Fedora Core 2 test1 Released

GerritHoll writes "A test release of Fedora Core 2 is now available from Red Hat and at distinguished mirror sites near you, and is also available in the torrent. Fedora Core has expanded in this release to four binary ISO images and four source ISO images. This test release is specifically designed for testing the 2.6 kernel, GNOME 2.5, and KDE 3.2. Please file bugs via Bugzilla, Product Fedora Core, Version test1, Architecture i386 so that they are noticed and appropriately classified. Discuss this test release on fedora-test-list."

Comments

I know Fedora is supposed to be bleeding edge

[Kick the Donkey]

I know Fedora is supposed to be bleeding edge, but isn't including GNOME 2.5 (a development version) a little, un-savery? I would imagine they'd want to wait for the first release of 2.6, and go with 2.4 till then.

Re:I know Fedora is supposed to be bleeding edge

[arendjr]

Probably GNOME 2.6 is expected to be out by the time the release their final version of Core 2. Then they'll be the first to have it.

Re:I know Fedora is supposed to be bleeding edge

[Ars-Fartsica]

This is just the first test release so you can assume that the next test release will likely merge with production GNOME, and the release of Core 2 certainly will.

Re:I know Fedora is supposed to be bleeding edge

[MSG]

GNOME 2.6 is expected to be available before FC2's release. Including 2.5 now means they get more testing on the beta desktop before the final release, and as a result get a better final release.

Re:I know Fedora is supposed to be bleeding edge

[pjl5602]

This is a test of Fedora Core 2. Gnome 2.6 should be out when FC2 final ships.

Re:I know Fedora is supposed to be bleeding edge

[justsomebody]

Release date of Gnome 2.6: march 8
Release date of FC2: april 6

so yes, Gnome will be 2.6, and I don't see a problem with test release of Linux using test release of Gnome, because in the end both will be final for release.

Re:I know Fedora is supposed to be bleeding edge

[Stonent1]

but isn't including GNOME 2.5 (a development version) a little, un-savery?

Actually Gnomes with a little butter, rosemary and garlic can be quite savory.

Re:I know Fedora is supposed to be bleeding edge

[nsxfreddy]

I'll wager Gentoo will have it first ;)

Yeah, but by the time you're done building it, FC2 will be released.

Re:I know Fedora is supposed to be bleeding edge

[Junta]

I think my system can beat the FC2 lag to build gnome.... now if we were talking about a KDE release..... That is an entirely different story....

Re:I know Fedora is supposed to be bleeding edge

[facelessnumber]

Calm down, mods... The mere mention of Gentoo doesn't neccessarily make parent a troll.

Huge

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora Core has expanded in this release to four binary ISO images...

Ugh. Looks like my modem will be getting a workout again soon. Wouldn't it be easier to skimp on some of the apps, and provide separate links to them so we can reduce download times? Four ISO discs is hella big.

Re:Huge

[theIG]

you don't need to download all of the isos to install fedora. Probably the first two at the most. Just do a minimal install, and then use aptforrpm or yum to install all of the software you need from the internet. -kyle

Re:Huge

[DAldredge]

If it is like Fedora Core 1 just download the first ISO and select the base install. The base install in Fedora Core 1 was just on the first cd. You can download the rpms for anything else you need later.

Re:Huge

[anthonyclark]

Allegedly you can download just the first disc and choose a 'minimal' install, then use yum or apt-get* to install the packages you want.

Can anyone confirm this?

* only yum is installed by default, apt-get you have to snag from http://freshrpms.net/

Re:Huge

[rodgster]

I installed it last night via ftp and the boot.iso

Nautilus crashes on logoff, and I seem to have some acpi issues on my laptop, but it looks really cool. A lot of New stuff and much better GUIs.

Just my 2 cents.

Re:Huge

[shaitand]

If it's like fedora 1 you need all the iso's. minimal install STILL requires like 30mbs off of disc 3. There is plenty of room for everything and then some on disc1 but due to poor structuring and layout of the cd's.

Re:Huge

[pyros]

Really? I just did a Personal Desktop install the other day and it only required discs 1 and 2, perhaps minimal isn't so minimal.

Re:Huge

[dbc001]

that's what they said about mandrake 9.1 . then those bastards put all the modem stuff on the 3rd cd. i think i had a similar problem with redhat 9, now that i think of it

Re:Huge

[GerritHoll]

If you fetch almost everything from the internet, what's the point of downloading an iso at all? If your uplink is fast enough to do 'yum install ', I don't see why it isn't fast enough to perform 'minimal install' through FTP.

Re:Huge

[74nova]

why has redhat always done that? with 8 and 9, it seemed like they would span all 3 discs with stuff for a light install just to make sure you had them. i always figured with a gui-less install, they could fit all of it on the 1st cd to save you time and cd-rs(not that those are expensive).

Re:Huge

[Zork the Almighty]

(Score: 5, Troll)

Re:Huge

[shaitand]

a minimal linux install can fit on a floppy disk. The craziest ideas of a general purpose minimal linux install are under 50mb. The redhat/fedora minimal install are 300-400MB, you decide how minimal it is ;)

Re:Huge

[Zarjazz]

If it's like fedora 1 you need all the iso's. minimal install STILL requires like 30mbs off of disc 3. There is plenty of room for everything and then some on disc1 but due to poor structuring and layout of the cd's.

Thats totally incorrect. Fedora Core 1 minimum install only requires disc 1. I should know, I just built several servers that way this week!

Re:Huge

[Alan Cox]

Fedora 1 minimal install needs Disc 1, most other stuff disc 1 and 2. I've not played with FC2 test1 enough yet to check.

In FC1 however you can end up needing disc3 if you select some other language support as disc3 has locale specific bits on it

Re:Huge

[Peter Cooper]

Come on, Alan, assert your authority and get Welsh and UK locale stuff to disc 1 or 2 ;-) BTW, I was almost expecting your Slashdot posts hereforth to be in Welsh, but alas.. ;-)

Re:Huge

[stor]

Ugh. Looks like my modem will be getting a workout again soon.

Not to mention your 386SX with 2M Ram ;)

Cheers
Stor

Re:Huge

[sgi]

It's already been posted on the fedora-list mailing list that 4 CDs is not desireable and people are being solicited for feedback on what to eliminate from the distribution to get a smaller set of installation discs.

apt-get and yum?

[anthonyclark]

So how do I add a magic line to my sources.list or yum.conf to allow me to upgrade to this 'release'? Will upgrading be as easy as apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade ?

Re:apt-get and yum?

[maelstrom]

I'd imagine so, considering I just upgraded to Fedora Core 1 through apt from Redhat 7.3. I was pretty impressed it didn't break anything. Rebooted into the new kernel and everything.

Re:apt-get and yum?

[IpsissimusMarr]

Its discussed how to automatically update your fedora core through rpm on the fedora-test-list here. Hope that helps.

Re:apt-get and yum?

[Goner]

I believe the most magic way to do it would be to change the name in /etc/redhat-release from:
Fedora Core release 1 (Yarrow)
to:
Fedora Core release 2

or something

then try yum update (or maybe yum upgrade)

I'm not adventurous to even try r2 yet. the fedora.us wiki may have better info.

-Rich

Re:apt-get and yum?

[tarm]

See this post for why it might not be that easy. Basically, if you upgrade to the test1 release now, you might not be able to then upgrade to -final later. See the whole thread for more information.

That said you probably can do it anyway.

Re:apt-get and yum?

[reaper20]

[development]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - Development Tree
baseurl=http://mirror.dulug.duke.edu/pub/fed ora/li nux/core/development

in /etc/yum.conf and then yum update. That worked for me. Look for "development" instead of "rawhide" on whichever mirror you use.

As always, there's no guarantee that any of that will work with test releases, although for FC1 I went from test1,2,3, and then to final using yum and had no issues.

Re:apt-get and yum?

[NateTech]

You obviously didn't have anything set up in Apache (upgraded to Apache2 with no clear indication that it would barf miserably on the old config file nor an .rpmnew config file to use for sanity), nor anything that used a bunch of perl modules that have disappeared from RPM packages, or anything that relied on mod_perl, or....

Would it not be

[Anonymous Coward]

more prudent if slashdot made some kind of ticker on the website of software releases?

Re:Would it not be

[Stevyn]

A ticker for linux distros? Shit, that'd be longer than NYSE on the bloomberg channel. I just hope they don't also delay the "quote" 15 minutes or else we might miss one.

Re:Would it not be

[74nova]

maybe they could let you choose what they display. shoot, make it a streamer for gaim like AIM has the nyse. shoot, maybe add a freshmeat-esque box to the /. homepage for the distros you choose.

i know it was partly a joke, but seriously, youre right, it woudl be insane to have them all. no matter how big, thered be 1 guy in the middle of nowhere yelling "hey! how come you didnt include billy-bob linux??"

i think its an interesting idea, however.

Re:Would it not be

[nycsubway]

like freshmeat?

they used to have a ticker on slashdot, listing the latest new packages. although something for major releases like fedora or a linux kernel would be more what your looking for. and its not a bad idea, considering all the time some people spend on slashdot.

Re:Would it not be

[adrianbaugh]

It's called "freshmeat". Pity slashdot's editors have never heard of it.

Re:Would it not be

[mattyrobinson69]

goto options - you can set freshmeat to be on your homepage on slashdot - i have, i downloaded mldonkey yesterday because of a link that was there.

Re:Would it not be

[Jonathan Platt]

more prudent if slashdot made some kind of ticker on the website of software releases?

That would just be annoying, and I'm sure allot of people learn allot about the releases by being able to discuss them.

Besides while it may often seem like a software site, /. is still primarily a news service.

What about

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandrake 10.0 beta 2 is out also! Why no posting about that, hrmmm?

Re:What about

[steve's nose is blee]

I donwloaded and installed Mdk10 test 2 the other night, it's nice, but it's slow. I'd imagine because it hasn't been optomized yet. Still, it's going to be a sweet distro.

It's also running Kernel 2.6.2-test"something"

Re:What about

[Mateito]

> Mandrake 10.0 beta 2 is out also! Why no posting
> about that, hrmmm?

Because Mandrake, like BSD and Apple, is dying, and will continue to do so for the next 20 years. :)

Silly question

[baryon351]

Is there a version for PPC machines?

thanks

Re:Silly question

[teh*fink]

try yellowdog linux; it may not be entirely up to date but it's mostly there. i regularly rebuild fedora source rpms to use on my ppc linux box and they also have a 64-bit version for the g5 ready.

Use a mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on editors. Why did you link directly to the full isos?!?!?! Use a mirror.

Re:Use a mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

What crack are you smoking?

Re:Use a mirror

[ticklemeozmo]

Why did you link directly to the full isos?!?!?!

Duh, so the part-timers who just happened to load the page before me can get the slow-ass version while the appropriately "hidden" mirror sites remain speedy and fast for me. :)

i386

[truthsearch]

Why is Fedora/Red Hat still compiled for i386? Can there be many 386 or 486 users? I would think it better to make it for Pentium I or II to get a nice performance gain while not abandoning many users. I realize they probably do it because Linux's oldest supported Intel chip is the 386, but it seems much more practical to compile higher. This was the reason I switched to Mandrake years ago, to try a distro compiled for Pentium.

Re:i386

[chez69]

If you read the mailing lists, you'll realize that the parts that benefit (kernel, glibc, openssl) are compiled for i686.

anthing else is a exercise in gentoo masterbation.

Re:i386

[Cthefuture]

There is that much performance difference, but I still agree. I wish there was an i686 version of both Fedora and Debian.

i686 should be the default build and special low-end builds could be made for i386. I'd say i386 is more the exception than the rule.

Re:i386

[FrostedWheat]

I remember reading somewhere that they optimise builds for i586 while keeping binary compatibility with i386. The exception being the packages that need optimisation, like glibc and the kernel.

Re:i386

[zoloto]

the performance gain you get is almost nill.
I know because I've tried both.

Re:i386

[pavon]

Especially since Fedora has very agressively defined itself as the bleeding edge distro. I can understand debian stable and Red Hat Enterprise being compiled for i386 but not Fedora.

