between Ubuntu and Fedora.
The main features that differentiate Fedora from Ubuntu are:
It uses RPM packaging and YUM for command-line package management, which some may find slower than Ubuntu’s apt-get and aptitude, but I didn’t notice that much of a difference.Community is smaller, number of pages indexed by Google is smaller(31 mil compared to 75) but the forums are active and you will definitely get your questions answered.It is considered leading-edge, because it always integrates the latest open-source technologies. (For example: OpenOffice 3.0, that didn’t made it to Ubuntu 8.10)Comes only with FOSS. So you don’t have MP3 support out of the box.because security is one of the most important features in Fedora, it has Security-Enhanced Linux(SELinux) which provides advanced security policies trough the use of Linux Security Modules(LSM) in the Linux kernel.
Installation
Fedora’s installer, called Anaconda, looks like a mature installer, with a lot of options if you know what you are doing (fully unattended installation with scripts or VNC support).
Partition configuration is easy and more intuitive than Ubuntu’s and you can also choose which software packages to install. During installation, you are asked for the root password. In Ubuntu I had to search the forums to figure out how to do a sudo, because the installer did not ask for a root password.
Devices
Logitech USB Webcam, Fuji Digital Camera, Wireless and Dual Monitor support worked OOB. To enable Bluetooth I had to modify a config file, but it worked great. My Canon MP520 printer refused to print with the generic drivers and no plug&play 3G internet connection with my Nokia phone. Overall, the experience was acceptable. Power management, suspend and hibernate also worked flawlessly on my MacBook.
Look and feel
As mentioned, because of Gnome, Fedora looked very much like Ubuntu. The default Nautilus is striped down – no side panel, no buttons and no tab browsing. One little glitch I encountered: folder icons on external drives were represented with file icons.
I liked the Solar theme with it’s desktop wallpaper and the wait cursor. The boot loading bar is quite original, but the start-up tune is awful.
No luck in enabling desktop effects. It would just hang, requiring a restart. I tried to install some Compiz Configuration packages, but at every boot, it just loaded a blank screen. I had to reinstall Fedora. So no eye-candy for me. Reinstalling Fedora because of Xorg video framework errors is highly unnecessary; just remember to back-up the config files, then boot into the failsafe terminal to restore them. Unlike Ubuntu, the configuration tools are organized in folders and are easier to find.
Something very useful I didn’t notice in Ubuntu 8.10 is the File Sharing (SAMBA) configuration utility. This applet lets you easily set up a shared folder locally or access already shared resources.
Package Manager
Yum’s graphical front-end (gpk-application or Add/Remove Software) is somewhat similar to Synaptic, but a little less ergonomic and the number of available applications seemed smaller. To get the software that Fedora Project did not want to ship you need to install RPM Fusion.
Every time I tried to install a downloaded rpm package, I was greeted with some annoying warning messages and had to click “Copy File” and “Force Install”. To add to the frustration, no finish message was displayed, leaving me to think something bad happened.
I don’t know if this behavior is general, or specific just to Fedora and other RPM-based distros, but it is very annoying: I can’t install an rpm while another rpm is being installed.
Editor’s note: This is a security feature of SELinux.
Updates seem to come very often. Unfortunately, after a round of updates I started to receive Kernel failure errors. Just my luck.
Newbie friendly
In order to do some of the basic things they are used to on Windows or Mac, new Linux users must be fairly tech-savvy. This is why the ‘newbie friendly’ factor is important in attracting new Linux users from the other operating systems.
Ubuntu emerged as the most easy and user-friendly Linux distribution. I can say Fedora is not that far behind, but I wouldn’t recommend it to someone completely new to Linux.
I agree with the consensus that Ubuntu is intended for the desktop, while Fedora, with its high degree of configuration and professional feeling is intended for developers, linux enthusiasts or server machines. Or NASA geeks.
Any Fedora users around? How was your experience?
hi i have fedora 10 i hate it cant do anything with it only surf the net wont my win xp back but will have to buy new hard drive first as i did,nt pertision for fedora 10
Hey Rom… good you have moved away from Windows but you made a wrong selection on Linux. I have spent more than 10 years using Linux and I'd suggest not to go for Fedora ever again till they fix the issues. What I recommend is go for Ubuntu or Mandriva or Suse as you alternative for Windows and you will be happiest person.
