Hi all

Advice from someone experienced with Fedora core 3 test 2 would be very helpful. My situation is this:

I run RH9 and the only problem I had is that my 1st cdrom wouldn’t work (not a valid block device) but my burner did. I replaced the cdrom with a DVD drive and decided that I would finally try to get it to work. To cut a long story short I stuffed things up and now neither work. I have decided that it might be time to upgrade to Fedora as there is no up2date support for RH9 anymore. That was the only support I ever used from RedHat so like many I am between distros. I’m not a hobbyist and I require stability and reliability but can’t justify the cost of RHEL.

I have an Athlon XP on an ECS K7S5A MB, 512MB DDR, onboard i810 AC97 audio, an ATI 9600SE (if I don’t have 3D in Linux I don’t mind – games are what Windoze is for), CD-RW drive and a DVD-ROM, Dlink NIC that uses the VH Rhine? Drivers and I have a HP6110 printer/scanner/fax.

I use Star Office 7, Xmms with MP3 support, Quanta, Edonkey2000, Mplayer, Sane, Gimp, Real player and various other distro standard software packages.

When I upgraded from RH7.3 to RH8 it trashed my system. Considering my hardware and the software I use, am I likely to experience any problems with FC3 test 2?

I plan to install clean on a new 120GB drive and copy over my user files. Can I also copy over my KDE settings to avoid having to reconfigure everything? I think I have KDE3.1 now.

With upgrading Fedora, will new cores reliably upgrade over old ones or is it necessary to do a clean install and (how often/will) the core be so radically changed that it requires a clean install to work? (I would think now that big changes like SELinux and Xorg are done everything from now on should only be minor)

I’ve come across a lot of conflicting information about Fedora and would like to know what I’m in for before I dump a stable reliable OS.

Plus, anyone who knows about HDD’s. The new drive I got is a WD. I have one dead 20GB WD (about 6 month old) and I have read a lot of bad reports about WD today. Are they good or do they really suck? Most of my experience is with Quantum, Maxtor, Seagate and IBM.

Thanks in advance.
Biggles

check CENTOS distro. it is similar of RHEL (maybe same)
www.centos.org
also there are lots stable distros like debian. u can prefer them for stability.

if u want go with fedora, wait for while for fc3 release or move to fc2. i didnt try fc3 test. so i cannot know about it. all i can say is all of fedoras are not stable.

i dont know about WD now. i prefer samsung or seagate. when u buy electronics u have to be lucky. all of them can crash. but as i see samsung and seagate disks are a little better than others.

Thanks maxut. I'll check it out.

Biggles

Hi biggles...

I would start with a stable version of fedora Core 2. If you are looking for stability I would never recommend going with a version that is still in testing. I have been using fedora for a little while now on my laptop and really enjoy it. I use Slackware on my desktop and never thought I'd like another distro.

Yum is a great tool for updating. I like it much better than up2date. Use the yum.conf file found at this site.

http://www.fedorafaq.org/

This site will help you with a lot of your questions. Its a great source for those making the move to Fedora.

As far as your hard drive goes i haven't had bad luck with WD. As far as I know its a prtty good company. Good luck!

i agree with all above: go with FC2 or wait for 3; personally I'd wait until 3, but i haven't had many problems with 2.

as for hard drives, i've never had problems with Western Digital; Seagates always crapped out on me; WD and Maxtor are my top 2

Test releases are expected to be broken from time to time.
They usually somewhat work when installed, but you can't always update because of broken repositories - and sometimes what comes from the update is worse than what is on your machine - etc.

Back in FC2 i couldn't update because I had balsa installed, and whoever was responsible for the balsa rpm wasn't updating it to match the new libraries - so I uninstalled balsa, was able to update, and then found out why balsa wasn't being updated - it would no longer build in the current environment.

Test releases are for those who don't mind having a broken install, and wish to work to make it better - or for those who need to prepare software to be made available ASAP when the final is pushed to the servers.

The test3 is usually the best test release, that's when newer versions that are not going to be ready on time are cut, and annoying things are cleaned up a bit.

Wow.
I've had horrible issues with WD and Maxtor, especially Maxtor - I've _never_ had a Seagate drive die - and that's what I get most often.

FC3 is only for testing. The stabality has not yet been posted. So I would reccomend you stay with RedHat 9, or you may wanna try FC2. I'am dual booting FC2 and Windows XP, and I'am quite happy with it.