Fedora Core 4 64-bit and Uniwill 258KAO

As I wait for the 5 ISOs to download I thought i'd get the thread rolling for all the recent love of FC4 on these forums that I was so against because of my bad experiences with FC2 and FC3. So to appease everyone what I chose to do is give up my ubuntu install for a few weeks and run FC4 x86_64. If FC4 is in deed such a great distro, then you have my cudos, if it sucks really bad, just like FC2 and FC3 did for me, then I stick firmly by my comments expressed in other FC4 related threads.

This review will put everything in comparison to Ubuntu Hoary 5.04 because it is the only distro I have succefully been able to run on my laptop and have a good handle on it's performance and other details. I will be focusing on the following topics:

1) out of the box compatiblity -- what worked and what didn't after i did the first reboot

2) speed. what good is a 64 bit distro if its slow. i will be making this comparison to the i386 Ubuntu....if FC4 is slower...that is PATHETIC

3) ease of configuring things that did not work out of the box

4) look and feel of things

5) other random details

keep in mind that i am no linux expert so i will not be putting up details of any sort, just brief listings and rundowns of things. i might also be posting in here for a little help trying to configure something.

as for the getting started portion of things, downloading 5 cds (even though #5 is only 160odd mb) is a real pain and is taking up too much time compared to the 1 cd of Ubuntu. lets just say the time i spent downloadnig (and not done yet) i already would have downloaded, installed, and even configured some things (ATI, wifi, look and feel) under ubuntu. so in this department of a quick getting started FC4 fails. Even if they do have a lot of packages to deliver, i suggest they have multiple ways to install (and i dont mean dvd or 5cds). they could have ordered a bare bones package (like the base, crucial apps, and fluxbox) or a network install (much like debian).

as of right now i have 1 and only 1 conclusion to draw from FC4.

the final grade is: FAILED!

How so? I could not complete the tests because no matter what I tried the installer failed to launch. As I would boot off the CD, then press enter, vmlinux would unzip, then give me a black screen for a second or 2 and then the laptop would just reboot. Since the install did not complete (or start for the matter of fact), I could not complete the other points of the test and thus I have no other choice but to FAIL FC4.

If you have some ideas on getting the monkey rolling, I'll take a stab at it and if it works I'll run my tests and reconsider this grade. I downloaded the 64 bit version (i am not stupid to run 64bit software on 32bit hardware, my laptop has an AMD64 3200+).

i dont own any more 64 bit machines, but for the experiment i put the cd in my Thinkpad T23 (Pentium 3 1.133ghz) and these are the results:

the Fedora Core screen came up with the options, i pressed Enter, everything unzipped and then the message came up "your CPU does not support long mode, use 32bit distribution" which is obvious because its a 32bit cpu we are talkin in the thinkpad. So i think the CD is just fine....

onewickedferret my man, you got it going on. thanks to you the experiment will continue. acpi=off is what i needed to get the donkey kicking. i am giving up a fantastic configuartion of Ubuntu (with CS:S installed and working and everything) i am gonna get back to the forum on as as needed basis

alright...it installed, having issues booting though. i am gonna leave it for the night...maybe somebody will dish me a solution

EDIT:
ok, i resolved that issue, had to basically delete 1/2 of the boot command, jesus.

UPDATE: 1:20 AM Tuesday

So i got teh wireless to work eventually, although it was much more painful than it had to be. So there goes the whole user friendly concept. Furthermore, i already needed to edit grub.conf to not include "acpi=off" so the laptop would boot right.

As for speed, so far so good, but I haven't even installed fglrx yet.

Tomorrow will be all basic configuring of things and getting this thing ready for 'day to day use" since it is my primary os right now (lets just say my windows is nearly useless right now).

EDIT. I went ahead and gave up on FC4 because it is just way too much trouble. after i ran yum-update it installed a new kernel and a few new packages (295 mb worth). For starters, yum is slower, and overall less impressive than debian's apt. it just doesn't have the magic cow powers. After the yum update, once i tried to reboot the boot up would fail, i even further tweaked grub commands, but no luck. So as of right now i am back on ubuntu configuring everything i had done before i tried the FC4 proect.

in the big scheme of things FC4 just failed me. It would not install, boot, or even update itself correctly. On top of it all nothing worked out of the box except for the screen. installing madwifi was easy and that got my wireless working, but that is where the ease of things ended. As for the theme of gnome, not too bad, i've seen worse (*cough*VLOS 1.1). Speed wise, considering it was a 64 bit distro, it did perform faster than the old and stable 32 bit i386 ubuntu but not what i expected from 64 bit because PC-BSD 0.7.5 worked just as fast as FC4, but it ran on older hardware (p3 866mhz, 512mb pc100, nvidia 5700 128mb) and had KDE, and as all of us know, gnome > kde when it comes to speed. (i would know using mepis on my desktop and ubuntu on laptop, both debian distros, just one on kde and the other on gnome). Regardless, all i can say is if you like it, go for it and try your luck but I am not going to go in the Fedora/RedHat world for the life of it. If you are in a rush to get a new distro, i highly recommend VLOS 1.2 which is comming out August 1, and Ubuntu Breezy is comming in october. Also kris has been working really hard on getting PC-BSD 0.7.8 released soon, he is days away from being done, it is a very awesome FreeBSD distro.

final grade: C - just your run of the mill bloaded linux distro. just in the same boat as Suse and Mandrake (as it always has been).

Highlights: smooth looking interface, lots of kernel modules, a ton of software to choose from on install

Lowpoints: yum < apt, always has been, always will be. it clearly has a lack of support for laptops and "unique" hardware (seeing my laptop is not a run of the mill dell or HP). The 5 cds to install is a joke, downloading 5 isos and burning 5 disks is a joke and a waste. 2 cds is more than enough to get the software ready to go on most hardware (which it fails to do with 5 disks of crap).

Verdict: FC failed, their distro sucks. they have to rework it from the ground up and take a few pointers from the people at Ubuntu, Mepis and even Linspire

linux is a funny os. there are hundreds of distros to choose from, and people complain that its about a few hundred to many, well, i wouldn't say so because what runs on one set of hardware doesnt run on the other. for instance Mepis, VLOS and SUSE runs onmy desktop but not even close on my laptop, on the other hand Ubuntu works like magic on my laptop and my desktop doesn't even want to boot it. So like i said in my previous post...if you don't mind downloading 5 ISOs and if you know it will work on your hardware, its not the worst distro out there (its generally a good distro...just yum is such crap!). For me frankly, it was just a waste of time (and a good ubuntu install).

If i am bored one night I'll post a "Linux on 258KAO" thread here just giving people my pointers from trying dozens of distros and maybe a good howto that will give noobs something to use who want to try linux on their 258kao (i know there are quite a bit of 258kao owners on this forum).

and mwilliman, my bias was pretty simple and was based on fact. It really was. I had terrible experiences with FC2 and FC3 (and now FC4) and ubuntu basically works like magic on my laptop.