Fedora 9 - Instability

I can't seem to have this distro run on my machine for more than a few hours without my system hanging or the kernel crashing.

The biggest culprit seems to be the PackageKit, which is indeed a nightmarish application. But the whole distro also seems to be built on strange grounds.

For instance, upgrading to X.org 1.5 from the main repository invalidates the fedora boot screen (a quiet attractive one, at that). This is no big deal, the OS keeps booting in text mode and Gnome fires normally. However, this issue runs across all machines, regardless of setup, after the update. So why did someone have to fill a bug report for an issue that happens on any fedora machina and regarding a package on the main repository? Scary...

I should stay away from this, shouldn't I?

To be honest, I loved Red Hat in a way that can only be gauged similarly to the way a man loves a his wife, son, and dog combined. So switching over to fedora was kind of a drag to me. I use Ubuntu on my main desktop, and OpenSuSE on my main dev machine. To be honest, I will have to download Fedora 9 to see if I can duplicate your pain. So be patient and we shall see what happens.

I'm honestly starting to think these packages are really just a waste of our time. The OS just doesn't suit well for pretty laced box distributions. Distributions like Arch Linux seem the way to go. Only if there were Linux books as it used to be in the days, where you could really learn how to use Linux and slowly but steadily build your way up a distro like Arch.

I try to keep my machines running on the debian package managed systems (Ubuntu, debian, knoppix) - never had a problem with it.

Your experience with Fedora was much better than mine luckily. Granted, I only have two machines at my disposal here, but the last time I tried Fedora (1.5 - 2 years ago I think), I installed directly off the DVD, ran a yum update overnight, and the next day the system wouldn't boot - kernel panic.

After I reproduced this same thing 3 times in a row, I went to the message boards, listened to every single piece of advice that any expert could give, and the final conclusion was... just don't update. DON'T UPDATE!? Riiiight.

My experience with Ubuntu was MUCH nicer, but I still prefer Windows for many reasons.

[edit]
I almost forgot to mention Gentoo. When I first decided to try Linux, most of my friends were telling me, "Oh god no, don't go with Gentoo, it's a nightmare." EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. I love Gentoo. I've compiled a complete system from scratch on both of my machines and had almost zero problems. When you emerge a package, it just plain works. And the couple times it didn't, and I couldn't figure out why, I went to the message boards and immediately some very experienced members solved the problem. Sure the installs and updates take a while if you don't use binary packages, but I expected that.
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Originally Posted by Fordy

I try to keep my machines running on the debian package managed systems (Ubuntu, debian, knoppix) - never had a problem with it.

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I'm just annoyed at this, so I shoot in all directions. Nevermind me.
A typical installation of fedora 9 with all updates takes around 8 hours on my machine. Even with just Gnome, that's around 700 Mbs post-intallation updates I have to download on my meager internet connection. And I ended up doing this twice.

I'll either go CentOS or just forget about RedHat and move on to Ubuntu... the one everyone says it's easy but crashes on my machine during installation.

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Originally Posted by arpsmack

My experience with Ubuntu was MUCH nicer, but I still prefer Windows for many reasons.

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Ah, well... I don't. Not anymore. I'm divorcing from Windows.
In any case I want to learn about this operating system. It just seems the easier they tried to make it to use, the more difficult it became to learn from the viewpoint of a newcomer. I remember an argument I had with Elysia sometime ago... and I will have to concede to her on a few points. It's not the terminal window that scares me though. It's the whole thing that is stitched in so many complicated ways (I'm talking about GNOME and KDE) that it is definitely one of the most difficult tasks in computer usage these days to learn how to manage your desktop environment under Linux. The whole operating system is not welcoming to someone who actually wants to learn about it, instead of just use it.

User-friendly? Maybe...
Newcomer-friendly? Yes...
Learning tool? Definitely no!

Arch is fantastic, especially pacman (I wouldn't say I'm a Linux pro either). The strict Arch "conventions" means everything is *usually* where it should be.

I've been using it for well over a year, just moved to 64-bit too without hassels :). pacman (The package manager) is fantastic, the only problem is some dependencies aren't resolved... for example I upgraded Firefox (From pacman) which upgraded Gtk+ and friends -- but that broke Nautilus and friends :)

I too tried Gentoo (for a few months infact), but really -- compiling *uhhh* boring :). The only way you'll find a distro that works for you is try them, I started a few years back:
FC3 -> RedHat -> FC5 -> Ubuntu 5.10 -> OpenSuse -> Gentoo -> Debian -> Arch [staying!]