Re:i386

[questionlp]

Although most of the machines that would be running Fedora are running with Intel or AMD processors, but (IIRC) the current Via processors lack a specific register or property that could potentially cause issues when running code that has been compilied with i686 optimizations.

Of course, I could be way off base...

Re:i386

[shaitand]

My system is 100% optimized for my athlonXP, yours can be too, just pick up a copy of gentoo and do a stage1 install.

Re:i386

[Spoke]

While Fedora still compiles with the i386 instruction set for maximum compatibility, they do optimize for the i686 cpus using the following compiler options: "-march=i386 -mcpu=i686".

I'd be interested to see if specifying -march=i586 resulted in any significant speed increase. I doubt it would be significant. For code which does appear to be sensitive to optimizations, they do provide -march=i686 compiled RPMs as well as i386, glibc is a good example, openssl is another.

If you want an OS totally optimized for your CPU, use Gentoo.

Of course, if you want, you can always recompile the SRPMs using the target of your choice as well.

Re:i386

[ctr2sprt]

I suspect the cause of your confusion is that many people insist on referring to Intel's 32-bit instruction set architecture by the name of the first processor to support it. The proper term is "IA32" (for "Intel Architecture, 32-bit").

My campaign for IA32 Awareness continues. If only I could persuade some actual developers to use the right term.

Re:i386

[ecalkin]

it's been my understanding that i386 is a rather generic term that describes the intel platform (instruction set) that started with the 80386, as opposed to 'alpha' or 'ppc'.

eric

Re:i386

[Brandybuck]

If you want an OS totally optimized for your CPU, use Gentoo.

Or any other OS that allows you a complete source build, such as FreeBSD.

Re:i386

[the_2nd_coming]

not to mention that most of those programs they are compiling in 1386 form are not even programed with that processor or grade of computer in mind anyway....I mean....Gnome on a 386?

Re:i386

[0x0d0a]

Oh, the Red Hat engineers aren't stupid.

The Pentium ran stuff compiled for the 386 rather slowly, and you could get significant performance improvements by using stuff targetting the 586.

The Pentium II did a much, much better job of running 386 code quickly, which is why folks mostly stopped worrying about doing processor-specific builds.

There are certain packages for which the processor type makes a significant difference. Red Hat builds multiple versions of those few -- the kernel, glibc, etc.

Furthermore, as others have pointed out, Red Hat already aligns the code for i686 by default. This is where most of the improvements come from.

If you're really curious, I have tried rebuilding most of Red Hat for a couple versions for the i686, just for the hell of it. One gets no noticeable improvements. It's really a waste of time to spend time building differently. There are a couple programs that use arch-specific assembly (SDL, for instance), but in general, very few software packages are faster when built specifically for a given processor.

Re:i386

[y0bhgu0d]

...or you can install a pre-compiled OS and use those 3 days to actually be productive.

Re:i386

[chez69]

if they do that, then they have 4 copies ( i386, i586, i686, athlon ) of each RPM.

Re:i386

[Compenguin]

In this case it means the specific instruction set found on the 80386, no sse, no mmx, no 3dnow,no other extentions

Re:i386

[dtfinch]

They have it compiling to i386 instructions, but optimizing for i686. Plus the kernel has cpu detection, so in many places it will use i686 instructions when built for i386. I haven't been able to find benchmarks, but I suspect that for most apps the performance hit is minimal, with the exception of those that rely heavily on floating point or 64 bit math.

Though you do have a point that they really don't need to do that anymore. If someone wants to put Linux on a 386, they shouldn't use the newest Redhat anyway.

Re:i386

[pimpinmonk]

anthing else is a exercise in gentoo masterbation.

Dude my forearms are sooo optimized, -03 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -ffast-math -fexpensive-optimisations -fget-me-a-towel

Re:i386

[Anonymous Coward]

Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic
By M, version 1.0

Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes and leprotards who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...

"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."

"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."

"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."

"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."

"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."

"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."

"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -O9 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."

"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. However, this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"

Re:i386

[dAzED1]

took me barely any longer than the redhat build, personally. Of course, mine was a dual athlon-mp system...but the kernel built in like 5 minutes or some crazy crap. I barely had time to get a glass of water, much less drink it!

Re:i386

[noselasd]

Fedora is compiled mostly with -march=i386 -mcpu=i686, except atleast glibc and the kernel which for one comtains lots of arch specific assembly so it makes sence to divide it up in more arch packages.

If you read the gcc manual, -march=i386 -mcpu=i686 optimizes for i686, but only uses the i386 instruction set.(Hint: there is _alot_ more to optimizing than the instruction set..)
Anyway there isn't that many speedy instruction present in i686, atleast not since gcc doesn't generate mmx or sse automatically.
And compiling only with -march=i686 throws of alot of e.g. pentium users.
The alternative is -march=i586 or -march=-i586 -mcpu=i686, the first usually gives worse performance on i686, the next have just about zero advantage over the current used flags..

If you are still unhappy, recompile the src.rpms yourself with arcane compiler flags.. And please, please benchmark the diffrence.

Re:i386

[Reteo Varala]

If you want an OS totally optimized for your CPU, use Gentoo.

apt-build [package-name]

bittorrenting now

[stephenb]

Please join me:

btdownloadcurses.py --max_upload_rate 350 \
--url http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/FC2-test1-binary-i38 6.torrent

Thank you, and goodnight! :)

Re:bittorrenting now

[stephenb]

Ah, finally the upload speed is ramping up. Thank you, my nerdly brethren.

Re:bittorrenting now

[computersareevil]

You're a coward with a bad ISP and bad bittorrent settings.

Seriously; if your not pegging your downstream pipe with even a slow upload, your settings must be wrong. I routinely peg my 1.5m downstream while uploading is restricted to 56k (of 128k available). Assuming of course there are enough other people in the bittorrent, and that you have opened up your firewall, and waited long enough for your information to propogate.

What a lot of people with hugely asymmetric links (like 1.5m/128k) don't realize is that if your upstream link is saturated, your downstream will go to near zilch. I suspect this is what's happening to you, coward. Set your upload limit (via --max_upload_rate) to about half your upstream capacity, and your problems will likely go away. (Again, make sure your firewall has the right holes poked in it.)

That is, as long as you dump that crappy ISP!

Re:bittorrenting now

[stephenb]

And done!

Thanks, kids. Total time, about 1.5 hours. Not bad at all. Thank you bittorrent!

And don't worry, I'll leave my client open for about 20 hours or so to help the other teeming masses. You should too!

Re:bittorrenting now

[computersareevil]

Ahhh. I love cowards who just spit vitriol when they have nothing useful to say.

I'm on a 3 mbit downlink (twice yours) and if I'm uploading at half rate that's 128 kbit upstream. That's not enough up to saturate the down.

Go back and reread what I wrote, coward. It's UPSTREAM that becomes saturated. When that happens, you won't get anything downstream. Your downstream will be coming in at less than your upstream. This is a function of TCP, and that it must acknowlege every incoming downstream packet. That saturates your upstream with ack's. The sender isn't getting your ack's, so it stops sending you data. Please go read-up on TCP/IP before you spout off again, coward.

Most people can't just dump their ISP. That's moronic.

Why not? Your the customer, you can do whatever you want. If you can't, that's your problem, not mine.

I get a 3 mbit connection for $30/mo. Beat that fucker.

That's a good deal, no question. I get 1.5 mbit for $10 month (splitting DSL with 2 non-techies). Tag! Your it!

Oh, and thanks for calling me "fucker". It improves my karma.

BitTorrent is a waste of time designed for stupid hippies like yourself.

Yes, that's why large corporations have been using it. It's clearly too complicated for cowards to use. (And I ain't no hippie, coward. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I just don't like Phish or the Dead...)

Go feed your lion some tofu.

What? That is the strangest attempt at an insult I've ever encountered. "A" for effort, coward.

"I've always found profanity to be refuge of the inarticulate motherfucker."
- Lord Byron as paraphrased by ry4an-slashdot@ry4an.org

Re:bittorrenting now

[ajs]

Actually, you can also use Gnutella for this. The Gnutella protocol has had this kind of multi-sourced-download available for a long time, but only recently are clients beginning to support it. I use gtk-gnutella which works quite well. I got the fedora core isos just about as fast as my line could handle. No waiting here ;-)

Re:bittorrenting now

[mikefoley]

I'm seeing pathetic downloads. 1-16kB/s My uploads are moving along at 36kB/s.

A torrent I downloaded the other night was flying at over a meg/sec.

Re:bittorrenting now

[pyros]

"Go feed your lion some tofu" is a reference to Futurama. One of the people protesting with Leela is a hippy who taught his lion to eat tofu.

Re:bittorrenting now

[dtfinch]

Same story here, but getting worse.

Re:bittorrenting now

[computersareevil]

BitTorrent is a give/take kinda thing, if you don't send much then you don't get much. Electronic communism for hippies like yourself.

*sigh* That's only true if there are not a lot of seeds. If there are enough seeds, your download should saturate more-or-less regardlesss of your upload.

As for sharing; I don't see how sharing for the benefit of all is a bad thing. You are here on Slashdot, so you either agree, or you are just a trolling coward.

Because they are the only broadband provider here. There are no other choices except dial-up.

Sucks to be you. Show some initiative and start your own broadband service.

So you get half my bandwidth for the same $30 a month... 0K... cuckoo cuckoo

No, I'm getting half your bandwidth for 1/3 the price, coward. Cowards always seem to be reading challenged... And don't whine "but your shared!". Your 3megs is probably cable, which means you are sharing with far more than 2 people. If it's DSL, then you're not sharing, but I'm still getting a better deal than you.

L0L, your response is what makes that priceless fucker

Easy to call people names when you are a coward, coward.

Don't EVER use the word hella AGAIN

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is the matter with you? Please read what you just posted here. "HELLA"? Jesus... I'm trying really hard to get along with "BLOG"... but I won't put up with hella...

Re:Don't EVER use the word hella AGAIN

[Anonymous Coward]

but I won't put up with hella

No need to yella, fella.

Re:Don't EVER use the word hella AGAIN

[Mooncaller]

Just ignore it. The AC is probably a spoiled rich kid from Northern California, and hella stupid.

fedora.org

[Hallow]

And since there was no link to the fedora website, I went to fedora.org. Whoops. Guess I'm gonna get fired (it's not a work friendly image, not nearly in goatse's league though). Apparently they forgot to register the names before they announced the project name.

Re:fedora.org

[InsaneCreator]

So, I can download THAT? It might take some time on dial-up, but what the heck...

Already using it

[ZuperDee]

I've been following its development by using Rawhide on my system. Yeah, call me crazy and stupid, but the reason I'm doing it is that I *MUST* use the kernel 2.6 now, since 2.4 does not support the onboard SATA controller on my VIA 8237 southbridge. (It'd be kind of a nuisance not being able to use my hard drive under Linux, you know.)

To me, the 2.6 kernel is really almost the ONLY reason to use FC2. Yeah, GNOME 2.5 might have some nice refinements over 2.4, but they're mere incremental improvements that for the most part, I don't even notice.

The 2.6 kernel also finally has ALSA support built-in, which is another good reason to go with FC2. I find it has *MUCH* better sound support as a result. (I could never get the stock OSS drivers working satisfactorily.)

Just my 2 cents, for what it's worth.

Re:Already using it

[0x0d0a]

Gack -- the general Linux X10 driver -- wish -- *only* works on 2.4.

Sigh.

Re:Already using it

[macdaddy]

I had to upgrade to RH9 to get support for the SATA controller in my SuperMicro 6013P-T server. Otherwise I would have used 7.3 (the last decent RH release). I'm now running 2.6 on my server and it works flawlessly (the kernel that is. RH9 sucks ass). You don't need Fedora or Rawhide to run 2.6 though. It's quite easy to get it running on RH9 and older. Just follow the instructions over at KernelTrap. I'm preparing to give Gentoo a whirl. I'm hoping I can scrap RH for Gentoo in the near future. Whoot!

Re:Already using it

[oconnorcjo]

Yeah, call me crazy and stupid, but the reason I'm doing it is that I *MUST* use the kernel 2.6 now, since 2.4 does not support the onboard SATA controller on my VIA 8237 southbridge.