I've used RedHat from 6.1 all the way up to 9 and Fedora since 3 (after RedHat started the Enterprise line), and I have to disagree that Ubuntu is easier. I've had friends that have had simple things that they wanted to do, and often, Ubuntu and apt-get failed where yum and rpm succeeded.
As for why you can't install two RPMs at once, this is a feature, not a bug. It's intended to prevent files from conflict and the internal package database from being corrupted. This is necessary because RPMs are tracked by feature "provides", "conflicts" and "obsoletes", meaning that a package of a different name that provides the same functionality can easily be swapped in if the original package is deprecated.
Fedora 10 is by far one of the best releases of Fedora – it worked on my HP laptop immediately, with all features working (except for network, which needed ndiswrapper).
Tried Fedora in VirtualBox.
PackageKit really did not impress me, and I hope in it's current state it never replaces the update system Ubuntu currently has.
I personally use Linux Mint, very robust and elegant.
Nice Post.
I have upgraded from Fedora 9 to 10 (using the preupgrade utility) and Fedora 10 seems pretty well polished. The two things that I am annoyed with are:
1.) When creating users, it's hard to tell what groups I need to put them in, for being able to use the machine like a normal computer. (i.e., there are groups like users, audio, ssh, mail, etc.).
2.) The update/package management utility in Fedora has been "dumbed down" too much. For example: in Ubuntu, when install updates/packages, you can click the "details" arrow and see the CLI I/O of the package installation progress. Something I've always liked about GNU/Linux is that you can turn on/off the display verbosity of anything that's going on with the computer (e.g., strace), which enables the user of the computer with powers that are not available in other OSes. GNU/Linux has nothing to hide from the user, and by "dumbing down" the output of a GUI utility, I think this goes against what GNU/Linux stands for.
I tested Fedora 10 last week on my old Toshiba M200 tablet. Everything worked out of the box. I was never happier. Before I had Ubuntu LTS running on the maschine. Fedore feels more smooth to me.
> Every time I tried to install a downloaded rpm package, I was greeted
> with some annoying warning messages and had to click “Copy File” and
> “Force Install”.
In both cases what you're describing is a security feature. As you yourself have observed, "security is one of the most important features in Fedora", and advanced security features are enabled by default.
>As mentioned, because of Gnome, Fedora looked very much like Ubuntu.
Ahh, then you are missing out. While both Fedora and Ubuntu ship with GNOME as the default, I recently tried KDE with Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 8.10. It looks like Fedora has tried to make KDE a part of the family, while it's just sort of out there with Ubuntu. I much prefer KDE to GNOME, and Fedora makes setting KDE up a lot easier, especially if you choose to install it with Anaconda.
> To get the software that Fedora Project did not want to ship you need to install RPM Fusion.
This isn't that hard at all. In fact, you can set it up through Anaconda, and it's a lot easier for somebody not in love with the console
>> Every time I tried to install a downloaded rpm package, I was greeted
>> with some annoying warning messages and had to click “Copy File” and
>> “Force Install”.
> In both cases what you're describing is a security feature. As you yourself have observed, "security is
> one of the most important features in Fedora", and advanced security features are enabled by default.
Yup, that's it. I believe that this is done to verify the package's integrity and that the package the source tried to send to you wasn't intercepted and changed en route.
That was great.
A Fedora article that didn't compare it to Ubuntu…
OOPS, you just did.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "at once". If you do rpm -Uvh *.rpm each of the files are installed one after the other. I.e. they are not installed concurrently, meaning that you would not be able to start the installation of another set of rpms while the first is still running.
As for the "Do you want to copy this file?" dialog, I agree with the auther. This is annoying fedora should just create some temporary folder in /tmp, do the copying and continue with the installation without asking. There are a lot of programs that creates temp files and folders without asking why should this be different.
The no signature dialog is probably a good thing though, you should really only download stuff from places that you trust, and if that place is serious about providing packages they will have a signature of their own. Once you have told fedora that this signature is trusted there will be no more bitching about this.
Fedora 10 will be very nice, in two or three months when the bleeding edge features have got some more bug fixes. My advice is, by all means use Fedora it is a very nice distro but don't upgrade to the latest version until it have been out a few months. If you handle it that way, you probably get the best Linux experience you can get.
