fc2

Asa, You might want to ask your friends at RH to hook you up with some Redhat Desktop licenses.

http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/desktop/

These have Real Player, Flash, Agfa Monotype fonts and of course Mozilla. This is what they are targetting corporate workers and if that is a segment the Mozilla Foundation wants to target you need to be testing that platform

My overall impression of FC2 is that it's an incremental improvement over FC1. While there isn't anything groundbreakingly new from a UI point of view, there have been a lot of polish changes and small usability things that have left me happy with the upgrade. They all add up.

Major features of FC2 over FC1:
- Based on 2.6 series Kernel
- Gnome 2.6 instead of 2.4
- SELinux (disabled by default)

Most of the major changes here are backend. While Gnome 2.6 is a frontend change, it's not all that different from Gnome 2.4.

Also, a pet peeve bug of mine has been fixed:
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=107639

A lot of people have said that FC2 is supposed to be much faster than FC1. While it's certainly not slower, I don't really know whether or not it's really faster. I've not had it installed long enough to tell.

All in all, it's a smoother release, and I'm happy with the result.

Not only do they leave out the MP3 codec, but they also avoid being sued for patent infringement (http://www.mp3licensing.com/).

Since that the software is being given away and users can install it on as many machines as they want, it would be a bit difficult for them to pay the required per-unit royalties.

Given these constraints, they've taken the only route possible for a free distribution -- leave out the patent encumbered code, and provide free alternatives where possible.

There are third party repositories where you can get the extra codecs, but you will have to find them yourself (Red Hat won't point them out to you because linking is a crime).

I still have not tried FC2 as I don't see any official links for AMD64 CDs/DVD. In fact I haven't tried Red Hat/Fedora ever since I switched to Mandrake a few years back and it would be nice to see how it works after all this time. Currently I am runing Gentoo which I think is runing the best on on my main machine with AMD Athlon 64 and I'll check it out how it compares to FC2 for AMD64.

RE the AMD64 version, perhaps you're looking for this:

http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/FC2-test3-binary-x86_64.torrent
(more torrents at http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/)

For those of you who have BitTorrent blocked, or can't use it for whatever reason, I've mirrored the FC2 i386 CDs over here:

http://www.munuc.org/~aebrahim/fedora/

To verify authenticity you can compare the MD5SUM file on my server to the one at:
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/2/i386/iso/MD5SUM
and then compare the ISO downloaded files' MD5 hash against that.

Feel free to grab them off there, but they probably won't stay up there for more than a few days.

Oops, the correct URL for the x86-64 torrent is:
http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/tettnang-binary-x86_64-iso.torrent

James, they could certainly work on making it easy to add mp3 support if they can't include it themselves. I spent about 4 hours trying to get mp3 support into Rhythmbox and finally gave up. Here's my experience (compared, roughly, to my other two primary OSs, Mac and Windows): Install and firstlaunch was acceptable but no support for my wireless card is a big minus. Basic first tasks like browsing, email, word processing, im/irc, ftp, all worked well or even "great". Multimedia was about as acceptable as support for my wireless card -- by that I mean completely incompatible with all of my media.

RH and other linux distros need to focus on the things that matter to me ;-) I know it's a tired expression, and lord knows I get enough of it about Mozilla in Bugzilla, but "the one thing (actually, two) that keeps me from using Linux as my default OS" is the lack of Broadcom wireless support and the lack of mp3 support in Rhythmbox and XMMS (or even a super-simple way to plug in that support).

In these cases, though, I don't think I'm alone. Broadcom is a hugely popular wireless chipeset and the powerhouse linux players (Red Hat, Novell, etc.) really need to cut some deal with Broadcom to get a driver for these wireless cards. Two of my three laptops with integrated wireless (different brands, even) have had broadcom chips and several very popular cards (including the Linksys WMP line) have broadcom chips. Not supporting this is a pretty big issue for a lot of potential users. Mp3 is _the_ format for digital audio these days. I know it's tricky to support this because of patents and licensing and whatnot, but something needs to be done. A really easy to use plugin architecture would be nice. Alternate sources for packages compiled with mp3 support would be OK, but not great. No reasonably easy way for normal users (who are _not_ going to recompile or sort out package dependency hell) to get mp3 support is unacceptable.

""the one thing (actually, two) that keeps me from using Linux as my default OS" is the lack of Broadcom wireless support and the lack of mp3 support in Rhythmbox and XMMS (or even a super-simple way to plug in that support)."

