Fedora

like?/dislike?

[RainMaker]

Soon I am going to be developing a game engine to run on *nix like OS's as well with windows....Currently I am running slack 10 and I like it...very geeky and increases productivity...although I know that you can download Fedora now and wondered if anyone had any dislikes about the distro. especially for development.

[ergophobe]

25% through the download now, which takes forever on my quad-channel ISDN :-(

I sure hope it's worth it.

[outrun]

Firstly im comparing with Redhat 9.

I upgraded to fedora and the only reason I didn't stick with it because I couldnt not improve the font quality in Fedora (after trying for many many hours) like I could with Redhat 9, and as Im typing and reading a lot I dont like the default font rendering for smaller fonts (16 and smaller) under normal installations of redhat 9 and Fedora.

Other then that if you use KDE as your desktop manager its runs a lot smoother and faster then the KDE that comes with Redhat 9, for me anyway.

regards
Mark

[bartek]

s-l-o-w, even on a fast machine and needs a lot of tweaking to bring it to a usable state. Ditched it and went back to Gentoo. Installs pretty easy though... (Anything installs pretty easy compared to Gentoo). #1 annoyance - RedHat habits of keeping things in non-default places - if you've used other distros can be a while before you get used to it.
hth

[ergophobe]

Hmmm... I wasn't planning to install on a fast machine, but on a Ahlon Thunderbird 750MHz with 512MB of RAM.

Instead of installing Fedora and then trying to tweak it, would it just be less headache to install something else (Gentoo?)?

The last linux distro I ran was Caldera Open Linux 2.4 (before it became Caldera Unopen Linux) on an old machine that I ended up giving to an elderly aunt. That was way back in the 1900s.

Tom

[ogletree]

We just installed mandrake. Have not played with it much.

[bartek]

My linux box is a 3200+ Athlon XP, 1Gb RAM (400), 80GB WD (8Mb buffer), GeForce Ti 4200 sitting in a Gigabyte GA-7VT600. I think I had KDE by default (big mistake) and installed Gnome out of curiosity as I haven't used it in a long time. Both were laggy and slow as an all-around, everyday desktop.

As I don't typically use RedHat, I couldn't find anything. Out of frustration I installed Gentoo on it with Windowmaker, xfce4 and Enlightenment and still can't decide which one to use :)

If you are going to be using it for development work, perhaps you'll find it better - I don't like the noticably slower responding desktop (compared to Gentoo) and the "everything + the kitchen sink" Fedora installation approach.
hth

[encyclo]

Hmmm... I wasn't planning to install on a fast machine, but on a Ahlon Thunderbird 750MHz with 512MB of RAM.

As I mentioned in another thread [webmasterworld.com] today, I run some elderly kit and I would consider the machine you describe as fast. Fedora should run just fine on it - but the speed is not really to do with the underlying distro, but on the choice of window manager. KDE is getting faster, but is still very slow on our kind of machines. Gnome is a bit better, but still hard work if you are running more than a few apps at the same time.

Personally, I'm on the point of switching distros and moving to Debian. The "testing" branch, codename Sarge, is literally a couple of weeks from becoming the new "Stable" branch. That means Debian stability, really easy management with apt-get and a huge repository, and the availability of some of the latest packages such as the 2.6.7 kernel. You can get the Release Candidate 1 of the new installer here:

[debian.org...]

If you have a router with DHCP and a broadband connection, you can use the 110Mb netinstall CD and then build a minimalist, fast and personalized system. As for the window manager, I use XFCE 4 [xfce.org] exclusively. However, the file manager for XFCE is awful, so I would recommend installing Gnome as well, then using Nautilus (the Gnome file manager) within XFCE. (Hint - use the command "

nautilus --no-desktop

" to run!)

[ergophobe]

Thanks for the tip. I might try that. I doubt I can do the net install (my quad ISDN is only 256kb) but I might try it.

speed is not really to do with the underlying distro

I understand that I can change window managers, but different distros will install different things by default and if one has a better default install, that saves me headaches.

I read the other thread RE your slow machine. In general, I'm not a gamer, so I don't need speed. If the computer would chug along annoyingly in Fedora (or Debian), it would be... annoying. But mostly I'm opening a few apps and typing typing typing, which doesn't require huge horsepower usually. If I can run a browser, a word processor and simple text editor, I'll be happy.

Thanks again,

Tom