Fedora 13 review

June 04, 2010 — BarryK

I don't make it a habit of knocking other distros. But, I was planning to download the latest from Fedora, and this comment from Ladislav really put me off:

I downloaded the KDE live edition of Fedora 13 and burned it to a CD. Unfortunately, things got off to a rough start. I kicked off my test drive by trying Fedora on my HP laptop (dual-core 2.5 GHz CPU, 3 GB of RAM, Intel video card) and found the boot process was a bit slow. Upon reaching the live desktop environment, I found my laptop operating at a crawl. Opening simple applications, such as a terminal window, would take about twenty seconds. A quick (or not so quick) check showed no desktop effects were enabled and I shut down all unneeded services. A little poking around showed X was taking up about 80% or more of my CPU while nothing was happening visually and more cycles were used while opening or moving windows. Trying different video configurations and turning off kernel mode setting didn't improve the situation.

This wasn't a complete surprise as my laptop had the same problem when running Fedora 12. What did surprise me were other regressions in hardware recognition. Recent versions of Fedora had properly detected and made use of my Intel wireless card and my Novatel mobile modem automatically. Such was not the case this time around; my wireless card wasn't picked up and my mobile modem required some tweaking to get it to work. My laptop's touchpad, as with prior releases, didn't detect taps as mouse clicks. I believe this is to keep in line with upstream settings, a policy which I would applaud if it didn't require manually editing text files to provide the same experience almost every other Linux distribution provides out of the box.

At first things didn't seem to be going much better on my desktop machine (2.5 GHz CPU, 2 GB of RAM, NVIDIA graphics card) where booting from the live CD took eight minutes to get from GRUB to the desktop. However, once I arrived at the desktop, performance was good and about on par with other modern KDE 4 live environments. I also found that my desktop was set to a reasonable resolution and sound worked out of the box. As a result, most of my testing going forward was done on the desktop PC.

Extract from:
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20100531

Even on his desktop PC, the one that performed better, it took 8 minutes to get to the desktop!

I was thinking of adding support in Woof for building Puppy from Fedora packages.

Comments

F13
Username: Sage
Ladislav had better luck than me; it wouldn't boot on any of my nV boxes until I added vga=normal to the boot line. Best to get these things on-screen with a basic VESA drive, no more than 800x600 probably, install it then make the necessary changes. Anyone tried the BFO install yet?"4 Jun 2010, 24:11"01644"89.243.182.198'spins"dionicio"spins.fedoraproject.org lxde spin. needs 3Gb on hard disk. fast and responsive. decent on memory. just for fun. :)"5 Jun 2010, 5:18"01644"148.202.68.205'fedora lxde on Eee 701"dionicio"Just for fun I installed it on an Eee 701 1.9 Gb root an 0.1 Gb swap. Solid State. Partitioning with Quirky. (flaging boot too) Ataching an USB dvd drive. Guesing out of sight OK buttons... (Alt+O). No fuss. No glimps. Beautiful blue, from startup up to desktop. 130 Mb free on / at end. Updating would bring it useless. It is a "lean and beauty" distro. If of big ones we are talking. :) Username: 5 Jun 2010, 5:34
"01644"148.202.68.205'Full Install"lwill"I would love to see Fedora support! Used it since FC2. I just installed F13 on two P4HT machines a few weeks ago, both are used to run MythTV. Both have Nvidia cards for DVI output to HD TV's (Geforce 7600 and 8400) running Nvidia binary driver. No major problems. I run F12 on my general use machine (also P4). Soon to upgrade. I previously tested the live disks and was never impressed, very slow. They are ok for demo, but not for use. The main complaint I have is that they do not include ANY programs in their repo if they are not FULL GPL, you have to use third party ones for Nvidia, MP3, firmware images, etc. Second is that they drop support after two versions so you are always upgrading. Doing full install (and then yum update) takes quite a while, but I have no complaints about speed, usability, or stability. Very rarely I get in RPM hell (had to downgrade a default (python?) installed package to install MythTV, but it has so many dependencies) All that said, Puppy is my all purpose experimenting, fix-it, and demo disk."5 Jun 2010, 5:37"01644"70.131.104.173'No problems with Fedora"BoscoBearbank"Don't let Ladislav's results deter you from trying it yourself. YMMV. Mine did. I've been running Fedora 13 since before the branch from Rawhide. I installed the default GNOME version, then the XFCE spin, and finally the LXDE spin on my desktop PC; on the netbook I run the LXDE spin. In all cases, installation went smoothly and quickly. Speed is (subjectively) comparable to the corresponding Ubuntu derivative, but not as fast as Puppy. Everything seems to just work. Username: 5 Jun 2010, 7:17
"01644"68.115.108.100'Fedora / Mandriva / PCLinux"ozsouth"I recently got a cheap new Compaq C61, native resolution 1366x768. Couldn't get full display on any Puppy bar Lupu 500 (it had other issues), so I tried Fedora 12 (slow), Mandriva one (very slow) and PCLinuxOS 2010 Mini (good). Under PCLOS, almost all the Compaq's functions worked, and it uses a bfs kernel, which apparently makes use of multicore CPUs. Definitely my other OS choice."5 Jun 2010, 15:11"01644"60.241.74.39'prior FC user"q5sys"I used to use Fedora before I found my way to puppy. I liked it, but I started getting very frustrated at the massive bloat. Looking for a slimmer OS is what led me to Puppy. Yes, Fedora does not including any repos that are not full GPL is mildly annoying, but its an easy enough fix. I would be rather interested in woof-fedora build possibility."6 Jun 2010, 3:13"01644"72.23.213.122'Fedora & Woof"Dougal"I looked into using Fedora last week and it's a real mess: Rather than having a file named "packages.txt", it has a hash in the name (be70ac9e1031fd34222b2ec6cc8a337bc6fabd1d06969990955c5f358d138e35-primary). On top of that, it's a damned XML file, which makes it harder to parse from a shell script. While that can be solved with a bit of sed and grep trickery, there's also the problem of dependencies being listed by the actual library name (eg. libpthread.so.0) rather than package name (glibc) and to top that off, you have multiple equivalent dependencies (like "libpthread.so.0(GLIBC_2.0)" and "libpthread.so.0(GLIBC_2.1)"). They also seem to have the packages all together (Fedora 11+12+13). Here's an example file if you want to have a look: http://mirror.isoc.org.il/pub/fedora/releases/13/Everything/i386/os/repodata/be70ac9e1031fd34222b2ec6cc8a337bc6fabd1d06969990955c5f358d138e35-primary.xml.gz Username: 6 Jun 2010, 24:22
"01644"109.66.31.231'Re: Dougal"q5sys"Dougal, eh? Not sure what you mean, but if you're looking for a complete package list have you tried: yum list all > packages.txt with the other switches: whatprovides, resolvedep, deplist, provides, grouplist, etc You should be able to script whatever."7 Jun 2010, 7:10"01644"72.23.213.122'

Tags: puppy