[Ambassadors] Re: [Fedora-marketing-list] Fedora Core 6 Pre release review

[Rahul Sundaram]

Dimitrios 'sehh' Michelinakis wrote:
> On Fri, 06 Oct 2006 20:43:20 +0530 Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> 
>> A comparative review on Fedora Core 6.
> 
> He is right indeed.

I answered several of these as comments in the review but here we go again.

> - the icon theme is indeed outdated, VERY outdated and missing many icons

The icon theme set is one of most complete cross desktop sets that you 
can ever find. We do indeed plan to replace it however and work has 
already started a while back. It wasnt complete enough to be a default 
icon set for FC6 but the next release should have this

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/EchoDevelopment

If you are interested, feel free to package this for Fedora Extras now.

> 
> - firefox 2.0 beta is great and stable to use for most things, definetly an advantage to include in Fedora than the old version

Firefox 2.0 beta has serious regressions in it and is not very well 
tested within Fedora since the beta release came out late in the 
development process of FC6

  - fedora is the slowest Linux distro i've ever used! He is right to 
bash on fedora like that, my Intel P4 1Ghz machine with Windoze XP Pro 
boots in 7 seconds flat! while my Athon64 X2 3800 Dual Core boots Fedora 
Core 5 in a few minutes!!! jesus!

The development release has many debugging options and services enabled 
as compared to the general  releases. If you arent using the development 
release then you wouldnt able to judge the performance of FC6.

> 
> - the initial boot text is indeed ugly and geeky. We either have a full graphical boot, from start to end or we don't have one. Right now we are half and half, which looks very unfinished and ugly.

The quiet option is intentionally ignored during development and test 
releases to enable easier debugging. The other bootsplash methods would 
require kernel patches which we avoid in Fedora.

> - yum had problems on my system as well, weird messages about cache not beign writable when it updated fontconfig and other stuff like that. Its also dead slow...

We had some issues with the new mirror management systems which is not a 
flaw in Yum. Those issues are fairly sorted out now. Recent development 
in Yum has results in significant increase in performance. Refer to 
http://rahulsundaram.livejournal.com/7734.html for more information.

> - Compiz was a fiasco as well. We've seen the videos from the Novel presentation and what we have in fedora is just two effects (out of 20?). Ofcourse it didn't work at first (like it happened with the author of the review) and even after i got it working i found too many bugs to actualy keep it running (ctrl-fX keys wouldn't work, couldn't change virtual desktops with ctrl-left arrow, etc).

Compiz on AIGLX is capable of having the exact same effects as on XGL. 
Some of the Compiz extensions are not in Fedora Core but could be easily 
packaged in Fedora Extras. If you find bugs in the test releases, kindly 
report them http://bugzilla.redhat.com

> 
> - my media keys on my IBM ThinkPad wouldn't work either. I had to set them up manualy.

Bugzilla again.

> 
> - The fedora sound theme is indeed a joke... thank god its disabled by default. The GDM beep is... well lets just say its better to be deaf than hearing the PC speaker beep every time GDM loads.

There is no Fedora sound theme. We provide the upstream GNOME ones 
disabled by default. GDM beeps seem to be bugs. Report them.


Rahul