Getting fedora core 1 to work with the 2.6 kernel was not too hard... the tips on http://www.freax.be/wiki/index.php/Fedora%20core%2 01%20with%20kernel%202.6-test were helpfull. I am posting from fedora core 1 with 2.6.2 stock kernel. Everything works fine for me.

Re:Already using it

[prockcore]

Yeah, GNOME 2.5 might have some nice refinements over 2.4, but they're mere incremental improvements that for the most part, I don't even notice.

If you didn't notice, then you must not use Nautilus. It's been completely redone in 2.5. It's lightning fast, and works completely different than earlier versions of nautilus.

Re:Already using it

[starm_]

Man, the 2.6 kernel rules!!! I can't beleive it. They must have been some crappy code in 2.4 because everything is twice as fast in 2.6. I just downloaded Mandrake 10 beta 2. My computer boots (almost) twice as fast. And you know how we use to have to ignore the fact that in X you have to wait a few noticable miliseconds for every actions? I was sorta achamed to say it but everything seemed a lot more instantanous in windows. Everyone seemed to blame it on X. Well no more!!! All mouse clics programs load times, everything is lightning quik all because of 2.6 .(unless they also change Xwindows)

anyways I'm very impressed.

try it youll see.

Re:Already using it

[jmv]

No need for Rawhide. I've been running FC1 with a 2.6 since 2.6.0-test11 and I've had no problem so far.

Re:Already using it

[really?]

I am not sure that you need 2.6 for 8237 support; unless you have some "strange" MB.

lspci | grep 8237
2:00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI Bridge

uname -a
Linux eggs 2.4.21-166-athlon #1 Thu Dec 18 18:24:05 UTC 2003 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

It's a Suse9 box. Also, if you are not "attached" to Linux, freeBSD 4.9 fully supports it too.

So, what you are saying is...

[al!ethel]

...this new test release will be the bee's knees? I have to really wonder why it is that the releases for Fedora are coming out so quickly? Most of the other distros that I have been using have had a fairly regular release schedule? I have not used Fedora yet, but I feel like I am being thrown a bone, in hopes of getting the new kernel tested and patched.

Re:So, what you are saying is...

[pyros]

The aggresive release schedule is one of the project goals to keep it current with OSS projects. Debian Unstable is updated rather frequently too, as is Mandrake Cooker, and Ark Dockyard, not sure if Suse has anything similar. The difference is that Fedora is actually a released distro, with official ISO images and everything. If you want a slower schedule and more tested software, you need to go to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If you want a something that's updating daily, and don't care about and actual releases (ala Debian Unstable and friends) use Rawhide.

Re:So, what you are saying is...

[al!ethel]

I think I will have to try that (using Rawhide). I am just still in a gripe over the whole Fedora thing. I have enough trouble getting myself totaly set up on a stable distro, I can't imagine the fun I am going to be having with something bleeding edge.

Comparison?

[peter_gzowski]

Now I'll need a comparison between this and Mandrake 10.0 Beta 2. Maybe I'll try Fedora Core 2 on my wife's comuter and Mandrake 10.0 Beta 2 on my computer. Anyone know where the package specification is for FC2? I assume kernel 2.6.2, and the versions of KDE and GNOME mentioned, but what about XFree? 4.4pre or 4.3? Too... many... distros... to try!

Re:Comparison?

[mahdi13]

Is it that difficult to look?

kernel-2.6.1-1.65
XFree86-4.3.0-45.0.1
Full list is almost linked right to it from the post
ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/ core/test/1.90/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/

Re:Comparison?

[stor]

Mostly it's just renaming and updating /etc/redhat-release

Cheers
Stor

What about java for browsers?

[provoix]

a quote from the fedora site about the Core 2 includes:

more Java software using gcj (Ant, Tomcat, Jakarta, Eclipse, but not Mozilla plugins, AWT, or Swing)

I am excited to see the growth of java on the desktop and as part of distributions. And for us J2EE guys the eclipse/tomcat/jakarta/ant integration is exciting. But why is there no focus on integration with browsers?

And yes...I have tried Mozilla's self-install and have also wanted to stab my eyes with a pencil trying to configure the plugins, which work on occasion with embedded applets.

Re:What about java for browsers?

[the_2nd_coming]

if you are a j2ee guy, why not download the SUN binary, install it, then link to the ns6 plugin from the mozilla plugin folder in /lib/mozilla ?

Re:What about java for browsers?

[hardave]

more Java software using gcj (Ant, Tomcat, Jakarta, Eclipse, but not Mozilla plugins, AWT, or Swing) From what I get from that statements is that the java programs that are opensource (Ant, Tomcat, Jakarta, Eclipse) are now being compiled using the GNU Java compiler (gcj). Where as things that there is no source for (Internal Sun JRE libraries) are provided as is. Also I'm not sure how you can have a problem setting up mozilla to use java.

cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
ln -s $JAVA_HOME/jre/plugin/$ARCH/$BROWSER/javaplugin_oj i.so

Restart Mozilla.

Re:What about java for browsers?

[geekschmoe]

for us j2ee/ant/tomcat guys, symlinking is almost as hard as calling System.out.println()!

if they really wanted to sell their product, they would ship it with auto-symlink support!

DAMMIT...

[JoeBaldwin]

Just after I switched to Knoppix.

And to be honest, I don't really want to switch back.

I had a load of fun and games trying to get Fedora to share my internet connection (coming in through one ethernet card) to the Windows XP computer in the other room used by my family (on the other one). Despite following a nice tutorial I found through Google, I couldn't get it to work.

Knoppix, on the other hand, stormed in and kicked the fuck out of Fedora, and with a few mouse clicks internet connection sharing was set up. A bit of wrangling with apt-get and one command in Konstruct and I had a full KDE 3.2 desktop set up and running. I'm using it now (very slick). It's the power of Debian with the simplicity of XP, and I wouldn't think twice about setting one of these up for a friend. It's just a perfect system.

Fedora seemed bent on making everything I need to do hard as hell and putting things out of the way. Most irritating was GDM, which decided that if I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Backspace I really didn't want to kill X so I could install the NVIDIA drivers, I just wanted X to restart. It shipped with a broken kudzu meaning that hardware detection didn't work properly...gah.

Just my two pence (for Brits) :)

Re:DAMMIT...

[Lussarn]

Altough I'm also using gentoo now there is APT for RPM just as integrated as APT for debian, so keep that argument quiet in the future.

Re:DAMMIT...

[IamTheRealMike]

Most irritating was GDM, which decided that if I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Backspace I really didn't want to kill X so I could install the NVIDIA drivers, I just wanted X to restart.

Um this is the correct behaviour in almost every circumstance. If you want to install the binary drivers you're supposed to drop to runlevel 3, this is even documented.

The alternative is that if the X server crashes, you get thrown to a blank text screen - I'd much rather be put back at the login screen. GDM is designed this way for good reasons, you know - in fact I think most display managers do this.

Re:DAMMIT...

[74nova]

no flame, i assure you.

however, i dont understand why people do this. is there really security gained by using your linux box instead of a $30(what i payed for a netgear, used) router? not only that, but the power used for doing this or having an old p120 routing for you easily makes up for any money you saved by not just buying the router. you have to fire up your machine just to get the other one online, too.

is there a real reason to do this?

Re:DAMMIT...

[JoeBaldwin]

That's what the tutorial said, and it didn't work.

And if you think that normal users would do that to just get their home network going, well, just no, they won't.

Re:DAMMIT...

[ajs]

Yep. More to the point, it's how xdm and every well behaved sysv-init-friendly window manager behaves. Does this other OS (Knopix, I think you said) invent its own semantics around X-server-exit, or does it simply not provide a session manager at all?

Re:DAMMIT...

[sloanster]

I had a load of fun and games trying to get Fedora to share my internet connection (coming in through one ethernet card) to the Windows XP computer in the other room used by my family (on the other one). Despite following a nice tutorial I found through Google, I couldn't get it to work.

How odd - I am using the same iptables script I've been using since RH 7.1, and it all works like a charm here, and at the small businesses where I've set up fedora firewalls.

Most irritating was GDM, which decided that if I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Backspace I really didn't want to kill X so I could install the NVIDIA drivers, I just wanted X to restart.

I imagine that's standard, in any case, you really want to fo to runlevel 3, install the nvidia drivers, then go back to runlevel 5.

Re:DAMMIT...

[MSG]

...Or was the poster ranting about GDM's behavior because he's bent on finding *something* wrong with Fedora Core which justifies his decision to use something else?

Re:DAMMIT...

[SpaghettiPattern]

Fedora seemed bent on making everything I need to do hard as hell and putting things out of the way. Most irritating was GDM, which decided that if I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Backspace I really didn't want to kill X so I could install the NVIDIA drivers, I just wanted X to restart. It shipped with a broken kudzu meaning that hardware detection didn't work properly...gah.

1) Comment out /etc/X11/prefdm in /etc/inittab
2) Run "telinit q"
3) Install NVIDIA drivers
4) Follow NVIDIA instructions
5) Undo 1)
6) Redo 2)

This is basic SVR4/Linux knowledge.

There is a reason.

[ZuperDee]

The important parts of Fedora for which CPU-specific optimizations do make a difference are already offered in i686 versions. The most prominent examples are the kernel and the glibc libraries.

For the rest, I believe it was found that compiling general user-space applications for i686 makes only a miniscule difference, if any.

Some misconceptions

[Rascasse]

Fedora/RH compiles their distributions so that they only use i386 instructions. However, if I'm not mistaken the binaries are optimized for i686 class CPUs. In other words, the instructions are scheduled optimally for an i686 class CPU, but they only use i386 instructions. In fact, in some performance critical components, the binaries are both scheduled for i686 and use i686 instructions. One example of such a binary is glibc.

Re:Some misconceptions

[bangular]

But it still is considerbly slower. The proof is in the pudding. Compare a i386 distribution to a source one with sse, mmx, -march=athlon-xp etc. etc. It feels considerbly faster (which is more important to me than benchmarks). Not a Gentoo zealot =P but I've tried a few i686 distro's (first one was beehive for those of you that remember) and a bunch source compiled distro's with good compile time options and it's night and day.

Re:Some misconceptions

[chez69]

Feel faster is not worth the time. If I labeled the rpms with a *686 in the name and compiled for i386 folks would claim it is faster.

Re:Some misconceptions

[lederhosen]

Say that we define "immediatly" as less than half a second.

Then you are saying that you get 8 times faster
programs when compiling for 686???

Do you actually think that gcc will be 3 times faster?

Or that an SQL query will be 3 times faster?

That is simply not true, *especially* when a great deal of the load time is due to the harddrive.

Where did you get that information?

Re:Some misconceptions

[dtfinch]

The assembly output for i386 vs i686 is nearly identical, which most exceptions relating to floating point and 64 bit math, which the majority of apps don't rely on heavily.

Perhaps your problems were unrelated to whether it was an i386 or i686 distribution.

Net install?

[Cthefuture]

Does Fedora have a net installer?

You know, I small ISO that I can bootstrap the install from. That way I only download what I need.

Maybe I'm just too used to non-Red-Hat based distros but I rather prefer net installers.

Re:Net install?

[CMonk]

Sure does. RH has had it as long as I can remember. If you install via floppy you'll need the second net.img (or something like that) as well. If you want to install via CD image they have boot.iso which is about 4MB, if I remember right, which has everything you need for a net or PCCard install.

They've released development stuff before

[October_30th]

Well, if I remember correctly Red Hat has a history of releasing distros with development versions of critical components.

The notorious gcc debacle with Red Hat 7.0 comes to mind...

Re:They've released development stuff before

[pyros]

To be fair, they couldn't use the older version without dropping some kernel/glibc changes. Also, the things they did in GCC 2.96 were rolled back in to GCC 3.x. A lot of coders got pissed off because it wouldn't compile their code, complete leaving out the fact that their code wouldn't compile because it relied on GCC supporting broken (not standards-compliant) code.

Re:They've released development stuff before

[October_30th]

because it relied on GCC supporting broken (not standards-compliant) code.

Agreed. I'm still hoping that Linux kernel would some day compile on something else than gcc...

Re:They've released development stuff before

[abigor]

It has compiled with icc (the Intel compiler) since 2.5.x, I believe. By the way, why were you "hoping" for this? What difference does it make to you?

