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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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: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]"