[KLUG Members] Fedora - first look.

[Bruce Smith]

I've upgraded my Redhat 9 desktop PC at work to Fedora Core-1 about 
24 hours ago, and here are my impressions so far:


Upgrade:
                                                                                                                              
  The CD upgrade from Redhat 9 (non Ximian) went flawlessly.
  One improvement is the estimated time to completion is
  vastly more accurate.  :-)
                                                                                                                              
Browsers:
                                                                                                                              
  Galeon is no longer supported.  It is not included in Fedora,
  and the Redhat 9 version of galeon will NOT run in Fedora.
                                                                                                                              
  Export your galeon bookmarks before you upgrade!  :-)
                                                                                                                              
  Mozilla crashes all the time, even a advanced google search
  crashes on me.  Here is an URL that crashes it every time:
      http://www.i4u.com/japanreleases/hitachirobot.htm

  Epiphany (the Galeon replacement) aborts for me every place
  that Mozilla aborts.  (makes sense since they use the same 
  rendering engine and libraries)

  Be prepared to use an alternate browser:
      Opera, Netscape 7.1, Konqueror, lynx ...
                                                                                                                              
Email:
                                                                                                                              
  Evolution 1.4.5 is NICE.

  The only problem I had with it is it couldn't read my old calendar
  from Redhat 9.  After a LOT of screwing around, I finally fixed it
  by removing the directory:  ~/.gconf/apps/evolution/calendar/
                                                                                                                              
VMware:
                                                                                                                              
  Initially the compile of the VMware modules failed because of gcc
  version differences.  Do a "export CC=gcc32" before running
  vmware-config.pl and then it works.  VMware seems to run,
  at least it booted up a copy of Devil Linux.
                                                                                                                              
Sound.
                                                                                                                              
  If you need ALSA, good luck!  It took me MANY HOURS to get ALSA
  to compile and actually load the ALSA modules.  The first problem
  was the compile kept aborting.  I finally ended up disabling a bunch
  of ISA sound card modules I didn't need.  Then the module wouldn't
  load because of unresolved symbols.  I finally found a compile time
  patch by searching the newsgroups.
                                                                                                                              
X-Windows.
                                                                                                                              
  Sawfish window manager no longer works correctly with gnome.
  It shouldn't be a problem for most people since metacity has been
  the default gnome WM since Redhat 8.  I managed to make metacity
  do most of the special things I had sawfish configured to do.

Office:

  OpenOffice 1.1 is included.  It starts, and that's as far as I got.


More fun to come, I'm sure ...

 - BS