Fedora Core 2 Test 2 Released

Kalak writes "Fedora Core 2 Test 2, part of the project's goal to 'work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software', has just been released - this test release 'is specifically designed for SELinux testing, as well as testing the 2.6 kernel, GNOME 2.5, and KDE 3.2.1.' Get a copy from one of the mirrors or grab a copy via BitTorrent. You probably want the binary only Torrent."

Comments

Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is now officially the BEST MONDAY EVER!

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, why not? And I could fall in love with you for that! I'm just very fond of dudes with a positive attitude! Just let us hope you're gay too.

Careful - lots of experimental stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Not for production use. SELinux should create some fun errors.

Re:Careful - lots of experimental stuff

[Cthefuture]

SELinux should create some fun errors.

No joke. I tried Fedora the other day with SElinux turned on. Some stuff worked (like the machine booted) but tons of stuff was broken.

Even with SElinux turned off I didn't care for Fedora too much. It takes forever to startup and shutdown. It also seemed a bit wonky... after the install some stuff just didn't work and often the machine wouldn't even boot up. I tried it on two different machines with the same results.

I'll stick with Debian or Arch Linux for now. Gentoo is OK but there is no way in hell I'm going to sit there and spend hours compiling stuff every time a new version comes out or I need to do an install; I have work to do dammit.

Re:Careful - lots of experimental stuff

[GreyPoopon]

Even with SElinux turned off I didn't care for Fedora too much. It takes forever to startup and shutdown. It also seemed a bit wonky... after the install some stuff just didn't work and often the machine wouldn't even boot up.

Yeah, it pretty much stinks that I no longer fit within RedHat's business model. I was content paying a small fee every couple years for a system that worked out of the box, even though support was limited. But I'm not going to help beta test Fedora, sorry. I'm in the process of moving on to another distribution now.

Gentoo is OK but there is no way in hell I'm going to sit there and spend hours compiling stuff every time a new version comes out or I need to do an install

I hear you, but can't you just do "emerge --usepkg ..." to avoid the compiling part?

Re:Careful - lots of experimental stuff

[b12arr0]

I think that's why they call it 'Fedora Core 2 TEST 2'.

Re:Careful - lots of experimental stuff

[trippinonbsd]

I hear you, but can't you just do "emerge --usepkg ..." to avoid the compiling part?

If you have the package. Gentoo as of now does not provide them. There is a seperate project that is trying to keep upto date packages. You can also roll your own Gentoo packages. I myself would like to dedicate a box to just building optimized packages, but alas i have not had enough time.

Re:Careful - lots of experimental stuff

[GreyPoopon]

Gentoo as of now does not provide them. There is a seperate project that is trying to keep upto date packages.

Hmmm. I somehow missed this. Right now, I have an old 200 MHz P-Pro box that I migrated from Win95 to Gentoo. To try to coax some extra performance out of it, I've built everything from source. Since this computer isn't critical, it's ok for it to take several days to compile a major application. I was considering installing Gentoo on the primary machine (850 MHZ Athlon -- not speedy, but satisfactory) and just using packages for updating. I had also planned to use this machine for distributed compiling to help out the slower one. But I can't afford more than about 4 hours of downtime during an upgrade, so maybe Gentoo isn't the best option for it.

Re:Careful - lots of experimental stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

In my testing I've found that any i686 compiled distro is 99% as fast as anything you custom compile in Gentoo. The biggest difference in performance that I've seen is really only the difference between "arch=i686" and "arch=i386". And even then it isn't a whole lot. Most optimization crap that Gentooers like to shout about is just chasing rainbows.

Although the major distros don't tend to do i686 for some reason, there are many minor ones that do. Arch Linux is one of my current favorites.

Re:Careful - lots of experimental stuff

[sparrow_hawk]

Umm... dude, there's nothing *forcing* you to download Fedora Core 2 Test 2. You can, in fact, wait until Fedora Core 2 "ships" in May -- which is what I'm doing, since I don't need SELinux and I don't want to FUBAR my existing config at the moment. I'm perfectly happily running Fedora Core 1.

Re:Careful - lots of experimental stuff

[phaggood]

cannot affod 4hrs downtime

Don't you sleep? If so, why not run the update just before you go to bed?

Re:Careful - lots of experimental stuff

[Daengbo]

K12LTSP is having problems with their new alpha for exactly this reason. Disabling SELinux seems to solve the problems, but nobody really knows yet what else it affects.

Re:Careful - lots of experimental stuff

[GreyPoopon]

Umm... dude, there's nothing *forcing* you to download Fedora Core 2 Test 2.

I wasn't referring to just Core 2 testing. My impression of even Core 1 was that it wasn't as stable as the RedHat releases I was previously using. And just for the record, I got the same impression with Mandrake version 9.0.

Re:Careful - lots of experimental stuff

[GreyPoopon]

Don't you sleep? If so, why not run the update just before you go to bed?

You're assuming that my computer isn't doing useful things while I'm asleep. I can handle an occasional instance of extended downtime (which will be required to switch distributions anyway), but not regular downtimes. Besides, on my slow machine it took over a week to build everything for just an office workstation. Even if the primary computer is five times as fast, it will still take more than a day. I'll probably have to do some testing to see how useable the machine is during an EMERGE. If it is still useable, then I'm OK even if a build takes a couple days.

Re:Careful - lots of experimental stuff

[sparrow_hawk]

Umm... Dunno. FC1 probably isn't as stable as, say, Debian Stable, but I've been using it since it came out and haven't had any kind of stability issues -- rock solid, as always. I'm not sure if you would want to use it in a dedicated server environment where you need the utmost reliability, but that's where the knockoffs of RedHat Enterprise Linux come in.

Still, though, if you want to use another distro, for *whatever* reason, you can -- that's the beauty of Linux. :)

Re:Careful - lots of experimental stuff

[jagger]

Well then again isnt Debian Stable still using kernel 2.0?

Not the first project to do this?

[bigirondawg]

One of the goals is to "work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software"

Pardon me, but isn't that what UnitedLinux was supposed to do? And doesn't UL have far more vendors participating than Fedora?

Re:Not the first project to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Key words: "was supposed to do" :/

Re:Not the first project to do this?

[aeoo]

You mean "UnitedLinux" started by Caldera?

Is UnitedLinux still alive in a more than a symbolic way?

Re:Not the first project to do this?

[Coneasfast]

Pardon me, but isn't that what UnitedLinux was supposed to do?

look at the united linux page. looks very 'commercial' to me, you can't even find a download link easily, or can you even download it?

while the fedora page has a nice and simple download link.

Re:Not the first project to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except one of their members wants $699 per seat.

Re:Not the first project to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the correct question is what happened to United Linux... and I think we all know what happened there.

*SCO!* *cough* *cough* *SCO!*

Re:Not the first project to do this?

[SquadBoy]

Debian you were thinking of Debian

Re:Not the first project to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

yup. from their faq:

What is UnitedLinux?

UnitedLinux is a standards-based, worldwide Linux solution targeted at the business user and developed by Conectiva, The SCO Group, SuSE, and Turbolinux.

and since Suse was bought by Novell, and United Linux was really 99% Suse...can we say "poof" UL is no more.

Re:Not the first project to do this?

[bigirondawg]

Seeing as Suse hasn't ceased to exist since Novell bought them, I don't think you can say UL doesn't exist.

TurboLinux is one of the most popular distros in Asia, and Suse is the most popular distro in Europe, in addition to being the #1 Linux distro on the mainframe platform.

I think if Red Hat really had the best interests of the Linux community in mind, they would have joined the UL project at the beginning, anyway, instead of trying to "go it alone" with their own marketing and distro environment. Then they start the Fedora project as yet another offshoot in a community that has lots of them already... when is it too much?

I mean, nerds like us /. readers can keep all these distros separate, but the business users out there (which really keep Linux alive) like to be able to see a strategy... some sign that your company is willing to work with other companies for the good of your customers.

Re:Not the first project to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

SuSE dropped out of UL -- the combination of "Novell" and "SuSE" outweighs any branding advantage that UnitedLinux might have offered.

The whole thing was identified with SCO/Caldera anyway, so it's now worthless as a branding effort.

If TurboLinux and Conectiva want to proceed with UL, they can. Nobody in US/EU will care.

Re:Not the first project to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or does the parent mean UserLinux instead of UnitedLinux?

Re:Not the first project to do this?

[boarder8925]

Pardon me, but isn't that what UnitedLinux was supposed to do? And doesn't UL have far more vendors participating than Fedora?

Yes, but it's not made by the people who make Red Hat, now, is it?

Re:Not the first project to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

One more info: Conectiva (www.conectiva.com.br) is very near its dead.

One of their great cash incomes, a magazine by the name of "Revista do Linux" is no more.

Their giant structure has also diminished to a couple of rooms.

So, UL is even more "no more" (had it been something sometime!)

Re:Not the first project to do this?

[M1FCJ]

No you can't. There were no downloads for United Linux, ever.

A number of "enterprise" server distros were built on UL, notably SLES 8 and SCO Linux 4 (if my memory serves me right, it was called Linux 4, not SCO United Crap).

I've worked with both distros and currently have a number of servers running SLES 8.

Fedora FC1 was useless for me, Java couldn't stay stable on it, Tomcat servers would hand w/o any reason, Ant would just freeze... Redhat 9 or Suse 9 both work fine. FC2 Bittorrent is working fine so by tomorrow morning I should have my first FC2 box up&running. We'll see how good it is this time.

Re:Not the first project to do this?

[Pros_n_Cons]

Damn my modpoints ran out just as i was reading the article =)

"think if Red Hat really had the best interests of the Linux community in mind, they would have joined the UL project at the beginning, anyway, instead of trying to "go it alone" with their own marketing and distro environment."

Do you think this has anything to do with it? A clip from a ZDnet Germany interview with Red Hat:

Were you asked to be part of the UnitedLinux team? Were there any negotiations?
We were asked to be a part of UnitedLinux team hours before their public announcement.

If Red Hat got together with mandrake, developed a standard that is 99% red hat, Calls SuSe the day before its released and says. Hurry up and be a standard, you have 9 hours! Think SuSe would do that?

Re:Not the first project to do this?

[zootman]

United Linux ? She's dead mate....

