parthab

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I have installation notes and review at my site.
www.partha.com

Mizzou_Engineer

I installed Fedora Core 5 on a new computer that is sitting in a lab. There are other computers there that run RH9 and FC4, so I put FC5 on this one as it is newer.

The install was quite slow and there were very few options in the install when using GUI mode. This would be good for new-to-Linux users, but a little dumbed-down for advanced users. Once installed, the OS runs nicely on the dual-2.8 Xeon box and seems about as stable as any other decent Linux I've used, which means that it is like a rock.

It looks and feels much like FC4 but with kind of a halfway-done feel to it. The configuration tools work decently but it seems like they do not really mesh together well, like say, SuSE's YaST does. I also could not get KDE to run the monitor at its full 1600x1200 (it said 1152x964) even though the X configurator said it was 1600x1200 and it was 1600x1200 during the install. The refresh rate is also unable to be changed

All in all, it's decent but looks like it would have benefitted from a little more polish. The goods are there, but they just need a little more tweaking and this will be a very good distribution.

karellen

Together with Suse 10.0 that's my favourite distro

beast2k

The problems start before the install even begins, the cd checking utility that verifies that your cd's are okay is not working correctly so it will tell you that cd's are no good when in actuality they are fine. So after needlessly burning a few extra cd's I start the install which goes okay it's your typical anaconda installer with a different "bubble" theme. After install I start the usuall multimedia setup that is still required with fedora all went okay there, I tried installing crossoveroffice 5 it installs fine but refuses to install any software I used this app on fc4 with no troubles. I tried to install my firefox bookmarks from a floppy and lo and behold the floppy drive is detected but refuses to work, but thats okay I said I also put my boomarks on my zip disk so I put in my zip100 disk and that does not work either at this point I'm thinking "does the cdrom work? I tried it and it did work with no problems (small miracle there)Fedora5 uses a new way to mount media called gnome-mount (I think thats what it's called) I would guess thats why all removable media doesn't work. Getting connected to my network and internet went smoothly enough though. Over all I would say it just isn't ready for a new linux user if you have been using linux for a while and know how and have time to fix these things then fedora may be for you but with other distros offering full MP3 and multimedia support and built in ATI/nvidia drivers working out of the box along with working floppy and zip support and doing all of it with one cd not 5 or 6 it is getting harder and harder to justify the time spent on fedoras multimedia setup and to repair buggy drive support. In my opinion you would be better off using suse or mandriva fedora is just not ready for use there is just to many things to setup and fix it not worth the time or the headaches. Fedora Core 5 the begining of the end for fedora ? They really blew it with this one.

jnev

last time I tried Fedora was a few years ago with 1 or 2, can't remember which. I installed with hopes that it would be an improvement. well, while the distro looks very nice and polished, it isn't. in a 20 minutes time-span that I was testing it, several different applications froze 3 times (all that were auto-installed with the distro, I didn't put anything on up to that point). then, I got a full system freeze. my mouse froze, there was nothing I could do, no keyboard shortcut, nothing. I booted back into Ubuntu and promptly erased that partition.

gwp

I'm dissapointed... If RedHat was not so entrenched with certain major Hardware vendors I'd look at something else... Also no-one seems interested in contributing documentation...

I'm really keen on Ubuntu at this stage and if I see vendors adding support for it I would like to trash FC/RHEL

Old issues seem to flow from version to version and never get fixed...

I'm really not impressed which is sad as RedHat in the 7/8/9 days was probably the best distro in it's time, but it's getting a serious hiding these days

Wheat_Thins

How one system can go from Very good to bad with a release is beyond me, you are supposed to progress with newer distros, not take a step back in terms of stability.

ulftho

My RH-experiences covers all versions of Fedora Core. I have earlier used SUSE 9.1 and 10.1 and Mandriva 10 tried Knoppix, Libranet and Lycoris. It is very difficult to judge one distribution as better then the other. However FC5 installed on my AMD-64 desktop is almost perfect. You can choose between a very large number of programs through a nice program installer The new Latex-editors KILE or Texmaker are excellent . All combinations of programs, easiness of choosing and installing programs makes FC5 to my favorite Linuxdistribution.

