Prosthetic Conscience

Brief impressions of Fedora Core 4

So, I’ve got Fedora Core 4 installed on my laptop now, and I’m holding off on putting it on my main computer until I get its backups fully updated, and get it switched over to using RAID. But for now, I’ll put in a little note on my impressions on FC4, not quite a full review.

The Good

Lower memory usage in Gnome

I didn’t record any numbers before switching over, but just from looking at the system monitor, and from general feel, it seems that Gnome apps are using less memory in FC4/GNOME 2.10 than in FC3/GNOME 2.8. Presumably it’s a library improvement somewhere. On this little 128M machine, it’s *still* possible to get into heavy thrashing, but it takes longer.

Better package management

Up2date is now better integrated with yum — they share a list of repositories, for instance. Also, Fedora Extras is now included in the default set of repositories.

Overall more polished

FC4 seems much more polished overall than FC3. For example, the default GTK+ theme is Clearlooks, rather than Bluecurve. Rather than ggv and gpdf, it includes the Evince document viewer, which is faster, more featureful, and more elegant. GNOME 2.10 has a numbre of small usability enhancements relative to GNOME 2.8. The updated version of Evolution (email) is much better in many small ways.

NetworkManager is maturing

NetworkManager is a daemon and related tools added during FC3 updates which makes using wireless network connections easier. In FC3, it unfortunately tended to break things badly for my wired PCMCIA ethernet card, overriding the configuration set up for it by the Fedora system configuration tools. In FC4, it doesn’t do that anymore. So far.

The Bad

Show-stopper Xorg-X11 bug

For some incomprehensible reason, FC4 shipped with a broken version of one library in xorg-x11, which makes X unusable in many common chipsets, including both my laptop *and* my desktop. The xorg-x11 packages in FC4 updates don’t fix this, either — apparently the standard compiler on FC4 does not compile this library correctly, which makes it difficult for the Fedora maintainers to produce a package which both works and uses pristine sources. Fortunately, there is a workaround, and fortunately, I read about it *before* installing FC4. Copying the library (libvgahw.a) from FC3 over the version in FC4 solves the problem.

The Ugly

These are things that are bad, but that are not Fedora’s fault (i.e., they are my fault), or are only my opinion.

Firefox still default browser

This is a matter of opinion, but I think that if the Fedora developers are serious about shipping an integrated desktop, they should be shipping Epiphany as the default browser, *not* Firefox. Firefox is a good browser; I have PortableFirefox on my flash drive for whenever I have to use a Windows machine. But Firefox on GNOME is not consistent with the rest of the GNOME desktop (wrong icons, non-HIG preferences window, doesn’t use GNOME network proxy settings, many other small issues).

I forgot to install language packs

I forgot to install languages other than the default (en_US), so I am stuck with en_US rather than my preferred en_GB. I also seem to be too dense to figure out what I need to install to fix this.

I forgot to back up some settings

*Mostly*, my laptop doesn’t have much local configuration; anything that’s not configured through the system-config programs is copied over from the desktop computer. But there are some things (like apm-scripts) that I customized on here, and forgot to back up before wiping the system to upgrade.

[ Posted: 09:17] | [ Category: ] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]