Fedora Core is Useless
I fail to see why distributions like Fedora core are immensly popular. Fedora core and any corresponding system based on rpm and dependent on the anaconda installer all suffer from the same fatal flaw. If any single rpm fails to install, the entire install process is halted and must be restarted. It doesn’t pause and ask you for a different source for the rpm, in this day and age it could probaby even download the specified rpm online, let alone just wait for you to clean the install disk.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that as near as I can tell Fedora Core install disks are the most finicky disk images I have ever encountered. The only possible way I can even get a system installed is to install bare GUI desktop install.
Yet once the base system is installed the problems still continue. Apparently it’s only possible to manually select all the packages you didn’t get to install with yum. There is a gui for selecting additional packages but it suffers from the same problem the original install gui suffered from, ie a single failure kills the whole process. I don’t know if this is better here or worse, on the one hand at least you can try several different combinations without needing to walk back through the entire disk formatting procedure, but on the other it would definitely seem logical to allow the tool to download packages from a remote location if the cd fails.
It’s not really like the problems end with the installation and package system either. If you ever need to compile anything from source I bid you good luck. Assuming you track down all the devel rpm’s that are missing because of the afore-mentioned problems, it still assumes that the rpm themselves are actually complete, or working properly. Though I have imagemagick, imagemagick-c++ and the corresponding devel packages installed I am still unable to link RMagick against these installed libraries.
Lets not even get into the abomination that is Fedora Core 4. I see no logical reason to base any distribution on gcc4 at this point unless you want to be involved in the gcc development process. Sure it’s stable, but it’s significantly slower then say gcc 3.4.3.
I highly recommend more flexible distributions like gentoo or debian if anyone is interested in a usable platform for development.
Trackbacks
Use the following link to trackback from your own site:
http://dgtized.net/trackbacks?article_id=4
