Fwd: Laptop for Church - Which Distro

Tue Apr 4 08:05:39 CDT 2006

On 4/3/06, Jason D. Clinton <me at jasonclinton.com> wrote:

>  On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 21:19 -0500, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
>
> - Fedora comes with both Gnome and KDE (I prefer and use the later)
>
>
> KDE is a second class citizen in Fedora, but okay.
>

I support that statement. However, besides everyone I know personally who
uses Fedora, Linux uses KDE on Fedora. So KDE isn't that badly off in the
Fedora world.

- Supposedly the Gnome desktop comes with some killer Mono apps, I am not
> ure of this.
>
>
> Yea, it does (I agregate a few Fedora developer blogs). All distros do.
> Fedora has nothing unique to it with regard to Gnome other than its theme.
>

I agree with you there also. Wasn't impling otherwise.

- Fedora comes with a package manager, arguably not the best, but it does
> use RPM for its packaging, and any and all package managers that handle RPMs
> will work on Fedora, and many infact are already packaged for Fedora. For
> interface, Fedora uses yum (console app) and has many available GUIs
> packaged for Yum ( I do not use one myself, no need)
>
>
> Erm, no. Yum is a third party development which was originally designed
> for Yellow Dog. Yum is also a second class citizen in Fedora and only works
> because someone maintains a Yum repository with the latest Fedora sources in
> it. In fact, if you were to use the built-in package manager and then use
> Yum, the results would be undefined.
>

Yum is the suggested, and primary method of software installtion and
management for Fedora:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAQ#head-eeb72f8986226805f39306991a88c2848d80ff55

Yum is a 1st class citizen, to use your metaphor. It works because that is
the main (only ?) method of package distribution for Fedora. The built in
package manager is Yum, or are you refering to the little GUI tool that
allows you uninstall/install things that are on the CD media. The title of
the window it brings up is a tad deceiving, the only packages that manages
are what come from the install media. The result of using both are wholly
predictable: no problem.

And you can't just wave your hands and say that package dependency problems
> don't happen;
>

Well it was more like moving my fingers across the keyboard. And the only
time I hear of that happening these days is when people use 3rd party epos
that are known to conflict with each other. As it is, I have nine third
party repos setup with my yum. I only use 4 of them. (in addition to the
Fedora repos themsevles)

when you introduce third party RPMS, they do. And sometimes they can be a
> real bitch to fix -- without a nice dep. resolver like yum, you could get a
> real headache.
>

Very much agreed.

Which is why I asked whether there was an 'official' way dealing with it but
> I gather, now, that there isn't.
>

Well you are free to ignore me telling you that yum is the package manager
used by Fedora.

- last I remember, it took 5 third party RPMS , all installed via Yum to
> give me full multimedia support, infact I think I have that in a bash script
> somewhere.
>
>
> Unless one of those RPM's contains more than one of the following and does
> a 'provides' so that they appear to be installed to other packages:
>
> Sun Java
> Macromedia Flash
> Nvidia/ATI driver
> Ndiswrapper
> Xvid
> FFMPEG
> x264
> lame/mad/mpg12321
> rte
> libdvdcss
> libavcodec
> faad/faac
> [a gstreamer binding to each of the above, usually each a seperate
> package]
> etc. etc.
>

I forgot to consider Flash the first time, but I would stil stick to my
original estimate. Also, didn't consider Java at all, not the proprietary
binaries as least. I have them installed, but that was too long ago to
remember details except that I followed some simple instructions from one of
the Fedora websites.

Right now my Fedora handles more codecs than the last few Windows XP i have
used. MytvTV is also fun.

- I might be ignorant on the installer options, what options did you need
> that were missing? I haven't ran into such a lack there of, but that is just
> me, my needs may be different from yours.
>
>
> Based on the FC5 screen shots on OSDir it appears that most of the options
> are now available versus what I experience with the 4.92 preview release.
>

I think it was 4.93 that I installed, can't say that there was anything
noticeable missing.

- Two unique aspect of Fedora I would regard as: 1) Built in SELinux support
> (great for servers) , 2) system-config tools good for mid level users and
> quick configuring
>
>
> SELinux is nice, yes, I missed that. Where are these system-config tools
> you speak of?
>

Nice little (most PyGTK based) configuration apps:
system-config-bind
system-config-boot
system-config-control
system-config-date
system-config-display
system-config-httpd
system-config-keyboard
system-config-language
system-config-kickstart
system-config-lvm
system-config-mouse
system-config-netboot
system-config-network
system-config-network-tui
system-config-nfs
system-config-packages
system-config-printer
system-config-printer-gui
system-config-rootpassword
system-config-samba
system-config-securitylevel
system-config-securitylevel-tui
system-config-services
system-config-soundcard
system-config-users

- Most of the dues go to the actual software, but FC has been a more than
> adequate desktop OS for me since FC3 (when I put away Windows for it)
>
>
> I sure that it has but probably mostly because KDE does what you want it
> to do; not really Fedora's work at all.
>

I do not disagree with this. But isn't that part of the definition of the
distro? Most of the software on any real Linux distro is available to any
other distro. I like Fedora because I started with RedHat 8.0 and It has
always been better than enough for me. And I generally like the community
around it also.

 --
> Jason D. Clinton <me at jasonclinton.com>
>

--
As a boy I jumped through Windows, as a man I play with Penguins.

--
As a boy I jumped through Windows, as a man I play with Penguins.
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