Re:Not the first project to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

All of this is news to me, as we run Fedora in Development and some production environments with complete stability (including Java 1.4).

Yipee

[altaic]

Now we can use the lk 2.6 without having to add homebrew packages (yeah, I know there's some guy who provides a yum-able package tree). Anyway, this release should be an excellent updgrade. I'd be very interested to hear of the pre-release stability. Anyone care to comment?

Re:Yipee

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah... Kernel 2.6. w007. New process scheduler... ALSA using OSS emulation. No WineX compatibility.

How is this any good?

Re:Yipee

[swillden]

Now we can use the lk 2.6 without having to add homebrew packages

Yeah, well, if you were using Debian, you'd have had apt-get installable 2.6 kernels since the late pre-releases six or seven months ago.

Why do you guys insist on using such an ancient, out-of-date distribution, anyway? ;-)

Re:Yipee

[justi9]

And a 2.6 kernel has been yum and apt-get installable on FC1 for some time as well. Y'all are silly.

Re:Yipee

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like Arch Linux, CRUX Linux, Debian, and Gentoo (to name a few)?

Meh.

Re:Yipee

[ktulu1115]

I installed FC2 test1 and it worked for the most part... Obviously being a beta, there were bugs with some applications, but overall it was quite stable. However, I didn't keep my system bleeding-edge (up2date every day), one of my friends did though. I remember he encountered a bug with a new package that prevented him from logging in as anyone but root... lol. Can't recall the reason but it was fixed not too long later. Overall I've been pretty happy considering its a test release. I'm even running XFS on most of my filesystems, using several USB devices, and pretty much everything is stable. My friend's (same one) problems were limited to getting Totem working... I think there was a period it would hardlock the machine and it might have happened once or twice to me as well, but not too much. Good job guys, keep up the good work. I can't wait to see FC2 final.

Re:Yipee

[div_2n]

I've been using FC2 T1 since it came out. Here are some points on the past test. Haven't checked out the latest:

-Sound hasn't worked ever. It used to not even detect my soundcard but now does (still no sound).

-X refused to start on kernel upgrades until I modified some settings to configuration files. That was just plain rediculous to have to do that.

-Double-clicking on PDF's has never worked. I have discovered that Gnome PDF Viewer doesn't work period. XPDF works great though.

-Occasionally Update has just plain refused to work. Could be issues with mirror sites.

-Occasionally GToaster locks the system up.

-Mozilla (1.6) occasionally flakes out for no apparent reason.

-By default, there are lots of CLI commands that just aren't there (such as ip). This is beyond annoying.

-My scroll weel on my PS/2 mouse does very strange and inexplicable things.

-Weather Report applet (2.5.6) no longer retrieves weather forecasts

-The clock occasionally reverts back to military time even though it is set not to

-To date, Linux has never correctly configured my HP PSC 750xi scanner (the printer part works great though by default). Installing HP's driver makes it work

-NTP time syncing has never worked

-CD drives behave strange in inexplicable ways occasionally

Overall? Usable but lots of issues. Not for faint of heart. Test 2 may be better. YMMV based on your hadware/software configuration.

Re:Yipee

[74nova]

Why do you guys insist on using such an ancient, out-of-date distribution, anyway? ;-)

surely this, coming from a debian user, was a joke and not a troll... if youre running stable, its especially funny.

Bueno

[WTFmonkey]

I'd heard great things, but then I wasted one hard drive trying to make kernel 2.6 work with Fedora 1. I mean, it worked, but only by stretching definitions.

I'm not horribly ign'nt, but I'm obviously no genious either. Somewhere along the line /dev got all dicked up and stuff stopped working. So to stop the bitching, it's great to see a faster-than-average turnaround by the Fedora guys. Will be installing this (and checking config files to see where I went wrong-- LEARN from your mistakes, people) tonight.

Re:Bueno

[Spoing]

My custom 2.6.x kernels work well with Fedora test 1. The only thing I really did was;

1. Update all the user space packages as decribed in the kernel README.
2. Grab the .config file for one of the Fedora binary 2.6.x kernels (in /boot if it is installed, the RPM if not).
3. Copy it to the 2.6.x kernel source directory -- where ever you put it -- and run "make oldconfig".

Tweak and modify the kernel as you see fit. Otherwise, compile as-is.

That said, there are customized parts of the official Fedora Linux kernels, so some of the .config options will be tossed out during "make oldconfig". Look for error messages to see what you'll be missing.

Re:Bueno

[Ianoo]

I've been on Kernel 2.6 for several months now, and am currently running Kernel 2.6 + udev 023 + hotplug . You really ought to try Gentoo.

Re:Bueno

[stor]

Sorry that it didn't work out for you. As you mention perseverence is the key.

I found upgrading to 2.6 on FC1 extremely straightforward and an enjoyable experience. All I did was download the latest FC updates, download 2.6, compile, build, reboot. It would have gone perfectly well if 2.6 had understood the e2labels ;) A quick fix of grub.conf got me up and running. Then installed the experimental nvidia drivers from minion.de: worked flawlessly. All on my via chipset motherboard (Asus a7v8x).

I'm feeling lucky. Perhaps I should go to a casino...

Cheers
Stor

ACPI and kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope their gonna switch to 2.6.4 cuz last time I checked, they were using 2.6.1 and acpi for that is still broken. For some reason, the acpi people don't even support 2.6.3 any more...

Re:ACPI and kernel

[prisen]

One of the RPM's I find in the release:
kernel-2.6.3-2.1.253.2.1.i686.rpm

Well, there's a good chance it might be patched with newer ACPI, but I haven't had trouble with it on an nforce2 system. If there are problems, I'm sure it'll be fixed pretty quickly.

Re:ACPI and kernel

[prockcore]

I hope their gonna switch to 2.6.4 cuz last time I checked, they were using 2.6.1 and acpi for that is still broken. For some reason, the acpi people don't even support 2.6.3 any more...

When was the last time you checked? FCtest has been using 2.6.4 for a few months now.

Re:ACPI and kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

How can that be if 2.6.4 has only been out since 3/11/04?

Re:ACPI and kernel

[cgh4be]

Uh, 2.6.4 hasn't been out for months.

From www.kernel.org:

"The latest stable version of the Linux kernel is: 2.6.4 2004-03-11 03:16 UTC"

Re:ACPI and kernel

[ajs]

This is still pre-release so your comments aren't too unreasonable, but just so that people understand that this isn't always the right way to look at the problem:

The way version numbering works in Red Hat (and by extension, Fedora), is that the package version number is the version of the software that the package STARTED from, but it may have little to do with the state of the software as installed.

For example, you might have openssh version 3.1 on a box, but if you look at the SRPM for that package, you will find security bug-fixes applied from all of the openssh versions between 3.1 and the current day.

The SRPM is essentially three things: A tar-ball(s) of the original source as shipped by the developers; a set of patches or add-ons that the vendor has decided to include and a Makefile-like thing that RPM knows how to read called a spec file.

Thus, FC2 might ship with Linux 2.6.4, but that doesn't mean it lacks a feature or bug-fix from 2.6.5... you have to check the patch-set in the SRPM to know that.

Every time the contents of that SRPM are updated, the RPM version changes, so you'll see something like "foo-1.2-2", where 1.2 is the version of foo that the SRPM was based on, and this is the second build from Fedora.

Re:ACPI and kernel

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

I was still getting ACPI lockups with 2.6.4 on my Nforce2 system when working with relatively large files. Works fine with ACPI disabled tho..

Re:ACPI and kernel

[prockcore]

It used the 2.6.4pre's as well. FCtest had like 6 different kernel releases since 2.6.3, each with a -2004xxxx daytag.

Re:ACPI and kernel

[prockcore]

Oops, I just checked, and I'm wrong. I'm using a developers yum repository to get the 2.6.4 kernels, the official yum development repository is still on the 2.6.3 kernel.

Re:ACPI and kernel

[Wesley Felter]

Backports are evil for exactly the reason you describe. Luckily Fedora has a policy of avoiding backports wherever possible.

Re:ACPI and kernel

[ajs]

Backports are evil for exactly the reason you describe

I don't think I described anything evil at all. Backporting functionality should be avoided when possible only because it's easier to let someone else maintain the software for you. But, nearly every piece of software in a traditional open source OS distribution (from FreeBSD to Fedora) will involve local changes, feature additions etc.

At the very least, if you've got a security update, it's just downright wrong to require that all of your users upgrade to some random next version of that package just to make your OS secure. You released an OS and should be responsible for fixing bugs without introducing spurious breakage or feature-creep.

So the previous distributions weren't....

[millahtime]

So are you saying the previous distributions of linux weren't general purpose operating systems or that they weren't completely from open source software. Was say redhat 9 not general purpose??? Isn't FreeBSD general purpose and all open source??

What defines general purpose???

Re:So the previous distributions weren't....

[Crispy Critters]

"So are you saying the previous distributions of linux weren't general purpose operating systems or that they weren't completely from open source software.

Many Linux distros include non open source software. SuSE's installer was not open source. I have an old Red Hat distro that includes a proprietary X server (and xfree86 as well, I believe). My memory and rpmfind sugest that Netscape 4 was included in some distros, and it certainly isn't open source.

Re:So the previous distributions weren't....

[Anonymous Coward]

What defines general purpose???

Dictionary.com for most of us.

Re:So the previous distributions weren't....

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh? SUSE's installer (YaST) WAS open source. It always has been. Sure, it has some distribution restrictions, but the source has always been available to tweak and tune.

I love the way some Linux users spout off, not knowing what the flip they're talking about.

Get a clue.

Exciting stuff going on at Fedora

[capz loc]

I installed Fedora Core 1 when it first came out and I was very impressed. It included some stuff that wasn't in RH9, including a very pretty graphical boot. If Fedora continues on the path that it is on now, it could become a worthy competitor with SuSE and Mandrake on the home user front.

The community projects like Fedora and Debian tend to innovate more than distros that are managed by companies because they can get away with the "if it breaks, you keep both pieces" warantee. Distros used in enterprise scenarios (generally) offer a more stable product, at the cost of innovation.

Re:Exciting stuff going on at Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

The community projects like Fedora and Debian tend to innovate more than distros that are managed by companies because they can get away with the "if it breaks, you keep both pieces" warantee. Distros used in enterprise scenarios (generally) offer a more stable product, at the cost of innovation.

