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Thursday, 28 December 2006 |
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I was building a Linux machine at work to test VMWare on as well as use for my main workstation. I decided to give Fedora Core 6 a try. This is my opinion of Fedora Core 6 after a day and a half of use...
Yum seems ok once you get past the proxy mess, but the updater and software installer are dog slow. (K)Ubuntu's such a dream with apt-get and Adept Package Manager! Not only are Fedora's GUI update and software manager slow, but they also lack the software I want and need, like DrPython! I guess there's a non-standard repo somewhere? I also dislike the way it is setup, like I need all the software split into limited categories. Eitherway, I went forward.
While trying to get the proxy work with Yum I find their docs tell me things like, "use su -c". BS, that command proceeds with an error so I just used good ol' su. Their docs yielded no results on the proxy issue so I finaly figured it out on my own. I don't setup Linux machines in big environments often so bare with me.
To get global proxy connections I set this in home/user_name/bash_profile, this is the way to go for me since I don't have anyone else using this box:
export http_proxy="http://proxy_username:
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:80"
This did not work for Yum though. To get Yum working I added this to the end of etc/yum.conf file:
proxy="http://proxy_username:
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:80"
Magically it started working. I guess I will ignore the GUI proxy configuration tool next time. It was a waste of time.
So now I decided to setup Evolution, which was already installed, but after updating my system with Yum I got an Evolution that had no icons! Worked fine before the update! Not a big deal, I installed Gnome since I wanted to see if it would be faster anyway. That fixed the icons, but the connector does not work, which should allow me to use Evolution with Exchange web mail. I gave up on that one and settled for pop until I get time to look into it.
So after losing things on the panel that I added the night before and not being able to find features, that are in most KDE Linux systems these days, I decided to install VMWare. Now this was messy! I loaded the kernel headers and when VMWare installer got there they didn't exist. So I had to manually copy everything in /usr/src/kernels/your_kernel_version.fc6-i686 to usr/src/linux. Tried again and it bombed during the compile stating it could not find config.h! What the hell?
I found config.h in /usr/src/kernels/your_kernel_version.fc6-i686/include/config/i2o/config.h and I manually copied that, if I remember correctly, to /usr/src/include/linux/
Finally it compiled and VMWare is running. I can't complain too much as Windows 2003 runs very well on the 1.8ghz with 1.5gb ram.
Now for the good points. Fedora looks nice, has lot of rpm suuport on the internet, and Samba works great out of the box. I am going to stick with it until we get our new machines then it will be Kubuntu or Suse all the way. If you want a more corporate Linux give OpenSuse or Mandriva a try, unless you have a fast CPU and use Gnome. Fedora really just isn't cutting edge compared to (K)Ubuntu Edgy to me so I would suggest at least giving Kubuntu or Ubuntu a look over. |
