Revealed: How Fedora And The Community Interact

bakwas_internet writes "Konstantin Ryabitsev sent a funny message in form of a irc chat log, revealing how Fedora and the Community Interact, to the development discussions mailing list related to Fedora Core.The story also appeared at lwn.net and OSnews."

Comments

Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

Brings you Linux!

Re:Fedora

[chemF]

you're a complete tool.

Re:Fedora

[strictnein]

Unless you like to see shit on a girls face... don't click the link

if you do... click on the link, and then go jump out of the window. if you're in the basement, stay there and impaile yourself on your keyboard. if you're on the first floor, eat a box of broken glass and then drink a jug of drano.

thank you

Re:Fedora

[gujo-odori]

Unless you like to see shit on a girls face... don't click the link

Well, actually, this needs to be amended to "Unless you are using IE and want to see shit on a girl's face..." because if you're using some more advanced and secure browser[1] (or presumably, one of those browsers reporting itself as IE, but why would you want to do claim to be using IE?), all you'll see is:

"We're sorry, this site takes advantage of advanced technology only found in the award winning Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser for Windows."

This was fortunate for me, because I stupidly clicked it before seeing your warning. Saved by Konqueror yet again :-)

By "advanced technology," I can only wonder if they mean "This site exploits a security hole found only in IE to take control of your computer while distracting you with a disgusting image." IE not only doesn't support any advanced technology that other browsers don't support (No, ActiveX controls are not an advanced technology, they are just another way of doing what everyone else does, and doing so with less security), it has long been the only major browser to not support tabbed browsing. That makes it pretty hard to think of "Internet Explorer" and "advanced technology" in the same sentence.

[1] Defined as "Pretty much any browser other than Netscape 4.x, which has a security track record about as bad as IE versions below 6, or nearly so.

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh ok so where can I see shit on a girl's face?

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

please stop posting links that crash my IE or I'll kill a puppy.

Re:Fedora

[strictnein]

because if you're using some more advanced and secure browser[1]

like mozilla firefox which is what I'm using?

oh shoot... still see the shit

Re:Fedora

[cos(0)]

I clicked, and my Mozilla Firefox entered an infinite loop; I had to kill it through my window manager. I posted a bug report on this: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243150

Thanks for allowing the Mozilla suite to improve!

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeez, you use IE and you're talking about killing a puppy? Bill Gates has a contract with the abortion unit at the Seattle Royal Infirmary. He buys dead babies from there and tramples on their faces. Every time someone boots up Windows another dead baby gets stomped.

Think I give a damn about the puppy?

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the puppy's still alive so I would worry more about the puppy, frankly. Although the dead babies make me ill, there's nothing I can do about them.

Re:Fedora

[strictnein]

This isn't trolling you idiot mods. Offtopic? Yes. Troll? No.

Warning people about what the link leads to is not trolling. And stating that people who enjoy seeing those type of pictures should kill themselves is +1 Insightful (as they really should kill themselves) or +1 Informative (as it lists ways for them to kill themselves).

How is this news?

[syousef]

Watch the standard of slashdot article sink!

Re:How is this news?

[krumms]

I agree. Slashdot's becoming more than a waste of time. It's becoming an uninformative waste of time.

Re:How is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm Glad I don't pay for this "service".

Re:How is this news?

[wavecoder]

Okay, at the risk of hurting my "karma"...

One has to ask oneself, here, why one really expects to be part of a community of open source developers when the project in question is run by a for-profit company and there are thousands of people who want to help and think they can.

What I'm saying is, with the decision to split Fedora from the core product lines, Red Hat essentially removed their own motive for expending huge amounts of time in evaluating user input, particularly user-submitted code.

It's simple economics: where's the money in it? "User loyalty," you say. Really? Aren't Fedora users the ones who don't need RH Enterprise or just don't want to pay for anything? Seems to me that they're the same ones who, if they convince an employer to go OSS, will also try to do it all themselves, to avoid "evil" licensing fees.

It seems to me that Red Hat is just looking out for number 1 by not spending huge amounts of time with non-paying users; even when those users have valid input, the time involved in building a trusted developer base makes it prohibitive.

Comments?