Please show me a company managed Linux distro that is more stable than Debian Stable. I'll promise to try it.

Re:Exciting stuff going on at Fedora

[ultrabot]

It included some stuff that wasn't in RH9, including a very pretty graphical boot.

And even better, official yum/apt repos.

If Fedora continues on the path that it is on now, it could become a worthy competitor with SuSE and Mandrake on the home user front.

Huh? It already is a worthy competitor for both of those distros. The quality seems to be pretty good, and I have to admit that FC1 was *the* distro that killed most of my dual booting needs.

The community projects like Fedora and Debian tend to innovate more than distros that are managed by companies because they can get away with the "if it breaks, you keep both pieces" warantee.

Actually, Fedora is still more of a RH product than a community product. Paid developers that can go on a limb and live on the bleeding edge seem to be able to pull this off pretty well.

Re:Exciting stuff going on at Fedora

[ArsonSmith]

Please show me a company managed Linux distro that is more stable than Debian Stable. I'll promise to try it

Or more up to date than Debian Sid. Or a better compromise of the two than debian testing.

Re:Exciting stuff going on at Fedora

[HuguesT]

From the Debian site, front page:

> Please note that security updates for "unstable"
> distribution are not managed by the security team.
> Hence, "unstable" does not get security updates in > a timely manner.

You'd be taking risk to run Sid on a production box. Meanwhile it's not that up-to-date. I heard it got XFree86 4.3 really really late.

Debian stable also runs on a restricted set of hardware compared with a lot of distros. We spent weeks trying to make it run on a standard DELL to run a forge server. No luck, had to revert to RHEL.

As for testing, it's for testing. Compared to RH it feels like RH7.3

Apt-get is great but a real bummer if you are stil on dialup. Who would like to lug around 9 CDs or wait for hours for the .deb to download?

Debian is great, don't get me wrong. We will always have Debian, and this makes me all warm and fuzzy, but it doesn't solve all the Linux problems.

Cheers

Re:Exciting stuff going on at Fedora

[ArsonSmith]

From the Debian site, front page:

> Please note that security updates for "unstable"
> distribution are not managed by the security team.
> Hence, "unstable" does not get security updates in > a timely manner.

You'd be taking risk to run Sid on a production box. Meanwhile it's not that up-to-date. I heard it got XFree86 4.3 really really late.

Which is why I run a Debian stable firewall between my single user sid desktop and the internet.

Debian stable also runs on a restricted set of hardware compared with a lot of distros. We spent weeks trying to make it run on a standard DELL to run a forge server. No luck, had to revert to RHEL.

this can very much be a problem. Although Kernel specific and due to the changing nature of x86 hardware. Debian actually supports more types of hardware than all the other major distributions combined. I have run Debian proper personally on StrongARM iPAQ, SparcII, x86, and Alpha. That is only 4 of the 11 platforms supported.

As for testing, it's for testing. Compared to RH it feels like RH7.3

feels like? I'm not sure what that means. It feels more like Debian Stable with the ocasinal apt problems associated with packages being upgraded rather than just bug/security fixed.

Apt-get is great but a real bummer if you are stil on dialup. Who would like to lug around 9 CDs or wait for hours for the .deb to download?

What is the option in any other distribution that gets around this? 99% of the common used applications are on the first 2-3 cds. I don't know of any distribution that magicly somehow give you software without carrying cds or downloading it off the internet.

Debian is great, don't get me wrong. We will always have Debian, and this makes me all warm and fuzzy, but it doesn't solve all the Linux problems.

Debian doesn't solve all the Linux problems. It does have a focus more where I belive it should be though. Moving out of the release schedual and more tords an ever expanding and morphing system. It is comming, there will be a day when Debian is realased more as snapshots rather than full fleged releases the way they are today.

(sorry about spelling I am too lazy to spell check right now and just in a typing hurry.)

Re:Exciting stuff going on at Fedora

[HuguesT]

Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

> It feels like RH7.3
>> ... feels like? ...

I mean no AA fonts, KDE 2 (!), etc. Things have changed so much useability-wise it's like a different era.

> Apt-get is great but a real bummer if you are still on dialup
>> What is the option in any other distribution that gets around this?

Actually what I meant was that if you want a reasonably up-to-date with KDE 3, AA, etc, then you are up for quite a bit of downloading, because it's not in stable, and not in testing, and you cannot find unstable on CDs for purchase anywhere. There are Debian-based distros that are reasonably recent, I haven't tried those I must say.

So assuming you start from stable CDs, good luck to upgrade to unstable via dialup. Moreover once you are on unstable you can assume you'll be downloading stuff *all*the*time*. A lot more than with other distros, believe me.

Also Debian developers don't make any selection I find. They give you 9 CDs worth of stuff. Where is the good stuff? the first 3 are inadequate IMHO. You need to do your own, which is great but time-consuming.

I like Debian but I find it's not easy to maintain. It's good for backend/server stuff using stable (where things are really stable, as good as the BSDs or better), for desktop it's too much work (for me).

Cheers

MP3 support?

[IO ERROR]

Is Fedora Core 2 going to re-enable MP3 support now that it's no longer a "commercial" product?

Re:MP3 support?

[rgmoore]

No. Fedora is trying very hard to avoid IP issues, so they've deliberately refrained from including things like mp3 decoders and DVD decoders that might get them into legal trouble. Fortunately, Fedora does have apt and yum available, so it's easy to add external repositories, like FreshRPMS or Livna, both of which do include mp3 players and DVD decoders. It's very convenient, and avoids a lot of legal headaches for RedHat.

Re:MP3 support?

[Kalak]

The commercial / non-commercial isn't the reason - it's that mp3 is a proprietary format, and Fedora is still backed by RedHat. Royalty issues for mp3 have been talked about before on slashdot, and I don't see RedHat giving the nod to distributing mp3 decoders in Fedora any more than in the RedHat Enterprise distributions. It's the same as distributing the NTFS modules. New Fedora releases shouldn't effect this decision.

Just grab XMMS RPMS for Fedora from their home page and let RedHat worry about what they distribute. NTFS module RPMS are available as well.

Re:MP3 support?

[Trogre]

The question is, with superior free codecs out there, would you really want to go back to mp3?

Re:MP3 support?

[JoeBuck]

It's trivial to get MP3 support in Fedora and to keep it current. Go to rpm.livna.org and follow the instructions.

Fedora News

[hey]

Maybe this is obvious -- I donno.
If you are interested Fedora, check out:
Fedora News
(unofficial site).
Lots of good stuff there.

Re:Fedora News

[prisen]

Fedora Forum is also a good resource, which the "unofficial" fedora.artoo.net FAQ/Forum recently merged into.

Re:Fedora News

[geirt]

and Fedorazine

Goddamnit.

[el-spectre]

As I type, one of my machines at home is downloading FC2 test 1. Guess I'd better check the timeline next time...

Re:Goddamnit.

[eniu!uine]

It's a good thing you posted that.. I was grabbing the first two CD's of test 2 off one mirror and the second 2 CD's of test 1 off another.. I only double checked because of what you said.

Re:Goddamnit.

[prockcore]

As I type, one of my machines at home is downloading FC2 test 1. Guess I'd better check the timeline next time...

So? Install FC2 test 1, and then type "yum update" and it'll update you to FC2 test 2.

Re:Goddamnit.

[el-spectre]

good point... didn't think about that, thanks.

Gnome 2.5

[nycsubway]

I notice they're still using gnome 2.5, not 2.6. I hope they get gnome 2.6 in by the test3 release.

Re:Gnome 2.5

[daemonc]

This not surprising, considering Gnome 2.6 will not be released for another 2 days. Unless you have some method for pulling tarballs from the future that you'd like to let us know about.

But yes, this is just a test release, and the final will include Gnome 2.6 and hopefully will not require time travel.

Re:Gnome 2.5

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, like, download it and, like, INSTALL it????

Re:Gnome 2.5

[Skeezix]

They'll ship Fedora Core 2 final with GNOME 2.6, but GNOME 2.6 isn't due to be released until March 31st...

Re:Gnome 2.5

[Shakrai]

This not surprising, considering Gnome 2.6 will not be released for another 2 days. Unless you have some method for pulling tarballs from the future that you'd like to let us know about.

It's called a subscription and it let's you see into "The Mysterious Future" where you should be able to get ahold of whatever tarballs you need.

(Sorry, that was probably lame, but I couldn't resist)

Re:Gnome 2.5

[nycsubway]

My point exactly. Gnome 2.6 is due to be released soon, I was hoping they would have at least one fedora testX release with gnome 2.6 in it. Even if that meant waiting 2 days to have two test releases instead of one with gnome 2.6

Re:Gnome 2.5

[ookaze]

This not surprising, considering Gnome 2.6 will not be released for another 2 days. Unless you have some method for pulling tarballs from the future that you'd like to let us know about.

I must have one, as the tarballs are available on the Gnome ftp site since some days.
I know, I run Gnome 2.6 right now ...

Re:Gnome 2.5

[Anonymous Coward]

There will be a test3 before the final Fedora Core 2. The packages for test2 were already frozen at least a week ago.

Re:Gnome 2.5

[Anonymous Coward]

you should be able to get ahold of whatever tarballs you need

I do not understand why all slashdotters are looking for these mysterious tar balls. Are these any good? I am quite happy with my ones although I don't have any tar on them.

No

[Wesley Felter]

They can't include MP3 support precisely because Fedora is non-commercial. (Who would pay the per-copy license fees?)

Re:No

[Abjifyicious]

But doesn't Debian have MP3 support?

Re:No

[ajs]

If Debian has MP3 support, then they are violating the patents. Debian can do this just as long as the holders of said patents let them get away with it, but I don't recommend it. FAR more importantly, I don't recommend that anyone attempt to "keep up" with other platforms that violate patents.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

No one since your allowed to freely distribute mp3 decoders. The token word being freely, once you start charging is when you start paying.

Re:No

[Minna Kirai]

FAR more importantly, I don't recommend that anyone attempt to "keep up" with other platforms that violate patents.

That's an unrealistic viewpoint. There are just TOO MANY software patents out there for a developer to worry about avoiding them until the patent-holder initiates action. ("Willful ignorance" is the official policy of the Linux Kernel developers, who've had some formal legal advice on the matter)

For example, both Debian and Red Hat are violating patents by shipping GNOME, so should they stop that too on the off-chance of an enforcement?