Re:They've released development stuff before

[sloanster]

LOL the debacle was the spectacle the anti redhat activists made of themselves at every opportunity.

They call gcc 2.96 a development version, but let's look at the facts:

1. cygnus, a subsidiary of redhat, pioneered work on egcs to get around the stalled gcc development process. egcs was later accepted into the gcc tree and became gcc 2.9x. It goes without saying that redhat/cygnus were eminently qualified to develop and support a compiler.

2. redhat shipped 2.96 with redhat 7.0 - a bug was found, and promptly fixed. The way these activists went on for years and years, you'd think nobody had every had a bug in their software before. The important thing is, redhat fixed it, and that's good enough for me.

3. gcc 2.96 was the best and most standards compliant version of gcc in existence at the time, and had features not in gcc 2.5, which were needed by big customers of redhat.

Bottom line: You call it a "development version", I call it what is was: fully functional, and fully supported.

Hurry Up...

[Sentosus]

I understand the purpose of Fedora. Still, I don't take lightly to being used as a Quality Check/Beta Testing type person. There are advantages, but there are advantages to having a tight group of beta testers that you can account for and be sure that they are not influencing changes to better suit their own needs. Suggest a bug fix that opens a flaw in a competitor's program? I like RedHat, but I question whether there is a reason to pick it over any other distribution at this point. Maybe if I pick out enough bugs and they get fixed, they can raise the price a little. -SP

Re:Hurry Up...

[0x0d0a]

You do realize that Fedora is *exactly* the same system that the regular Red Hat releases have been, ever since RHEL came out, and that the RH marketing people are simply trying to play off image ("Oh, you can use this *enterprise*-class Linux distro, or some thing that only techies that like trying out new stuff use"). If you can handle Red Hat 9, you can definitely deal with Fedora Core.

On the other hand unlike the final release of Fedora Core 2, this is a test release, and *is* intended for beta testing. If you don't want to beta test, don't install it. :-)

Re:Hurry Up...

[0x0d0a]

I can't debate the Kerberos packages, as I haven't ever used
. Back when I was setting up Kerberos on RH, *nobody* had *any* Kerberos support (especially for Kerb 4) and you had to roll a lot of your own stuff. It sucked. A lot. I dunno what RH's done wrong with Kerb, though. I'm not sure what packages you're upset with static linking in -- I don't see a whole lot of statically linked packages.

On the other hand, if you don't like RH 9, it's certainly reasonable to assume that you may well not like Fedora Core 1. My beef is with people that used and liked the Red Hat series, but then got the idea that the Fedora Core series was anything different. It's *exactly* the same distro, plus some extra packages and with a name change and is produced by exactly the same folks at Red Hat.

Re:Hurry Up...

[macdaddy]

I'd probably like Fedora as much as I do RH9. I'd really like Fedora if their distro acted anything like RH 7.3. That was a very useable OS IMHO.

Upgrading Fedora Core 1 - Fedora Core 2

[Anonymous Coward]

Is upgrading FC1 to FC2 possible/advised?

Re:Upgrading Fedora Core 1 - Fedora Core 2

[0x0d0a]

Note that, whether it's an intended upgrade path or not, I've had luck since Red Hat 5.2 (and back then you were definitely supported to choose "Upgrade" from a CD-ROM) doing upgrades piecemeal by simply upgrading RPMs. Used to cause various breakages, but RH's pretty good at avoiding these these days. You can do the same thing, but much easier, by just making yum or apt point at the new Fedora Core 2 repository, and running an update and installing whatever important stuff has been added. Very cool, and a good way to stress-test dependencies that RH has added. ;-)

Re:Alternatively

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, I have this as a cron job at midnight :) Anyway, let's return to Fedora Core 2. I'll install it and see if it is as easy to maintain and upgrade as my Gentoo box. Perhaps it is.

Check the EULA carefully

[ahodgkinson]

And by the way, there's been a small change to the EULA, which means you have to register to download one copy for every single CPU that you plan to install it on! Don't worry, it's still free, you just have to (re-)regester each time. This is so that RedHat can keep it's statistics up to date. They claim that since it's a GNU license the download registration information will be placed in the public domain.

Also, download soon. Because the all the script kiddies planning to run Fedora based password crackers on their Beawolf clusters will be clogging the mirrors. :)

Did you read this far? Are you smiling at the joke? No? Sorry.. ah.. nevermind.. I guess I better get back to work before my boss catches me on /. again.

Re:Check the EULA carefully

[mahdi13]

CodeWeavers had a simular joke in their EULA for the CrossOver Plugin

YOU REALLY WANT TO READ THIS, ESPECIALLY THE PART ABOUT
YOUR FIRST BORN CHILD...

If you don't like this EULA:
a) Let us know, we'd appreciate the feedback.
b) Stop right now, and ask for a refund. We'll cheerfully do so.

Then at the very end

OKAY, WE WERE JUST KIDDING. THERE'S NOTHING IN HERE ABOUT
YOUR FIRST BORN CHILD. BUT YOU REALLY SHOULD READ THESE
THINGS, YOU KNOW.

Full EULA can be found here

Discuss this test release on fedora-test-list.

[elbarrio]

Does that mean we shouldn't be discussing it here?

Screw Fedora. Run Mandrake.

[waxmop]

Fedora is Red Hat minus the Red Hat corporate backing, which is really the main reason for using Red Hat. Mandrake has a better installer and urpmi has been used for years now. Mandrake is completely agnostic about which window manager you can use. The Mandrake Control Center rawks and covers 99% of the typical user's needs. And Mandrake has been down with BitTorrent since before it was cool.

DVD wish list

[heroine]

Someday some bright Indian is going to supply DVD's of this software so we don't need to keep swapping CD's.

Re:DVD wish list

[kluro]

DVD of all of the isos for i386 - Fedora Core 1
http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/Yarrow-i386-DVD.t orr ent

Restraining order on RedHat

[bloxnet]

Mark me as a troll, or flamebait, whatever....but I gotta say it at least once.

We done broke up RedHat. You burned me badly, screwed me for telling my bosses you were cool, made me feel like a tool for relying on you, and I'm sorry, but I can't let it happen again.

It's over between us. We broke up, stop driving by my house, calling, telling me your sorry and it won't happen again, or trying tell me you will have a $99 professional workstation release.

None of it's gonna work.

I found me a new woman, you might have seen her around...her name Debbie (short for Debian), and she treats me right.

(Damn I need to get out more...but seriously, I would hope many others have a similar view of RedHat, I just felt from a user perspective and on a business level RedHat kind of gave me the finger with the actions over the last few months)

Re:Restraining order on RedHat

[sabat]

This is funny enough, but what's important is that it rings true. We're moving away from RedHat, too, probably for the same reasons.

Why would I want to pay for Advanced Server (or whatever they're calling it this week)? Well, if I was running a complex app like Oracle or something, sure; it makes sense to get a highly stable, supported OS that's recommended by the app vendor.

But why would I want it for a DNS server, a webserver, an SMTP server, etc.? Other distributions (ahem, Debian, ahem, cough cough) are at least as stable, much more modular, and don't cost a cent because they're community-maintained.

"Core" my ass.

Re:Restraining order on RedHat

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you take things too personally and feel that people owe you somthing they don't

I am very happy with fedora and am more happy then I was with RHL before Fedora. I get the same updates I used to get, only this time its less of a black box and more of a community thing (and though its still not perfect its getting better)
and its free.

I dont have to install software (like the new GNOME) from scratch or wait a year for them to release a new version.

The whole process is somthing that anyone can join, or see what is going on inside. If a certian package is removed, or if I want to add a package, it is much easier now.

Yes, Fedora is a distribution for the USERS of RHL, and most of the serious ones that dont think Redhat owed us anything, are actally very happy!

Re:Restraining order on RedHat

[debian4life]

I was going to mod you down, just because you asked for it and I am a spiteful person. But I must admit, you are right on in this post.

I don't even know what the point of Fedora is.

Yeah, we got this distro which is like the one we really support, but does not get the same development cycles. (Do they throw the interns on this before they move on to Enterprise?) And then it is not really a distro because it will be in beta forever and .......whatever.

I use Debian unstable. It is not bleeding edge, but it is out there. For example no KDE3.2 yet, but I am sure it is coming soon.

Nonetheless, the next time my Debian "unstable" box has a stability issue will be the first.

Re:Restraining order on RedHat

[lone_marauder]

Then you take things too personally and feel that people owe you somthing they don't

Well, I don't know about this whole "owing" business, but an upgrade path might have been nice.

Yes, Fedora is a distribution for the USERS of RHL, and most of the serious ones that dont think Redhat owed us anything, are actally very happy!

Red Hat Linux (RHL) does not exist anymore. Perhaps you mean $RHEL.00? If so, I'm glad you have a cool toy to play with. At any rate, those of us who evangelized for years against hostile management to get Red Hat where they are don't have time for toys. It's a little difficult not to feel bitter about what Red Hat did when one's boss remembers the conversation about how Linux will free us from the Microsoft licensing roller coaster and allow us to use software without being worried about what might happen if the company providing it suddenly changed course.

Re:Restraining order on RedHat

[ajs]

So, let me get this right... you were running some production systems on a consumer OS that you thought you could get away with paying $50 support for (when the vendor clearly said that you should move to their enterprise product for such support) and... when they said "look, this is really unsupported, 'cause that $50 barely pays for the coffee around here" you get upset? Red Hat provides amazingly good support for Fedora: paid developers; release engineers; security updates; download servers; etc. The only thing they don't provide is a guarantee of support.

I laugh when I hear people talking about switching to Debian. It's not like they provide better support than RHEL. Red Hat provided an excellent upgrade path from Red Hat Linux 1 all the way to the most recent releases of RHEL WS, AS, etc.

Where was the problem? If it was too much money, fine, you can't afford it, I understand. But, don't blame Red Hat for that. We all knew a long time ago that supporting hundreds of diverse projects loosely gathered together into an OS distribution was a mountain of work. No one is shocked here.

If anything, RH took the best road. They provide the business suit set with something they can pay for and they provide a high-quality free version that the community gets input on! I use Fedora every day, and it's a great system. The apt integration is perfect, the compatibility with Red Hat Linux is seemless and the software selection is unrivaled (though it tends to be slightly more conservative than Debian unstable and slightly less so than Debian stable (which always lags unstable by a year or more).

Re:Restraining order on RedHat

[bloxnet]

I am glad to see the only people bitching back at me over the post are those who clearly have not had to eat the backlash of RedHat's turn on a dime change in support, distribution, and update models. Until you have spent the time making the case for the value and need for a Linux solution to replace Windows, Unix, or whatever, then had to go back and explain that the one company that seemed a viable option for your implementation screws the customer base, tells you that you'll have to effectively upgrade because they are EOL'ing anything previous to the more expensive, not directly (or easily direct) upgrade/new release and a whole gag of other things. I can deal with getting the finger on the distro for my playtime, and I don't feel entitled to jack...but I can tell you one thing...RedHat did way more harm than good with their judgement and burning the very people who got their foot in the door in so many businesses is a piss poor decision. So as to what I am entitled too, the only thing I had hoped for would be for RedHat to not inside of 6 months make Microsoft look better in regards to support, policies, and yes, TCO. My post was a single "why not throw out one good troll response"....past that my feelings and opinion will be expressed properly, but not spending money with a company that I truly do not feel I can trust or rely on in regards to the enterprise business level.

Re:Restraining order on RedHat

[Pros_n_Cons]

I'm glad you have a cool toy to play with. At any rate, those of us who evangelized for years against hostile management to get Red Hat where they are don't have time for toys.

It's nice to see you taking credit for Red Hat's success and I commend you for building my favorite distro.
If people like you are responsible for "getting red hat where they are" Then they wouldn't abandon you because you gave them money. But its obvious the product you pushed for at work was a free download and you didn't give red hat a f***ing thing now you are pissed they are giving you something back that has 2 months shorter release cycle. but has the added benifit of:
1.) install everywhere and anywhere without problems or restrictions.
2.) Have a chance to put your own packages in
3.) Decide the direction of your distro by having 1 on 50 discussions with the developers.
4.) No RHN to sign up for 'yum -y update' 5.) Set up your own local repositories. I bought RHPW for $50 and will probably pay for updates the next 3 years ($60). But all it does is sit there serving my homepage. The distro I spend 4 hours a day on is Fedora. Debian might be nice but I have used Red Hat for years and like it, so why switch? when I had the free RHL they send out questionairs asking what direction id like to see linux go and I always choose this split of products. I think many others did aswell and that is why we have what we have. People like you are not a majority or this move would have never happend. I hope you enjoy Debian, Gentoo, SuSe as much as I enjoy Fedora then we can all be happy again.

