Good looking wiki. I'll have to bookmark that in case anyone I know decides to use Fedora.
Umpa wrote:
No distribution is painless, try getting the latest java plugins working, or flash installed, or the latest ATI/NVidia drivers in place, tested, and xorg.conf to keep you dual head views or XEIV settings. Have you upgraded all 6 times ATI released updates in the last couple months? Lose your 7 button mouse settings? Upgrades are tougher then new installs many times because there are things you have tricked out and installed, that will NOT be in the upgrade, and most people do not document their fixes very well, or are even confused about what actually they fixed. My biggest [censored] is the sound support for multichannel mixing. I use the built in soundcard on and asus board at home and it all works great, 7.1. At this point its as functional for multi application use as Windows is for the gamer and normal user.
Every distribution is going to have its quirks, some more painful than others. Thus far, Ubuntu has proven to be the easiest in my experience which includes Fedora, OpenSuse, Slackware, Gentoo, White Box, CentOS, Mandrake (pre-Mandriva days). I probably shouldn't even include Gentoo due to the upgrade path being so drastically different from the others.
I've had no problems at all upgrading the Nvidia drivers in Ubuntu. I have never had to do any reconfiguration of Nvidia card after the upgrades either. I've not owned an ATI card that required the closed drivers so I couldn't comment as to that.
I haven't had any problems with my 5 button mouse either, though when I have an update to X, I always make a copy of the conf file just in case. My sound card, which still isn't perfectly supported in ALSA (darn you, Turtle Beach / Voyetra) needs no reconfiguration after kernel upgrades.
Re-configuration issues and upgrade issues are a large part of why I stopped using both Fedora and OpenSuse. Using YAST and SAX during the Nvidia driver update is a major pain. Once I saw how easy it was in Ubuntu, I was hooked.
Umpa wrote:When I reffered to the RPM as in used in redhat, I was not reffering to yum, even though I really like yum a great deal more then the up2date processes that the commercial version uses. You can do some interesting things with YUM I really like over other products, but thats not the issue really. Most unix interviews will consist if its covering linux, questions about RPM packages and such, what tools you download with are really not a big deal, such as my company I wrote my own, and we use it on all servers, AIX, HP, LINUX, Tru64, and SUN. It uses CPIO and compress which is everywhere out of the box pretty much. Debian still messes up dependencies, try updating to a latest beta version of speex then update some dependent packages. yum list >yum.list then look at that list to find package issue. yumex is a very nice python gui for yum.
The keyword in your Debian story is the fact that you were updating to a *beta* version of an application. If you were running Debian-stable, I would have been surprised if you *didn't* have dependency issues.
I've yet to have an interview regarding a *NIX related position where a crucial part of the interview dealt with knowing the ins and outs of RPM. Now, if I didn't know how to use the "man" command to get the information I needed on RPM switches, that would be more of a problem. RPM, like any package management system, is a tool. If you have shown the ability to use a similar tool, that's good enough in 90% of the cases.
Umpa wrote:Non of the package managers do very well really if you want to talk about it, non of them do proper repair of all files in case of massive file corruption. I once rsynced to the wrong box and overwrote via the /opt/kde directory FC5 with FC6 files, all of my base libs and executables cored full time. I had to write my own perl scripts to resolve the file repairs. Lots of fun there. Nobody has a solution for something like that.
True. It is one of the dangers of any *NIX type OS. If you have the rights to a particular directory, you can really screw things up if you're not careful. And the system isn't going to stop you either. That's why I thought the CEO of Linspire was being rather dense in his insistence that running as root from the beginning was not a bad thing for new users. In fact, it's probably the worst.
Umpa wrote:The thing is Fedora 1-5 got marginally better, but 6 really put it over the top for multimedia that workes every time. If you have video issues, or library issues I'd be supprised if you followed the livna setup. My laptop has 205 processes running in dualhead mode, playing mp3's from encrypted disks and USB pen among other things. I had issues getting all this working while I was watching CNN videos in FC5, 6 was almost painless, and it worked.
