Fedora Linux 12
Sound and Multimedia
I popped in my usual test DVD (the old Superman cartoons) and noticed that it didn’t play. I got an error message when I tried to open the movie player. Youtube videos also did not play by default as Flash was not installed in Firefox. If you do a search for Flash in the Add/Remove software tool you will find a number of different options for adding it to your Fedora 12 system.
Problems & Headaches
I was somewhat surprised not to find GIMP or OpenOffice.org available as part of the default installation. When I looked under the Office section of apps neither was present. Both are pretty much a must-have on a desktop version of Linux like Fedora 12 and their absence was glaring, to say the least.
When I started the Add/Remove software tool to find these apps and install them, it took about 15 seconds for tool to refresh the package lists. There was a visual cue that told me that it was starting but no progress bar or anything like that. I found this to be somewhat disconcerting as I expected to click on a category and see packages available without having to refresh the list or do anything else. I wasn’t sure if I was seeing some kind of bug or malfunction until packages finally started to appear in each category.
After the package list refreshed, I found OpenOffice.org and GIMP and installed both of them. I liked the fact that OpenOffice.org was broken down into each app, I opted to install the word processor part of it and skip the rest.
Beyond that and the multimedia issues I noted above, I didn’t find too much in the way of problems with Fedora 12. For the most part this seems to be a pretty polished release.
(9 votes, average: 2.78 out of 5)
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How is it with netbooks? I saw on the website that it has optimizations for Atom processors.
FWIW, I have had problems with the last 2 Fedora releases on my Compaq Presario (Athlon/nvidia). For me, if I can’t make Compiz work AT ALL, then a distro isn’t up to snuff. OTOH, Fedora works great on my Dell Latitude D810 with Intel video. I guess it’s just a matter of proprietary drivers but c’mon… I LOVED Fedora 10 (that blue flaming globe during startup ruled!) and Compiz worked on it once I jumped through a few hoops… why not now? It took me hours to even get the nvidia drivers installed on f12, only to find that Compiz either white-screens or leaves you without titlebars. I know this is off topic… sorry… as a final digression I’ll just mention how much I despise grub2.
I installed Fedora 12 KDE and it’s been working nicely. It included KOffice 1.6 instead of OpenOffice or Abiword.
It should come as no surprise that Flash and DVDs don’t work out-of-the-box as with most major Linux distributions they cannot (legally) include these pieces. It takes a moment to install it, but it isn’t a killer.
On the plus side, my Broadcom wireless card was recognized and available out-of-the-box in Fedora 12! A First! No need to use fwcutter or anything to slice-and-dice the proprietary drivers! This alone is a feature I hope the other distributions include!
Ran Gnome version in VM Ware Player under Vista. It did install in about 5 minutes. Only minor hickup was when it gave me an error and said it had to “reinitialize” the hard disk. I said OK and install proceeded without a hitch. I use VM Ware Player exclusively now as I am able to change video resolutions at will. Virtual Box still has not figured this out yet. I am running VM’s at my laptops native 1280×800 res. regardless of distro.
Running the Gnome LiveCD right now on the laptop. Wireless had to be set up manually, but it did work(Atheros). I also like the fact that it includes only the essentials. I can do all the photo work I need on Gthumb, including light editing. All I had to add was Gnumeric, K3B, and Wine. It still makes me wonder though, with such a minimal compliment of preinstalls, how did they still get to 694mb?
Oh well, still a very fine effort. It seems as if Fedora is finally getting in the game. Ubuntu should be very worried. I for one, am switching to Fedora on my desktop machine, and will run it in VM on the laptop under Vista until I can do a bit more stand alone testing. After that, it may replace Vista on the laptop. Unfortunately Ubuntu has lost me with their failure to support my laptop video and other oddities since version 9.04. They finally got wireless right, but that is about all.
My one issue is the recommendation to beginners. While the tech oriented will be able to add the RPMfusion repo and acquire multimedia codecs as well as video drivers, the system is not intuitive to those un-familiar with Linux in general.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Fedora in theory (though I hate their package management), but there are many distros ahead of Fedora that I would recommend to beginners.
Install speed from the live CD is very fast because it’s just cloning a filesystem image – the same one the live environment uses – onto your hard disk. Installation from the traditional installer (DVD, or a net install) will be somewhat slower, as it actually installs a whole set of RPM packages as you’d expect.
The live CD is somewhat light on software because of space issues. Fedora ships a very large range of languages on its live CDs which reduces the space available for software, so there isn’t room for OO.o. For F13 we’re probably going to introduce a 1GB or 2GB size live spin, which you could burn to a DVD or write to a USB stick. That will allow us to include software that doesn’t fit on the current live images.
Fedora has been my distribution for my servers since FC1, but sadly they have dropped support for Via C3 in F12. Looking for an alternative…
Jim, I think that Fedora has great software, and it is particularly useful for those who fall into one of these categories: 1) enterprise user who is evaluating future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases and wants to help make them as solid as possible. 2) Free software enthusiast who wants a pure, or as close to pure, Linux experience as possible; Fedora delivers. 3) Those who want to use or evaluate the very latest in Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) features. Fedora leads here as well. 4) Those who want the latest virtualization features; again Fedora is a leader.
I cannot, however, recommend any Fedora release to a beginner unless they are a self driven beginner. The Free Software stance alone is enough to keep people away. I am sure that Adam will howl about this, but the last couple of releases, while very much leading edge, have not been the models of stability or ease of installation because there have been a number of impediments that a large number of people have complained about.
That does not make Fedora (any version) a lousy release; it is a leader in quite a few respects, as I have highlighted. I just think it is best for the experienced user, one who will use it, test it, evaluate it, and report back on findings. I have done so many times in the past; unfortunately for me, this is not one of those times, for I feel it does require an investment in time, both to take advantage of it, scope out potential issues and their solutions, report defects to help improve it, etc., and right now, I just cannot devote much time to those things.
I wouldn’t push people away from Fedora, but I would hesitate to recommend it to a beginner without at least bringing up its strengths and weaknesses. It has a LOT of strengths; it has a few weaknesses – the cutting edge nature sometimes reveals things unexpected that the user community finds after release. Based on my own experiences with Fedora 7,8,9,10, and 11, (I think I liked 7 and 10 best, but had a horror of an experience with 11 Final after a great initial Live experience with 11 Alpha), I would leave this one to the veterans.
Fedora is a good distro but you need to install manually the Flash plugin and the “libdvdcss”.If a beginner wants to try Fedora I suggest this “installation guide”:
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f12.html
That’s a good distro for newbies users. But the main point here is that Fedora has turned into the new XZ compression packages…and Slackware was the first Linux distro to turn into XZ (LMZA) compression… Follow Slackware and someday it will be a high-level distro, perhaps.