Re:Restraining order on RedHat

[tweek]

Actually our company has taken the same route. We bought RHAS to be "supported" by IBM for our WAS/DB2 application. The other part of the application (CUPS print servers) are running gentoo. All of the rest of our internal company servers are running gentoo as well.

Support is really the key here. We bought the lowend support contract from RedHat though because there isn't much that we can't resolve that we would need a RedHat support call but with DB2 and WAS, don't even think about calling IBM unless your OS is listed on the supported page.

Sometimes it makes me wonder what these people who are bitching actually do for a living. RedHat earned our money because our program products are supported on it and we get uncontested support from IBM in those cases. I think that more than makes up for the cost of the 7 copies we bought.

The other aspect of RHEL is rhn. If you haven't managed a group of servers via RHN, you don't know what you're missing. Oh sure, you could hack out some perl scripts to do the same thing but do you really have the time? I can point our Jr. admins at RHN and they can see what they need.

Re:Restraining order on RedHat

[lone_marauder]

It's nice to see you taking credit for Red Hat's success and I commend you for building my favorite distro.

If you mean me as in The Linux Community, then on all our behalf, you're welcome. In case you've forgotten, Red Hat did not write Linux.

If people like you are responsible for "getting red hat where they are" Then they wouldn't abandon you because you gave them money. But its obvious the product you pushed for at work was a free download and you didn't give red hat a f***ing thing now you are pissed they are giving you something back that has 2 months shorter release cycle. but has the added benifit of:

I gave Red Hat a couple of hundred RHN subscriptions, including all of my personal systems and the rest from among my employer and client base, all for doing what a Gentoo user does every time he installs a system (kludging packages together) and keeping an update server running.

1.) install everywhere and anywhere without problems or restrictions.

Except for the small matter of Fedora being a screaming train wreck.

2.) Have a chance to put your own packages in
3.) Decide the direction of your distro by having 1 on 50 discussions with the developers.
4.) No RHN to sign up for 'yum -y update'
5.) Set up your own local repositories.

A distro with a real package management system makes customization and maintenance a lot less of a problem.

I bought RHPW for $50 and will probably pay for updates the next 3 years ($60).

Actually, it's more like $90. After the discount. For a system whose concept Red Hat said was untenable a few weeks ago (desktop Linux). What will they say next week? Will it sound like "Guess what, you, your employer, and all your customers are fucked. Have a nice day."

The distro I spend 4 hours a day on is Fedora. Debian might be nice but I have used Red Hat for years and like it, so why switch?

Because Red Hat Linux doesn't exist anymore?

Re:Restraining order on RedHat

[Pros_n_Cons]

If you mean me as in The Linux Community, then on all our behalf, you're welcome. In case you've forgotten, Red Hat did not write Linux.

I'm aware Red Hat didn't write linux, but even you have to admit they blaze a few trails and lead in my areas. If you don't admit it that's fine too I will not list them.

I gave Red Hat a couple of hundred RHN subscriptions, including all of my personal systems and the rest from among my employer and client base, all for doing what a Gentoo user does every time he installs a system (kludging packages together) and keeping an update server running.

And you can not afford $10 extra per-box this year? RHPW is still $60 per year for updates and only $10 more for the box.

Except for the small matter of Fedora being a screaming train wreck.

Could you explain please? Personally I can see a few things that sucked, A few bugs, etc. The way I see fedora is the first release was kinda slammed together quickly "here it is!" but it really wasn't ready IMO. Documentation, Guidelines, Repositories. Nobody was ready for it so some snags ensued. And FC2 is going to have 2.6 kernel, apt-get and SElinux so I expect more snags here, But FC3? FC4? the biggest things we are likely to see is KDE/GNOME like things. Once the kernel and the Fedora project itself have Ironed out thier flaws I expect Fedora to be an excellent distro for a long time.

A distro with a real package management system makes customization and maintenance a lot less of a problem.

apt-get isn't a good package management system? Debian users would disagree. Take away apt from dpkg and what do you have? the same problem RPM does without yum, or apt-get. This is the part where I wonder if you've even tried Fedora.

Actually, it's more like $90. After the discount. For a system whose concept Red Hat said was untenable a few weeks ago (desktop Linux). What will they say next week? Will it sound like "Guess what, you, your employer, and all your customers are fucked. Have a nice day."

Nah more like $49.94
They said the "desktop was unatainable" wow I never got that memo, do you have a link? It looks like they're hiring desktop people to me http://www.redhat.com/about/careers/boston/
On the Desktop thing, if you honestly think our mothers, and local hardware store owners are just fine on KDE you're flat wrong, the Desktop is great for us, or secretarys people with some technical abilitys. But for your average gamer and solitare player? c'mon man..

Re:Restraining order on RedHat

[sabat]

So, let me get this right... you were running some production systems on a consumer OS that you thought you could get away with paying $50 support for (when the vendor clearly said that you should move to their enterprise product for such support) and... when they said "look, this is really unsupported, 'cause that $50 barely pays for the coffee around here" you get upset? Red Hat provides amazingly good support for Fedora: paid developers; release engineers; security updates; download servers; etc.

I guess I wasn't clear. I've never used RH support for servers, except in the case of Advanced Server for Oracle. RH, btw, does not guarantee anything like security updates for Fedora. So far it's been diligent about it, but maybe it won't in the future.

I laugh when I hear people talking about switching to Debian. It's not like they provide better support than RHEL.

Actually, community support -- IRC, newsgroups -- is excellent, compared to some monkey sitting in a cubicle answering phones. You really takes your chances taking to official tech support: I'd say about 50/50. Not that I bother with support for stuff like DNS servers, as I had said before.

If anything, RH took the best road. They provide the business suit set with something they can pay for and they provide a high-quality free version that the community gets input on!

You're missing some things here:

security updates and other important stuff are not guaranteed for Fedora, and may be dropped or ignored in the future

the worst: they are going to stop updating RH9 in April.

It's that last point that really sticks in my craw. It was unnecessary, Microsoft-like, and demonstrates the kind of stunt that RH is willing to pull. It makes me worry. It makes me wonder what's coming next for those who run Fedora. And it makes me wonder why I bothered to run RH at all.

What if you build a whole slough of server farms around Fedora Core 2, and then RH suddenly discontinues updating it? And what if Fedora Core 3 is different enough in structure, or very unstable, so that upgrading is difficult?

Those kind of situations, paranoid as they are, aren't unlikely. Heck, it would be good strategy on the part of RH, to attempt to force people to move to Enterprise Server or whatever.

That's why I'm moving. It's not that I'm so upset. I just can't afford to put up with their stunts.

Re:Restraining order on RedHat

[ninjadroid]

RH, btw, does not guarantee anything like security updates for Fedora.

I once heard somebody say that Source Code is Free Speech. See, if RedHat decides that it's worth all that bad face to have the fun of dropping security updates, somebody else can (and likely will) provide them.

But why the hell would they stop security updates? There's no guarantee for all of Free Software that it won't suck, but it generally doesn't. Magic, I suppose. I don't see why security updates will disappear.

Apart from freedom, most community distros don't guarantee anything. If you want a guarantee, pay for it.

Actually, community support -- IRC, newsgroups -- is excellent, compared to some monkey sitting in a cubicle answering phones.

Yeah, I hate when I call for tech support and I get a friggin' monkey. That's why I only give repeat business to companies that have the sense to employ knowledgeable homo sapiens for tech support. But geez, imagine that if, by decree of the heavens, all tech support personell were replaced by monkeys? That would really suck. It's a good thing that's not the way the world works.

they are going to stop updating RH9 in April.

Bastards. Why don't they just extend the support contracts? That would be the sensible thing to do. It would get rid of all that extra cash they have by perpetuating an unsupportable business model. Geez, suits just don't get it.

What if...

Oh shut the fuck up! Do you realize that you can say "what if" about ANY distro and it will have just as much credibility as it would applied to Fedora? That is to say, quite close to NILL. Now go get me a weather forecast.

Re:Restraining order on RedHat

[lone_marauder]

apt-get isn't a good package management system?

I was thinking more along the lines of portage, but let's explore apt for Fedora...

Wowee. Four mirrors on this continent. Looks like this whole Fedora apt thing is really taking off.

Nah more like $49.94

Wow. They're giving the zero service box-pusher channel 50 points. The best deal Red Hat would give me direct was $89. Add trolling the CDWs of the world for price quotes to the annual Red Hat ownership ritual.

They said the "desktop was unatainable" wow I never got that memo, do you have a link?

yes.

Re:Restraining order on RedHat

[Pros_n_Cons]

Wowee. Four [fedora.us] mirrors on this continent. Looks like this whole Fedora apt thing is really taking off.

dont you mean this mirror list? The one you posted is a 3rd party repository. That has nothing to do with apt-get's adoption it has to do with fedora.us adoption.

Wow. They're giving the zero service box-pusher channel 50 points. The best deal Red Hat would give me direct was $89. Add trolling the CDWs of the world for price quotes to the annual Red Hat ownership ritual.

well, whatever. fact remains its $49 and I was right, not sure what you're trying to spin here.

"yes" Matthew Szulik said "the desktop was unatainable"

From the very article you posted:
"However, Szulik expects Linux to be ready in a couple of years after it has had time to mature."
they are hiring desktop people as i've pointed out.
They started freedesktop.org. They wrote the HIG guidelines for gnome, They have 24/7 development on gnome. Does this sound like a company throwing away the desktop market to you? Matthews quote explicitly said it was his _opnion_ it was not ready yet and gave his reasons:
"Microsoft has been delivering a desktop product now for almost 14 or 15 years, ever since it introduced Windows, and that is the expectation that most customers in the marketplace have about ease of use, about function," said Matthew Szulik, Red Hat's chairman and CEO, in Bangalore, India, on Friday. "So for Red Hat to move into the consumer marketplace means that we have to exceed that expectation, and that will take time."
"We don't want the user getting frustrated in understanding why the search does not work, or can't find files, or finding that the joystick for their games does not work correctly, all of which ultimately will turn that desktop user back to the competitive alternative," Szulik said.

Then why...

[truthsearch]

Then why is Gentoo so much faster for me than Mandrake or Red Hat on the same computer? And I don't just mean launch times or graphics drivers or a pre-emptive patch. I mean everything is faster. I've checked the kernel compile flags and other things and can only attribute the huge gain to being native compiled to my Pentium III.

Re:Then why...

[DAldredge]

How much is "so much faster"? Do you have any numbers?

Re:Then why...

[zoloto]

Then why is Gentoo so much faster for me than Mandrake or Red Hat on the same computer?


I believe you answered your own question right there buddy :)

A total of 8 CDs?

[k98sven]

Ok.. can someone tell me why it's named "Core"?
To me, that seems to imply that it'd be a bare-bones system, like the kernel+GNU utilities..

This is obviously not the case.. but, seriously, why the name?

Re:A total of 8 CDs?

[Johnathon Walls]

I believe the idea is eventually to have an "apt-like" repository of software, similar to Debian.

The repository would not be in the distribution, and would be called "Fedora Extras" or something like that. But it's on hold for now, I think.

Re:A total of 8 CDs?

[n0dez]

Well I think that they called it Fedora Core because it is/will be the core of RHEL. They test stuff on Fedora and later, when they think it is stable enough, they add it to RHEL.

Re:A total of 8 CDs?

[Jokkey]

"Fedora Core" distinguishes the current, core distribution from various add-ons and alternatives (Fedora Extras and Fedora Alternatives) and from software packages for older distributions (Fedora Legacy). See here.

(There don't seem to be any packages released yet under Fedora Extras and Fedora Alternatives, but there's no harm in planning ahead, I guess. Fedora Legacy is alive and active and has already released several updates for Red Hat 7.2/7.3/8.0.)

