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Review: Fedora Core 2

Though the installation for me was flawless, I am a firm believer in clean installs, so I have not tested how well FC2 does an upgrade installation. Also, there are reports that installing FC2 in a dual-boot configuration with Windows 2000 or XP might cause the Windows side of the machine to fail. Readers contemplating this configuration should thoroughly read bug #115980. (It is hard to resist the temptation to ask whether this is really a bug or just a security feature, and why anyone would want to run Windows anyway.)

Owners of nVidia graphics cards should be aware that nVidia's proprietary, binary-only drivers for FC2 are not due to be available until somewhere around the time this article sees print.

Last January Red Hat became a victim of its own success when Fedora Core 1 (FC1) became so popular that the update repositories hosted by Red Hat could no longer keep up with the demand for downloads. This was a tragedy because there were plenty of mirrors to distribute the load and the configuration fix was an easy one to make. Unfortunately, not enough people found out about it, and Red Hat ended up with some serious egg on its face.

FC2 solves this problem in a truly elegant fashion: <kbd>up2date</kbd> is now configured to get updates from any one of several authorized mirrors, which it seems to pick from the list at random.

Kernel improvements

After the software was installed, real testing began well. FC2 runs noticeably faster than FC1, which in turn ran faster than its competitors from Mandrake and SuSE. There are a great many other improvements as well, such as support for CD burners without a SCSI emulation layer and better support for laptop hardware. Unfortunately, FireWire support had to be pulled back at the last minute because of show-stopper bugs.

The kernel improvements that excite me the most are in the security arena: NTFS-like ACL support in filesystems, the SELinux improvements contributed by the U.S. National Security Agency, and -- my favorite -- a crypto API. This last will enable easy setup and configuration of encrypted filesytems and IPSec networking, which will in turn make the world a safer and more secure place.

The tools to implement most of the kernel's new security capabilities are still at an early stage, so it will be a while before most people can take advantage of them. But for anyone working with next-generation security FC2 will probably be required study material.

System administration

Over the last couple of years Red Hat developers have been building a set of Python-based GUI tools to simplify the tasks of system administration. These live in the System Settings submenu in the Gnome and KDE environments, and have come to be known as the redhat-config-* scripts because their command-line invocations all start with that phrase. Now they'll be known as the system-config-* scripts. As usual there are a few new ones, making a total of about two dozen now. That's a good thing.

However, SUSE's YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool) still beats the pants off of every other system administration tool. Now that Novell has decided to release YaST under an open-source license I am hoping that we will start seeing it in other distros.

Packages

I think we're all finally getting used to the idea that Fedora is not a consumer product and was never intended for use by Joe Sixpack. Rather, it's a testbed for future releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a collection of core components from which tinkerers can build something useful, and that is exactly what Red Hat Corporation wants to see happening.

In this release the Fedora Project has given us more to tinker with than usual (read: lots of stuff doesn't work). If you need a distribution that "just works" out of the box, FC2 is not for you. For everyone else, there is a growing list of third-party repositories to explore. A list of them can be found in this Slashdot post. You also won't find your skills with the <KBD>make</KBD> utility getting rusty anytime soon.

You won't find any proprietary software in FC2, such as Acrobat Reader, RealPlayer, or Flash player. You also won't find any apps that might infringe on a patent, which unfortunately leaves out MP3 support and mplayer. This is frustrating to people who want a Windows-like experience out of the box, but a benefit to the Open Source movement in the long term.

There are a few apps that should be included but are not, such as Abiword, Quanta (Web authoring) and Audacity (audio editing). Curiously, the first two are actually included on the installation CDs but are not available to be selected from the Package Manager.

Correction: As the author points out in a comment to the story, both Quanta and Abiword are present.

On the plus side, there is cool new stuff, such as KGPG (a GPG keyring tool) and K3B (CD burning tool).

What's broken

Unfortunately, all of FC2's admirable qualities cannot save it from its congenital defects. These range from annoyances such as broken audio drivers to the abomination known as Gnome 2.6, and are serious enough to make the Fedora Project's second litter of pups unsuitable for any use other than as laboratory animals.

Audio drivers

The bug preventing Rhythmbox from working on a rather large number of sound cards has a workaround posted, but it causes a royal pain every time I want to listen to music. Also, my sound card outputs constant "white noise" to my speakers that is too loud ignore.

OpenOffice.org 1.1.1

Let me make this as clear as I can: PDF files hundreds of kilobytes in size are unacceptable for a single-page text document, especially when the only fonts in that document are native to Acrobat Reader. OO.o 1.1.1's PDF export worked fine in Red Hat 9 as long as I used only those fonts, but PDF output has been horribly broken ever since. For those of us who produce content for a living, especially on the Web, this is a show-stopper.

Evolution and GPG encryption

For a long time, Evolution developers have had an attitude problem with old-style (non-MIME) GPG encryption. Now they seem to be treating both ways equally: there is no support for GPG encryption at all in Evolution 1.4! At least I couln't find any, and believe me, I looked.

Correction: The author didn't look closely enough. Evolution has handled cryptographic signatures and message encryption correctly for a long while now.

The GIMP 2.0

Color management using icc profiles is an important tool for anyone doing serious photography work. To date, Mac OS X (v. 10.2 and above) is the world's only operating system that fully implements color management, but a few rudimentary tools are available to Linux users, including a partially functional plug-in for Gimp 1.2. While that plug-in's developer told me he plans to make it available for Gimp 2 eventually, it is not available today.

Gnome 2.6

If you're going to install and use FC2, don't bother installing Gnome. Yes, it is that bad. Nicholas Petreley barely scratched the surface in his scathing criticism of Gnome 2.6 a few weeks ago. To his remarks about the sheer stupidity in the new Nautilus design, allow me to add a couple more observations:

The File Open dialog box

Click to enlarge

Those of us who administer systems need a fast, easy way to edit configuration files. We know where most of those files live, and can usually type them in to the File Open dialog a lot faster than we can get to them via the browsing tool. But my favorite tool, gedit, is no longer suitable for that purpose, because, as you can see from the screen shot at right, there is no longer any way to type a filename into the File Open dialog!

The Help system

We all know how unwieldy man pages can get. I remember one that ran more than a hundred printed pages. A GUI help browser is a real timesaver to system administrators. Guess what? Man and Info pages are gone from the new Gnome help browser. What were these people thinking?

Fortunately, KDE's help system is excellent. It's even better than Gnome's was. And so are KDE's mail client and file manager (KMail and Konqueror). I might eventually learn to like KDE.

Conclusion

Fedora Core 1 has proved to be a remarkably stable and well-supported distribution suitable for home and office desktop work, after the missing (non-open source) pieces are installed.

Fedora Core 2 is not. It is bleeding-edge technology that will become mainstream in a year or so, and as such is an important distro for people who will be working with next year's technology. It's an important step in the evolution of Linux, and I'm glad it's here to experiment with, but I won't be using it for production work anytime soon.

Ken Barber teaches Linux system administration at Lane Community College in Eugene, Ore., and writes open-source-related technical articles and user documentation when he isn't roaming around in the nearby woods and mountains.