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Anticipated Problem in Fedora Core 3

I’ve hit quite a few snags with FC3 lately. Very odd that people consider this one of the most new user friendly. I have a bad feeling that this is actually going to score very low with my wife when she takes it for a test drive. The reason I say this is that FC3 doesn’t play mp3’s! That’s right, you heard me correctly, you can’t play mp3s with FC3…I was shocked as well. I did some snooping and it turns out that Red Hat thinks they can’t distribute the mp3 codec legally…or are just to scared to do so. Pretty odd considering all of those mp3 players out there seem to be a-ok with being able to play mp3s. Let me setup what happened and how I came to this conclusion.

I decided to go back to FC3 to do some more messing with it…mainly because quite a few of the Lxer.com crew seem to LOVE FC3. So…I install and have it up and running. I mount my shared music drive and decide that I want some mood music while I mess with compiling a few things. XMMS pops open and decides that mp3’s aren’t something it wants to play. Here I thought of two things I could do.

Convert all of my mp3s to .wavs immediately so that FC3 would be happy with it and play them.
Find out what in the world was up with this and get a workaround

Now, if this were the review we’ve been building up to for the past couple of months…I’m afraid a new user would be more apt to replace my number 2 above with a “ditch Fedora Core 3” and they’d be perfectly justifiable in doing so. How many new users have even been to a forum before? How many have asked for help? If we’re shooting at being viable competition for Windows, we’ll need a distro that allows a person to operate WITHOUT GOING TO FORUMS or helplines. It will need documentation available to it immediately after installation and it will need things as simple as listening to mp3s to work out of the box.

Snooping led me to a tips and tricks post on a forum that shows me a bunch more stuff I haven’t even run across that doesn’t work out of the box. I wouldn’t be too concerned if they didn’t have to deal with really basic tasks such as playing music. But alas, one cannot wish for too much out of a distro evidently. Fedora came up majorly short in this department and I suspect that my wife will give up on it if she runs across this problem. We’ll see what happens I guess 😛

The Criteria

I’ve been neglecting the ‘experiment’ for the last couple of days. So, I’ve decided to post the things that will be considered when we review the 5 picked desktop distributions of Linux. This will not be a “normal” Linux review in the sense of that word…instead we’ll opt for a largly ‘new user look’ at how each desktop distro performs for a new user and how it asthetically feels for that new user because, let’s face it, if something doesn’t work or looks unpleasant for a new user right away…they’re going to run back to Windows quick fast and in a hurry. It is also important to note that my wife who knows little of Linux will be taking these distributions for a drive from install to remove. Here I am rambling again! Ok, without further adieu, here it is:

The Feel/Look – How does the desktop layout ‘feel’? Is it pleasant to look at? How is the organization in the menu’s? Do you feel as though you are ‘in control’ of this desktop (i.e., windows control panel gives a one stop place for users to go…is there something similar?). Does the OS make you feel comfortable when you perform your regular tasks? Is it easy to change the look and feel of your desktop?
The Perfomance – How does the desktop perform when you tax it (i.e., when it has multi-apps open and running)? Is it quicker or slower than ‘normal’? Can you perform your regular tasks without any intervention? Do things, ‘just work’ out of the box? Do you notice any difference in speed (overall such as browsing, burning, listening, copying, etc)? Is it scalable?
Hardware/Software – Does the distro detect everything? Does it have all the software you may need? Is it clear up front how to get software? Does it offer visible help if hardware doesn’t detect?? added based on reader comments:? How easy is it to install and use software not included on the default install.
Upgradeability/Security – Is the distro upgradeable? Does the distro make it clear how to patch your system? Does the distro make you feel secure? Does the distro have options for firewall? Does it provide help with setting a firewall up?
Documentation – Is there a clear place to go for documentation on the distro? Are there supportive forums or websites you can visit to get started? Does the existing documentation make you feel good about using the distro? Is there a lack of information available?
The Installation – Was the installation clear and concise? Did the installation complete with minimal interaction? Did the install process have a good look and feel? Did the installation take a long time? Were there any downsides to the installation process?

Ok…so there are the six main points I’ve come up with thus far to rate the distros on. We’re not going to go in depth with most stuff and we’ll post 3-5 screenshots from each distro doing different stuffs. I don’t have a screen capture card so I won’t be able to provide screenshots from the installs. Anyway, as stated earlier, we’ll go into detail with how the distro feels/looks and performs and concentrate on whether or not eveyrthing ‘just works’ out of the box because that is what a new user would do. Hopefully, one of these distros will stand up to that challenge…afterall, they are the top distributions available for free currently right?

