Fedora Core 5 Review
Excellent!.
That was the fisrt impresion when I installed FC5. I first upgraded from FC4 and the process was smooth enough. But later, I decided to do a fresh install later. I'm using a lot of repos like rpmforge, freshrpms etc. so It's hard to find broken softwares.
Installation
Fresh install was smooth, took about 30 minutes for a custom install. And the installation was fine, extremely easy for newbies and without any gliches. The only notable difference from earlier installers is the Package Selection. It looks much improved now.
Booting
One notable change in FC5 from FC4 is their change in theme. They have now selected a light (and bright) blue, instead of dark blue in FC4. Fedora seems much brighter now. The same light blue has been used in graphical boot screen too.
The Desktop
The default login screen and desktop is really cool with the new light-blue theme and Fedora bubbles wallpaper.
The Default Desktop
What's New
There are several additions and enhancements to FC5. Some of them are
PUP and PIRUT
PUP (Package Updater) and
PIRUT (Package Install Remove and Upgrade Tool) are two new players of the Software Management in Fedora Core 5, and both use yum as backend.
PIRUT (Add/Remove programs in menu) using yum in backend is an excellent tool. As it uses yum in backend a lot of software that is in the Fedora Extras Repository is available for install (which are not available at the time of install). The only downpoint is that no support for installing software fro CD/DVD is enabled by default. We have to setup a local repo for that. This is bad for newbies those who doesn't have an internet connection or who does not want download packages from internet. But this setup will ensure that you always install the latest version of the software and all the dependancies will be resolved. PIRUT offers two types of view, Catergory wise browsing and All package listing. You can also search for packages.
PIRUT with Category View
PIRUT with List View
PUP (Software Updater in menu) also using yum in backend just updates the packages installed in the system. Unlike yumex, PUP groups similar packages into a single unit. ie, kernel and kernel-devel are grouped into a single unit as "Kernel Updates"
PUP showing available updates
Beagle
Atlast it's there! The most awaited feature is here in FC5. Beagle is an excellent desktop searching tool. Beagle searches for keywords in your Applications, Documents, Email contacts, IM conversations, Images, Media, Web History and many others.
Beagle in action
F-Spot Photo Manager
F-Spot organizes all your photos and shares it. You can tag your photos, browse them by category, tags, date, Search for photos, and enables you to share the photos.
F-Spot Photo Manager
Ekiga
Ekiga is full-featured SIP and H.323 compatible VoIP, IP-Telephony and Videoconferencing application that allows you to make audio and video calls to remote users with SIP and H.323 hardware or software. It supports voice conference with Google Talk and video conference with Skype users.
Gparted
Gparted is included in the core packages. Gparted is an excellent frontend fro the CLI parted. Gparted allows to add, delete, copy, move and resize partitions.
There are several numerous new packages available, listing all of them are out of the scope of this article. You must check the
release notes for more details.
Enhancements and Latests
Fedora Core 5 includes the bleeding edge technologies. It includes the latest version of almost all available softwares like kernel-2.6.15, GNOME-2.14, KDE-3.5, Firefox and Thunderbird-1.5, Rhythmbox-0.9.3, Gstreamer-0.10 etc.,
GNOME-2.14
Hmmmm... what to say ? The nearly perfect Desktop Environment. Light, Fast, Simple and Clean. yelp, gnome-terminal etc has several enhancements and have noticable progress in terms of speed. Nautilus has improved, Screensavers are pretty nice, and have several additional panel applets.
Nautilus the file manager has several features built-in, the most notable being the integrated search. Users are now able to search within the folders by just pressing F3 from nautilus
Integrated search in nautilus
KDE-3.5
I don't like KDE, and I usually doesn't install it. So I can't comment on KDE and KDE Apps. Anyway the DE with more fans should be better.
Firefox, Thunderbird
FC5 ships with the latest stable release of (arguably) the best browser/email client. Both features incremental updates so no hassles of downloading the full package again.
Firefox
Rhythmbox
My faourite FLOSS app just got better. Rhythmbox 0.93 (Audio Player in menu) rocks. Bundled with the latest gstreamer-0.10 as backend, rhythmbox provides an excellent way to manage, organize and play my audio files.
The latest version supports Online radio and Podcasts. It has 4 new Playlists by default in the Source pane. Queued songs (for queing up songs to current playlist), Recently Added, Recently Playe and My Top Rated. Rhythmbox supports both manual and automatic playlists. This version has a new look gui arrangement, which looks much better from the previous version. This version has also
Audioscrobbler plugin inbuilt.
The Brand New Rhythmbox
This version too lacks mp3 support due to patend issues. This can be resolved by installing gstreamer-plugins-ugly
GCJ and Eclipse
FC5 ships with the new GCJ and the best IDE for Java, Eclipse. But the default GCJ has some issues with azureus, the only java app I'm using, especially with some plugins like Speed Scheduler. So I settled with Sun Java SDK and NetBeans IDE
Multimedia
Still lacks support for various multimedia types due to patend issues. Totem, the default movie player of GNOME still doesn't play many file types. So I installed VLC, Mplayer and Xine with various codecs.
Extras
The new Add/Remove Software (PIRUT) with yum in backend is an excellent way to add numerous software into the box. The fedora extras has some excellent software collections like alacarte menu editor, gdesklets, blender, bittorrent, azureus, drivel, d4x, gcfilms, audacity, easytag, gnomebaker, kino and many more.
Conclusion
My Fedora Core 5 Desktop, after customization
Fedora Core 5 is a near perfect Desktop OS, and ofcourse Server too. Though some minuses like lack of inbuilt multimedia support, which can be resolved with a few mouse clicks, this distribution rocks. The defaults SELinux and iptables ensures maximum security. Fedora stands in between complete geek distos like debian and gentoo and complete n00b distros like SuSE and Mandriva, offerring features of both. The latest release of Fedora, Fedora Core 5, codenamed Bordeaux, is worth a try for people falls into both categories, geeks and n00bies.
Have your say too, if anyone installed already.
Fedora Core 5 Review
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