Least Significant Bits

Fedora Core 4 was released today. This release is a standard refresh, featuring gcc 4.0, KDE 3.4, and GNOME 2.10.

This said, it has quietly been available on various bittorent networks since Friday, apparently due to a leak from one of the mirror sites. Oops. There are also a total of six updated packages available as of now on release day.

If faced with the need for both the CD and DVD images, and download speeds under 1MB/sec, don't bother downloading the DVD ISO. Instead, download the CD ISOs and use a simple shell script to generate a bootable DVD ISO.

KDE 3.4 has been available for some three months now. The KDE-RedHat Project packages new KDE releases for Fedora Core shortly after they are released. In the past, and in the case of KDE 3.4, their releases exhibit many bugs that never appear in the official Fedora KDE packages. Examples of this for KDE 3.4 might include Konqueror's support for removable media and hotplug devices on the desktop, and the kio_smb CIFS protocol module. In this case, the best decision would have been to skip KDE-RedHat and wait for the next release of Fedora.

Something to be commended in Fedora Core 4 would be improvements to the yum update program. For those who don't know, yum is the automatic updater, which downloads and installs software updates for Fedora and other Red Hat based distributions. Yum is complete and conveinent, but has a reputation for being memory-inefficient. A typical session of the Fedora Core 3 yum would reach a virtual size over 100MB, and the host system shows all the symptoms of "thrashing." This seems quite excessive. Fedora Core 3 also included the up2date tool, which was just as bad. The Fedora Core 4 yum seems greatly improved, reaching a mere 50MB virtual size for a task that would inflate the Fedora Core 3 yum to 90MB.

For the limited tasks that I use it for, Fedora Core 4 seems to be an improvement over its predecessor.

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