Red Hat Linux Project Merges With Fedora

An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat has announced a merger of its Red Hat Linux Project with Fedora Linux, a group that has specialized in providing high-quality RPM packages for Red Hat. According to Red Hat, 'The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products.' From the FAQ: 'Rather than being run through product management as something that has to appear on retail shelves on a certain date, Fedora Core will be released based on schedules, set by a steering committee, that will be open and accessible to the community, as well as influenced by the community.'"

Comments

"Red Hat Artwork"

[soren42]

I think it's interesting that there is what appears to be a "core" part of the Fedora team focused on artwork.

This, alone, is an excellent move by RedHat to compete with Microsoft in a space they clearly lead the market - desktop UI.

As the Fedora site says, "Making things look pretty is the name of the game."

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Lord Kholdan]

I think it's interesting that there is what appears to be a "core" part of the Fedora team focused on artwork.

This, alone, is an excellent move by RedHat to compete with Microsoft in a space they clearly lead the market - desktop UI.

As the Fedora site says, "Making things look pretty is the name of the game."

Unfortunately what needs improvement is the GUIs of the programs, not the desktop itself. Even the best desktop is no use if 2/3 of programs have awful GUI or are commandline only.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[lanswitch]

Sure, everything has to be GUI and shiny these days. that;s something that RH understands. RH seems to have some problems lately with rpm's and dependencies, and the 9.0 release was rushed. Maybe they need Fedora to sort these things out...

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[cgranade]

True. Look at OSX and XP (Aqua v. Luna) if you for even one second doubt that prettiness is important. Why else would Apple and Microsoft each spend millions of dollars reinventing their visual styles?

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[cgranade]

This does rely on a consistant desktop, tho. Much as I hate Windows, MS has a very consistant standard for UI. Right-clicking brings up context menus (which I love), single-clicking selects, double-clicking activates, C+c copies, C+x cuts, C+v pastes, C+n is New, a disk indicates save, a folder indicates open, etc. In fact, MS's devkits (VB, VC++, etc) include standard icon sets so that developers can fit in to the Windows styling easier.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Vann_v2]

GTK includes stock icons, too. If an application uses another icon they really have to go out of their way to do it, so the only reasonable explanation is that they just don't know stock icons exist.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Randolpho]

More important than prettiness is reliability and responsiveness, two things linux currently lacks in the GUI department.

And don't think it can't be done. Just look at OSX.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[JosefK]

Unfortunately what needs improvement is the GUIs of the programs, not the desktop itself.

This problem, however, is beyond the control of Red Hat or any other distro. It's up to the developers to decide whether they want their apps to integrate nicely into a desktop environment or not. But go to any Windows shareware/freeware download sites, and you'll find just as many apps with awful GUI/widget choices.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux lacks reliability in the GUI department? What are you on? Their are issues with consistency, I agree, but GUIs like WMaker, IceWM, Fluxbox etc. are infinitely more stable than Explorer.exe.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Micah]

Why else would Apple and Microsoft each spend millions of dollars reinventing their visual styles?

Because they think it will make them money. Which it probably will.

But will these new styles really make things a lot easier?

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[typobox43]

Those may be more stable, but X itself has problems. If there's a problem with the underlying support libraries to a program, there's problems with that program - whether or not the code of that program is actually where the problem lies.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Anonymous Coward]

"'The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project."

In other words, the people in the Fedora project is free labour.

It's amazing to witness so many people in the IT-sector blessing free labour considering the fact that unemployment is enourmous.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[dillon_rinker]

MS has a very consistant standard for UI
Really? When I right-click on something, nothing happens (Pre-1995 Windows). Single-clicking opens something (Post-IE4 Windows). Keyboard shortcuts vary with the application and are subject to the whim of the application developer; CTRL-N is a new email in Outlook, but a new database in Lotus Notes.

MS's devkits include standard icon sets
Icons are also subject to the whims of the developer. In the 90s, I could always tell when a new version of Visual Basic had been released, because Windows shareware would have new and inexplicable icons.

Microsoft's user interface is not consistent over time. It is not consistent between applications, except those from the same vendor (and even then it's questionable). What seems like consistency and logic in the UI is really a huge installed base and a decade of acclimatization.

This is not intended as a bash on MS; the same would be true if Macs were 90% prevalent, or if Gnome were. It is, however, intended as a bash on those who think the MS UI is the Correct Way (tm) to do things, rather than the conventional way to do things.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[akahige]

As the Fedora site says, "Making things look pretty is the name of the game."

ironic that they claim that, then lay the site out in a completely unreadable font. not too reassuring, that...

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Anonymous Coward]

Why else would Apple and Microsoft each spend millions of dollars reinventing their visual styles?

You mean, why does Apple re-invent visual styles, and then Microsoft rip it off in a half-baked way and add way too much blue?

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Pros_n_Cons]

Unfortunately what needs improvement is the GUIs of the programs, not the desktop itself. Even the best desktop is no use if 2/3 of programs have awful GUI or are commandline only

Read the developer and HIG guidelines HERE I think the direction they're going as far as GUI is excellent. look how nice things are now since RH did thier GUI crackdown last year.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[BigBir3d]

And how does Gnome or KDE compare now with their 1995 editions?

And what is the difference between correctness and convention? Point of view.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Randolpho]

You hit the nail right on the head. X is exactly what I was talking about.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[ShinmaWa]

This problem, however, is beyond the control of Red Hat or any other distro.

Yeah, its a shame, too. If only there was a license that would allow people to see the source then modify/redistribute it as they see fit.....

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[bfields]

As the Fedora site says, "Making things look pretty is the name of the game."

There's a difference between "prettiness" and usability.

A purely commandline OS could be extremely usable. But no linux distribution that I've seen is, mainly because it's so heterogeneous--given a new commandline tool, is it going to use short options or long options? If short options, can they be combined or not? For options that can be toggled on or off, do you indicate this by preceding them by "+" or "-", or by preceding the negative options by "no-"? Do you get the definitive documentation from man pages, info pages, "-h", "--help", or somplace else?

And the gui's used in any linux distribution often have exactly the same problems. It's not a problem when they're not pretty; what sucks is when they're inconsistent and unintuitive.

--Bruce Fields

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[JosefK]

You're right - let's tell all those developers at Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, et al., to get their heads out of their asses and start rewriting all of those crappy programs on freshmeat. For free. By next week.

Oh, and when you're fixing the apps, don't do anything that might upset the app maintainers.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[cgranade]

I'm not trying to say that MS is consistant over time, but rather within a certain version. Further, I don't think for even a moment that MS is the only Right Way (r). I only mean to point out that MS does employ a level of consistancy over a version space, and can use this to leverage other applications to follow, and thus perpetuate a consistancy that ultimately eases learning the system. It can be argued that this destroys innovation in UI design, as in the case of GoldWave recently moving to the right-click => context-menu binding from a binding that made much more sense in the context of a sound editor (setting selection range ending).

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Overly Critical Guy]

Really? When I right-click on something, nothing happens (Pre-1995 Windows).

Jesus, that was over eight years ago.

Single-clicking opens something (Post-IE4 Windows).

No, it doesn't. Only if you turn that option on.

Keyboard shortcuts vary with the application and are subject to the whim of the application developer; CTRL-N is a new email in Outlook, but a new database in Lotus Notes.

90% of applications follow standard shortcut procedure, but there are always the exceptions, which aren't the fault of Windows consistency.

MS's devkits include standard icon sets
Icons are also subject to the whims of the developer. In the 90s, I could always tell when a new version of Visual Basic had been released, because Windows shareware would have new and inexplicable icons.

Um...huh? What does the changing of some default dev icon have to do with the interface consistency? Most apps use their own custom icons.

Microsoft's user interface is not consistent over time. It is not consistent between applications, except those from the same vendor (and even then it's questionable). What seems like consistency and logic in the UI is really a huge installed base and a decade of acclimatization.

Completely false. Windows is considered a bastion of homogenized consistency (good or bad), especially compared to the hell that is the Linux desktop attempt.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[cgranade]

No, I don't think it will make it one whit easier for users. If anything this reinvention of the wheel makes it harder. But it does make money, and that is the ultimate motivation for MS and Apple. They give a damn about users only insofar as they get money from them.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[iceT]

MS has a very consistant standard for UI.

Bullshit. Microsoft USED to have a very consistant UI. Gradually, they are corrupting individual packages to make them INCONSISTANT.

Example: Word vs. Excel.

Open 2 word documents. You get 2 items on the task bar. And each window is totally seperate. Use the upper-right close button to close one window, then then other.

Now, open 2 EXCEL documents.. Two windows... Two icons on the task bar. Click the upper-right close button on one of the windows... BOTH WINDOWS CLOSE>

Excel has always had a dependent window model, each spreadsheet was a sub window of the master window (a la program manager in Windows 3.1), but, users complained because each sheet didn't show up in the task bar.. So they completely trashed the dependent window model for Excel, and now window-management between Word and Excel have different behaviors.

There are other consistancies in double-clicking in windows explorer, and etc..

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[fault0]

The problem is that one third of the linux world uses gtk stock icons (and gnome icon themes), and another third uses qaction icons (and kde icon themes), and still another third uses their own icons.

RH has fixed the first two with a consistant (bluecurve) set of icons, but it's again, fairly easy to break.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[fault0]

Responsiveness? OSX's GUI is *way* less responsive than X, because everything is doublebuffered through the video card. That makes it *very* smooth, but it's not responsive at all. X isn't terribly responsive either, but it's better than OSX's.

Windows is probably the most responsive.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[lokedhs]

This reminds me...

Why is Windows so consistent in having Control-C etc... being cut&paste keys. They add a million "email-buttons" and other crap to the "windows keyboards" but they fail to add the thee most important buttons...

Cut, Copy and Paste buttons.

Sun has had them for 15 or so years. Fortunately I can cofigure my Sun keyboard I have connected to my Linux PC to use these buttons for copy&paste. I have yet to find a way to do it in Windows.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft did have an "MS Office" keyboard that actually had useful button such as cut/copy/paste.

Apple had the right idea by putting Cut/Copy/Paste/Undo/Help right up on the F-Key row back with the old extended keyboard. Too bad they dropped it.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell? Hey, I'm willing to put up with a fast, reliable desktop, no adware or spyware or such crap, even if TWO FRIGGING CHECKBOXES DON'T LOOK IDENTICAL.

Sheesh, get some perspective. Car dashboards are different. Microwaves are different. VCRs. DVDs. Things can be intuitive and usable without having to be identical to everything else out there, you know.

What have you got to say about that, eh?

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[lokedhs]

90% of applications follow standard shortcut procedure, but there are always the exceptions, which aren't the fault of Windows consistency.

Umm, Control-F makes bold text in the swedish version of MS Office, and starts a search in just about every other application. They can't even get it right within their own set of applications.

Completely false. Windows is considered a bastion of homogenized consistency (good or bad), especially compared to the hell that is the Linux desktop attempt.

If you install a stock RedHat 9 system and start using everything they ship, and, when you want to download new apps, make sure you download GNOME or GTK+ apps, you are looking at a pretty standardised user interface.

Before I installed RedHat 9 my GF was rebooting into windows all the time (I had this WindowMaker+assorted tools setup) becuase she just felt Windows was easier to use. After I reinstalled with RedHat 9 and decided to stop mess around I realised that she wasn't rebooting anymore. I didn't even ask her. She really felt it was nicer to use the GNOME desktop than Windows.

So, you can complain all you like about how crappy the Linux desktop is, but I have actual proof that at least one fairly computer ilitterate person prefers GNOME before Windows. (and no, she's no power user. she uses Mozilla, various text editors, Open Office, GIMP (for working with the digital photos) and I hardly ever have to help her).

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[lokedhs]

I guess they weren't k3wl enough. You're not Internet-savvy if you have an "Office keyboard". If you got one of those "Web keyboards" though...

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Anonymous Coward]

Renice your X server. I've run X on 486 boxes and it's faster than Win95; you can't attribute the bloat and sluggish performance of massive desktops like KDE and GNOME to X. It doesn't work like that. XFree86 runs on low-end hardware, but you'd better run IceWM or FluxBox on them too.

Go and see X installations in the real world, on low-end SGI boxes. X is fine. XFree86 could do with some improvements. KDE and GNOME are huge, bloated and slow (although rather cool admittedly!).

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Anonymous Coward]

What you prefer: Free labor or hire Cheap (ala crapy) Indy labor.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Overly Critical Guy]

Umm, Control-F makes bold text in the swedish version of MS Office, and starts a search in just about every other application. They can't even get it right within their own set of applications.

Um, hello? That's the Swedish version.

So, you can complain all you like about how crappy the Linux desktop is, but I have actual proof that at least one fairly computer ilitterate person prefers GNOME before Windows.

Wow. I'm convinced now.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[lokedhs]

Um, hello? That's the Swedish version.

Well, MS Office is the only swedish application I can think of that doesn't use Control-F for search. Say what you like, but the shortcuts are not consistent. It's all up to the developer.

And by the way, how many GNOME applications can you think of that doesn't use Control-C etc, for cupt&paste (unless you configure it otherwise).

Wow. I'm convinced now.

I never expected you to be. The intention was to convince other readers.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[dash2]

Actually, I think it is more pleasant to work with systems that look and feel "easy on the eye". I've just installed a recent Mandrake and the default font makes things look very pleasant.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[konmaskisin]

"MS has a very consistant standard for UI"

Not in my office. This is such an oft repeated statement everyone thinks it's true. It is not true.

