On 4/3/06, Jason D. Clinton me@jasonclinton.com wrote:
On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 21:19 -0500, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
- Fedora comes with both Gnome and KDE (I prefer and use the later)
KDE is a second class citizen in Fedora, but okay.
I support that statement. However, besides everyone I know personally who uses Fedora, Linux uses KDE on Fedora. So KDE isn't that badly off in the Fedora world.
- Supposedly the Gnome desktop comes with some killer Mono apps, I am not
ure of this.
Yea, it does (I agregate a few Fedora developer blogs). All distros do. Fedora has nothing unique to it with regard to Gnome other than its theme.
I agree with you there also. Wasn't impling otherwise.
- Fedora comes with a package manager, arguably not the best, but it does
use RPM for its packaging, and any and all package managers that handle RPMs will work on Fedora, and many infact are already packaged for Fedora. For interface, Fedora uses yum (console app) and has many available GUIs packaged for Yum ( I do not use one myself, no need)
Erm, no. Yum is a third party development which was originally designed for Yellow Dog. Yum is also a second class citizen in Fedora and only works because someone maintains a Yum repository with the latest Fedora sources in it. In fact, if you were to use the built-in package manager and then use Yum, the results would be undefined.
Yum is the suggested, and primary method of software installtion and management for Fedora: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAQ#head-eeb72f8986226805f39306991a88c2848d80f...
Yum is a 1st class citizen, to use your metaphor. It works because that is the main (only ?) method of package distribution for Fedora. The built in package manager is Yum, or are you refering to the little GUI tool that allows you uninstall/install things that are on the CD media. The title of the window it brings up is a tad deceiving, the only packages that manages are what come from the install media. The result of using both are wholly predictable: no problem.
And you can't just wave your hands and say that package dependency problems
don't happen;
Well it was more like moving my fingers across the keyboard. And the only time I hear of that happening these days is when people use 3rd party epos that are known to conflict with each other. As it is, I have nine third party repos setup with my yum. I only use 4 of them. (in addition to the Fedora repos themsevles)
when you introduce third party RPMS, they do. And sometimes they can be a
real bitch to fix -- without a nice dep. resolver like yum, you could get a real headache.
Very much agreed.
Which is why I asked whether there was an 'official' way dealing with it but
I gather, now, that there isn't.
Well you are free to ignore me telling you that yum is the package manager used by Fedora.
- last I remember, it took 5 third party RPMS , all installed via Yum to
give me full multimedia support, infact I think I have that in a bash script somewhere.
Unless one of those RPM's contains more than one of the following and does a 'provides' so that they appear to be installed to other packages:
Sun Java Macromedia Flash Nvidia/ATI driver Ndiswrapper Xvid FFMPEG x264 lame/mad/mpg12321 rte libdvdcss libavcodec faad/faac [a gstreamer binding to each of the above, usually each a seperate package] etc. etc.
I forgot to consider Flash the first time, but I would stil stick to my original estimate. Also, didn't consider Java at all, not the proprietary binaries as least. I have them installed, but that was too long ago to remember details except that I followed some simple instructions from one of the Fedora websites.
Right now my Fedora handles more codecs than the last few Windows XP i have used. MytvTV is also fun.
- I might be ignorant on the installer options, what options did you need
that were missing? I haven't ran into such a lack there of, but that is just me, my needs may be different from yours.
Based on the FC5 screen shots on OSDir it appears that most of the options are now available versus what I experience with the 4.92 preview release.
I think it was 4.93 that I installed, can't say that there was anything noticeable missing.
- Two unique aspect of Fedora I would regard as: 1) Built in SELinux support
(great for servers) , 2) system-config tools good for mid level users and quick configuring
SELinux is nice, yes, I missed that. Where are these system-config tools you speak of?
Nice little (most PyGTK based) configuration apps: system-config-bind system-config-boot system-config-control system-config-date system-config-display system-config-httpd system-config-keyboard system-config-language system-config-kickstart system-config-lvm system-config-mouse system-config-netboot system-config-network system-config-network-tui system-config-nfs system-config-packages system-config-printer system-config-printer-gui system-config-rootpassword system-config-samba system-config-securitylevel system-config-securitylevel-tui system-config-services system-config-soundcard system-config-users
- Most of the dues go to the actual software, but FC has been a more than
adequate desktop OS for me since FC3 (when I put away Windows for it)
I sure that it has but probably mostly because KDE does what you want it to do; not really Fedora's work at all.
I do not disagree with this. But isn't that part of the definition of the distro? Most of the software on any real Linux distro is available to any other distro. I like Fedora because I started with RedHat 8.0 and It has always been better than enough for me. And I generally like the community around it also.
--
Jason D. Clinton me@jasonclinton.com
-- As a boy I jumped through Windows, as a man I play with Penguins.
-- As a boy I jumped through Windows, as a man I play with Penguins.