Fedora Core 2: Reviewed

Can “Red Hat” be any better? Yes. Fedora Core series, particularly Core 2 is a great improvement over its design lineage. In fact, between Mandrake 10 and FC2? FC2 out shines MDK10 on looks. Booting FC2 is amazing, gorgeous.

Here comes the but. :)

Installing FC2 was easy. But the packages? Hello! Developers, too much Bloat-ware! I mean, Developer's Edition? 3GB? My, my, my folks! And to think, that not all the apps you'd normally need are installed. No Video Player at all. And what passes for a music player? Doesn't carry MP3 support because of “political” reasons. DVD-playback? Not even a strip down, no CSS player. Nothing, NADA. MDK10 has slightly over 1.7GB when installed with the developer tools and it comes with a suite of video and music players that actually work.

OK, Red Hat... excuse me, Fedora isn't exactly multimedia friendly proof, ran the standard Sound Test... it works. But aboard Gnome 2.6? I felt deaf. Sound wouldn't work. So as of posting time, I'm still compiling my kernel... embedding directly my Sound Blaster PCI64. That move usually works, as experience has taught me. So we'll find out in a few hours or so.

Compiling on a P3-600 and 256MB Ram isn't what it used to be. Manageable sure but not much else. What simply is amazing is how the Kernel Developers have made the 2.6.x series such a wonderful piece of computing technology, hats off to them. Compiling the kernel didn't even scratch my 512MB swap. Pure genius! To think my load average peaked to 4 at one point, and I had OpenOffice or Mozilla running in one of the workspaces and four terminals and of course, Nautilus running on another.

What are some things I didn't like with FC2? Gnome 2.6 is both a disappointment and a pleasure to use. Its a pleasure to use because its a great piece of software, especially coupled with X11 from www.freedesktop.org the machine ran smoothly on my TNT2 graphics card. Quick response all around compared to MDK10 on 2.4 and roughly the same version of xfree86 on the same machine.

Why is Gnome 2.6 a disappointment? Some users are right you know, opening a folder on Nautilus always brings up a new window. The bar isn't like a browser... it actually reminded me of Program Manager from Windows 3.1 complete with all the menus “File”, “Edit”, “View”, etc. Hello (again) Developers! Don't you guys know of Tab browsing (One of my fave things in Firefox and Mozilla Browsers in general and what i hate that IE doesn't have)? Tabs would have been better and the old fashioned “Open in New Window” would have suffice instead of rewriting Nautilus to open in default, new windows. Bring in Tabs and browser-like controls or come up with more user and visually stunning navigation interfaces please! Innovate people!

Also before I forget, haven't these guys learned... you need “Terminal” on the panel! Its so increasingly irritating that this is not a default on the panel.

Otherwise, Gnome 2.6 is a great piece of software.

OpenOffice 1.1.1 for FC2 is also a great piece of software. I haven't had a chance to fully explore it but the Fedora people took a page (and rightly so) from the Debian (great piece of engineering) Project and “modified” oo111 for their own (the splash is hard to miss). Other features? Like I said haven't fully explored it. But looks great.

So, what's next? Downloading xine and other stuff to play videos and music. And maybe a much needed upgrade to the default 2.6.5 kernel installed. :)

We'll post our findings as soon as possible. :)

Fedora Core 2 is a great piece of software. Its a bit rough on the edges, and if they can help add more multimedia stuff, its simply better than Mdk10.