Fedora Core 5: The Two Week Review

I've been running Fedora Core 5 on my desktop machine for 16 days. I posted snippets of first impressions about two Gnome misfeatures and the screencast utility earlier. As promised, this post summarized my overall impression of the Fedora Core 5 release.

Aside from the irritants I mentioned earlier, my over all impression of Fedora Core 5 is very positive. Some highlights:

Free Java

For people who are used to the Sun JDK, the Free Java stack sounds like a patch work of many projects, a VM project here, a class library project there, a native compiler in GNU Compiler Collection, another compiler in Eclipse. However, what people may not know is that the Fedora people did their best to package the various pieces together to provide an development environment that mimics Sun JDK so that users can start developing Java programs using the familiar javac/java/jar/javadoc commands.

Three SWT applications are included with Fedora Core 5: Eclipse, Azureus the BitTorrent tool, and RSSOwl the blog aggregator. They seem to be stable and usable.

Here's a screenshot of Azureus in action. I'm downloading Ubuntu Dapper! :)

Here's a screenshot of RSSOwl in action. It's features are comparable with other desktop blog aggregators that I've tried. I doubt I'll switch from Bloglines.com but RSSOwl is definitely a usable application. I particularly liked the HTML rendering component they used.

I also tried to compile and run some of my short Java classes. They pretty much all compile and run fine, even some of the Swing classes that use JTree and JTable. I do have to remove some com.sun.* references, mostly related to the UIManager.

Finally, I tried to deploy Pebble into the Tomcat 5.5.15 web container. I ran into some problems. With 2.0.0-M1, Tomcat went into a 100% Cpu infinite loop of the gij interpreter. With 1.9, I had several problems. I had a JSP error which is fixed by deleting the offending element. I also had an intermittent error of TransformerFactoryImpl not found which I don't know how to resolve. During runs when the TransformerFactoryImpl was not a problem, I was able to create a blog entry and add comments but the content was not persisted to disk.

This means that if I were to upgrade my blog server (currently FC3 with Sun JDK and JPackage rpms) to FC5, I'll have to get the Sun JDK and go through the JPackage installation cycle again.

I have compiled a partial list of available Java packages at the end of this post.

Mono and .NET Applications

Fedora Core 5 is the first Fedora Core distribution that included the Mono .NET stack. There are several notable included applications: a desktop search utility called Beagle, a desktop note taking applet called Tomboy, and a photo manager called F-Spot.

One thing that I want to mention about all these applications is: although they are developed in a technology very similar to Java, they don't feel like Java applications speedwise. They feel more like native applications.

Here's Beagle in action. The search result screen is very intuitive.

Here's Tomboy in action:

Add/Remove Software

The Add/Remove Software utility has changed. It uses the yum repositories now. It allows me to browse and search for installed/available applications by categories and subcategories. It also have a list view where everything is listed without reference to their categories/subcategories.

For each subcategory, there is a general description and a button that brings up a list of optional packages for me to select/deselect. The problem is that it never shows what mandatory packages a subcategory contains. I'm sure that information is contained in some XML file somewhere in on the internet, maybe even on my file system. I'll just have to dig deeper.

Subversion

My Subversion repository survived the Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 5 upgrade. I didn't have to do anything special. I can do svn status, svn update and svn commit from all of my previously checked out Subversion project sites, both on the same machine and on remote machines.

Multimedia and video driver

Multimedia support has always been less than optimal on Red Hat distributions because of their patent policy. Luckily my multimedia needs is not too demanding (mp3s, real audio, CDs and DVDs, MPEG and QuickTime videos) and I was able to set everything up using livna.org and the Fedora Core 5 Tips and Tricks. I can do all I want with Totem and Xine.

Another rough spot is the binary only video driver for my nVidia based card. The kernel module for the binary driver won't compile with the initial release of Fedora Core 5. It took ten days for an updated kernel to show up. Once that happened, I was able to install the driver from livna.org. And it worked beautifully.

GCC

GCC 4.1 contains several features that are easily observable. One is double free detection. One is stack overflow protection.