In spite of the above, I install Fedora 10 on an old Thinkpad R50e laptop. It seam to work all right with the exception that 3D accelleration doesn't work. So no compiz on that box. The other problem is that suspend to ram doesn't work (resume fails). This is the case on any Linux distro that uses the Intel Xorg drivers for Intel855GM so this was no surprise and not really Fedoras fault. However, the error looks a bit more promising than usual. This time the screen doesn't just remain black, but actually seam to resume for a split second, just to go back to suspend again. My guess is that they actuall are close to solving this.
Other than that, Fedora is a very nice distro, I'm really looking forward to Red Hat 6 that most likely will have most of the features of Fedora 10 and perhpas some of Fedora 11, in a bug fixed and stable form.
It's just the "fresh install" smell… lol
Linus just fixed the suspend issue, see this: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/12/life-…
They just provided an update to the Intel Xorg drivers, so now compiz works just fine. Thanks Fedora!
In my experience, suspend resume probably have more than one bug, so it remains to be seen if this actually fixes my problem. So, I'll wait to celebrate until I actually see it work, but one more dead bug is always a good thing. Keep up the good work Linus!
How is not being able to install two RPMs at once a feature? Anytime a multi-tasking multi-user operating system simply refuses to do what you ask it is a bug. The RPM "database" is a bit too finicky with its single access model. It would be a feature if the RPM system serialized dependent transactions and erred only there were truly a problem.
I'm also a long time redhat fedora user (since redhat 5.1).
You can definitely install multiple rpm files at once.
Run "rpm -Uvh *.rpm" in a directory with multiple rpms, if the dependencies are met it will work fine.
If you don't have the dependencies installed, you can have yum install the local rpms and check the repos to find them.
ATI/AMD is a little behind the times, as usual. The proprietary fglrx driver does not currently work on Fedora 10. Hopefully this is a minor incompatibility with the new X server/kernel and will be fixed soon. The free X.org driver fortunately does support acceleration on a lot of chips.
Hope you have also looked at: http://www.cenolan.com/2008/11/installing-fedora-…
As root, do the following to change the startup… it will be MUCH better than before.
plymouth-set-default-plugin solar
/usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd
My university uses Fedora 9, they have the whole slow update problem, which is fine for servers but on our desktops it's getting quite annoying having bugs which you know have been fixed but just aren't available. I hope they upgrade to 10 but its taken years to get to 9 and that only happened at the begining of this year so it's unlikely.
I use Ubuntu on my own computers but when I've learnt to do more from the command line I'll try out other distros, the main thing that holds me back is being too reliant on knowing certain GUIs
Exactly yum is a big problem in Fedora. Ubuntu/Debian are simply breez when it comes to software installations. Also Fedora seems lot bolted. I hate when yum takes minutes when asked to install package and at the end prompts "Nothing to do!"
I'm using Ubuntu since 6.04. But I developed a little game on Fedora (I forgot which release) with KDE (it was KDE 3.something) at the university, it was a stable and very cool system too. So I don't have many Fedora experiences, but for the class it was more than enough.
I prefer Ubuntu fonts and package manager apt. Fedora has great tools though. From and Ubuntu box.
I've been using Fedora over Ubuntu since FC6, and while probably my best experience came with Fedora 8, Fedora 10 is definitely a great OS. If gnome isn't really your thing, just install KDE 4.1, I'm a big fan of it. Also, you can use yum to install yumex, which is very similar to the synaptic package manager found in ubuntu. The only real draw back I have with Fedora 10 is the same gripe I had with 9, 3D acceleration on ATI video cards doesn't work because the ATI driver fails to install correctly, the fix is to downgrade the xserver to the fedora 8 version. However, it's not really a big issue for me, since i use fedora mostly for programming in java and c/c++.
I’m torn between Ubuntu (latest release), and Fedora 10. Fedora 10 worked immediately on my HP DV9500 laptop. Of course no MP3 support, but that was fixed quickly.
‘Had to install Adobe Flash (beta x64), for both Ubuntu and Fedora.
I think Ubuntu works REALLY well for non-techno savy folks.
I like them both.
Both articles were great!
Good article. I was looking to check out a few different distros. I'll keep following your articles seeing how you like them.
If only Ubuntu had the security options and SELinux in its Kernel things would be great. Ubuntu could use a little more Security.