njsci12

I don't know why there are so many negitive reviews of fedora core 5 as i have come to like it. I wanted to give linux a try as i have been used to winxpand tried fedora because it looks good and easy to use, the inatll was pretty painless with grub detecting my windows and working first off, the interface is very nice and its very polished interface using gnome 2.14, i don't know what the kde interface looks like as haven't tried it. Otherwise hardware was all detected including my usb printer but not the scanner because it has no support in SANE. Installing apps apart from yum is a pain but with yum its very easy and everyting is updated in one go and the use of more than 1 repository makes it easy to install all the apps you need , i suggest that you follow a install guide for a newbie which maps how you should use yum and ainatll the major apps , but once you get used to it , its very good and evthing works seemlessly including 3d drivers , its much more secure than windows and installing rpm's is very easy with yum and genaerally when u get the hang of it , overall well recommeded !!!, looks amazing and works very well!! in most cases after a bit of work!!

burntfuse

First of all, the installer wouldn't work on my 1 Ghz PIII desktop - even though the CDs passed the tests, it would complain that a package couldn't be found at completely random steps in the installation, and since the installer is more dumbed-down than before, there wasn't any option to skip the package - just a reboot button. It did work on a 1.5 Ghz Celeron M laptop, though. The selection of packages was very nice. The newest versions of GNOME, KDE, Eclipse, and many other programs were included. I initially used the preset installation options, wanting to get it over with quickly and figuring that I could customize it later. Well unfortunately, unlike with the nice package manager in RH9, the default settings for the package manager are set so that it only installs from the online repositories, so it requires an annoying workaround (which I still haven't gotten to work for me) to install from the CDs or DVD. This is something that they REALLY need to fix in the next release, possibly with a menu option to select the installation source.

Once installed, everything was fine, although RhythmBox is unstable at times and freezes GNOME too. The hardware detection worked fine, everything is pretty configurable thanks to the new more hackable version of GNOME and some additional Fedora-specific utilities, and the startup time is AMAZING (about 1 minute from when GRUB loads until everything is up and ready to use), at least compared to RH9 and RHEL4 which took forever to boot. One problem here - the search daemon isn't activated by default, due to a memory leak IIRC, so that takes a bit more tweaking that could completely turn off new users.

Overall, I think this has a lot of potential, and with some small changes it could be VERY good, but for now I'd recommend using something else, like Ubuntu or SuSE.

rewtedesco

I downloaded FC5 on a Suse 10.0 machine and burned the DVD there (btw, it is progress that many CD burners and DVD burners now actually work - thanks K3d), and then installed
on a Dell laptop.
I am used to have to do an installation three times before I finally get it right, and figure out which mistakes I have to avoid. This installation wasn't any different. It is a Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop with PIII, and fortunately it has a dvd device, so no playing the DJ. The issue was of course, following good old linux tradition, that the setup of X11 failed, which means one has one guess. I guessed wrong twice and each time, the only thing to do was switch the power off and start over. Pain in the neck! But you see, one forgets these things: one has to do the installation procedure only once (or three times in my case).

After that I had to hangle around for quite a while with ndiswrapper (a piece of software needed to be able to use
windows drivers for certain wireless devices). Even though there is no lack of good advice and quite detailed tutorials, little things can go wrong easily, and I had a good share of that. It would be nicer if ndiswrapper was
contained in the distribution of FC5, in my opinion, but there may be legit reasons for it not being part of FC5.

I think that the origin of most of the problems where because of infamiliarity with things like yum: Very powerful tool, and I recomment to read the description in
the Fedore project. For configuration purposes, I was used to Suse's yast, which is also a fantastic tool. But then I realized how easy it was under FC5 to set up things like cups printer and samba.

Basically everything is working fine now. I am impressed how much progress the gnome windows system has made, and I am also much impressed with the recent KDE 3.5.

Either user surface is now a lot more convenient than windows machines could ever be. Maybe Macs are superior to this, but I don't have a Mac.

I also tried wine again. It made some progress and I could use it to install windows drivers for the wireless device so it can run with a kernel module under linux (an ndiswrapper module that contains a windows driver). wine is to some extend integrated, so it can do now things like
autorun if one inserts windows installation disks, and it actually does install things - Whether they work is a different issue.

I really hope that things go further towards integration of
several operating systems. How about FC6 or FC7 comes with integrated wine environment (there are already elements of that in FC5) so one can open one of the 4 or 6 or 8 desktops and run XP, and run all the proprietary windows software that's installed there.