Re:No

[pyros]

Debian has the contrib and non-free trees which is where packages with lingering doubts about patent and/or copyright restrictions are usually placed. For example there are the flashplugin-nonfree and msttcorefonts packages.

Re:No

[pyros]

For example, both Debian and Red Hat are violating patents by shipping GNOME

Do you have any references for that?

Re:No

[ajs]

"There are just TOO MANY software patents out there for a developer to worry about avoiding them"

I disagree on several points. First off, there is wide precident for file formats that are patented or contain patented encodings being ripped out of applications (LZW comes to mind, but many other formats have been removed for this sort of reason).

What's more, you're not talking about a case where these folks could claim ignorance. It is widely known even to many lay users that MP3 uses patented encodings. Red Hat and Fedora could not hide behind ignorance in thise case.

But, the most DANGEROUS statement that you make here is, ""Willful ignorance" is the official policy of the Linux Kernel developers, who've had some formal legal advice on the matter". First off, there is no official policy. One developer (albeit the lead developer for most purposes) has aspoused this position, but I guarantee you that that's not the IBM developers' veiw, whose activities are scrutinized by IBM's legal department. It's also not at all reasonable to suggest that one should take someone else's example as "safe" simply on the basis of your belief that their legal advice was sound.

"For example, both Debian and Red Hat are violating patents by shipping GNOME, so should they stop that too on the off-chance of an enforcement?"

Gnome does not violate any patents (for starters, I've never seen a patent that broad). Some Gnome technologies may, and yes, I think they should be stripped out before a vendor makes them available to their customers.

It's not that this isn't damaging, but we need to start accepting that software patents stifle innovation and fix the process. We can't just act as if there is no problem and build our house on a foundation of poor legal decisions.

Re:No

[jovlinger]

just off the top of my head there are two important patents on font stuff:
1) the TT font hinting in XFT. By default disabled in favor of the autohinter, but that doesn't really make a diff for patent issues.
2) Microsoft has a patent on cleartype, which is damn close to the subpixel rendering that makes fonts pretty on lcds.

I'd not be suprised if both apple and microsoft have UI elements patented which both gnome and KDE infring on, but I can't name any. Likely these patents will come out of the woodwork should the free software world become very successful.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to hack Freetype's build scripts to get support for the patented font rendering, and the Cleartype patents have nothing to do with Gnome's subpixel rendering.

Also, Microsoft went to court to prove that UI design is not patentable, so I can't see any challenges over that.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:No

[Minna Kirai]

Gnome does not violate any patents (for starters, I've never seen a patent that broad).

Then I guess you haven't seen many patents. Spend an hour browsing uspto.gov for software patents, and I trust you'll see enough to disgust you. It looks as if nearly every nontrivial program falls under 4-6 patents from random large corporations.

There's one patent, for example, which covers the GTK toolkit essential to all GNOME programs. GTK uses object orientation in a non-object-oriented language, therefore they are violating US Patent 5,446,902.

Re:No

[ajs]

Re-read what I said (past your short clip of my statement). You're agreeing with me, and I responded to the issue of PARTS of a large system like Gnome violating patents.

Second, you cite a Sun patent. Sun has contributed a great deal to Gnome and Gtk+... being co-authors I don't see how their own patent would be of concern.

Third, the glib object system (GObject) would be a pain in the *** to replace, but there's no reason it could not be. The obvious solutions would be a) proceduralize the whole thing or b) move to an OO language and re-implement GObject as a wrapper around that language's functionality (thus, perhaps, avoiding the patent).

Fourth, I only scanned the patent, but it seems fairly specific to XView.

Great

[Blue Master]

That's great news.

But do we really need Yet Another Linux Distro?

As far as I can see, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware and probably others are already
"working with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software."

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Was this supposed to be an original comment instead of harping on something that has been said 9 billion times before?

Re:Great

[MrIrwin]

I think it is more a case of RHAT branching into 2 distros, one for hacking and one for data centers (RHAT enterprise).

It would appear to fill a void that IMHO exists between Debian and Slakware.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet Another Linux Distro?

Fedora Core is basically just redhat's free linux distro

Re:Great

[prockcore]

But do we really need Yet Another Linux Distro?

As far as I can see, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware and probably others are already

Two of those distros are younger than RedHat (fedora).

Plus none of those offer SELinux out of the box (which FCTest2 does), none of those offer xorg instead of XFree86 (which FCTest2 does).

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus none of those offer SELinux out of the box (which FCTest2 does), none of those offer xorg instead of XFree86 (which FCTest2 does).

err i dont know about the others, but gentoo has both of these :o

Re:Great

[cubic6]

Gentoo can do security "out of the box." Check out the Hardened Gentoo project. They provide install isos and stage tarballs so you can start with SELinux, stack-protection, and a couple of other nice security goodies.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I can see, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware and probably others are already

Two of those distros are younger than RedHat (fedora).

Interesting. Gentoo's the obvious one, but which one of Slackware (July '93) or Debian (August '93) is younger than Red Hat (October '94)?

(Not that I'm saying we don't need Fedora or, for that matter, Gentoo)

Re:Great

[wormbin]

Please mod parent down. As seen by other replies he's wrong on every point.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but those of us on 28.8k connections don't want to run Gentoo, because we lose most of the advantage of running it, since we can't download the sources.

I just wait for an ISO to come out for Fedora, buy a burnt copy for $5, then install it. I tried precompiled Gentoo, but it is really built around the notion of downloading source files (which are much bigger than binaries), so you lose most of the advantage of running it when you can only donwnload 50 meg a day.

UL still alive and widely used

[bigirondawg]

No, UnitedLinux was formed by Caldera, Connectiva,TurboLinux, and SuSE. SCO is obviously not an active contributor anymore, but Suse, TurboLinux, and Connectiva continue to distribute UL. UL is actually more of a brand that stands for packaging uniformity, since you download (or purchase) the UL version you want based on the vendor you choose. (i.e. You can get UL based on the SuSE, Turbo, or Connectiva dist. of Linux.)

Basically, the UL framework allows the companies to still market their product to corporations while still standardizing the Linux product and giving a (semi) unified front to the Linux world.

Re:UL still alive and widely used

[M1FCJ]

Wake up. Suse pulled out of it ages ago. It was a worthless publicity stunt in any case. The only reason it made sense was Suse kept on doing what they were good at (doing distros) and other guys (SCO especially) would sell the damn thing to clueless customers. No wonder it collapsed so quickly and good riddance.

YMMV

[captain_craptacular]

I got 2.6 working with Fedora 1 in about 45 minutes a couple weeks after it (lk 2.6) came out. I had no problems whatsoever, so I'm not sure what your problem was... I ran it that way for about 3 weeks with no hiccups and then switched back to the regular 2.4.x kernel so I could get hassle free updates...

Re:YMMV

[SuiteSisterMary]

and then switched back to the regular 2.4.x kernel so I could get hassle free updates...

Might have answered, in part, at least, your own question there, boyo.

Re:YMMV

[WTFmonkey]

Yeah, I've done successful kernel upgrades on various other distros, but I think I just bonered the X config getting the "new mouse" to work and continued to knee-jerk my way through the upgrade rather than stop, take a deep breath, and think about it.

It probably also had to do with the fact that this was the first one on this particular computer, so I wasn't entirely sure which modules needed to be built, things like that. *shrug* No skin off of my ass, and now I know better.

Re:YMMV

[reaper20]

This guide to moving FC1 to 2.6 covers all the bases.

I think many people just grab Arjanv's RPMs or whatever, install them, and then wonder why the system blows up in their face, there is no easy answer to moving a 2.4-based box to 2.6 without a few modifications, regardless of distro.

Re:YMMV

[IceAgeComing]

Maybe this step from the previous reply's link is important: ...(after several rpm -ivh statements) ...

"Now you have installed the kernel, you have to remove /etc/sysconfig/hwconf so kudzu will configure modprobe.conf next boot."

Re:YMMV

[koody]

there is no easy answer to moving a 2.4-based box to 2.6 without a few modifications, regardless of distro.

This is simply not true. I have debian sarge installed and one command was ALL that was required.

apt-get install kernel-image-2.6

It installed the necessary init utils, added the new kernel to grub's menu and probably configured some other things I'm not aware of. It's working like a charm and without any problems.

I was really surprised myself. All I can say is that Debian rules.

Re:YMMV

[Anonymous Coward]

Might have answered, in part, at least, your own question there, boyo.

He didn't ask a question. In fact, the person you are quoting stated that 2.6 worked fine for him.

Re:YMMV

[qwertyatwork]

What are you talking about? On Debian I just added the mod-utils (or whatever it is) and compiled. Nothing more.

Re:YMMV

[acidtripp101]

Your two other replies say how easy it was on debian, and at the risk of sounding like a gentoo zealot, all it took was to emerge the sources. Granted I had to compile a kernel myself, but it worked first boot.

Re:YMMV

[reaper20]

Does it change /dev/psaux to /dev/input/mice for you in X for those systems that have it configured like that? You still need to configure and install ALSA if you weren't using it before. You still need to clean up /etc/modules and get rid of all your old module names (although the script is better these days).

Depending on the hardware there's umteen things that could not work when you upgrade major kernels revisions just because it worked for you once doesn't help the guy with a nonfunctional touchpad because he doesn't realize the module name has changed.

It just worked...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just installed it on a Compaq Armada M700 laptop..it just worked(tm) fine (typing on it now) with the exception of configuring sound and the ltmodem, which I have to do myself...

The email announcement

[afd8856]

Anybody else thought their email announcement is extremly hilarious? :)

One bug, two bugs, tar bugs, su bugs,
grep bugs, mew bugs, old bugs, new bugs.

This bug has a little hack,
This bug has a broken stack.
Say! What a lot of bugs to track.

Yes, some are in tar, and some in su.
Some are old. And some are new.

Some in sed, and some in jed.
And some are even in parted.
Why are they in parted, jed and sed?
I do not know. Bugs should be dead!

Some in jpeg, and some in TIFF
This TIFF one has an attached diff.

>From there to here, from here to there
Test release bugs are everywhere.

Fedora Core test 2 is available for
x86 and x86-64
It should not be installed where production is hot;
use it only for test, as we say quite a lot.