Re:A total of 8 CDs?

[lcde]

Just a guess... It will be the core of RHat Enterprise Edition

Informative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on moderators, stay awake. Fedora doesn't even have a EULA.

Re:Informative? -- MOD PARENT UP

[ahodgkinson]

Way way up...

From the original post:

> Did you read this far? Are you smiling at the joke?

where is the minimal boot.iso?

[honold]

i see people mentioning booting off of 'boot.iso' and doing minimal ftp installs, but i don't see it on their ftp site.

Re:where is the minimal boot.iso?

[GerritHoll]

Just a random mirror: ftp://alviss.et.tudelft.nl/pub/fedora/core/test/1. 90/i386/os/images/boot.iso

So it's in /fedora/core/test/1.90/i386/os/images/boot.iso

(Waiting till his own ISP has it so he can download it from a computer only 1 hop away ;-)

Re:Screw Fedora. Run Mandrake.

[the_2nd_coming]

if you need Red Hat corprate backing, then use RH Enterprise Linux!!!

Fedora, public sentiment, and actual impression

[poopie]

I like many people here, felt that Redhat made a giant PR mistake (for the opensource commmunity which got Redhat where they are today) when it turned redhat into fedora. The perception was, "Redhat needs to make money, so we're only supporting the enterprise versions. You'll need to pay for our software. You'll need to pay for binary patches, and you'll need to pay for support. No more free lunch. See ya' later."

Okay, so... I got over that (sort of...) and tried a whole bunch of different distributions, including Fedora core 1.

What I found was that I really like the fedora model, and can see that with just a little more momentum, it could become something far better that the original free redhat releases ever were.

If you are like I was, and have sworn off redhat for hacking/non-work purposes for whatever ideological reasons, I urge you to read the unofficial Fedora FAQ and actually give it a try.

I have been quite impressed with Fedora and with yum for updates. Make sure to get a new yum.conf file from the unofficial faq site before you try to update your system -- redhat's patch sites are almost always flooded. Then try adding in some of the development channels and do "yum install $package1 $package2 $package3".Add yum to run from cron/as a daemon to update your system.

I just wish now that *someone* would release a version of fedora core that includes support for mp3 and various popular video formats so that it would make a usable desktop for most people out of the box. What's to stop someone from releasing ISOs of feature-overloaded-fedora that would include most of the stuff that the repositories are currently building to "fix" fedora?

But back on the topic -- Before you swear off Fedora, give it a try with an open mind.

Re:Fedora, public sentiment, and actual impression

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi

There is a fedora based distro with mp3 and all that. just dont remember its name right now. its just adding a line to yum.conf and doing yum update anyway

Re:Fedora, public sentiment, and actual impression

[esme]

If you are like I was, and have sworn off redhat for hacking/non-work purposes for whatever ideological reasons, I urge you to read the unofficial Fedora FAQ and actually give it a try

yeah, but if i wanted to use a community-supported distro, why not use debian? it's stable, got a predictable development cycle, etc.

i, and i suspect a lot of other people, were using redhat out of inertia, and because it was the market leader. if it's not the market leader because they've decided to fragment, and i've got to upgrade my rh8 box anyway, why should i use some new, unpredictable bastard stepchild?

not that i'm bitter. at least now i've got apt-get.

-esme

Re:Fedora, public sentiment, and actual impression

[True_Seeker]

> I have been quite impressed with Fedora and with yum for updates.

> I just wish now that *someone* would release a version of fedora core that includes support for mp3 and various popular video formats so that it would make a usable desktop for most people out of the box. What's to stop someone from releasing ISOs of feature-overloaded-fedora that would include most of the stuff that the repositories are currently building to "fix" fedora?

Give these two bits of information, you may want to look at www.freshrpms.net . It has the "missing" packages to enable the stuff you want, built specifically for the current version of RH / Fedora, and it is all accessible via yum. I have been quite happy with it.

Re:Fedora, public sentiment, and actual impression

[Blarfy_Snarflepoop]

From what I gather - With what you were talking about having movie players, mp3 support etc (There's alos previous post questioning what 'core' means):

There was talk about there being 'core' and 'extras' - core would adhere to the "only Open source & free software with no patent issues" model, and 'extras' would be contributed stuff, like what freshrpms, and fedora.us do.

Re:Fedora, public sentiment, and actual impression

[bogie]

Try Lorma Linux. According to their site its Fedora Core 1 with mp3, Realplayer, Wine, Divx etc all built in. Personally I think your better off apting that stuff, but maybe you want to give it a shot.

"include most of the stuff that the repositories are currently building to "fix" fedora?"

btw that should be "enhance" fedora. Right now its not broken its just a strict interpretation of what constitutes truly Free software. Yea I agree the whole mp3 thing is annoying and dumb, but as long as it easy to re-add I can live with it. Because of patents etc you'll never see an official Fedora version that great multimedia wise out of the box. But obviously you knew that.

Re:Fedora, public sentiment, and actual impression

[buchanmilne]

I just wish now that *someone* would release a version of fedora core that includes support for mp3 and various popular video formats so that it would make a usable desktop for most people out of the box.

Of course, if you used Mandrake, the first (and NTFS ro support - for now) wouldn't be a problem, and the 2nd could be solved by the PLF with a:

# urpmi xine-win32

(been running 'urpmi --auto-select' via cron for over 18 months, most of the time with my most-used personal box running cooker ..)

Re:Fedora, public sentiment, and actual impression

[ajs]

"I just wish now that *someone* would release a version of fedora core that includes support for mp3 and various popular video formats"

It was done a long time ago for Red Hat Linux, and is still maintained.

Install apt (comes with Fedora as an optional component) and then make sure the first line in your /etc/apt/sources.list is:

rpm http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/1/i386 core updates freshrpms

Now just run:

apt-get install xmms-mp3

and you have full mp3 support. Ditto for

apt-get install mplayer mplayer-skins

Enjoy!:-)

Re:Fedora, public sentiment, and actual impression

[Paul Jakma]

I just wish now that *someone* would release a version of fedora core that includes support for mp3 and various popular video formats so that it would make a usable desktop for most people out of the box. What's to stop someone from releasing ISOs of feature-overloaded-fedora ....

The law perhaps? MP3 is patented and players must be licenced and a royalty fee paid. Video: Fedora includes at least one MPEG player. For other formats you most likely need to use Windows DLLs, not freely redistributable, so they cant go into Fedora obviously. Some players provide the ability to link to DVD CSS libraries and hence redistribution is legally impossible it seems.

RedHat cant redistribute these, nor can they even tell users where to go to find these types of players in some cases. This isnt RedHat's fault, it is the legal advice they have gotten and which they must follow. The only way to fix it is to fix the dumb laws which are in place, hence which RedHat must adhere to.

Your time would be far better spent complaining to your Senator, if you are in the US, than complaining on /..

Re:Fedora, public sentiment, and actual impression

[Pros_n_Cons]

http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2004 -February/msg00175.html Alan Cox said early on they thought about using Debian instead of making fedora but there were reasons they didn't.

Re:Fedora, public sentiment, and actual impression

[bruthasj]

freshrpms.net?

Re:Fedora, public sentiment, and actual impression

[Sri Lumpa]

So you should say Debian is outdated XOR unstable (btw, the unstability refers to package versions, not to code maturity).

As for the question "why Fedora rather than Debian?" it would be because of speed of development.

While Debian has Sid (Debian Unstable) and Sarge (Debian testing, mid-way between unstable and stable) that stay quite up to date it takes a long while between each stable release (which I think is good but not everybody does). Fedora doesn't have as many platforms to support as Debian and therefore less synchronisation problems and it is easier for them to release a major version every 5-6 months.

Both are good distros with their set of advantages/shortcomings and I am quite happy that both exist.

Re:SELinux for all

[YetAnotherDave]

how the fsck is this offtopic - fedora core 2 will now be the first distro to be SELinux-ready out of the box...

This is a good thing - might even get me to move from slack, at least until slack gets SELinux...

Re:Shouldn't they fix Core 1 bugs first ?

[Lumpy]

how aboutr the show-stopper bugs from core 1 that hose most compaq laptops?

ATI mobility has goofy graphics on the installer that redhat9 doesnt have and no other distro has a problem with so it's a bug in fedora's installer.

the requirement to constantly tap the caps lock ket on many compaq laptops so you have keyboard and mouse for the installer also is not apparent in any other distro (except redhat9) or the problem that the installer just fails if you dont issue the allowcddma command on startup for most laptops in general...

fedora's installer is a gigantic mess and has forced many LUG's to put it in a not-reccomended list for newbies or even mid-level linux users.

these problems alone made corperate here issue a statement that fedora is not allowed due to instability (they ignore my comment that if fedora isn't allowed then why do we allow XP?)

my questions and bugzilla reports go unanswered and I had 3 laptops set aside for testing/ bug working for figureing it out and solving the problem... but no answers except for the " try the kludge/hacks we posted or buy different hardware" type of response...

I dont want it to be a kludge, I want to help get these problems with fedora fixed.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Fedora pronunciation

[Old Wolf]

How is "Fedora" said? It looks like a Russian name to me (hence 'Fyedora' or similar).

Re:Fedora pronunciation

[jjohnson]

Like the synonym for hat. Feh-DOH-rah.

Re:Fedora pronunciation

[dpete4552]

fed-ore-uh

Re:Fedora pronunciation

[trouser]

A fedora is a type of hat. Get it?

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=fedora

Re:Screw Fedora. Run Mandrake.

[Lumpy]

because of the huge bugs in fedora core 1 my local LUG and the one across the state I also talk to have removed fedora from the recommended/supported state.

About 5 LUG's I know of now reccomend Mandrake for newbies/early users.

Re:SDL_mixer

[Chuck Bucket]

sorry to be a Gentoo fanboy, but if you had Gentoo, the command 'emerge sdl-mixer' would get and install it for you.

regards,
CB

bash-2.05b# emerge -s sdl-mixer
Searching...
[ Results for search key : sdl-mixer ]
[ Applications found : 1 ]

* media-libs/sdl-mixer
Latest version available: 1.2.5-r1
Latest version installed: 1.2.5-r1
Size of downloaded files: 914 kB
Homepage: http://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_mixer/index.htm l
Description: Simple Direct Media Layer Mixer Library
License: GPL-2

Not sure...

[justMichael]

I just finished testing Fedora Core 1, RedHat EL WS 3 and Gentoo 1.4 as I am about to build a new server and am curious where I should go now that "RedHat" is defunct for the free stuff.

My results show that there was no significant difference between the 3 of them (No, I didn't do a stage 1, I did stage 3 and even that took longer than I wanted).

The interesting thing was that RHEL WS burned through the RAM and started swapping a LOT sooner than Fedora or Gentoo, I was able to apply 4 times the load before Fedora and Gentoo started swapping.

RHEL was slightly faster 1-1.5 transactions/sec. But as we know once your web server starts using the swap you might as well pull the plug.

Dsiclaimer: I should have tested Gentoo using a Stage 1 install and I may do that before I make a final decision.

The test consisted of a production environment as I would normally use, the load was applied using siege.

And to avoid the flames, if someone has tuning ideas for either Fedora or Gentoo for a general purpose (apache/php/db) box I'll be more than happy to listen.

Re:Not sure...

[Pathway]

Please note: A) I have not read any of the other comments, so somebody may have already said something... and B) No, I'm not trying to force my oppinion on you, just offering a suggestion.

Have you considered Debian?

Why I ask: I have found that Debian, while not always suitable for the Desktop, is quite excelent for STABLE SERVERS.

If you use the Stable branch, you will know that your software is well tested and stable. Don't need extra software bogging down your system? Use Debian's 'dselect' and 'apt-get' programs to easily manage your installed packages.

One downside with using Debian stable is that your software is fairly old compared to what other distro's come with. But, Stable's running Kernel 2.4, and does your apache, php and Databases (mysql and pg) without problems. I run it on my site, and never have to worry about it.

Don't count out Debian, especialy for servers.

--Pathway

Re:Not sure...