So in all: I am quite happy with FC5.

TruongAn

Fedora used to be my favorites distro before I switch to gentoo.
However I still loyal to FC since they are more up-to-date.
I bought the predownload and burn FC from a shop near my house, it cost me more than 2$ for it and I went to the installion straightly. Since many people complain that the media check report wrong problem, I skip it. I choose text mode installion because it run faster on my slow machine. 3 hours later, FC5 is up and running.

The operating sysem look nice but the cons aspect is that it is out-performanced by the heavily-tweaked-gentoo though I have minimize the installion and haven't touch it yet.

Since most of my wokrs are done on gentoo now, I don't have much things to complain about this OS. But in my point of view: Fedora Core is a easy of use OS, created to test the latest soft of the open source world. And that make it a getting-worse-overtime distro. However I can accept it.
The suggestion is that keep Fedora for fun and find another distro for your work.

p_s_p_c

I wanted to find a distribution that worked without needing much system fixing on my NEC notebook (E6100). I tried a number of free versions: SUSE 10, Ubuntu, Debian (unstable), and FC5.

FC5 was the only one that worked immediately, e.g. without needing fixes for the LCD monitor.

My only complaint is that I have not managed (yet!) to get the sound card and dvd player working properly. I am not too bothered about this as I don't need it for my work.

yum worked fine, once I found a site that would allow ALL updates to come down (e.g. mirror.pacific.net.au) without complaining.

I give FC5 a 10 despite the lack of sound and DVD software, because I blame this more on NEC than RedHat - NEC notebooks have the "Designed for Windows XP" sticker ;-)

trengen

There are some bugs with FC5 that need to be resolved. I installed FC5 to my Intel P4, 2.Hz with Ati Radeon video card. This combination did not work very well. I kept getting system lock up at system boot up, immediately after the splash screen. The system seemed to run very slow when multiple applications are opened. High frame drop rates made it impossible for multi-tasks and multimedia applications to work properly.

wed1964

found fc5 very easy to install lots of up to date software although changed the layout of desktop as soon as i could didnt like the toolbar on top of the screen but very good othewise apart fromthe fact i cant get my speedtouch 330 modem to work

abonnema

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I have been using FC for a while now (since FC1). I switched over from RH9. I have been fairly content with it up until now.

Packages
There is a lot of software to choose from. The package installer that is the basis for many GUI package installers in FC5 is yum. Personnaly I like the command line interface too much to start using the GUI interface, but really there is a lot of choice: yum, yumex, pup (for updates), pirut and probably there are others. They are all based on yum, but use a GUI.

Yum, Yumex, Pirut, Pup
One of the main advantages of yum is its automatic dependency resolver. In order to do this you need to choose which repositories you want and you have to be careful which repositories you combine: not all repos work well together. Basis is always core, update and extras. I have found livna to be very compatible with core, update and extras, but do not combine livna with other external repos like freerpms or the like. Rather choose the one that is best for you. If not sure, choose core, update, extras and livna.

Automatic updates
It is very easy to set up automatic updates, but I have chosen to just enter "yum update" from the commandline so I will know in advance which packages will be updated and specifically when a kernel update occurs. I always want to test a new kernel once before I accept it.

Repositories
FC5 is quite bleeding edge and will once in a while crash an application. Chances for a crash increase if you install non-Fedora packages, especially if they are not from one of the recognized repos, or if you mix non-compatible repos. A well known example of problems is installing java from Sun without checking the FC-READMEs and other documentation. Their implementation seems to overwrite important shared libraries causing problems. If you install using the appropriate instruction, no problems occur.

Communities
Another great thing about FC is the community. It has a number of very knowledgable people around that are really willing to help you. And even if you are new to Linux, or to FC, they point you in the right direction. But please, you do have to do the main work of searching and reparing problems yourself! Don't expect the community to do all the work for you.

SE-Linux, an extra line of defense
SE-Linux is one side of FC5 that is a recent addition to FC. It was added (I think) to FC4, but in FC5 it becomes more intrusively present. From the start I have had enough problems with it, that in the end I disabled it completely.

This is not a good thing, as SE-Linux is an extra line of defense. But, it caused so much hassle and I really wanted to go on with my business, so I disabled it.

