Fedora Setup

A while back, after publishing a review praising a past version of Fedora Core, I was chided by a reader who objected to my referring to it as 'beta' software. In my mind, it was always understood that the Fedora project was the test bed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but with the latest versions, the project has been trying to get away from Fedora's being identified with the word 'beta'. Well, I'm afraid I'm going to have to say that I think Fedora 7 is clearly back to beta.

First, when I booted the computer, I noticed that I didn't get the standard Grub menu with options to boot either one or the other operating system. Perhaps I misunderstood when I configured the Grub bootloader, (you can see my options in the screenshot on the previous page) but my machine automatically booted into Fedora. I thought I had configured it to offer the choice on boot. At any rate, after I had finished the system setup, I had to edit the grub.conf by hand to get the menu to show up.

But back to the system setup itself: here are some of the tasks I had to perform to get the system running:

First, you must accept the license requirements. Since it doesn't say anything about blood samples or bequeathing your first born child, this shouldn't be a big deal. After, you'll be asked to let certain services go through your firewall. If you're setting up a desktop computer and not planning on offering any web or mail services or sharing any other services, you can enable SSH logins, which is what I did, and be done with it. The next step was configuring the SELinux security enhancements. These are some extra security measures put into the Linux kernel. You are advised here to accept the default setting, called 'enforcing'. If you want to disable this, then you'll have to reboot and go through a long process. It's a good incentive to keep it enabled, I suppose. Next comes the configuration of date and time via the Network Time Protocol. This is always a good idea because your computer's clock will now keep exact time - no more emails from the future or from 1978. At this point, you will be asked to send your computer's hardware profile to the Fedora developers. This is entirely optional, so if you consider this an invasion of your privacy, then by all means, keep your hardware profile to yourself. Finally, after testing my sound card (I heard the guitar sound just fine), Fedora 7 was ready for general use. What I got first, however, were a couple of surprises.

Apart from the aforementioned Grub boot menu having gone missing, a network connection, which I had nicely configured (I offer the screenshot for evidence), was not working. When I opened the network configuration tool, I discovered that my computer now had a completely different IP address - not even one reserved for a local network. My DNS settings for my ISP were also gone. I had to change these settings back and reinitialize the network, which was kind of annoying. I looked at some blogs and mailing list postings and this seems to be happening to others, so that rules out evil spirits or gremlins in my machine.

After fixing these issues, my system was ready to use.

Working with Fedora

By "ready", I mean you have a basic system. A bit too basic, it seems to be - at least by the route I took - the Live-CD install. Perhaps it was space considerations, but There was no Firefox or OpenOffice installed. This is strange, considering that this is standard open source software and freely distributed. What people do often complain about is the fact that you're not going to be able to play MP3s or watch Windows Media videos, RealVideo, Quicktime or use other proprietary video or audio formats out of the box. This is not a bug. It's a feature. It should be pointed out that Fedora is a 'free' as in 'freedom' Linux distribution and proprietary codecs cannot be freely distributed with Fedora. Now, if you want any of this (and most people do), then you'll have to do some tweaking. Luckily, and this is one of the highlights I see in Fedora 7, this tweaking is very easy to do.

And here's how you do it. First, let me thank the blog Complete Dose of Linux Poison for posting the easiest method out there. You'll need to get and install a small Red Hat package (RPM) that will enable your Yum package management program to use a package repository called 'Livna'. You do it like so: As root do:

wget http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/7/i386/livna-release-7-2.noarch.rpm

Then:

rpm -ivh livna-release-7-2.noarch.rpm

And finally, you need to install these programs:

yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly xine-lib-extras-nonfree

Now you'll have MP3 support. MP3 is a closed source, proprietary codec, so I feel obligated to advocate using Ogg Vorbis, which is, apart from being open source, a better codec. But MP3 is ubiquitous now and there's not too much you can do about that. Many people have to have it. You can also use this 'yum' method to install programs to play most video codecs. These programs include popular applications like 'mplayer' and 'videolan-client' or VLC.

I also used the 'yum' method to install some other programs that were surprisingly missing, like the instant messenger program Pidgin, formerly known as 'gaim'. That was another developer oversight, I think. After a few other tweaks (perhaps a few too many), I had a working system. If you get to this point, Fedora 7 should be perfect for all of your computing needs - getting to this point, being the key words.

Conclusions

Before the flames commence, I am aware that there were some major changes to this distribution's development process between Fedora Core 6 and Fedora 7. I kept up with the discussions on the mailing list and there were warnings about glitches, but even with the warnings there are a few glitches too many I think. Actually, the warnings given were more about how the organization of the packages were going to be changed. There wasn't anything about flaws in the installation and setup process. In contrast to the latest OpenSUSE versions and Freespire, which are also community-driven 'test-bed' type projects, and compared to its former 'Core' offerings, Fedora 7 is a clearly inferior distribution. The Fedora 7 itch out there may have become too much for the developers. It seems that rather than facing up to the need for more delays, they may have rushed this one out the door. Perhaps a lesson from the Debian project is in order: release no distribution before its time. Fedora 7 developers have released a distribution that's not ready for prime time. Though I was planning on changing back to Fedora, this writer is going to stick with Ubuntu for now.

Michael J. Jordan is the managing editor of Linux Online. He can be reached at Michael.Jordan**AT**linux.org