fitter happier

I’m writing this in kate. In the terminal window below, konstruct is building kde 3.2. I don’t quite know why, but there is something immensely satisfying about watching hundreds of lines of code (that I completely don’t understand) scroll by. It’s so much more “real” than just watching an LED blink on and off. Hooray. Go me.
This talk of computers raises a question: Is the Fedora Project’s Core 1 release good enough to use on a daily basis? I’m still runing 9.0 with a ton of stuff in /usr/built/ and /home/wil/bin/ (So I guess I could call it the WheaTONIX version of 9.0 . . . 9.0.wHx? Seriously, I’m just killing myself this morning. Oh, afternoon. Sorry.)

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33 thoughts on “fitter happier”

  2. I just moved to Fedora Core 1 about 5 weeks ago. I had read a bad review on osnews, but to be honest it’s been great. Between up2date, apt-get, and yum, you’ll find it easy to keep up-to-date…not that 9.0 doesn’t have that. Anyway, I even used one of arjanv’s 2.6 kernel RPMs and it’s freakishly stable. Back in the day I didn’t move to 2.4 until maybe 2.4.6, and here 2.6.1 is great.
    kkthxybye

  3. I’ve been planning a similar migration, Wil. I did the upgrade to the second Fedora Beta last year but things didn’t go very well so I revered back.
    I’m running franken-redhat-9 with kernel-2.6 and things are very stable. But I want the latest OpenOffice (1.1) and there are a ton of dependencies that I’m unwilling to take at risk of destablizing my environment.
    So I’ve been doing some homework as well, picking the brains of some friends and colleagues at OCLUG (www.oclug.on.ca). Several friends who were running Redhat 9 have successfully upgraded to Fedore Core 1 — some from fresh installs, other using the upgrade path. No bad reports from my trusted friends.
    I’ve got the Yarrow ISOs burned to CD and I’m ready to take the plunge. I’ll let you know how it goes.
    Cheers,
    Peter

  4. Ah, yes, building from source…
    Building an application the other day at work (mpich, I think), I noticed that there was a bunch of “sleep 1” calls in the compilation chain. I asked someone else in the room (attached to that project) why–the answer was that keeps time stamps from accidentally crossing. Go figure.
    Have pretty much given up on Red Hat; I’ve gone to all Debian.

  6. Don’t know if you where really asking, but I have been using FC 1 since it came out. I just started using Linux about a month before then. Well long story short I really like it and now that the wife & kid have learned how things work, I do not think we will ever go back to Windows.
    Microsoft Free since 2003
    Later

  8. I’d been half-heartedly trying out various distros for about a year now, but Fedora’s the first one I’ve been really impressed enough with to really make me consider staying with longterm. Redhat 9 was close, but I never could get it to behave with my NTFS drives, although that was probably my fault more than Redhat’s. In my opinion, Fedora’s a big step up from RH9.
    It just works. And I am happy with that.

  9. Wil, Fedora Core 1 is quite fine for home use (very stable since day 1, really) and I use it there and at work. And, frankly, most extra stuff by the Big Four (FreshRPMs, Dag, newrpms, ATrpms) is built for it mainly. Now, Fedora Core 2 will be entering testing soon…that will *not* be stable for a while.
    That said, if you are geeking out, you can go Gentoo. If you got a good fast box, it’s probably the tweakers choice. There you’ll see millions of lines go across as you compile everything on your computer.
    Oh, and use XFce4, Wil. Much nicer than GNOME or KDE.

  10. i just got done emerging kde 3.2 yesterday, and boy is this bad boy speedy. it is a huge improvement even over 3.2rc1.
    as for fedora, why not try something totally new and try out slackware or gentoo? i am running gentoo right now, and considering you have the option of compiling everything to your exact ystem specs and cpu, IMHO, you wind up with a much speedier system. i went from a RH based system to gentoo and the difference is -very- noticable. and portage > RPM anyday. it is much easier, and nearly impossible to break things. finally, you really end up learning about the nuts and bolts of linux if you start from stage 1 with gentoo. i have been using linux for a long while, and it really amazed me how much i learned by getting my system going myself. anyways thats my two cents!

  11. First, I hope you and your wife have a great time, um, watching “Family Guy”, lol.
    Speaking as the former UNIX SysAdmin to the folks who invented it, I’d have to echo the sentiments that Fedora Core 1 is probably fine for home use, but it’s definitely not ready for prime time when it comes to running servers that serve “important stuff” (TM). I’m sure that will change with time and, indeed, I look forward to it.

  12. I’ve been using the Fedora 1 Core for about two months to run MythTV on two different boxes (living room and bedroom: Backend and Frontend Servers) and have been very happy with it in terms of stability and usability. However, I’m not using it on a daily basis for everyday computing, so it is possible that I’ve missed any issues that it may have.

  13. Fedora Core 2 is scheduled to be released in early April. I’m on RH9 still myself. I’m going to wait the whole two months for FC2.
    Tom

  15. Fedora Core 1 = Red Hat 9.1, basically.
    I see very little difference between it and RH9 except more updated packages and a stupidy annoying installation (three cheers for no individual package selection. Hip hip BLAH!).
    I’m using it right now with a bunch of Freshrpms mods. Use dag’s apt repository and you’re set.

