Hi folks,
I just upgraded an existing FC3 installation on a Dell Inspiron
P3/700 notebook to FC4, and here are my first impressions after playing
with it for about a day:
1. It is faster than FC3 in most areas: Booting to the login prompt, X
startup, text scrolling within xterm, general desktop responsiveness,
system shutdown. About 10-30% quicker overall, which is nothing
short of miraculous - given that this comes for free, and seems to be
rock stable (so far).
2. Everything 'just worked' in my upgrade installation, except the audio
(maestro3). I had to manually tweak /etc/modprobe.conf to get alsa to
recognise the audio (perhaps it might have worked perfectly if I'd
done a fresh install instead of an upgrade).
3. Existing binary RPMs from FC3 will mostly work on FC4 with minimal
dependency problems - the situation is reminiscent of the transition
from RH 7.3 to RH 8, but without the hairy bugs.
4. The gcc-4.0.0 compiler is more picky and will generate fresh errors
that were undetected by gcc-3.4.x. Therefore, some earlier SRPMs
and kernels will not build on an FC4 host with gcc4. For instance,
Linux-2.6.8.1, abiword-2.0.12-9 and xmms-1.2.7-21 all broke during
build. However, Linux-2.6.12 (from kernel.org) compiles fine and I
replaced the FC4 kernel with this one, with no apparent problems.
5. Since binary RPMs built on FC3 install fine on FC4, it's a good idea
to have an FC3 build machine with gcc-3.4.x for building earlier RPMs
and kernels.
6. The only Cons of FC4: the relative immaturity of the gcc4 toolchain,
and the larger memory footprint (256 MB recommended for FC4 vs.
128 MB for FC3).
7. Overall, I'd rate this distro 9/10 - the main Pros are speed, ease of
migration, API stability, ABI stability. It's great for breathing new
life into aging hardware (for reference, the difference in performance
between a P3/1Ghz and a Northwood Celeron 2.4 GHz is about 25%
for gcc-3.4 compilation of Firefox. We could get this same boost
for free by upgrading from FC3 to FC4 on the P3/1GHz.)
To summarize: Everything just works as before, only quicker. Go for it!
-Siva
P.S. My pam-losetup/cryptoloop stuff still works, with on-disk binary
compatibility retained from Linux-2.4/RH 7.3. Try doing these kinds of
things with NTFS or similar crap in the M$ world.