Hanve you thought about a different distro? mp3 support is peculiar to Red Hat and although the Broadcom situation looks pretty hopeless for native drivers there are at least windows driver wrappers (http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/)

I think leaving out patented file formats, methods, xml schema and other such non-inventions is a good idea and wish more distro's would take this route. At the very least a nag screen with the USPTO mailing address and a brief explaination of how software patents are in violation of TRIPS.

Did I take the bait?

Asa,

You should check out this page for MP3 support and other media formats:

http://rpm.livna.org/

I tried it, but found it too contemporary.

Asa: as far as xmms goes, the code to support the MP3 format is usually included with the package under the GPL. This essentially makes xmms's MP3 support non-redistributable in any country where the MP3 patents are in effect (MP3 licensing requires per-unit roylaties, and GPL forbids imposing additional restrictions). The plugin is however available from a non-US repository as Ali mentioned.

On the other hand, Rythmbox uses the GStreamer multimedia architecture, so all that is missing is the gstreamer MP3 codec. This should also be available in one of the non-US repositories.

There is nothing stopping a US company from licensing the MP3 patents and selling a codec for use under Linux, but at this point most people seem to be content with ignoring the patents (of course a Linux distributor can't really ignore the patents, since they would make better targets for lawsuits).

On the subject of the wireless card, Broadcom _have_ produced Linux drivers for at least some of their 802.11g wireless chipsets. When people were reverse engineering the Linksys WRT54g router, they found it was running Linux, and there was a kernel module for the wireless card in the firmware image.

This particular kernel module wouldn't be any use to you though, since the router used a MIPS architecture CPU. However, the fact that they produced a Linux driver indicates that they could potentially release an i386 driver without much trouble. I'm not quite sure why they haven't though.

Well, it's on to the third distro (5th version) for me. I started with Mandrake 9.1, which worked okay except that urpmi wouldn't work, meaning I was essentially running Mandrake wide-open for hacks. I then tried Debian unstable but couldn't figure out the install process. Then I tried Debian 3.0rc2 (Woody), which wouldn't set up X properly. I reverted to Mandrake 10 Community, but that wouldn't install either due to a known problem mentioned in the release notes (and their workaround didn't).

Now, I'm trying Fedora core 2. It should be an interesting experience, tho I don't have too much hope for a superior experience. I haven't once been able to get sound to work in Linux on my computer (despite it supposedly working according to SoundDrake, or whatever the applet's called), which is a minor nit that nevertheless really, really bugs me. The vast array of free Linux software is extremely useful, however, so I keep trying.

On a somewhat unrelated note, why the devil does BitTorrent start with such a small download speed? I'm on cable and I can get 300KB/s, but the torrent starts with a download speed of merely 9KiB/s (roughly 9KB/s, I'm not going to do the conversion). It's slowly increasing as time goes (now at 123KiB/s after maybe fifteen minutes), however, so perhaps this download will finish before morning (as it would if I were directly downloading the ISOs via any reasonably fast FTP server).

Jeff,

If you're using a firewall, be sure to open up ports 6881-6889 on tcp while using BT. Then things should speed up. Also, set the max upload rate (if you can) to about 80% of your available upload speed.

I guess RedHat assumes if your adept enough to DL the CDs, your adept enough to search for the answer to the mp3 problem. It didn't take me long to find the rpms for mp3 support.

As far as bittorrent goes, it does start real slow, mine said 300+ hours when I startd it, but about 20 minutes later it was down to four hours, and DL'ing at full speed.

Bittorrent is awesome after half an hour. The speed eventually got up to very close to normal. I helped out a few souls by leaving the upload on for nearly half a day. The firewall wasn't the problem -- my guess is it's just Bittorrent.

Fedora Core 2 rocks my world.

Why does FC2 rock? It recognizes and correctly configures my soundcard without any effort whatsoever on my part. The test sound played perfectly. Mandrake, a half-working Debian, Damn Small Linux, and Knoppix all failed that task miserably at various times over the last eight months. Without even running it (had to stop after getting successful sound to post), it looks visually polished. I haven't used Linux for much, and as I mentioned sound is a major nit (I don't consider that an oxymoron) for me in Linux. I can't imagine anything going wrong as we're at the point of simple app running (which has probably already been done transparently half a dozen times). The only remaining plus before I'd have Windows parity would be printing (from computer to Windows host to Windows client to printer, hence the trouble), which looks as though it just might be easier in FC2 than with anything else I've tried. If it isn't, I oddly don't care as much as I did for dysfunctional sound.

Fedora Core 2 rocks my world. 'Nuff said.