Fedora Core Talk

[jdong]

How was the hardware recognition and support ?
I have used all the Fedora releases to date . Core three gave me a lot of issues .I havent tried Core 4 test 3 yet , trying to be a reformed distro junkie is hard , but I am trying .

Hmm, Fedora's hardware has been relatively flawless since Core 2, and flawless since Core 3 on my desktop (Athlon64, Asus K8v, Nvidia) and laptop (cheap toshiba Celeron 330, Intel onboard kitchen sink).

So, I guess I'm not qualified to answer this question.

[TravisNewman]

I always wait on a stable release for distributions I don't have much experience in, and I haven't REALLY used Fedora (short of testing and almost immediately uninstalling) but this one sound promising-- like maybe they've finally found their direction. I'll be testing this one when it hits final.

[blinksilver]

FC4 has made such great improvements over FC3 it is not even funny, i am really proud of the fedora team, am downloading it right now actually

[Lovechild]

How was the hardware recognition and support ?
I have used all the Fedora releases to date . Core three gave me a lot of issues .I havent tried Core 4 test 3 yet , trying to be a reformed distro junkie is hard , but I am trying .

Every single item worked out of the box for me, except my monitor which I needed to select by hand (Fujitsu x177) but that's the standard with all distros I guess it's an X thing.

Fedora is excellent in that regard.

[23meg]

does it boot any faster than FC3, which took 3.5 minutes to boot on my 1.8ghz p4m?

[Lovechild]

does it boot any faster than FC3, which took 3.5 minutes to boot on my 1.8ghz p4m?

yes, several improvements have gone into boottime, e.g. a lot of services don't start if you don't have the hardware needed. and FC5 will be even better, the bootchart guy rewrote readahead to be more efficient and in the FC5 cycle it will be hooked up to auditd to provide the readahead list. It's noticably faster now already though, I think I boot in about 45 secs on my 1600+XP box, not that I've done serious meassurements.

[jdong]

I also confirm a very noticable improvement in bootup time. Services seem to start up faster (GCC4? Code cleanup?), and there are less services loaded on my system.

[Lovechild]

I also confirm a very noticable improvement in bootup time. Services seem to start up faster (GCC4? Code cleanup?), and there are less services loaded on my system.

Mostly you can "blame" that on Ziga who wrote bootchart, it really helped the developers examine the boot process and find bugs. Ziga is basically our new god and overlord, all must hail him.

And might I pled you people to not attribute all speed ups to gcc4, it's really not true, it's a better compiler but the biggest gain with gcc4 is java, gcj really works now - so much so that FC4 ships with a natively compiled OpenOffice and Eclipse. This cannot be understated in terms of importance, both breezy and FC5 should ship gcjwebplugin which allows us to have completely free web java applets.. just try imagining that. And tests on planet classpath show that gcj is extremely fast, more so than the sun java JDK - infact everyone's darling wikipedia now runs using gcj.

[brickbat]

I downloaded it and installed it on my hp laptop. It recognised all the hardware pretty well. I gave up after 6 hours of trying to install the multimedia capability. I think this is because it is a test and changing all the time. Two diferent instruction sites are out of date even though one of them is less 2 weeks old.

I am not a compiler type. I can't program so it is on my laptop but pretty useless. I will have to wait until the final fc4 comes out. Then there should be stable instructions. I am going to check out centos while I wait.

ciao
bb

[jdong]

And might I pled you people to not attribute all speed ups to gcc4,

In FC3, committing 10 1KB binaries to a locally hosted mod_dav_svn Subversion repository took about 20 seconds.

In FC4, the same operation takes about 5 seconds.


What's to attribute this massive speedup to?