I've recently been playing with Fedora Core 5 (I know, I'm a bit behind the times) on a new Athlon 64 machine. In the spirit of my first irritations with Fedora Core 4, here are some very early, very preliminary impressions of Fedora Core 5:

• the hcid daemon (part of the Bluetooth stuff) consistently crashes on system shutdown on x86_64 machines. Since I don't have any Bluetooth stuff, I'll be removing the bluez-utils RPM, assuming the dependencies let me. (Bugzilla #186101 and #189464)

• gnome-terminal's cursor still blinks. Kconsole's does not. Advantage: KDE.
• gnome-terminal is no longer on the Gnome root menu. Kconsole is still on the KDE root menu. Advantage: KDE.

• it is surprisingly hard for even a relatively experienced person who's new to Fedora Core 5 to tell if an install is using KDE or Gnome just from the visual appearance. (Somehow I managed to de-select Gnome and select KDE in Anaconda, and then didn't notice for a while when I was using the system.)

• pirut, the graphical software manager, is pretty looking but pretty useless. I tried to install Gnome with it (once I noticed that I only had KDE), but it resolved dependencies with all the speed of a lazy snail and then produced very weird pukes once it got to the actual install phase; sometimes it claimed there were file conflicts, sometimes it claimed that something (that was already installed) couldn't be installed because a library was missing.

What I wound up doing was taking the list of RPMs pirut was going to install and feeding the list to 'yum install'. Reading the yum manpage (I should do this more often) suggests that I could have saved the work of the first step with

yum groupinstall "GNOME Desktop Environment"

(Possibly the name changed in FC5; 'yum grouplist' to see them. My FC5 machine is currently running memtest86+, so I can't check.)

• Anaconda's support for setting up RAID partitions is not so much primitive as almost completely backwards; it is primitive based ('make multiple RAID slices; make a RAID device from RAID slices; repeat endlessly') instead of task based ('make a partition of size X that is RAID-1 across these disks'). Some of its limitations are highly peculiar; for instance, it lets you clone one disk's partitioning to another but only if they have no non-RAID partitions.

This is the first time I've tried to use Anaconda to set up our standard mirrored system disks configuration. I'm not sure there will be a second time; the sheer boring repetition annoyed the heck out of me. (It's also strangely at odds with how task-oriented the basic partitioning is.)

(Unlike last time around, I haven't been playing with Anaconda upgrades or Kickstart installations, so I have no idea if they're better than with Fedora Core 4.)