Review: Fedora 10

WHEN Fedora 10 was released a couple of days ago, some highly respected websites posted reviews which spoke in glowing terms about its improvements.

The praise was well deserved - and I will come to my own assessment of Fedora 10 in due course - but first I have a bone to pick.

The fact that the Fedora Project is getting such widespread positive publicity is welcome and just, but I am concerned that new users might be drawn to Fedora without knowing about its aversion to patent-encumbered software and its strict adherence to free/open source software licensing rules.

I won't repeat this debate here but Fedora's stance is hinted at here ...and the bit that ought to leap out at you is this:

"We try to always do the right thing, and provide only free and open source software."

Because what that means in practice, dear Linux newcomer, is that when you first install Fedora 10, it WILL NOT PLAY your MP3s, DVDs, .AVI videos, YouTube or any other Flash-based content, movie trailers on the Apple website or live radio streams from, for example, the BBC.

This is because the codecs or plugins required to do all those routine things are not and never will be included in Fedora by default, because they do not meet the project's free/open source criteria.

The review of F10 in my favourite magazine, Linux Format - which was summarised and posted on Tech Radar - merely stated:

"Moving well away from the corporate sphere and into the living room, a fair amount of work has gone into LIRC, to improve connectivity with remote controls to further enhance Fedora's media centre credentials."

LXF then went on to discuss improvements to F10's sound server, which I will return to, but nowhere was the codecs issue mentioned.

The closest that The Register's review of F10 came to discussing the multimedia codecs issue was this:

"As with its predecessor, Fedora 10 features PackageKit with its very nice on-demand software for default apps. PackageKit makes Linux a bit more user-friendly. For example, if you download a PDF file, but don't have a PDF viewer installed, PackageKit notices that and offers to install the software you need. It makes for a much smoother Linux experience.

Of course PackageKit really only works for files that have a Linux-compatible app available - download a .flv movie and PackageKit will ignore it.

Speaking of proprietary things like Flash files, Fedora 10 includes the latest stable version of X.Org, which means no more support for proprietary nVidia drivers. The free driver will work for those systems, but you'll lose 3-D support, which is a shame."

These reviews are doing potential Fedora users a disservice by not making the multimedia codec issue clearer - something I hope to redress later in this review.

Anyway, I am getting a bit dizzy sitting on my high horse, so it's back down to earth now for a detailed look at what makes F10 such a top class Linux distribution - even despite those multimedia limitations.

I installed F10 from the live CD (available here) on a Pentium 4, 3.4GHz desktop machine with 1024MB of RAM, twin DVD/DVDRW drives, an NVidia Geforce 9500GTS graphics card with 512MB of dedicated RAM and wired ethernet.

F10 now 'lives' on a secondary partition on a drive which also houses Linux Mint 5, and I took the risk of installing F10's GRUB bootloader over the existing LM GRUB - the Mint partition was not detected but I was able to add it to the Fedora boot menu during the installation process.Fedora's tried-and-tested Anaconda graphical installer is a joy to use and certainly doesn't present even the freshest Linux newbie with anything too taxing - if anything, it's easier than ever.

It is also quick - the whole install took around 10-12 minutes. You need to be quick at the reboot if you want to 'catch' GRUB before it loads Fedora by default: Press a key before the brief timeout and you're presented with the full GRUB boot menu from which to make your choice.

Of course, this is only an issue if, like me, you are dual-booting F10 with another Linux distribution or Microsoft Windows - if it occupies all of your HDD, then let it do its thing.

One of the under-the-hood improvements in F10 is the bootup speed, which has been shortened by the introduction of Plymouth - the replacement for the ageing and increasingly fragile RHGB (Red Hat graphical boot).

Along with this improvement in speed, the general look and feel of the boot process feels a lot smoother thanks to work done to minimise the handovers between the BIOS, GRUB, RHGB and GDM login screen.

