[H-GEN] Fedora Core 5 for PPC needed for the distro server.

[Anthony Irwin]

Tony Nugent wrote:

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>
>Speaking of Fedora Core 5...
>
>I have it on a DVD that came with the June issue of Linux Magazine, but I
>haven't tried it as yet.  I'll planning to have a first look at it in a Vmware
>box when I finally get some time.  If it looks good then I'm thinking about
>updating two or three other boxes that I have here.
>
>What are other people's impressions of it?  Is it worth the trouble?
>  
>
It really depends what you consider trouble I used it for a couple of 
months on my home machine and setting it up wasn't all that hard but I 
had to do google searches to find out about the extra yum repositories 
and the packages I needed to install to get mp3 support and other codec 
issues like that.

I personally find the other distros like Debian and Gentoo handle that 
better but if you have used other distros that remove such things then 
you may not care about having to find out about how they handle you 
getting it.

>- easy install and setup? (any issues? - are the default settings ok, etc?)
>  
>
Yeah it pretty much just works except for the sound and video codecs 
mentioned above.

>- does it have all the goodies for driving the hardware on a multi-media box
>working with 3D video, 5.1 sound and video capture cards etc?
>  
>
I would imagine it would automatically detect the kernel drivers for you 
tvcard and load them on boot but you would probably need to install any 
software you use like tvtime etc.

>- does it have everything needed for building a decent server and router boxes?
>
>- can it install and run on older CPUs and hardware as a slim install for
>dedicated purposes on old sub-1Gb HDDs?
>  
>
 From memory redhat stuff is not good for older machines.

>- is it using the latest versions of open office, samba, gimp, php, ldap, mysql,
>and so on?
>  
>
Yes all the latest packages thats a good thing about it.

>- any comments about its system and network management tools, and the default
>user GUI setup?
>  
>
When I was playing with it at home I used the gui to set up wireless as 
at the time I did not know where the scripts were for manual editing. I 
did of cause first manually install the required firmware for my 
wireless card but it seemed to work well being configured from the gui. 
 From memory the scripts for manually editing the network is located at 
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts

The gui is a gnome desktop by default and works well. If your like me 
and like to use a minimalistic window manager then they don't have a lot 
of the nice apps that you would run in the slit/docks so you will be 
doing some hunting on the web and manual compiling.

Also from memory they don't have many extra window managers so depending 
on what you use you may need to compile it yourself. But they have all 
the standard gnome/kde stuff.

>- are there any major changes or big surprises?
>  
>
You have to use the patched kernel sources from fedora for some reason 
you can't use vanilla kernel sources I forget why. If you have never 
used selinux you may want to turn it off during installation as it will 
make permissions work differently to what your used to and can be a real 
pain in the butt if you don't use selinux or want to know about it just yet.

You can change it after an installation by editing the 
/etc/sysconfig/selinux file and set SELINUX= to enforcing or disabled.

Anyway thats my thoughts.

Kind Regards,
Anthony Irwin