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I remember reading somewhere today that this release puts Fedora "back on track for predictability". I wonder if that bodes well for their perception?

In any event anyone who has followed along with the "Fedora Philosophy" knows that they always had the objective of releasing fairly quickly and all the while trying the latest and greatest technologies, however rough they are. You don't have to be a genius to know where the newest technologies end up all polished: RHEL.

I tried out the RC3 release a week ago and felt it a slight notable improvement over Fedora 7 in terms of polish and performance although that's just a brief evaluation. Here are some links (most I just pulled off the last link):

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/8/ReleaseSummary
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f8/
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F8Common
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f8.html

Oh wait ... looks like fedoraproject site is overwhelmed!

You just did that to advertise Fedora 8, didn't you? Nice one, thanks for the reminder. Download your copy now from these fine mirrors.

"You might ask just as well why the Linux community tolerates RedHat. It's the way it's supposed to work."

Or because Red Hat gives a huge amount to the GNU/Linux community, and employs some of its most prominent figures?

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions

According to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing , the FSF has cleared the STIX license as Free.

From TFA:

and:

From what I gather (and I haven't been awake very long, so I might be wrong) they've been maintaining Linux boxes on their own for years (about 5, IIRC Redhat 7.3 came out 2002-ish), and the reason they're ditching Redhat is it costs too much for support they didn't need previously? If I might go on a limb and make a bizarre suggestion: Don't pay it.

I don't really think this is that true. I was under the impression (and unless this is wrong too) RHEL forked off Fedora whenever they feel like it, so in effect (according to this) isn't Fedora just a testbed where people do free QA work for Redhat?

So they're UNIX veterans, have been administering Linux systems for years, and they haven't mastered './configure && make && make install'? TFA claims they're LAMP-based, with the exception of the L, I can start on the AMP portion first thing in the morning and have all three upgraded in time for lunch (My day starts at 10, Lunch is noon without fail). Sounds to me like they're just too lazy to upgrade the 2 or 3 dependencies something might have. That's a great reason for ditching a known good and stable kernel, right?

Hell, the first thing I do when I install a new OS is replace their Apache/MySQL/PHP with versions I compile myself (based on known-good versions we use on staging/test servers), that way I know 100% it's going to do what I want and I'm not going to see any crap in my error logs about PHP not loading it's GD extension because I opted not to install X on a server which really doesn't need it.

If they really wanted set-it-and-forget-it why not use Slackware? Or ditch Linux entirely and go to FreeBSD?

Sometimes people hurt my head.

Already in Fedora, on the assumption 4. is 4.a or 4.b (making it a Free/Libre font according to us)

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts/Triaging/Pipeline#head-a970f733a2659c3045c01321c4f775536fa0ff8f

According to Fedora Weekly News Alan Cox and others say that it's definitely down to how the BIOS is set to handle things and that's the same on Ubuntu, Fedora and Windows.

Thanks for the info. I see the date is still November 8th.

Since its on a secondary machine, I don't minde doing the wipe/reinstall from scratch bit.

At least Ubuntu 7.04 (perhaps also 6.10, but not 6.06 LTS) is compiled with fstack-protector; Debian is not. However, both Debian and Ubuntu make it very hard, if not impossible, to find any information about proactive security features, contrary to e.g. Fedora, where you can fetch all the information from a single web page (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Security/Features). I'm only sure about fstack-protector in 7.04 because I've tested some exploits...

I appreciate that you say that you haven't used an RPM based distro for several years. I think you'd find if you tried one now that the tools (such as YUM and PUP and SMART) simplify package managament greatly. When you add to this that the quality and quantity of RPM packaging (now 5000 packages for Fedora) is going up there really isn't much of a case to make for debs and distros based on them being superior. Add to this that there are examples of "Deb-hell" if you look for them.

The reason that debs used to be superior was because of the Debian community working together to package Free software according to agreed high standards. It's a pity that more people don't explicitly acknowledge that Ubuntu is just a slightly tweaked distro sitting on top of all this work done by the Debian community.

