A Quick Look at Fedora Core 5

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi Eugenia, 

http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=14111

Thanks for the review of Fedora Core 5. You have remarked about the
performance improvements that we have had in Fedora Core 5p and wondered
whether the system monitor application's algorithm has changed or
whether GNOME and Fedora actually has optimized to this extend. It
turn's out that we did make some big jumps over the development process.
Many of these improvements are what we inherited from the upstream
development (including some of these made by Red Hat developers) rather
than Fedora specific improvements but we still share the benefits as
always.

While you have been positive about the general package management
improvements through Pirut and Pup, you have mentioned that Pirut is
still buggy. Can you report these bugs in http://bugzilla.redhat.com and
list them?

On the review, you have mentioned that sound mixing works by default
without manual configuration through .asoundrc files. This is a feature
that works starting from Fedora Core 4 and not a new one to this
release. 

I would appreciate if you can file bug reports on the suspend feature
not working on your laptop as well as issue with the touchpad
configuration.

I was unable to reproduce the GNOME 2.14 issue about preferences that
you have mentioned in the review. I didn't see it get discussed anywhere
in our lists or forums which I keep a close eye on. So i truly seems
weird to me. 

A menu editor is part of Fedora Core 5 (GNOME 2.12 wasnt included in any
Fedora release). You just have to right click the menu bar in the panel
and click on edit menus to access this feature. Also FUSA is disabled in
the menus due to some thorny issues with device ownership on consoles.
Both of these are highlighted in
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/FC5Common listed in our frontpage.

You have mentioned that FC6 will rock even better with AIGLX. While
that's of course true, you can try this out even with FC5,
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RenderingProject/AiglxOnFedora

Let me tackle the cons part one by one

* Suspend-to-RAM didn't work as advertised - As mentioned earlier I
would like to see a bug report on this. This is highly hardware specific
and while it works on many hardware that we explicitly tested on
(http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/HCL/Machines/Laptops),
 we aren't perfect yet.

* No phone tools (PDA support hit and miss) - True. Has been a major
pain point for quite sometime in Fedora. I am hoping that we see some
traction and maturity with a common framework like opensync. 

* A pain to install non-free stuff manually - While not in match with
the ideals of the Fedora Project, as a general issue about adding
repositories, many of them now usually have a repository-release.rpm or
similar package which drops in a repository in /etc/yum.repos.d which is
better than manually tweaking configuration files. Fedora Extras and
custom repositories during installation time might even happen as soon
as Fedora Core 6. Work has already been done in FC5 time frame to get
Anaconda to support yum as its dependency resolver.

* No iMovie/iDVD-style applications - Not sure which one matches this
requirement now to be included in Fedora Core. Maybe Diva, Kino or Pitvi
would be good enough at some point in the future.

* No UI for most Bluetooth profiles - Haven't use bluetooth enabled
devices. KDE has a application. GNOME support could be improved better.

* No Gnome menu editor included - It is. As already indicated just right
click on the menu bar.

* No Fast User Switch applet - True. We still have to hash out some
issues in this implementation.


Thanks again for the review. Looking forward to a release of Fedora Core
6 and your review of it.

Rahul