Review: Flying High with Fedora 7

July 1, 2007 at 09:10 am by Nilayan Sharma Permalink 12 Comments

Fedora 7 is a first class distro that demonstrates solid progress in improving the user experience, easing the move to virtualization and enabling the user to create their own custom spins with open source build tools.

Alolita Sharma and Robert Adkins also contributed to this review.

"Public forums. Open processes. Rapid innovation. Meritocracy and transparency. All in pursuit of the best operating system and platform that free software can provide" – these goals are the air beneath Fedora's wings, lifting the distribution to new heights.

Competition is Good

Over the past couple of years, competition for the Linux desktop has heated up. Major distributions are vying for the best desktop user experience. If Ubuntu's popularity is any indication, a smooth out-of-the-box experience matters a lot.

With the release of Fedora 7, it is refreshing to see the Fedora project back in the game ready to take on all comers. Fedora's latest incarnation has better package management, open source release tools, and a sophisticated virtualization environment. In bringing Fedora 7 into the competitive arena of the open source desktop, Red Hat and the Fedora community have raised the bar for others to follow.

The merger of Fedora Core and Fedora Extras is a significant milestone that is already dramatically boosting the vitality of the project. Re-focusing the project structure to ramp up community participation across all parts of Fedora will help inject new ideas, latest technologies and more developers into the distribution. Benefits of this merger are already being seen in the software development cycle which is now simplified and easily accessible to all – Red Hat as well as community contributors.

Anaconda package installation

Start the Engines

Installation

For this review, we installed Fedora 7 using the DVD ISO for both default as well as custom settings. Our test system was a Sony VAIO notebook (VGN-A600) with an Intel Mobile Pentium 2GHz processor and 2Gb system memory. But Fedora 7 runs on a wide range of hardware and is available for x86, x86-64, and PowerPC (ppc) platforms. In addition, Fedora 7 introduces GNOME and KDE specific Live-CDs and Live-DVDs for x86 and x86-64 platforms.

Default Install

Using default settings suggested by the installer, a total of 805 packages were installed in about 30 minutes. An existing legacy operating system was detected and listed in the GRUB bootloader menu. Fedora was able to automatically configure the system's sound card (HDA Intel), display resolution (1920x1200), and onboard wireless interface (Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG).

Fedora 7's latest version of the Anaconda system installer gets high marks for its stability and improved visual appeal. For example, it sports the new "Flying High" artwork theme. And a new zoom widget in the timezone selector map makes it easy for users to drill down to their own locality (although when zoomed-in, the scroll buttons do not work). But missing is the 'remaining time' indicator under the progress bar that was a reassuring, if not always accurate, feature of Fedora Core 6 installations.

After completing package installation, the system reboots and comes to the firstboot "Setup Agent". This tool walks you through configuration screens for the firewall, SELinux, date and time, sound and creating new users. A new screen invites you to send your hardware profile to Fedora HQ to improve quality assurance (QA) and troubleshooting.

Smolt hardware profile agent

Custom Install

When we selected a full installation of all three package sets (Office Productivity, Software Development, Web Server), the installation failed due to a missing dependency for 'system-config-lvm-1.1.1-1.0.fc7.noarch.rpm'. A closer look at the RPM files on the DVD revealed that this package was indeed missing.

We'd like to make a suggestion to Fedora about recovering gracefully from a failed installation: please provide the user with an option to retrieve missing packages from software repositories via a network connection, if available. It seems that the initial dependency check could flag such problems early on in the installation process. This would help prevent a frustrating user experience.

Taking Off

What's new on the desktop

All major desktop components have been updated to their latest stable versions in Fedora 7, notably Firefox 2 (v2.0.0.3) is now the default. Other major components include GNOME 2.18, KDE 3.5.6, OpenOffice 2.2, Evolution 2.10.1, Pidgin 2.0, GIMP 2.2, Ekiga 2.0.9, RhythmBox 0.10, and Totem 2.18.1.

One of the most visible changes on Fedora's desktop is the new "Flying High" artwork theme. It resonates Fedora's message of "infinity, freedom, voice". We were expecting to see the cool "Echo" icon theme but, alas, it was not ready to be shipped. It would have added even more bling. This will ultimately replace the current "Blue Curve" theme.

A quick look around the default GNOME desktop reveals new features – big and small.

