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By : vasanth
RedHat, one of the biggest contributor to open source and Linux, proved the world that the Open Source service based model is profitable. RedHat introduces all the exiting new technologies in Fedora, the community driven distribution sponsored by RedHat. These technologies will be integrated into the official RetHat distribution after they are mature enough. The technologies like udev, upstart, SELinux, pulseaudio, Plymouth, Xen and KVM are first introduced (if I remember correctly) in Fedora and then later integrated into various other distributions. I've not used Fedora as my main desktop, but I always try every release of Fedora to get a feel of the new technologies.
Fedora 11 will have the following features besides package version upgrades.
- 20 seconds boot time to log in screen from the 30 second Fedora 10 boot time
- EXT4 as the default file system
- OpenChange for native access of Microsoft Exchange
- rpm 4.7 (improved performance)
- Automatic multimedia codecs, fonts and mime installer
I've used the GNOME version of the Fedora release for this review on a DELL Inspiron laptop.
Installation:
Anaconda is the installer for Fedora, which has not changed much but the introduction of EXT4 file system introduced few complications. You need to create an EXT4 root partition and an EXT3 boot partition as the live image can only be installed on an EXT4 file system and the GRUB version available will not support booting from EXT4 partitions. The latest Ubuntu and Mandriva versions, which were released a month before the final release of Fedora support booting from EXT4. Please refer this if you need more information on why Fedora 11 could not boot from an EXT4. Also, note that Fedora is one of the first distributions to support EXT4 file systems.
After partitioning, the installer showed an exception and forced me to restart the installation, but I could not reproduce the exception afterwards.
One notable usability issue with the intaller is that the partitoning screen showed 'Replace existing Linux System' instead of 'Use the free space' when my HDD had a lot of free space. Also, the 'Review and Modify Partitioning Layout' option was not enabled by default. The installer did not detect the existing Linux installations.
Hardware Detection:
All the hardware components were detected and configured properly except the mouse scrolling in the thouchpad. You may need to install/upgrade the 'synaptics' package to enable the scrolling. The 'Function' keys and front panel multimedia keys on the laptop worked as expected. The Reliance USB CDMA broadband connection was detected and configured when I plugged the USB device. The NetworkManager Mobile Broadband capability is a certainly a major improvement.
Fedora's default boot (plymouth) and desktop themes look clear and very professional. In my opinion, Fedora has one of the best visual customizations.
Applications:
The ~650 MB image includes all the applications like Firefox, Pidgin, Transmission, GIMP, Evolution, audio/video player and Brasero, needed for a desktop user. One noticeable application is Palimpsest, which enables us to manage all the connected media devices at one place. Using this tool we can create/delete partitions, check file system for errors and mount/unmount partitions etc. This tool could be considered as a replacement for gparted.
One important missing appilcation is OpenOffice though 'Abiword' is included.
The unified Volume Control application enables us to control all the sound related settings from one place. This helps to have one mixer instead of KMix, ALSA Mixer etc.
The bootloader conofiguration tool crashed every time due to a bug in the application.
The 'SELinux policy generation tool' and 'SELinux troubleshooter tool ' are grouped under Application-->System Tools but the related tool 'SELinux Management' is listed under System-->Administration.
Package Management:
The biggest problematic area in this preview release is the package management. I could not even update my system so for!!!. There are many functional and usability issues which made me to think of this as a beta release than a preview.
Any graphical package manager should support the following functionalities.
- List installed/available packages
- Search a Package
- Install/Remove packages
- Upgrade the system
- Add/Remove/Modify repositories
- Select a mirror
The graphical package manager included in Fedora allowed me to do the first five tasks but not the mirror selection. This might be because the 'yum' manages mirror selections on its own. The first time I tried to update the system I got the GPG key error for the Fedora i386 repository. I've to Google and find a way to bypass the signature checking. Even after this workaround I was not able to update my system as there are some packages missing in the repositories. This issue might be solved using a different mirror but did not try so far. This very basic functionality should be working without any issues since this being a 'Preview' release.
Fedora does not include any copyrighted codecs and hence to play common media files you need to download the gstreamer bad, ugly and ffmpeg plug-ins. I tried to install the these plug-ins but after downloading the packages, the 'yum' failed to install because of the GPG error. Since I did not know the workaround to bypass this check initially, I had to install the packages by manually installing them :-). After installing the codecs and VLC, I was able to play all the media files.
There are also some usability issues with the graphical package manager. When you upgrade the system or install a package, the status of the sequence of operations being performed was not shown by default. You need to open the icon on the panel to get the progress of what is being done. If you do not see this icon or you fail to see a status message which is being shown in a corner in the package manager, then there is no way you can tell what the package manager is doing. The icon, when clicked, showed the progress of the download but not the download speed. If you need to a detailed information, you need to use the 'yum' terminal command.
The package manager also had trouble displaying the category 'Package Collections'.
The Fedora preview release has some important issues which may scare first time desktop users. I hope these issues will be addressed in the final release.
