Thoughts on Fedora Core 2
A lot of people have recently been throwing
stones at the Fedora Core 2 release. I’ve been using it since May 18th, and I think it’s both neat-o and whizbang. I have various machines around the house serving different needs, but I chose to install FC2 on my main desktop, yellowdart which happens to be a solid 800MHz Pentium-III machine with 512MB of PC133 memory, and a couple of hard drives. In general, I’ve been quite pleased with using FC2 on yellowdart. It’s rock-solid, and with some minor tweaking, it’s a very usable desktop.
MP3 Support
The biggest complaint about FC2 so far has mostly been about “multimedia support”. I think this is mostly due to the fact that Redhat chose to not include mp3 decompression algorithms with their distributions a _long_ time ago due to the potential liability and costs involved with licensing the software. So, they dropped the mpg123 package a long while ago. Basically, get over it, Fedora Core does not support mp3 by default in FC2, and they likely won’t do it in the near future. You can get mp3 support by installing the livna rpm from here:
MPlayer vs WMP
A big strength of the Microsoft hegemony is the perception that it has better multimedia support. On average, it is _much_ easier to handle
media under The Vole’s operating system than any Linux distribution, especially when you qualify it with “by default”. Fortunately for Linux, MS keeps adding layers of code to deal with DRM, Palladium, and “Trusted Computing”-initiatives to their Media Player. The result of that has been people moving back to insecure versions of WMP like version 6.4 because version 9.0 is slow. There’s other recent problems with wmp too. DivX 5.11 doesn’t seem to work quite right in some cases. On my dual monitor configuration, there’s a problem where the video won’t initialize on
monitor 1 or 2 if I click on a file in an explorer window in monitor 2. If I click on the file on monitor 1, the video initializes properly on monitor 1, but I can’t drag it onto monitor 2. So, WMP is kind of screwy.
That being said, MPlayer on Linux has come a long way in the past few years. I installed the latest rpms from livna and dag’s repositories to
install mplayer with all the extras. Here’s the list of RPMs that I needed.
aalib-1.4.0-5.1.fc2.dag.i386.rpm
faad2-2.0-0.lvn.1.2.i386.rpm
lame-3.96-1.1.fc2.dag.i386.rpm
libdvdcss-1.2.8-3.1.fc2.dag.i386.rpm
libdvdread-0.9.4-4.1.fc2.dag.i386.rpm
libmad-0.15.1b-1.1.fc2.dag.i386.rpm
libpostproc-1.0-0.lvn.0.10.pre4.2.i386.rpm
lzo-1.08-2.1.fc2.dag.i686.rpm
mplayer-1.0-0.lvn.0.10.pre4.2.i386.rpm
mplayer-fonts-1.1-0.lvn.3.2.noarch.rpm
mplayer-gui-1.0-0.lvn.0.10.pre4.2.i386.rpm
xvidcore-1.0.0-1.1.fc2.dag.i386.rpm
Obviously the lvn rpms are from livna and the dag one’s are from Dag’s repo.
The good news is MPlayer plays video just fine on my dual-head
DVD Support
I’ve always been a _HUGE_ fan of ATI’s software DVD player. Recently, I had the unfortunate experience of an 80GB hard drive failing, and Murphy’s Law being what it is, it was the hard drive that contained the Windows 2000 %WINDIR%. So, I had to reinstall W2K from scratch. In doing that, I had to upgrade to a cadre of new drivers, and DirectX 9. There’s some new video-handling scheme in the dx9 that breaks the original ATI TV
and DVD software. So, guess what? I had to pay ATI $20 for new drivers and new DVD software. That left a bad taste in my mouth. The new drivers work well enough, but not remarkbly so. And guess what? Hydravision doesn’t support dragging the DVD Window across multiple displays. Also, the ATI FilePlayer does not handle playing standalone VOB files very well at all either.
This is where MPlayer actually exceeds the quality of ATI and Microsoft’s software. I can drag video between screens, even play video with window centered between both monitors, and MPlayer happily does every asinine thing I tell it to. The playlist support is good, even though the playlist editor is seriously lacking. The only problem with the MPlayer as a DVD player is that it doesn’t seem to support ATI’s hardware acceleration for iDCT and Motion Compensation judging from the load average that I experieced while playing a DVD9 disc in my DVD+RW drive.
Dual-boot Issues?
I didn’t have any issues. I think the problem existed for people who did continual updates for FC1 to FC2. The release seems fine for W2K and FC2 dual-booting. The original problem was solved, and installing FC2 didn’t destroy anyone’s data. So, dual-boot to your heart’s content.
There’s a LARGE email about dual-booting issues here:
Gnome 2.6 Issues?
Gnome 2.6 absolutely rocks, and this is coming from a “used-to-be KDE fan boy”. It does _sane_ things on an Xinerama display, it looks perty
with the metacity window manager, and all of the applets that have cropped up over the past few years are _way_ cool. One of the FC2 reviews that I read was overly harsh on Gnome 2.6 because of some minor issue about the default preferences. The cool thing about Linux is, the source is there, recompile it however you like, and put whatever ninja options you want to on it.
Speaking of Gnome Applets, I actually compiled the netspeed applet for Fedora Core under Gnome 2.6 using the stock -devel FC2 rpms. You can download that here:
I have no idea why the FC team doesn’t incorporate NetSpeed into their default applets package. They have gnome-netstatus which is the wannabe Windows XP-style network monitor-style display. netspeed is ten times cooler than the included netstatus applet.
Kernel Updates
Arjan van de Ven seems to be compiling kernels like mad crazy for FC2. I’m currently using his 398 release. I installed 406, but I had several random hangs under his June 1 versions. So, I migrated back to 398 which solved some weird problems where going to runlevel 0 was powering-down my hard disks during a restart.
I’d seriously suggest running a newer kernel than the stock FC2 one. Arjan’s 398 release of 2.6.6-1 seems to be working quite well for me.
Stability
Since Redhat stopped doing the official releases of the desktop operating system, a lot of people have been concerned about stability. I think FC1 is a good test run of how stable the next release may or may not be. I’ve been running an FC1 desktop in my office now since it was
released. I’ve been generally astounded at how well the things been
running.
[jperrie@trogdor jperrie]$ head -n 1 /etc/issue
Fedora Core release 1 (Yarrow)
[jperrie@trogdor jperrie]$ uname -a
Linux trogdor 2.4.22-1.2115.nptl #1 Wed Oct 29 15:42:51 EST 2003 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
[jperrie@trogdorjperrie]$ uptime
16:12:12 up 177 days, 22:10, 4 users, load average: 0.10, 0.03, 0.01 Other RPMs
Fedora Tracker is a great web site for trying to find out what RPMs are available for the new Fedora releases. Check there before attempting to compile whatever random esoteric software that you can’t live without.
Other Hints
I found this site which gives a few helpful Gnome tips for FC2.
