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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."
Good, solid base of stable kernel, glibc, gcc and XFree86 releases. Not sure how the 8-month no-backport security fix policy is going to work though; it could be a right shambles having to update all sorts of stuff and dependencies just because of hole in nano requires upgrading to the latest version etc.
Still, looks like RH's first-rate QA has been put into place (unlike in Mandrake), and hopefully they'll keep that up as the community gets more involved.
M
Although this was silly of me in a certain sense, I originally interpreted "download options include bittorrent and..." to mean that the web browser in this release would include a bittorrent client. And then the obvious occurred to me that they just meant you could use torrents to download the iso. But really... It would be VERY nice to have an integrated torrent client. Mozilla Firebird people, are you listening? Just because you're the best browser around doesn't mean you shouldn't implement this. :)
That's really cool, and more useful than it sounds... I was looking for just this feature several months ago when installing RH on a laptop whose video card was supported by XFree but for some reason wouldn't work with the graphical installer. (Tweaks were required for the configuration file.) I know there's a text-based installer as well, but it's so much easier to select packages on the GUI install. It sounds like this will be a nice successor to RH 9.
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No software goal would be complete without having at least two or three separate open source projects working towards it.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I looked around the website and they don't really explain how important a priority stability is. They do have a QA "project", but they also say they want to "Be on the leading edge of open source technology..."
I take it we're not talking OpenBSD/Debian-stable level of reliability. That's fine. But what's the goal? Will this stuff be /directly/ used by RedHat, or is there a "polishing" step?
If you are talking about this stuff ending up in RH Advanced Server, then yes, this will be heavily polished before release.
If you are talking about RH Linux 10, well, that won't be happening. This is the new world right here.
Speaking as someone who runs Mandrake Cooker (someone pick up that reader who just fainted) stability concerns really don't worry me too much as I can hack the problems as they occur :-) However, this stuff has gone through basic Redhat QA so it can be assumed that it won't eat your dog or sleep with your wife :-)
This is a distribution for the release early, release often crowd. The primary release (which this is) should be treated as being a reasonable base to build on. Once you hook up the apt-get or yum tools to the respective repositories, upgrading broken packages should be easy enough. Fedora will be making an appearance on my laptop in the next week or so - time will tell whether Fedora is stable enough. If you are nervous about being an early adopter, sit back and watch the forums, newsgroups and mailing lists for show stoppers that might hit your configuration.
I'm happy to see Fedora hit the streets. I've been running RH 8.0 on this laptop for a while now and I miss the absolute bleeding edge that the Mandrake Cooker tree gives me. Running Fedora on this laptop will allow me to track the latest stable release series. Mandrake Cooker allows me to track the latest developer releases on my desktop box.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
I think Fedora is an answer to the whining of people who run Debian but say even unstable is too behind the times (gnome, xfree, etc).
All the flaming of Redhat for switching to a model that resembles a commercial Debian has been amusing. They take away boxed CD's that you could buy for XX dollars (which tons of slashdotters would flame anyways, 'who would pay for what you can get for free', as seen by SuSE 9 threads) and replace it with a leading edge distro that focuses on quick updates that would be impossible to accomplish with a boxed distrobution method (call it debian unstable). They will then take what they learn from Fedora and incorporate it into Redhat Enterprise line of software (think of it as analogous to debian stable).
Of course that asks why use Redhat instead of just Debian? For personal use it really comes down to flavor, but for Enterprise use it is an easy question.
-Eyston
- Everywhere the Red Hat emblem used to appear, the new Fedora logo does. - Almost all of the major programs in Red Hat 9 have been updated to their most recent incarnations. - CUPS is used for all printing needs. - More recent version of the Linux kernel (still not 2.6, that's for the next version of Fedora). - Same lack of built-in NTFS read-only capailities and MP3 support in XMMS. Based on beta 3, that's about all I'd put down as new. I might go insofar as to say it's a tad bit faster, but it could be psychological. :)
RH 10 == FC 1
Red Hat still puts resources into Fedora.
Red Hat still puts QA into Fedora (in fact they caught flack for delaying it).
Red Hat opened up the development to outsiders through Fedora.
Red Hat changed the products name into something everyone can use and sell.
We get a more open, supported, release often OS.
So far this sounds great. In the coming months we will see if this really is a win/win.
I'm quite happy with the new kernel version, since it supports DMA mode on my new SATA drive, while the kernel in RH9 would occasionally hang if you tried to turn DMA on. Not a huge thing, unless you happen to have an affected drive, in which case it makes a world of difference. There are some other kernel changes that should make life nicer for laptop users.
Some other random changes that I notice in their release notes:
They've also removed a number of packages that are either no longer necessary (e.g. QT2, LPRng) or have licensing issues (e.g. pine, some aspell packages).
One other big change is that they're moving from using ASCII to UTF8 wherever they can. That's one of those things that's kind of annoying while the switch is taking place (they mention that this could cause problems with telnet and ssh, since they don't explicitly negotiate the encoding) but will presumably make everything easier in the long run.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
It's never too late to change your mind. Debian is fairly gung-ho on the idea of multiple maintainers for packages, which makes for a reasonable entry point for folks from other distributions to join the fun. Another good hook is Debian's Testing distribution. The basic idea is to have a usable software collection with a time granularity between Unstable (daily) and Stable (roughly two year cycle). Testing doesn't currently get the tons of programmer nourishment it so richly deserves, and instead relies on automated QA programs and a few gallant human efforts. With some additional manpower, this would be a great layer in the distribution/maintenance system for something like Fedora to emerge.
You would lose that bet. I'm very close to releasing ISO images of "white box enterprise linux". I have all of the heavy lifting done, currently I'm polishing things up a bit and starting in on cleaning out logos.
:)
And no, I don't expect to be sued. RedHat understands the consequences of releasing software under the GPL. Besides, they would have to be zarking mad to try sueing a public library for publishing GPL software. They would be reviled second only to SCO.
If they find something I have missed I expect they will drop an email, I'll make a corrected set of images available and that will be that. They aren't at war with us, they just made a business decision that non-enterprise customers weren't all that profitable. Personally I think it is going to cost them in the long term, but that's just my opinion and it is their call to make. They are the ones who answer to the shareholders.
Democrat delenda est
no NTFS...yeah..that can be a pain. For some.
/. whinegers I'm quite happy to tell the Powers That Be to fork over the money to Red Hat.
No MP3...as long as the license for the codec is what it is you'll never see anything even remotely associated with Red Hat including it.
No 2.6...well 2.6 is not ready for the parameters of this type of release yet. And 2.4.22*.nptl does moderately rock...
prelink is absolulely amazing
I'm actually looking forward to how the "extras" path will pan out. For me on my personal boxes Fedora is a no brainer
but not for my servers.
unlike many of the
For them it's the "security" factor.Easily understood in their finacial world
For me it's the oppertunity to finally pay back Red Hat for some quality production level code that I have used over the years.
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.