There's always new features I long for, but I'm very happy with Fedora Core 1 overall. I've never been so impressed with Free Software than when having a videoconference using a webcam and headset to a person 5,000 miles away in another country: clear as a bell and free to boot (besides my normal bandwidth costs, of course). This couldn't have been so easy without Fedora Core 1 RPMs provided by the gnomemeeting authors.

Fedora is the distro I've probably given most time to. I used Debian for about 3 months, but Debian set incorrect DMA values on my laptop and killed my drive. I've now got Fedora Core 1 installed on my desktop and laptop, and both work great.

The FC1 installer is just like previous versions of Red Hat. FC1 is actually one of about 4 distros that actually install on my laptop, which uses an external PCMCIA CD drive that it can't boot from. The graphical install is nice, and hardware detection is excellent. Disk Druid is still Disk Druid, and is second in GUI partition editors only to Disk Drake.

The Fedora developers have added a very nice bootsplash to provide you with a nice and pretty GUI while the system boots. The default desktop is GNOME v2.4. KDE 3.1 is also available. FC1 still uses Bluecurve, but the default backdrop is a lot better than the Blueswirl image used by RH9.

My biggest gripe about Fedora is the yum, the package manager used in Fedora, repositories, which seem rather lacking. However, once the Fedora community grows, it's doubtless these repos will grow in size. However, coming from Debian Unstable and Gentoo, it's disappointing to type "yum install <package name>" and not have the package exist, as opposed to the aforementioned distros in which their are 13000+ and 7000+ packages, respectively.

MP3 support is still missing. However, if you set up yum right, using a yum.conf from fedora.artoo.net, it's a simple "yum install xmms-mp3" and you're set. Just copy and paste the yum.conf from that website to yours as root and you'll have many packages available not available in the default yum repos.

Overall, Fedora Core 1 is a very solid distro, and most of the bad hype it receives is probably just because people don't like the 'fact' that RedHat is 'abandoning' home users. Fedora Core 2 is set for release in May 2004, and uses kernel 2.6, GNOME 2.6, and KDE 3.2. It's doubtless to say that the Fedora Project has a very spectacular future ahead of it.

I got rid of windows 98se on my compaq presario 5000 , cause I was tired of system crashes, programs not responding, and the BSOD.I took my time, compared features of the newbie friendly distributions, and decided on Fedora core 1.
I've heard people say that "linux takes to long to install". Maybe on their machines...but on mine ....it took less time than installing windows( and I've had windows me, xp, and 98se on this same machine.....so I know how long it takes each to install on a wiped hard drive)
It installed everything I needed to be up and running quickly.....even Nvidia drivers( on windows...I had to download them ).
The only problem I have, is, I reckon, a general linux/unix problem---the mounting and unmounting of cd drives, which, if you've never had to do this before...is kind of confusing.
Partitioning wasn't a problem.That hurdle has been cleared.
Overall, a great experience, one that'll make you say" Why haven't I done this before?".
now...about that cd drive thing...........

I've been using FC1 for a while and haven't had very many problems (when compared to Redhat 9), running FluxBox and only time i've ever needed to reboot was due to gaming in Windoze...

Because the Fedora Core project is community based it is very easy to get updates from the FC site (if you like using RPM's that is)

Fantastic distro but waiting impatiently for the release of FC2 :)

If anybody needs an easy-to-use, fast, and stable distribution, give Fedora a try. They really are headed in the right direction IMO. Usually, even with easy-to-use distributions like Mandrake, I still end up with only half of what I need working (there is always that one dependancy that needs another dependancy, which needs ANOTHER dependancy, etc). So I've tried Debian (because of apt-get) but that didn't go to well. But, with Fedora, you get an easy-to-use system with apt-get (well, you have to install apt-get first, but it's point and click). I know it comes with YUM, but for some reason I really like apt-get, and to update the system, just type "apt-get upgrade" and go watch TV (or put gnome-terminal in a different workspace and browse the 'net).

I've tried both Red Hat Linux 9 and Fedora Core 1 and I say that Fedora is better. Why? Because Fedora uses up2date and yum, so you don't have to register with RHN. Plus, Fedora has newer versions of OpenOffice, GNOME, up2date and more. It also has a part-graphical part-text bootup. Obviously, Fedora is as easy to use as RHL, but also faster and better. So I'd recommend to whoever's using RHL to move to Fedora Core!

I installed FC1 on P2 333 Mhz and it works great!

OK well, this is in my opinion the absolute best distro for a person jst gettinginto linux. It has great hardware configuration with Kudzu. It has picked up everything I shot at it, except my wireless card. Fedora has never crashed on me in my 6 months of using it and is quick as heck.

The only cons are that up2date abosultely sucks. It always freezes on me. But not a problem because you can update your computer with apt-get and synaptic which are 10 times better.

Well after my bad experiences with Red Hat Linux 6 and 7, I had not used Linux in quite a while.

However, when I got my hands on Fedora core1, I could hardly wait to try it out.

In the first place, I noticed a lot of changes in Fedora as compared to earlier versions of Red Hat.

In the first place, the hardware detection was smooth and quite good. Though the graphical installation didn't work the first time, I could get it to work without the framebuffer mode (using the 'nofb' option).

The installation took about 45 minutes with lots of packages loaded on. The system installed the 'grub' boot loader and I could configure grub even within the installation this time.

Once inside, Fedora is quite a good distro to work with. With KDE 3.2, the GUI has definitely improved a lot and there are a lot more applications now in KDE. The best part was that my CD-Writer got automatically configured to work with Linux: something that didn't happen with earlier distros. My sound card (on-board on my A7N8X-E mobo) also got recognised without any hassles. I can now both play music and record audio from my Line-in jack. The OSS drivers got configured automatically. Even my USB Digital Camera (Canon Powershot S50) works with the digikam application!! Wow!

On the whole, this version rocks! I would recommend this distro even to newbies because of all the simplifications in GUI and also the excellent hardware detection during the installation. Go for it!

You get the basic support from the 3 cds.
But u need to install mplayer, xmms plugins for mp3 wma etc
Install K3B coz xcdroast looks lousy.
Window decorations are poor. They can give some good window decorations like suse does.
No rpm updates to kde3.3.
But great for beginners.
i installed mplayer, k3b, stardict, many plugins for xmms, xine, realplayer 10, firefox, thunderbird, gaim(latest version )...and now i love my computer.

This was my first linux os. Fedora core 1 was easy to install and use. openoffice and gnome ,kde, are designed quite well. The cons of this os, are keyboard and mouse not working sometimes. The main problem I had was update sometimes lock up and stop working. I have fedora core 2 also and I have none of these problems.
Newbee's should get fedora for dummies,comes with a full Fedora core distribution on dvd.