Fedora Core 5 - Notes

From Julian Yap

Contents

Software issues

PUP - Software updater

When updating ("Apply updates"), "Resolving dependencies for updates" hangs for a long time with no real progress reports. Very confusing for users.

GUI hangs and looks unresponsive when downloading packages and other tasks. See screenshot.

It also crashed on me the first time I ran it. I suspect it ran into an unresponsive yum repository and didn't time out.

Yum

On a 512Mb RAM system slows everything down greatly. Maintains around 22% of memory usage.

Out of the box issues

Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2200BG (rev 05)

Detected but not installed. It's a non-FOSS firmware issue.

Monitor/Graphics card

Not detected as a widescreen monitor and highest resolution available by default is 800x600. Selected Generic LCD display capable of 1280x800 during install and that works fine.

Hibernation

Does not support hibernation out of the box. Only suspend.

Fast user switching

Unsupported out of the box.

Amount of updates and 'instability'

When I installed as minimal an installation I could on June 12, 2006 it over 340 package updates (including dependencies) with over 247 Mb to download.

The kernel also moved from 2.6.15 to 2.6.16.

Somewhere along the line, Fedora became the equivalent to Debian Unstable. This is a total joke and makes the distribution unusable to basic end-users.

Update:

On a June 15, 2006 installation with Office and Development packages selected (454 packages including dependencies):

Install      3 Package(s)
Update     225 Package(s)
Remove       0 Package(s)
Total download size: 541 M

Asian fonts

Aren't installed by default. On Ubuntu, they are.

yum install fonts-japanese fonts-chinese fonts-korean

Good things

Fonts

The default Fedora fonts are nice.