Preliminary Review on Fedora Core 1 I will start this review with a little background; I left behind the safety of Mandrake 9.2, to move towards my now seemingly ancient copy of Redhat 8.0, in an effort to homogenize my network (ok, is it too much to ask to have the same basic distro on all the Linux machines in my LAN?). When I discovered that distribution to be deeply troubled, I tossed the dice and gave Fedora Core 1 a shot.
It comes on 3 CD's, and they were painless to obtain and burn. The install process is much like the last 4 or 5 versions of Redhat's install; smooth, relatively a no-brainer. Initially, on the webserver, which is old, I had trouble getting Redhat to remove the Windows Fat32 partitions that were on it. Mandrake wouldn't find the 4 ISA network cards that were in it, either (which is why I abandoned a perfectly functional Mandrake webserver install). The first boot was where it got sweet - it's fast. It's smooth. It has a really cool style to it. It wanted to, by default, install Gnome (which I prefer), so I let it. Overall, it's very fast, and very smooth. It didn't install a DVD player by default, and I think that this is a serious deficiency in all current distros. But, all of the hardware on my big box was identified and installed correctly (except my Geforce 4). Getting the Geforce 4 installed was kind of a nightmare; but, it's always a pain in the butt. The networking was defaulted to DHCP, and it detected my NIC, which means zero configuration in that regard. The downside; the "start menu" is limited. If you install a new piece of software, via RPM, it doesn't add it to that menu. And there wasn't a decent package manager in the start menu at all. Removing RPM-installed software that wasn't on the official Fedora distro was impossible, without going to the terminal console. But, these are stumbling starts...I will report more as I play with it. Overall (so far); worth the download, and worth giving a shot, if you are looking for something new to play with. For standing Redhat customers, there's not much new here (but they have fixed all of the problems that came with 8.0). David Jackson
