Review: Fedora 7 Test 2
March 5th, 2007 by jamesOn March 1, Red Hat released Fedora 7 Test 2. Here’s my quick look at the live CD version of this distro. I’ll wait until the final release to do a full install.
The live CD, downloaded here, is a nice way to test new releases of distributions without having to install the entire distribution.
First Boot
I burned the CD and put it in my desktop (no VM, as apparently the fact I test things on both my desktop natively, and on my MacBook Pro in a VM confused people on previous reviews). The boot loader came up and I picked the option to boot the Live CD to RAM. I figured with 2GB of RAM this would make things a lot faster for me.
The boot messages started scrolling and eventually X started up.
And that’s as far as it got.
Once again my Nvidia GeForce 7800GT card trips up another distribution attempting to auto-detect my card and deciding to use the open source “nv” driver. The nv driver does not work with my card. I either need to use to the crappy vesa driver or I need the binary drivers from Nvidia. All I get from the nv driver is a garbled screen and I have to hard reset my desktop.
I tried again, this time booting straight from the live CD and not copying the CD to RAM, but it resulted (obviously) in the same thing happening again. While I understand distributions not including the binary Nvidia drivers by default due to the licensing issue, it would be nice if they could not load the nv driver or at least give me an option to choose the video driver I want since loading the wrong one results in a complete failure.
I looked around the web to see if I could find any information that might help me be able to reconfigure X before it loads on the live CD but I was unsuccessful. Obviously the live CD is not meant to be configurable and so I’m not surprised I was unable to figure out a work around to this problem. I know other live CD distros offer different boot options to avoid problems like this. I tried to find if there was a boot option to force the display driver, but I was unable to find one. If anyone has any information on how to get this working, I will gladly write an update review with the full test.
Second Try
Not being one to give up so easily I decided that it was time to whip out VMware Fusion Beta on my MacBook Pro and give the live CD a whirl in it. Here’s where a lot of people seem to get confused and start blaming my problems for things like my graphics card not working because I’m using a VM. I don’t know why people seem to get confused by this other than the fact they just look at the screen shots and pick a few sentences without completely reading what I’ve wrote.
In any case, I setup a VM and threw the live CD in my laptop. The nice thing about this part is I can get screen shots a lot easily during the install and booting.
Fedora 7 Test 2 Live CD booting on my MacBook Pro
Fedora 7 Test 2 booted up beautifully in VMware, with the exception that it was running at 800×600 resolution and no one uses that anymore.
I loaded up Firefox and it worked fine and I also setup Evolution to check my IMAP email at work which also worked fine with the exception it was very hard to use at 800×600. The GIMP also worked just fine on the live CD.
Fedora 7 Test 2 Desktop, and Evolution
Abiword crashed when I attempted to load it.
Abiword wouldn’t run on Fedora 7 Test 2
The theme is nice and clean and looks sharp. I like the blue and the desktop wallpaper goes well with the theme. Fedora 7 Test 2 is using GNOME 2.17.91, a pre-release development version of GNOME 2.18. The Fedora live CD, besides a few extra applications, is mostly just a GNOME desktop. There’s a variety of GNOME games installed as well.
GNOME About dialog
Try Number Three
I decided to try the live CD on a computer at work for another test. I really wanted to get a legitimate test on a desktop PC not running under a VM.
A Dell Optiplex GX240 was my third test machine. The distro booted up just fine and X worked fine on the built-in ATI Rage 128 video card. Functionally it was the same as under the VM but of course much faster. I was contemplating trying the install to hard disk feature, but decided not to make any changes to the work PC I was using.
I loaded up the Firewall and SELinux configuration utility off the System menu. This feature is pretty nice since you can have a secure, live CD based, firewall that is easily configurable. With SELinux built-in the system has even more security.
Fedora 7 Test 2 Live CD running on Dell GX240
Concluding Comments
I checked Fedora’s Bugzilla and there are a few people that had the same problem with their video cards as I did. It would’ve been nice if I could’ve opted to use the vesa driver in the live CD but since that wasn’t the case I opted to just play around with it under VMware which did work fine (other than a max 800×600 resolution). It also worked fine on a built-in ATI Rage 128 card on a Dell Optiplex GX240 (1024×768 res).
Fedora 7 Test 2 looked nice with its theme and desktop wallpaper. Most of the included applications did work fine, but Abiword didn’t. Considering this is a pre-release version of the OS the applications that didn’t work will no doubt be fixed before the final release.
Once the final version comes out I will take another look and install the complete version to my desktop. I’ll get the Nvidia binary drivers working if the included one continues to not work with my card.
Fedora / Red Hat have never been my Linux distro of choice, but they do offer an easy to use community supported distribution. Many companies like to stick to Fedora / Red Hat due to the Red Hat name and the support Red Hat offers. RPM is also not my favorite package system as I’ve had many problems in the past getting RPMs working on slightly different versions of Red Hat.