Knoppix Installs with no Problems…

No problems with the Knoppix install tonight. Very nice interface and I love the way it detects everything. It really lets you see the detection process and how it goes. This makes you really think that Knoppix is something different from most distros…however, it didn’t detect my monitor and sound card. It was the first distro to not detect the monitor…odd considering that all others did. But other than that, it seems to be a very solid distro…an excellent way for people to try out Linux.

I don’t think this distro has anything special as far as the Linux desktop is concerned. It is very plain…but I did appreciate the languages options and the menu layout. It was a bit more organized than a default install of Debian. Wine was another added bonus. I’ll have to play around with this a bit more to get used to it. A very solid distro. I can see why so many like it.

5 Distros of Desktop Linux go head to head…

Not all distros are created equal. This is something I’ve found out the hard way during the past 10 years I’ve experimented with Linux. Keeping this in mind, I wanted to search for the most new user friendly distribution of Linux I could possibly find on the market in order to recruit my friends and acquaintances to Linux. In order to find the best of the best, I’ve selected 5 distributions of Linux that are some of the top rated ‘Desktop’ linux distros (according to distrowatch.com and user opinion). I’m going to install each one of these distros for a week and let my wife try to do all of the stuff she normally would do (blog entries, surf web, email, burn CD’s, listen to mp3s, link her portable media device) and see how each one stacks up to each other. My wife is a new user to Linux. While she does know the basics of what Linux is…she’s never used a Linux desktop. I hope this qualifies her as a ‘new user’.

I’ve selected the criteria that all distros will be judged on which I will post after I install Knoppix to hard disk and do a quick comment under the ‘distros’ category here (sometime next week). I install these distros before hand to ensure that there are no large issues that cause problems for me so that when we go to actually rate these distros…they’re all on the same starting point. I also do a quick commentary with my take on the distro so you know my biases and opinions (which I will eliminate from the rating process as much as possible).

We’re one week away from posting the criteria of rating and 2 weeks away from getting started. It is important to note that if any hardware conflicts arise, I will not help my wife resolve them. She has told me that if something that ‘just works’ in XP doesn’t work in Linux, she’s giving up on that distro and moving on. That sounds a lot like what a new user would do so I have no problems with that. So, some reviews might be quite short. I’ll be equipping my wife with the command alsaconf and that is it 🙂 We’ll really know what distro is great because the hardware configuration (posted earlier in another entry) is really standard and isn’t cutting edge new…if a distro can’t detect and install what I’ve got…they not really that great. If I were to add a modem to this, I’m sure that it would really throw a kink in many distros spokes…but I think I’ll save the modem/winmodem tests for a part II of this feature. I’ll publish each review by mrs.devnet in the ‘reviews’ category here with as many screenshots as possible. Countdown, 2 weeks.

Fedora Core 3. Polished?

I type this from Firefox 1.0 after updating FC3 via yum. Upon first booting FC3 I think there is a sense of eager anticipation…it is visually pleasing. This is a perfect second distro (I’ll explain further on in this post) but I don’t think it is a very wise choice for those crossing over into Linux for the first time. It’s bound to score low for mrs.devnet because there is quite a bit of configuration that is needed to get it up and running. The sound didn’t work out of the gate. I’m used to alsaconf…so I didn’t go into the menu’s right away to get the sound working. While I do like the organization that they have going on in the menu AND the ability to get your sound going by clicking on a menu option…I don’t like the fact that I am not able to run alsaconf if I want to. One other peeve is the fact that when I go to do a yum update via commandline…I have no gpg key set. It tells me to run rpm –import blahblah.key.gpg and when I do…it fails. This was annoying but the up2date gui is very nice and eliminated the need.

I’d say the worst part about things is that there are no plugins installed by default in the web browsers. Trying to install them…both fail automatic installs. Mrs.devnet would be stopped in her tracks right there. Any new user would be stopped in their tracks. They’d be about as inclined to try a manual install as they would to try and stick their fingers into a blender. So…while FC3 is visually pleasing with a fantastic install…I believe it to be more hype that anything. We’ll see how it stacks up when mrs.devnet gives it the test drive.

Yoper doesn’t fulfill the bargain…

I gave the latest version of Yoper a try tonight and was not impressed. It’s an extremely different installation. I was able to get everything installed after a couple of tries to see different options and how they would play out. However, I could not get either Lilo or Grub to play nice. I thought that perhaps the media had been messed up (even though md5 checksum was ok) but everything checked out fine. I tried switching filesystem types because I’ve heard that grub doesn’t like reiserfs much…but no go. So, unfortunately, the “fastest Linux distro out of the box” has to be put back into the box and out of my little test. I may have to just remove one distro out of the list.

I’m going to ‘attempt’ a couple of more installs before I throw in the towel. I’ll attempt Kanotix and Arch Linux to see if things will play nice…I just want another unknown distro to fill in with some of the more well known ones now to showcase it’s desktop. Perhaps I’ll find it in one of these two.