LonnieOlson

I decided to give [tag]Fedora[/tag] another try after a very long time of using and loving FreeBSD, Ubuntu, and Debian. I thought to myself that it’s continued popularity has to be a testament to it’s greatness. Perhaps it has improved over time.

I was initially turned off RPM based distributions long ago by the pain of dealing with dependencies, tracking down RPMs, and bloated default installs. I had given them up long since RedHat 8.0. Since then I have given half-assed efforts to look at them a couple of times. Once with FC3, and again with OpenSuse 10.1. Both times was immediately turned off by bloated installs and/or having to hack in apt and external repositories.

This time is going to be different. I am going to keep an open mind. Here are my thoughts as I progressed.

• I just downloaded the DVD image of Fedora Core 6 since my test machine has a DVD drive. I really like single CD installation sources, but maybe I won’t mind a single DVD.
• Why have the installation verify the medium by default. It is extremely rare to get even this far if your medium is somehow damaged. Lame defaults, not lame functionality.
• The installation program (anaconda) is extremely solid and professional looking. RedHat has always had good install programs. IMHO, the installation program isn’t that important, so whoop-de-do.
• The installation has a wonderful partition editor, it allows you to set up complex raids, and/or LVM. Wow! Best one I have ever seen.
• Install seems much quicker than I remeber. I always thought RPM based distros took forever. Perhaps it is because this system is so much faster than my previous test machines.
• Couldn’t boot Fedora. The installer didn’t give me the option to install the boot loader in the MBR of sdb so I picked sdb1. The FreeBSD boot manager couldn’t start it. Oh well, I just ran the rescue from the install disc, and installed grub manually into the MBR of sdb. All better boots fine. Not a problem with Fedora really, just a complicated setup on my end.
• Booted, finished the first boot install step. Holy cow. It properly detected my monitor’s native resolution. Sweet! I have a widescreen LCD with a native resolution of 1680×1050.
  
• Launched Firefox, clicked on the Fedora FAQ link. I learned that Fedora doesn’t install any non-free software. That is wonderful. Even Ubuntu installs a tainted kernel by default. I am so proud.
• I had a look at the xorg.conf and saw the smallest xorg configuration evar. There was no font, monitor, resolution, or mouse configuration info. xorg detected and made everything work perfectly. Is this a feature of xorg 7.1.1, or is this Fedora specific?
  
• Further exploration of the gui reveals all the standard Gnome-y goodness I come to love and expect from my distro.
• The "Add/Remove Programs" is slightly different from Ubuntu, but works just about as well.
• There is a lot of stuff installed by default, but not to the extreme like it used to.
• sudo is not setup by default. I really liked the way Ubuntu locks root, and uses sudo for everything. I had to assign myself to group wheel and enable sudo for the group manually.
• I wanted to install a few other basics I expect to have available. Some are already installed (rsync, mutt, sudo). Some are easily installed using yum (nmap). Some are nowhere to be found (tcpflow, tcptraceroute, etc). This is horrible. After some more reading and poking around I find that there are third parties that publish these packages. WTF! tcpflow and tcptraceroute should be in the Core repository, or at least in Extras. This is a total F$#! up. Why can’t the Fedora community come together and merge the Dag/Dries repository with the Extras repository. They can leave out the non-free stuff, but at least get the obvious stuff.
• On a side note, I think it is very funny that http://ftp.freshrpms.net/ is "Powered by" Debian. ROFL.

In summary, Fedora is no longer a distro to be detested. It’s dedication to Free Software; addition and focus on yum; use of new technology like xorg 7.1; and more conservative default install has made it usable, and almost recommendable. However, it’s repository is extremely lacking, and it needs more thought into default options for some things.