Review: Fedora 16 x64: Fedora Hat or Babies Bonnet?

 

As we have established since I started doing this whole journalism thing, I am an IT engineer by trade. I also discussed in my very first article how much experience I have with Linux. I’d like to think that I was at least good enough to do my mentor proud. So as a tribute to a great man, I decided to do a review on the latest version of his favorite Linux distribution: Red Hat’s Fedora Core 16.

Fedora Core is what Red Hat calls “the foundation for derivatives such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux”. Now, that quote does go on to say that Fedora is also the base for the one laptop per child project’s OS, which is admirable but not the point. What they meant to say, and in the past have said, is that Fedora Core is the beta test bed for RHEL and as such you are to expect issues in day to day use. That’s fine, I suppose, as long as I know what I’m getting into, but this time I find myself wondering if I have bitten off more than I can chew.

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The installation is pretty simple. You download the Live CD from the Fedora website, burn it to disc, drop it in, and reboot the PC (or in my case start the virtual machine). Once the pc has booted you’ll be presented with a KDE 4 based desktop (more on that later). As it’s a live cd you have the choice of trying everything out, and if you like, you can click the installer icon on the desktop. The installer itself is a proper KDE based application as opposed to most others I’ve seen which are raw Xorg X11 programs. This gives it a welcome, polished look which kind of distracts you from how simple the whole affair is. There is no option to choose which packages are installed, so you have to deal with that post installation when you should be getting to grips with where everything is and how to use the Fedora tool set.

By default, the installer wants to create an LVM (Logical Volume Manager), which has its advantages, but it can be difficult to manage, especially in situations where you need to access the file system from a different distribution. There are options to create a traditional partition setup and to create a custom scheme using the included partition manager. I chose a traditional partition setup because I was installing in a virtual machine. There isn’t much else to the installer. After the partition setup stage it goes straight to copying files to disk, and before you know it, it’s rebooting the system.

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[tab name = “First Impressions”]

The initial desktop is the standard KDE4 affair. Fedora use 4.7.4 and when compared to 4.8 on my openSUSE install, it’s starting to look a little dated, but KDE is a solid desktop environment in any form. The default colour scheme is blue with a grey taskbar panel at the bottom. The included is a bright seascape that I really did quite like. Another thing I like is that Fedora uses KDE’s configuration tool set for most of it’s core systems.

I didn’t like that flash wasn’t included even as an option. Fed even tried to persuade me to use an open source alternative. Also LibreOffice is not included by default, which is irritating. There are choices like this all over the place. Another example is Red Hat forces source compilation to take place in a specially created RPM build environment, which at best, is tricky to use. It also requires certain commands to be only run as root and others only as a normal user. This creates a need to constantly switch between them, and after a very short period of time, this becomes infuriating.

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[tab name = “Our Take”]

Fed is riddled with these problems. Part of it is because Red Hat wants Fedora to only include software licensed under the GPL, but worse it will not allow proprietary software to be host on it’s repositories, which makes it difficult to install some popular programs. Worse is that the 64 bit version of Apper (the package management software) has a known bug in it, which means it can’t deal with yum security certificates properly. This means you have to add repositories by hand, and if your new to Linux, this can be difficult. Also, because Fedora is the test bed for Cent OS and RHEL, it is very enterprise oriented in it’s structure, which overall makes it pretty hard to use.

And that is precisely Fedora’s problem. Pretty, comfortable to be around, and strangely comforting, but the entire time it’s walking around with a knife hidden behind it’s back.

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[tab name = “Install or Not”]

It is for this reason I wouldn’t recommend Fedora to a Linux newbie, but if you’re looking for a cheaper alternative to RHEL, and don’t want to use Cent., Fed should be your choice. If you’re looking for a more desktop/single machine friendly Linux distribution, you’re still better off going for either Ubuntu or openSUSE.

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[easyreview title=”Install or Not Scorecard” cat1title=”Features” cat1detail=”” cat1rating=”3.5″ cat2title=”Functionality” cat2detail=”” cat2rating=”2″ cat3title=”Performance” cat3detail=”” cat3rating=”4.5″ summary=””]