[justMichael]

If I have the time I'll give it a look... The main reason I was looking at Fedora, RHEL and Gentoo was that I want to stick close to what I know or if Gentoo gives as much performance improvement as people claim I'd accept a change and learning curve.

PS: You have a typo in your url nineinchenrds.org

Re:Not sure...

[Pathway]

Doh!

Man, Now I feel stupid. Thanks for pointing that out.

I hope you find the distro that's right for you. That's probably the most important thing.

Pathway

Performance using the .torrent

[abe ferlman]

I'm using the .torrent and getting about 6k down, 20k up on my cable modem- is this what others are seeing?

Re:Performance using the .torrent

[abirdman]

200K Down, 33K up (it varies all over the place, but basically gets faster the longer I stay on). I've gotten about 1.2 gig in about 2.5 hours. Not too shabby.

Does ACPI power management work?

[cheezus]

The only reason I'm running xp on this laptop is so i can put it to sleep.

Re:Does ACPI power management work?

[anthonyclark]

You have to put acpi=on at the boot prompt to enable acpi, then acpid will work. If you want acpi to do more than just sit there taking memory, then look here:

http://cknoerle.homelinux.org/nx9000/stuff/acpi/
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=80077&h ig hlight=acpi
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.ph p?t=122145&po stdays=0&postorder=asc&start=25

acpi support enables /proc/acpi which has cool things like 'cat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance' :

state count: 2
active state: P0
states:
*P0: 1200 MHz, 20000 mW, 500 uS
P1: 800 MHz, 13500 mW, 500 uS

You can then echo 1:0 > performance to change down to 800MHz.

Of course, that's not at all like XPs nice'n'noodly handling of ACPI, but it's way more transparent and configurable. Hey, just like Linux! ;-)

Re:Does ACPI power management work?

[maxmg]

Yes it does. I'm having some problems on my Dell Inspiron though, where the display backlight won't turn off. Standby mode works well otherwise. Although S0 (suspend to disk) is not yet supported, there have been successes reported using swsusp. You'll need to pass acpi=on to the kernel on startup, and preferrably tinker with the acpi scripts a bit, but if you have a google around, I'm sure you'll find some for yor machine as well.

Re:Does ACPI power management work?

[xoran99]

The only reason I'm running xp on this laptop is so i can put it to sleep.

Putting Windows XP to sleep does sound like a good idea...

Re:Does ACPI power management work?

[stor]

The only reason I'm running xp on this laptop is so i can put it to sleep.

Hmm? I thought you'd be running xp on it so that you can launch your applications...

Otherwise, leave it off... problem solved! ;)

Cheers
Stor

Release Notes??

[menscher]

I'd like to check the release notes before wasting bandwidth on the download. Can't seem to find them, though. Could someone provide a link (or a mirror from what you downloaded)?

Re:Release Notes??

[menscher]

Couldn't be bothered to notice I'm asking for Fedora Core 2 Test release notes, not Fedora Core 1 release notes, eh?

Fedore UML Server/Minimal Images Available

[william_lorenz]

Somewhat unrelated but nonetheless on-topic with the Fedora release, Fedore Core 1 server/minimal UML images are available at http://myturl.com/000pz/ (Linux Users Group site) for public consumption. I'm going to try to wait until the official Fedora Core 2 (not a test Core 2 release as this is but rather the real thing) is available before making UML images for that, as well. But using this UML image provides a good way to test and play with Fedora without reinstalling your system, just so you can see how much you like it. More info on UML in general can be found a the User-Mode Linux website on SourceForge, of course.

CmdrTaco's had enough of us?

[386spart]

Discuss this test release on fedora-test-list.
So we're not supposed to discuss it here? ;-)

why don't they use a bittorrent

[DenOfEarth]

I've switched off of redhat some time ago, not because I didn't like, I just needed a change. What makes me wonder is that they have the iso's available on bittorrent, but then you have to burn them on a cd. Why the heck don't they just build the bittorrent into the install, and then you only have to burn one CD.

One of the things I liked about debian, and gentoo for that matter, is the fact that you only need one CD to start the install, and then the rest is done off the net through a distributed mirror system. I hope fedora decides to go this way, then maybe I'll try it out.

Re:why don't they use a bittorrent

[noselasd]

So download a floppy disk image and do a net install.

Oh Christ Shut up already!

[bogie]

I am so sick of these Trollish "Dear Red Hat" letters that get modded up. Red Hat owes you NOTHING. The whole sense of entitlement among users that Red Hat HAS to provide a Free distro that's updated for years for Free is bullshit.

Red Hat still does make a quality Free distro that's updated for Free, its called Fedora. Don't like the fact that its only supported for like 9-12 months which is shorter than it used to be? Too freaking bad.

Enjoy your Debian but realize is no magic bullet either. Unless you hop on stable the day it comes out you face the same problem of having to upgrade you whole OS in a short timeframe. If you installed Woody today your going to be dropped or "burned" as you put it because the next Stable will be out soon and then the clock ticks till Woody isn't supported anymore.

Get over you angst against Red Hat. Want a good Free as in beer and Free as in GPl distro from Red Hat? Use Fedora. Want something else? Pay for it or build it yourself.

Advert.... Re:DVD wish list

[moggie_xev]

Okay so I feel sad I am the only person on ebay doing just that.... I can feel the bad karma already. And I will roll up a fedora test release in a few days time.

Maybe this makes too much sense

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

But I have a 1Gb limit on traffic (thanks Cox.net) and maybe the Fedora Project could put the base system on just the first CD? Whole installation chokes if you try and go ahead and install w/out the first two CDs. Solution so far has been to install the minimal system and apt-get or yum the rest but that's problematic. At least Mandrake lets you install off the first CD and get a decent system up and running.

Debian is total CRAP

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora kicks the shit out of debian anyday, anytime. Its useable, fun and runs fast unlike that piece of crap.

and guess what, the debian community sucks too. Fedora has a much nicer community.

Dump your ISP

[0x0d0a]

You have a 1GB (I assume not giga*bit*) limit on traffic per month?

Dump your ISP.

Even someone saturating a 56K modem can download about 12GB a month. You're getting shafted, unless you're paying less than a tenth of what a dialup account runs.

ISP bandwidth costs, based on colo prices I've seen at servercove.com, are no more than $99 for 700GB of data transferred. Given that you're probably paying at least $30 a month for broadband...

Re:Dump your ISP

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

No, per day. sorry. And it's free via my landlord. Hate having to spend 3 days downloading CDs at one iso a day.

Re:Seriously. What do you have against Debian?

[poopie]

Debian installs are great for the uber-guru sysadmin, but for joe user, they're like medieval torture.

I have nothing against debian, though. I've used it, and apt-get really has been the standard that all other patch mechanisms have been judged against.

I think that a knoppix-based bootstrap install of Debian kicks serious butt!

But, there's something about debian... it's far more open, but far less likely to adopt or drive any radical changes to the way linux/unix works that could make linux better/easier for new users.

Redhat/fedora at least for better or worse, have made some daring (and often unpopular) moves that have ended up moving linux forward by big steps instead of little steps.

Perhaps I'm underinformed, but I see Debian as a stable 'don't rock the free software boat' distribution, and that's good for many reasons.

But, it could be the same underlying ideology of Debian that has slowed it's uptake by the enterprises where their goal is to make money.

It's a double-edged sword. We want linux companies to give everything away for free, yet they need some revenue model to pay their developers -- as does every software company that sells software for Linux.

Perhaps someday there will be a 200 million hobbyist programmers who choose free software hacking as their philanthropy and every possible software need will be provided for with free software. Then, I'd be out of a job, but I would probably be a devout supporter of Debian.

Re:Shouldn't they fix Core 1 bugs first ?

[justsomebody]

Just wondering. Which compaqs?

I'm posting this from Compaq N800v and from the start everything except battery meter is working as a charm.

fedora's installer is a gigantic mess

??? care to explain it?

AMD64 Fedora

[kisak]

Anyone knows if the AMD64 version of Fedora will contain most of the same programs as these i386 iso's when it is released? (AMD64 Fedora is still beta it seems) or are there still significant amount of programs not ready for AMD64?

Thinking seriously about buying an opteron machine...

Re:AMD64 Fedora

[kisak]

The Operton is 100% backwards compatible with i386 binaries. I dont know about the compiler and native binaries, but thats not Fedora's issue to resolve.

That might be, but you don't buy an Opteron machine to rune i386 binaries. Besides, is it clear that it is straight forward to run any i386 binaries on a AMD64 compiled kernel?

Where can you get apt?

[Stone316]

I've searched for apt/apt-get or whatever its called and can't find it. I downloaded it at one point for my old redhat box but now that i'm on mandrake I want to use it again.

Thanks

Re:Where can you get apt?

[pyros]

Well, having Apt on Mandrake will only do you any good if there are some Apt repo's for Mandrake. I think the PLF (plf.zarb.org) has a tool to give you 3rd party urpmi repos, but I've never heard of Apt repos with Mandrake packages. That said, you can download apt from any number of sources, fedora.us and freshrpms.net coming to mind first. Although I would recommend grabbing the source package and compiling it on your system.

Re:Where can you get apt?

[Stone316]

I'm not sure I understand.. I don't remember specifying anything unique when I installed it on my rh9 box. Since rh and mandrake are rpm distros I didn't think there would be any issues. thanks

Re:Where can you get apt?

[pyros]

They are both RPM based, but they have different naming conventions so dependencies won't match up right. Some stuff might work right, but I wouldn't expect most of it to work.

SELinux?

[PineHall]

Will this have the Security Enhanced Linux? RedHat is suppose to be moving in that direction

Re:SELinux?

[brett_sinclair]

Yes. FC2 has two "stop-ship" features: 2.6 kernel and SELinux. See the schedule.

Re:SELinux?

[sabat]

Will this have the Security Enhanced Linux?

SELinux is built into the 2.6 kernel, so all they'd need to do is package the userland tools. I'm under the impression that they're doing that -- RH has already put please-come-hack-me SELinux boxes on the net to see how good their standard policies are.

does sleep work out of the box

[cheezus]

i don't want to have to patch or compile

can i just shut the lid and have it sleep? and then wake back up again?

Re:does sleep work out of the box

[pyros]

I did absolutely nothing to get this to work on my Dell Latitude c400. Of course, I think I recently determined that it was going into suspend and not hibernate. Left it in that state for a few days with no power and the battery died. Plugged in AC power and it went through a full boot, telling me that it was shut down uncleanly. To enable hibernate, I can need to create a FAT partition and run a win32 program (downloaded from Dell's site) to create the hibernation file. After doing that, the BIOS should put it into hibernate using that file. No extra software installed or configured for Fedora. The exact same statements can be made for my IBM Thinkpad 600x (2645-5EU). Althought opening/closing the lid doesn't seem to trigger those events, but I think that's a BIOS thing, not a Linux thing.

PLEASE RE-MOD PARENT

[ajs]

Please re-mod the parent as funny. It is most certainly not "informative". The word "joke" should have tipped off moderators. :-(

Re:SDL_mixer

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is better than:

yum install sdl_mixer

How?

Re:Screw Fedora. Run Mandrake.

[justsomebody]

Fedora has corporate backing from Redhat. You really should read sometimes before you post. Sad news for you is that this is known fact ever since Fedora started.

Yes, your comment about package manager was true, but only if this comment was posted 2 years ago.

Default RPM managers
Mandrake
urpmi
Fedora
yum, (and I think fc2 should have apt-get too)

Sorry, Mandrake is blowing against the wind (urpmi is not and will never be standard). Try setting yum repository once in life and you'll love it.

Howto:
1.start apache
2.if you're too lazy to create alias, just copy RPMs under /var/www/html
3.in directory where you copied RPMS run yum-arch
4.add your yum repository in /etc/yum.conf

How do you do that with urpmi to be network usable??? Personally I need yum repositories for updating my servers. I always disable standard updates on my servers and set my repository as default. Updates that find their way there are always tested before applied in that case.

Re:install problems

[EngMedic]

I had similar issues, and my conclusion was that at some point when i was burning the iso's to disk, it had issues, and would do about what you're describing.

I reccomend first verifying that the iso's you downloaded are good with md5sum, then copying them to a small ext3 partition on your hadrrive and running a local harddrive install.

