StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I am going to try installing Fedora (in a VM first, for real if it works out). Does anyone have experience with it? Good distro, bad distro? Anything I need to be careful of, anything that particularly like/hate about it?

I've had limited experience using Fedora at a job once, though I'm not sure I can say anything good or bad about it than any other distro like Mandriva one way or the other.

Fedora is too bleeding-edge for me. I'd rather play with Ubuntu for the desktop and use one of the RHEL derivatives (e.g. White Box, CentOS, etc.) for the server.

If and when I'm happy with it I might replace Xubuntu with Fedora, but for the moment, it's just me being curious. Plus I'd like to see Gnome in action..two birds, one stone and all that.

Bounty wrote:If and when I'm happy with it I might replace Xubuntu with Fedora, but for the moment, it's just me being curious. Plus I'd like to see Gnome in action..two birds, one stone and all that.

The desktop is somewhat independent of the distro. The version of Fedora I used had a KDE desktop with it, though Gnome I've never really cared for in general. (I suppose it's okay if you're a Mac fan, as it's similar to the OSX interface).

General Zod wrote:

Bounty wrote:If and when I'm happy with it I might replace Xubuntu with Fedora, but for the moment, it's just me being curious. Plus I'd like to see Gnome in action..two birds, one stone and all that.

The desktop is somewhat independent of the distro. The version of Fedora I used had a KDE desktop with it, though Gnome I've never really cared for in general. (I suppose it's okay if you're a Mac fan, as it's similar to the OSX interface).

I've switched between KDE and XFCE myself, but the process was a bit of a bitch.

I've had a really good experience with Fedora 6 on bare metal. I wasn't able to install the software I had planned to to it, but that was a result of some really unusual quirks in the software (Aolserver+Project Open) that were just too annoying to deal with, so I wound up cheating and going with a VM. My only gripe about Fedora is that the GUI configuration tools were worthless. That aside though, everything else was quite pleasant.

It's been running my server, which has been up for nearly 150 days with no problems (and 350 before that, when it needed turning off for a hardware upgrade). There may be better, but for the simple tasks the server needs to perform (file server, web server, database server, way for me to torrent stuff from uni), it's fine.

As a desktop, it can be a pain in the arse though - for example, FC6 installing the wrong fucking kernel with certain processors meaning that whilst things run, you can't get some applications to work without command line cockery about. I found SuSE to be a much more refined desktop OS (but still not good enough for day-to-day use over Windows).

I'll stick with Xubuntu, then.

Pezzoni wrote:It's been running my server, which has been up for nearly 150 days with no problems (and 350 before that, when it needed turning off for a hardware upgrade). There may be better, but for the simple tasks the server needs to perform (file server, web server, database server, way for me to torrent stuff from uni), it's fine.

Heh. I'm surprised you don't use CentOS instead?

I've had no problems using ubuntu on a server (although I usually run a desktop environment over VNC for p2p apps and server applications requiring a GUI such as paintchat. For work though I use Debian (running Etch since it's almost out for release anyway and I need OpenVZ support (running that instead of VMWare for performance)).

phongn wrote:Heh. I'm surprised you don't use CentOS instead?

I'd never heard of it till recently. It's time for more hardware changes though soon (the main fileserver is moving to Windows so it can be used as a file server for some medical applications my dad uses which don't run under linux, and possibly as a MSSQL/IIS server for me to arse about on), so I may well give it a go then (I'll keep the Linux server as a development / remote torrent enviroment ). Is it relatively easy to get installed (compared to the fantasticness of the Fedora installer when it isn't installing the wrong kernel).

Edit; Ah well, downloading the x64 version. I've got a spare P4 661 box I can wack it on to see how it looks.

You might want to wait a bit, actually - CentOS 5 will be out soon (it is a derivative of RHEL) and brings quite a few new things to the table. It isn't anywhere near as leading-edge as other distros, but it is a solid distribution with years of support.