Other than fixing the minor issues with a pre-release product, if Fedora adds some boot options to its live cd (or at least provides more documentation so I could find out what they are, if they exist) so I can avoid having the nv driver kill my system, that would be great. Also, one minor inconvenience, the distro doesn’t eject the live CD prior to rebooting or shutting down the system. This would be a nice feature for Fedora to add for their next release.
March 6th, 2007 at 9:39 am
I think that the nv driver didn’t work is because it doesn’t have support for the 7 series yet. It works fine with my 6200.
I’m pleased with the new desktop background. When Fedora was putting in ideas for it, they all looked liked vector graphics or something you’d expect from the 80’s.
Obviously, Fedora is always bleeding edge, so the alpha versions will always have some sort of problem.
March 6th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Chris: Well yes it would make sense that it’s because it’s the 7 series. The author points out it is an issue with his particular card. His point is that, there are issues, there may well be issues with new cards that aren’t even released yet, there should be an option to over ride in this situation. Saying it works with “your card” doesn’t really change the validity of having those options unless it works on ALL cards.
March 7th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Why don’t the various Live CDs and distros offer an option to download and install the Nvidia binary drivers initially or at startup? Sure I’d rather have open source if possible, but the Xorg nv driver is close to useless for me.
I’ve a real-time image processing application and using FC5 Xorg 6.x nv driver the X server uses ~37% CPU and things work (its what I initially developed it on). On Ubuntu 6.06 Xorg 7 the nv driver uses ~90% CPU! meaning my code don’t run. Ubuntu makes it pretty easy to install the binary drivers, and when I did what a shock, ~10% CPU used by the X server!
Besides if the Nvidia servers saw a big increase in downloads maybe they’d wake up and realize many people do buy their cards to run Linux!
–wally.
March 9th, 2007 at 5:25 am
Will this distro detect Centrino h/w on DELL laptops? Havn’t gotten a LINUX distro. to recognize the INTEL card and connect to an OPEN network(no encrypt or keys set) yet!
March 10th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
[…] After I chose the theme, Elive told me it detected my Nvidia graphics card. Here it gave me the option to decide which Nvidia display driver I wanted to use. The options were: nvidia_new, nvidia_old, nv, and vesa. I decided to go with nvidia_new, since I wanted the latest. I also knew that nv would result in my system freezing hard, and I felt no reason to use vesa since I could use the proprietary drivers. I must say this is a very nice touch for Elive. It is something Fedora 7 Test 2 could definitely have used when I tried it. […]
March 16th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
You should be able to select an X driver by passing it as a kernel option at boot (xdriver=vesa perhaps??? I forget the exact syntax). Also, once you boot the live CD and get a garbled screen go to tty0 and edit xorg.conf to use vesa, then back to the X screen and restart X. Should work fine.
March 18th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Same problem with my Nvidia GeForce 7800GS for Fedora6, I used an old GeForce, no problem, then re-installed the GS. GS worked OK for Fedora7 but with a 800×600 screen, with no way of altering it, even tried to install from Nvidia driver, that was a joke, this is missing, that is missing. Gone back to Fedora6 64 bit version.
March 21st, 2007 at 10:01 pm
3: wkulecz:
It’s likely nvidia wouldn’t see an increase in driver downloads because it’s so much easier to use internet repositories (like for Fedora you can install the nvidia driver from livna) so lots of people go to the repo. That way nvidia only sees the few that go right to them. –Mark
March 27th, 2007 at 8:33 am
Another option is to use Fedora’s VNC install option. You could connect to your Desktop with a Mac VNC client.
I believe the boot options are:
vnc vncpassword=somepassword
The installer would boot up to a point where it would tell you when to connect to it’s vnc server and what the ip address, etc.. is.
April 4th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
When I look at your screenshots, I wonder why linux grafics is so damn ugly. MacOS and Windows just make it much nicer.
That is why people use Windows and not Linux.
Written bye a Linux fann - what a shame… Linux GUI should have evolved better, than this!
April 4th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
And yes I do know is in 800×600 but under normal operations I still need a 21 inch screen so the programs don’t steal all the space…
April 4th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
Thomas Lauritsen:
Right now I’m using Sabayon as my primary Linux desktop OS (other than the ones I test) on a 19″ widescreen LCD (1440×900) and with Beryl on the graphics look much better than Vista and OS X to me. I’d say give that distro a try. It might work great on your hardware.
September 19th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Hi,
can anyone suggest me how to install the driver cd. iam not able to install the driver cd, it doesn’t the accept the mother cd and other s/w cd’s also.
Regards
B.umapathy
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:36 pm
[…] machine. The distro booted up just fine and X worked fine on the built-in ATI Rage 128 video card.http://www.triedit.org/review/review-fedora-7-test-2/HELP with USB booting on DELL OPTIPLEX gx240 - Wim&39s BIOS PageSep 16, 2006 … driver Agent scan: […]