dgoodwin's blog

A few years back I was prone to spells of obsessively installing and re-installing various Unix-based operating systems on my desktop at all hours of the night, trying to pick one that I was completely satisfied with. This could go on for a few days, sometimes switching back and forth between distros multiple times a night. Eventually I decided it was too much of a waste of time and vowed to just pick the solution that let me work with the least amount of hassle. After stints with Debian, Red Hat, Gentoo, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, I eventually found Ubuntu a couple years ago. Ubuntu has been the most impressive to work with of them all, particularly since the Dapper release when they included preempt in the stock AMD64 kernel and I no longer had to compile my own. It's clean, reliable, fast, has a huge user community, and generally just lets me do what I want.

Alas, I've been hearing good things about Fedora lately. Strangely enough this seems to have started shortly after bowes got hired on with Red Hat, and I started listening shortly before I did. I understand non-Fedora running users get flamed mercilessly down there, so the time has come for me to drink the Fedora kool aid. As much as I like Ubuntu, I am looking forward to playing with Compiz and Xen. I've tinkered with both in Ubuntu before but found it difficult and frustrating, particularly with running an AMD64 processor.

My experiences were as follows:

• Installer crashed when I selected the Fedora Extras repository. Had to restart the installation process and not click that checkbox, somehow it was magically enabled later when I went to do it myself.
• There seems to be something flaky with reiserfs. My /home partition (which I didn't format after the reinstall and intend to reuse) is formated as reisferfs until I can get a replacement drive and convert back to ext3. As soon as I had Fedora installed and boot up, the machine locks up hard shortly after failing to mount my filesystems. I couldn't get any info about this yet, but would later go on to discover that I can't have /home mounted automatically or the system locks. If I let it boot up, Alt-F1, login as root, and mount it manually, it works fine. No idea what the problem is with this yet.
• Sound and X worked out of the box (naturally) and after installing the Livna Nvidia RPMs, I was automatically running at 1600x1200.
• Nice to see a simple firewall setup screen during the post-install config, although I've already got one setup.
• Nice touch with the default theme.
• Once logged in successfully I immediately see the CPU pegged. It's a yum process, but I soon learn that a pegged yum process has usually not gone rogue, it's just slow as molasses and very resource intensive. This will eventually become my main point of dislike with Fedora, yum is almost unbearably slow and unreliable. This initial spike lasts for about 4-5 minutes.
• 160 packages in need of update, I launch the graphical updater "pup". CPU spikes for another 2-3 minutes as it's "Retrieving update information". I'm then presented with a list of packages to upgrade and tell it to fire up. Pup now sites at "Resolving dependencies for updates" and using absolutely no CPU, strange... I sit there staring at it seemingly doing nothing for 5 mins and just as I'm about to kill it, it picks up and lets me start downloading. Maybe a network timeout?
• Both times I installed, midway through the initial package upgrades X restarts for no reason and with no warning. Everything I had running was gone, and I don't know if the upgrade process completed or what happened. It turns out it's a bug. Upon re-logging in a new process has my CPU pegged, restorecon? This one just lasts for maybe 5 minutes. I then learn that X restart has left my RPM database in a bad place, several dependency errors prevent me from continuing with yum update. A little manual hacking and I figure out how to purge the conflicting packages with rpm and get back underway, but it took some time.
• Fedora has decided they will not officially package Firefox 2. After getting hooked on it in Ubuntu there's no way I can go back. The linked page gives a quick one liner for installing FF2, which went off without a hitch.
• The user community behind Fedora seems a lot smaller than with Ubuntu. Search for a problem in Ubuntu land and you'll almost always find a handful of people who've been through what you're facing. Thus far I'm not seeing the same result with Fedora, I'd be curious to know what the actual user base numbers are. In any case it's no fault of Fedora's, just something people should be aware of if considering a switch.
• Compiz was very easy to get up and running. Effects are very tasteful and seem reliable, right up until I spawn a new GDM session for my wife to login, at which time my original X session dies. Another glitch of some kind, have to investigate why this is and file a bug if necessary. Until then I setup a script attached to an icon she can click to switch my window manager back to metacity, then spawn gdmflexiserver to login herself, after which I can resume using Compiz and we can switch back and forth without issue.
• Xen was also no problem to get up and running, the packaged kernel booted first try. I've yet to invest the time to get an actual guest installed and running.

Overall I like the way Fedora looks and the majority of the OS has a very nice refined touch to it. My only real complaint is with yum, it really is quite irritating when you're used to the bliss that is apt, and even when it doesn't have your CPU pegged it's behavior can be very strange. (although I'm referring to Pup in that example)

Time to suck it up and file some bugs. Will be interesting to see how things look after a few weeks of prolonged usage.