A Quick Look at Fedora Core 5

When I first looked into Fedora, I felt that it sucked and sucked badly. Well, a few years later it looks like it has had a chance to mature a little bit. What’s changed? Just take a look for yourself…

It’s been about 2.5 years since the first release of Fedora Core. And boy has it come long way! The new version of Fedora Core (FC) is featuring a number of goodies and performance enhancements as we describe below (and yes, it even includes a new logo).

The installation of FC5 is very much the same as any older Anaconda installation procedure, however some refinements have also taken place. The package selection for example is now much more pleasant to the eyes and… brain, the boot manager and partitioning screens have seen a refreshment while a long-standing kernel bug on our laptop (a LinuxCertified laptop) that used to trigger during installations of recent Debian/Ubuntu/FC has been fixed. Overall, installation went without any incident. It was quick and up to the point (heck, the installer even used the better-looking Vera font than the default desktop did!). Anaconda is the best installer out there today (on par with Mac OS X’s in ease of use, albeit more powerful than OSX’s).

When booting FC5 for the first time we immediately recognized the work that was put behind the speeding up of the booting process. The system feels snappier overall and applications start faster than before too, but nothing had prepared us for the memory consumption reported by the system: 95 MBs (Cups was off btw, I don’t have a printer connected to this laptop). Wow, just wow. FC4 was taking over 220 MBs of memory on a default Gnome boot but now the System Monitor app reports anywhere between 90 and 95 MBs. I don’t know if the memory-calculation algorithm changed or if FC and Gnome were truly that much optimized. Regardless, our system felt snappy. Source: OSNews

[tags]fedora core,anaconda installation procedure,boot manager,linuxcertified[/tags]