Fedora 8 Review By Me

Heres my own review, sorry no pics, might include them later

Setup

• Intel Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz x86
• Asus P800s Motherboard
• 512 MB DDR Kingston RAM
• 320 GB 7200 RPM Samsung Hard-drive
• ATI 9600 256 MB Graphics Card
• Logitech Keyboard & Mouse
• Cannon Pixma IP 3000 Printer
• 5.1 Surround Sound setup with C-Media Soundcard
• D-Link Ethernet 100 MBps

Installation

I grabbed the Live CD rather than the Live DVD which contains more preinstalled applications as sadly I have a monthly volume limit. Anyhow after burning the image I popped it in and booted into the Live CD and then Fedora 8 itself.

Once inside launched the installer rather then playing around with the OS, I have to say the installation is much easier than Ubuntu and gives you more configuration options such as if you are dual booting it detects all other operating systems and asks you which one you would like to be the default rather than having to edit it later on using the command line. The installation went with ease and rather quickly, about 15 min.

Initial Impressions

First impressions; the display was horizontally offset this was also the case within the Live CD, It was cutting off a small margin from the left keeping me from viewing the entire desktop, I found this annoying as I am going for a dual boot with Windows and since the setup has a CRT monitor which does not automatically adjust the display it was going to be a pain to manually alter the offset each time I decide to use Windows or Fedora.

Other then this all my other hardware was properly configured and working as it should, no need to go into messy command line stuff, this left me quite happy as with the above setup almost every Linux distribution I have tried fails to properly configure the ATI card + Screen and leaves me with an incorrect resolution and refresh rate.

Folders and files in the file browser all open in different windows, annoying indeed but easily solved. Just launch the file browser go into its preference and check the option which reads always open in browser window.

I know this isn’t distribution specific but I really love the feature in gnome where you can hover the mouse over a music file and it will play the music.

Visuals

Moving on to the visuals; it’s easy on the eyes, has a polished feel to it and the default theme is one I will stick to. This again is not normally the case with other Linux distributions, the brown Ubuntu theme made me feel all dull and sick. The fonts particularly caught my attention, they all include anti aliasing, smoothing and hinting by default and look much better then Windows XP’s fonts, this is new since in previous Linux distributions I had to change the fonts to Window XP’s. The default wallpaper is decent enough and it changes colour depending on the time of the day which is rather neat but to me the transition is never noticeable so it kind of defeats the purpose, for me at least.

It uses gnome and its interface is pretty easy to navigate by, consisting of the usual two panels. However I have altered it to be more Windows like with one panel at the bottom for everything, this because my screens resolution is 1024 x 768 and having two panels reduces my view. The main menu is sort of like Windows XP, it should have been more like the KDE kicker menu in Suse or the main menu in Linux Mint.

Eye Candy

Moving on to the eye candy, honestly I don’t understand why people always use this sole reason to brag that Linux is better than Windows, every effing video and screenshot of any Linux distribution shows some person messing about with the special effects. Anyway navigating to Desktop Effects from the main menu opens a little window which has the option to enable desktop effects, surprisingly considering how painful it is getting ATI cards to work with Compiz, it worked. I got all those crazy wobbly windows and desktop cubes effects up and running, without even having to install new drivers or messing with the command line.

Now I didn’t mean to get your hopes up with the statement about special effects above, but after enabling special effects scrolling in windows became noticeably slower and sluggish. I thought this was due to it using XGL instead of AIGLX and because it was using the default radeon drivers instead of the latest fglrx. This problem is easily fixed by following this guide

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=155503&page=1&pp=10

After following the guide and rebooting my earlier problem with the screen offset was also resolved as was the sluggish scrolling, and all the effects were intact and working great. A little note, you might want to install compiz settings manager through add/remove to be able to configure every little effect as by default you can’t configure anything.

Codecs

As you may know Fedora 8 does not come with codecs pre installed, but whenever you launch a file which requires a codec, codec buddy pops up and asks you if you wish to buy and install the appropriate codec or use the free alternative if available. In my opinion codec buddy is not that great, it does not do a great job of listing the free alternatives and sometimes does not include them as well. You are better off searching for codecs through the add/remove application. To make life easier there is a handy guide which explains how to install the commonly used codecs to gain full media support, it’s located here

First configure Yum as described here

http://www.fedorafaq.org/#yumconf

Then follow this guide

http://www.fedorafaq.org/

Pulse Audio

Fedora 8 includes a new sound system for Linux, Pulse Audio rather than the previous ALSA. It is quite an improvement as in ALSA when playing audio from multiple sources could cause freezes and other problems, with Pulse Audio everything is smooth.

