Advantages of Fedora Core 5 over FC3/FC4:
- Faster boot times
- Faster Gnome desktop login
- Faster responsiveness in the Gnome user interface (snappier application menu, etc.)
- Suspend to disk and suspend to RAM
- New desktop applications: Beagle desktop search tool, F-spot photo manager, Tomboy note taking application.
- Firefox: Opening a new window is MUCH faster than with FC4.
- Most stable installer to date, in my opinion.
- New HAL integration (hardware abstraction layer) manages USB flash drives, and as a result, they mount on the user’s desktop more quickly than in the past.
- SELinux targetted policies are much more comprehensive
- Better wireless NIC support.
- Xen virtulization.
I find it easier to upgrade rather than reinstall. The upgrade process did not install the new applications that a fresh install would have provided. Therefore, I did a fresh install of FC5 on one machine, and grabbed the package list (FC5 Packages). Then, I upgraded another machine, grabbed the package list ("rpm -qa | sort > upgradepackages.txt“). I generated a ‘diff’ of the two files. Here are the main things I came up with when going from FC4 to FC5:
Missing desktop packages:
- beagle
- f-spot
- frysk
- tomboy
- gnome-backgrounds
- gnome-power-manager
- gnome-screensaver
- gnome-user-share
- nautilus-sendto
- hal-gnome
Missing non-desktop packages:
- xorg-x11-fonts-truetype
- smartmontools
- systemtap
- hplip
- longrun
- irqbalance
- glx-utils
- gmime
- gmime-sharp
- dbus-sharp
- dcraw
- evolution-sharp
It’s always a good idea to read the release notes:
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc5/
Install extra software using yum, or using the graphical application ‘pirut’, or view ‘extra’ packages with your browser:
http://fedoraproject.org/extras/5/i386/repodata/repoview/graphical-internet.group.html
Useful packages (from extras repository):
yum install yum-utils gtweakui themes-backgrounds-gnome nautilus-open-terminal nautilus-image-converter nautilus-actions