I agree entirely with you, fellow AC.
The solution for your problem can be found at: http://fedoraproject.org/

IMHO the future direction taken with Kerberos should be merging the protocol into LDAP (e.g. for the future LDAPv4 revision of LDAP protocol).

Here's my rationale behind this: The problem with Kerberos being a distinct protocol from LDAP is that the distinction causes lots of confusion among the implementors, system architects, developers and administrators. This results in lots of cases where the two protocols are misused.

The correct distinction should be that you use Kerberos for authentication (that is, proving that a user is someone he claims to be) and LDAP for authorization (that is, given an authenticated user, determining information related to granting access to some resources - such as group memberships, possibly some application-specific ACLs etc) and for other data for which a directory is useful (hard to list all possible uses of LDAP, but e.g. mail aliases are a fine example).

But because the protocols are separate and very hard to setup together on a single authentication/authorization/directory server (or a group of servers!), people go along with only one of them, usually using LDAP for authentication instead of Kerberos (see mod_auth_ldap for Apache), effectively prohibiting themselves from implementing usable single sign-on

For an example, let's have a look at available OSS solutions. Apache Directory has Kerberos and LDAP integrated from the start, but it's painfully slow as a server at its current state. A mail server using LDAP for aliases can perform quite a bit of hammering on the LDAP server. MIT Kerberos cannot use LDAP databases. So doesn't Shishi Kerberos, although they plan implementing this in the future. That leaves us with Heimdal Kerberos. Heimdal requires the LDAP server to be on the same machine and support LDAPI connections. So that rules out Fedora Directory Server, whose stable version 1.0.4 doesn't support LDAPI yet (although the CVS development version recently got LDAPI support, finally).

I've tried setting up a Heimdal Kerberos server with OpenLDAP (with SASL2 daemon in the middle), and succeeded, but it was a royal pain in the *ss.

All HOWTOs I've found on the web described a brain-dead design where Kerberos maintains a classic file-based database on its own, separate from OpenLDAP database, and one has to make sure they both are in sync (because it's possible that one can have a user that the other doesn't). In such a setup replication is really troublesome and has to be done using 2 different channels and mechanisms (e.g. LDAP syncrepl + Kerberos' own redundant servers).

I wanted an integrated design, where Heimdal stores its data directly in OpenLDAP.
This way, I couldn't possibly create a Kerberos account without an LDAP account (well, I could if I omitted Kerberos objectclass and attributes, but it would be harder to do and easier to detect). Also, I could use only LDAP's replication mechanisms and easily provide fault-tolerant cluster of LDAP and Kerberos servers.

Unfortunately, the diagram for this setup looks quite daunting for a beginner implementor, as you can see for yourself.

There were also lots of gotchas:

• Heimdal can connect to LDAP as its database only using LDAPI - a networkless LDAP connection over UNIX domain socket. So you have to configure OpenLDAP in a quite non-standard way, and latest

... I don't understand why anyone would connect any machine directly to the Internet without some type of hardware firewall.

That is what the Internet is for. You're projecting Windows' problems onto real computers. There is no reason why a router or hardware firewall should be necessary to add security -- they're both computers with instructions and flaws. Increasing the number of hardware pieces increases the number of failure points at the cost of also increasing latency and reducing actual bandwidth.

There are only three reason why a computer needs to be isolated from the Internet:

• There are not enough addresses in the IPV4 space to expand forever. IPV6 fixes that.
• The network administrator's convenience.
• Experience has shown the software provider doesn't know how to write or fix network code. These links can help with that.

my X41 (2525-3CG) with the Intel Pro Wireless card "just worked" with Fedora 7. Even got a huwaei E220 3G modem from (t-mobile UK) working (which I am using now).

Several of the ones about commercial / advertising based services have had complaints that it's leaching. This is different from free porn and Fedora releases in that it's not done from the good of the distributors heart. It's about fixing MS's F*#@ ups. Having said that I personally think it's a perfectly acceptable commercial arrangement as long as they list it up front and use more or less equal amounts of bandwidth per download. Why is it that whenever people criticise other companies it passes withiout comment but all MS criticism seems to get flamed?

