== Some first impressions of Fedora Core 5

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 FC4FirstIrritations]], 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
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=186101]] and
  [[#189464 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=189464]])

* gnome-terminal's cursor [[still blinks FC4FirstIrritations]].
  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+ http://www.memtest.org/]], 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 FC4FirstIrritations]], 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.)