Fedora 9 Review

Fedora 9 (released 5/13/08) is the latest community release of the Red Hat based distribution. While the bleeding edge features were excellent, the package management and installation leaves much to be desired.

I have never used Fedora, the last flavor of Red Hat Linux I tried was version 7.2, and even that I didn't use extensively. However, there was a LOT of buzz surrounding this release of Fedora, so I decided to give it another chance. I know some people who swear by Fedora alone and have never strayed, so there must be something intriguing about it. I do remember having a lot of trouble with an early version of Red Hat (maybe 6-something?) which is why I've never really been on the bandwagon....and by trouble, I mean the installer would hang and not let me install on my hardware at all.

For the purposes of evaluation, I installed on an HP nc6230 Laptop (w/ 1 Gig of RAM) and in a VirtualBox Virtual Machine.

Slideshow of all Screenshots

My primary distributions are now Ubuntu and SuSE, so I was really expecting more from the installation process. Many things are straight forward, the keyboard and location selection is easy enough. The first major roadblock is resizing the disk- which is necessary to dual boot with Windows (or some other OS). The default options didn't work for me - I have two Windows partitions, and the automatic resize option would always resize the SECOND partition, which had a lot less free space. So the "Create Custom Layout" was the only route to go. But here's where it was really lacking. Look at the screen shot here. Even if there were Windows partitions or existing Linux partitions you won't see how much free space is available or how much of the partition is used. Which makes resizing difficult unless you reboot and find out how much there is. After rebooting to find out how small I could make the partition, I tried to resize. Rather than having a nice GUI partitioning tool, you given a dialog box with cylinder numbers, etc. But hey, this is Linux, we can live with that right? However, after I set the amount I wanted and clicked Next, the machine hung (CTRL-ALT-F1 did nothing, SysRq wasn't configured, hard drive light on constant). So to get around this, I booted from an Ubuntu live CD and used the Gnome Paritioning Tool.

The second problem with installation is the package selection box, although admittedly this is mostly aesthetic in nature. The screenshot to the right and the one here look terrible to me. But more importantly, if you want to be more granular in your selections, you're in trouble. Not to mention that these packages are ONLY a part of the installation program, so if you want to select a package later after the OS is running, you're out of luck. A little bit of polish here would go a long way. Ubuntu admittedly struggles with this too, as you only get whatever they've decided for you during the normal "LiveCD" install, but they offer the OEM CD to be more granular. As I am installing from the "Installation Only" DVD, I expect to be able to customize it better than this.

The other reason I was told to try Fedora was the brand new PackageKit, which is a graphical frontend to yum. I really would have thought this was great, had I been using yum alone to manage packages. However, other distributions have spoiled me, and PackageKit is really lacking. For example, if I want to install more than one package at a time? Well, you click on the first package, click "Install", wait for it to download and finish installing. Then you can proceed to click on the next item....wait, what? Even Debian's ncurses-based aptitude can select multiple packages at once! Having user intervention after EVERY package means the user now has to babysit the entire process. I believe it does at least resolve dependencies for you automatically, but I don't recall at the moment. The other problem with PackageKit is if I want to add a community repository (and this is really the problem of yum) you have to download an rpm and install it, and there are none that come with the distribution itself, you *have* to search online. Again, this was acceptable before other distributions raised the bar. The auto-update utility works adequately.

Considering the issues above, I was pleasantly surprised with how well it ran. I used this for several months on my laptop with regular use. Aesthetically, I really like the sharp blue theme Fedora comes with by default. Probably the single greatest feature, though, was that out of the box my AT&T Wireless AirCard was detected by the kernel, and Fedora was the first distribution to include network manager 0.7, which includes GSM support. Thus with literally two clicks, I was able to connect to my GSM network. Extremely cool stuff as it is now easier in Linux to connect to the GSM network than in Windows. In addition the new version of Xorg included by default does a lot of autodetection. I couldn't believe when I went into the xorg.conf file and found only a little over a page of configuration, which makes life easier in the event you actually have to modify the file directly.

The largest problem I had with the performance though was that the Open Source driver for my ATI video card doesn't work well at all. When I used Compiz it would hang at random times - the logs didn't give much detail and I didn't dig very hard. Trying to install the binary driver was a pain, but if you're going to use Fedora, it must be with the understanding that things like this are difficult. I decided in the case of the ATI driver it wasn't worth the time I was going to spend. I did get Sun's Java installed by downloading the package directly from Sun, but using it as the default required quite a bit of manipulation. Once again, this is because of Fedora's strong commitment to Open Source Software only. On the positive side, once I got Sun's Java working, I was able to install the SNX client and use VPN to my office (TID). Linux on my laptop is now completely viable.

I really have to applaud Red Hat for everything they've done for Gnome and Linux distributions in general. However, for me, Fedora's rigid distaste for proprietary solutions left me with a less than perfect solution. Personally, I want a solution that works best, and if that means the proprietary ATI or Nvidia driver, I'd like to be able to use it easily. Ubuntu and SuSE have made it very easy. If the Open source solution is better, I'll naturally use it, but if it ISN'T as good yet there's no need to hamstring my performance for it. The installation and package management left a lot to be desired as well, so for me, other distributions meet my needs better. Also, while this is a minor thing, I prefer KDE, and the "Installation DVD" gave me no option to choose that by default. Perhaps when v10 comes out I'll give it another shot.

I give it 2 out of 5 stars

-Josh