Fedora Core 5

Well the long awaited Fedora core 5 is finally available for downloaded. And I think millions are downloading the DVD image at this moment cause the download speed is astonishingly slow.

I am not a regular torrent user so before actually beginning the download I had to upgrade azureus. Then when I began the download I was dismayed to see the progress indicator say it will take 199 days! That was a few hours ago. The speed has now stabilized to around 10KB/s and at that rate, I will have to wait more than 2 days before I can get my hands on the DVD. Perhaps it would be better to just use wget even though it goes against the spirit of sharing.

Anyway, what's so exciting about FC 5. Well to start off with it has brand new versions of Gnome and KDE as well as X Window. Then Mono is built in so is apache 2.2X there are dozens and dozens of changes listed.

The downside of all this is that the days when linux distros could be run on old hardware is long gone. During the days of Red Hat 7.3 it could be installed on really old machines. Machines on which it was well nigh impossible to run windows. Now Fedora five needs 256 Mb to run X. Other distros are pretty much the same. If you want to do really nifty stuff you need a lot more memory. I am wondering if the 1GB I have will be good enough.