If you install with the default
SELinux will be the result
SELinux is a form of MAC
For more answers, check the FAQ [*]
By explicitly stating what apps can use
Unwanted accesses it will refuse

[*] http://people.redhat.com/kwade/fedora-docs/selinux -faq-en/

So please test test2 in this mode;
and please test it with your code.
Plus it comes with a new GNOME;
can you test that in your home?
Also X.org is new,
replacing XFree, test it too.
And 3.2.1 of KDE
We need to test, test, test, you see!
So we will test it on our box.
And we will even test out sox.
And we will test it in our house.
And we will test it with our mouse.
And we will test it here and there.
Say! We will test it ANYWHERE!

Re:The email announcement

[Fisher99]

Wow the team seem to of mistaken their sugar for their coffee for some other white power substance.

Re:The email announcement

[Anonymous Coward]

The cat in the hat is really a penguin in disguise :)

Re:The email announcement

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

>If you install with the default
SELinux will be the result

Shouldn't that be SeusSELINUX?

Re:The email announcement

[prisoner-of-enigma]

If there was ever a need for a "+10 Funny As Hell" moderation point, this is it! I just about had a convulsion from laughing as I read this. My staff thought I'd had some sort of fit of madness or something, face turning red, tears streaming from eyes, and clutching my sides while I tried to breathe.

Re:The email announcement

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, chill out. It's certainly funny (well, enough to make you smile, anyway), but not THAT funny.

Re:The email announcement

[Sri Lumpa]

" >If you install with the default
SELinux will be the result"

"Shouldn't that be SeusSELINUX?"

I'm not sure that SuSeLinux would have appreciated.

Re:The email announcement

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody else thought their email announcement is extremly hilarious? :)

Umm, I thought it was, like, childish? :-}

"You probably want the binary only Torrent."

[syntap]

You insensitive clod.

I tried fedora, had a terrible time with it

[Anonymous Coward]

as far as i can tell, its just like redhat, except that it CANNOT use RH binaries, which completely defeats the purpose of using RH in the first place.

so, its a distro of redhat that is not compatible with... redhat

whats the point in that?!? im not trolling here, im genuinely curious.

Re:I tried fedora, had a terrible time with it

[jaylee7877]

Most rpms built for RedHat 7.3 - 9 should work without a problem in FC1 and FC2. With Linux, you can easily build binarys that will only work on one version of one distro, it takes a little more work to make it generic.

Re:I tried fedora, had a terrible time with it

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora 1 was for all intents and purpouses Red Hat 10, and now we get 11. I have had no problems using RH9 RPMs on Fedora, but of course you have to take into account things like newer glibc, gcc, NTPL, etc versions, as always. Some things won't work, same as it has always been with upgrades.

The point of Fedora that it is a high quality, very up to date distro. You've got all the same ol' Red Hat staff working on it, Pennington, Cox, etc. Shit, FC1 was probably the best distro I've ever used, and I've used most. Now with FC2 we've got the guy who wrote SELinux doing a full security policy for EVERY RPM. Try that with Debian or Gentoo, sure you can get SELinux up and running by yourself, but you'll spend the next 2 months setting it up.

Re:I tried fedora, had a terrible time with it

[Anonymous Coward]

ok, is FC2 going to have support for more hardware then? is there somewhere on their site that lists the hardware thats supported right outa the box?

the first version of linux i find that can recognize my onboard NIC without a hassle will be the one that converts me for good.

sorry if it sounds trollish, but all the security in the world is meaningless when you dont have any network access to begin with.

fedora update

[Anonymous Coward]

this makes me wonder. why would an upgrade require a bittorrent? a new iso? a reinstall? why cannot you just apt-get upgrade? proof of debian's superiority?

Re:fedora update

[RichiP]

This is a test of the distribution. This way, they get to test the ISOs, as well. You CAN apt-get upgrade or yum update your older release installation if you want to. Not everyone has an older installation and for those people, they'd rather download the new distribution rather than an old one and the upgrades.

Would've been logical if you thought it through.

Re:fedora update

[emanuelez]

can i really yum update? :-O

Re:fedora update

[Anonymous Coward]

YHBT HAND.

Re:fedora update

[youknowmewell]

Or perhaps you're like me and can't access the internet with your Linux partition because of an unsupported wireless network USB adapter?

Just finished installing on my desktop

[bdigit]

I had alot of problems, the graphic installer would not work for me, it would just lock my mouse up out of no where and I had to reboot. Once I got it installed I could not change my clock out of 24 hour format , the clock applet kept crashing. I tried to open hwbrowser to take a look into setting up my printer, that never loaded. The new nautilus is just garbage imho. I then tried to run yum but that failed as it couldnt reach any servers so I installed apt-get but I could not install any packages due to gpg issues. Sigh... core 1 runs fine on my laptop though.

Re:Just finished installing on my desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry for posting that rant. i guess I'm just full of shit today.

i just finished installing FC2 and it works great.

i guess i'll do a little research before i open my big mouth again.

thanks redhat for getting it right this time.

Re:Just finished installing on my desktop

[samrichards]

don't worry about it - i installed the test 2 of fedora core 1 and it didn't even come close to being functional. pretty much everything i did resulted in my machine going slightly crazy. i was quite alarmed that fedora was gonna suck and never be much good, but by the time the final release of fedora core 1 came out, it installed perfectly and ran wonderfully on my laptop. so, hey, submit your bugs (or, if you're a better person than myself, fixes) and then wait for the final to come out and blow you away! :o)

Re:Anyone have any experience with Gnome in Fedora

[Wesley Felter]

How exactly is it crippled?

I hope its better than Test 1

[MajorDick]

I was horribly disapointed with test 1, WOW , I mean I install it on release day and there are already like 500 megs of updates ?!?! , Not to mention all the menu issues and other buggies, I know its a "test" but wow RH betas were never in such disarray in my experience. On the other hand I was Thrilled with FC1 for my laptop, everything just Worked like it was supposed to I hope FC2 release is as good.

Re:I hope its better than Test 1

[RichiP]

The -test series do not have official update sites. The updates that you're seeing actually point you to the development repository. Test1 was cut from a couple of older packages. Not all the upgrades in the development (aka rawhide) subdirectory are crucial.

To balance off statements like yours, I must say that fedora core2 test1 worked very well on 4 DIFFERENT systems that I tried it on (1 dual-SMP, 1 uni server, 1 uni workstation and 1 laptop). Some with a little tweaking.

Re:I hope its better than Test 1

[Bob C. Cock]

Well consider yourself lucky that you were able to get to download the updates. I was able to install FC1 and make it happily co-exist with XP on my laptop but it gave me the finger when I tried to get my Cisco Aironet 350 installed an running. I've been scouring the net for info on getting the card to work with FC1 and everything I've found basically says it's impossible. If anyone's been able to get an Aironet card working on FC1 I'd be interested in hearing the tale.

Re:I hope its better than Test 1

[pyros]

I thought the aironet problem was because FC2 uses kernel 2.6, and part of the the driver/utils is closed source and linked against kernel 2.4.

Re:I hope its better than Test 1

[Niten]

Maybe offtopic, maybe not, but I'd just like to add that I have the same problem with my Aironet 350 and Fedora Core 1; poking around on Usenet, it doesn't appear that we are alone with these problems. Word of mouth is that there's some kind of bug in Fedora's wireless scripts causing these troubles.

Has anybody had any luck with their Aironet 350 PCMCIA cards and this Fedora Core 2 testing distribution? Or with Fedora Core 1, for that matter? The Aironet 350 is quite a popular wireless card, and it actually has a good, open source driver provided by Cisco... it's a real shame to have such a grevious bug in an otherwise impressive GNU/Linux distribution.

Re:I hope its better than Test 1

[Bob C. Cock]

Maybe offtopic, maybe not, but I'd just like to add that I have the same problem with my Aironet 350 and Fedora Core 1; poking around on Usenet, it doesn't appear that we are alone with these problems. Word of mouth is that there's some kind of bug in Fedora's wireless scripts causing these troubles.

That's pretty much what I found out too, this was a bug with Fedora. The aironet 350 works with other distros. The bummer for me is that my work only uses LEAP so no other wireless card will work for me. :SIGH:

Re:Huh?

[Black Perl]

'work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software'

Wait a minute! Isn't Fedora directly derived from Redhat? And wasn't it Redhat who smugly proclaimed their superiority over certain other distros because they didn't use ANY proprietary software? Was Redhat lying to us?

No. I think it may make more sense to you if you put the emphasis in a different place:

'work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software'

In other words, it'll be just like Red Hat except they'll be working with the Linux community more.

How to get my favorite package in Fedora?

[ajiva]

How do I get my favorite package to be in the Fedora install? Personally I'd love to see better wireless support, maybe WLAN or HostAP.

Re:How to get my favorite package in Fedora?

[AFairlyNormalPerson]

The answer depends on if you want it included in the Fedora Extras repository or on the distribution disks. You might want to visit http://fedora.us and http://fedora.redhat.com (under participate).

Here is an extended discussion from the devel mailing list. The link is to the question; just follow the links within to read the discussion. http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2 004-March/msg00539.html

-Norm

re: NTFS

[bani]

and what exactly is preventing redhat from distributing NTFS like everyone else, commercial or not?

i've asked redhat repeatedly to explain, and they have refused to give a straight answer. first they claimed it was "stability issues", claiming NTFS would "corrupt memory", but wouldnt give any examples and clammed up when i asked for clarifications. then they suddenly changed their story to "legal issues", but again clammed up when asked to explain. patents? copyrights? trade secrets? no answer.

it ain't legal issues -- unless you can point to NTFS patents. and it ain't copyright issues either -- because the code was written from scratch. the codebase for NTFS was developed much the same way as the codebase for SAMBA -- from publically available documentation and reverse engineering. if redhat has a legal problem with NTFS then they shouldnt be distributing SAMBA either.

it also strikes me very odd that they would include FAT filesystems which DO have patent issues, but exclude NTFS which does NOT.

WTF?

[irix]

Who upmodded this troll?

work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software

That is part of the original mission statement for the Fedora Project. As in:

The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year with a public release schedule. The Red Hat engineering team will continue to participate in the building of Fedora Core and will invite and encourage more outside participation than was possible in Red Hat Linux. By using this more open process, we hope to provide an operating system that uses free software development practices and is more appealing to the open source community.

