Fedora 11, released just under six months ago, was a disaster. I couldn’t get it to install on my system no matter which method I tried, and due to my strict zero tolerance policy for broken installers, Fedora 11 recieved a score of 0/5 on my site. This angered a lot of people, but I simply cannot recommend a distribution to my readers in good conscience if the installer is completely broken. Thankfully, Fedora 12 was recently released and it’s fixed this problem, and then some!
Looking back, I’ve tried everything to install Fedora 11 on my test machine. Different file systems, options, partitioning schemes, redownloading, reburning, you name it, I tried it all and I found that it simply doesn’t work. (Keep in mind that this is coming from someone that’s been installing Linux since 2002, I’m definitely no slouch). Fedora 12, as it turns out, installs without a hitch. It was painfully easy to install, and the installation worked on the very same box that Fedora 11 failed on previously with no configuration changes whatsoever. Fedora 12′s installer works, and it works well.
Just like before, I downloaded the 64-bit GNOME Live CD. From starting it up for the first time, I was amazed by how well polished the experience was from the booting of the Live CD, to the booting of the final installed system. Everything is themed, and it looks very decent. From someone used to Ubuntu’s brownish and gloomy artwork, Fedora’s colorful blue schemes are definitely a blessing. Both Mandriva and Fedora get some respect in this area with both of their recent releases.
Fedora 12 recieves the usual upgrading of all major packages across the board. Everything you’d expect from a bleeding edge distro is here, such as GNOME 2.28, KDE 4.3, Kernel 2.6.31, a preview of the upcoming GNOME shell, and other improvements are present such as EXT4 by default for the boot partition and more.
As far as speed goes, Fedora 12 performs just as fast as you’d expect any GNOME-based distro to. The boot process is definitely improved, but for me it boots just as fast as any other recent GNOME distro. That is to say, there is nothing to complain about here when it comes to speed. Considering my test box is a slow machine with a single core-Athlon 64 processor, this is saying a lot.
My only complaint with Fedora 12 is the spatial browsing, which is where each window opens another when clicking on a folder. To me, having windows with small screen footprints by removing the browser controls is nice, but having each folder open a new one is annoying. However, this is no big deal at all because this behavior is simple to correct. As great as Fedora 12 is, I have to reach a bit in order to find something to complain about.
From spending a good week and a half with Fedora 12, I couldn’t find anything broken or out of place. The entire experience feels polished and well thought out. As I’ve mentioned before in past articles it seems to me that every even-numbered Fedora release is exceptional, and given the quality of this latest release, I’ll have to say that the tradition still holds strong.
The Good
- The installer works well
- Well polished and themed
- Stable and fast
The Bad
- GNOME’s “Spatial Browsing” by default
Overall: 5/5 (Fantastic)!
Jeremy is a Certified IT Technician that blogs at ITNewsToday.com in his spare time. He has over ten years of industry experience, and studies the IT industry every single day. Jeremy has become an open source enthusiast over time and is studying for his Linux+ certification. He lives in Waterford MI with his wife Krystal and son Alan.
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Fedora goes from 0/5 to 5/5 and “fantastic” on one release. Either there has been a revolution around, or maybe the autor sees the world a little bit to much in black and white
opposite experience. F11 was a dream and f12 required complete reinstall 3 times to get everything going right, and that was because of updates in the kernel not because of the fact that i changed different install media 2X. But! i still work with fedora because i don’t expect things to just work out of th ebox, that is what my debian boxes are for (the wife and kids). fedora is for real geeks who have the need for messing with things. (personal opinion there of course). i would set up fedora for someone and let it go knowing that they will have something solid once it is setup for them, but its not something i could just walk away from. My wife and daughter and 7 year old son can update/ upgrade debian without handholding.
…due to my strict zero tolerance policy for broken installers, Fedora 11 recieved a score of 0/5 on my site…
…painfully easy to install…
Fedora 12 recieves the…
If your readers were upholding the same “zero tolerance policy” for grammar so they would stop reading at the first error, you’d be the first to moan. You’d tell them to look beyond the form, and to care about the content since it’s what really matters. Isn’t that the same for a Linux distribution? Once installed, no matter how difficult that process was, it’s the content that counts. Dismissing an entire distro on such a whim is just as childish as dismissing your entire article at the first sign of a typo.
Thank you for the comment. However, it doesn’t appear that you judged what I wrote fairly based on what you said. First of all, Fedora 11 wasn’t difficult to install at all. Instead, Fedora 11 wouldn’t install at all on the most basic of a system. The installer was completely broken. Sure, it did work on some machines I’m sure, but the machine I used has installed a ton of different distributions without fail.