Vista is far more secure than Lunix.

I apologize if you thought I was picking on Joe Six Pack. My point is that the hardware is up to the task, but the bloated, slow, and inefficient software grinds down the performance of the machine. I base this on personal experience and run a MythDora (MythTV + Fedora Linux) media center on a Pentium III without any performance issues. It happily plays and records TV, burns DVDs, shows pictures, plays games, plays/rips DVDs, transcodes video, surfs RSS feeds, streams video and audio without any performance problems.

The modern hardware we have is very powerful in terms of computing power. It is the bloated software like Vista/Java/.NET which make your shiny new machine feel slooooow. If we could get the DirectX guys and the Linux kernel guys together, we could have a killer O/S.

Smolt is a basic hardware profiler. Its intended to be a profiler to get automated information from users. This should make it easier for our developers to do what they need to do. How can you help? Well look at the code and make it better. It's still in the very early stages but has good potential. https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/smolt

I'll go ahead and ruin your joke, but Smolt is already used to keep track on hardware and distros.

Perhaps if we get more distros to adopt the use of Smolt, with a central server, we could *attempt* to keep track of stats, as seen on Fedora Project

I think yes. He could just require that for inclusion of contributions in officially distributed kernel all contributors must agree, say, that entire kernel can be relicensed by vote of contributors held on lkml. Some additional restrictions can be added - like 4 freedoms from OSI definition or right to explicitly request removing one's contribution. But the core idea is "If you do not respond, you delegate decision to accessible part of community - or your code is never in our release". Look here for an example of similar policy: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal/Licenses/CLA

>> Item 8 states that the majority of the traffic on P2P is pirated material .... While no one is going to argue the amount of pirated content available on P2P networks, given (a) that many Linux releases use BT as a distribution medium (Fedora, Ubuntu, CentOS, OpenSUSE, etc.) with images up to a DVD-ROM's worth of data (4.5 Gb), (b) the amount of video-based material (movies and television) that is out there, whose files are no doubt larger than audio MP3 rips, is it fair to assume that the music industry's concerns are a relatively small portion of the overall P2P traffic? Going to a popular tracker site such as http://mininova.org/, the largest BT swarms are typically found for the prior night's TV shows. Item 9 (sales decline directly related to pirated content) has been contested for some time; the industry has reduced its number of releases, the majority sellers are now the big-box stores who carry little in the way of back-catalog material in favor of chart-topping new releases, and the rise of sales in DVDs (sell-through DVD prices comparable to new-release CDs appearing as a better value).

1. This has nothing to do with the OLPC Project submitting to the terms of the Fedora Project Individual Contributor License Agreement. It also has NOTHING to do with the GPL. These don't matter, period. The OLPC project is run by Americans, in Cambridge from what I gather. This means that the OLPC project was already subject to US export regulations, regardless of any license agreement or what have you.
2. Yes, the hardware is also subject to US export regulations
3. The Fedora Project Wiki entry for Legal/Export is outdated and inaccurate. For example, Iraq is still listed under "Embargoed Destinations". Iraq is not embargoed (*somehow* that changed when we invaded)
4. There are two US agencies that are important when discussing the Cuba sanctions/embargo. The Department of Commerce and the Treasury Department.
   • Here's a nice 6 page overview of the US embargo of Cuba from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (Treasury). Notice the text stating:
     To whom do these sanctions regulations apply?All U.S. citizens and permanent residents wherever they are located, all people and organizations physically in the United States, and all branches and subsidiaries of U.S. organizations throughout the world
   • And here's a nice overview from the Bureau of Industry and Security (Commerce) discussing exports and reexports to Cuba. Note that you will need to obtain a license from BIS for shipping something like an Xbox or OLPC to Cuba. Also note that there is a general policy of denial in place (meaning it's unlikely that these exports will be authorized by BIS)
5. No, you can't be a "middle man" or you'd be violating US export control regulations. There are these pesky things called General Prohibitions that, you know, "prohibit" certain things. General Prohibition 10 in Part 736 of the Export Administration Regulations states:
   You may not sell, transfer, export, reexport, finance, order, buy, remove, conceal, store, use, loan, dispose of, transfer, transport, forward, or otherwise service, in whole or in part, any item subject to the EAR and exported or to be exported with knowledge that a violation of the Export Administration Regulations, the Export Administration Act or any order, license, License Exception, or other authorization issued thereunder has occurred, is about to occur, or is intended to occur in connection with the item

Fedora. Fast-paced perhaps but plenty to learn and contribute.