Here sme things require two clicks some one; on some right click gives context some right click produces nothing; some use Ctrl-this some use Ctrl-that for the same function. And that's the MS applications. Overall the desktop (NT4.0 with SAP, Lotus, Java, legacy apps written for Win3.1, IE5, OfficeXP) looks like hell and has no consistency whatsoever.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[ball-lightning]

Wow, I never even noticed it before. Actually it gets weirder. Depending on what you are doing, and the way you exit, sometimes only one windows closes and sometimes two. That said, I think multiple documents coming up on the taskbar is the "best thing ever" =D

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Zork the Almighty]

Does it replace "cool" with "k3wl" ?

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[neonprimetime]

you excite me...21/F/NY ?

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[neonprimetime]

Before I installed RedHat 9 my GF was rebooting into windows all the time (I had this WindowMaker+assorted tools setup) becuase she just felt Windows was easier to use. After I reinstalled with RedHat 9 and decided to stop mess around I realised that she wasn't rebooting anymore. I didn't even ask her. She really felt it was nicer to use the GNOME desktop than Windows.

Is your GF available?
my number is...

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[forgotmypassword]

cat /var/log/XFree86.0.log | grep -i buffer
(II) Loading extension DOUBLE-BUFFER
(**) NVIDIA(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32
(--) NVIDIA(0): Linear framebuffer at 0xD0000000

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[0x0d0a]

Jesus, that was over eight years ago.

Fair enough.

No, it doesn't. Only if you turn that option on.

No. It does *unless you turn that option off*. Very large difference. The vast majority of desktops use the default.

Windows is considered a bastion of homogenized consistency (good or bad)

Wow. I'm not sure exactly who've you been talking to, but they either aren't HCI or were buzzed at the time. Windows is infamous for being used as Microsoft's testing grounds for the latest version of their widgets (which go first into Office, then into IE and Windows). MS has masses of odd little don't-quite-fit controls in their apps. Witness the big-Motif-looking-button above the mailbox list in Outlook Express, or the Start Menu -- the button that acts like a menu (but a menu that acts differently from all other menus on the system). Windows is up to three user-visible layers of filesystem (8.3, long filenames, Explorer-only features like shortcuts), which are hell from a consistency point of view.

That's just with core MS software. The really atrocious UIs come from third party VB apps. Say what you will about Linux, most volunteer efforts have a far more consistent interface than their Windows shareware equivalents.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[0x0d0a]

Double buffering is not the bottleneck. It's layers of software involved. OS X has many. X has to ram most things through the networking system. Windows is compartatively direct.

Just so that you're aware of the fact, double-buffering takes the same amount of time on all the systems you mentioned. You're probably thinking of vsync-synching, which still doesn't produce perceptible response delay.

Heck, it's even more complex than that. Even systems with few layers of software involved can be slow. Look at the cooperatively-multitasking classic Mac OS. Not much between it and the pixels, but a click could take quite some time to be processed.

X needs to context-switch at least once for each chunk of drawing operations.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[infoovld]

eMachines have Cut, Copy, and Paste on their KBDS

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[lokedhs]

eMachines? What's that? Oh, never mind, google told me.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not simply do grep -i buffer /var/log/XFree86.0.log? :P

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[Overly Critical Guy]

No. It does *unless you turn that option off*. Very large difference. The vast majority of desktops use the default.

What on earth are you talking about? There is no single Windows installation that has it on by default. Not a one.

Not Windows 95, not 98, not ME, not XP.

Re:"Red Hat Artwork"

[forgotmypassword]

because i cat'ed it first to make sure it looked ok

then i went up one in my history and appended the grep part

Does that mean apt will be included?

[Kynde]

But isn't up2date the service they plan on making money with?

Re:Does that mean apt will be included?

[Majix]

The new up2date already available in rawhide and to be included in the next beta already includes APT and Yum repository support. The yum tool (very apt-get like) will also be included with the base distribution in addition to up2date.

AFAIK Red Hat will not sell support for the Fedora distribution. If you want support go with the Enterprise products, of which I'm sure we'll see more of in the future.

Re:Does that mean apt will be included?

[wfberg]

But isn't up2date the service they plan on making money with?

Please some-one answer this.. I was looking into fedora because up2date simply didn't work for patching sshd lately (server too busy to cater to free-as-in-beer accounts) and my budget is roughly less than a shoestring :-/

Re:Does that mean apt will be included?

[Znonymous Coward]

yum update openssh

Should work in the next release.

In the mean time Download UM.

Re:Does that mean apt will be included?

[warmcat]

Apologies for the blatent plug, but you might be interested in up3date, which is free in the GPL, money and survey senses, and lets you autoupdate as a cron job from Redhat FTP mirrors or set up your own local HTTP mirrors for supporting multiple machines.

Re:Does that mean apt will be included?

[Koatdus]

Another choice for keeping your redhat system up to date is RH-ERATTA. It can be found on sourceforge. It is basicly a script that compares the errata dir on an ftp site with a local copy and downloads anything you don't have. You can use switches to have it email you the results, compare what is installed vs. what is available, download errata for just the version you are using, download for other versions or multiple versions, download errata only if the package is installed, etc. You then install the RPM's by hand but that is not hard. I have it set up to run in the middle of the night a couple of times a week and email me if anything new was downloaded. If something big comes out like the latest openssh problems I just run it by hand. One more thing. Be sure that you edit the script to change the redhat mirror it is pointed to. Otherwise your updates can be problematic as the default mirror is sometimes swamped. (I tried several and found one that is almost always fast, and no I am not going to tell you which mirror I use.)

Re:Does that mean apt will be included?

[Kynde]

apt (for RH) does _just_that_ already and more... say, freshrpms has a very good repository and so does fedora.

Re:Does that mean apt will be included?

[repetty]

Very cool. I was pretty bummed when Red Hat started making me jump through hoops to use up2date, a utility which has always worked very well for me.

Thanks for posting it. This is what "community" is all about.

--Richard

Re:Does that mean apt will be included?

[DA-MAN]

Personally I like autorpm.

Autorpm with a cron job can add custom rpm's, update custom rpm's and update the distro. All based on perl.

Automatically cron's itself too, perfect for mass updating using local mirrors.

No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[Mr_Icon]

Red Hat Linux 9 was the last in the line. Instead of being "Red Hat Linux 10" it's going to be "Fedora Linux 1[.0]" when it's released within the next few weeks/months.

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[Azghoul]

I think this is totally right, wish I had a mod point. Pretty interesting that "RedHat" will be going the way of the enterprise, while "Fedora" will be the community version.

Pretty cool, IMO.

Now, I just wish they'd update packages AND version numbers, so I can more easily satisfy silly Symantec / Norton port security scanning... :-P (say Hi, httpd-2.0.40- with- everything- up-to-47- added- but- not-the- version- number)

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[chadm1967]

I agree.......

We need good Enterprise "support" companies like Red Hat if Linux wants to make it really big with large companies. It's also very cool to have a "community" version of Linux that everyone can help build.

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[DarkOx]

Yep great plan. Lets see I have a well trusted and for the most part well respected brand name. Perfect business plan is then:
1. Change product name to something few have head about.

2. ????

3.Profit.$$$

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[swb]

You know you're right, they are squandering quite a bit of brand identity.

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[lordcorusa]

In the past, Red Hat only backported security fixes and major bug fixes, but not new features and other new things, in the updates to a given release. So your httpd was not in fact version 2.4.47, but 2.4.40 with security patches for 2.4.47. This practice helped ensure intra-release stability for commercial users. It is considered an acceptable practice and is used by other distros, like Debian stable.

Now, one of the goals of the Fedora Porject is to do more maintenence upstream, from which I imply that they want to end this practice and simply bring new versions of software immediately into the update stream, rather than waiting for the next release cycle. This will be better for home users, but it might in some cases not be good for commercial users, who would rather stability over bleeding edge.

By more clearly splitting the hobbyist OS from the enterprise OS, they can now offer the best to each world.

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[zerocool^]

I beg to differ with you on this one... I think redhat will still be the commercial one for at least the next release.

Which, by the way, no one knows if it will be called Trendy "Red Hat X" or if they will stick with Plain "Red Hat 10".

Having said that, good lord, quality control will be a godsend in redhat RPM's. If for no other reason than to make sure that THE SOFTWARE IN ONE RELEASE IS ACTUALLY COMPATABLE WITH THE OTHER SOFTWARE IN THE SAME RELEASE. I pray for the day that redhat actually tests their software, to make sure they don't do something completely retarted like redhat 8 again. For example: Bundling apache 2.0.x with mod_perl that works with apache 1.3.x, but NOT with 2.0.x.

Thank you, fedora, for adding quality control. Redhat may only care that it looks pretty, and I know that they want us to spend $4000 on RH-enterprise, but it's important to have standards, and releaseing software *after* testing and *after* checking to make sure that it works at all is pretty important.

~Will //gentoo fan

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think they are dropping the redhat name for their actual, money making products. They will lose some name recog in the community, but name recog among people who don't buy product doesn't keep a company afloat for long...

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a great plan! The Red Hat brand name is a respected one and now, you'll have to their entreprise product to use it.

What I mean by "paying to use it" is that ISP or ASP won't be able to say "we'll host your site on Red Hat Linux" unless they buy the entreprise version with support. If you still want to go with the community version, you'll have to say "we'll host your site on Fedora Linux" ... which won't allow you to benefit from the Red Hat brand recognition.

For community users, who cares what it's called, we know what it is! This has an impact on people who benefit from the Red Hat brand name without paying a penny to Red Hat. And if brand name matters, those people will start sending some money to Red Hat!

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[Azghoul]

Yep, I know about RH's policy of not pushing out new versions until they're really needed, but it's hell when you have to try to explain that to a under-knowledgeable security guy for the Federal Agency you're contracting for:

"Well, my security scan says you're using Apache version 2.0.40, but the latest version is 2.0.46, and there are security fixes in there that you'll need."

"I know, but my version of Apache has the security fixes back-ported to 2.0.40, so it's safe."

"uhh". Blank stare.

If you can come up with a good response that'll keep the dogs at bay, please share! :)

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[AKnightCowboy]

This practice helped ensure intra-release stability for commercial users. It is considered an acceptable practice and is used by other distros, like Debian stable.

Backporting patches is fine as long as they add a custom header to things to return the distribution-specific information. For example, with this recent spat of OpenSSH vulnerabilities my patched Red Hat 9 boxes still show they're running OpenSSH 3.5p1, while my Debian (granted, unstable, but it applies to stable as well) boxes show: "SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_3.6.1p2 Debian 1:3.6.1p2-9". At least I can quickly scan my boxes and know what's upgraded and what's not. It may not matter with 2 or 3, but when you have 300-400 to worry about some can slip through.

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[Crispy Critters]

"Red Hat Linux 9 was the last in the line. Instead of being "Red Hat Linux 10" it's going to be "Fedora Linux 1[.0]" when it's released within the next few weeks/months."

From reading their web pages, it certainly sounds like that is more or less the plan. It seems that RH wants to drop the consumer version of their distro. This amply clear from the packages that have disappeared in RH8 and RH9. Considering the hacker/hobbyist base of Linux, I was shocked to see them dropping mature popular window managers (fvwm et al), and classics like xtetris and xevil, as well as UNIX staples like fortune.

In all cases, it is because these programs conflict with the goal of selling the Redhat distro as a business desktop system, with minimum variations between installations and nothing "non-professional". RH employees have said this on mailing lists and in bugzilla comments.

They don't care about those of us that go to Fry's and buy their boxed sets. They need the businesses that will buy installation and support for 10,000 seats.

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[MSG]

I was shocked to see them dropping mature popular window managers (fvwm et al), and classics like xtetris and xevil, as well as UNIX staples like fortune.

In all cases, it is because these programs conflict with the goal of selling the Redhat distro as a business desktop system, with minimum variations between installations and nothing "non-professional"

Actually, xtetris and fortune were both dropped for licensing reasons. Tetris is copyrighted, and Red Hat doesn't have the rights to distribute it. Fortune doesn't have copyrights to a large portion of the quotes in the standard databases. These items, along with mp3 software support were dropped as Red Hat (and everyone else) becomes more aware of the property issues that have from time to time been ignored.

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[JoeBuck]

Backports are actually safer than version upgrades. Version upgrades introduce new features, and it is likely that this introduces new bugs as well. If you have a working system, it's better to backport security fixes, because it reduces the likelihood that you'll break something.

I hope that the Fedora folks will continue to do backports in addition to doing new releases.

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[BiggerIsBetter]

Once again, meddling lawyers spoil the fun for everyone. :(

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[James Manning]

http://www.debian.org/security/faq#oldversion
htt p://www.debian.org/security/faq#version

I use those links to explain security backports all the time, even for clients. It's well-phrased and then tend to "get it" once it's phrased the way it is in that FAQ

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[Anonymous Coward]

by the way, no one knows if it will be called Trendy "Red Hat X" or if they will stick with Plain "Red Hat 10".

It won't be called either of those names.

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[DA-MAN]

Install the src rpm, change the apache banner, recompile and install!

That should keep this goofball away from you for a while!

Re:No more "Red Hat Linux" product.

[Azghoul]

Now THAT's an explanation I can go for! :) Thanks, man

History of Red Hat/Fedora

[jbellis]

Oddly (for something one link away from the Fedora main page), it has nothing to do with Fedora. Still, the Red Hat timeline under History is an interesting read, particularly for someone like me who only used relatively modern versions of Red Hat. (Starting with 5.0 in my case.)

Still wouldn't mind seeing a history of Fedora per se though. Seems like it's a more open, community-oriented Rawhide. Is that accurate?

