First look: Fedora Core 5
Hello Bruce Byfield,
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/03/08/2321254
Thank you for taking the time to review Fedora Core 5 (test 2) and I
would like to offer my feedback and comments on the review . My first
reaction to seeing this title is confusion over a review about a release
that hasnt been made yet. It would been much better to clarify upfront
that you are reviewing the second test release. Anaconda not listing
reisferfs or other filesystems besides Ext3/ext2 by default is by design
since these are not supported by the Fedora project and the provision to
install Fedora on other filesystems are only provided for facilitating
easy migration. The review says that Anaconda has a long standing
problem that crashes if the CD requires cleaning. However I havent run
into problem myself. It would be good if you can file a bug report in
http://bugzilla.redhat.com regarding this to verify and fix this issue.
Desktop and software selection
The review notes that SELinux slows down GNOME by 60% and this claim is
unsubstantiated in the absence of any benchmarks. The second test
release had various debugging options which helped find and fix various
bugs during the development cycle. An example of such a analysis from
Dave Jones, Fedora Kernel maintainer at Red Hat can be found at
http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/35270.html. It is very likely that
you have seen a slowdown trigged by such debugging patches. Various
SELinux performance improvements have also been merged during the
comparatively long development cycle of Fedora Core 5.
Fedora Core 5 does not have XFCE which is only provided in the Fedora
Extras repository. KDE and XFCE are not branded to look like GNOME in
Fedora. XFCE and KDE uses BlueCurve while GNOME uses the new Cairo based
Clearlooks theme as an example of the differences between them.
We do not have detailed performance comparisons between GCJ and Sun
Java yet since the current development is focused on completeness and
coverage over the standard API in preference to tweaking the
performance but if there are significant differences, do let the Fedora
Java development team
(http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-java-list) know
about it.
Sabayon and Alacarte is offered in Fedora Extras repository though
Alacarte is not part of GNOME 2.14 as claimed in the review. Festival,
drivers for wacom project and ruby are not new to Fedora Core 5 and have
been part of every Fedora release. Ruby does not replace GCJ based
applications either.
Yum does not replace RPM as claimed in the review and only complements
it by adding a automatic dependency resolving tool which uses RPM
internally. Pirut only provides a timer with a ability to confirm
immediately when there is a additional dependency that is required to
update or install a package and does not hide dependencies.
Security and Administration
system-config-kickstart is not a new tool and again has been in every
release of Fedora and Pirut does list dependencies when required which
you have even noted earlier as a annoyance.
Recommendations
The system specifications indicated in the release notes are targeted
towards the default package profile and any distribution providing the
latest versions of GNOME and KDE would require a very similar
configuration to perform well and this does not differ very from from
the latest version of Debian or Ubuntu. Fedora Core along with extras
offers a choice of several thousand packages and can be tailored to fit
the beginner or the super geek.
It would help avoid several of these factual mistakes and provide more
details if you can contact me during your review period on future
occasions. Thank you for your interest in Fedora.
--
Rahul