Welcome to the 21st century. DVD drives have been around since at least 1998. :) And they're dirt cheap. In fact, I just bought two to replace 3-year old ones (one stunk from the beginning and the others Dual Layer DVD recording speed was "ancient" by today's standards).

Anyway, they can be had for under $30.00 for an OEM model or $50.00 for a retail version. Get one. You'll be glad you did.

In the meantime, you can do a network install with a Fedora boot CD. Or (if your servers have USB ports) install from a USB flash drive.

Details for all options are here:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f7/en_ US/sn-which-files.html

Actually, any version of Fedora will have FedoraLegacy support for the current version plus two back:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legacy/FAQ

Using Fedora on production servers isn't wise, unless you plan to upgrade yearly. As others have pointed out, use CentOS 5.0. EL 5.0 will have patches for 7 more years (2014!).

Do the net install. One small image to boot from, then you point that at another small image, then pick out what you want and it only does that then. That's about as small as it gets for now, AFAIK.. I did that for FC6,relatively painless. Just follow the instructions at the download-get it page. Or just order the disks from one of the online vendors. Looking, they have some single disk "live cd" images as well.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/Downloa d?action=fullsearch&value=linkto%3A%22Distribution /Download%22&context=180

For those as lazy as me, the screenshots can be found here. The website navigation is unfortunately not overly intuitive.

Fedora 7 does look very polished tho - at first glance anyway. I might give it a go this weekend :).

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned one of Fedora's major strengths; security. This is the primary reason that I use Fedora. The combination of security layers has made Fedora immune to many (all?) of the compromises/exploits in recent history.

While distributions like Ubuntu are more popular with end-users, I'm concerned that an exploit across such a popular (but security weak) distribution will paint all of Linux with an unfavorable brush.

Hehe, apparently the new build system is called Pungi. Which is pretty funny given that "Pung" is the Swedish word for nutsack =)

Hmm.. maybe using it is as painful as being kicked in the balls? Only time will tell. Anyway, I'll be using a cup from now on.

Not sure what sites you explored, but if you go to http://fedoraproject.org/
You can find the download links pretty quickly "Get Fedora".

You can get the torrents for F7 here: http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/
Or download the isos from here: http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora /7/

Not sure what sites you explored, but if you go to http://fedoraproject.org/
You can find the download links pretty quickly "Get Fedora".

You can get the torrents for F7 here: http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/
Or download the isos from here: http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora /7/

Not sure what sites you explored, but if you go to http://fedoraproject.org/
You can find the download links pretty quickly "Get Fedora".

You can get the torrents for F7 here: http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/
Or download the isos from here: http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora /7/

That would be here

The complete build process is FL/OSS!

The tool for taking all the RPM packages and composing them into an installation tree is pungi. It's FL/OSS.

The tool for taking source from CVS and turning it into packages is Koji and it's completely FL/OSS too

The tool for producing updated packages is bodhi and is FL/OSS

Be happy. The Fedora Project yet again has made major contributions to FL/OSS which can be enjoyed and improved by everyone. It means that Fedora is completely independent of Red Hat (apart from Red Hat's very generous donation of hardware and developers) and that anyone that wants to can easily produce a specialised "spin" of Fedora suited exactly to their own needs. That's one of the main innovations that Fedora is pursuing with the above: instead of being stuck dependent on the choices of a distributor you can benefit from the patched sources, even their packaging, yet diverge when needed. This should be the goal that every distribution follows, and the only thing that is similar in terms of flexibility is Gentoo, but that IMHO fails to provide an easy path for those that are happy with a distributor making the decisions for them.