I am all for judging a distribution on it’s merits. I will definitely judge a distro fairly and look passed it’s flaws, as none can be truly perfect. However, I cannot give a single point to a distribution that fails at the most basic of concepts, the installation. Period. If you think I should recommend a distribution to my readers that has a broken installer, something is very wrong with your logic. In addition, if grammar/typos are more important to you than an honest review, something is doubly wrong with your logic. You can notify me of errors and I’ll gladly fix them, but you cannot fix a faulty product.
I just don’t understand. I’m not going to recommend a car with a broken engine any more than I am going to recommend a distribution that cannot even install on a basic computer. Many readers appreciate this of me. Thankfully, the latest Fedora has fixed this, and it installs without fail on the exact same machine, so everything is good now.
PS. Dismissing an article based on a typo is NOT the same thing as dismissing a distribution based on the installer. It’s one thing if my article has a typo, but it’s clearly another if it can’t load at all in your browser.
It sounds like you either didn’t verify the checksum of your F11 downloaded .iso file before burning the CD,or you didn’t use the included media check facility before trying to install from the CD.
Actually, not only did I do that, I also downloaded it several times and burned it at different speeds. The installer in Fedora 11 was broken, end of story.
For Live CD, YES. Next time DVD’s are the way to go for Fedora.
The one major problem with Fedora 12 is that they seem to have introduced a quite annoying bug that causes screen to fail to clear the terminal when exiting, after using ncurses-based apps. It also fails to switch back from application mode quite often, forcing me to use a dirty hack to regain the use of the cursor keys.
Unfortunately, this problem affects me quite seriously as I use screen heavily.
Lol. It’s funny when some people can’t get to install a distro within a GUI installer like Anaconda. Fedora 11 was a great distro. I’m glad you do like Fedora 12 though.
* Word of advice: Don’t use Live CD’s
You are right about Anaconda generally being good. I find it strange that I had any trouble with Anaconda at all. It’s never failed me before in any other Fedora release, and I’ve tried them all. I can try any Fedora release on that machine, and they will all work except for Fedora 11. Especially considering installing Linux is typically much easier than installing Windows, that makes my issues even stranger. However, I’ve heard of others having issues so I know I’m not the only one.
About using Live CD’s, I usually don’t have any problems with them. I use them primarily, not just because I prefer them but also because it’s what the majority of people will try first.
There was a lot of issues with the Live CD installer in Fedora 11. Not only you. It only worked if you did a “default” partition scheme.
I stopped using Live CD’s. The fedora devs swear by the DVD version having almost no bugs. I have been using DVD’s to install since Fedora 10 and have never had problems… Nvidia drivers on the other hand are a different story
The live CD installer and the DVD installer are the same installer. They’re both anaconda, it’s all the same code. The only real difference is that they behave totally differently at the actual ‘installing the system’ phase – the live CD just dumps a pre-built filesystem image to the hard disk, it doesn’t actually install individual packages. That shouldn’t make any difference, however.
That’s also the reason you can’t change the filesystem when doing a live CD install. It’s not a bug, it’s an unavoidable limitation of how the live CD is built. It applies to F12 as well as F11.
I don’t really understand. The Live CD gives you an option on which file system to use. If you’re only supposed to choose a particular one, you shouldn’t be given options that won’t work. That’s why I think the file system choices were supposed to work because the choices are offered. With Fedora 12 I’ve had no problems, and I didn’t have problems with versions earlier than Fedora 11 either.
Did you try net-install or the DVD install media after the live CD failed on you? For one thing, you seemed too eager to dismiss the distribution (Fedora 11) before you even put some effort into it. If live CD fails on me, I would try downloading the net-install, I would not re-download the same ISO even after checksum seemed fine. Also, as you say your test machine is a really old one. Did you think about bad sectors on your hard disk preventing the installer to continue?
Bug/No bug, your article on Fedora 11 deserves a 0/5 for the lack of attempt to understand the problem. Saying you tried downloading the same ISO image several times or re-initializing setup several times does not mean you contributed anything.
Fedora/Linux/Any open source software is a community effort. As a member of that community who think he has the authority to rate a project should have some contribution back to the project and the least you could do was to file a bug report. If a bug report was already filed for the same bug, you should have atleast directed your *readers* to it. Your article has simply no utility value what so ever and for that it receives a 0/5.
