Recently I’ve installed Fedora Core 5 (FC5) replacing my Fedora Core 4. The first impression of FC5 on my first boot is wow…. Wow in terms of eye candy, wow in terms of ease of use, wow in terms of application provided, and most importantly wow in terms of speed. Installation wise hasent change much since my Redhat 9. I’ve started Linux since Redhat 6.2 and that is my first encounter with the world of true computing. Ever since i’ve learn alot about computing with Linux than Windows. FC5 boots very fast and restart fast and I’ve tried side by side with my roommate Window XP on restart and the result is FC5 restarted into desktop and ready to use while Windows XP just finishing the XP logo with loading bar beneath it.

NOTE: The system with Window XP is the same as mine except for its RAM. His is 1024 MB and mine is 512 MB DDR RAM

All application works well and haven’t encounter any crashes with application yet. All application launches like browser popup ads. Like redhat it provides all the user friendly tools to configure hardware and the OS environment itself.

I personally prefer KDE than Gnome and guess what it comes with KDE-3.5.1 and it itself optimized speed and memory consumption. Previously there is talk about FC5 which takes out more memory and requires more memory to operate is a false claim. The memory that are uses are smaller than FC4 and when you close an application you can simply see the memory used decrease quite immediately. FC4 in the other hand, when you close an application you need to wait few seconds or minutes before the memory is released from use.

Fedora Core 5 - KDE

There is still some more work that i to do that is to tweak it to make it a more personal and more user friendly for me. There is some third party application that need has to be installed. There is some rough edges on final release of FC5 that needs to be iron out. Particularly it dosent play multimedia well such as MP3, AVI, and etc. So there is some rpms that need to be installed to make it work. And the following are the rpms that you need to install to let you play all those media. Included is some of the guide that you might want to know.

NOTE before you do any of those below you need to do this first

# rpm -ivh http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/…/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm

To play MP3 on amaroK

# yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly

To install XMMS and play mp3 on XMMS

# yum install xmms xmms-mp3

To play video media you can use VideoLan Client

# yum install videolan-client

To get NVIDIA Graphic card support please use this guide http://forums.fedoraforum.org/……php?t=99285&highlight=nvidia+core

To install Adobe Reader v7 do this

# yum install compat-libstdc++

download Adobe reader RPM from Adober website http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

# rpm -ivh \AdobeReader_enu-7.0.5-1.i386.rpm

is directory where you downloaded Adobe Reader rpm located

There is two great site for newbie of Fedora Core 5

http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc5.html

http://www.stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_5_installation_notes.html