I'll freely admit to being a Fedora and Red Hat fan, but I hope that the significance of the release of these build tools is not overlooked by people using other distributions.

The complete build process is FL/OSS!

The tool for taking all the RPM packages and composing them into an installation tree is pungi. It's FL/OSS.

The tool for taking source from CVS and turning it into packages is Koji and it's completely FL/OSS too

The tool for producing updated packages is bodhi and is FL/OSS

Be happy. The Fedora Project yet again has made major contributions to FL/OSS which can be enjoyed and improved by everyone. It means that Fedora is completely independent of Red Hat (apart from Red Hat's very generous donation of hardware and developers) and that anyone that wants to can easily produce a specialised "spin" of Fedora suited exactly to their own needs. That's one of the main innovations that Fedora is pursuing with the above: instead of being stuck dependent on the choices of a distributor you can benefit from the patched sources, even their packaging, yet diverge when needed. This should be the goal that every distribution follows, and the only thing that is similar in terms of flexibility is Gentoo, but that IMHO fails to provide an easy path for those that are happy with a distributor making the decisions for them.

I'll freely admit to being a Fedora and Red Hat fan, but I hope that the significance of the release of these build tools is not overlooked by people using other distributions.

The complete build process is FL/OSS!

The tool for taking all the RPM packages and composing them into an installation tree is pungi. It's FL/OSS.

The tool for taking source from CVS and turning it into packages is Koji and it's completely FL/OSS too

The tool for producing updated packages is bodhi and is FL/OSS

Be happy. The Fedora Project yet again has made major contributions to FL/OSS which can be enjoyed and improved by everyone. It means that Fedora is completely independent of Red Hat (apart from Red Hat's very generous donation of hardware and developers) and that anyone that wants to can easily produce a specialised "spin" of Fedora suited exactly to their own needs. That's one of the main innovations that Fedora is pursuing with the above: instead of being stuck dependent on the choices of a distributor you can benefit from the patched sources, even their packaging, yet diverge when needed. This should be the goal that every distribution follows, and the only thing that is similar in terms of flexibility is Gentoo, but that IMHO fails to provide an easy path for those that are happy with a distributor making the decisions for them.

I'll freely admit to being a Fedora and Red Hat fan, but I hope that the significance of the release of these build tools is not overlooked by people using other distributions.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Beats I'm pretty sure those are quite similar to what we would have found on the 404'ed Release Notes page.

wget is patient... :)

Linux: It's Not Just For Computer Geeks Anymore

By Carl Lumma | May 2007

You might think there's no way a free operating system written by volunteers could compete when it comes to music production. But in the past couple of years, all the tools you need to make music have arrived on Linux.

For years, Linux has enjoyed market leadership as a server operating system -- Google's servers run it, for starters -- while struggling with the stigma that it isn't polished enough for desktop use. Those days are over, and word is getting out. Linux is quickly becoming the OS you'd set up for your grandmother, with no fuss over activation, software updates, or viruses. Unlike any version of Windows or Mac OS, Linux is open-source. What does this mean to musicians? For starters, there are no company secrets to keep or non-disclosure agreements to sign, so software developers and users alike can get on the same page very quickly, speeding the flow of bug fixes and feature additions.

Linux demands more nuts-and-bolts computer knowledge for pro audio than for web browsing, but if you've ever tried to troubleshoot a latency or driver issue on a store-bought laptop, you're probably still listening. If you upgrade your hard drive, you won't have to reactivate all your apps due to the hardware change, and when you discover a cool tool or workflow, you can share it with friends without them shelling out hundreds of dollars or resorting to piracy. With the exception of Linux versions that include commercial tech support, most everything in the Linux world is free for the asking, Many developers accept voluntary donations, which we encourage you to make.

HOW IS IT DONE?

