Fedora Core 6

[KrazyHorse]

Just installed it on my home computer (was tired of having to ssh into work to do ****)



Painless install, it autodetected my sound and video cards, it autoinstalled everything I need for what I want to do in Linux.

This is the first time I've seen Linux just ****ing work without me having to go look up some obscure error message.

[KrazyHorse]

26 views and no replies? Interesting.

[Hueij]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
26 views and no replies? Interesting.

Hey, we are all upstanding, taxpaying citizens so we all use Windows. Are you a terrorist maybe?

[Pekka]

Talking about Fedora, I had no problems with.. Fedora 4... pretty much no errors. Also tried Debian, the legendary installers nightmare like a year ago, the only problem I encountered was with my graphics card but that was well documented so it was easily fixed. Then again, if one has little experience with computers, as in only plays, uses the internet etc.. that can turn out to be mission impossible.

So I can't give it full credits because of that, my card was and is pretty generic one after all. I do like Linux in some ways more and it's open design, however it will challenge Windows only after the installation becomes as easy, and it IS an important factor that it has to be easy for it to be considered an OS that truly challenges Windows. I mean, you don't get an OS to work the OS itself, unless you want to tweak it or do something else, which many Linux users do, so it's not a problem for them.

But it must be as usable as Windows in terms of newbies getting into it. Then it challenges Windows in my opinion.

Now it's becoming more.. sophisticated, some years ago they were all celebrating the 'easy install', but it depends who you are talking to. Most people don't know what a partition is or how to make one. So they include it in the install process, so what? most people still don't know what it is or what happens, but they get the sense that if they screw this up, something will break up. It was an easy install for experienced computer users who knew more than your average user, an average user couldn't really get around the requirements part either. They might know they have x amount of memory but that's about it. Then there's talk about all kinds of chipsets etc.. people don't know what that means!

So when you promote easy install, that is one key factor in OS success obviously, you really need to go where Windows is going. That is, put in the CD, type in your name and CD key and that's it.

[KrazyHorse]

I don't know. FC6 was pretty simple. I had created the partition I wanted by hand before installation (just in case), but it seems as though the default options were pretty good. I did a dual boot install, and even that was completely painless. The installer even checked my BIOS to make sure I didn't run into the 1024 cylinder problem (I wasn't sure when that had been fixed, so I had shrunk my windows partition so that there was enough room for /boot at the beginning of the drive, but it turns out it wasn't necessary). I clicked maybe 3 buttons during the install, and two of them were because I had (at some point in the past) changed the boot order to go from floppy->cd->hard to floppy->hard->cd

Also, when did gfortran replace g77?

[Pekka]

I said I had no problems with Fedora 4 It was pretty advanced then.. so it's even better now I'd suppose

[KrazyHorse]

Honestly, while the install of the actual OS could be a little bit harder than a Windows install (assuming you wanted to do the simplest thing), it gets made up for by the fact that all the utilities get installed for you. I'm talking drivers, compilers, editors, music players that don't suck, etc. I clicked three buttons, waited 20 minutes, set a root password and a user account name/password and was online 20 seconds later.

[Pekka]

Definitely. Also, you still have the benefits of Linux OS, the original benefits you wanted.

I see open model and Microsoft as a positive battle. I like the battle. It forces Microsoft to compete. They can deny they see Linux as their competition, but they know it's a competition so they need to develop their systems further and further to keep the edge.

Linux, on the other hand, they come and they be better all the time.

To me, this is about competition, getting better systems, getting more options, I think this is extremely positive. I hope neither side loses.

[KrazyHorse]

I was actually frightened by how easy the dual boot thing was.

My default is set to windows. If this thing stays as easy as it is, I might just change that.

[Jon Miller]

Hmm, maybe I will try this out next weekend.

JM

[KrazyHorse]

Just to let you know, they give you the option of installing a bare bones OS plus any of the three following options

a) Office products (openoffice, gcalc, GIMP etc)
b) Software development tools (compilers, editors, python, etc)
c) Web hosting tools (don't know what they meant here)

The default was just a

I clicked b and left c off. The install took ~6 gigs, which is smaller than I'd thought.

I might shrink the Linux partition a little bit, because it now has ~9 gigs free while the Windows partition only has ~6 gigs free. Both can share the external hard drive (250 gigs)

[Eroberer]

I did a couple FC6 installs myself, because I had fuxored two of my FC5 installations and I didn't feel like trying to figure out how (just trying out random programs). The beautiful new feature of FC6 installations is that you can connect to the internet and download programs from the repositories from the very beginning. That is, you not only have what's on the CD or DVD, but you can go out to the Fedora Core repositories and install those packages as well. Very convenient.

To add to KH's last word, you can customize your installation from the DVD, adding and subtracting packages from the get go. Those three default installations are pretty good, though.

Also, for those who didn't know, the Ubuntu Linux distribution (btw, Ubuntu is in the Firefox spelling dictionary...) installs via a LiveCD. That is, you plop the CD in and it'll boot to the actual Ubuntu Linux distro. You can play around with it, and install it to your hard drive. So you can be playing a game or something while it's installing.

FC6 includes a lot of little programs that I use a lot, and I know all about yum and the package system. That's about the only reason I stick with FC, other than that it's usually a very polished and stable distro (FC5 and FC6 being the best).

[KrazyHorse]

Yeah. The yum thing is amazing. Didn't know about that until I googled it.

[KrazyHorse]

Okay. Now to install all the fortran libraries I need for work.

This, I can guarantee you, will not be fun.

[Eroberer]

Yup. It takes a while to get your mind around the fact that any open source software that you want usually resides in these online repositories, and all you have to do is do "yum install " and it's on your system, along with all the open source programs that it depends on to run, if any. If you want to talk about something that beats Windows hands down, that's it.