It took me about 10 minutes to install, running a 1 Ghz centrino laptop with 512 RAM -- and when i hose the system now (which is far too frequent), fixing it is simple.

This just in:

[ubernostrum]

Mandrake is completely agnostic about which window manager you can use.

A request was filed today by the KDE project, in the spirit of Richard Stallman, asking that Mandrake be renamed "KDE/Mandrake GNU/Linux."

Also, last time I used Mandrake (an 8.x, I think) I couldn't figure out how to switch between KDE, GNOME, and simple window managers... ended up installing Red Hat's switchdesk utility to solve the problem. Who's agnositc about window managers again?

Re:Shouldn't they fix Core 1 bugs first ?

[forevermore]

Also there is very few rpms for Fedora at rpmfind.net

Try using: ATrpms or NewRPMs or FreshRPMs or Dag's

All friendly with apt and yum. It's rare that I don't find a package in one of these repositories..

Hear it here

[r.jimenezz]

Hear it from yourself :) http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/audio.pl?fedora01.wav=f edora

Oracle platform recommendations?

[sloanster]

Well, if I was running a complex app like Oracle or something, sure; it makes sense to get a highly stable, supported OS that's recommended by the app vendor.

um, yes, a platform recommended by oracle - and that would be red hat enterprise server...

But why would I want it for a DNS server, a webserver, an SMTP server, etc.

indeed - and you will find that redhat's free-beer, free-speech gift to the community (Fedora) makes solid platform for basic unix services such as you mentioned....

Re:Oracle platform recommendations?

[sabat]

um, yes, a platform recommended by oracle - and that would be red hat enterprise server...

Enterprise, Advanced, whatever. A year ago it was Advanced Server. shrug.

indeed - and you will find that redhat's free-beer, free-speech gift to the community (Fedora) makes solid platform for basic unix services such as you mentioned....

Well, yeah, it's not like I don't know about Fedora Core. But there are potential problems. RH could change strategy yet again. It already is ceasing updates for RH9, forcing us to go to Progeny (who's picking up the slack). (One wonders why RH doesn't charge the $5/server that Progeny is charging for RH9 packages.)

Also, frankly, RH is begging the question: what's so good about RedHat's approach anyway? It's a one-size-fits-all, I-just-dare-you-to-make-a-minimal-system distribution. Want it to be secure? Want to remove unnecessary packages? Good luck.

Re:Oracle platform recommendations?

[sloanster]

Enterprise, Advanced, whatever. A year ago it was Advanced Server. shrug.

Nope, didn't exist a year ago, you're thinking of a different product.

But there are potential problems. RH could change strategy yet again.

I suppose if you're paranoid you could always be fearful that redhat will somehow pull the rug out from under you, despite their excellent track record.

It already is ceasing updates for RH9, forcing us to go to Progeny (who's picking up the slack).

Nope, RH 9 is still maintained until end of april, as a quick glance at the RH web site will tell you. - and oh, nobody's forcing you to do anything - you see, that's the beauty of open source. Just because redhat isn't doing the maintenance, doesnt mean it won't be done. The fedora legacy project has already addressed your concern, and will be picking up the maintenance on RH 9 and other releases as they come to "end of life" status as far as redhat is concerned.

The move to differentiate the 100% free speech/free beer and supported enterprise products was announced, along with end of life on various lines, long ago. If you didn't get the word you weren't paying attention.

Re:Oracle platform recommendations?

[sabat]

I suppose if you're paranoid you could always be fearful that redhat will somehow pull the rug out from under you, despite their excellent track record.

I don't call ceasing update support of an OS that's less than a year old an "excellent track record." It ruins their track record.

Nope, RH 9 is still maintained until end of april, as a quick glance at the RH web site will tell you.

You just made my point for me. I said that RH is ceasing updates. I meant "in April", which is a couple of months from now -- may as well be next week.

The fedora legacy project has already addressed your concern, and will be picking up the maintenance on RH 9

Maybe. But the damage is already done. If I want to take advantage of pure community support, I would probably want to go with a community that's been around for a long time and has a proven track record. Debian fits that bill pretty well.

Re:Best distro?

[sloanster]

Spoken like a typical anonymous troll - but I suppose that in a pinch, expee makes a passable dumb terminal for accessing your remote linux system, but I don't enjoy using it - I'm always glad to get back to the comfort and power of my linux desktop.

IMHO, microsoft has a long way to go before I could consider it a credible alternative to linux.

Re:SDL_mixer

[RdsArts]

Huh. Funny.
Archlinux has 1.2.5-1.
CRUX has 1.2.5.
FreeBSD? You guessed it, 1.2.5-1.

Debian testing even has libsdl_mixer 1.2.5-3, for what that's worth.

The grandparent probably ran startx.

[Ayanami Rei]

Re:The grandparent probably ran startx.

[ajs]

Yep, you're probably right, which is why I asked if his other OS of choice lacked session/login management of any sort, which is, now that I think about it, unfair. It might just default to runlevel 3 and he didn't know any other way to start X up.

For those who don't know, the command (as root) is:

init 5

Then you should get (on any properly configured Linux variant) a session manager (kdm, gdm, xdm, etc) that will guide you through logging in as whatever user with that user's saved settings (except xdm which only provides login management, not session management).

It's all the things besides the firewalll...

[Ayanami Rei]

being able to route mail there, running a PHP IMAP frontend to have webmail wherever, being able to ssh in and send wake-on-lan events to machines in your house, rolling your own WAP, running an ad-filtering proxy/cache in a centralized location, etc. etc. etc.

Cause there'll be a Fedora Extras in future

[Nailer]

the lameness filter sucks.

And if you go to redhat.com...

[sn0wman3030]

you'll notice that they're offering a "FREE HAT" with the purchase of Red Hat Professional Workstation. Kinda reminds me of a South Park episode.

Fedora vs FreeBSD?

[xot]

Maybe this is not the appropriate topic to ask this, but seeing all the hype about fedora, i was wondering how fedora fared as a desktop OS as compared to FreeBSD which i run as an alternate desktop OS. Just wondering if its too much of a development or testing OS as compared to RedHat?would it be worth it to move over to Fedora?Thnx.

Re:Fedora vs FreeBSD?

[sloanster]

As far as being a "development OS" I think it makes a great development platform ;)

With the fedora legacy project, you get at least 2 years of maintenance, after which time it shouldn't be too much trouble to upgrade to a newer release.

- especially since the upgrade can be done while the box is up and running, and in service.

Re:Shouldn't they fix Core 1 bugs first ?

[Anders1]

You forgot Fedora.us, which is has more-or-less official addon packages.

Re:Screw Fedora. Run Mandrake.

[tropicflite]

I just got done installing and uninstalling Mandrake 10.0 Beta 2. It wouldn't find my USB mouse on install (I tried the various choices), and when I finally got to the end of the 3 cd install, my machine would not reboot, or boot at all in any mode.

Back to K12ltsp for me.

Re:Test?

[Pros_n_Cons]

1.) Rawhide
2.) Test 1
3.) Test 2
4.) Test 3
5.) Released Product
The End product is basically stable but having various bugs for a certain hardware or certain feature that was missed in the previous months of testing. IN FC1 yum had a bug, and there was a bug that didn't allow clean shutdowns in SMP kernels every once in a while. Stuff like that. Things that don't happen everytime but for some people sometimes it does.

Re:SDL_mixer

[Pros_n_Cons]

yes and if you had fedora you'd type:
yum -y install SDL_sound-devel Which would fetch everything for you. No time compiling either. I love seeing an offtopic post that is also wrong get modded up makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

GNU Classpath for applets?

[mparaz]

It's more because GNU Classpath doesn't support Swing yet - as per the status - and its users are J2EE types who don't do AWT/Swing. I think Red Hat is supporting server-side Java for its commercial products.

WARNING!

[temojen]

I upgraded from RH 9 to Fedora Core 1 a few months ago.

One thing it changes that you may not be aware of is:

In RedHat, the IDE-SCSI module does not treat ide disks as SCSI devices (only CD-RWs and Tape drives)

Fedora Core 1's IDE-SCSI module treats ide disks as SCSI devices.

This means, if you plug in a SCSI disk (or something like a USB keyfob that emulates one) and you have ide_scsi.o loaded (ie you've burned a CD since the last reboot), the new device may not appear where you expected.

Trust me, greping for your partition boundaries ("ReIsEr4") because you "#/sbin/dosformat /dev/sda"'d is no fun.

Tuning Idea

[temojen]

If your code will be exec'ing other processes on a regular basis, consider prelink.

It's usually discussed in a desktop context, but I think it could make a noticeable difference on a server (I've not tried it on a heavily loaded server)

It shouldn't matter much for long-running jobs like Apache and mod_php, but if the user has to wait for something to link, it'll make a difference.

I'm missing the floppy-based net-install

[NKJensen]

Check out:

ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linu x/ core/test/1.90/i386/os/images/

You'll see that the bootdisk.img and netdrv.img are missing.

You'll have to make a bootable CD in order to net-install. My firewall machine does not have a CD-ROM drive at all.

Not having ye good olde floppy images is a step backwards, methinks.

Re:I'm missing the floppy-based net-install

[ISayWeOnlyToBePolite]

I don't think the 2.6 kernel (and i assume this is the default) supports kernel on floppies booting.

Re:I'm missing the floppy-based net-install

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Nottingham claims that the Fedora 2.6 kernel is too big to fit on a floppy.

Re:I'm missing the floppy-based net-install

[CMonk]

Not having ye good olde floppy images is a step backwards, methinks.

I agree. They do include some great tools for setting up a netboot/install server which for the non-consumer users is really the only way to go.

2 floppys with a net-installer, please

[NKJensen]

I'm fond of the net-install method on RH 9. A bootdisk.img and a netdrv.img on two floppys and you'll be able to install.

Neat.

I sure am missing that feature on Feodora.

Re:i386 speed improvement

[nimblebrain]

Now that I've got my machine back up and running with a full fresh install of Fedora (too much fighting trying to upgrade from RH7.3 the source code way - yikes :), I am back to running my background SETI@Home and Folding@Home.

I've compiled the 2.4 Kernel targetting Athlon before, and it made a significant difference in speed to those relatively intensive tasks. I informally benchmarked it simply by noting how fast ./xsetiathome performed when you ran it with a custom kernel versus the i386 kernel (at the time, having to run NVidia's driver setup each time - just wasn't as happy linking against the custom kernel). Custom kernels, even ones where all you do is tell it which processor to -march against, are fast, and you can tell.

I think I'll be back to recompiling my own kernel so I can get me some speed again :)

Any brave souls tried to get the 2.6 kernel compiled and running under Fedora Core 1?

Re:Shouldn't they fix Core 1 bugs first ?

[Lumpy]

evo N400c, Armada E500 and E700, Presario 2100. actually every presario I have tried lately (newer models) have exibited the keyboard/mouse problem with the installer.

Like I said, these problesm are non-existant with Mandrake and Debian. and only manifest themselves in the installer. after the OS is installed things work. (Except for ATI radeon Mobility drivers for Linux completely suck because of ATI's unwillingness to help.. I so wish that HP/compaq would use nvidia and tell ATI to bugger off.)

Re:Shouldn't they fix Core 1 bugs first ?

[LaTechTech]

>>fedora's installer is a gigantic mess and has forced many LUG's to put it in a not-reccomended list for newbies or even mid-level linux users
I'm a true newbie but, I found that installing it on two PIIs and a PIII wasn't too hard. After all, anyone can read and get help off of forums (www.linuxquestions.org among others). The only problem I had was trying to get the new updates without any errors while the Mirrors were experiencing a ton of traffic (or maybe COX was doing something). Anyway, it sure beats the heck out of the Windows world I work in every day.

Ohh! Pick me!

[MarcQuadra]

Welcome in, RedHat and RPM drove me to Gentoo as well.

Bounce me a message if you'd like anything, I'm building cutting-edge stagefiles now with 2.6 kernel-headers, and NPTL glibc libraries. I don't mind sharing what I've learned, or compiled.

BTW, advice from a two-year GentooJunkie, keep the CFLAGS simple, and compile at -O2 unless you've benchmarked better at -O3; -O3 makes bloaty binaries that can run slower on modern systems with decent cache.