Some of the highlights:

Fonts: The new "Liberation" fonts make it easy for documents from MS Office to maintain a similar "look and feel" in Linux productivity applications such as OpenOffice.
New Menu Items: The popular IM (instant messenger) client "Gaim" has been renamed to "Pidgin". It can be found through the "Applications->Internet" menu. The "Places" menu now includes shortcuts to default folders for your documents, music, pictures, videos and downloads. The "System->Preferences" menu items have been grouped into broad categories for greater clarity.
Power Management: On our test system, we found two features quite useful. "GNOME Power Manager" provides neat graphs of system power usage over time. It is accessed via the "Applications->System Tools->Power Statistics". Also, you can control the brightness of your screen by using the "Brightness applet". This applet is available through the "Add to panel" dialog when you right-click on the GNOME panel.
Logins: "Fast User Switching" is now integrated with Fedora 7. This applet displays the name of the user currently logged-in at the top right hand corner. Right-clicking on it allows you to switch between sessions of multiple users who are logged in simultaneously.
Printing: Adding a printer is painless using the revamped graphical tool (system-config-printer) that not only auto detects CUPS printers but also pre-configures most important settings.
Network Administration: Network Manager, a graphical tool to manage wired and wireless network connections is installed by default now. To use it, you must enable the "NetworkManager" and "NetworkManagerDispatcher" services using the "System->Administration->Services" control panel. This tool also supports modem connections as well as some VPNs like OpenVPN and VPNC.

Folder shortcuts in Places menu

Managing the system

One of Fedora's traditional strengths has been its system management tools. These tools have benefited from Red Hat's RHEL work and add tremendously to Fedora's system administration capabilities. Performance improvements of the system tools contribute noticeably to the responsiveness of this release. A lot of effort has gone into optimizing Fedora's performance. A great example is yum and its GUI tools, "Pirut" and "Pup", which are now significantly faster. To further test the tools, we tried installing the email client Thunderbird using "Pirut", Fedora's package installer. Although the installation worked fine, "Pirut" assumes the user is knowledgeable about the overall package installation process. A wizard approach where the user is guided through the package selection and installation process would be a welcome improvement.

"Pup", Fedora's package updater, has seen many improvements since it was introduced back in Fedora Core 5. During our review, "Pup" notified us (via "puplet") that there were 37 updates available. So we ran "Pup". All updates were successful. However, it would be nice if users could select a mirror site geographically closer to them, from a list of official mirrors.

Fedora 7 also features the latest upstream additions to the mainline Linux kernel. For the user that means broader support for wireless networking with a new mac80211 stack and better power management using kernel dynamic ticks.

Advanced users wanting to make use of the latest virtualization support in the Linux kernel can now efficiently manage their virtual machines (VMs) with both graphical "virt-manager" and command line "virsh" tools. These tools can administer virtual machines based on Xen, KVM and QEMU. Both "virt-manager" and "virsh" rely on "libvirt", a C API toolkit.

SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux) implements Mandatory Access Control (MAC) and Role Based Access Control (RBAC) levels of security in Fedora. Deploying SELinux has become more practical with the addition of friendlier management tools. Fedora 7 adds a new graphical administration tool "system-config-selinux" to help set up and customize policies for your system. Another tool, "setroubleshoot", notifies users about access denials and helps track down problems with better error reporting capabilities.

SELinux troubleshoot tool menu item

In the Pilot's Seat

Spin Tools and Live CDs

Spins are variations of Fedora with custom software sets. The ability to remix user applications with a Fedora base onto a new bootable CD, DVD or even a USB key makes it attractive as an easy and convenient deployment platform. It can also facilitate deployment in bandwidth-constrained regions like India, SE Asia, Latin America and Africa. To make this complex process of creating spins simpler, Fedora has released its open source build toolchain consisting of "Pungi", "Livecd-tools", and "Revisor". "Pungi" takes packages from repositories to produce a Fedora release tree and or ISO. Other tools can be built using "Pungi" through its Python API. "Livecd-tools" as the name suggests are tools to build 'installable' live CDs. "Revisor" is a GUI tool, that uses "Livecd-tools" and "Pungi" to create installation media as well as live media.

The Next Airfield

Features that did not make Fedora 7 are now targeted to land in Fedora 8, slated for October 2007.

Key areas expected to receive attention are sound-mixing, multimedia codec integration, and an 'online-aware' desktop to improve one's overall user experience. More virtualization features are also planned for Fedora 8. Some packages addressing these key areas are:

PulseAudio, a sophisticated sound server that allows multiple applications to share sound hardware and serves as a proxy for ALSA, EsounD and JACK based applications.
CodecBuddy, a GUI tool to help users find support for restricted multimedia formats such as mpeg and mp3.
BigBoard, a replacement for GNOME panel will make future Fedora desktops aware of your online presence, contacts, documents, spreadsheets, web mail, photos, etc. using MugShot's infrastructure.

The Final Landing

As their "Flying High" theme promises, Fedora 7 is indeed a great plane to fly. It is a first class distro that demonstrates solid progress in improving the user experience, easing the move to virtualization and enabling the user to create their own flying machine through custom build tools. So grab your flight gear and take Fedora 7 for a spin. See you onboard!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Category: Technology | Bookmark:

Comments

#1 Anonymous User July 6, 2007 at 08:10 am

Nice review, this certainly makes me feel a bit better about fedora and maybe I will try F7 again.
However-what is it with these 5GB the installer says is needed for the / partition? I had a partitioning scheme placing most of the directory tree each in their own partitions and mount points and the installer still insisted on 5GB, although / by itself should really only need a couple hundred megs the most.
An inflexible, unintelligent or overzealous installer? AFAIK this has always been a problem with RHT and is one of the reasons why these days I rather use Debian, Slackware, or PClinuxOS (highly recommended btw).