Conclusion
I like FC5, it works and sometimes you need the community, which also gives great support, even though sometimes a question goes unanswered, partly because of the shere bulk of messages arriving daily, partly because of awkward frasing.

Bottomline: FC5 yes, but be prepared to have some amount of hassle. Otherwise, look for a hasslefree distribution (obviously less bleeding edge).

jbannon

Installation:
Having previously been on FC4 and before that Gentoo, this release does have its problems. Getting the installer to work first time is a hassle because of the buggy kernel and if you're doing anything complicated like dual boot then you're in for a hard time. Also, in spite of its "bleeding edge" reputation, it doesn't support many common devices like SATA drives (at least not out of the box). It's fine if, like me, you're running an IDE drive as a master but otherwise quite difficult.

Yum is fairly easy to use, though, as with other distros I've tried, working out the dependencies can be a bit mysterious. Do not use Pirut to install anything as it's completely hopeless - it's far too slow and buggy. Get rid of it and the same goes for the Graphical boot. Use Yumex instead as it's much better though it can still have problems getting content from the mirrors.

Tools:
Somewhat surprisingly, although things like GCC are well up-to-date, they all have i386 as a common denominator. As I have a 2.2GHz P4 processor etc, this means I'm not getting the best out of the tools. Performance is adequate however.

For development tools the "standard" offering appears to be Eclipse but the implementation of this is absolutely awful. It's dreadfully slow, it doesn't like the Sun J2SE and breaks whenever the Eclipse update tool is run. If you're an Eclipse user then use the vanilla version from the Eclipse.org web site rather than the Fedora version. The KDE development tools are of the usual standard and are the ones I use because of the paucity of tools offered for Gnome.

Office Apps:
These are of the usual quality though Firefox is a tad slow (use nautilus to get rid of all the language packs that come as default). The current version of OpenOffice is OK and is improved if you install the Sun J2SE.

Multimedia:
Setting this up is a bit of a hassle because of all the licensing issues surround MP3 and the like. You can get suitable dlls for these though and once they're installed the multimedia side is OK with all the usual presentation tools being available.

Summary:
All in all, not too bad but it's still a bit on the rough side.

jesuscakes

Well I tried to install it on my dual 7800 GT SLI system to no avail. I then tried to install the driver through the linux terminal in text mode to no avail. I guess I was just not meant to run fedora.

mrmeetze

When I first got started with Linux about a year ago, my first OS I double booted with was Red Hat Fedora Linux. I have not had much time to play with other distros, so to some people this review may be bias.

First off, if you download Fedora I really recommend getting a DVD iso. Don't do the 5 CD download because:
1) Many CD's to pop in and out
2) I've had so many problems trying to install with multiple CDs. When I did a DVD I had no problem. Maybe its just me?

Fedora is great for people new to Linux, who just want to get their feet wet with the new world of free software. It includes both KDE and Gnome desktops. Another thing I really enjoyed about Fedora is it include PLENTY of software such as Open Office, PHP, MySQL, Apache, Developer tools, GIMP, etc. And again this is for people new to Linux, the Fedora system comes with YUM and RPMS. RPMS are very similar to the typical "setup.exe" you would find in Windows. Yum (Yellowdog Update Manager) is another easy way to install software and upgrade the system if needed.

Now for the things I really didn't like. Like I said I haven't had time to explore other operating systems, since I'm still in school and constantly staying busy. Fedora 5 took a very long time to install. When I popped it in my HP Laptop (ze4400) and it gave me the option to upgrade I was like, "Wow I don't have to download the update DVD iso!" So I updated from 4 to 5. Little did I know it would take almost an hour and 30 minutes. So while it was installing I watched "Meet the Fockers". After the movie ended, it was still installing.
Now this is in the past, but as I mentioned above I used to download the 4 iso images and have 4 CDs to juggle around with. When I was installing Core 4 on my laptop it kept giving me error after error, and I about gave up. I've noticed this on many computers, there it is really picky about its installation. For example, on my laptop I had to enter the GUI with some kind of ending on the command for monitors. Then it installed fine. No problems. Maybe its me!

Overall, I highly recommend Red Hat Fedora to anyone who is looking at getting their feet wet with Linux and the Open Source world. Just be sure to download or purchase a DVD iso instead of multiple CDs.

-Malcolm