Re:History of Red Hat/Fedora

[MSG]

Seems like it's a more open, community-oriented Rawhide. Is that accurate?

No, it's more like a more open, community-oriented GNU/Linux distribution. Rawhide will continue to exist as an unstable repository of packages that are being tested (as it's always been). Fedora will apparently be replacing the traditional "Red Hat Linux". Red Hat's "products" will include their Enterprise Linux distributions, developer tools, database product, etc.

Never heard of it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never heard of this project before and I am curious as to the reason for its existence. It would seem that the Red Hat Corporation has the same function as the Red Hat Project/Fedora so, what is the point of the redundant project?

Re:Never heard of it.

[sardonic2]

http://mirrors.kernel.org/ has listed Fedora project for awhile as a local mirror.

Re:Never heard of it.

[Anonymous Coward]

One related news, FreeBSD merges with freshports.org and NetBSD merges with pkgsrc.org

Why the name Fedora?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why Fedora? Why not sombrero or chapeaux? Why pick something associated with the mob?

Re:Why the name Fedora?

[sardonic2]

Fedora - a low soft felt hat with the crown creased lengthwise Could it be a red hat?

Re:Why the name Fedora?

[Anonymous Coward]

If only more people would ask that question of themselves every day. "Why do I buy products made by union labor, which is well known to be associated with the mob?" "Why do I go to Vegas/Reno, also known to be associated with the mob?" "Why do I vote for the candidate that gets labor's support, which is known for its mob influence?"

We'd be in a much better place today.

Re:Why the name Fedora?

[J. J. Ramsey]

Because the red hat in the Red Hat logo is a fedora.

Re:Why the name Fedora?

[ZoneGray]

When I see fedoras, I don't think so much of the mob... nowadays, it's more like, "Uh, oh, better change lanes, I don't want to get stuck behind THAT guy." Also, you want to make sure you don't stand in front of one while they're backing up. A brick wall is scant cover from a rampaging Buick Regal.

Re:Why the name Fedora?

[sharkey]

Why Fedora?

Two words: Indiana Jones

Re:Why the name Fedora?

[theshowmecanuck]

Why don't they call it "pimp hat" and change the colour to pink?

motif

[Savatte]

at least they are sticking with the hat motif. If a company like Caldera merged, it wouldn't make any sense.

Re:motif

[fr2asbury]

Well . . . it's a bit of a stretch but a caldera is in part created by a volcano "blowing it's top."
Hat's are tradiationally worn on top of the head.
I don't know. It'd be contrived, but one could make a connection.

What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA?

[JoeBuck]

Fedora currently distributes packages like xmms-mp3, mplayer and ogle, which violate US patents, as well as the DMCA. Will those packages now go away?

What is "Open Source" to Fedora?

[MadChicken]

They don't make it explicitly clear. I would like to see something like Debian's Free software guidelines

And is "Red Hat" proper now a non-free [as in beer] OS?

Re:What is "Open Source" to Fedora?

[DaveAtFraud]

My bet is that Fedora will move "up" the release scale while the various Red Hat "Advanced Server" products will move down the scale. Fedora will be more like "rawhide" and AS will be more like Debian stable. Both will remain free [as in beer] but the only *easy* way to get the exact set of RPMs that constitute the Adavanced Server line will be to cough up some money. This still won't get you the support, updates, etc. It just means that Red Hat can't stop you from finding and assembling the exact same set of RPMs as constitute AS. Otherwise they violate the GPL. The RPMs will still be available and downloadable, Red Hat just don't have to provide the ISOs unless they want to and they still meet the letter of the GPL without competing with themselves by giving the product away for free.

I don't consider this at all bad. Red Hat makes more money as a *service company* selling a very stable version of Linux to companies and organizations that are willing to pay for the service. They continue to support the open source community by providing Fedora. They don't have to continue to be both on the cutting edge and providing a stable product at the same time through the same product. Linux continues to advance through Fedora with new versions getting "released" and Red Hat incorporates the results into AS when it is sufficiently shaken out. Red Hat benefits from Fedora by allowing them to steer more so than they would be able to otherwise.

One other benefit: this also takes some of the competitive pressure off of Mandrake and some of the other mainstream (not just for developers like say gentoo) consumer/desktop distros since Red Hat effectively pulls out of the "boxed set for end users" distro business.

Re:What is "Open Source" to Fedora?

[693746]

Red Hat can't stop you from finding and assembling the exact same set of RPMs as constitute AS. Otherwise they violate the GPL. The RPMs will still be available and downloadable...

It's my understanding that under the GPL, Red Hat doesn't have to provide you a damn thing. In fact, it doesn't have to provide RPMs to anyone. All it has to do is provide source code to anyone to whom it distributes RHAS to. And it's perfectly legal for them to require you to submit proof of purchase to get that source code.

Erik

Debian

[jdavidb]

Sounds like RedHat is trying to achieve some of the advantages of Debian. I'll welcome this, although I won't switch any machines over right away.

It'll be nice to get new software packages and rpms. I think apt-rpm has illustrated the need and the market for this. RedHat also has several great advantages over Debian, notably the installation process and more up to date software, so this could really revitalize them.

With projects like Linux From Scratch and Gentoo, distribution-building has gone fomr being an arcane art of wizards to something the community can do, and I'm glad RedHat wants to partner with the community in doing this.

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmm, while I like this move, probably heading to Mandrake 9.2 till they get their bugs worked out with the merger....

Wish they would keep the RH name

Re:Debian

[SwansonMarpalum]

Having recently swapped over to Gentoo from Red Hat there are three advantages to it that are fundamentally against the Red Hat machine: 1) Strong, FLAT LEVEL community. People in Gentoo help each other and there is no official Gentoo support facility. Likewise as Gentoo isn't trying to make money off of support contracts they actively work with the community forums and support them. I think this was the big thing that made me switch. 2) Streamlined "distribution". Gentoo is a meta-distribution engineered for helping you build your own distribution package from the ground up, letting you control what will be supported by the binaries you generate yourself. RedHat has a monolithic attempt to support everything out of the box. 3) Portage vs. Up2Date. Both can serve similar purposes (though portage will do more than up2date as most anyone who's used gentoo can tell you) in that portage lets you keep software up to date as up2date also does. Portage is a free service that is integrated into the heart of Gentoo. Up2date you have to pay for more than one machine (and have to 'pay' with demographic information every 60 days). If you're confident with Linux it can really be a nobrainer.

Re:Debian

[generic-man]

The performance gains from compiling your own software are negligible at best, and certainly don't offset the 23+ hours that it took to compile Gentoo on a modest machine (700 MHz Athlon, 384 MB RAM).

The community for Gentoo is still rather small, and thus close-knit. Once it becomes as popular as, say, Debian, the ops in #gentoo will resort to "RTFM and STFU, noob" as in most Linux help forums.

Gentoo is the flavor of the month. Once something more bleeding-edge and less popular comes along, it will die out.

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

There was no mention made in the parent about performance gains; doesn't matter.

Community is good now, and might become like every other later? Okay, fine... what's your point.

Flavour of the month; well it works now for a lot of people, so they use it. That's what Linux is about.

Something more bleeding-edge and less popular? Yep, that's Debian already. Again, so what?

Re:Debian

[andymar]

What happens when there is a need for a security upgrade of say sendmail, and you have an old Gentoo server ? Doing emerge update can easily break your server, right ? Do Gentoo backport security fixes as Redhat do, which you install by running up2date ?

Re:Debian

[blakestah]

Sounds like RedHat is trying to achieve some of the advantages of Debian. I'll welcome this, although I won't switch any machines over right away.

That's sorta what I saw too. Debian uses almost all volunteers, and things work amazingly well. If RedHat could pull their distro up to Debian standards, and off-load the work to the community, it would be a huge plus. They would re-orient their business to consulting, and specialized packaging (like to OEM computer sales).

There is not enough money in it for a corporation to maintain a distro as their principal revenue stream. Especially not while Debian is around and so comprehensive.

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

I think - like LFS - I'll build my own toilet_bowl from the groud up. Let's be clever, eh pad'res, and call it something like ... GENpoo ....

Re:Debian

[j1mmy]

1) community != business support. redhat is very much looking into the enterprise market, and you can't do that without dedicated technical support to back you up.

2) again with the business world. no IT staffer is going to waste her or his time configuring and building gentoo on hordes different machines when you can get a base redhat installations in place and mindlessly keep it up to date with red-carpet or something similar.

3) red-carpet.

Re:Debian

[Enucite]

1) Most of whom have no idea what they are doing. Any problems that I've had with gentoo I've had to find the solution for myself by weeding through manuals/documents. You're not going to be able to get support for complex problems from the gentoo community. I wonder why people pay Red Hat for support...

2) This is a matter of opinion. Each way has it's advantages and disadvantages. And for that matter, either one can be customized to your preference.

3) This is another matter of opinion. I love using portage at home, but I'm not going to be using it on production machines. I'm going to be installing thoroughly-tested binary packages.

I love gentoo and the community is great and generally tries their best to be helpful, but the one thing that irks me is most of the gentoo community seems to think simply because you compiling it yourself the program is going to "be faster". Most people don't understand how optimizations work and what the trade-offs of using each optimization are. So they end up using -O3 -funroll-loops and all sorts of other optimizations that increase the size of the binary. The programs may execute 5% faster, but now they take 500% longer to load. In some situations this is a good idea, in others it's better to optimize for size. In general the people managing the packages for Red Hat probably have a better idea of how to optimize than the average gentoo user does.

Don't get me wrong, I really do like gentoo and the flexibility it gives you. It's actually what I'm running on my primary desktop at home and I'm very happy with it.

I'm just asking that people understand there's a place for each style and that one is not necessarily better than the other.

Re:Debian

[Kashif Shaikh]

Yes, but its easy to break your system with Gentoo.

Effects on Suse and Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

This thing seems to be somewhere between Debian and Suse - not as open as Debian, but not as closed as Suse. Seems to be a good start nevertheless, and an interesting experiment to follow!

Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendliess?

[Ophidian P. Jones]

First, my disclaimer: I am a newbie to *ix. I am confident that I can handle any reasonable system administration task in Windows and/or DOS, as I have dealt with those OSes since 1990. That said, I hope this new merger will improve the OS in terms of stability and user friendliness.

My experience with Linux has been one week of trying to make the GUI work with RH7.2 and my Radeon 8500. I believe that at that time XFree86 was just plain incompatible at that time, though I'd bet some uber dudes made it work. I couldn't, and if there is no GUI, then it is not the kind of OS I want to use at home. Later I tried RH7.3, and X worked, but with no hardware 3D acceleration. Tux Racer was a slide show. Since I will not pay Xi for drivers so I can game at home, and ATI's binaries didn't work well enough for me, I abandoned 7.3. I skipped RH8 entirely because by then I had sold the 8500 and installed a 9700 Pro (love that card!). So now I have RH9 up and running, ATI's catalyst 3.7 drivers working reasonably well, and RTCW:Enemy Territory and UT2003 working great, so I can say that I believe I now have an OS acceptable for my home use.

As for *ix, I know there exists a command line prompt, and the operator can do many things provided he knows what to do there. I am not one of these people. I am the guy who needs a HOW-TO page to use rpm. I want to know how to use bash and the like. I want to know how to make KDE and GNOME do exactly what I want. I want to know how to install drivers correctly and understand the steps. I want to be as proficient in Linux as I am in windows.

That said, I do have a Linux book--The Red Hat Linux Bible (for RH7.2) It is a comprehensive book, with enough information for a beginner to install RH Linux and not much else. I'd say that unless you are already familiar with Linux and similar OSes that 95% of the material in that book is going to be over your head. About the only useful newbie information I found was installing RH. I understand that not everyone is going to use the same procedure, but for me, it was pretty much insert disk 1 and follow the prompts.

Don't get me wrong-- while convering installation is a great idea-- maybe some easy to understand tips on configuring X would be nice. Would you believe that changing the desktop resolution is covered in an obscure paragraph some 300 pages into the book? How about changing the refresh rate? I'll bet I'll have to edit my config file, but perhaps someone made it possible through the GUI. You Linux uber coders did that, didn't you?

How about sound cards? I'd bet that millions of computers sold in the last 4 years are capable of 4- or more channel audio. I don't know how to activate the rear channels. (Disclaimer-- i accidentally got them to work in RH7.3)

Guess what else? I sure would like my logitech 3 button + wheel mouse to work correctly. When connected via PS2, the only selection that works is 2 button wheel mouse. Changing to the USB port, RH discovers it nicely (I was floored to see the mouse discovered when booting!), but I have no idea what the thumb button does nor do I know how to change it.

My guess is that those of you who have read this whole thing are saying RTFM. Well, sure, I'd love to RTFM. Just give me a manual I can understand! Man pages are not good reading for the beginner, and unless you have a laptop, hard to take with you when you need a break from getting the fvcking screen resolution fixed.

Ah, well... just venting. I'll probably have to take a class at the community college, as none of my friends use Linux. Me, I am bored with windows, and want to be ready for the time when it is not worth the effort to get an unliscensed wopy of windows to work. I'll see if I can find a copy of RH9 Unleashed... thanks for the review!

KRUD

[jdavidb]

For another distribution that focuses on providing updates to RedHat, see KRUD, recommended by Eric Raymond. This one's not as community-oriented, however.

Re:KRUD

[10Ghz]

recommended by Eric Raymond.

Reason enough for me to steer clear from it.

Re:KRUD

[Anonymous Coward]

With a name like THAT, I'd worry about the quality!

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[FattMattP]

Although not an offical answer, the Fedora web site says

This merger necessitates the removal of certain problematic packages due to licensing issues.

So the answer might likely be yes.

