Linux News: Red Hat's Fedora 8

Okay if I were looking for a computer to load Linux on what should it be? Tiger Direct has lots of barebone systems without monitor at what I consider pretty good prices. I'm really getting the urge to give Linus a look at, but don't really want to mess with or mess up my XP computer.   

So far every mirror I've hit has been down. Oh, well. Maybe in a few days.
By the way, it's code named "Werewolf" Beats the heck out of a gibbon, or goat, or whatever they're calling that other thing.

OK, found a good mirror and got the image downloaded, burned, and installed.

First impressions (compared to OpenSuse 10.3):
Good: Install time, much faster
Bad: no choice of KDE/Gnome during install process(default is Gnome, I have a slight preference for KDE)
Good: Installer "saw" my other drives (Suse did not) and allowed me to mount them after the install was complete
Bad: CPU usage is running very high, causing a lot of unnecessary lag. A view of the running processes doesn't show anything using more than 10%, but a view of the CPU history shows spikes in the 50% to 100% range simply by moving a window around. Still investigating this one. (Mason, feel free to offer advice here....)
Good, YUM and available RPMs beats YAST updater hands down.

These are just first impressions. I'll try to post something more complete after getting it set up. Assuming CPU usage issue can be resolved soon. I'm watching both CPU cores spike to 100% by doing nothing more than type this. Weird.

Fast US FTP mirror: ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora
I was able to download the 3.2 GB iso in about 90 minutes.

Thanks for the update tjesterb. Are you running this on a computer as stand alone or dual boot?

Sort of dual-boot. Win XP installed on one drive (with a second NTFS drive for storage), Linux installed to second drive. I choose which one to boot into by changing priority n BIOS.

I left the machine alone and after a few minutes with nothing running, the CPU usage has finally settled down. I'll run some applications and see what happens.

**Edit: as soon as I typed that, I watched both cores jump back up to running between 50-70% usage for a few minutes, then fall back to 2-3% with nothing running, and me not touching the machine (typing this from my Windows laptop.)

Sure sounds like something is running in the background.   

Huh. Hope you figure out what's causing that, tjesterb. I'd like to give the new fedora a shot. I really like Ubuntu, but I get tired of trying to get all my codecs in a line. Supposedly fedora comes with it all already, so that would be a definite benefit.

I've been using Fedora for years. Love it. I'm still dabbling with Fedora 7. Those CPU spikes worry me as I have a Pentium 4 single core CPU.

I applied all my Windows troubleshooting expertise and rebooted, applied the latest system updates, and rebooted again.
CPU usage is running about what I would expect, and no unexplained spikes.

Slackware is the way to go!

Seriously though, if you like Fedora use it. I find it a bit bloated and slow for my tastes, but to each his own.



Yeah, the codename is a smart way to choose a distro.

Now you tell me!  

It's nothing new. All Windows versions have a codename. Anyone remember Black Comb?

Well or Long Horn?

Or Whistler. All the code names come from a mountain range up in Canada if I recall correctly.

That was supposed to be a joke. Must not have come across the way I intended.

In the realm of Linux news . . .

I'm sure you've all heard of the ASUS eeePCs, right? Little itty bitty notebooks with 7" screens and solid-state memory. Very small, very, very cool - especially for the price (250-400 bucks, depending on the memory and a couple of features).

They've got a specially designed Linux distro of their own making on it. With the gPCs and the eeePCs coming along with really low prices and functionality that will please average Joe end user, maybe it'll help make Linux more mainstream.

From an outsider, talking about me, Linux will always have a problem becoming main stream as an open source OS. There's no single company or corporation pushing it as is the case with of the two other pay for OS companies.

Another problem is the Linux folks seem to be way too laid back. It would seem, atleast from the posts here on this forum, that for the most part it makes not real difference to you if people switch to Linux or not. Linux users have made their choice and have moved on, which sure isn't what the others have done. It's a constant mine is better than yours discussion.   

The Linux folks HERE are like that, but that's because most of them are at WINcustomize, which means they're usually dual-booters (like myself). Those of us who are at JoeUser are just a laid-back group all together.

Go to a Linux fanboi site, though, and you'll have some of the most virulent infighting out there - just as bad (if not worse and more snobbish) than Windows and Mac guys.

Wow SanChonio didn't realize that. I've been kind of thinking that I would like to try a dual boot on my XP Home box. No real reason other than to take a look at Linux and I have nothing better to do with my time.   

Where would I start looking on the web for help to to do this?   

I like the dual-boot. For a while, I did straight Ubuntu, but I needed to use a certain Windows-only periphery, so you know how it is . . .

I'd either go to the fedora forums (which I'm not very familiar with, since I haven't used fedora before), or the Ubuntu Forums, in the "Absolute Beginners" section. You'll be able to decide if it's worth your while.

I love it. I won't lie. And once you start, it's rather addictive.

I use Suse because every other distro failed with my complex network and weird devices (RF keyboard connected to KVM switch...)



I think I know what is causing this problem. Which video card are you using? Get the driver for the card and enable hardware acceleration.