J_K9 @ Linux

Fedora Core 6 - A Cursory Glance (At What Looks Like A Great Distro)

October 26, 2006 on 7:07 pm | In Linux, Reviews, Distributions |

I downloaded Fedora Core 6 yesterday, and had a good couple of hours today (I’m on holiday) to test it out - so here’s what I think of it

The installation was fairly slow, as I opted to install all the applications on the disc. It took substantially longer than Ubuntu (this took about 25 minutes, in contrast to Ubuntu’s 10 minutes, but the latter brings far fewer applications than Fedora), but I think that it was worth it in the end. When I rebooted, I went through the standard configuration screens that most distributions have, and I was then greeted by a flashy GDM login screen. I typed in my details, and was swept away (as expected) to this:

What amazed me most was that it had automatically detected my graphics card and correctly configured the X server to use the ATi driver at my particular widescreen resolution. This is the first distribution which has done this all automatically (on this laptop, which has an ATi Mobility Radeon 9800) - I was shocked, to say the least.

As you can see, the desktop is clean and simple, just as it should be. I then moved onto the menus, applications and configurations:

Another good touch was renaming the applications to give a new user an idea of what the applications actually are. It’s no good giving a new user a menu with applications called “Mozilla Thunderbird” and “Ekiga” - if, on the other hand, those applications are given the titles “Email” and “IP Telephony, VoIP and Video Conferencing” respectively, the user will find it much easier to learn which application does what and will save some confusion. Something as simple of this can have a huge effect on end-user experience. They also have sub-captions, further descriptions in layman terms, as shown in the screenshot: Ekiga can be used to “Talk to people over the Internet”

That’s a screenshot of two administration panels (found in the System->Administration menu): Security Level and Firewall and Services. The Services panel is the large one on the left - this allows you to configure every daemon running on the system, be it cups, httpd or avahi-daemon (yes, Fedora even comes with Avahi!). As you can see, you can start, stop or restart each daemon, and the tickbox next to their names shows whether they are set to start on boot or not.

The Security Level and Firewall panel allows you to allow and disallow network access to services on demand, and provides a simple (if a little too simple) front-end to the iptables firewall that powers it. The SELinux tab allows you to change the SELinux setting from “Enforcing” (default) to “Permissive” or “Disabled”.^[1] It also allows you to modify the default SELinux policies via an easy-to-use checkbox interface. This is a panel that not many other distros bring, so kudos to the Fedora Core team for it.

All in all, I’m very pleased with Fedora Core 6. It seems like a very solid distribution, it’s easy and fun to use, and I’m damn pleased it automatically recognised my graphics card I haven’t tried it on the internet yet though, because my laptop’s network card is broken, so I can’t tell you what the package manager is like (or if any of the internet apps work) If any of you have managed to test it out on the network, please let me know.

^[1] - The difference between the “Enforcing” and “Permissive” SELinux settings

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So planning this distro to be your primary one?

Comment by E@zyVG — October 27, 2006 #
Using Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.7 on SuSE Linux
I must say that the installation of Fedora Core 6 has been a breeze, and on an older system at that! What I am most pleased with is remote printing. I do a lot of remote printing over a wireless network and the laptop was able to find the printer over the wireless network. In previous versions of Fedora, I always had to configure the /etc/cups/cupsd.conf file to do this but now, it works like a charm without any type of configuration. I believe that Fedora Core 6 is top notch!.

Comment by Jeffrey D. Yuille — October 27, 2006 #
Using Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.7 on Fedora Linux
I installed FC6 the day after it came out as my primary operating system, replacing Ubuntu 6.10 beta at that position. For now, I haven’t had any hardware problems with it, and it looks very, very nice. Fedora recognized my Radeon X300 correctly out of the box and even the AIGLX + Compiz effects were ready to use.

Yum, the package manager, isn’t as fast as Debian’t Apt but otherwise it does the job and is easy to use. I’ve had a few programs that aren’t available in the standard repositories, but I’ve compiled them myself when needed.

I like this distro quite a lot and I think I’m going to use it for a while.

Comment by muep — October 27, 2006 #
Using Epiphany 2.16 on Fedora Linux
E@syVG: I don’t know.. It could well be I’m going to try Ubuntu 6.10 first though, as I’ve heard a lot about it. In fact, I’ve already installed Ubuntu, and I’m having quite a few problems with it, two being a black screen after the bootsplash (ie. no ATi graphics card driver, as expected from Ubuntu) and a network card which is recognised but which I cannot get to ping IPs outside my network They can both be fixed, but it’s not done for me automatically, as it was in FC6. I might make the switch completely.

Jeffrey: Precisely! Everything just seems to work in Fedora Core 6, which is great news (I remember how much I hated FC2!).

muep: I don’t like Yum as much as APT either, but FC6 seems a better choice for me than Ubuntu 6.10 at the moment.. It just works!

Comment by J_K9 — October 27, 2006 #
Using Mozilla SeaMonkey 1.0.4 on Linux
I agree with much of what is being said here. I updated from FC5 (yum) no problems. For those of you w/ pm issues do this yum install smart smart-gui. Once it’s done you should have the smart package manager, you can using it via gui smart install “package” or via gui Applications –> System Tools –> Smart. Good luck!

Comment by ihavenoname — October 30, 2006 #
Using Mozilla Firefox 2.0 on Ubuntu Linux
[…] Fedora Core 6 - A Cursory Glance (J_K9 @ Linux) […]

Pingback by Press [F8] to continue… » Bow to Zod! — October 30, 2006 #
Using WordPress 2.0.4
Yeah.. i agree. FC6 has done out itself absolute neat to kill the M’soft Win (CENSORED!!) platform on the terms of being ‘UISER FRIENDLINES”.

FC6 is the (yet another) revolution in the *NIX World, in the OpenSource Technology. It’s what i see as the birth to the end of other “PREMIUM” costly-affairs-of-having-a-computer!

Time calls us to start petitioning and rolling out drums in public against those others.

FC6 is neat, sleek, beautiful, auto-detect-urPCstuff-n-install, and it “IS” user friendly (so much that even newbies and *NIX un-aware people can start falling in to the Linux Community)

Cheers Redhat!

Comment by Honey — March 6, 2007 #
Using Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows Server 2003
Fedora Core 6 certainly was one of those distributions, and I can only hope that Fedora 7 will be better

Comment by J_K9 — March 6, 2007 #
Using Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows XP
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Comment by fleede — February 11, 2008 #
Using Opera 7.54 on Windows XP
Hi all. Cool site zawermash Google
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Comment by cadS — February 14, 2008 #
Using Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7 on Windows XP