Let's look over the shoulder of Aaron Krister-Johnson, the keyboardist and choir director at Temple Sholom in Chicago. He also composes incidental music for local theater, and is half of the electronica duo Divide by Pi, Keyboard's June '04 unsigned artist of the month. The core of his home studio is a PC running Linux (see Figure 1).

To obtain Linux, you download a particular distribution or "distro," which is a particular version of Linux someone put together, for free or a donation. Some distros are available boxed at very low cost. Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com) is popular for home-computer tasks, but Aaron uses Zenwalk (www.zenwalk.org). Software compiled for a particular distro will only run on that distro, so most come with several free applications that you can install along with the basic OS. We recommend Fedora (www.fedoraproject.org), because you can then install the Planet CCRMA package (ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software), which includes just about every Linux audio application in existence.

Speaking of music applications, the most popular DAW for Linux is Ardour, and Aaron also uses JACK (see "You Don't Know JACK?" below), a soft synth called ZynSubAddFx, and an arpeggiator he wrote called Pymidichaos. Some distros come with binaries -- apps that have been compiled, i.e. converted from the programming language the developers used to the ones and zeroes computers understand at their innermost level. Three such distros are meant to provide install-and-go solutions for Linux-curious musicians: Studio to Go (www.ferventsoftware.com), Musix (www.musix.org.ar/en) and 64Studio (www.64studio.com).

But sooner or later (most likely sooner), you're going to have to take some groovy, free program you've downloaded and compile it yourself. This is where musicians used to commercial software might get scared off. Fear not, and remember that all the actual pr

On AIX, every volume is an LVM-managed one

Only the /boot partition is outside LVM control ---

I use LVM on my media server, as it allows me to keep a consistent addressing format (in automatically generated playlists) as the disks get filled up. I currently have 4 disks arranged as 1 LVM volume with a total capacity of 1.3TiB.
Another plus point being that as the disks age and available disk capacities rise, I can migrate the data within the LVM group onto the newest drives and then replace the older ones. I have 1x 200GB, 1x 250GB, 2x 500GB currently installed.

[root@kids ~]# pvscan
PV /dev/sdb VG my_movies_group lvm2 [232.88 GB / 0 free]
PV /dev/sda VG my_movies_group lvm2 [186.31 GB / 0 free]
PV /dev/sdc VG my_movies_group lvm2 [465.76 GB / 0 free]
PV /dev/sdd VG my_movies_group lvm2 [465.76 GB / 0 free]
Total: 4 [1.32 TB] / in use: 4 [1.32 TB] / in no VG: 0 [0 ]

Well ... it seems that the Fedora team (and Board Chairman) do not seem to share your opinion of CentOS (they must not have gotten the memo to hate CentOS before we shared a FOSDEM 2007 devroom). Also see:

LinuxFormat Article

I'm sure that Red Hat would be much better off if the people who want to install a free server did not install CentOS (which can easily run anything on RHEL later if support and a paid for OS is required) ... but instead used debian or ubuntu. Of course they wouldn't ... Red Hat benefits greatly because CentOS gets software installed that can easily move to their flag ship product when and if the time is right.

Also, take a look at the Red Hat bugzilla sometime and do a search for CentOS. The code base gets seen / installed by many more people on many more pieces of hardware, many of which would not have installed on RHEL but some other free OS if CentOS were unavailable. This allows RH to get feedback and bug reports from many more people to stablize their codebase. All the time, RH does not need to provide any real support to this group of people.

You can even argue that because of the popularity of CentOS combined with some big name 3rd party repositories like RPMForge and KBS CentOS Extras that a whole new need was demonstrated, and that the EPEL project was created to help fill that need. Again, Red Hat and RHEL users benefit greatly because of this colaboration.

There are other numerous advantages as well ... but that is enough for now. No, Red Hat is not loosing sleep because CentOS exists ... indeed, quite the opposite.

Well, if you want to be a red hat beta tester, that's up to you. I mean, I want to be a Ubuntu beta tester, but in order to become one I had to edit my apt-sources and s/edgy/feisty/ and do a dist-upgrade. All Fedora users are beta testers.

