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.)