Anxiously Awaiting On Everything Eternal…

Fedora 7: The Bad

Fedora 7 is a very good Linux distribution. However, it is not without it's faults. Last post I outlined the things that I liked about Fedora 7. This time, I'll discuss the shortcomings of the distribution. Note that all of these are opinions and based on my own experience and user level. I am in no way an authority on this =D. Let's get started shall we?

The Bad

XGL/Compiz/Beryl
I usually judge a distribution on how easy it is to set up Beryl and the cooresponding native drivers. Fedora actually isn't too bad, but it's not good enough to get a mark in the good column for this category. Since everything is handled through its package manager, theoretically I should simply be able to search for my NVidia drivers, install them, and then install all the Beryl packages. Unfortunately this did not work. I ended up with a white screen, even after adding beryl --use-copy to my Gnome session. So, in short, I'm sure I could get it to work, but it's not as easy to set up as it was for me using Suse 10.2 for this particular Dell at work.

Sudoers Access Denied
Seems like Fedora took a page out of Madriva and Ubuntu's book for this one. The default user that you create during installation is not granted sudo rights. This results in you having to edit the sudoers file in /etc/sudoers. This is a hassel if you are a pseudo power user because you have to find the file (thank google for that), and then decipher its cryptic syntax in order to be able to give yourself sudo rights. I simply created a group called sudoers, and edited the following line:

## Allows people in group wheel to run all commands
# %wheel  ALL=(ALL)  ALL

becomes

%sudoers All=(ALL) ALL

Package Manager Searches
You can forget using the search function on the package manager to look for any librarys you think you may need. It appears that the search is not very smart. You need to know the exact name of the library or software that you are looking for in order to find what you need. For example, say we are looking for a plugin for xmms that would enable mp3 playback. An obvious query that comes to mind would be: "xmms mp3." Sadly it yields nothing.

Random Updates
It appears that Fedora will only check for updates after a reboot. I am unsure if they have a daemon running in the background to check for updates to packages, or if I simply don't know how to configure it. I also have not found a way as of yet to run a manual update, and the update manager tends to be a little flakey.

Despite its annoyances, Fedora is quite impressive. It definitely deserves a high place on my favorite Linux distribution list; of which it currently holds third =).