WTF does that have to do with being based on RedHat? How does it indicate RedHat ever having lied to anyone?

But at least I now know that Fedora Core 1 is not a complete, general purpose operating system built exclusively from open source software.

If you knew the first thing about FC1 you'd know it did.

doh

[Anonymous Coward]

and I just upgraded from RH9 to fedora core 1. oh well.

How about giving Fedora its own topic/icon ?

[phoxix]

Because Redhat != Fedora.

Sunny Dubey

Re:How about giving Fedora its own topic/icon ?

[dwave]

Well, there's no real icon for Fedora (yet). And in fc1's Gnome (haven't checked KDE) there's still that peculiar little red hat visible on the panel. It's an fedora[1] hat in fact.

[1] Taken from a glossary about hats:

FEDORA ( fe doe ra ) Men's soft felt hat with brim and lengthwise crease in crown , adopted by women. The name Fedora was after the heroine of Victorian Sardou's drama presented in Paris in 1882. Also TYROLEAN HAT, ALPINE HAT, HOMBURG.

So as long as there isn't a new logo within the distro, the red hat fedora icon should be ok.

Re:How about giving Fedora its own topic/icon ?

[Pros_n_Cons]

Redhat != Red Hat

Re:How about giving Fedora its own topic/icon ?

[zerocool^]

How about redhat doing their own beta testing and QA, instead of letting a bunch of people do it for them, and then taking their contributions and merging them into a $300 linux distro that they not only didn't write, but also were too lazy to test.

Because Redhat = Fedora.

~Will

Re:How about giving Fedora its own topic/icon ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi Troll,
You didn't get the memo?
http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/ 3/en/os/i386/SRPMS/
They are not selling source code, amazingly not even the stuff they pay people to write.

Live support URLs

[jroysdon]

fedoraforum.org has a wealth of info in the FAQs and Forums.

For the newest issues, jump on IRC: irc.freenode.net #fedora

Not "Another Distro"

[ultrabot]

But do we really need Yet Another Linux Distro?

Are you going to say the same thing if/when Sarge is released?

It's not yet another distro, it's a new version of Fedora. You know, the one that comes after Fedora Core, get this, ONE.

And BTW, Fedora is a great thing to run while waiting for that Sarge. These Red Hat people (and contributors) seem the have a special knack at getting things done *on time*.

I think of Fedora as...

[Anonymous Coward]

RH Testing. As such, it's swell, and serves a purpose, and the price is right. I've had a couple of problems with it, but nothing show stopping. Getting xmms to work correctly, and manually doing inet connect with wvdial instead of the GUI network tool which seems to have issues on dial-up, and has since RH 8.0 near as I can tell. Moz 1.6 is another matter, "save to disk" on media files and others is kerflooey. (for me anyway)

zogger

p.s. I agree on the USB comments. I tried plugging in my cheap digital camera (a low end vivitar) and I had enough panic to have the kernel hyperventilitating and the keyboard a kaliedoscope of blinkenlights....

...I hope its Faster

[The Angry Mick]

While I agree that Fedora 1 installed flawlessly (even on my funky hardware), I was more than a little disappointed with its overall speed. RH9 took about a minute and a half to get from power-on to desktop, but Fedora 1 took closer to three minutes on the same box, with the same basic apps. Has anyone else noticed speed decreases from release to release?

Re:...I hope its Faster

[MajorDick]

Heh , Well I must say I use RHEL , and I installed it on my laptop for parity in development, Until I needed to test some compat issues with a package so I installed FC1 on my laptop. WOW SuperFast , compared to RHEL 3 (AS and ES) I guess its all relative I was thrilled with FC1 speed BUT that was in relation to RHEL 3

Re:...I hope its Faster

[Koatdus]

Odd... I had the exact opposite experience. RH9 was slow to boot and slow to use, while FC1 is faster all the way around. (Athlon 1500+ .5GB ram, ide disk drive) It probably has something to do with my installation choices. Both times I moved everything I wanted to keep to an extra partition (thank you large disk drive) and let the install wipe the existing OS and install from scratch, but I seem to recall choosing "everything" with RH9 while picking and choosing just what I really use with FC1.

Configure Fedora up2date to use a mirror

[Copperhead]

I was upset that the system pointed to download.redhat.com for updates, which is constantly being hammered. I would get 9k/sec if I was lucky, and the download was constantly freezing.

However, in looking through the messages, I found that there is a document on how to use mirror servers as a source for updates. I'm surprised that Fedora doesn't have a system for balancing clients to different mirror servers, a la Gentoo, but now that I've picked a few mirrors, things have been a lot smoother.

Re:Configure Fedora up2date to use a mirror

[pyros]

test1 had up2date configured with two sources: download.fedora.redhat.com and a mirror list. I think what it would do is check download.fedora.redhat.com to see if there were updates, and then use the mirror list to actually get them. So they took the mirror list out for test2? Could be because the mirror sites don't instantaneously get updates, and you end up with errors where it tries to grab an update listed on download.fedora.redhat.com from mirrors.kernel.org which isn't there. It got to the point where I just took both listings out and pointed it solely at the mirrors.kernel.org mirror of fedora.us (which mirrors the base release and the updates).

Re:Configure Fedora up2date to use a mirror

[Copperhead]

I guess I should have clarified. I was using Fedora Core 1.

They may have fixed this in a later version, but I install using a floppy and http install, and the Fedora Core 2 Test 1 didn't have a network boot floppy on the image.

Re:Configure Fedora up2date to use a mirror

[pyros]

They may have fixed this in a later version, but I install using a floppy and http install, and the Fedora Core 2 Test 1 didn't have a network boot floppy on the image.

if you have a cd burner grab boot.iso from here. It's about 4 MB and will boot the installer with support for all network based installs.

Re:Configure Fedora up2date to use a mirror

[Copperhead]

The only outside connection my linux box has is a floppy drive and a network connection. No CD-rom to boot off of.

I may just bite the bullet and get a cd drive, though. I'm only against the idea because I never use the cd drive to introduce media to my linux boxes, and I'm trying to prove to my wife how little I can spend to build a useable workstation.

Thanks for the info, though...

Re: NTFS

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing that's clear is that RedHat is focused on Unix Customers, not Windows Customers. They probably just don't wanna support NTFS, none of their customers dualboot, and it's not really all that useful for a migration anyway.

Re:Huh?

[love2hateMS]

The guy thinks the word "exclusively" means "excluding".

Ugh.

Either he is being funny or just doesn't have a clue.

Any comparisions using different compilers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone done comparisons where Linux is compiled using different compilers, like MS-Visual C++, Borland, CodeWarrior, etc, and then compared for speed and quality?

Re:Any comparisions using different compilers?

[Caiwyn]

I haven't seen such a thing, but it's kind of a moot point, isn't it? I mean, GCC is generally the accepted compiler due to it being open-source. I doubt any closed-source compiler can make enough of a difference in performance to be worth the trade-off to most people. It certainly wouldn't even be worth investigating for a project like Fedora where the entire point is to use only open-source software.

Re:Any comparisions using different compilers?

[Anonymous Coward]

gcc > 3.3 eats CodeWarrior alive, at least on x86. Probably powerpc too by gcc-3.4.0.

I don't know about borland.

MS-Visual C++ I gave up on long ago, although I hear that VC++.NET is actually decent again.

Usually for x86 C/C++ codgen, gcc is fine. Correctness is a greater concern for gcc than for these other compilers, especially for FP, so you have to be careful, and use -ffast-math when trying to compare GCC to these other compilers when you are looking at numeric type codegen.

Debian or Fedora?

[unger]

hi all,

i've standardized on Debian but have been wondering if i should take a look at Fedora.

in all honesty i'm not that comfortable with the fact that Fedora is being sponsored by Red Hat. i have nothing against Red Hat, i just learned long ago that my clients' long-term interests were best served by not being dependent on an OS company (thus the natural selection of Debian).

on the other hand, there seems to be a lot of enthusiasm behind Fedora, so i'm interested.

can folks that have a lot of experience with Debian and Red Hat give me some perspective on choosing between Debian and Fedora? i only want to focus on one distro.

i'm not concerned that i'm currently invested in Debian i'm just interested in providing my customers with the best possible solutions.

thanks

Re:Debian or Fedora?

[logical1010]

To get a good idea with what's happening in current development for fedora you could lurk on the fedora-devel mail list for a while. Or check out the archives

Re:Debian or Fedora?

[hendridm]

I like Fedora, but I'm not running it in a production environment. However, it seems stable enough for several dedicated hosts to deploy... Other than that, whats really the different between the two besides packaging managers? They both have apt-get available, plus the Core 2 will come standard with 2.6.

Re:Debian or Fedora?

[endoftheroadmatt]

Actually, I was thinking of going the other way, so I can comment more on Fedora.

I tested out Debian-Sid/Sarge quite a few times, and love it. Only one real problem, no software raid setup on an install, which Redhat/Fedora make really easy (good for us cheap bastards who don't fork out money for a hardware raid controller). You CAN do software raid on Debian, but it is not quick/easy. If you know Debian, I would say stay with it. You will have a nice distro that will have a very long lifetime (quick updates, etc) as opposed to RedhatX-now-Fedora that will be releasing at least 2 times a year. (There is a Fedora-legacy project, don't have the link in front of me)

If you're putting up a Desktop machine, Debian-unstable always seems to be the first to get the bleeding edge apps.

I still use Redhat9/Fedora, simply because I really know how to lock 'em down. As soon as I feel confident that my Debian installs are secure, I'll probably switch to Debian.

Re:Debian or Fedora?

[HrothgarReborn]

We used RedHat exclusively at my shop and when it ended life we investigated many options. We were not satisfied with Fedora largely because it lacked solid update solutions which is why we went with RedHat. We tried it on a few servers but found it was missing packages we were use to and up2date was a thing of the past.

We tried Suse and like it. At the time we were worried that it might go the same way as RedHat, but now it looks like Novell is opening it up even more.

We tried Gentoo and love it. But it wasn't till we got into it and made a build server and a deployment plan that it became attractive as a server system. Now we deploy a Gentoo server in 1.5 hours, mostly automated and updates are a breeze. I think it is going to be a major player in the Linux market.

