The Top 20 things that don't work in a new FC3 install.

The one that gets me is XMMS. It's on the CD's but it's disabled.

Then there's WinModem's. Countless people have them and RH has no support for them in FC3.

The video driver is a BIG one... ATI and nVidia. No native 3D acceleration.

SATA... it didn't like my controller and kept freaking out.

The El-torrito boot was changed from floppy emulation from CD#1 to some new thing which wreaked havoc on loads of people who had SCSI.

And ...

Up2Date is as flaky as it ever was.

no mp3 support out of the box and lack of Mplayer on cds or in the original repositories

I forgot about the crashing...

nautilus from GNOME would crash all the time or intermittently.

KDE was doing the same thing too but not as often.

EDIT: oh and the USB mouse would disappear too.

Yeah, mplayer.... there's even a Fedora Multimedia HOWTO at The Linux Documentation Project to help people make FC "normal" multimedia wise....

Then there is the SSL that's in FC3 which isn't secure so that means it aint working! Red Hat even has an alert from over a year ago with RH9, that said 0.9.7 OpenSSL has a problem and can easily be hacked rendering your system security useless. Which then gives the attacker the opportunity to get all your passwords and credit card numbers and any other sensitive stuff, etc. http://www.linuxsecurity.com
FC4 you will notice has the new rev that isn't in the alert....

Then there is WIFI which seems everybody is having trouble with these days with FC3.

How about Flash for the web browsers?

CUPS... how many people got this to work with their printers without having to download something?!

KDAT.... there's a notice... read it if you have it installed... "restore".... something about "may not work". What the ?! All the icons were HUGE for files and not directories and it wouldn't show all of the files I backed up per directory. Then the indexes would overlap each other if there was more than one per tape. You know what I'm referring to if you've run KDAT in FC3.

Hardware Browser with kernel 2.6.9-1.667... even with the drivers loaded many items still showed "unknown" for the manufacturer.... like my Adaptec AHA-2940U. Tell me why FC couldn't show what manufacturer in the GNOME Hardware Browser! Or my ATI 9200 Radeon... again the Hardware Browser showed "unknown". Same with my Seagate STD224000N "Scorpion" 4mm DDS3 dat tape drive. It's supposed to say "Archive" for manufacturer but it said again "unknown". It got the rest of the string right but never the manufacturer.

CD-ROM mounting was flaky and needed to have the permissions changed to mount them. At the time I had (3) CD-ROM drives: (2) SCSI and (1) IDE. As root I couldn't mount the SCSI CD-ROM drives intermittently.

And...

Hi!

I love FC3 but I must say that the first thing I just *have* to do when I make a fresh install is to go straight to DAG RPMs and download apt and synaptic, and then set it up to read from the DAG apt repository. The RedHat Package Management is so irritating and apt solves all of the problems. You can then install virtually everything you want, including stuff like mp3 support etc.

But please, developer guys, you've all done a great job, now *please* improve the RedHat Update Manager. It keeps crashing on me randomly and only works about 30% of the time!

Thanks!

Jamie.

HOWTO: Make Fedora useable for multimedia (and most other things).

0. 'yum update'
1. Add the DAG repository to yum.conf
2. 'yum install <mplayer|xine|xmms-mp3|...>'

Aaaaaand relax.

Dave

I find this kind of post very stupid. We all know about apt/synaptic. There are many work arounds for ntfs/mp3/dvd etc. Stop being lazy people, MS doesn't give you dvd playback out the box do they? I don't see anyone complaining that there's no ext2,3,reiserfs support in MS kernels? But you can download explore2fs and visualreiserfs (I think that's the name). You're all bitching and it's just that you're too damn lazy. If you had everything given to you on a silver platter what would be the fun in that? I actually like getting a base system and tweaking it the way I want from there. Nvidia drivers aren't hard to install. If anything ATI is terrible and that should be taken up with ATI - NOT with RH/Fedora or any other Linux distro. Winmodem support is different, the Linux kernel is GPL, Winmodem drivers are closed source, there would be alot of upset developers/kernel hackers if Linus included closed source drivers in the Linux kernel. So stop complaining and live with it, some things are never going to change, it's up to you to change them and make Linux work for you.

</end>

Equinox: Relax! We're just venting.

Besides, if no-one complains about the things that annoy them, then those things never get fixed.

Dave

k3b got segmentation faults and for awhile it saw (2) CD-ROM ATAPI drives when there was only one, and then it made one of them into a CD-RW and refused to recognize the SCSI CD-RW which could be mounted with konqueror, through konsole and through the admin mount util. No go burning CD's using the console way and xcdroast had the same problem but with out the segmentation faults.

I even reinstalled k3b & xcdroast from the FC CD's but that didn't fix it. Later when I updated the kernal to 2.6.10 the problem went away. Nice. :P

The jukebox/ripper kept crashing too stating that there was no CD drive when I set it up just prior to the crashes, but that was before the kernel update.

