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Fedora Core 2 Schedule Up
An anonymous reader writes "The Fedora website has posted a schedule for their second release. " Now that the 2.6 Kernel is out, I imagine all the major distributions will have updates relatively soon.
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Updates will be out, yes, but most distributions have already had 2.6 updates available as a "No, it's not ready yet, but here you go."
Remember how fun 2.4 was when it first came out?
Yeah.
Fedora is basically Redhat's testbed for new technology, so it makes perfect sense for them to push out 2.6 this quickly.
I'll tell you why.
Because I love and use Debian, but contrary to what the Debian fanatics will tell you, the testing/unstable versions are unusable for serious business. So, I have to use the stable build, which has many good qualities, but as others have noted... kernel 2.2 as the default kernel?!? X Window System is a P.I.T.A. for anybody but an X god and forget about detecting my Radeon. GCC in stable is so old that there are ANSI compatibility problems. etc. etc. And no, package pinning does NOT solve any of this.
I absolutely despise Windows, but at least I can run recent compilers on Windows 98 without having to compile the compilers myself. At least the latest games still work.
I'm not merely complaining idly. If I could pay $50 for a stable version of Debian that worked right, had reasonably modern versions of everything, and was still idealistically free, I'd be first in line with my checkbook.
-- laws are the opinions of politicians --
Is this really where linux is going, one distro for this kind of utilities and one distro for security, another for network-chores and this one for mailservers etc.
I know you can't win them all, aren't there enough distroes out there. What the world needs now is more people contributing to the existing projects rather than people forking new projects.
I'd rather see 10 new RedHat/Debian/Whatever developers than 10 new distroes specializing in their own thing. Why not create the necessary packages for a smashing audio-distro and submit them to your favourite distro ?
It's interesting to see how Red Hat is contributing not only to glibc, but also playing the leading role in for example GCC development. It should give the RH bashers something to think about.
Does Havoc work on the freedesktop.org effort on RH's paycheck? I'm guessing he is, but I'm not sure. RH has said they're pretty much not interested in the desktop at the moment, yet outside RH probably only Ximian/Novell can compete with the number of core GNOME developers under a single roof.
In response to the recent release of kernel 2.6.0, Debian is accelerating their development cycle and plans to immediately release a stable distribution containing the new kernel. Look for this new version sometime in 2005.
Actually, 2005 is about right.
What just released is 2.6.0. Looking at the past history of kernel releases -- or even just reading the comments of kernel developers about this release -- you'd have to be an absolute fool to put this on an an important production server now.
It's important to understand the Linux kernel release cycle. When Linus cuts loose a "stable" release, that does not mean that it's stable in the sense of "reliable", it means it's stable in the sense that developers aren't going to be hacking the guts apart (well, excepting the 2.4 VM thing, which actually supports my point). There are going to be problems for a while, and that's just part of the process.
Nope, if your workload is important, you'll want to wait a few minor versions. From what I read on LKML, the developers think that 2.6 will stabilize a lot faster than 2.4 did, because 2.6.0 is a lot more solid that 2.4.0 was, but you still probably shouldn't even think about it for serious production work until at least 2.6.5, and even then you'd better test the crap out of it (never a bad idea anyway).
So, figure that about six months from now, 2.6 will be solid enough to be the default kernel in less conservative distributions. At that point, Debian will be watching how well everyone else fares with it. A year or so later, they'll have some confidence that it's trustworthy. The next release after that, it will probably be the default. In the meantime, 2.6 will probably be available in woody fairly soon, and is already available in sarge, though it's very unlikely to be the default when sarge is released.
Meanwhile, one of my Debian unstable boxes is happily running a Debian-provided 2.6 and has been for a couple of months now.
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