October 8, 2005
Fedora Core 4
Ok I have spent the past couple of days fiddling with FC4 and I have noticed the following things that kind of bug me.
No more koffice!!!
It struck me as odd but it is true the FC4 team decided to remove koffice from the install. This means you have to kludge around with the much Slower but equally functional Open Office. This is nutty I did notice a potenial reason as being the compiler included with FC4 but it is still odd.
They messed up the Firefox Default theme!!
Why would you mess with the default theme of the most popular download on the internet right now. This causes some theme conflicts with some of the extensions used by developers including the web dev extension. Why would they do it? Who knows I could understand if they added a new extension and made the the default for users but replacing the entire default theme was just dumb.
Yum upgrade not supported!
Don’t know how many people out there have ever used a distro that allowed you to update from one version to another without downloading 4 isos but they do exist. Given the backing Fedora has I’m very supprised they are not supporting using yum upgrade to move from one version to the other. Are there extra items they have to worry about when doing the upgrade of course. Does this mean it would be to difficult for them to accomplish? No!
This was the bad stuff I encountered it really made the upgrade a pain in the rear and one I wished I had just skipped. But it is here now and a few things I can say are good about the upgrade are that the machine I’m running on is a celeron 1.1Ghz with 128Mb of ram. The machine runs much faster in FC4 than it did in FC3. The additions to the task bar in KDE are actually usefull. I don’t have to dink as much with audio sources to get them working now and for the first time I have all my apps i used to run in windows on my linux box leaving the windows machine for what it is good for, games!
I like the new setup everything seems to be a bit more stable options for video are working like they should have in FC3 even though I forced them manualy. My favorite feature live resolution switching. In FC3 to change the res I had to shut down the X server to switch resolutions and I had to edit the XF86config-4 file by hand to get to 1600×1200. In FC4 under KDE I simply opened up the control pannel and I was able to bump up from 1024×768 straight to 1600×1200. This made my day as after the install I was bumbed that I was going to have to edit the file by hand again to get the correct h&v sync to support the higher res.
Samba adminitration under FC4 in KDE is easy. Finally without a webbrowser you can edit your config just as easy as you used to be able to with swat. There are a number of updates to various admin tools that are great.
Some of the apps I think are still missing are the video apps. I still haven’t seen a good video player that will play many of the videos I watch on my xbox.
Overall a great distribution but I hate some of the little stuff they did to the distro like koffice missing, the removal of the default theme in firefox, and the continued lack of support for over the wire ugrades.