Archive for November 2004

FC3 vs. Ubuntu (silly)

Don’t get me wrong, I love Ubuntu, but the Fedora Core 3 vs Ubuntu Warty Warthog was filled with some FUD.

Red Hat Magazine really doesn’t get printed anymore, so you don’t get a copy of FC3 from there. What users are complaining of kernel panics? Media file problems are normal – Ubuntu can’t support MP3’s either. Networking woes? Fedora never claims to support anything more than ext2/ext3, it just so happens if the reviewer had a clue, he’d have realised that booting with linux xfs or linux reiserfs is what is used to get those options enabled. Besides which, Reiser and SELinux don’t play nice, so it really isn’t recommended.

Come to first booting, and the icon placements and nice desktop integration on Ubuntu. That’s not upstream GNOME (if Red Hat pulled something like this, goodness, the bad press). Fedora’s OpenOffice.org does not crash the system when you try to use the spell-checker – you installed all the languages so it takes time to read it in. Thats OpenOffice.org in general. Does junk mail filtering work in Ubuntu?

Surely the media support on Ubuntu and Fedora is the same. There is no MP3 support or other proprietary codecs – its all ogg and open stuff, damnit. I’d agree that the Synaptic integration on Ubuntu is good – we need that for YUM, hopefully FC4 will see system-config-packages and yum more integrated.

Urgh, why do I bother. If at all to jive up Fedora Marketing.

Of Fedora bits

Michael Tiemann is down in Melbourne, giving a talk tonight. Go see him (read about the interesting bloke at linuxquestions). Faye’s What’s New in Fedora Core 3 SE Linux is a nice read, especially since SELinux is a “big thing”, in active, targeted mode in Fedora Core 3 by default.

Fedora Core 3 / Made Simple preview

Fedora Core 3 is out. Go Heidelberg. Now, for a sample chapter from Fedora Core: Made Simple, go take a look at Installing Fedora. I’m told that the more screenshots the better for the user, so go buy your mom a copy of the Made Simple guide ;-)

Warning, its 2.3MB in size. Screen optimising just made it look bad, so its print optimised. Have fun, feedback via e-mail please at byte@aeon.com.my – no comments, thank the comment spammers for that.

We’ve come a long, long way baby

Its Saturday night. FC3 is almost out. I’m sitting at home, and chatting with two others on #fedora-ppc, realising that we’re all in Australia, and are all at home on a Saturday night doing Fedora installs. This is sad. I’m young, I should be out hitting the clubs or something. On the bright side, we have more happy PPC users (jamieson, wmealing), because the rawhide tree seems to work.

So here’s the beef. Install Fedora, according to the guide. Make sure in /etc/yaboot.conf, you not only have a location, but there’s initrd= and if you want, sysmap= for initrd/sysmap. Run ybin. Probably getting the unable to load inital console bug. Easy fix. Harald’s udev doc has a section for Udev without initrd. Boot into rescue mode, and follow instructions. Reboot, have a happy PPC life. selinux=0 will get rid of avc error messages. I’ll update the guide soon, its already sitting here in Emacs RCS, I just need to spiff it up a bit.


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