New Fedora core something to crow about

FINALLY Fedora Core 4 (FC4) has been released, and its time to get rid of the broken FC3.

It took me about an hour to upgrade from FC3 to FC4 (codenamed Stentz) but it did not immediately fix anything – the menu was confusing, missing some icons and so on.

Downloading
If you want to download FC4, it’s best that you have a broadband connection because you are looking at four 600MB-plus files – enough data for four CDs.

My advice is to choose a mirror site that is located somewhere in Malaysia or Singapore.

Unfortunately the Asiaosc.org website has not updated to FC4 yet, but you can get it at the Singapore Spanasia site (ftp://mirror.spanasia.net/pub/fedora/linux). Still it took many hours to download.

When downloading, it is best to use a tool that can resume the task if the transfer gets interrupted. On my FC3, I used “wget -c ftp://mirror.spanasia. net/pub/fedora/ linux.”

After downloading, you should check if it was done correctly using “sha1sum” for the correct “checksum” on the webpage.

For safekeeping, burn each ISO file onto a CD. Your burner must support ISO burning, as normal data burning won’t work.

A program like cdrecord will do just fine. Run “cdrecord -scanbus” to see where the CD writer is.

To burn disc 1, type in: “cdrecord -v -dev=ATA:1,0,0 -eject FC4-i386-disc1.iso,” where “1,0,0” is the bus address of the CD writer found from “scanbus” command.

The “ATA” depends on your CD writer transport type.

With the four discs ready, proceed to put the first disc in, and reboot your computer.

The installation should be easy on most computers. Any hiccup would be at the disc partitioning stage.

There is a guide at http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedora-install-guide-en/fc4 to help you through this task.

If you are installing on a fairly new PC, you can choose to install the Personal option. Any additional packages that are needed can be added with the custom package option. This can be done at a later stage.

Impressions
The new default desktop theme, Clearlook, is neat and clean without unnecessary clutter, and there are plenty more themes out there. Customising themes for your desktop is now fun!

When you first run FC4, the menu is a bit sluggish, which is probably because it is building the menu and icons. Once this is done, it should run ok.

The top panel bar now has new menu options: Applications, Places and Desktop.

The Places menu logically locates Computer, CD, Home, Desktop, Recent Documents etc, which basically lists locations like CD player, servers, folders and files.

This is a much-appreciated improvement. The Desktop menu has options for setting Preferences and Logging Out. And of course the Applications menu has all your applications divided into Accessories, Games, Graphics, Internet, Office, Programming, Sound and Video and Systems Tools.

Previously on FC3, the sound didn’t work upon installation, but FC4 detected my soundcard automatically. I’m happy to report that it worked perfectly, even though my soundcard is an integrated board.

Although this means that you can now play your CDs out of the box, MP3 files are not supported and you have download additional programs to play MP3s.

Windows file sharing also worked painlessly. To connect to a Windows machine, open the Places menu and choose Connect To Server.

Next, key in the shared Windows computer and username, and voila! You are connected. This will spare a lot of pain for many beginners.

USB (Universal Serial Bus) worked like a charm as well – plugging in a Flash memory drive was not a problem as it was automatically detected.

There was a problem with the keyboard, though, as it defaults to the US keyboard layout with dead keys.

This is for typing accented letters but will create a problem when entering single or double quotes, so it is best to set the default layout to just US English or UK English.

Software
All commonly-used software is available for FC4. This includes OpenOffice 2.0 beta, which opens Word and PowerPoint documents perfectly. The latest Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client comes bundled, and this saves you the hassle of a separate download. For instant messaging, the multi-protocol Gaim is installed.

There seemed to be a small problem with Thunderbird, though. For it to work, you have to uncheck “usename and password” under Edit/Account Settings in the Outgoing Server (SMTP) tab.

There is a new all-in-one Evince document viewer, which replaces several others for viewing PDFs, and Postscript files. Evince supports page thumbnails, search and page indexing.

For listening to music, you have RhythmBox (version 0.8.8) to organise your tracks, Helix Player to play Ogg Vorbis and Theora files, Sound Juicer (version 2.10.1) for extracting music from CDs.

CD Player plays your audio CDs, and X-CD-Roast comes in handy for burning CDs.

Gimp (version 2.2) is available for touching up your photos and other imaging endeavours, but unfortunately Inkscape (for vector drawing) and Sribus (for page formatting and printing) is missing.

However, this shouldn’t be a real problem because all of these programs are just a download away.

If you are into programming, the included Eclipse (version 3.1) will save you the trouble of an additional download.

Programmers that use Java Swing will have to download it separately, because FC4 comes with GCJ (Gnu Java Compiler) that does not yet support Swing. The GCC (Gnu C Compiler) is included, though.

Conclusion
Installing FC4 was easily, even on dual-boot machines. Everything worked including integrated soundcards and Windows file sharing.

All commonly used software for productivity, imaging, sound and video tasks, is also included in this package.

In a nutshell, FC4 could easily be the new primary operating system to replace the current one residing on your machine.

·The writer can be reached at Loke.Kar.Seng@infotech.monash.edu.my