fc5

[brads at redhat.com (Brad Smith)]

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Stephen Adler wrote:
> FC5 is out... Anyone had a chance to kick its tires? How good is it?
> Should one wait a couple of weeks, let the dust settle, or plunge ahead
> and install...
> 
> Cheers. Steve.
> 

Hi folks,

I installed fc5 today and have been playing around with it, so I thought I
would post my impressions since someone asked. Note that I'm a bit
biased, but my work at Red Hat is unrelated to Fedora and I think I've
given it a pretty fair shakedown, covering good an bad points alike. I hope
people find this info useful. Oh, and "Hi!", I've been living in Somerville for
about 7 months now, but have only just found my way to this mailing list.

The worst bit comes first: I started things off with a bang by managing to
crash the installer. I had initially decided to wipe my FC4 partition, so
I selected "Install" instead of "Upgrade" and went into the partitioning
utility where I opted to do a custom partitioning scheme. I started
clearing out the old partitions and removed an LVM volume group that
wasn't being used anymore but then decided to try an upgrade instead. The
VG I'd removed wasn't being used by the FC4 installation I wanted to
upgrade, so I backed out of the partitioning tool and chose upgrade
instead.

Well, apparently this caused some issues for poor anaconda, which bombed out
later with an "index out of range" exception when going through the list
of partitions on the system. I wouldn't have been so annoyed by this if it had
happened immediately, but no, instead it didn't actually die until after
the 2+ hour(!) upgrade process was almost finished. Ugh.

But there is a silver lining here in that it demonstrated a cool new feature of
anaconda. Now when it bombs it gives you the option to specify a
system/user to which anaconda will scp a very detailed crash log before
rebooting. As a result I was able to send the crash info to my laptop and file a bug with enough
information about what was going on at the time of the crash that hopefully the
anaconda folks will be able to sort it out fairly easily.

Rather than try to salvage the system, I decided to go for a full install, which
went smoothly. The install only took about 15-20 minutes
and was quite painless. During the process I noted a couple of nice
changes in the installer:

First and foremost, one of my longest-standing annoyances with Anaconda
has been fixed: You can now click the 'back' button all the way from
package selection to the partitioning screen. That way if you find you
don't have enough room on a partition for the packages you want, you can go
back and fiddle with the partition sizes. This used to require restarting
the install.

The firewall tool, which has been moved to firstboot instead of the main
installer, now has a little more friendly gui for specifying non-standard
ports. A dialog asks you for a port type and number instead of just
providing a text box where you have to remember the correct syntax.

The new SELinux policy looks really exciting. One of the main features
they are touting in the new policy is modularity and the SELinux
configurator (also moved to firstboot) shows it. Whereas in previous
versions there were just a few booleans that could be used to tune the
policy, there look to be about 50 in fc5, controlling everything from
httpd to spamassassin.

The package selection interface has also been updated. It's nicer looking
and arguably more usable, but it no longer seems to include a total of the
space used by the packages selected. I've heard that these estimations
were never that accurate to begin with, which is maybe why they are no
longer there. Regardless, you now only find out that you've installed more
packages than will fit on your drive after you try to click Next (if you
do have too much you can still go back and fix it).

Maybe I've just missed this in prior versions, but you can read the
release notes at any time during the fc5 install, including while packages
are installing I highly recommend browsing these notes. The docs people
have spent a lot of time on them and it shows. They've got a lot of good
info.

Post-boot, the first thing I noticed is that fc5 seems to start faster
than fc4 did. Gnome takes only a few seconds to start up. The second thing
I noticed is that fc5 is _pretty_. I love the new logo, gdm and gnome
themes.

The much-talked-about Beagle search tool is there under the "Places" menu,
though I haven't gotten to play with it much yet (no files to search) as
are some other newish apps like F-Spot and Tomboy. I think I'm going to
like these.

F-Spot is a handy photo org tool that lets you view, edit and
tag/group your photos. Think of it like itunes for images. I haven't played with it much yet,
but since my photo collection is quickly approaching critical mass I
intend to.

Tomboy is a note taking tool that lets you create what is effectively a
personal wiki. You start out on the main note. Type a heading, highlight
it and click "link". A new note comes up, which is now linked from the
main note. You can format text within a note, do your stuff and then
export the whole hierarchy to an html file.

A minor thing, but the new version of Thunderbird supports inline
spellchecking, which I've been anticipating for some time now.

There are also, finally, some nice graphical package management tools
included with fc5. Pirut is a yum frontend that allows you to search for,
install and uninstall packages on your system. I used it to install some
of the software from Fedora Extras, which is enabled by default, but not
available from anaconda. Personally, I think I prefer yumEx, which I'd installed
myself under fc4, but Pirut gets the job done. It is awfully slow,
unfortunately, but I think that's more Yum than Pirut.

Under the System Tools menu is another new graphical package management
tool, Pup. It does one thing: Display available updates and let you
install them. It does this well and within a minute of finishing the
install I'd pulled down all of the updates that have come out since the
launch. Personally I'd like to see Pup and Pirut combined into one app
(YumEx did bot installs and updates) since I don't see the point of having
them separate. I'd also like to see a panel applet that lets you know when
an update is available a la RHEL and earlier RH distros.

Now for a couple of the big complaints: First off, fc5 seems to have
ditched smb in favor of cifs. This in its self is a good thing. However,
someone forgot to tell the mount command because trying to run a command
like:

mount //server/share /mnt/tmp

bombs, saying that smbfs is an unsupported fs type. After some tinkering,
I got the following to work:

mount -t cifs //server_ip/share /mnt/tmp

Note that I had to use the ip. Not quite sure what's up there. nmblookup
can figure out the server's ip by name, but mount can't figure it out
unless I just use the ip. Strangely there's no mention of any of this in
the release notes.

On the up side, smb support within Nautilus seems to be immensely
improved, by which I mean I was, for the first time, able to use it with
no problems. Both browsing the cifs network and connecting to a server
manually with "file->connect to server" worked flawlessly.

Finally we come to the last and weirdest of the problems that I've had:
There seems to be no link for gnome-terminal... anywhere. It isn't on the menu
and it doesn't show up as an option when you right-click on the desktop
either. I had to add the mini command-line applet to the panel and type
gnome-terminal in. I don't know if this is intentional or not, but
regardless I found it annoying. I'm still trying to determine if this is
something others are experiencing or just me.

I'm still going through the other applications and whatnot. I'm sure there
are lots more goodies waiting to be found, but those are my impressions
after day one.

Overall, despite my complaints, my overall feeling about fc5 is that it is
a huge improvement and I'm looking forward to using it. The SMB bug is
going to be the biggest thorn in my side for the time being, but hopefully
it will be fixed soon.

Next up, I'm looking forward to playing with the Xen virtualization stuff
that comes with fc5. I'll post my thoughts on that when I get a chance.


- --Brad
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