The new input method system

The newly integrated input method platform SCIM replaced IIIMP. They offer the same set of Chinese input methods. However, if I remember correctly, the old IIIMP works only in some applications (like the Gnome Terminal) but not other applications (like Firefox). The new SCIM works everywhere. That's a big improvement. 谢谢红帽(Thank you, Red Hat).

Games and such

On the game front, the upgrade wiped out the high scores for my favorite game (Five or More). I'm really disappointed. :(

To balance that out, I found Stellarium Nightsky Renderer in the Graphics menu that shows the night sky in real time/real location. Here's the sky above me last night. I was able to go out and spot Saturn and Mars without difficulties.

Other applications

Other included applications that I found interesting but haven't had time to play with yet: XEN, Blender, ErLang, git, HSQLDB, Geronimo.

Drawbacks of x86_64

The 64-bit Firefox 1.5.0.1 browser lacks several plugins. The most obvious is Flash plugin. Adobe hasn't made it available yet. So I'm browsing without Flash, which means I don't get to see the most annoying kind of online ads. On the other hand, more and more websites integrate their video feeds within a Flash player, and I can't see those either.

The Java plugin is also missing for the x86_64 platform. Strangely I don't feel it, probably because no modern website uses Java applets anymore.

Appendix: Java packages in FC5

• adaptx
• adaptx-doc
• ant
• ant-antlr
• ant-apache-bcel
• ant-apache-bsf
• ant-apache-log4j
• ant-apache-oro
• ant-apache-regexp
• ant-apache-resolver
• ant-commons-logging
• ant-javamail
• ant-jdepend
• ant-jsch
• ant-junit
• antlr
• ant-nodeps
• ant-scripts
• ant-swing
• ant-trax
• avalon-framework
• avalon-logkit
• azureus
• axis
• bcel
• bsf
• bsh
• castor
• castor-doc
• castor-test
• castor-xml
• classpathx-jaf
• classpathx-mail
• classpathx-mail-monolithic
• concurrent
• cryptix
• cryptix-asn1
• eclipse-bugzilla
• eclipse-cdt
• eclipse-changelog
• eclipse-ecj
• eclipse-jdt
• eclipse-jdt-devel
• eclipse-pde
• eclipse-pde-devel
• eclipse-platform
• eclipse-platform-devel
• eclipse-pydev
• eclipse-rcp
• eclipse-rcp-devel
• geronimo-specs
• geronimo-specs-compat
• gnu-crypto
• gnu.getopt
• hsqldb
• itext
• jakarta-commons-beanutils
• jakarta-commons-cli
• jakarta-commons-codec
• jakarta-commons-collections
• jakarta-commons-daemon
• jakarta-commons-dbcp
• jakarta-commons-digester
• jakarta-commons-discovery
• jakarta-commons-el
• jakarta-commons-fileupload
• jakarta-commons-httpclient
• jakarta-commons-lang
• jakarta-commons-launcher
• jakarta-commons-logging
• jakarta-commons-modeler
• jakarta-commons-pool
• jakarta-commons-validator
• jakarta-taglibs-standard
• java-1.4.2-gcj-compat
• java-1.4.2-gcj-compat-devel
• java-1.4.2-gcj-compat-src
• javacc
• java_cup
• jdepend
• jdom
• jgroups
• jlex
• jpackage-utils
• jrefactory
• jsch
• junit
• jzlib
• ldapjdk
• libswt3-gtk2
• log4j
• lucene
• lucene-devel
• mockobjects
• mockobjects-alt-httpclient
• mockobjects-alt-jdk1.4
• mockobjects-httpclient
• mockobjects-jdk1.4
• mx4j
• oro
• puretls
• regexp
• rssowl
• struts
• struts-webapps-tomcat5
• tanukiwrapper
• tomcat5
• tomcat5-admin-webapps
• tomcat5-common-lib
• tomcat5-jasper
• tomcat5-jsp-2.0-api
• tomcat5-server-lib
• tomcat5-servlet-2.4-api
• tomcat5-webapps
• velocity
• werken.xpath
• wsdl4j
• xalan-j2
• xalan-j2-xsltc
• xdoclet
• xerces-j2
• xerces-j2-scripts
• xml-commons
• xml-commons-apis
• xml-commons-resolver
• xml-commons-which
• xmlrpc