Ease of Use

Very easy to use for a newbie, have not had the need to get into messy command line stuff and configuration at all. It detects and mounts my Windows partitions letting me easily access, read & write to them.

Installing software is very easily done, and you have three different ways to go about it. Firs one is to go to the application you are wanting to install’s website and have a see if they offer a .RPM download, which most do, go ahead and download it and once download just double click and follow the instructions. The second way is through the add/remove application in the main menu. The last is through the command line using yum which I find incredibly easy to do.

I do a lot of printing and thus having my printer working properly is a must, with previous distributions I had to sacrifice colour printing since it would not work I would get messy printouts, but with Fedora it detects my IP3000 gives me an option to select which manufacturer it’s from, I choose Cannon and as for model the closest one is IP4000, I select that since it’s the same series and guess what it works perfectly, no sacrifices.

Conclusion

I am happy to say I will leave Fedora 8 installed on my desktop; it’s much more responsive and faster than before without having to give up anything.

Pros

• Easy to use
• Hardware fully functional
• Visually very appealing
• Pulse Audio sound system is much better

Cons

• No codecs preinstalled
• Has some serious issues with cross platform networking

 

did u have to partition your hard disk or did u just download it and its just on your computer and you are able to use it like a regular OS?

 

I have a 320 GB hard-drive partitioned into 5.

4 of the partitions are Windows XP ntfs partitions and I left the last one for a dual boot with linux

So during the installation, when it asked for the partitioning I selected manual partition, created a ext 3 / and sawp partition out of the 5th partition mentioned above and continued the install.

Now I have 4 partitions which are recognized in Windows XP and the 5th one has Fedora 8 on it

 

Nice review. Thanks a lot. I like a lot of things about Fedora. I have a feeling that I will have to make some room on my machine for it in the future. I like the fact that they are putting more resources into KDE than K/Ubuntu. I think it was a brave move on their part to schedule KDE 4.0 as the base desktop for their next release. Personally, I am planning to skip 4.0. But, I think that by the time 4.1 comes along, the Fedora KDE team is going to be more deeply familiar with the 4.x internals than many other distros. I would be very surprised if Fedora does not become one of the three distros I run on my laptop. (Currently I run PCLinuxOS 2008 MiniME, Mandriva 2008, and Linux Mint.)

 

@blackbird: thanks for the review. When I tried Fedora, I couldn't get the sound to work. To be honest, I didn't spend much time trying because I also was not pleased with a few display issues - for which your link seems to provide fixes. I'm going to try again; this time I'll pay closer attention to Pulse Audio. Excellent post.

@rm2: I've been trying to triple-boot Linux/Linux/Linux and have failed several times. Not sure exactly what I'm doing wrong. Dual-booting is not a problem; I've been able to do that with all sorts of distros, and even with XP (for which I really have no further use). Is there a guide you follow to properly install the third distro? I've read several, but still manage to end up with only the third distro - the first two are always a mess when I'm through. LOL If you can help, perhaps a PM or new thread would be better than a post here, so as not to go further OT. And, thanks for any advice.

 

Glad the review was of help, youl have to change the audio preferences to say pulseaudio in some cases.

 

You know Fedora 9's almost out, don't you?

 

Yea, this review was written back when Fedora 8 just came out

 

I liked Fedora 8, it's currently on my desktop machine. The only thing I found annoying was the startup time...which seemed longer than other distro's I've had on it.

 

The only thing I have against F8 is that I can't configure my WLAN connection.

 

I had a heck of problem with it 'seeing' my windows network, with samba et all installed.....have you tried that? I had to give it up over that, forum members couldn't help either. Maybe that's been updated, been 3 months or so.

 

It never saw my network as well, didn't even try to fix it, just dumped it for Arch

 

I remember the last statement in the Fedora Forum by a moderator about getting on the windows network was "read the purpose statement of Fedora"....it was gone in 30 minutes lol

 

lol, anyway very happy with gnome + arch on laptop.

got some free time now so going to try kdemod 4 + arch on the desktop

 

PS....nice review on this and Arch....man, you got it right about serious issues with cross platform networking re Fedora....

 

Thanks, I know this is off topic but have you tried kde 4. Also have you compiled openoffice because its really slow and it using java isnt helping, why did it have to use java, I hate java.

 

Are you going to review fedora 9 when it comes out in a week

 

il just secretly replace the 8 with the 9 and call it a day.

 

Just tried it on Suse 11beta live cd....but not for long....may take a longer look at it...