Magnus Hedemark on 13 Feb 2004 13:06:02 -0000


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[PLUG] FC2t1 - life on the edge


So I tried the new Fedora Core 2 test release 1 on my sandbox system last 
night (1.1GHz Celeron, 256MB RAM, Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI controller, IBM 
18GB SCSI disk).  I'm not going to go into an in-depth review here, but if 
you have a spare machine to try it on I think you will be impressed with 
the performance.

I have had many diffent OS's on this machine, ranging from the three big 
*BSD's to several flavors of Linux and even Windoze.  None of them gave me 
the impression that I was working on a fast machine.

The first thing you notice is that the login process (via GUI) is not 
obnoxiously long as it typically has been with Red Hat.  The very first 
time I logged in, which is usually the worst, was pretty quick.  
Subsequent logins were even faster.

The apps themselves launch faster.  Don't bother going for coffee after 
starting OOo because you'll miss it.  Mozilla starts as quickly in this 
release as Konqueror did in the last one.  The only disappointment was 
Evolution, which is badly broken in this release and segfaulted on me 
early on.

Regardless of what you think of Red Hat-ish distributions, this is a good 
way to get a feel for the performance improvements to come when the other 
distros are able to integrate the latest Linux kernel, Gnome, KDE, etc.

One thing I was very sour about, though, is that the "Workstation" install 
option is very Gnome-centric and assumes that you don't want KDE at all.  
Bah!  If you're a KDE user, you're going to want to manually select a 
couple of package sets during the installation of FC2.

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