A few questions about Fedora

[Arthur Pemberton]

On 6/13/06, Endre Szabo <sze_mail at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hello
>
> I'm an absolute Linux novice with no experience with
> this OS. Now I'm looking for a suitable distribution.
>
> I've got a P3 800Mhz 256MB RAM 10GB HDD machine.
> I intend to make  database gui apps with MySql, Python
> and the wxPython toolkit with Boa RAD tool and also
> web developement.

Good luck with that.

> So many of above will run simultaneously.

I suspect your bottleneck may be the performance of your hard drive.

>
> I've got a few questions:
>
> 1. Is Fedora suitable for me? Used with KDE and all
> above will it have the necessary speed and stability
> on my machine?

Your specs sound like that of my test machine. I run KDE, 4 virtual
desktops, SSHd, and a subversion server on it, plus it is facing the
internet. Compared to my desktop machine it is adittedly a bit slow.
However, I have found it good enough to work on a Python + pyGTK app
from scratch, at times having Konsole, Kdevelop, Firefox, Konqueror,
and the GTK gui designing app opened all at one time. With some
streaminglining of your running applications, I believe your system
will be responsive enough.

Whether it is suitable for you is still somewhat subjective.

> 2. Where can I find a list of apps wich come with FC5?

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=Fedora

> 3. Can I install new softs or update existing ones
> without internet connection -- ie. from cd?

Installing the fresh OS will be a breeze. If the machine is totally
off the internet, updating may not be necessary. It will be possible
to do all you ask from CD, however, it is not commonly done, so it may
take some Q&A the first time around.

> 4. Can I install from tarballs (tar.gz) or only from
> rpm?

It's your computer, so you can do whatever you want. Just that you
can't install from tarball and get the benifits of installing via RPM.

> 5. Will softs not intented especially for fedora but
> for "generally Linux" work?

Fedora is supposed to follow the Linux Standard Base (
http://lsb.freestandards.org ) so any binary compiled against LSB
should work in Fedora. For examples see the recent Google Earty,
Skype, and the generic MySQL rpms.

>
> Thanks
> Endre Szabo
>
You're welcome, and good luck.

-- 
To be updated...