Oh Yeah!

[doublebackslash]

So long as I can modify the source to say so i will ALLWAYS run Red Hat Linux!

A new linux user's story. Victory!

[scumbucket]

About two weeks ago I decided to try and install Linux on my old K6-2 450mhz machine gathering dust in the basement.
A friend of mine gave me a few cd's that had something called 'Mandrake' on it.

He said "This is supposed to be the most user-friendly 'distro' out there. Give it a try."

So with trepidation about wiping out my beloved win98se install on the old machine, I jumped right in.

On firing up the install disk, the Man-drake installer asked me if I wanted to remove the win98se partition that already existed. After pondering this for several minutes I though, 'what the hell, I can always reinstall it!' So I let it fly.

After what seemed like 45 minutes of swapping cd's in-and-out of the drive, the man-drake (isn't that some sort of bird?) installer ask me what I wanted to use this linux machine for. So many choices! games, office, mail server, web server, about 2 dozen choices flooded my screen. This is madness! So after carefully considerating my options I decided to choose them all! I would be a Linux power-user to end all linux power-users!

So after this decision was made I waited. And waited. And waited. During this I started to wonder. My Windows XP Home intallation on my other Peecee didn't ask me thse kind of questions, and it easily has the all the abilities that man-drake advertised to have. After all, I paid for WinXP Home. Sigh, I guess this it the price one pays
for being part of the linux elite.

Approximately 50 mintues later I get another prompt from the man-drake installer asking me what kind of GUI I wanted to use, KDE or GNOME. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me! I selected both and let it fly.

After only about 20 mintues this time it appeared the install was completed. The mandrake installer told me it was going to reboot and then I would revel in Linux goodness. I waited with baited breath while the reboot churned away, eagerly waiting the opportuntity to use the KDE/GNOME interface. Page after page of command line
stuff flew by my screen, seeming to get faster and faster as the time of my linux deliverance approached. Then, the screen flashed black (kinda like those scenes from the movie Wargames). I gasped and was presented with something like this:

bsh: blah/blah/blah/ ____

What the hell was this? Wasn't this man-drake linux supposed to be user friendly? Instead of the friendly confines of a WinXP like GUI instead I was given an ugly DOS like prompt, which looked supiciously like the TRS-80 system I first learned BASIC on in high school. Is this all the farther the great open-source movement has progressed?

After serveral minutes of sobbing and knashing of teeth, I came to a decision. All the linux fags out there were not going to defeat me! They were not going to cry "Bend over WinXP boy, you're going to take linux OUR WAY and like it!".

I quickly found my old musty copy of 'Unix in a Nutshell' from my college days and got to work. In a few hours I found out how to start the KDE GUI. This made life so much easier. After several days I was able to get the machine's 14.4 internal modem working with man-drake and connected to the internet, using a browser called Mozilla. Where oh where were the glorious pop-ups that appeared as I was surfing porn sites? Those bastards!

After several more days I was starting to feel somewhat comfortable. Using something called Gimp to manipulate my growing collection of adult images was becoming a habit. And because I was ashamed to let my friends and neighbors know I was using a gasp! free operating system like mandrake, I kept the pee-cee in the basement. Now my girlfriend thinks the sounds emanating from below are me just woodworking or lifting weights. I guess linux has freed me after all!

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[rute20740]

From looking at the package list, they are not listed.

Let me be the first to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

..."hats off" to these guys.

Re:Let me be the first to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm with you 99%.

Next objects of merger:

[burgburgburg]

Derby, Bowler, Porkpie and Kangol.

Have you tried OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's even worse. So consider yourself lucky that you didn't get a Mac.

Re:Overlaps with Debian

[Rick the Red]

Buy golly, you're right! And I just noticed: The goals of Ford overlap with the goals of Volkswagon and the goals of Toyota! Oops! The goals of McDonalds overlap the goals of KFC! Oh My God -- the goals of Home Depot overlap the goals of Lowes! When will the insanity end?

hmm . . . Sounds like Mandrake, to me

[Idou]

"The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software."

Yet another example of Mandrake innovation influencing and improving the industry.

I fully support Red Hat's push to be more open and community based. However, if you are interested in a more mature implementation of such ideas, please visit mandrakeclub.com.

Funny how Mandrake started out as a knock-off of Red Hat and now Red Hat appears to sometimes follow Mandrake's lead.

Re:hmm . . . Sounds like Mandrake, to me

[Tyler Eaves]

*cough* Debian *cough*

Re:hmm . . . Sounds like Mandrake, to me

[Anonymous Coward]

actually .. i would say this is more of a knockoff of OpenDarwin .. but thats my opinion

Re:hmm . . . Sounds like Mandrake, to me

[Second Vampyre]

I didn't know they were planning on wasting all of their money and then begging for "club subscriptions" over at Fedora.

Re:hmm . . . Sounds like Mandrake, to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandrake doesnt beg for club subscriptions,
thought i would set the record straigt, i do
find it interesting that u would go there
though.

check out red hat's license agreement sometimes.
maybe they just want to be the microsoft of
linux.

the license agreement for their server software.

Re:hmm . . . Sounds like Mandrake, to me

[Idou]

Of course, by "Mandrake's innovation" I specifically meant Mandrake implementing a Debian-like system for development of their product;)

Re:hmm . . . Sounds like Mandrake, to me

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be because you are a mac zealot. The rest of us see that it is nothing like OpenDarwin.

Re:hmm . . . Sounds like Mandrake, to me

[Anonymous Coward]

The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software.

Also sounds like Gentoo, Debian, etc... where's the knock-off?

Re:hmm . . . Sounds like Mandrake, to me

[Vintermann]

"Funny how Mandrake started out as a knock-off of Red Hat and now Red Hat appears to sometimes follow Mandrake's lead."

Well, that's open source for you. All this unproductive stealing of other people's ideas ;-)

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[aled]

My guess is that those of you who have read this whole thing are saying RTFM. Well, sure, I'd love to RTFM. Just give me a manual I can understand! Man pages are not good reading for the beginner...

I totally agree with you.

PGP key management

[tarvin]

The Red Hat/Fedora merger sounds OK. One thing, though: In the past, it has been very difficult to verify the PGP signatures in Fedora's packages: The packager's public keys were hard - sometimes impossible - to find. I have looked through the fedora.redhat.com web site, hoping to find out how they plan to manage PGP-keys and signatures in the new Fedora distribution, but I couldn't find any information. Does anyone know?

Re:PGP key management

[noselasd]

pgp.mit.edu

Why not something really geeky?

[FatalTourist]

Headgear.

Re:Why not something really geeky?

[Roberto]

Hmm... chapeaux and sombreros are also headgear.

Re:Why not something really geeky?

[ZaMoose]

Methinkshhh he meant orthodontic headgear, you inconshhiderate shhnob.

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[Anonymous Coward]

7.2 and 7.3? Ya, those probably wouldn't work on my 2ghz Athlon with DDR either. Try redhat 9. It installed with zero problems for me, and putting mp3 and ntfs support after the install was pretty easy too.

Or if you want fun configuration tools too, try Mandrake. It comes with a nice "control Panel" type config tool.

Sorry if this is a dumb question...

[ngunton]

Will this mean that security updates will still be available for RedHat 7.3 after it is End of Life'd at the end of this year? If not then I will still be switching to Debian when that happens.

Anyone have any insight on that issue, which is the biggest one by far at present for me regarding RedHat?

TIA /Neil

Re:Sorry if this is a dumb question...

[SoundGuy666]

Not a dumb question at all - this is one of our major worries about RedHat at the moment too. However, looking at their site (and FAQ), it seems like this (Fedora) is going to be very similar to the RedHat we know at the moment (not the enterprise bit) - ie, major releases every six months or so. It's quite reasonable to expect support for the old releases to fall off very rapidly (it's really not economical to continue to support more than two distributions at a time), and there is certainly no indication they would do otherwise.

RedHat are, IMHO, likely to continue the push for this rapid development so that they can entice more customers into their relatively slow moving Enterprise product.

Re:Sorry if this is a dumb question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares dude. Once you make that switch to Debian, Redhat will get real old, real fast :) Enjoy!

Re:Sorry if this is a dumb question...

[Alan Cox]

The goal of the project is to be current and up to date. That should actually make updating easier since much of the time people tracking current updates will find they basically have the next release when a release point is declared and 'official' .iso images created.

Even with current Red Hat 8, 9, .. upgrading is no big deal. I've taken boxes from 7.1 to 9 without rebooting.

Supporting old releases is expensive and gets vastly more expensive over time. Its why nobody does it in detail for old releases except in the enterprise space, Debian included.

Various non Red Hat folks have talked about doing unofficial RH 7.3 errata, I guess it depends if enough people willing to pay them to make it cost effective.

Re:Sorry if this is a dumb question...

[repetty]

"upgrading is no big deal."

I guess that's pretty true if you stick with a stock installations but, given enough time, I've always drifted into configurations that seem to entail some loose ends (un-official software that I've installed).

As a result, while supporting old distibutions is expensive for vendors, repeated upgrade cycles are likewise unpleasant for me.

As a result, I have to be dragged kicking and screaming from one major release to the next. I skipped RH8 altogether.

The important thing is that there seems to be a lot of work being done to deal with these issues, from/by/for both ends of the community.

--Richard

Re:Sorry if this is a dumb question...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not negative towards the Fedora project, but the point of these updates still concerns me. Will we be forced to re-download the iso's, reinstall them and recompile our custom stuff every time there is a sendmail security issue ?

Re:Sorry if this is a dumb question...

[caseih]

Will this mean that security updates will still be available for RedHat 7.3 after it is End of Life'd at the end of this year? If not then I will still be switching to Debian when that happens.

Anyone have any insight on that issue, which is the biggest one by far at present for me regarding RedHat?

I expect the same issues to remain with redhat fedora. However under redhat fedora linux you can just apt-get dist-upgrade every year or so. For a workstation, this the best way, anyway. For a server, RedHat's really pushing for their slower-moving enterprise product which will have much longer lifespan.

What I'm doing with my old venerable redhat 6.2 server is taking relavent rh 9 security patches (sendmail an openssh to name two) and recompiling them for rh 6.2 In most cases, it's just a matter of tweaking the the spec file a bit (rh's openssh rpm still has build options for 6.2 that I can turn on) and spitting out some patched rpms.

Re:Sorry if this is a dumb question...

[Dan Ost]

I've always addressed this issue by installing all non-standard
software under ~/pkgs and linking executables into ~/bin. That
way when I upgrade my laptop, I simply make a tarball of my
home directory, ftp it somewhere (or burn it to cd), do a fresh
install of whatever distribution I'm moving to (wiping out anything
on my HD), and then untaring my home directory tarball. The only
thing I have trouble with are dynamically linked executables, so
I generally statically link anything that lives in my home directory.

Obviously, I don't do this with huge things like KDE or Gnome, but
then I don't particularly care about window managers or desktop
environments. Just give me a wm which supports work spaces and
alt-tabbing and I'm pretty much happy.

Re:Sorry if this is a dumb question...

[Alan Cox]

The goal is to provide as many routes for distribution as we can - both of ISO files and updates for the current version - which in generally will be following the mainstream, so if sendmail 8.foo has a bug and they put out 8.foo+1, expect the path to be an update to foo+1. We can do this with Fedora while with RHEL you have to do careful backports of specific fixes.

With regard to custom stuff the best model may well be to set up your own local YUM repository o the extra's you maintain - either for yourself or for the world to use. Turning a collection of RPM files into a yum repository is nice and easy.

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[Resaurtus]

One of the main problems you are having is that you are buying hardware that wasn't supported at the time. When buying hardware you want to run Linux on, check to see that it supports it. If you don't, you will have problems and the vendor (correctly in this case) sees that that lack of Linux support makes no difference to it's sales.

I know this doesn't sound ideal, but you're really in the same boat with any other OS, even Windows. (Some hardware works only with NT/2000 or 9x, not both, plus old hardware often loses support.) Buying hardware without checking driver status leads to pain.

I don't think Fedora can make this better, only the hardware vendors can.

As for documentation, try checking out the RedHat manuals. That and a good introduction to the Unix command line and vi/emacs should cover you.

Re:OFFTOPIC: Question About Linux on SATA Drives

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't fret, Token-Ring network support has been added recently, along with a TCP/IP stack so you should be able to browse Slashdot on your linux box soon (on the developmental series kernel only).

Re:More important info from the FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

That was a pathetic attempt at a troll. In order for such a troll to work, the post must be long enough for the moderators' eyes to glaze over and possibly miss the "easter egg". You are a dismal failure.

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[lordcorusa]

That sucks, but it is not unexpected. Red Hat does not want to open themselves to a lawsuit from the "owners" of mp3, and now that they are merged with Fedora, Fedora cannot distribute them either.

It's not a big problem though, as you can still easily get such packages from other compatible repositories such as freshrpms.

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but most people who are trying out Linux don't go out and purchase hardware first, nor would anyone really expect them to...

Ghetto Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

the new ghetto release of Linux "Deybian"

Re:Ghetto Linux

[Mipsalawishus]

You must be referring to SCO's crack smoking Linux distribution. :->

Re:More important info from the FAQ

[stratjakt]

I admit, I've lost my passion for trolling. It's just too easy, like throwing eggs at a schoolbus full of retarded children.

Will they speed it up?

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried Red Hat Linux Severn yesterday, I had some terrible problems with it. I had bought a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 Box to replace my old 68K based imac with MacOS 6.8 running photoshop 3.1

I am a graphics designer which has to do special effectds for a holiday brocure, working on large (6400x5000 pixels) photos.