With the default aic7xxx driver, the install "Check media" thing would always cause a blank screen and lockup no matter how many different FC3 ISO's I used from various people that never had a bad report from the media check. That was random. Something far worse was the install would hang at detecting SCSI controllers using the aic7xxx driver too. Which I now see is a bug because it's listed at http://bugzilla.redhat.com ... finally. :O

Originally posted by equinox I find this kind of post very stupid. We all know about apt/synaptic. There are many work arounds for ntfs/mp3/dvd etc. Stop being lazy people, MS doesn't give you dvd playback out the box do they? I don't see anyone complaining that there's no ext2,3,reiserfs support in MS kernels? But you can download explore2fs and visualreiserfs (I think that's the name). You're all bitching and it's just that you're too damn lazy. If you had everything given to you on a silver platter what would be the fun in that? I actually like getting a base system and tweaking it the way I want from there. Nvidia drivers aren't hard to install. If anything ATI is terrible and that should be taken up with ATI - NOT with RH/Fedora or any other Linux distro. Winmodem support is different, the Linux kernel is GPL, Winmodem drivers are closed source, there would be alot of upset developers/kernel hackers if Linus included closed source drivers in the Linux kernel. So stop complaining and live with it, some things are never going to change, it's up to you to change them and make Linux work for you. </end>

FreeBSD 5.3 has native support for WinModems.

Download FC3 and fix it to make it work since RH won't. Gotcha.

To all those who are complaining that many things don't work in Fedora, I must say that all these is premeditated by RedHat. They know that is you want a 100% working copy of
Fedora, you better *buy* RedHat.
To me all of these smell a Microsoft. I played for a while with Fedora, and it is fustrating trying to make the sound work, xmms is disable, etc, etc.

Basicallly they release a freaking broken copy of Fedora!

Raxxal

I find this kind of post very stupid. We all know about apt/synaptic. There are many work arounds for ntfs/mp3/dvd etc.

Yeah - there are plenty of workarounds. And I really love Fedora, so I'm not complaining. But I think there's no harm in the occassional bitching sessions! :-D If we don't talk about the things that we would like to see arriving in future, they'd never happen! Plus I think a lot of noob users (like me) have problems with packages when we're first settling in, so I like to remind people that its soooo easy when you install apt! :-P

If you had everything given to you on a silver platter what would be the fun in that? I actually like getting a base system and tweaking it the way I want from there.

You're absolutely right - even when something is so much easier in Windows, its so much more satisfying when you get it working in Linux. On my first Fedora install I spent ages getting IPW2100 to work, in order to use my wireless connection, and when I finally did, I was so happy about it. It works straight off in Windows, but that's no fun! :-)

But IMHO Linux is beginning to attract a much wider user base these days, and these things that are 'bitching sessions' for us more technical minded people are the sort of things that will stop other users from ever using Linux. I can't imagine many users wanting to compile the IPW2100 drivers and mess around with firmware etc, just to get something working on their PC that worked fine already in Windows! :-P

We all like Linux - that's why we're here. Just want to see it getting even better than it already is!

Bye for now!

Jamie.

All I want is an Open Source distro that is at least 99.9% working and will install without troubleshooting my hardware because they changed the el-torrito type of boot mechanism and didn't bother to tell anyone.

If you are new to computers and haven't been using them as long as I have this is just normal to have to correct things so the computer will work for you when it should be the other way around as the computer is the tool!

The problem I have or had was not checking out Fedora's disclaimer at http://fedora.redhat.com which states that the sole purpose of the Fedora Project is like race cars for automobile manufacturers. It's a "test bed". But in the case of car makers, they, car makers, foot the bill or get sponsorship to pay the R&D costs. In the case of the Fedora Project from RedHat.com they, RedHat, are using all of us to do the research and debugging so they can take the end product and use it with what they sell, which seems to be more stable and it is. We are even writing howto's, tutorials and the Linux Documentation Project wrote a whole howto on Fedora Multimedia. Then some people say "so what" these days, which is the wrong attitude imho. Then some people spout how good Firefox is and that Netscape 7.2 is old and dead. At least NS7.2 has Flash built into the installer and the installer knows where to go, unlike Firefox up to 1.0.2.

"But they give Fedora away, so it's free" you say. Not really... we pay for Internet access to download hundreds of megabytes of software that's broken and must be fixed by us. That game company gave Doom away and that game worked with no hassles of itself if I remember correctly. Not that Doom can be compared to operating systems and software packages of Open Source nature, but it's an interesting example.

But then I'm used to Apple's MacOS and other operating systems that work and don't need kernel updates every week to fix one thing after another.

A perfect example to what we people and even developers mean to RedHat is the release of FC4 Test 1. They, RH, couldn't wait a couple of days for GNOME 2.10 to be released so they, RH, put out FC4T1 with a beta rev of GNOME 2.10. So instead of developers and other people testing what is a preview of the release they become beta testers for gnome.org. What the !!!!!

That's a tell right there. In my case I've kept FC because I test software for people on my Linux LAN. I get free machines and components that way. The more I test the more its evident which Distro's are the ones to go for.

So in the end... FC is a toy and RedHat is for mature people by their policy and past actions.

As for me? All I want is something that works, is secure and is stable, so I can spend blissful days and years downloading media and documents from the Internet, etc., etc., etc. That's what I expect for my main computer I do work with and enjoy what the world has to offer. As for my "lab", working or broken, it matters not as I've already stated. If you want to work for RedHat for free that's your business. I'm just reporting what's wrong with it. Kind of like a rating system but with actual data. I suppose I could put this in the Distro review section here at LQ.org... which some to think of it.. I did! Only I forgot about alot of things and that's why I started this thread. I didn't think anyone else was going to tell the true story about Fedora Core 3.....

Hmmm.

RedHat have always warned the Fedora is a test-bed for their commercial offerings and shouldn't be used in production, so putting a beta Gnome version is FC4 Test 1 is fine (a test version of a desktop environment in a test version of a test distrobution(?)).

All the other problems stem from Fedora staying away from non-free-speech software (hence the lack of MP3 support). I don't think they're going to change that any time soon.

Dave