If you don't like Fedora, don't forget that it's not the only free-as-in-beer RedHat system. My servers run CentOS, which is essentially RHEL recompiled. I don't have "shitpiles of money", but I still use a solid system that RedHat built. The only practical difference is that I don't have a guaranteed support channel. Are you suggesting that I should get that without paying them money? How would RedHat be able to pay the engineers who write so much software? And Ubuntu doesn't have that sort of support - should they be held to a different standard?

All of the people I know who use Gentoo use it because of the amazing build toolset and customizability. I can compile everything with "-g" and debug anything on the system through glibc... and see source listings at any stack frame. That's incredibly valuable

You should try a more mainstream distro again. They've anticipated this need, so you don't need to rebuild anything. RedHat-based systems (and I believe SuSE and Debian/Ubuntu as well) all have a build system which extracts debugging symbols from binaries, placing them in -debuginfo packages along with the source code. gdb has been modified to look for debugging info in this location. You can run gstack on a coredump, realize you don't have the right debugging symbols, do a yum install foo-debuginfo, run it again, and get the right information. (And even have list do the right thing.) You can audit exactly how much disk space these packages use with a simple du -sk /usr/lib/debug and remove them without rebuilding. There's more information on the Fedora wiki.

CFLAGS customization makes Gentoo users (particularly ricers) feel superior, but in practice, I don't see any advantages. (I've never seen a situation where it made a worthwhile performance boost. There was an interesting thread about this on pgsql-performance a while back.) One major disadvantage is obvious: long compile times. A couple less so: it's harder to reproduce bugs affected by compiler options, and you need a separate scheme for updating systems which can't do the compile themselves.

I used to recompile the kernel with flags for my hardware. Now the system has been modularized, so unless I'm writing kernel code myself, I just use the RedHat vendor kernel which has been extensively QAed. In time, the same thing will happen to userspace binaries with optional dependencies: instead of detecting at configure time that I have support therefore modifying the base package's code, we'll move toward add-in modules that get dlload()ed in to provide the external functional that dependencies are needed for.

Odd... I've never met anyone who was actually fanatical about RedHat. Or even really liked it. It usually comes down to either "we can buy support for it" or "it installs and is hands-off after that." Back when I still used Fedora, I fell into the latter category... tolerating it, because it worked.

RedHat makes a good system, and they make contributions that benefit everyone. That you don't know anyone fanatical about it is not surprising. You're a Gentoo guy who hasn't used any other system in a while, so your sample's pretty skewed. And it's rare for people to get fanatical about the dominant system, particularly people who have an irrational fear of companies with working business models.

All of the people I know who use Gentoo use it because of the amazing build toolset and customizability. I can compile everything with "-g" and debug anything on the system through glibc... and see source listings at any stack frame. That's incredibly valuable

You should try a more mainstream distro again. They've anticipated this need, so you don't need to rebuild anything. RedHat-based systems (and I believe SuSE and Debian/Ubuntu as well) all have a build system which extracts debugging symbols from binaries, placing them in -debuginfo packages along with the source code. gdb has been modified to look for debugging info in this location. You can run gstack on a coredump, realize you don't have the right debugging symbols, do a yum install foo-debuginfo, run it again, and get the right information. (And even have list do the right thing.) You can audit exactly how much disk space these packages use with a simple du -sk /usr/lib/debug and remove them without rebuilding. There's more information on the Fedora wiki.

CFLAGS customization makes Gentoo users (particularly ricers) feel superior, but in practice, I don't see any advantages. (I've never seen a situation where it made a worthwhile performance boost. There was an interesting thread about this on pgsql-performance a while back.) One major disadvantage is obvious: long compile times. A couple less so: it's harder to reproduce bugs affected by compiler options, and you need a separate scheme for updating systems which can't do the compile themselves.

I used to recompile the kernel with flags for my hardware. Now the system has been modularized, so unless I'm writing kernel code myself, I just use the RedHat vendor kernel which has been extensively QAed. In time, the same thing will happen to userspace binaries with optional dependencies: instead of detecting at configure time that I have support therefore modifying the base package's code, we'll move toward add-in modules that get dlload()ed in to provide the external functional that dependencies are needed for.