I downloaded the Gimp version 1.3.21 because of the newly added CMYK support, which meant i could finally use it. But it was SLOW! It took about 15 minutes to apply a solar flare effect on a phot, and it took several minutes for the other effects too. The old mac couuld do it in about 60 seconds max.

It wasn't just gimp. KDE 3.1 took 2 minutes to load, and the nautilus file manager took 20 minutes to copy a 17Mb image file to my floppy drive, while the old mac only took two.

I would like to switch to Linux, but unless it can make some serious speed ups, I may sell the pentium box and go and buy the Dual G5 with OSX panther when it comes out.

Re:Will they speed it up?

[Etcetera]

I tried Red Hat Linux Severn yesterday, I had some terrible problems with it. I had bought a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 Box to replace my old 68K based imac with MacOS 6.8 running photoshop 3.1

God I hate feeding trolls.. but for those who didn't catch this:

- There was no 6.8 (there was a 6.0.8, but it was only released as an after-thought for increased compatability with the already-out 7.0)
- There were no 68k iMacs.

Go mooch off some other pond, foo.

Re:Will they speed it up?

[dpw2atox]

it sounds to me like your hard drives aren't running in DMA mode. Run hdparm -Tt as root and if you are getting below 40MB/s then you need to enable dma.

Re:Will they speed it up?

[Mipsalawishus]

*cough*BETA RELEASE DUMBASS!!*cough*
Seriously though, have you tried an install of Redhat 9? As a general rule, never expect much from a beta release. It still has alot of "under the hood" details to be worked out. I would be willing to bet that when it is released as stable, you won't have these problems. As far as Linux needing serious speedups, get real, it's damn fast already. Your problems are with the desktops, not the Linux kernel. If your complaint is based soley on your experience with a beta release of one particular distribution, then you seriously need to widen the periphery of your view of Linux. Perhaps try another distribution like Mandrake or Suse if you're into a quick-to-setup desktop. If you're really into a fast desktop, try Slackware. It doesn't hold your hand like other distributions might, but it's damn stable, and damn fast.

Re:Will they speed it up?

[zpok]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster running that!
and in soviet russia we stopped wearing red hats after glasnost!

QA?

[Ricin]

Occurs to me that RH basically bought a QA system for packages. Since in a linux distro, apart from the kernel pretty much anything is a package, it makes one wonder if they were thinking their own QA wasn't good enough.

"Release fast release often" ring a bell? Red Hat is in the business, what, 8 years, and they're heading for a double digit main release. Way too much even if you're only in the business of putting something on retail shelves.

Perhaps they were afraid of another Drake emerging from this project or saw it as an opportunity to let the community do more of the groundwork and then serve it up to businesses.

They "have a release scedule and a steering committee"? Gosh. So do the BSDs.

Re:QA?

[sab39]

Doesn't sound like that to me. Although QA is clearly *one of* the benefits of going more community-oriented, they already had "community QA" in the form of RawHide.

Sounds to me more like what they got is *development* of desktop-based packages so that they can concentrate on the enterprise space.

Re:QA?

[Ricin]

No not *development* of desktop oriented packages but rather proper packaging, integration, optimalisation of them. In other words: QA. Something a distro ought to do anyway but now it saves RH resources. That was my main point.

We'll all be millionaires!

[Anonymous Coward]

1) One guy make a "Derby Linux" distro. Another make a "Bowler Linux" distro, etc.

2) We'll wait for Red Hat to buy us out

3) Profit! No need for "???"

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody "owns" MP3. It's an open standard, like JPEG and MPEG.

And what about KDE for Red Hat?

[Jungle guy]

It is another community-oriented project that makes high-quality RPMs for people that have Red Hat Linux, but think Red Hat have messed up bad with KDE. Also, they allowed me to upgrade from KDE 3 to 3.1 using Red Hat 8, without breaking my system. Check these guys out at kde-redhat.sourceforge.net.

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[Angram]

I completely agree with everything you just said. I started back with DOS, moved through every version of Windows, and am sought out by friends and family to take care of computer problems. I make no claim to be a "computer expert" as they label me, but I can do just about anything I need to do, and have no trouble figuring out anything that pops up. I bought the Red Hat Linux Bible (9.0), and installed it. I found myself completely lost. Sure, the book got it set up, but I have no idea how to do anything - from navigating directories to updating drivers. I abandoned it after a week, and until I can find some sort of useful guide, I can't see myself investing more time in dead ends. I really wanted to get into Linux and ditch Microsoft permanently, but I was heartily let down by useability.

Once I know what I'm doing, I'll switch my family and friends, but it doesn't look like that will happen any time soon.

Re:OFFTOPIC: Question About Linux on SATA Drives

[Anonymous Coward]

Try google, or IRC. I could probably help you with your problem, but slashdot is NOT the forum.

Does this mean no more "Pink Tie" nonsense?

[J. J. Ramsey]

Copying myself from OSNews . . .

From http://fedora.redhat.com/about/name.html:

The rules for using the Fedora trademark will be generally more permissive than the rules for using the Red Hat trademarks. The separate name and trademark are necessary in order to have different rules for using the trademarks. The rules for using the "Fedora" trademark will be available before the first release of Fedora Core.

I wish Red Hat weren't so non-committal here, but does this mean that instead of CheapBytes selling Pink Tie, LinuxCD selling Blue Jacket, and OSDisc selling Red Tux, every third-party CD Vendor will just call it Fedora?

Re:Does this mean no more "Pink Tie" nonsense?

[cesarcardoso]

If I understood the paragraph correctly, yes.

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat linux has also changed dramatically sine the 7.xx days; I think your best bet will be something newer (and the documentation specific to what you're running).

That was the single most frustrating thing I personally came across: documentation that didn't actually apply to what I was running (editing XFree86, for instance, when that had no effect and I needed to be editing XFree86-4).

anyways, having said that, the hardware that is supported under Linux is always improving: I was amazed that my previous sources of frustration (winmodems, multimedia keyboards, etc.) were configured and working automagically with the latest installs (I'm not claiming things are perfect, but they're not bad now, and improving at an amazing speed).

Good luck!

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[sflory]

I suspect that this will be a part of "Fedora Extras, Fedora Alternatives, Fedora Legacy", or will be kept in some sort of external respository like debian does with certain packages. With yum, or apt-get adding an additional respository is easy.

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[mt_nixnut]

Pragmatically speaking. How hard would it really be to produce "legitimized" versions of protected software (particularly multimedia stuff I am thinking) for linux? I think an awful lot of people would pay a little bit a least for programs that work and are legal. I think these patents stink don't get me wrong, but what do we do in the meantime? Am I missing something here? Is this a case where peoples idealism is stopping production or are there other problems with making this work legally on Linux?

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[e.colli]

Me too, after several years of RTFM's I found that the hardware acceleration works only with 16 bits in my sound card.... :)

Releases

[__aahlyu4518]

The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year with a public release schedule.

So will RedHat release a new product everytime a core gets delivered? Will we see a .0 a .1 and a .2 in 1 year? 3 releases for the core a year sounds rediculous to me. The core is the thing you want to be stable as a rock, not being in beta forever, which is basically what a 3 time release schedule means.

The release cycle of linux distros is what will kill them eventually if they don't slow it down. Most of them have 2 releases (not major ones, but new boxed sets anyway) a year. And they all want the users to pay for them. That's only logic, they're running a business. But the linux distro's and the software they deliver seem to be in eternal beta. People always want the latest and greatest I guess. Lots of distro's have close to 0 people running their stable release. The thing 'we' are all so proud of (stability and security) will be going down the drain real soon if we don't start focusing on them again iso getting a filemanager #311 and a desktop #24. Lets first settle down and get everything stable. And then have a look at what needs a change.

If I buy a distro version 9, it has a lifecycle of 6 months, a year at most. Then I do need to upgrade. if you want businesses to adopt your distro or joe average to use it, cut the upgrades down. It looks silly... We are so stable and secure, but you need to upgrade every 6 months to keep up. A business doesn't want to be in an eternal upgrade cycle. Neither does Joe Average. They want to get work done. Not upgrade or do a complete reinstall with the next release just a few weeks after they have their configuration just as they want.

I started using Linux in 1996 because I wanted something different, a new challenge. I loved the "if you don't need the new feature and it is not a security thing, why upgrade program X?" mentality. Now it's just the other way around. My wife is still running Windows 98 SE on the laptop. That was released what.. 5 years ago? Sure... there were upgrades for a lot of things... but did she need to upgrade the OS itsself every 6 months ? No .

*sigh*... I'm getting old I guess... nevermind me.... I just want my Linux to be stable, secure, and also all the apps i'm running on it. And preferably without losing all support for it because i'm running a distro that is more than 1 yr old.

Sure, my computer doesn't crash when 1 program does. But the program shouldn't crash. I want that to be fixed, not another feature added. Microsoft won't kill Linux... It's doing just fine on its own.

Re:Releases

[Anonymous Coward]

I know what you mean, but that's just a trade-off for a single distro. If you want 5 years support, download Red Hat Enterprise Linux (ISOs can be found on the Web, and you can rpm -bb SRPM updates as they're released). Or download the beta and update from SRPMs.

Alternatively, go with Debian -- Potato was supported for, oooh, something like three years. Slackware supports its current and current-minus-one releases, giving them about two years of fixes and security updates.

All I'm saying is, there are options out there if you want a Linux distro with a long lifespan.

Re:Releases

[Wesley Felter]

It sounds like you want Red Hat Obsolete Enterprise Linux, and they'll be happy to sell it to you.

Re:Releases

[__aahlyu4518]

I know. But if the rest of the oss world keeps this unhealthy pace, most of the software will get less quality, which will have it's consequenses for the distros that release less often as well..

I've just gone back to slackware for the moment. That's the one I started with as well... (Slackware 3.0). I still have that CD :-) It was something I was proud of of using. Also have the CD with Red Hat 3.0.3 and Red Hat 5.0 (the first real boxed set I bought !)

Now it's nothing to be proud of anymore.. I'm a Mandrakeclub member and like mdk very much, but after 6 months I throw away the cd's...

As I said... i'm getting old... haha

Re:Releases

[Alan Cox]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux - long support, aimed at maximum stability (jn the sense of predictability especially), with various pricing options from the low end to 24x7 support (its not just a $2000 a year deal!). Aimed mostly at business.

Fedora Project - 2 or 3 releases a year, and as many easy ways of getting it and its updates we can think of - including hopefully stuff like BitTorrent. I'm even kicking around an idea for some wireless "FedoraPoints". After all many people who have wireless but can't share their internet connection due to ISP rules will probably have local Fedora mirrors for their own use too.

Time for drive by upgrading

Re:Releases

[Pros_n_Cons]

What I think is going on right now is there are massive changes happening to GNU/linux in general. The market is dictating linux's direction. why is that bad? people are demanding gnome 2.4, 2.6 kernel, etc. but sooner or later 'must upgrade' features will die down.

Let's be honest in the last year its just now hitting main stream and is racing to catch up to It's critizms but because of this rapid development main stream feature goals will be reached fairly quickly. like intergration, compatibility, and quality applications.

With the future in mind alot of projects underwent major overhauls for this reason but they're getting stable, when they do its going to be prime time for products like RH workstation or debian stable since they're nearly the same thng but with longer support cycles. for instance i don't care about not having a perfect file dialog box for gnome so why upgrade? but I DO want yum and kernel 2.6 integrated so when those features are in the RH stable i'm buying it and saying with it till my 1-3 years support is up.

Re:Releases

[Ancil]

Who says you have to buy each release? I ran RedHat 7.2 for years without any problems on my home file/web server. When I had to rework some stuff due to changing ISP's, I went ahead and wiped the disk, installing RedHat 9. I skipped 7.3 and 8 in the process, but so what?

The only problem I see is people who think, "There's a new version, better go buy it and install immediately!!" That's hardly RedHat or Linux's fault. If it ain't broke, don't reformat it.

Re:Releases

[__aahlyu4518]

Thanx for replying.

Even though the ease of updates is good (up2date, urpmi, apt-get), the real question is why and most importantly, IF those updates are nescessery. If people need support for some new hardware they want to install the driver, not a whole new OS every 6 months.

I hope that the update/upgrade process will be smooth for the people, and i trust it will. But very often you see people complaining about any program/distro (as complaining people are the loudest) that X doesn't work, Y needs a workaround and Z is either completely broken or needs a fix asap. At some point THOSE things need to be taken care of before adding yet another feature. I know all the developers of all the oss software are doing the best they can to give us the best software. But you can only give the best if you take the time to take the worst out.

But it would be great if Fedora will accomplish what is really needed... a barely noticable upgrade- and update process. Not just for fixes but for dot and whole releases of the distro. Because no joe average wants or needs the hassle of losing a day upgrading the whole pc again.

I know distros have come a long way allready. I just wish people (that means the users as well) would be more patient. We all know those people that are shouting... Distro 9.Xrc2 is out but probably next week Desktop 4.0 will come out, will the distro wait for that???

Luckily the answer is still no... And I can't blame the distro's for including the latest and greatest if it is more or less stable : they need to sell and the demand is: give us all beta software. And people don't even consider if they actually need it.

But the IT business is relatively new and I guess it is logic for this revolutionary development of this culture. But there will be a time somewhere soon that it will settle down because it has to survive. Just like everything else. Like the dotcom boom that is over. People were taken of the street to work as IT-consultants or programmers. People that didn't even know what a PC looked like. Most of them get fired now as they were in it for the money, not the thing itself. There is some heavy filtering going on and those that need or want to be programmer /consultant will survive. The branch is settling down... now all we need is the same for the ludicrous pace of the software/hardware developments and innovations. That will come soon as well.... Just as you expect your 5yr old VCR to play it's tapes on your brand new widescreen TV. So will the people demand at one time the same for all the soft/hardware and services / standards etc etc.