It appears that livna serves the same function for Fedora that the universe and multiverse repositories serve for Ubuntu. The real difference being that I didn't have to manually add those to repositories to Ubuntu, all I had to do was activate them.
Umpa wrote:I am pointing out, that FC6 has finally made it to a decent desktop status, no its not utter newbie ware, but its almost painless if you follow a good setup guide, you can cut and paste your way to almost all the funtionality at this point. My normal assumptions when someone installs it, is they have a browser, can read, and type in commands to setup something in a terminal.
I refuse to bother with any distro that doesn't have good online documentation, so I'm with you there. I've found that I still use the Gentoo guides when troubleshooting issues long after I had stopped using the distro. They are among the best I've ever seen.
Umpa wrote:I have never recommended gnome for anything but maintenance, KDE all the way for everyone. KDE understands that most people know windows but not LINUX, also GNOME assumes people are stupid and dangerous so lock all the fun stuff down or doesn't show it, Linus has actually submitted a bunch of patches to get them started a month ago.
I read the thread where Linus ripped into the GNOME maintainers. I see you agree with him lockstep on that. While there is some validity to his arguments, I think he was way over the top as are you in saying that GNOME assumes people are stupid. They assume no such thing. GNOME is simply aimed at a different segment than KDE is. For better or worse, GNOME is aimed at the corporate desktop/server segment. They've obviously tried to cut down administrative nightmares by limiting how easily a user can drastically change their desktop. KDE has more of an "everything and the kitchen sink" mentality. I'm currently using both on different machines. There are things I like about both. There are things I dislike about both. In the end, each one is a tool, each meant for a different purpose.
Umpa wrote:If you run NWN in linux and haven't changed any settings then its locking your soundcard, try running it and say mplayer or xmms at the same time. Your not mixing channels unless you put the alsa settings in your NWN start script to use ALSA, and your SDL needs to support it. By default the original script for running nwn doesnt' do this, so SDL takes ownership of the /dev/dsp. All of the programs you would want to run would need to support ALSA also, which most on FC6 do at this point.
And why would I be using xmms or mplayer at the same time I'm running NWN? I want every CPU cycle, every GPU cycle, and every bit of RAM dedicated to running NWN as quick as possible. If I wanted to listen to tunes at the same time, I'll either do it from my other machine or pop in a CD.
Umpa wrote:I did point out that most people have their favorites when it comes to Distro's of Linux. I do actually work on this stuff full time, and I have switched every linux server we have at this point to FC6 and everyone I know with a desktop is now using it that about 10 people to date. Try it, use a setup guide that includes the video in fedora setups, then compare it to others trying to run the same things such as CNN videos.
I believe that you do work on this stuff full time. I've done it full time. I now do it purely in my free time. I might consider trying Fedora again if there was something Ubuntu or Kubuntu didn't let me do easily. Getting CNN videos working was simple enough. The Ubuntu help docs have a section specifically devoted to Restricted Formats. The install was a simple copy/paste of 3 commands and I was done.
Umpa wrote:Even though I included servers perhaps in the text, what I'm reffering to is LINUX desktop usage only. Everyone already pretty much knows how it acts as a server.
My big gripe with using Fedora as a server is the fact that I'm not into bleeding edge on the server side. Stability is a heck of a lot more important than having all the newest features. There's also the problem of how relatively short the Fedora Core lifecycle is. Give me Ubuntu Dapper Drake LTS (Long Term Support) any day.
Umpa wrote:Non of the above applies to the 64bit mode linux, since firefox doesn't really support itself really well in 64bit mode, which will mean you have to run in 32bit mode, and do some wrappers, there is a good page somewhere on the net for this which I've used for the one machine here we have as a 64bit desktop. Otherwise it works well with nvidia drivers, I haven't tried ATI there yet.
I'll be a happy man when I have to deal with the 64 bit side of things as this will mean I've finally moved up to a 64 bit processor. Woohoo!
Right now, I have Ubuntu and Kubuntu on two machines just so I can get used to the differences between Gnome and KDE without having to have both on the same machine. I'm loving it.