  16. Honestly, I’d go with Debian or one of it’s brethren. MEPIS Linux is getting pretty good reviews, and Libranet is pretty good. apt is the shiznit. Really. I mean, the dependencies are mostly just taken care of for you, and if something messes up, you just force it, and it usually Just Works (TM).

  17. I’ve been using Fedora for months now without incident on my Dell laptop. I’ve been using synaptic as a front end for apt-rpm, it’s beautiful.

  18. Kate said:Oh, my god. My very own text editor. And here I was, using emacs like a chump.
    There’s a text editor in emacs?
    (See? It’s been like this all day.)
    (And I’m posting this from my iBook, using Firebird [rocks!] because konstruct is still . . . konstructing.)

  19. I’ve been using Fez 6.8 for the past few months and I must say it’s vastly superior to that Fedora nonsense. I’ve heard good things about Sombrero 5 as well.
    (Sorry. Bad joke payment for getting me into Nethack again!)
    I’ve been running FC1 on two boxes, one for network monitoring and the other for the intranet Apache server. I haven’t run into any problems at all. Keeping up to date is a breeze.

  20. Holy Moses.
    KDE 3.2 is awesome.
    The preformance is substantially faster than 3.1. whatever.I.was.using.before, and the spiffy little bells-n-whistles are really fun.
    I’m having problems with whatever the base font, or default font, or whatever it’s call is, though. I’ve been able to use the control panel to set most of my fonts to the Luxi family, but the text in this box, as well as all the text at Fark and in Amphetadesk is absolutely horrendous. It looks like KDE is tying to scale some bitmapped fonts, and I can’t seem to find any docs on how to fix it. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. On the off chance that I figure it out, I’ll post my solution here.

  21. I just built KDE3.2 using Konstruct on a heavily modified Knoppix/Debian install, and so far it’s flawless.
    I was getting used to rare, but random, kde application crashes, and so far I haven’t seen any.
    Lived without KDE for a while, as the beta build was really screwed up, and I didn’t have time nor motivation to fix it. Kudos to the KDE team for this latest release. It works superb.
    One note, Will (not sure if someone else has already posted this); make sure to put the system var exports in your .bashrc (the variables needed for a user build are detailed in the readme) so the next time you reboot/login, you don’t have to enter them again.
    A

  22. Fedora is fine. You should experience no problems migrating.
    I used apt to upgrade (apt-get dist-upgrade) after adding the Fedora lines to my apt.conf. The downside to this is some of the artwork stayed in RH9 style but no biggie.
    Hey a real celebrity using linux on th edesktop. Bully for us.

  23. I use Fedora both at home and on my laptop at work. My home box was a fresh install and the laptop was an upgrade from RedHat 9. Both went smoothly and I use them everyday,
    I’ve finally ditched Windows on every box except my kids’ machine – HaHa, Windows is a childs OS in my house 🙂
    It’s great to be able to play NetHack without using a crappy DOS box.

  24. I’ve been running it for my daily desktop use since january. The only problem I had was the 2.6 update. It worked just fine i even got the nvidia drivers working on 2.6 but my usb card reader no longer functioned, my wheel mouse (usb) went nonwheelish and also my archos usb mp3 jukebox no longer was seen.. I havn’t tried it again since then. I figure ill wait for .2 or .3 or soemthing… but fc1 with 2.4.x works just dandy

  25. Sweet… KDE 3.2!!! If I were smart enough to figure out why my harddisk wouldn’t partition, I’d be enjoying the beeeeeeeeautiful, sparklingly new KDE as well… Geez… I envy you so much… Waaaaaaaah!

  26. I work for a company that uses RH and honestly I have grown tired of it. Yeah, it’s stable, but anything of importance not supplied by RH causes problems many times. I won’t even allow my boss to look at Fedora. At home I have been running Gentoo for 2 yrs, and I would not trade it for anything. Rock stable, faster than RH could ever hope to be and probably the easiest package install. Give it a try.. http://www.gentoo.org . Download the iso, burn it and enjoy Linux the way YOU want it from the ground up. Addressing someone’s concern for OpenOffice dependencies, all I did was “emerge openoffice” to compile it, or “emerge openoffice-bin” to get optimized precompiled binaries, and it takes care of all dependencies for me. Simple and in no time I was enjoying OO on my system. It installed while I went out to lunch.
    ( just bragging about a fantastic distro people should try:) )
    Chuck

  27. I tried a few distros of linux when I had a pc but since I switched to Mac I never really thought of using it again. I have a livecd of Gentoo 1.4 for power pc but haven’t tried it yet.
    Are there any real advantages of using linux when you have OS X?

  28. Fedora mostly works OK for me, but IntelliJ (Java IDE) won’t install (its installer crashes), and eth0 has deactivated spontaneously a couple times. I’ll probably go back to RH9 until Fedora Core 2 is released.

  30. “I don’t quite know why, but there is something immensely satisfying about watching hundreds of lines of code (that I completely don’t understand) scroll by.”
    – Wil Wheaton
    “I don’t even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead…”
    – Cypher

  31. I’ve had trouble with Fedora, random glitches that make important things (like networking) not function. Granted, this was on someone else’s computer who I was troubleshooting for after a fresh install of it, but all-in-all I found gentoo much easier to maintain.

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