Re:Releases

[FooBarWidget]

I'll never understand why you people are always complaining about new distributions.
Fine, so you don't have to upgrade Win98. But then what's stopping you from not upgrading Linux? I find it odd that you complain about Linux when the situation is no different. I've been using RedHat 7.2 for 2 years now and it still works great. 7.2 is extremely usable for the average user who only checks email and browses Internet. I'm typing this in Galeon 1.3 on a GNOME 2 desktop right now, which I have compiled myself (no don't start about that normal users can't compile; they don't have to, they can keep on using GNOME 1/KDE 2 and Galeon 1.2 and KMail).

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[Roberto]

The algorithm to encode and decode MP3s is patented in the US, so, if you are there, it is pretty much owned, since writing code for those purposes without paying royalties is illegal.

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I meant when I put it in quotes. While you and I know that no one should own MP3, Fraunhofer, who holds US patents over the encoding and decoding scheme used by MP3, certainly seems to think that they own it. Red Hat and its affiliates, now including Fedora, do not wish to take the risk of being targetted by patent litigation ($1 million to defend, either way) just to give you something that you can easily find online anyway. Furthermore, since patents overshadow the MP3 format, no MP3 codec can truly be considered Free Software.

--lordcorusa

Amen Brother!

[Gorignak]

What kind of lame idiots call it a GUI when a click of an icon brings up a text interface window. Also, I believe there is way to much "Burger King" GUI programming going on in Linux. To many projects doing it their own way. There needs to be lots more standards put in place, starting with the desktop itself. There needs to be a merger of the features of GNOME and the 'look and feel' of KDE into one standard desktop before Sun's MadHatter muddies the water anymore. Frankly, I'd like to see allot more organization to the whole software for Linux arena. Not anti-competition, but a standardization of package distribution and compatibility. It's almost getting to the point that you can't run 2 programs at the same time without re-writing one of them to work with the new or outdated support package that another program needs. I was completely floored when I found out that Apache even changed it's file locations when going for ver 1 to ver 2. Ok, I'm ranting, but I've finally gotten it off my chest. Let the flaming begin.

Re:Amen Brother!

[sharkey]

Also, I believe there is way to much "Burger King" GUI programming going on in Linux.

The product is so underdone it's still cold, and you get sick if you eat it?

Re:Amen Brother!

[osu-neko]

Heh. The original poster is dating himself I suspect... at least, it's been a long time since I've heard that old BK jingle... "Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce / special orders don't upset us. / All we ask is that you let us / serve it your way. / Have it your way, at Burger King..."

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[Ishikawa Goemon]

Grr... Don't feed the trolls...

Let's see -
JPEG - Joint Photographics Experts Group
They have standardized it, and it's royalty free, AFAIK, but they still own it.
MPEG - Moving Picture Experts Group
They have standardized it, but it IS NOT royalty free, including ...
MP3 - Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG-1 Layer 3, to be exact.)
While involved with MPEG, Fraunhofer IIS-A and Thomson worked on and patented crucial parts of the MP3 format, AND THEY DO LICENCE IT.

REDHAT CANNOT LET YOU DOWNLOAD IT WITHOUT BREAKING THE LAW! What about this can't you idiots understand???

Read this...
http://www.mp3licensing.com/index.html

Grr... I won't feed the trolls, I won't feed the trolls... next time...

At least now Red Hat will have decent KDE packages

[Roberto]

http://kde-redhat.sf.net

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[MrResistor]

I highly recommend looking at SuSE, I think it addresses nicely the issues you're having, particularly in the last 2 releases (8.1 and 8.2). SuSE 8.1 was what finally let me ditch Windows for good, with no regrets.

Yast (Yet Another Setup Tool) provides easy GUI administration of almost everything (the one notable exception is the innitial setup of Samba, but once you have it going it has it's own web-based GUI). X configuration especially has been greatly simplified. I doubt it will solve your mouse problem, though (see below).

Important: spend the money to actually buy the Pro boxed version, as the printed manuals it comes with are easily the most useful Linux books in my collection (which numbers in the low 'teens). Suse doesn't offer ISOs to download, but you can install directly from their ftp site. It's pretty simple to do, and they provide boot images (4 floppies or a 16MB iso) to kick it off. Typically it takes a month or so after the release of the box for the new version to show up on ftp. Again, for a newbie, I highly recommend putting up the cash for the Suse Pro box.

Guess what else? I sure would like my logitech 3 button + wheel mouse to work correctly. When connected via PS2, the only selection that works is 2 button wheel mouse. Changing to the USB port, RH discovers it nicely (I was floored to see the mouse discovered when booting!), but I have no idea what the thumb button does nor do I know how to change it.

I think you are perhaps a bit confused about what you actually have. On most wheel mice the wheel also is clickable. That makes the wheel your 3rd button (aka middle button), which in Linux is typically "copy/paste". You should be able to highlight text anywhere and click on some other location with the wheel/middle button to copy/paste the highlighted text to the new location. This much should be no problem for any Linux distro (although sometimes you have to add a line to XF86Config to get the wheel working).

What you actually have, I believe, is a 4-button + wheel mouse*. I'm in a similar situation with a 5-button + wheel MS Intellimouse. I haven't been able to figure out how to bind these, and I have looked. The bad news is they do occasionally do something, though I'm rarely sure exactly what. I think most of the time they just replicate the functionality of one of the other buttons. There are rumors that the buttons can be bound to specific tasks, but I haven't been able to find any real info, and I strongly suspect that it would have to be set up individually for each app you wanted to use it in.

* XF86 treats wheel-up and wheel-down as buttons, typically buttons 4 and 5, so it would actually consider your mouse to be 6-button. XF86Config needs to have ZAxisMapping bound to buttons 4 and 5 in order for the wheel to work (this would be found in the "mouse" section, which is usually towards the bottom). I doubt this info will specifically help you solve the problem, but it should at least help you properly pose the question on IRC or USENET (I recommend USENET, as I've found it to be friendlier, but only if you don't post rants like the one I'm responding to).

Hello, McFly!

[curtlewis]

"Rather than being run through product management as something that has to appear on retail shelves on a certain date, Fedora Core will be released based on schedules"

So instead of basing it off dates, they'll base it off dates! Ah, well in THAT case...

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[Uerige]

Hm. I don't like to say this, but Suse is probably the distribution for you. It was my first Linux distribution (5.2), and it was really fun to play with at that time. I had some problems, yes, but most of that was getting XFree86 to work. This should be easyer today, tools have improved.
By the time I thought I`d understand Linux, I switched to Redhat (5.x again, I believe). Along came new problems, and I realized that I still had alot to learn. I really don't know about today, but back then, Suse was way easier to use.
Today I realize that most of my problems would have never existed, if I woul've had internet access. If you know how to use google, well, everything's alot easier.

If you want to know the end of the story (you don't): Today I am using Debian. I've had a look at some distributions, and my opinion is that if you know what you're doing, Debian is the best tool for you.

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[armyofone]

Here are some good places for newbies to start with Linux...

Hope this helps!

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds familiar. After 12 odd years of dos/windows and about 3 attempts at linux during that time, I made a SERIOUS attempt to switch to linux this weekend. It wasn't all easy, but so far i've managed to get most of what i want done (browsing, file sharing with a windows desktop, playing divx/xvid movies and mp3s, even got WINE to work). Like you i think the man pages aren't much help, and I'm not one for RTFA either, but what did help was a broadband connection and google. There are lots of sites out there that are perfect for newbies, especially ones switching over for windows. Heres a couple that might help.

Linux refresher course

Linuxquestions.org (the forums here are very good)

Sure, it takes some effort, but seeing how MS is getting so DRM centric, its worth switching. I only wish there was a worthwhile replacelemt for Office. Someday...

okay, but....

[mattdm]

Your rant is nice and all, but it's largely irrelevant. This new project exists _exactly_ to cover these concerns -- well #3 and #1, at least. #2 is a matter of style.

Maybe you need to update your information

[Idou]

I would say Mandrake is being VERY efficent with their money these days (when is the last time you checked out their financials?), and if selling ads is the same as begging, then I suppose you got me there, but only if we are in Soviet Russia.

You know, sometimes things change and one must adapt one's thoughts to accurately relate to the present state of reality. Or are you still calling IBM the "evil empire" these days?

Re:Maybe you need to update your information

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is what he's referring to. This certainly sounds like begging to me.

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[bigjnsa500]

Two words

Re - Tard

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[Wesley Felter]

You'd have to pay the per-copy licensing fees, which means you'd have to charge per copy for the software, so you'd have to set up billing and distribution systems. And then you'd have to crack down on people running "pirate" copies without paying, etc.

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[Anonymous Coward]

if you just play games, why didn't you stick with Windows?

if you want a usable Unix system, why didn't you get a Mac?

seriously.......

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[johnwroach]

I doubt this info will specifically help you solve the problem, but it should at least help you properly pose the question on IRC or USENET (I recommend USENET, as I've found it to be friendlier, but only if you don't post rants like the one I'm responding to).

Which brings up my single point of installation advice: make sure you have another computer online while you are trying to install linux. Trying to do it on your only computer is a pain. In this era of online documentation (and the helpful IRC and USENET communities), it's always helpful to be able to hop over to the internet when you have a problem.

No

[Wesley Felter]

It looks like they will only provide security updates for ~9 months after each release comes out.

No brainer

[Laconian]

So will the products be made under the Red Fedora label?

rpm lockups since redhat 8.0 bug not fixxed

[Anonymous Coward]

it may sound funny, but i just thought about switching from debian to redhat for the sake of more gui system apps, and up-to-date system when i found this little bug that seems to exist since redhat 8.0.

well i think i'll stay with debian now ;)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi? id=73097

MP3 players require no patent license

[Anonymous Coward]

Only encoders. Red Hat is either trying to make a point about patents, or they are on crack. I suspect the latter.

Re:MP3 players require no patent license

[Wesley Felter]

Wrong.

Re:MP3 players require NO patent license

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong again. Sure, they are trying to collect fees on decoding, but that doesn't mean shit. The patents they own are on encoding, not decoding, and they know it.

You won't see them pressing the issue of unlicensed software decoders. They'd lose the few licensees stupid enough to pay them for what they don't own.

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[Anonymous Coward]

no offense but, being good at DOS and Windows doesn't make somebody a computer expert.. it's a matter of being used to a certain system.

For instance, I'm good with Linux and Mac but I'm totally lost on Windows. I had to work with a Windows Server 2003 install and it took me a while to figure out how to set up the ethernet port. Everything is buried in "Properties" buttons, on multiple tiny dialogs (why such a small dialog for a 21" screen?) that don't make any effort to prioritize the most important settings.

Red Hat is even worst in some areas but I've gotten used to it.

So once you figure out Red Hat you'll be a "computer expert" on there too.

"Fedora Alternatives" == DLL Hell

[Wesley Felter]

I can't believe they're going to allow officially sanctioned packages which conflict with core packages; this will be like the Ximian Desktop problem but worse because these Alternatives will be semi-encouraged.

Re:"Fedora Alternatives" == DLL Hell

[JoeBuck]

If apt is used, conflicts are not necessarily a problem, provided that the conflicts are correctly described in the apt database. If you try to install a package that conflicts with some other package, you are given the option to proceed (and remove the conflicting package) or not, and with either choice your system stays consistent.

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[eviltypeguy]

"Is this a case where peoples idealism is stopping production or are there other problems with making this work legally on Linux?"

No, it is not. XMMS is distributed under the GPL. The GPL has very specific requirements about software that uses patented technology. Basically, regardless of whether or not fraunhoffer requires licensing fees means little. The only person that has a right to distribute GPL'd mp3 based software is Fraunhoffer. If Fraunhoffer did that, anyone could use MP3 GPL software for Commercial or Non-Commercial purposes.

I am not a lawyer.

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[caseih]

That said, I do have a Linux book--The Red Hat Linux Bible (for RH7.2) It is a comprehensive book, with enough information for a beginner to install RH Linux and not much else. I'd say that unless you are already familiar with Linux and similar OSes that 95% of the material in that book is going to be over your head. About the only useful newbie information I found was installing RH. I understand that not everyone is going to use the same procedure, but for me, it was pretty much insert disk 1 and follow the prompts.

RedHat publishes some great documentation on their web site (published in book form if you bought their boxed set) that is way underused. In pdf format you can download 2 different books, "Getting started" an "User's Guide." They are up to date an cover installation, configuration of various devices and graphics cards, and basica command line skills that you need to be successful. I highly recommend that all newbies take a look at these resources. They are available online in html or pdf format at redhat's site. Of course with Fedora Linux, I don't know if RedHat plans to keep these documents up to date.

Re:CLUELESS UBERS? er.. USERS?

[Lord Kholdan]

I find it really amazing that people that are supposedly literate computer users find Linux difficult. Geez... My mom who is 78 started using RedHat Linux when she was 74 with RedHat 6.2. I have since upgraded her system to RedHat 9. She never used a computer before and after a total of 2 hrs training she has few if any problems since then.

People here that say they 'Just can't get the GUIs to work' must either be lame or lying about it. IF my mom can do it, then what excuse do you have?
geez.......

Problem is that Linux is ready for the both ends of the bell curve but they ignore the middle ground where the majority is. Yes if you're a programming wizard and an administrator extradordinaire you'll master Linux in no time. If you don't ever do anything more complex then write email you're there. If you like to try new software, maybe run a few servers but are too timid to visit the difficult land of commandline? No Way In Hell.

