A Fedora Rant

February 9th, 2005 • Linux

I know that this blog is taking a little divert, I’m starting to talk more about various Linux distributions. The quest started when I failed to install Gentoo on an AMD64. That time, everything worked, except that X.org kept failing and crashing whenever I used nVidia’s GLX. As it turned out, my GeForce 6800 was the problem, it had nothing to do with Gentoo, or my abilities to install Gentoo (but I’ll get back to the hardware story later).

Well, at that time I didn’t know I had defect hardware, I thought that Gentoo had too many problems on my architecture to deal with. So I decided to install Ubuntu, and like I said before, it’s a great distribution, it got everything up and and running in no time. Ubuntu’s Warty was a little bit outdated for my tastes, so I got Hoary Array-4 and installed it. The installer’s been improved a lot, at least it now asks whether to install Grub or not. However, my personal advice is not to use it on AMD64, since although it has bleeding-edge software, right now it’s very unstable.

I was frustrated, I wanted to play with the latest software, I wanted to push my Athlon64 box to its limits, and I wanted to get some work done. Not a chance. Almost every AMD64 distribution is still too rough on the edges, some of them don’t have many packages for this arch, most of FC3’s third-party Yum repositories don’t even think of AMD64. My last chance was, get FC3 i386, install it, get the software I want to use, and just deal with it for a while. I knew that Fedora’s installation is “quick” and almost painless, so I decided to give it a last chance.

I waited for a while (~25 minutes), Fedora restarted and greeted me with a GDM login screen. The resolution was ugly, I wanted 1600×1200, instead X.org was only running at 800×600. Well, time to get nVidia’s drivers and compile them. Everything worked fine… until the first reboot. Fedora hung at “Configuring kernel parameters” and refused to go any further. Some googleing revealed that this is an issue with udev, and I all I had to do is to remove rhgb from kernel parameters, boot correctly, and then cp -a /dev/nvidia* /etc/udev/devices. Now, I can boot. Note that you should always run Xorg -configure and compare the generated ~/xorg.conf.new with /etc/X11/xorg.conf, sometimes the graphic card driver has extra options not listed in the latter, and can only be found after reconfiguring X.org

Everything ran smoothly. I got Firefox, Evolution, OpenOffice.org, and 2 sexy desktop environments (KDE and GNOME), oh yes, and Yum. Now I’m not going to go into why Yum sucks, at least not right now, but I think I’m going to stick to Portage/Apt, I just like those better.

Now comes the rant. Fedora’s (and RedHat’s for the matter) system-config-packages packages is stupid, period. It tries so hard to be Windows’ Add/Remove Programs, but it just isn’t. I only checked Development Tools category and clicked Update, only to wish I didn’t. It said it needed 4 CDs, that’s ok, Development Tools are probably big, but why in the world does the installer need the same CD more than once? I can easily count asking for CD3 more than 3-4 times. What’s wrong with you people? Can’t you cache your dependencies when you ask for a CD and you know you’re going to ask for it again? I thought we got rid of “dependency hell” only to get stuck in “CD-switching hell”. Thanks God Fedora comes on only 4 CDs, otherwise I would’ve spent all night switching and waiting.

Fedora’s package management is a joke, it only emphasizes the weaknesses of RPM, which I already don’t like very much. Probably the only think I like about Fedora is how sexy its desktop looks, especially when compared to stock KDE/GNOME. Other than that, I don’t think I’ll ever try Fedora again, and most probably won’t try any RPM-based distribution.

At this moment, my choices of Linux distributions is pretty much cut down to Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian, and Slackware. Along the lines comes FreeBSD for it’s port collection and easy administration. I know that others exist, I know that it’s a matter of taste more than technological advantages, but maybe I’m just too picky about things.

I’m pretty sure that many people have also been to what I’ve been through, so I decided to start a Linux section on my site to review certain distributions in some detail, hopefully, it’ll come in handy for some people. Just so you know, this isn’t going to be sponsored, and the reviews will present my own personal views and experiences, exactly like the rest of this blog; and yes, I’ll include reviews of Fedora and RPM-based distributions for the sake of completeness.

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