Just to get my bearings here... for how long have you been dabbling with Linux, zacs?

Since 2004 or so.

Fedora 9 worked pretty easily for me with one exception. The wireless driver crashed my system. I had to get a patch that fixed that problem and it was a pretty recent (2 or 3 months ago?) update that fixed it. Perhaps that's your problem? can you disable your wireless hardware?

Not using wireless. So I can't say that is a problem for me.

Fedora behaves much better when I don't do the following:

- Use PackageKit for repeating install operations. In fact when I don't use PackageKit at all. And for that matter I'm learning about yum and rpm, which are indeed nicer. The PackageKit GUI is... strange. It borders the useless and is one stupid package; no information in files sizes except when looking at packages descriptions, too big icons and fonts taking a lot of screen real estate, the groups list on the left doesn't reflect the repositories true group lists, an incredibly lame search box that searches over the entire repository lists, and heaps of bugs from a progress window that grows off the screen(!) as you keep displaying it, to occasional system halts and a dependencies window that also gets off the screen if it is too big. For pete's sake!...

- Disable, remove, prosecute, and burn at the stake SELinux.

- Disable Bluetooth.

I still however get the occasional kernel crash or system halt.

yeah, I use yum for package management and everything really does work great. I've been more than pleased with Fedora for a couple years now. PackageKit could be the whole issue.

woot!

Red Hat 9 -> Mandrake(Mandriva) -> FC 2 -> SuSE -> FC 3 -> debian -> gentoo -> debian -> ubuntu :)

since ~2003

back on topic...

I have never tried Fedora past version 3 or 4... so I can't comment on that.

I find Ubuntu very easy to work with, though. I guess it's because of the huge user base. You can usually just type the error messages you get into google and you will get detailed instructions and explainations specific to Ubuntu :).

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Originally Posted by cyberfish

I find Ubuntu very easy to work with, though. I guess it's because of the huge user base. You can usually just type the error messages you get into google and you will get detailed instructions and explainations specific to Ubuntu :).

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Yeah. And it's sickening. Like going to www.gnome-look.org/ and putting up with comments like "Why didn't you make this theme for Ubuntu? It's the most used distro!"... what a waste of perfectly good brain cells. Somebody shoot the fads.

True, I guess the problem with Ubuntu is that it attracts newbies, since it advertises itself as the easiest to use. With newbies come with silly comments. If you really know Linux, it doesn't really matter what distro you use. It's the same Linux afterall. You can throw me pretty much any desktop distro (within reason, of course), and I will be able to use it after 1-2 hrs of reading about the package management system and such that are specific to the distro. I even ran Linux on my ipod.

My point is, though, it probably doesn't make sense to use a startup distro with 10 users worldwide if one is just starting out on Linux.

I still recommend Ubuntu (and I use it myself, too, because it is convenient). I use Debian on my server because it's more easily configurable, and Ubuntu on my desktop and tablet PC.

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Originally Posted by master5001

To be honest, I will have to download Fedora 9 to see if I can duplicate your pain. So be patient and we shall see what happens.

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If you haven't yet, don't worry about it. I've found what I want... or better yet, what I want before I know enough to find myself comfortable around Arch Linux.

CentOs.
What a marvelous distro. Now, this is what I'm talking about. It works. It doesn't "just" work.

It's simple, elegant, and 100% binary compatible with RHEL. No fancy stuff. It offers the stable (which means older and heavily tested) versions of most software and I'm free to upgrade to more recent versions only those I wish. This is the perfect distro to learn about Linux. I won't have to fight against it during or after install and I'm free to concentrate on what really matters; what is and how do I use Linux.

Not a single crash or system halt yet, 24h after installation and after having done such ludicrous things as having pulled over 20 different windows at the same time while playing a short home-made movie from a NTFS mounted partition and at the same time playing an mp3 from another similar partition while downloading and instafling a package from Yumex (the much better yum GUI).

One secondary note though: I was a little unfair towards Fedora 9, apparently. The thing is a testbed for RHEL. It's supposed to have all the wacky gizmos e weird experimentations, plus 0.x versions and such.

Well you know what they say, "Linux is only free if your time is worthless. " :).

If you plan on learning, steer clear of most of the GUI front-ends (not including the DE ;))