I have wasted the better part of yesterday and today upgrading my main computer to Fedora Core 2 from Fedora Core 1. My system is heavily customized so I undertook this upgrade with dread. I hoped that the upgrade wouldn’t break my system too much, which it didn’t. Fedora Core 2 is actually well worth the upgrade. It feels 3 times faster than the last release and I absolutely love the new Gnome 2.6 desktop. I only have one real complaint about the software itself, which is they changed around the menu system, causing me to loose my custom main menu. An automated upgrade path for the menus would have been nice. Gnome still seems to also lack a way to easily get the main menu the way I like it.
The actual installer for Fedora Core 2 was the cause of my wasted time. I had to restart the install process 3 times because the install process would freeze while downloading the packages. The mirrors I was pulling the packages from were under a lot of stress, being that Fedora Core 2 was just released a couple of days ago, but the install process didn’t seem to detect when a package got stuck. It just sat there forever, hoping the server would send the package eventually. I have always preferred web based installs, where you only download the needed packages, instead of having to download and burn entire cd images. The Debian distribution has done web based installs correctly since I started using Linux 7 years ago. I would like to think that the Redhat lineage could have learned a thing or two by now from them but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The other 2 complaints I have about the installer are minor in both their effects and the work needed to correct them. The remaining time estimate for the install process is horribly inaccurate. Somehow, using magic numbers and ancient voodoo I imagine, at the start of the download and install process it conjures up a large number, such as 600 minutes. Then, as individual packages are installed, it subtracts 5 minutes off the remaining time. It always subtracts 5 minutes and doesn’t seem to care if the package is 200 megs or 1 meg. The Fedora group also seems to have missed replacing the term “Redhat” with the new term “Fedora” in several package names and descriptions. I can’t imagine it being very hard to do a simple grep for Redhat and replace it with Fedora, but maybe they had more important things to do.
The last problem I have with Fedora Core 2 isn’t really Fedora’s fault. My binary only video driver from NVidia does not work with Fedora Core 2. NVidia knows of this problem and is hopefully working on a fix for their driver. This is a great example of why drivers really should be open source. There are plenty of developers, such as me, who would make the fixes necessary to the driver to make it work, but can’t because we can’t get access to the tightly guarded code. So, we will have to wait patiently until NVidia gets around to updating the driver. Until then, I can rely on the standard, non-3d accelerated, open source driver and kiss my frame rates goodbye. I don’t have time to be playing Unreal Tournament anyways.
My parents love having the...