Short Review of Fedora 9

[meriadoc]

I know there must be at least one other person in the Helionet community besides myself that uses Fedora. I've used various releases of Fedora since Fedora Core 2 and before that I was on Red Hat Linux starting back with RHL 4.2 in 1997 and going up to RHL 9. It is amazing how fast new releases come out and the quantity as well as quality of the new packages. I have run a number of Linux distributions on my computers, but feel most comfortable with Fedora. Guess it is all a matter of preference and what system you learn on.

 

My install of F9 went pretty well. This release features a number of new packages. One called NetworkManager looks like a nice tool for users that need to switch between different networks on demand. Since I was installing on my home server I decided to turn it off and go with the network service I am use to. To me it didn't make much sense for my server to need NetworkManager and I wanted the peace of mind of something tried and true.

 

One of the other things that was revamped were the pirut and pup packages. These were the graphical tools to add/remove software and get updates. My verdict on the new PackageKit is still out. Since I installed on release day things seemed to move quite slowly. I also dislike not knowing what is going on. PackageKit tends to hide the stats like what is being downloaded or progress. You can find this information by using the icon in the panel, but it just seems to be less information than I'm use too. On the other hand yum is much more efficient than it has been in the past. There were some improvement made and this is a real bonus.

 

I really liked the High Flying theme with the hot air baloon in F7. F8 was dumbed down a little with curved lines, but wasn't too bad either. I'm not as impressed with the theme in F9. Seems like the stars and galaxy could be a little crisper and less blurry. This is all eye candy of course, what is really important is how things work. I brought up F9 and adjusted everything to where I want it in less than 24 hrs. This may seem like a lot of time, but between work and fun I probably spent 3-4 hrs on it. This box is used as my server so the time included configuring several server applications. Either I'm getting better at installing new releases or this one was really easy. Everything seems to be working fine and I've been running without incident since the install. All in all a pretty stable release that I'll be putting through the paces in the coming months. Hope everyone else installing F9 is doing just as well.

[Wizard]

They fix the dependency hell yet?

 

*Debian-base/Archlinux user*

 

In Debian, there's a few dep. problems that tripped me up. I heard that in Red Hat it's worse.

[meriadoc]

Dependency hell was when all you had to work with was rpm. I haven't had dependency problems in ages. Yum fixed that quite some time ago. Before yum was up2date and it was pretty good too. I believe up2date was first brought in with RHL 6.1, but I only used that for a short stint and don't remember for certain. RHL 7.3 definitely had up2date and I felt it worked great for package management. Last dependency problem I ran into was on an update of firefox in FC6, but it was a more of a bug in the packaging than something wrong with the package management tools. It was fixed fairly quickly after being reported. Only time I've seen people get into trouble is if they add too many repositories or don't use the tools correctly.

[Wizard]

Cool, cool. I might have to try that.

 

But for now:

*hugs apt-get*