#2 jef July 7, 2007 at 05:53 pm

:"Nice review, this certainly makes me feel a bit better about fedora and maybe I will try F7 again.
However-what is it with these 5GB the installer says is needed for the / partition?"

What are you talking about? Fedora 7 installed perfectly fine. Use the installable live cd if you don't want to handle many packages.

#3 Anonymous User July 8, 2007 at 12:00 pm

Do we really need an other sound server ?

Please think before you do.

#4 Anonymous User July 11, 2007 at 04:07 pm

>Use the installable live cd if you don't want to handle many packages.<

That's exactly what I've used this time-no difference. It still aborted telling me / needed 5GB disk space. Have you ever had a custom partitioning scheme done before trying to install Fedora/RedHat? If that worked I'ld like to know. Never worked for me, but fine with Slackware and Debian.

#5 Anonymous User July 18, 2007 at 01:35 pm

I went back and forth b/t F7, SuSE10.2 and Etch for the past two months.
Settled on F7 because it's so much faster on my PIII Thinkpad. Deb is (still) too server-oriented for my purposes, and SuSE, while ultimately being the *best* desktop (integrated tools, customized OpenOffice w/ MS Office compatibilities), is too sluggish for my tolerances. I chose F7.
Fedora went from pedestrian (F6--I hated it) to hungry underdog in a single release and that caught my attention. I now consider Fedora the insurgent distro to beat; Max's sense of urgency and agressive goals around the project have energized the project and that's a key draw for me.

#6 Anonymous User July 19, 2007 at 06:44 am

Thanks for writing this review. Your note regarding the Network Manager made me realise what might be causing my browser to run so slow in Fedora. I had to go in an manually set the DNS address - something I hadn't needed to do with Ubuntu. I'm happy to say that Firefox now browses very quickly in Fedora.

#7 Chaos July 22, 2007 at 10:55 am

Great review, I recently received an F7 cd, and I've been using it almost trouble free, the only thing is, I can't access any other HD partitions, but that's not a huge deal to me, and I've enjoyed my time with it immensely

#8 Anonymous User August 5, 2007 at 10:16 am

Really. the size a distro tells you it needs for partitions is quite arbitrary. I think I prefer F7 which tells me I need 5GB for / over Ubuntu which tells me I need 2 GB for /. When I install Ubuntu with just 2 GB, I get a disk full error before the install is complete. When I install F7 with the 5 GB root partition I have no problems... Although, I really think it would be better for distro's to recommend /tmp as a separate partition. You will really be hurting if you start trying to burn DVD's without enough disk space available where the ISO is written.

#9 Simon August 7, 2007 at 07:38 pm

I was looking for a fix on the ESD sound mixing and stumbled across this article and I can't agree more. Outside of the OSX terminal, this is my first foray into Nix and frankly I'm shocked at how good it is. Still a bit more work on the 'ol keyboard than an XP/MacOS guy normally handles but I'm hooked. I was looking to "un-bloat" my malware infected pc and checked out Open-Suse (had probs with my hardware), Mandrake and F7. I've installed and configured my F7 with lots of FREE apps to handle media playback, browsing, office apps, music, web dev and disc burning - even used VNC to control my mac! Can't wait to see some fixes for xine and 5.1surround fixes in general but overall, a much better experience. If you're new to F7, check out howtoforge.com for a fairly complete install of Fedora 7. I think I'll skip trying to install Mandrake for now...

Enjoy,

Simon

2GB, AMD 3500+, MSI K8-neo2plat, Soundblaster Audigy2, Radeon X800 XT, Dual boot XP, F7 on two separate internal SATA drives.

#10 Anonymous User August 8, 2007 at 11:09 am

I too liked the artwork; being a Linux newbie, I'm not in much of a position to evaluate anything else. However, one thing about Fedora 7 has made be a tiny bit unhappy; the lack of mpi, ypserv and portmap packages. Since one of my college projects depends on these packages, not having them by default is a bit of a drag. I've never installed any packages on my own. Will have to learn now. I realise I don't represent the majority of users...

#11 Anonymous User August 27, 2007 at 01:05 pm

Sorry but Fedora 7 is not yet ready for MS window users especiall if you are using a dialup modem and a POPs Account not enough info on how to configer,and still to technically worded to understand so ill have to stick with Xandros OS for now at least it will deteat my modem, but ill tri Fedora again maybe thay will make it a little easier down the road . I like Fedora and been using it for 3 day but still cant git on line. Just a comment from a window user

#12 manmath sahu September 13, 2007 at 11:49 pm

Fedora is a good general purpose linux. But PCLinuxOS is the best Desktop Linux. Depends what's your purpose. Anyways, the review is good.

Sections