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 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.
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.