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[tntguy]

That was not a useability problem you had, it was a training issue. You were expecting your ability to speak and read Klingon would help you read Narn textbooks.

How long did it take you to go from DOS, through every version of Windows, learning everything you know? More than a week, I'm sure. *NIX may not be your cup of tea, and that's fine. I'm not picking on you here. I just picked your message.

A commerical company is doing it . . .

[Idou]

Red Hat is a company. So is Mandrake. Debian and Gentoo, from what I know, are not companies.

Re:Will this improve Red Hat usability + friendlie

[thinkninja]

I'm pretty much in the same boat as you: Lots of Windows experience but a complete newbie to Linux (about a month).

I agree with you completely about the manuals. The vendor manual tells you how to install the distribution and that's it. For anything else (tv-out, wheel-mice, multimedia keyboards) you're on your own. Well, you and google.

The cannonical wheel-mouse solution I found through googling, and I now have 7 mouse buttons recognised in X. Unfortunately, I can't bind buttons 6 & 7 under this version of iMwheel and few applications recognise them (quake3 does). So no backwards and forwards in Firebird for me. Anyway, see this thread.

(The spelling is my own. I'm special.)

Re:Overlaps with Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but employees of these companies do that products, no "normal people". In this case Fedora will be competing for the same developers with Debian, trying to reach the same goal (community builded distro), an already reached goal by Debian.
RedHat makes this because just doesn't want to say "Ok, our distribution is a mess, so let's start a new one using Debian as their base".

I will stick with Deb.

**WARNING** parent post lifted from previous thred

[The Revolutionary]

The parent post is an exact repost of this post in a thread attached to a review of two Red Hat Linux books.

The original post was made by someone else, one "Bob-o-Matic!".

I suggest that the parent either provide a damn good explanation for this behavior, or be modded down for either or both plagerizing or "karma-whoring".

In fact, I don't care what his excuse is. Even if it is, "We're the same person", the post is off-topic, irrelelvant to this thread.

As far as I am concerned the parent is a karma-whoring troll who will fool the moderators no longer.

PINK TIE RULES

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah the name is funny but you can't argue with shipped CDs for $4.

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[Anonymous Coward]

How hard would it really be to produce "legitimized" versions of protected software (particularly multimedia stuff I am thinking) for linux?

I guess anyone could do that, and sell it as a product. Buy a distribution licence from the patent holders and produce plugins or modules as implementations. Probably would require some kind of binary module, though an encrypted/DRM-ed version should not be necessary (it isn't for tools running under MacOS or Windows OS).

I'd hate to see the software being sold as a monolithic package, though. Kinda defeats the reason to use a Unix-like system.

Please tell us how?

[roystgnr]

I've taken boxes from 7.1 to 9 without rebooting.

How does that work? Do you just do an "rpm -F" on all the new version's packages? Start anaconda on a running system?

Re:Please tell us how?

[Alan Cox]

You need an update tool like apt. Upgrade the redhat-release package by hand and the tiny number of bits you need to get apt-rpm for the new version installed (its about 10-12 packages). Then just tell apt/yum/.. to update your box and wait.

You don't get the automatic migration and addition of extra goodies that the installer does but in general it works fine and for anyone with a little knowledge adding a few packages on top by hand is not hard.

Funnily enough the new rawhide up2date has the option "--upgrade-to-release=[version]"

Flaimbait??? Nah, Funny!

[repetty]

Come on, guys! This is a joke.

This message and variants of it have been posted for a long time on Slashdot. Like the "image a beowulf-cluster of these."

If a fucking joke!

Re:CLUELESS UBERS? er.. USERS?

[repetty]

My grandmother (on my father's side) was using Linux back in the early 70's. That was back before X-windows. She used a Smith-Corona keyboard.

Re:Overlaps with Debian

[Rick the Red]

Why do you insist that any community built disto must be done by the same community? I hate to break it to you, but there's more than one Linux community. Debian is not the only one. You may not like it, but not all developers (or users) care to belong to the Debian community. Debian has a lot in its favor, but their (your?) shrill political stance turns some (me) off. It's an attitude thing. Like this attitude that there can be only one Linux community. Fine, go on believing that yours is the "only" Linux community -- but please take that belief the whole way and ignore all other communities. In other words, stop bothering the rest of us.

Product between Fedora and Enterprise Red Hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is, will there be a product to close the gap between this Fedora Project and the expensive Enterprise solutions from Red Hat (which one cannot use properly without buying support)?

I would very much like to see a Red Hat Linux 10, for which one must be a paid member on the RH Network, for consumers and business that don't need the full blown support but would like more than something coming from a 'community'. But this time, with licensed codecs for all the media since that won't be a problem any more, because it will cost you a RH Network membership, unlike the free Fedora Core.

A good move, if you ask me.

[Bowie J. Poag]

...Does anyone else find it a little strange that Red Hat still packages i386 binaries, when the minimum requirements for installing Red Hat have long since exceeded that which you can do on a 386?

Thats a page I wish Red Hat would take out of Mandrake's book. s/i386/i586/g ...at least!

Re:A good move, if you ask me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, it makes very little difference. The two components of a Linux system which deliver the most improvements when optimized are: kernel and glibc. And Red Hat provides i686-optimized versions of both.

Also, check out the rpmrc -- apps are built with 386 opcodes but ordered for 686, so recompiling with -march=i686 would gain practically nothing.

Re:A good move, if you ask me.

[Anonymous Coward]

I gots myself a 386 right here that runs redhat 9 nice and fine.

Re:What slashdot "editors" are really doing online

[fault0]

Simply Apalling. Rob Malda is a thief, a crook, and a would-be pedophile.

just a typical slashdot editor. typical.

Please...

[TheTick]

According to the Fedora desktop project page, the Desktop includes (among other things) the "email/calendaring" application. (Evolution, one presumes.)

<SOAPBOX>

Email and a calendar are not the same application. Doesn't anyone see this but me??

Let's have a lean, mean app whose function is to be a calendar, and another, equally tight app for email. They should exchange data easily. That's the unix way, and it's a good one. There's no reason for this to conflict with the goals of ease of use. (Trying to combine two disparate applications makes it harder to use IMHO.)

</SOAPBOX>

Re:Please...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Email and a calendar are not the same application. Doesn't anyone see this but me??

At home, yes,

At work, NO.

There are different groups of users, with different needs. Some of 'em want an integrated email/calendaring system - say, like Outlook and Exchange, but without the flaws.

Re:Please...

[2muchcoffeeman]

Email and a calendar are not the same application. Doesn't anyone see this but me??

Let's have a lean, mean app whose function is to be a calendar, and another, equally tight app for email. They should exchange data easily. That's the unix way, and it's a good one.

In other words, you want something along the lines of the Mail and iCal apps that Apple builds into Mac OS X.

Re:CLUELESS UBERS? er.. USERS?

[zpok]

You are of course right, but that's largely due to your specialised definition of the word "Clueless".

For me it's more like this:

1) installing Linux: if you're lucky, everything installs itself (with a decent distro). No probs. If you're not lucky, you're up shit creek without a paddle. It's worse than a Mickysoft install gone wrong.
Granted, if done well, you have a system that's tweakable to the limit - provided you know exactly, and I mean e-x-a-c-t-l-y what you're doing.
2) using: if you don't do anything complex or daring (stick to email, surfing and a bit of quake) you should be very happy. If however you try to install all those exciting packages out there, you'll more likely than not end up in same said creek.
Binding, commands in consoles, twiddling with config files, whatever. Give me one screen, a crappy user licence and a button ... yeahyeah, I know, I'm dumb.

Recap: for everything that goes wrong or is even mildly engaging (installing drivers, programs, hardware in quite a few cases) you find the cosmetic part of Linux doesn't support you.

You'll have to go into the geeky land of Man and ubernerd snottyness ("Ghwhat, you don't do chhommand line? Ghyou ghave a .... moussse? Ghyou looooking for phretty windows with bhuttons to push no doubtttt?")

Now, do you think that sounds appealing for people who've already gone through Microsoft Nevereverstoppayingland? Or for the happy candy-mac crowd - a large part of which doesn't know what a computer is And Still Gets Work Done(TM)?

And yeah, I guess I'm lame, but every linux person must recognise some of what I write, no?

In short, linux is great. For everyone? I doubt it very much. Because people are lame and clueless? No again, but because most people aren't into computers to exactly the same degree as yourself.

BTW Sun got that part right with their madhatter thingy: make a simple, productive and user-ready environment for people who do such and such tasks and put everything that distracts from that Under The Hood. My guess is we'll see more specialised environments - for the clueless if you will - like that in the near future.

Debian?

[rawshark]

Quick question.

I heard someone say that with this Red Hat is trying to be more like Debian. What does this mean? What advantage(s) of Debian is Red Hat hoping to replicate by doing this? I do not run Debian and have very little knowledge of that distro

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I heard someone say that with this Red Hat is trying to be more like Debian. What does this mean? What advantage(s) of Debian is Red Hat hoping to replicate by doing this?

The Debian distribution has three branches labelled "stable", "testing" and "unstable". Stable has well-tested, solid code - and the code won't be updated, except for security violations, for the life of that stable release. This makes it *very* good for servers, but not so good for home users and perhaps office workstations. Red Hat 7.3 can be compared to the Debian stable release. The lack of fixes being backported is somewhat annoying at times - such as the failure of the 7.3 BIND 9 to properly use rndc when stopping the service, for example. This is fixed in the BIND9 for RH9, but won't be backported. When Samba 3 is released, odds are great there won't be an official RH7.3 package for it - an annoyance for those with 7.3 servers in a Microsoft Active Directory environment.

For more current software, at a greater risk of some instabilities in that software, Debian offers the unstable and testing branches. Unstable is where the latest and greatest versions of packages are placed. New bug fixes and features go here. You risk some breakage, though, as you are the front-line tester of this software. Most of the time this isn't a problem, but occaisionally... Red Hat's rawhide and Mandrakes cooker are the unstable equivalents.

After a package has been in unstable for two weeks without having any critical bugs filed against it, the package is copied to the testing branch. Testing is next-to-leading-edge. It contains current software, but it's had exposure to a larger userbase prior to being introduced into the branch. Fedora will (hopefully) be like the Debian testing branch, and will allow current but tested versions of Red Hat software to be available on a regular basis for those wishing to keep their desktop systems more up to date than with a deliberately stable (unchanging) release.

Re:Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of Debian's charm is the ease of upgrading from one branch to another, or from one stable release to another. Usually it's as straightforward as updating the apt and dpkg tools, then

# apt-get dist-upgrade

Will upgrade all the packages on one's system from (say) the older stable release to the just-released stable release. Any newly-required packages (or packages that are being replaced, and thus being deleted) are automatically handled by the apt dependency checking. It's often said that the more-difficult-than-average Debian installation procedure is only a problem once - then, you dist-upgrade for the rest of that system's life and never install again just to do an OS upgrade. Red Hat's releases can do this as well, but I've heard that they're not as smooth as a Debian upgrade.

Debian achieves this, and the general overall smoothness of using apt-get, because the large repository of packages are maintained so carefully according to a well-documented set of policies on how packages should be maintained within Debian. If the Fedora folks can keep their enlarged set of Red Hat packages as well maintained, as a group, then their use of either apt-get or an improved up2date will have similar high quality. It depends on the ongoing effort put into maintaining the packages - if the effort keeps up, then Fedora's package system will work as well as Debian's.

Re:CLUELESS UBERS? er.. USERS?

[scotch]

My dad's parents were both farmers, wheat, cows, chickens and other consumables. I recall visiting the farm up in the heartland as a boy. Even though gramdma and grandpa worked from sun-up to sun-down, they still had time to run linux 2 or even 3 hours a day. Grandma had linux installed on his old international tractor. The thing was slow to boot, but boy it was stable. Keep in mind that this was mid to late seventies. I don't know when my grandparents started using linux, but I do know they taught my father to run linux from an early age. Growing up on a farm, my dad has lots of fine memories, but none finer than the lilo prompt and his first command line script.

Our family comes from a long line of linux using farmers. Our anscestors came over from the chezckque republic back in the mid 19th century. Being poor and making a hasty departure, they couldn't bring many belongings with them. My entire family is thankful that my great-great-grandmother chose to bring her trust girdle which she had been running linux on for the better part of 15 years.

The family tree is a little hazier earlier than that. We lost a lot of geneological data during a hard drive failure in 1809. There are some old hardcopy records of running linux during the middle ages on a 85lb rock. There's also some folklore about an remote uncle who booted linux on his cancerous third nipple shortly before dying. From so long ago, it's hard to separate fact from fiction.

I don't have any kids, but when I decide to get someone pregnant,you can bet that I'll have by baby running linux by the time its 1 years old

Been using Linux since 1964

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it...I have been using Linux since back in the punch card days when we had to take stacks of card to a punch card reader. The Gnome and KDE user interfaces worked fine then.

Of course today they are much better and more refined then they were then. Also, networking was a lot more limited as well. But hey, it worked great and other than the keypunching it was a breeze!.

The strides made on the GUI from 1964 until now has been tremendous, due largely to the popularity of the Internet and its commercialization in 1992. That is what has really given Linux the boost. Just my two cents worth.

Hm, maybe...

[dosius]

Maybe what needs to be done is work on GNUSTEP... I for one would think that an OS based on GNUSTEP (especially if based on Darwin) would be popular if only because it would be the closest thing to MacOS on x86. (GNUstep with an Aqua-inspired WM, that would be elite!)

-uso.

