Fedora Yarrow (RH10) review

[samwichse]

Well, it's more of a mini-review, or micro-review if you prefer.

So I finished pulling down the three install disks from bittorrent on Friday and installed it saturday afternoon, spending the whole of this afternoon playing around with it and getting into the detailed settings and such.

The install was pretty much the same as it was in redhat 9, with some updated graphics and the "progress" part has changed a bit (so that it no longer shows the individual packages going in).

A "chubby" install (what I consider the necessities, all the libraries and software development packages, kde and most administration tools) now takes me about 3050M, a "personal desktop" (which doesn't install KDE) takes ~1800).

So anyhow, I installed all that and booted the first time and all the hardware came up as supported on a K7S5A pro (which is to be expected) no problems there. The kernel was 2.4.22 and using KDE 3.1.4 and OpenOffice 1.1 final is nicely integrated with bluecurve. Stodgy as it may look, I've not really seen Open Office look so much like a part of the system before, a nice touch IMO.

Tool-wise, under the desktop configuration there's an easy to use tool that not only adjusts color depth and resolution as before, but now adds an easy graphical way of configuring a dual-head monitor setup, which I've been struggling with as of late.

There were a couple bugs, for instance in KDE, choosing logout in the K-menu won't generally bring up a logout prompt unless you do it 4 or 5 times in a row quickly, so I've had to use CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring it up. Another bug I encountered (probably wasn't the distro's fault) was that installing the drivers for the softmodem caused mousing issues that in turn caused X-startup to fail.

Overall it seems slickly packaged, I unfortunately had no MP3s on this new build to test out whether the developers had taken a turn away from RedHat's strict policy on that or not. Overall, it's a much improved in very certain areas, but featurewise just an updated RedHat 9.

Perhaps a better number would've been RedHat 9.1, had control of the distro not been handed over to the public.

Sam

[Xeroid]

Well, it's more of a mini-review, or micro-review if you prefer.

Thanks samwichse. Good info.

[e980238]

I almost feel ashamed to wear my red hat, hats around now

[pbharris]

thanks Sam.

[Dbest]

Thanks for the reviwe Sam I was lookin forward to someone reviewing this thanks.

[CMonster]

DVDs? How's the DVD playback if you install all the required xine packages?

[drizzle]

samwichse, just so you know. I tested xmms under Fedora and just like it was in Red Hat there is no MP3 support.

[e980238]

have you noticed any major dependency problems like there were in rh9?

[Scott Tiger]

Thanks for the review!

Is reiserfs a filesystem choice now in the installer or did you have to specify the choice at boot time (linux reiserfs enable)?

Thanks again!

[Droppyale]

I have to try it.. still have to download the isos though


anyways.. Thanks.