The default look of F10's GNOME desktop environment is very nice indeed - I could certainly live with that new desktop wallpaper a lot longer than, say, Ubuntu's Indistinguishable Ibex, and the new Echo theme is both minimalist and classy.Fedora was (in Fedora 8) one of the first distributions to use PulseAudio, the sound server which was supposed to bring new features like support for controlling the volume of individual audio streams, moving audio streams between devices and outputting audio streams simultaneously to multiple devices.

What it actually brought, in those early incarnations, was a whole lot of glitches.

But in F10, things have improved dramatically. The new PA is a rewrite that implements timer-based audio scheduling. This significantly reduces the potential for dropped audio. Don't be fooled into thinking that your new F10 install has no sound on your first boot - system sounds are disabled by default and it's a small matter of going in to System>Preferences>Hardware>Sound to enable them!

Fedora 10 also includes a new version of the excellent Network Manager utility, which is used to configure Fedora's connectivity settings (my wired ethernet was automagically configured on my first boot).

The new version has built-in support for connection sharing and also handles the increasingly popular mobile broadband dongles.

Fedora's RPM package management system has had a major overhaul for F10: RPM 4.6 has many new features and a cleaner code base. The system updater tool works very well - on my first boot it reported 42 updates were pending, 36 of which were bugfixes and six enhancements.The aforementioned PackageKit is a generic package management frontend with a user-friendly graphical interface which is designed to make the finding and installation of patent-encumbered codecs and plugins more straightforward.

I ran my usual list of multimedia tests through F10:

CD - played in the Rhythmbox jukebox application
MP3 - failed to play, and Package Kit failed to direct me to a suitable MP3 decoder plugin
.AVI video - failed to play, same Package Kit failure
DVD - failed to play, same Package Kit failure
Apple movie trailers in Firefox 3.0 - failed to play
BBC radio in Firefox - failed to play
YouTube videos - failed to play.

That's six out of seven multimedia formats which failed to play and, in each case, Package Kit failed to detect the necessary software required for me to download and install - I was simply referred on each occasion to the Fedora Project's multimedia wiki page.

Now, I know all about Fedora and multimedia issues, having struggled with them in previous releases, so I know how to 'fix' this - but how is a new Fedora user to know what to do when his shiny new F10 installation won't play anything?

Well, seeing as F10 appears not to want to tell you, I will.

To get any Flash content to play, you need to download the Flash Player (the latest version is 10.0.12.36-release.i386.rpm) from the Adobe website and then install it with the package manager .

For pretty much every other multimedia format, you need the help of the Fedora community and, specifically, the RPM Fusion repository.

To enable RPM Fusion in your software sources, and thereby make adding multimedia codecs more straightforward, enter the following command, as root, in a terminal.

su -c 'rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'

Now, whenever you try to play a multimedia file for which Fedora 10 does not have the codecs - like an MP3, an .AVI video file or a DVD - PackageKit will alert you, give you the option to search and then download and install the required codec or plugin from the RPM Fusion repository.

It's a faff, but it works.

Fedora, by tradition, does not load its releases with lots of default packages but what you do get tends to be of a high quality.

The live CD version of F10 includes Firefox 3.0.4, Abiword 2.6.4, GIMP 2.6, Pidgin, Transmission, Rhythmbox, Evolution, Totem, gThumb, Cheese, Sound Juicer and Nautilus. Obviously, many, many more packages are available from Fedora's massive repository and downloading and installing them, along with any necessary dependencies, is a breeze using the graphical package manager.

I am generally very impressed with F10: It is certainly a faster distribution than ever before and I appreciate the new, improved PulseAudio. More than anything, however, F10 is a distribution that just feels right, a feeling that comes from the sum of many different parts which have been well chosen, well-implemented and improved where necessary.

If you are an experienced Linux user, F10 is well worth spending some time with just for its sheer rounded-out quality; new users, once they get their heads around that multimedia issue, might also find a lot to admire in this excellent release.