Bill Nottingham's Dr. Seus Inspired Announcement

[nick_urbanik]

Bill is a dad, I think. The first part of the Fedora Test2 announcement, up to "Test release bugs are everywhere.", comes from One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish; the second part, from "So please test test2 in this mode;" to "Say! We will test it ANYWHERE!" comes from Green Eggs and Ham, both by Dr. Seus.

Does anyone know what book inspired the part in the middle?

Is Bill Nottingham a dad too?

RC1 had some major issues

[nurb432]

Hopefully this RC2 will be an improvement.. as would be the plan..

It shows promise, but still that damned 'RPM hell' sux...

Package list?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard there are four CDs for Fedora core 2. Is there an RPM package list on the web someplace? Specifically, I wanna know if it will have the K3B CD burning program. kthx.

Re:Package list?

[dbretton]

Yes.

2.6 is almost here!

[ChiralSoftware]

It's in this new Fedora release, it's also in the Mandrake 10 "community" release (I just got my DVD last week) and it's in the upcoming Mandrake 9.1 release, which you can pre-order from Amazon even though you can't actually find it by searching in Amazon. Too many choices! Oh and OpenBSD 3.5 is coming, too.

Re:2.6 is almost here!

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean SuSE 9.1, not Mandrake.

Moderated "Funny"? I'm being serious.

[Anonymous Coward]

While "funny" is better than being modded a troll or flamebait, I'm not joking. I'll take a guess just because I included MS's compiler you think I'm making a joke. No, I would like to know if certain compilers are better at compiling a better kernel, that is all.

Re:Moderated "Funny"? I'm being serious.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only other compiler besides GCC, worth trying to compile Linux on is Intel C++.

Re:Moderated "Funny"? I'm being serious.

[AFairlyNormalPerson]

For different compliers? I'm not sure. People have commented that compiling for 686 instead of 386 makes little difference.

Recompiling takes some time and is only worth it if the speed-up will save you more time than the amount of time used to compile it.
I would guess that one could not gain a speed-up that would offset the amount of time used to recompile before upgrading to the next fedora core - they have a pretty fast release schedule - which would require another recompile.
If one never upgraded their machine and a recompile gave slightly better performance, then the performance would surely pay off the time recompiling as time goes to infinity, but that's of little use.

-Norm

Re: NTFS

[ChrisJones]

Maybe they just don't want to pay to do all the due diligance required to make sure they are legally covered from Microsoft turning round and sueing.

The stability problems related mostly to write support, you could read NTFS partitions ok, but the writing code was unusable for a long time. This isn't some secret conspiracy nobody will tell you about, it's just bloody complicated filesystem code, it's not easy at the best of times, and when you're reverse engineering something it's a whole bunch harder. Cut them some slack.

If you want to know why it's not suitable for shipping, maybe ask the people who make it, they will most likely be highly intimate with a) the quality and stability of the codebase, b) the legal implications of their work.

IANAL, so I pass on the FAT question, I had wondered that myself when the licensing was announced. I didn't read into it enough to see what was in/excluded though. Research is left as an exercise for the reader ;)

Forward compatible?

[iamsure]

Fedora Core 2 Test 1 was specifically mentioned on the fedora mailing list to NOT be forward-compatible to Final.

Meaning, you could not upgrade (apt/yum/etc) directly from Test 1 to Core 2 Final.

Does anyone know if forward-upgradability is supported/endorsed for Test 2?

Re:Forward compatible?

[williamhooper]

Upgrading Test releases is never going to be a goal. Might work, might not. Don't be surprised if it doesn't.

To give an example, Evolution's schedule slipped, so Test1 has 1.5.x, but Test2 will have 1.4.x.

Re:Forward compatible?

[prockcore]

Meaning, you could not upgrade (apt/yum/etc) directly from Test 1 to Core 2 Final.

I don't see why not. In the past week yum has updated my kernel, glibc, and switched from XFree86 to x.org What could possibly prevent test1 from upgrading all the way to final?

Re:Anyone have any experience with Gnome in Fedora

[xutopia]

well it's an impression I get from looking at all the screenshots. Maybe the word crippled isn't the right one but it looks as though they removed the standard top panel which I happen to enjoy a lot. I'd like to have a standard Gnome DE and all I'm asking is if someone has any experience installing one on Fedora Core.

Re: NTFS

[Burdell]

There apparently are patent issues with NTFS, and people from Red Hat have said that multiple times (here for example).

As for FAT, from what I've read the patent (patents?) doesn't cover the way Linux uses a FAT filesystem.

gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

in gnome you can add/remove whatever panels you like. their default configuration might not have the menu panel, but you can go ahead and add it.

D'oh!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right of course.

Re:Anyone have any experience with Gnome in Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

Humm, here's a tip for you:

• Right click on the task bar.

• Now select 'New Panel'. Presto. Your top panel is now in place.

• Populate it accordingly.

How hard is that? No need to yank out the pre-packaged Gnome installation and install everything from scratch just because you feel it's "crippled".

Yes again WTF

[bogie]

are you talking about? You challenge the claim that Fedora is built exclusively from Open Source software and then ramble on about nothing that makes sense and this gets modded up?

Seriously WTF are you talking about? I've re-read this like 5 times and it Still doesn't make any sense.

"But at least I now know that Fedora Core 1 is not a complete, general purpose operating system built exclusively from open source software."

Ack. At least now we know it was the mountains who brought the aliens to Jesus for the dog project of sidewalk Pepsi rainbow.

Re:windows xp sucks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Children, please!

Re:Not the first project to do this? what, DIE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, isn't United Linux dead? disbanded? defunct? finito? shuffled off the mortal coil? last one out turn off the lights?

previously on Slashdot announced dead also... but not yet dead enough to be old news perhaps?

and, of course, a link:

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5146194.html

It's dead, stick a fork in it and turn it over...

Re: NTFS

[The Vulture]

The lack of NTFS included in Fedora Core 2 Test 1 was a bit annoying. But, as a parent poster pointed out, there are RPM's available, or you can just build the NTFS module:
1. cd /usr/src/linux-2.6
2. make menuconfig
3. Find NTFS, and build it as a module ("M")
4. Save configuration
5. make modules;make modules_install

Worked for me.

I was using Fedora Core 2 Test 1, but there was lots of things wrong with it. The installer wouldn't work with my PATA to SATA converter on a Silicon Image 3112A chipset (I logged the bug, Fedora Core 1 also breaks), and for some random, unknown reason, the system would just slow down.

At the moment, I'm back to Slackware-current, which does work for me.

-- Joe

Re: NTFS

[noselasd]

Most other distros are based outside the USA, where the patents often does not apply.
Nevertheless, if other distros ship it , does that automatically make it
legal ?
Or is the patent owners doesn't excersice their patent rights, is it still legal ?

My own Fedora experience

[ajutla]

I haven't tried either of these test releases for FC2; however, I installed FC1 not too long ago. I was relatively new to Linux and so I was looking for a nice distro that was easy to get started with. So I installed Fedora, and, er, wasn't all that impressed. It took about three times longer to load than the Windows XP I was dual-booting with, and the system was sluggish. The Gnome and KDE provided were extremely weird and nonstandard. KDE seemed broken in a few ways--some things, like having zoomable icons, simply did not work, and I didn't and don't know why. Gnome installs with a weird, nonstandard setup that looks exactly like KDE. Yeah, I know it's easy to fix, but it sure confused me at first--I was a newbie could see no apparent difference between the two environments :). Worse than that, though, was that the add/remove programs utility was badly broken and did not list, for example, rpms that you have installed manually--it only lists whether some of the stuff that comes with Fedora is installed. There was no mp3 support out of the box, there was no ntfs support out of the box, and a lot of things seemed buggy. up2date crashed every time I tried to use it. I came away from Fedora, in short, with an extremely poor impression of Linux--it was slower than my Windows setup, less stable, what the heck were those Linux people talking about? Then I installed Debian, which suits me better--it seems to be much less "heavy" with resources than Fedora, boots way way faster than Windows does, has a nice interface (aptitude) whereby I choose exactly what packages are installed, and, in general, seems a bit nicer. I'm not trying to troll or anything here, because, in general, I rather like redhat. I used redhat 7 some years ago (hadn't installed it myself; on a friend's PC) and enjoyed it, and Fedora is nice, too, but it's just not for me. I just hope that for Fedora Core 2 they fix some of the more problematic bugs and make the system run a bit more smoothly :)

Re:My own Fedora experience

[Bull999999]

As for the Gnome and KDE looking smiliar, it's called "Bluecurve" designed by Red Hat to make the desktops look similar for the end users. I remember Red Hat taking a lot of heat for doing this.

As for the speed, I found Slackware to be much faster that FC1, but FC1 makes up for it by being that much friendier to install and use. I didn't have any stability issue and the X seemed to be faster after I installed the native driver for my nVidia card.

Re:My own Fedora experience

[ajutla]

Nah, I'm not telling them anything. I'm just saying FC1 is too bloated, and maybe too "friendly", for my tastes.

Re:My own Fedora experience

[74nova]

i hope this isnt a troll...

The Gnome and KDE provided were extremely weird and nonstandard

what is this standard you speak of? i wasnt aware that either of them even pretended to comply with any standards like you suggest.

Worse than that, though, was that the add/remove programs utility was badly broken and did not list, for example, rpms that you have installed manually--it only lists whether some of the stuff that comes with Fedora is installed

you realize windows does this too, right? if they dont stick stuff in the registry that lists them in the "add/remove programs" then they dont show up.

There was no mp3 support out of the box

that was on purpose for legal reasons, read above posts about it.

there was no ntfs support out of the box

im not guru, but i am not aware of a distro that does. AFAIK, the problem is that it is a closed standard that hasnt quite been cracked yet. they can read reasonably well with linux ntfs, but i dont think its completely dependable for writing.

that being said, the stuff about it being buggy, crashing, and being slower are all legitimate complaints. i always thought redhat seemed a bit slower than the other distros ive tried. i was very impressed with the speed of slackware, but the updating didnt work as well as id like (if any readers can explain, please do).

i downloaded FC2test2 last night and plan to install it as soon as my senior semester in CS lets up a little. oops... speaking of which, id better go hit some engineering stat.