I participate in the open source community as much as I can. However, contrary to popular belief contributing to the community is NOT a requirement to justify having an opinion. I’m not sure what country you’re posting from, but here we practice freedom of speech. If you don’t like my article, by your own logic you can take time and contribute your own and submit it here. I’ll even take care of advertising it across all the usual news sites to get your review read by as many people as possible.
Second, it may be true that a DVD install or net-install may have worked, but should I really be forced to jump through those hoops when ALL other Live CD based distributions worked without a problem? Should I recommend a distribution to my readers that will require them to jump through those hoops? Absolutely not. The Live CD is the first thing the average Linux user tries, so it’s the first thing I’m going to try. The installer is the single most important part of a Linux distribution. The zero tolerance policy for broken installers will continue.
Third, of course I tried running a sector scan on my hard drive. I’ve even tried other hard drives, of which I have several. I’ve been in the industry over ten years so I’m absolutely going to scan my hardware first before making a claim. I’ve tried memory tests as well. When it passed the memory test, I tried different RAM anyway, and even different SATA cables as well as an IDE hard drive rather than SATA. Not only that, all other Fedora releases worked on the same machine/hard drive as I’ve already said several times now so I went above and beyond the call of duty.
So there was definitely no “lack of attempt” here.
Coming to your current article (about Fedora 12). Seriously, you want to complain about *Spatial browsing* in Nautilus? All it takes is around 5 mouse clicks to set it to Browser view. Just because you don’t like something, does not make it *bad*. It’s a feature, some people like it and some people don’t. (BTW, I too only use browser view). You just say that a feature you don’t like is a *con* for the entire operating system, especially when that feature can be configured the way you like.
Coming to ext3/ext4 issue (You previously wrote how Fedora is not able to boot from ext4 and now you report that it is supported), there is practically no difference in performance from a home/desktop use. You will only see the difference when you run benchmark tests. It affects those specialized users who have high I/O throughput requirements, such as database developers/testers, where lots of small files/changes are read/write to the file system.
Please make sure you have your arguments right before you write articles.
First of all, check the score I gave Fedora 12. I gave it a perfect score. Obviously spatial browsing wasn’t that big of a deal since I gave it such a high score, so I don’t know why you’re writing to complain about my not liking spatial browsing. It didn’t weigh down the score at all. I even said “However, this is no big deal at all because this behavior is simple to correct” so you and I are in agreement there.
In regards to EXT4 being faster or not, I haven’t benchmarked it but my system seems to be much faster now. Whether the speed boost is an illusion or not doesn’t change the fact that EXT4 is standard now and I’ve chosen to adopt the new technology with open arms as I always do.
Please make sure your counter-arguments are right before commenting.
Like the author, I also tried to install F-11 with no success. In the fedora forums someone mentioned it could be due to bugs in anaconda. Anyway, at that same time F10 did install perfectly, and presently F12 also does. So, whatever the reason was, it only affected F11.
I installed Fedora 12 and enjoyed using it. However, as the owner of an Nvidia card, I did not like getting stuck in 2D, so I followed instructions for compiling an proprietary driver based on Fedora 11, since I could find little on F12 at the time. Oops! Now F12 does not boot. I later found out (too late for me) that the proprietary driver do not work with Plymouth due to KMS.
Nvidia users account for a large percentage of Fedora users. I cannot fathom how they could think that it would be satisfactory to leave Nvidia users without an option to use the 3D graphics capabilities of their cards.
They could blame Nvidia, but it was their decision to use KMS. In the same time period I installed Mandriva 2010, openSuSE 11.2 and Kubuntu 9.10 and had no problem getting compositing to work. They appear to be alone on this one. Talk about dumb decisions! You would have to be a real die hard Fedora user to forego the use of 3D or to buy another graphics card just out of loyalty.
BTW, I get the whole open source argument. It just does not wash when the user is given no choice.
Situations like that can really hurt the appeal of a distribution. That’s why I’m starting to become a huge fan of rolling release distro’s. Sure, they have problems too, but the decisions are mine to make and I don’t have to deal with as many “surprises” due to “feature X” not being supported. What you wrote reminds me of a previous release of Ubuntu where gamepads were broken out of the box, and the developers just didn’t feel that playing games with a gamepad was an important thing to support at the time.
Nvidia drivers work just fine. I don’t know where your read a explanation of the problem but it was completely wrong. Refer to
http://rpmfusion.org/Howto/nVidia
The problem with the proprietary driver has ZERO to do with KMS as such but conflict with Nouveau driver. Since all distributions are moving to using Nouveau, Nvidia will likely fix the problem soon.