Fedora Core 3 development version for the PowerPC architecture was released few days ago. We did a fast and almost complete installation to have a look at the (we hope soon) upcoming stable release.
It comes in 8 CD's, 4 for the binaries and 4 for the sources, but to install this test release you will need a supplementary boot CD ISO (it's an 8 MB download) which is available for PowerMac's and IBM pSeries machines. I downloaded the 4 binaries cd and the pmac boot ISO and tested it on a G4 box.



Installation

The installation process is managed by the Anaconda installer: if you installed the x86 version and last Yellowdog releases you already know what we're talking about. A full graphical installer that will make it easy for everyone to install this distribution.
The installation process starts with the boot ISO, which will load the kernel and a minimal ramdisk: you will soon be prompted with the request of the first install CD. This is where we met the first problem: CD 1 is requested but the boot ISO is not ejected. The only way to take it out from the cd drive was to use a thin stick and slightly touche the eject button on our cdrom. The G4 we were testing on was a G4 QuickSilver, its case almost completely covers the CD drive and this operation was not so comfortable.
Once CD 1 is in the drive the anaconda installer will be loaded and will start...if your video card is well supported. In my case (if you read old reviews you already know) it was not. So we restarted the whole installation and booted again typing linux text to default to text-based anaconda installer.

Anaconda is famous as a GUI installer but its ncurses variant is good. It does not reach the level of the new Debian installer, but it does its work in an acceptable and enough clear way, and that's what the user needs. Anyway, the Anaconda shipped with this FC3 test version for PPC is still not complete in key tasks, as the yaboot bootloader automatic configuration and installation for example. I suggest you to read this page before you start the install process, as it covers solutions for known problems you could meet.

Desktop

Gnome and KDE desktop environments, as usual, come with FC3. The good news is that a third option is now considered as important as those ones: the Xfce desktop. It is a good alternative suitable for light-weight installations, perfect for old hardware. Our choice was to include all of the three environments and give a look. Once you boot and the gdm login manager starts, we got sveral session option and we have no doubt that the first thing to look at was Xfce.

Xfce comes with few but nice-looking and useful tools and there was a good Fedora work to integrate it in the global look&feel. The unified BlueCurve theme interacts well with Xfwm and there is plenty of different color and icon styles/sets to choose from.

Some features

Featured softwares include Linux kernel 2.6.9, X.org Xserver, SeLinux, udev, Gnome 2.8, Kde 3.3, Xfce 4, OpenOffice suite, Evolution 2 mail client. The kernel does not include some important patches released lately in the ppc tree. Most notably the sleep (suspend to ram) patch which is a must-have for Apple laptop users; G5 machines are reported to be not bootable. Experimental kernel packages are already available adding support and improvements in these areas. IBM pSeries is supported. On the test machine I used there seems to be some problems with sound support, or better, with its automatic configuration: basically needed modules, for some reason, are not loaded. Everything else is working correctly. X.org server needs to be configured manually for unsupported cards: it came out that the nVidia cards are supported just fine by the X.org nv module, but nor the first stage nor the second stage of the installer are able to autoconfigure with this module.
FC3 is one of the few distributions around that come with SELinux as a default. You can select among three policies at install time: enable, disable, warn. If you have no idea of what SELinux is and works but you're interested in it you'd probably best go for warn. This will disable SELinux but will warn you about all those operation that would be forbidden if it was enabled. This will help you understanding it and you can always enable it once you're fully conscious of what you're doing.

Packaging

I admit I never liked RPM as a package system. Not for the package format itself, but probably just for the lack of something like the apt suite of utilities to manage them. When I first saw years ago that Yellowdog was beginning to use apt as a package management system I thought this would have been a mor then positive change. For some reason that experimental apt (that was working just great, although just a test) is not used anymore. Fedora and Yellowdog are now both using yum, which is not bad, but still see no reason of why not using a recognized excellent system as apt. Anyway yum permitted me to install all I needed, with some problems on dependencies calculation (so you install, you think everything is ok, but under the hood there is something missing).

1 Fedora, 2 Fedora
There are now two Fedora ports for PPC out there: this official FC3 port in test stage and Yellowdog Linux, which is Fedora-based and in sync with Core 2. What's the difference between the two? What will be the difference?
For now all I can see is that, as expected, Yellowdog is fine-tuned on some hardware recognition there where Fedora still fails. But, being the Fedora port in a test stage, there is much room for improvement and soon we could see a stable release that will fix all of the small problem one meets now.

Screenshots