First look: Fedora Core 5

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hello Bruce Byfield,

http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/03/08/2321254

Thank you for taking the time to review Fedora Core 5 (test 2) and I 
would like to offer my feedback and comments on the review . My first 
reaction to seeing this title is confusion over a review about a release 
that hasnt been made yet. It would been much better to clarify upfront 
that you are reviewing the second test release.   Anaconda not listing 
reisferfs or other filesystems besides Ext3/ext2 by default is by design 
since these are not supported by the Fedora project and the provision to 
install Fedora on other filesystems are only provided for facilitating 
easy migration. The review says that Anaconda has a long standing 
problem that crashes if the CD requires cleaning. However I havent run 
into problem myself. It would be good if you can file a bug report in 
http://bugzilla.redhat.com regarding this to verify and fix this issue.

Desktop and software selection

The review notes that SELinux slows down GNOME by 60% and this claim is 
unsubstantiated in the absence of any benchmarks. The second test 
release had various debugging options which helped find and fix various 
bugs during the development cycle. An example of such a analysis from 
Dave Jones, Fedora Kernel maintainer at Red Hat can be found at 
http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/35270.html. It is very likely that 
you have seen a slowdown trigged by such debugging patches. Various 
SELinux performance improvements have also been merged during the 
comparatively long development cycle of Fedora Core 5.

Fedora Core 5  does not have XFCE which is only provided in the Fedora 
Extras repository. KDE and XFCE are not branded to look like GNOME in 
Fedora. XFCE and KDE uses BlueCurve while GNOME uses the new Cairo based 
Clearlooks theme as an example of the differences between them.

We do not have detailed performance comparisons between GCJ  and Sun 
Java yet since the current development is focused on completeness and 
coverage over the standard API  in preference to tweaking the 
performance but if there are significant differences, do let the Fedora 
Java development team 
(http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-java-list) know 
about it.

Sabayon and Alacarte is offered in Fedora Extras repository though 
Alacarte is not part of GNOME 2.14 as claimed in the review. Festival, 
drivers for wacom project and ruby are not new to Fedora Core 5 and have 
been part of every Fedora release. Ruby does not replace GCJ based 
applications either.

Yum does not replace RPM as claimed in the review and only complements 
it by adding a automatic dependency resolving tool which uses RPM 
internally. Pirut only provides a timer with a ability to confirm 
immediately when there is a additional dependency that is required to 
update or install a package and does not hide dependencies.

Security and Administration

system-config-kickstart is not a new tool and again has been in every 
release of Fedora and Pirut does list dependencies when required which 
you have even noted earlier as a annoyance.

Recommendations

The system specifications indicated in the release notes are targeted 
towards the default package profile and any distribution providing the 
latest versions of GNOME and KDE would require a very similar 
configuration to perform well and this does not differ very from from 
the latest version of Debian or Ubuntu. Fedora Core along with extras 
offers a choice of several thousand packages and can be tailored to fit 
the beginner or the super geek.

It would help avoid several of these factual mistakes and provide more 
details if you can contact me during your review period on future 
occasions. Thank you for your interest in Fedora.

-- 
Rahul