Here's my Fedora Core 2 experience report after one week of usage. First the positive:
The unofficial-official yum repositories (as described in the Unofficial FAQ) for things not included on the CD for licensing reasons. The installation of RealPlayer, Adobe Reader, XMMS MP3 plugin, Flash plugin, etc., is as painless as "yum install [package-name]".
The very usable input method support in Gnome 2.6. Right clicking on any Gnome text component brings up a context menu that includes an "Input Methods" submenu. Select the "Internet/Intranet Input Method" (iiimf) menu item and a taskbar applet will appear that allows for switching among the selected input methods. This is available even if I'm logged in with a US/English locale.
Tomcat 4.1.27 is included in the CD and is ready to run, just as any other system services. Many other Java packages are bundled in the CD: ant, junit, xerces, xalan, struts, mx4j, bcel, etc. I especially like the way the installed their jar files in a common location /usr/share/java.
The Mono 1.0 Beta1 yum repository for Fedora Core 1 seems to still work for Fedora Core 2. ASP.NET (xsp.exe), Gtk#, WinForms all seem to work. Official FC2 support, along with the MonoDevelop IDE, will be available with Mono 1.0 Beta2, scheduled for tomorrow, according to the Mono 1.0 Roadmap.
New versions of familiar softwares all around: subversion 1.0.2 (was 0.31.0 in FC1), Mozilla 1.6 (was 1.4), Gnome 2.6, kernel 2.6.5, Open Office 1.1.1, etc.
Newly available software such as the Rhythembox music player.
Now the glitches:
No 3D support for my nVidia GeForce MX 440 video card yet.
The dictionary taskbar applet stopped working.
The Volume Control Gnome applet is very confusing, at least for the on board RealTek ALC650 6-channel audio chip on my MSI KT4AV mb. With about 90 vertical slider bars laid out in a single row, I have to use the horizontal scroll bar five times to get to the right end of it. It took me a while to figure out by trial and error that the four controls names "VIA DXS" on the far right end are the ones that control the volume.
Unfortunately, the Sun JDK/JRE falls into the category of "software packages of questionable licenses and need a separate download." As a Java developer, I want at least the JRE to be distributed as widely as possible. Seeing that in the case of Fedora Core 2, the Sun license is preventing the widest distribution of the JRE, I recognized the importance of the recent round of "Open Source Java" calls. And I'm ready to switch sides from Sun to ESR and IBM.
The gcj compiled native executable /usr/bin/ant takes precedence over any ant ant shell script from the canonical Ant installation if the /opt/apache-ant-1.6.1/bin directory is not put in front of the /usr/bin directory. I reported a similar problem with the jar command in the context of Cygwin 66 days ago. Other affected commands include rmic and rmiregistry.
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