Fedora Core 1 Released

EvilAlien writes "The Fedora Project has released Fedora Core 1, aka Yarrow. The release was expected on November 3rd, but was briefly delayed. The release notes has quite a bit of good detail, and is worth checking out for any preliminary questions you may have. Download options include BitTorrent in addition to the traditional collection of FTP mirrors."

Comments

A couple of links

[Mr_Icon]

Bittorrent Link

Alternatively:
btdownloadcurses.py --max_upload_rate 350 --url http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/yarrow-binary-i386-i so.torrent

A few installation screenshots

Re:A couple of links

[oobar]

If you mean Bram's FAQ, then yes. But nobody ever accused him of being great with documentation. A much better FAQ is here.

Re:A couple of links

[j-turkey]

Looking at the screenies, I must ask: how is this different from RH9?

Yeah -- those screenshots really tell the whole story, don't they? ;)

All kidding aside, they've made some significant changes to the RH9 core. Check out the release notes.

The stuff that really interests me is:

• Prelinking: (search for it in the link above) From an end user perspective, it will make applications load faster, as dynamicly linked libraries will be loaded ahead of time into unused memory.
• Exec-Shield: (again, search for it in the release notes) Exec-shield purports to randomize VM addresses and make parts of applications (as well as their stack) non-executable. Think of it as "damage control" for security holes. The integrated stack protection (that the Exec-shield kernel addition replaces/includes) is very important for foiling buffer overflow attacks.
• /proc/cpufreq (again, see the notes) Maybe this has been done elsewhere, but I've neither used or seen it. Apparently, you can do CPU clock throttling. This is particularly useful for laptops where CPU speed is scaled down to conserve battery. This technology is still in its infancy (for Linux, anyway) and has a way to go, but is an excellent start nonetheless.
• Laptop mode compliments /proc/cpufreq and changes disk access to a sort of block-mode that will space apart disk accesses allow for the disk to spin down and conserve battery.
• Extended RPM/Up2Date support: Up2Date now supports APT and YUM, as well as local databases. (I read somewhere that the default package management is now APT but cannot confirm this.)

Anyway, this is just the stuff that piqued my interest. There are plenty of other changes that look pretty promising. I hadn't read much about Fedora until recently, and nothing technical until today -- but after scanning over the release notes, I'm ready to dump my RH9 desktop box and install Fedora.

--Turkey

Re:Now the question is...

[Rik van Riel]

One of the reasons for the name change from "Red Hat Linux" to Fedora is that everybody can sell CDs with the distribution now.

No need to rename it to "pink tie linux" or "green sock linux" any more, every cheap CD shop selling CDs with Fedora can call it by its real name.

Re:Still concerns about security errata

[Rik van Riel]

One of the nice things about Fedora being an open source project is that participation by others (eg. the Fedora Legacy people) is encouraged.

If a lot of people want backported security fixes, there's nobody stopping them from doing the work and putting up an apt or yum repository with those packages.

(one nice feature of Fedora is that up2date now talks apt and yum, so you can get your packages from anywhere you want, not just Red Hat)

Totally ridiculous

[Outland Traveller]

Look at the facts:

Support for Redhat 9 is good through April 2004.

You can download Fedora for free. Fedora has been specifically packaged to make 3rd party distribution easy, and looks like it's going to include all of the functionality of old redhat+up2date for free.

The new enterprise products have guaranteed 5-year support cycles. THIS IS HUGE. The low end, desktop-oriented enterprise workstation offering is 179$, including 1yr up2date support.

All of Redhat's software is still GPL.

I don't see what the anti-redhat has against one of their best neighbors and diplomats to the outside world.

Worst release process ever...

[A Masquerade]

Red Hat have always had a bit of a reputation for lousing up the release process of a distribution when it comes to getting mirrors ready before the release.

Fedora has taken this to new and astounding heights. I got the notification that Fedora was ready to mirror 31 minutes before the supposed official release time. The download.fedora.redhat.com name wasn't in the DNS. The permissions on the repository prvented us rsyncing, and there were no pre-release torrents in place.

So at release time there were no mirrors and no torrents available. Worse, the mirror list their download page points to are the old Red Hat mirrors which use a different directory heirarchy to the new Fedora tree, so those links are both wrong and to machines that don't have the damn software.

Its now 4.5 hours after release time. I have had a torrent client set running for most of that time (as soon as I got a torrent URL), and the torrents have not completed. The immediate throwing open of the release to the general public means I can't get rsync access to the main site. So my mirror, and I guess many other are not anywhere near synced.

Frankly I'm pissed off and will probably not bother to mirror in future.

Re:Features

[mukund]

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux /core/1/i386/os/images/boot.iso

Re:um..

[Alan Cox]

Believe me "do we just join Debian" was a seriously asked question in planning Fedora. But Fedora is about somewhat slightly different things like regular and rapid releases and so the idea of merging into Debian didnt look like it would work out.

Re:For you, then...

[T-Ranger]

One of the actual changes in 'Fedora' over 'Red Hat Linux' is the terms of the copyright. 'Red Hat Linux' is copyrighted with a very specific requirements for use.

Significantly, you couldnt sell CDs with 'Red Hat Linux' on them and call it 'Red Hat Linux'.... The product included support, and RH was getting lots of calls from people who had bought 'Red Hat Linux' out of the back of a van (or whatever :P)

With 'Fedora', OTOH, anyone can burn off CDs and call it 'Fedora'.. Well, more people can, there are still some restrictions Im sure.