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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.'"
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."
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
But isn't up2date the service they plan on making money with?
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
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.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
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?
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?
Why Fedora? Why not sombrero or chapeaux? Why pick something associated with the mob?
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?
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.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
From looking at the package list, they are not listed.
..."hats off" to these guys.
Derby, Bowler, Porkpie and Kangol.
"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.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
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?
Headgear.
Escape Pod Films: Sketch Comedy and Web Series
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.
/Neil
Anyone have any insight on that issue, which is the biggest one by far at present for me regarding RedHat?
TIA
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.
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.
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.
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.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
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.
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.
GL
Copying myself from OSNews . . .
From http://fedora.redhat.com/about/name.html:
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?
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?
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.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year with a public release schedule.
.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.
.
So will RedHat release a new product everytime a core gets delivered? Will we see a
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.
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.
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...
http://kde-redhat.sf.net
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).
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
"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...
Here are some good places for newbies to start with Linux...
Hope this helps!
"A revolution without dancing is... a revolution not worth having"
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.
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.
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>--
bachiatari na torisetsu o yome!
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
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
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.
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!
The Free desktop that Just Works
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]"
So that's why tallyho's NTPd was broken this morning ;)
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.
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.
> 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.
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)