The Fedora Core 5 Experience.

I have been using Fedora Core 5 for a few days now. Things didn't get off to a good start with the first boot ending up in failrure Finally when the login screen appeared it did look heaps better than the previus version but beauty is only skin deep.

Having logged on for the first time, I didn't exactly see anything really exciting. It looks a lot like same old same old to me. Maybe I am jaded. But somethings have changed. For example if you put a CD or DVD into the drive the system asks you what you want to do with it. Isn't it obvious? doesn't this smell of windows?

Other important things have disappeared too. It no longer seems possible to install anything off the CD new using the 'System->add/remove software' menu itme. It tries to download everying all over again. Hello, I spent nearly three days downloading the DVD image so that I don't need to do that. I don't care if something's version number has changed from 1.24.13 to 1.24.14

The power saving options have disappeared to the monitor does not switch of after idling for a while like it used to.

One of the first applications I tried was OpenOffice, it turned out to be a terrifying experience with oowriter trying to recover what it thought were thousands of corrupt files, i don't even know where they came from. They all turned out to be older versions of current documents.

K3B on the other hand is better behaved on FC5 than on FC4. The DVD burning errors seem to have disappeared. My Qemu accelerator has disappeared too. When ever the kernel version changes (even for the very small change from FC4 to FC5) the accelerator stops working. That's because it's a kernel module.

The old package manager has givenway to something called pirut (Why not pirate?), it seems to be just a frontend of yum. How many times have they changed the way packages and updates are managed?

As for yum itself, I did type 'yum update' just in case there are any security patches. There were 102 updates all toghether (not sure how many are security updates). That number seems really excessive for a OS that's just days old.