SuSE 10.1 vs. Fedora Core 5

Today's post has nothing to do with Montreal, but I wanted to document my findings somewhere, so I'm putting them here. Enjoy!

Background
I am a long time SuSE user (Since 6.4 in 1999) and I've been quite happy with it. Lately, I've decided that I've wanted to see what all the fuss was about with Fedora. I mean, a lot of people use it, so it can't be all bad, right? So I made a big backup of my laptop system (Dell Latitude D600, 1 GB memory, 40 GB HD, 1400 MHz Pentium M, Dell 1350 b/g Wireless, Bluetooth PCMCIA) and installed FC5.

Installation
The SuSE install is very easy. You pick your partition layout (and modify it, if you want), pick your package base, then - optionally - select individual packages that are on the media. You press "GO!" and you're off.

The FC5 install was also generally easy. One thing I found extraordinarily frustrating was individual package selection. You can pick base packages, which is a nice idea, and even modify those selections. However, I knew that I needed the kernel source because I was going to have to build the VMWare kernel modules against it. I couldn't find it anywhere!

Booting
One thing I really like about SuSE (Since version 7.2) is that it uses the framebuffer device on console 1 (ctrl-alt-F1), so you get a nice pretty picture while you boot and anytime you're using console 1. I admit that I've had problems with this, but they've been very minor and I think it's a good feature.

In FC5, you boot immediately into runlevel 5 and X starts on console 8. This is fine, but you still see all of the kernel messages that you don't care about unless you're troubleshooting something. X doesn't start until udev is configured. Once FC5 is booted, the X server on console 8 is stopped and GDM is started on console 7.

Logging in
I have always used KDE under SuSE as it is the default. I know it and I like it, but I wanted to give FC5's defaults a good run, so I installed a GNOME system. It turns out there's a lot to get used to here! KDE has a control panel application while GNOME has a menu. Either way is fine and you can find most of what you want in either place. One thing I didn't like about the default GNOME configuration was the menu bar at the top of the screen and the task bar at the bottom. My laptop can only do 1024x768 so screen real estate is at a premium. Anyway, I rearranged things to be a little more KDE-like and I'm much happier now.

Post-Installation
This was perhaps the most frustrating part for me. I knew enough about FC5's installation to know that I needed to do a yum update to get the most recent packages. Much to my dismay, I had to update MANY MANY packages, which meant a download of another 600 MB! After having downloaded the ISO at 3 GB, this was a lot of data. But that was just the beginning!

I needed the kernel source for VMWare, so I did a yum install kernel-devel only to find that a newer version of the kernel source was installed than the kernel! yum did absolutely no version checking to make sure the versions were the same! However, once I got that issue worked out, I was able to install VMWare successfully.

Before discovering yumex (which is not installed by default) I was very frustrated because if I knew I needed a certain thing (kernel source, or a library, etc.) I had no way to easily "Browse" packages. Also, if you take a guess and run yum install foobar and foobar doesn't exist, it takes a LONG time to tell you that you're an idiot.

I was impressed that X configuration was flawless and virtually automated. That was nice. I tried to install the fglx drivers for my ATI Radeon 9000 Mobility, but I ended up with the same problems that I had under SuSE, so I went back to the stock X.org radeon driver.

Everything else was just configuration.

Applications
yumex was a good utility to discover. It's a little like YaST's software installer and YOU combined.

I'm really not impressed with Rhythmbox (mp3 player). I really like Amarok better. Unfortunately, Amarok requires the KDE system and I'm trying to keep this system completely GNOME.

GAIM installation was a dream with FC5 compared to SuSE. I downloaded the FC5 rpm for the most recent beta version and it ran with no problems. Under SuSE I have to install a bunch of *-devel packages and then compile from source. It works pretty well, but still.... it's nice to have an rpm.

Back to the VMWare installation, with SuSE I had to pre-compile the kernel after installing the kernel-source package before the VMWare modules would compile. While I've gotten used to this, it requires a very lengthy make cloneconfig && make all process every time the kernel is updated. Under FC5 I simply install the kernel-devel package (which is harder than it sounds) and then run the vmware-config.pl script.

Firefox was a pain, unfortunately. I was installing plugins and the right files were in the right places, but they didn't show up in about:plugins. I finally found out that it was an SELinux issue and got it corrected by following this guide. I would go so far as to say that it is a MUST to do the things in that link.

Networking
Not surprisingly, the onboard 10/100 Ethernet card worked out of the box with no tricky stuff. Less surprisingly, I've had nothing but trouble with the Wireless Mini-PCI card. Under SuSE, I installed NDISWrapper and things worked fine. I could even configure the wireless card from within YaST. WIth FC5, however, once I got NDISWrapper installed and configured, I had to manually create the configuration files for wlan0. Even when that was done, I had all sorts of packet loss and duplicates. It was terrible. I played with it some more and I don't know what fixed it, but it seems to work now.

One last note on wireless: With SuSE 10.0 and 10.1 if I cold booted the laptop while on battery power the system would hang when NDISWrapper was loaded. I learned to live with this and would either use Windows while booting with the battery or plug into the wall if I wanted to use Linux. Interestingly, if I booted into Windows on the battery and then rebooted (without losing power) I could successfully boot into Linux. Apparently something in SuSE wasn't powering on the card when the driver was loaded. I mention all of this because this problem doesn't seem to exist in FC5. I've cold booted on battery power and NDISWrapper loads just fine.

Summary
That's about it for now. I still haven't tested Bluetooth under FC5 yet. It was iffy but worked under SuSE 10.1 and I'm not really in any hurry to test it. I also haven't tested CD Burning. I think I can do this right from Nautilus, but I don't know how. X-CDRoast is a joke and I'll never use that again. Come on! No one uses ide-scsi any more!

In general, I was actually more pleased with FC5 than I thought I would be. It's A LOT of work to get it set up... far more than SuSE. Lastly, I get the feeling that FC5 is a little faster than SuSE 10.1. However, the difference may just be the result of filesytem fragmentation. But FC5 does something weird sometimes where it will take a LONG time to open an application for no apparent reason. From what I can tell so far this happens when the IP address changes while X is running. Very bizarre.

Update: June 29, 2006
I tested CD burning last night and it's actually somewhat easy to burn a CD from Nautilus *IF* you're going to burn a data CD. There is no way to burn an audio CD from within Nautilus. So, I installed gnomebaker, which is attempting to be a K3B replacement. It it pretty easy to use and looks like it would have worked fine - again - for data. But when I tried to add MP3 files to the project, I got an error saying that the plugins for audio/mpeg weren't installed. I Googled this and came up with lots of hits, but none of which worked. Finally, I saw a post that said that gnomebaker is nowhere near a replacement for K3B (yet). So that's it. I have to install K3B and all of the KDE libraries. Well, I may as well go ahead and install Amarok then, too.