I disagree because GUI does not have to equal "dumb user". The purpose of a GUI is to maximize functionality in a graphical way, which has nothing to do with hiding "everything" from the user. A good GUI will be visually appealing enough, and provide the maximum amount of information that the user CHOOSES to have displayed. Contrary to the Micros0ft manual for dumbing down the user, progress bars are a real pain. Now a progress bar with the option of also showing detailed information, now that's more like it. My point is, we all spend entirely too much time watching progress bars!! Use the progress bar time to teach the user something, that's what I say. Besides, watching just a plain progress bar with no other detail actually makes the task seem like it takes longer. At the very least, give the user the choice, like Ubuntu does. CHOICE is paramount, I just don't see how you can argue with that if you are a GNU/Linux user.
Good article. I was looking to check out a few different distros. I'll keep following your articles seeing how you like them.
Both articles were great!!!
For me, I deliberately choose to use Ubuntu on my laptop and Fedora with KDE on my desktop.
I’ve used RedHat since v5, then Fedora Core from 3 to the current Fedora versions. Ubuntu I’ve been using since 6.06.
Both have pros and cons, but Fedora is certainly more flexible. Ubuntu used to have more polish, but recent incidents of regression and architecture change for no discernible good reason make it disappointing at times.
Truth is, both are true blue linux, so with a bit of a clue and some tweaking, both can do amazing things. Both can certainly replace windows while maintaining or improving productivity.
Since about 2005 I decided to attempt to ween myself off OSX as my GUI of choice and little by little Gnome and KDE & the linux kernel have delivered a complete alternative. I still keep up my proficiency in OSX, but don’t really need it, and prefer the honesty of linux.
For those who don’t mind knowing more, I recommend using both Fedora and Ubuntu.
OSX is optional and windows is a waste of your life as it doesn’t have a package manager and hence 98% of windows PCs are vulnerable to attack according to Secunia.
If you really want verbosity like a pro user then install the package from the command like a pro user. The whole point of the GUI "is" to dumb down the installation experience in the first place.
I think there is a huge confusion going on there. I think what you idiots are bickering about is running multiple instances of YUM. Installing RPMs at once is a different issue altogether. Actually even then only one RPM is installed at a time.
fully agree…
I disabled SELinux right away. Don't need it, and it can sometimes cause conflicts you'll mistake for something else. Ran kubuntu for two years, but the Fedora 10 DVD allows you to really set up your machine in one shot with tons of apps. Unlike kubuntu 8.10, Fedora 10 was only one of two distros that setup my ATI RadeonHD drivers during install (sidux was the other). KDE is not only well integrated, but tweaked for stability. Like the author, hardware and power management was flawless, which I've never achieved among the Ubuntu family on my three machines.
I highly recommend Fedora 10, and that's coming from a natural cynic.
Have all three of the big dogs up and running on my systems now – Ubuntu 8.10 (on HP Laptop), Ubuntu 8.04.1 (on my server), and Fedora 10 (on gaming rig) and I am very pleased with all of them. I think Ubuntu 8.04.1 blows them all away, but Fedora 10 comes a very close second to it, with Ubuntu 8.10 just barely edged into third place. Really, all three are phenomenal distro’s, and it clearly is a testament to how far Linux has come on the Desktop. For new users, Ubuntu is absolutely the way you should be going at first, but when you have cut your teeth and learned some things about Linux, then move on to one of the other Distros like Fedora, SUSE, ARCH Linux, Gentoo, or even Slackware. Its a journey that ends with both you and your computers much much happier!
That was great.
A Fedora article that didn't compare it to Ubuntu…
OOPS, you just did…
They just provided an update to the Intel Xorg drivers, so now compiz works just fine. Thanks Fedora!!
Good article. I was looking to check out a few different distros. I’ll keep following your articles seeing how you like them..
Hey. Don't forgett to supersize your fedora! With this easy adjustable skript:
http://www.suvi.org/theory/linux_fedora_supersize…
You get all the stuff you want, like MP3-Support, Movieplayer, FTP-Client, good working 3D Driver. So you can have your eye-candi as well. Cheers.
????? ???????? ????, ???????!!
Works good on my iMac minus the iSight camera displaying green. Known bug in gstreamer that no one seems in a hurry to fix.
I tried installing fedora core 12 on my MacBook 5,1 and when the machine booted i got a folder with a question make on it. Can any of you offer any help and insight?