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[theendlessnow]

If you check the redhat fedora site, you'll notice that things like mplayer and such ARE NOT listed in the packages list.

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[justsomebody]

The GPL has very specific requirements about software that uses patented technology. Basically, regardless of whether or not fraunhoffer requires licensing fees means little. The only person that has a right to distribute GPL'd mp3 based software is Fraunhoffer. If Fraunhoffer did that, anyone could use MP3 GPL software for Commercial or Non-Commercial purposes.

Yep, but you're wrong in one way. Fauhoffer only intended to make this packages this way. Software players are still allowed to be GPLed after MP3 specs. Changes for free software players were only intended. SO HAT MAKES GPLed MP3 player still a valid piece

Software Developer Concern

[RichiP]

As a third party software developer, I'd like to know what will be guaranteed to remain static within a given release of Fedora and its updates. If I write software that's dependent on, say gtk2-2.2.5 and which will break down (hypothetically) with a newer version of the gtk2 package, will I be guaranteed that this won't be the case with updates to a specific version of Fedora?

One concern of software developers is guaranteeing minimum requirements for the software they develop. Look around you and you'll see developers stating their software "works with RH 9" or whatever. If Fedora becomes too much of a moving target, it will be a headache to develop software for it.

Re:Software Developer Concern

[lordcorusa]

The simple answer is that if you are developing commercial software, you should not be targetting the Fedora distribution. Red Hat and the Fedora project clearly intend this to be like the equivalent of Debian unstable/testing. How many sane commercial software developers would target Debian unstable/testing?

If you want to target an "official" Red Hat distribution with guaranteed stability, Red Hat clearly wants you to target their Enterprise Linux. If you don't want to or cannot afford it, then I would say it's time to stop targetting Red Hat distributions at all, and go with Suse Enterprise, Debian stable, or some other distribution which better meets your needs.

If you really, really want to target Fedora, your best bet would be to bundle all required libraries into one big package, or statically compiling everything, assuming you legally can according to the licenses of the components (ala the Kompany). You might not like the idea of putting all of that "bloat" into your nice, clean little app, but that is what will be necessary to guarantee the level of package-stability you seem to require.

Whether or not you like this new strategery, this is the tack Red Hat appears to be taking. Now you need to decide whether you should keep fishing or move on to some other waters.

i won't say it

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's have a lean, mean app whose function is to be a calendar, and another, equally tight app for email.

I won't say it.

I'm not going to say it!

I WON'T SAY IT!!!

GAH!we'retalkingaboutopensourcesoftwareifyouwant it gomakeityourself!!!!!

*gasp* *gasp*

i'm sorry. this has never happened to me before. really, i tried to hold it in but i just could't. it was too much for me. it's ok, i'll clean it up.

OH NO!

[tempest303]

It's that time again, folks, since it's apparently a "no-brainer" now to choose Gentoo over Red Hat (or any other distro). Yes, it's time for another link to... the Amazing Gentoo-Linux-Zealot Translate-o-matic!

Re:OH NO!

[jdavidb]

I would like to extend my apologies to the Linux community for setting off the Gentoo people. While I admire Gentoo for what it provides, I have never used it and am most definitely not an advocate.

Can't even mention some things without getting people started...

Re:OH NO!

[tempest303]

I would like to extend my apologies to the Linux community for setting off the Gentoo people.

As part of the non-Genotoo-using Linux public, I declare you forgiven, since you could say something as completely unrelated to software as "Man, I love a good cheeseburger!", and at least one of the Gentoo peanut gallery will pipe up about Portage or "faster performance". It's a shame, since naturally most Gentoo users aren't this silly, but they sure have some of the most vocal idiots.

Re:OH NO!

[10Ghz]

Why is ot OK to talk about Debian, SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware or some other distro. But the moment someone mentions Gentoo, the trolls emerge from their caves and start flaming and/or posting their stupid "Amazing Gentoo-Linux-Zealot Translate-o-matic". If someone say "BTW I use Gentoo and I think it's great", he's a "vocal idiot". If that same person said "BTW I use Mandrake and I think it's great, no-one would flame him. Seriously, why the anti-Gentoo sentiment? It's just a distro that has some differences when compared to some other distros.

To me, it seems that the anti-Gentoo idiots feel the need to defend their choice of Linux. They feel that Gentoo is somehow threatening to the status quo, and therefore it and it's user should be flamed.

Re:OH NO!

[Jonner]

I have so much more time to eat my cheeseburger when I update a package on Gentoo!

Re:OH NO!

[jdavidb]

Not everybody talking about Gentoo is an idiot, but there are some idiots who talk about Gentoo. We all have our idiots. I'm from the Perl community, so you know I've seen idiots.

I highly respect Gentoo. I think it's great. I feel no need to defend my Linux distributions (which number three, including Linux From Scratch, which I don't optimize). I think some Gentoo folks feel a need to defend theirs, which is cool, but only interests me insofar as they bring new material to the table.

I'll always remember the guy who started Gentoo as the guy who wrote that great series of articles about ssh on an IBM developer page. Very smart guy, very smart distro.

Re:OH NO!

[jdavidb]

Heh, I love it. Especially the eMachines quote; my first Linux machine was (still running) an eMachine. In fact, I've spent the last few nights compiling Linux From Scratch on it.

But no Gentoo! No! ;)

Re:OH NO!

[jdavidb]

I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for).

Hmmm, actually, now I'm glad I read that. I've never seen "dependency hell," and now I know why. I've only recently started occasionally pulling rpms off of rpmfind, and I always do it for my exact version of RedHat. And I've always known you could plunk everything down on the rpm commandline and have it resolve it. (I once typed something like rpm -i *-dev.rpm so I'd quit having to install prerequisites to compile stuff.)

Re:OH NO!

[10Ghz]

What was this discussion about? Someone posted his reason for switching from RH to Gentoo. And his reasons were valid, I saw no problems with them. But apparently he's a "vocal idiot" because he dared to list few facts and .

Yes, if he had said something like "Gent00 ownz j00!" he would deserve a good flaming. But he did not. He posted a rational message where he mentioned his reasons to switch. Apparently that was too much for some.

What nesxt? someone mentions casually in Slahdot that "Well, I'm running [insert some software here] on Gentoo and it works great", and out comes the trolls with their anti-gentoo whining.

Re:OH NO!

[jdavidb]

You left out the initial sequence of events: I mentioned Gentoo only as it regards new advances in distribution building, and somebody took it as an opportunity to offer a Gentoo testimonial. Such testimonials are often overexuberant. If anything, nobody's flaming the guy who did it, but the abstract "Gentoo zealot" who really only exists as an amalgam of all these overexuberant testimonials that seem to show up at the drop of a hat.

Look, if you make fun of the caricature of a Perl advocate, I'll laugh, even though I'm a Perl programmer and think people in the Perl community are some of the smartest around. There's a caricature of Gentoo folks as always zealously pushing their operating system as the "one true solution" in any discussion, at the drop of a hat, etc. Admit that some people do that, and deal with it.

Re:OH NO!

[tempest303]

If someone say "BTW I use Gentoo and I think it's great", he's a "vocal idiot". If that same person said "BTW I use Mandrake and I think it's great, no-one would flame him.

You've built a straw-man here. The people I'm complaining about, and that the Translate-o-matic is referring to are the people who don't just say "I like Gentoo, I think it's great". The complaint is against the Gentoo users who, quoting the ToM: "absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity, no matter how off topic." These same people also seem to have a problem looking at their distribution with any serious objectivity - in this case, someone said that Gentoo was somehow a "no-brainer" for Linux users to all switch to. If someone had said that Mandrake (or Red Hat, my own preferred distro) was a "no-brainer" for all Linux installs, I would have flamed him, too. The difference is, the number of users from other distros that do this, vs the number of Gentoo users is vastly skewed, thus Gentoo takes the brunt of the flames.

To me, it seems that the anti-Gentoo idiots feel the need to defend their choice of Linux. They feel that Gentoo is somehow threatening to the status quo, and therefore it and it's user should be flamed.

Translation: (to quote the Translate-o-matic) "Let's face it, Gentoo is the future"

(sorry, couldn't help myself.) I would submit that rather it is you who feel threatened, because you know the truth to what is being said. Conversely, I'm not threatened by Gentoo, just annoyed by the current round of zealots who seem to think that it's somehow vastly superior to the other distros, or that it's right for everyone and everything. As the ToM says: "Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features." This certainly seems true, and for users who absolutely crave the very latest bleeding edge at all times, it certainly seems like the way to go, but until the community self-regulates (ie: the smart Gentoo users cluestick the idiots among your users), the ToM will continue to contain truth, and thus continue to be relevant and funny. ;)

Regular releases are fine...

[Sits]

...so long as the upgrades between them are easy. I think one of the biggest complaints I hear about Linux distros is that xyz new program does not run on them and many cite the sheer rapid availability of new releases as one of the reasons they switched to Gentoo from Debian. Plus it is harder to continously backport fixes to an old distro. Using the latest release is far easier from a maintainer's point of view (although doing this obviously introudces more risk)...

What I do find interesting is the fact that Red Hat will not provide support Fedora. This is probably the biggest blow - it has been great to file bugs into Red Hat's bugzilla and see the hackers they employ answer rather than post to a mailing list and see your comment washed away with the flood. Sure it wasn't enterprise support but no-one enjoys seeing their bug just rot away unlooked at only to be declared too old to care about.

I wonder if in the end this means we'll see move from "Small number of tightly tested packages" to "Large RPM repository of the latest versions of all the popular packages". In this scenario if the fault is anything but packaging then you have to find the original author of the program and ask them to fix it rather than being able to pass it through to an intermediary third party.

Re:Regular releases are fine...

[Alan Cox]

Support and fixing bugs in bugzilla are two different things. You can expect folk to be fixing bugs, scribbling in bugzilla and the like but you won't be able to pay someone to fix stuff or get guarantees anything will be fixed.

Re:Regular releases are fine...

[Sits]

Ahh I hadn't realised there was a difference between the two. In that case it will hopefully have the best of both worlds with fixes migrating back into the mainstream in a timely fashion.

Well all I can say is that this announcement is great news. Hopefully this will give us access to a larger collection of consistently packaged software while putting the destinty of the project in the hands of the community in a sustainable manner (supporting a single release of a large base of software for years on end without subscriptions is not in my opinion sustainable).

*Cough*

[Sits]

So that's why tallyho's NTPd was broken this morning ;)

Re:CLUELESS UBERS? er.. USERS?

[boudie]

Maybe your mom could show me how vi works.

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[MSG]

If that's true, all you have to do is get it in writing, and Red Hat will surely begin including MP3 software in their distribution again.

Management style

[cesarcardoso]

It will be interesting the management development of the Fedora project: FreeBSD-style or Debian-style?

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[Saeger]

REDHAT CANNOT LET YOU DOWNLOAD IT WITHOUT BREAKING THE LAW! What about this can't you idiots understand???

The "idiots" are being idealists; that's all. Blind allegiance to "The Letter of The (wrong) Law" makes a lot of people feel dirty.

Have to remind these idealists to hate the game (i.e. patent/legal system), and not the player (redhat).

--

Just use Ark Linux

[Professor Chaos]

Ark Linux www.arklinux.com is an apt-get based red hat derivative linux that is very desktop oriented. its in its late alpha stages right now but is very stable. If you run debian testing its probably more than stable enough for your needs.. here is a link to a review of arklinux at extremetech ... It is very KDE-centric and uses the keramik/geramik theme sets to make kde and gnome look similar. I've been using it for months and its by far the best linux distribution ive ever used (and ive used them all)

WARNING Ophidian P Jones is a plagarism troll

[pr0ntab]

Every one of his recent posts is a copy of some other post. He's trying to sop up karma by reposting +5 (but slightly OT) posts from related articles. I assume he'll use this karma to post trolls or crapfloods at +2 later.

He copied me, and now I'm pissed. I'm going to waste my karma replying to every one of his posts with rude, inflammatory comments.

He is a lazy fuck who can't even be bothered to put too intelligent words together. I've got 4 accounts at capped karma and I don't even try.

Un-fucking-believable.

Re:WARNING Ophidian P Jones is a plagarism troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got 4 accounts at capped karma and I don't even try.

Really? With two comments on a slow day, and twelve today, it seems like you have nothing better to do than "try". I hope that karma helps you through those lonely nights.

Re:WARNING Ophidian P Jones is a plagarism troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Whats "Un-fucking-believable" is that stupid shits like you are allowed to consume valuable oxygen. FOAD sir, FOAD.

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[G-funk]

REDHAT CANNOT LET YOU DOWNLOAD IT WITHOUT BREAKING THE LAW!

Why? Winamp does.

tra la la lump-a-do.... let's all hear it for the lamensss filter that stops me quoting too much caps in my message.

Is this a way to make you pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if this is a way...
1) to make people work for RH for free
2) a way to make you pay, if you call them asking for support ... they say "pay $4000 to buy the RHEL"?

Is this a way to extort your company when you have a problem?

Please, don't talk about another subject when replying and talk about this exactly, this is serious for me and I'm worried.

MOD PARENT DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

please don't post this off-topic crap. nobody cares about your personal flamewars.

This just in: UPDATE!

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears you've been mod-bombed.

In other news...

Re:What about patent-protected multimedia and DMCA

[eviltypeguy]

"Yep, but you're wrong in one way. Fauhoffer only intended to make this packages this way. Software players are still allowed to be GPLed after MP3 specs. Changes for free software players were only intended. SO HAT MAKES GPLed MP3 player still a valid piece"

You obviously have failed to read the GPL. Read it again.