What about the aic7xxx driver hanging the install?

[foyle]

So, have they fixed bug 29555, which has been around since RedHat 7.1? You get part way into the installation, and it hangs on loading the aic7xxx SCSI driver.

I don't mean to be picky, but this seems pretty basic. It worked in 6.x, and stopped working in 7.1 (or maybe 7.0). It was still broken in Fedora Core 1.

Now, if you read the bug report, you'll see they blame all sorts of things, and have all sorts of workarounds that don't seem to actually work. The very same machine has had Windows NT, FreeBSD 4.8, FreeBSD 5.2 and some old version of OpenBSD on it, all of which worked fine.

Before you complain and say that I must be using some weird piece of hardware, this machine has an Intel L440GX+ motherboard with a built in aic7xxx controller. The L440GX+ was relatively common in low-end servers (including those sold by VA-Linux).

So, is it fixed yet? 'Cause I'm not wasting my time on one more Linux install that can't get past loading the SCSI driver.

(Yes, I'm bitter.)

Netscape WAS standard in Red Hat

[JCCyC]

Until Mozilla and Konqueror got their act together. And true, it actually was the only (barely) usable alternative IMHO. Yecch.

Re:What about the aic7xxx driver hanging the insta

[dbretton]

Why, have you actually paid for something?

You have the source code, have at it!

Heads up on mouse/kbd wierdness:

[A_Non_Moose]

From a few threads up about mouse and keyboard not taking input properly:

If you have a newer system (serverworks chipset?) and you ps2 devices act flakey (if at all) you should go into the bios and disable "legacy USB keyboard support".

RH9, FC1 and FC2 test1 all suffered from a crash related to swap partition in machines with > 2G of memory.

It took me a couple of installs to realize that first, that was the problem and second: with 2G of RAM why would I need swap space in the first place?

FYI, in case you run into these bumps.

Re:Heads up on mouse/kbd wierdness:

[Anonymous Coward]

2GB should be enough for everyone.

--sorry couldn't resist

Re:What about the aic7xxx driver hanging the insta

[Pegasus]

Yes, i was bitter too ... but the problem actually is the fubared bios. There exists workarounds for it in the installer (ie install smp kernel even if only one proc and boot with apic or something).
However, recenlty intel offered the documentation for this old beast and the problem was quicky worked around.

Re:What about the aic7xxx driver hanging the insta

[Anonymous Coward]

I have adaptec 19160 and it uses aic7xxx, fedora core 1 installed fine

Unfair partneship?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bruce Perens: "... but with Fedora there an example of what an unfair partnership is"

http://www.linuxworld.com/story/44103.htm?DE=1

+1, Informative

[benjamindees]

This is definitely a known problem that has to do with the 2.6 kernels. On some motherboards, you may have to disable USB support completely (in the BIOS) to get your mouse or ps/2 devices to work.

Gotta love work

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Joined the Torrent using my virtually unused T1 at work. Enjoy the bandwidth guys! Nice to be able to give something back :)

Re:What about the aic7xxx driver hanging the insta

[foyle]

OK, so you're saying that because I didn't pay for it, it's OK that it doesn't work? There goes the entire open source movement right down the tubes if everyone adopts your attitude.

We're talking about the installer here. A rather basic piece of software that prevents me from actually using Fedora (or any previous version of RedHat after version 7) on this box or any other box with an Intel L440GX+ motherboard. If the installer doesn't work, I can't use it.

Re:What about the aic7xxx driver hanging the insta

[foyle]

Yes, i was bitter too ... but the problem actually is the fubared bios.

Ahhh, but FreeBSD, OpenBSD & NT work, even with the allegedly fubared bios. I'm not buying that excuse.

the problem was quicky worked around.

Worked around in Fedora Core 2? If so, I'm a happy man.

Re: NTFS

[Anonymous Coward]

I can explain. NTFS read-access has, historically, been fragile and able to corrupt your Windows box. Although it's been safe and stable for a while now, even the chance of screwing up your old Windows box on a dual-boot system is enough to make them very, very wary of enabling this by default.

The NTFS write-access is even more dangerous, since Linux and Windows NTFS have entirely different concepts of file ownership and they *will* get mucked up on the Windows box if you mess with it much.

Last, Micro$oft keeps changing NTFS without enough warning to update the Linux drivers without risk. So while NTFS access is useful for a user willing to build the tools themselves, it's a bit much to ask RedHat to support directly until it's really tested out.

Re:What about the aic7xxx driver hanging the insta

[arkhan_jg]

I've got an (RM) server with the same chipset and controller. In my case, booting with 'noapic' as a kernel option did the trick.

*shrug* oddball driver issues. Every platform has a few.

But wouldn't you want the fastest kernel possible?

[Anonymous Coward]

My question has nothing to do with Fedora and any 100% OSS labels. If let's say Borland's compiler gave you a superior kernel, wouldn't you want that? Or would the OSS bias insist that you run an inferior kernel, even if it was compiled with a OSS compiler? And what "trade off" are you talking about? The "taint" of using a non-OSS compiler? Of time in compiling? Seriously how long does it take to compile Linux? You make it seem like a month long task.

And who writes a program targeted toward a compiler? I thought you wrote your app to maximize the CPU, not the compiler.

Proprieteary Formats...

[imemyself]

While Open Source is awesome, and god bless it, refusing to put in support for stuff like MP3s and NTFS isn't going to help Linux gain more users. A friend of mine who recently tried Linux (RH9 I think), was turned off by the fact that he would have to download and RPM and stuff to use MP3s. He also wanted to access the NTFS drive on his computer. And I know you can recompile to kernel w/ NTFS support, but people who are just starting to use Linux, don't want to have to go through all that trouble.

Re:Proprieteary Formats...

[oldgeezer1954]

He didn't need to recompile the kernel if he was using RH9. He did need to download and install a third party rpm in order to get it to work though.

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/redhat9.ht ml

It would be nice if the ntfs support could come with the distribution but with the potential licensing/patent issues I can understand why they're reluctant.

I'm also not personally recommending a lot of write access to ntfs with the package since it seems to not as widely used as incorporated rpm's are. I stand to be corrected on that though.

I'm running rh9 and win xp pro. I access my xp ntfs partition quiet easily with it (above rpm) and it came in quite handy when grub trounced my partition table on the primary drive during an install of a fedora core release. I have two drives with XP on the primary drive, and I use the second drive for testing out various linux dists and rh9 (or whatever my main current flavour). I also keep a 10GB partition on that second drive formatted in fat32 for transfers between the various o/s's should I want to use it.

YMMV as always.

Which Version of X

[nurb432]

Wasnt able to get to the pages to look for myself..

Are they using X.free, or X.org, as their big brother RH is planning to do.

Re:According to the RH website...

[Anonymous Coward]

According to your mom, she's going to start charging $10 per blow job. Granted that's not very expensive, but it sucks to see her get more and more money-hungry. Plus she makes you pay using Paypal :(

Where's the Slashdot Effect When You Need It?

[hbo]

The binary torrent is ranging between 2KB/s and (rarely) 40KB/s. The source torrent, (started in frustration after watching its binary brother crawl for a while,) is cooking along at 400-450 KB/s.(Yay RCN!) They are both uploading at about 25 KB/s.

So, did all you nerds suck it down this morning? 8)

Re:What about the aic7xxx driver hanging the insta

[Anonymous Coward]

The GX chipset is buggy, and the workarounds often break things more than they fix. The GX chipset is hella old these days, too.

Re: NTFS

[bani]

yes, and i've asked them point blank for patent numbers. they have yet to provide a single one.

Re: NTFS

[bani]

actually I did ask them about stability problems and they (redhat) claimed you could corrupt unrelated non-ntfs filesystems/partitions by running the ntfs in read-only mode. when i asked them for examples i just got a "well thats what i heard" (third, fourth, fifth hand i guess).

as for due diligence, dont you think that would apply to say, SAMBA?

i'm not claiming it's a secret conspiracy, i'm saying that i've been given essentially BS excuses, waffling and dancing around and in general avoidance of the question altogether. far from conspiracy, i'd just write it off as incompetence/laziness.

and i _did_ ask the people who make it -- the linux-ntfs authors. i quoted redhat's responses to them and basically the reply was that they had no idea what redhat was talking about.

Re: NTFS

[bani]

redhat is shipping stuff (samba,fat) which _do_ have patent issues, but not shipping ntfs, which doesnt have any patent issues (or at least, redhat won't say which patent numbers -- which is _very_ strange).

but they've changed their excuses several times to explain why they're not shipping it. first it was linux-ntfs isnt stable. now it's 'legal issues' but they wont elaborate.

Re: NTFS

[bani]

given that redhat ships samba and fat, your statement makes no sense.

Re: NTFS

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be incredibly bored.

Too huge and too buggy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tried test 1 and test 2. Though these have some new cool features, even some of the basic admin GUI interfaces are broken and / or buggy. After RH9.1, Fedora has simply been to buggy to consider using in a development or production environment. Nice try, but too bad. Mandrake, Debian and Slackware are lots more stable and reliable.

Fedora in production hosting

[mparaz]

Fedora is also used in the User Mode Linux virtual servers here.

usable?

[qtothemax]

To those of you who have tried test2, how are the bugs? I know quite a few are to be expected in a beta release, so i'm asking if its actually usable as my main linux desktop without too much annoyance from things not working. I'v been wanting to try out a 2.6 based distro, since a lot didnt work when I tried to upgrade my mandrake install.

Is it good, or is it whack? Are any 2.6 based distros relatively bug free?

Re: NTFS

[ChrisJones]

Given the number of companies that base products on Samba, I would imagine a lot of due diligence work has been done on it, plus they have a very well structured process for reverse engineering the protocol. I am not familiar enough with the ntfs driver project to know if the same is true there.

It is entirely possible that running any kernel code could cause corruption in other parts of the kernel. I haven't heard of readonly ntfs code doing it, but it's entirely possible in the unprotected kernel memory.

I guess you just asked the wrong people at RH (ie people too far removed from engineering ;)

How to read patents

[aminorex]

Each claim is independent of the others, but they
are written from absurdly general to excruciatingly
specific, so that in court the barratrist can
apply the broadest claims that the court will
countenance. Making a very specific claim does not
in any way mitigate the breadth of the most general
claim made in a given patent.