Odd... I've never met anyone who was actually fanatical about RedHat. Or even really liked it. It usually comes down to either "we can buy support for it" or "it installs and is hands-off after that." Back when I still used Fedora, I fell into the latter category... tolerating it, because it worked.

RedHat makes a good system, and they make contributions that benefit everyone. That you don't know anyone fanatical about it is not surprising. You're a Gentoo guy who hasn't used any other system in a while, so your sample's pretty skewed. And it's rare for people to get fanatical about the dominant system, particularly people who have an irrational fear of companies with working business models.

One of the contributors to Mandriva developed a drop-in parallel init system, which uses LSB tags in the init scripts to determine dependencies. This was tested in the development version for a while, until it was selected as the default before the release of Mandriva 2007.0.

See more information on prcsys

The advantages with prcsys are:
-traditional serial startup can be used
-minimal changes are required to initscripts
-LSB compliance for free

The Fedora wiki has some good discussion of why some aspects of new fangled init systems may not be desirable.

You must be thinking of Fedora.

There's a tool from RedHat (at least, available for fedora) called mock which makes the build environemnt completely separate from the local system (as long as the binaries are compatible of course) that might help considerably in separating the build environment from the local system.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Projects/Mock

Well if you can wait until Fedora 7 then this will include Smolt which is a hardware profiler which collects not only information about how many systems are running fedora, but also what hardware they are using. This should hopefully give a better picture of the usage of Fedora and may also help with pressuring harware manufacturers for better linux support.

Of course sending your details to Smolt is stictly optional so reported numbers are guaranteed to be an underestimate, but hopefully most users will participate.

Red Hat is doing this with EPEL ... http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ

see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox2

basically, the fedora team looked at what ff is doing, decided ff2 was a halfway house for what ff3 will be ( that being a true platform that can be broken down into components like gecko properly ), and so concentrating on that as the next major update to the browser that the $DISTRIBUTION packages.

you are more than welcome to go grab the .tar.gz from mozilla directly, it will run fine. they also provide a package in the development repository for the more intrepid.

i think thats pretty much the same problem the original thread of this slashdot post comes down to... ESR has determined that he'd like something that isnt in the $DISTRIBUTION to run on his machine, and has brute forced the package manager to install it with a --force or --nodeps or something.

$DISTRIBUTIONs are about providing a base system and a set of packages ( for which updates are provided for a given period ), and these are usually pretty well tested for compatibility before being pushed out into the software repositories.

what ESR appears to ask his $DISTRIBUTION to do is bend over and take a --force enima, then found his system was borked, and tried to set $DISTRIBUTION alight to make it known he wasnt happy. didnt bother to read the gun nut's comments, but i bet he didnt mention his recent involvement with linspire.

so i cant see how his actions ( and result ) could possibly be the fault of the $DISTRIBUTION

personally, i've been with redhat on my desktop since rh6, and have never had a problem with any release in either the rh or fedora brands. when i wanted software that wasnt in the official package repositories, i worked out what to do to find and configure other repositories, read what compatibility issues may arise ( these are pretty much stated in every 3rd party repository website ), then proceeded with care.

where dependency issues arise, you pick and choose what is worth installing with the package manager, and what is better off installed in /usr/local with a source build.

often the issue(s) are more likely to be that the packages themselves have been built with dependencies from too new or too old flavours of the $DISTRIBUTION, which would be something the package maintainer should be responsible for, and for the 3rd party repository maintainer(s) to ensure that the package sets identified for a particular $DISTRIBUTION are compatible with the base system libraries.

vanilla fedora, plus extras has always been stable for me, even after adding livna, atrpms and jpackage stuff ( although i did manage to get my tomcat and java libs pretty toasted with fc4 & jpackage...but not my whole OS).

Actually, a codec buddy is planned for Fedora 7. This would launch when the users tried to play certain codecs, and allow the user to install them after informing the user why they cannot be included in the main distribution.