Re: [gtkmm] Fedora Core 2

[Gerald Henriksen <ghenriks rogers com>]

On Thu, 09 Sep 2004 23:24:04 -0600, you wrote:

>This question is a bit off topic,  but I can't help but respond because
>my experience with Fedora Core 2 leaves me no responsible choice but 
>to warn you off it.  I would not recommend Fedora Core 2 to anyone for
>any purpose.
>
>I have installed Fedora Core 2 on four very different machines,  two 
>desktops and two laptops.  All four installations failed initially in 
>different ways.  I had to try 5 times on one of the laptops before I 
>had a usable system.  Fedora Core is the most unreliable operating 
>system I have ever used in all my years of using computers.  It is more 
>unreliable than DOS 3.3 and more unreliable than Windows 3.0,  and not
>in the same class as more modern systems like Windows 2000.  Sorry to 
>sound like a Windows advocate,  but that is simply the truth.

Fedora Core 2, like any of the first releases based on kernel 2.6 from
any of the distributions, had problems.  Any radical change like a
major change in kernel will bring out problems.

Having said that it works fine for most people.

>The system I am on as I write is a P4 2.8 Ghz running Fedora Core 2 
>which I upgraded from Red Hat 9.  It is a disaster.  I have no time 
>right now to replace it with a different distro and I have no Windows 
>license for this machine,  so I'm stuck for the moment.  FC 2 crashes or
>freezes up or becomes unusable at least 5 or 10 times a week on

Have you tried the Fedora Core mailing list to track down the cause of
your problems?  The developers of the various packages can't fix the
bugs if no one ever reports them.

>average.  When I started out writing this response I had to stop because
>my keyboard suddenly cut out.  (This is a regular occurrence for me,  
>which other users have also reported.)  Before I could reboot,  a screen
>saver started and the system froze up.  (It always freezes up when this 
>particular screen saver,  called XFlame,  starts.)

Perhaps then you should file a bug report to the author of XFlame
and/or xscreensaver, and in the meantime disable/delete XFlame?

>time.  In addition to the instability,  Fedora Core 2 is 
>extremely resource intensive.  According to the FC 2 website,  the 
>minimum recommended ram for a system with Gnome is 256 MB with 512 MB 
>recommended.  I can confirm that this is correct.  My 512 MB system is 
>usually very close to exhausting all physical ram,  even though I do 
>nothing remarkable.  (A Windows 2000 system doing similar things would 
>typically use about 200 MB ram in my experience.)

How are you measuring ram usage?  The Linux kernel is designed to use
all available ram even if it is not needed for actively running
processes so just using things like top to show ram usage are
misleading.

My experience is that a 400MHz 256MB offers similar performance under
both Fedora Core 2 and Windows 2000.