-Ed

Re:How is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, at the risk of hurting my "karma"... ...and here you see the standard way of ensuring good moderation, regarless of whatever the post says. Variations include "I know I'll me modded down", "I'll probably get modded down to hell for this" and "I have karma to burn".

This, folks, concludes today's Slashdot karma-whoring lesson.

Re:How is this news?

[syousef]

Oh boo hoo. I've hurt my little Karma and I can't get up.

For goodness sake if you want to mod me down go ahead but "Troll"?

The motto is "News for nerds. Things that matter". Not pre-adolescent drug induced ramblings for the technically inclined. About 3 stories in 10 are remotely interesting and about 1 in 10 is news. For examples the fact that CD media deteriorates is not news and hasn't been for a few years now. 3 stories about it in as many months here is unimpressive.

*shakes head*

Re:How is this news?

[Vellmont]

One has to ask oneself, here, why one really expects to be part of a community of open source developers when the project in question is run by a for-profit company and there are thousands of people who want to help and think they can.

What I'm saying is, with the decision to split Fedora from the core product lines, Red Hat essentially removed their own motive for expending huge amounts of time in evaluating user input, particularly user-submitted code


Mozilla seemed to do it, though the reports I've heard seemed to indicate it was rough going at first. From the looks of the article, I'm just not sure how the project is part of the open source community. If Redhat doesn't want to spend the bucks to support Fedora, that's fine. If they do want to spend the bucks, that's fine too. But don't lie to us and tell us that Fedora is going to be part of the OSS community, and then not make it part of the community.

I suspect the real problem is just RH didn't have the infrastructure needed to have community development of Fedora.


Aren't Fedora users the ones who don't need RH Enterprise or just don't want to pay for anything? Seems to me that they're the same ones who, if they convince an employer to go OSS, will also try to do it all themselves, to avoid "evil" licensing fees.


I've got Fedora on my laptop, and we run RHEL on our servers at work. It's a nice mix because I want the latest and greatest on my laptop, and I want long-term support on servers. I don't want to wait a year and half between releases for my laptop, I want the 2.6 kernel as soon as it's reasonably stable. That's Fedora.

As for doing everything myself, I don't know about most administrators, but I _hate_ running up2date, hate compiling new versions of software for bug-fixes, and I hate upgrading working production servers to a new version of an OS. Since RHEL solves all those problems rather nicely, it's a great choice.

Re:How is this news?

[Rick Zeman]

The motto is "News for nerds. Things that matter". Not pre-adolescent drug induced ramblings for the technically inclined.

Re:How is this news?

[tvh2k]

1. With 1-2 new stories an hour, even your 1 in 10 figure means 3-4 tech news stories a day. There's just not that much tech news out there each day. Even check out http://www.cnn.com/tech/, sometimes they don't update that page for days. Feature stories and "filler" are a reality, so deal.

2. The tagline is "New for news, stuff that matters". If you're going to make a point with it, at least get it right.

3. If you don't like the stories, submit better ones. Remember, 99.9% of the stories are user-submitted, so the solution is in your hands!

Re:How is this news?

[Rick Zeman]

The motto is "News for nerds. Things that matter". Not pre-adolescent drug induced ramblings for the technically inclined.

Technically inclined? More like the humor-impaired. All it was missing was l33t spelling, too. What a waste of bandwidth... {also shakes head; also shoulda previewed. Didn't like a period closing the /i tag for some strange reason.]

Re:How is this news?

[wavecoder]

If they do want to spend the bucks, that's fine too. But don't lie to us and tell us that Fedora is going to be part of the OSS community, and then not make it part of the community.

I suspect the real problem is just RH didn't have the infrastructure needed to have community development of Fedora.

Exactly.

I've got Fedora on my laptop, and we run RHEL on our servers at work. It's a nice mix because I want the latest and greatest on my laptop, and I want long-term support on servers. I don't want to wait a year and half between releases for my laptop, I want the 2.6 kernel as soon as it's reasonably stable. That's Fedora.

Good points. I wasn't thinking about it that way.

-Ed

Re:How is this news?

[wavecoder]

This, folks, concludes today's Slashdot karma-whoring lesson.

Eh, whatever. I frankly couldn't care less how high my karma goes; I have many better things to do than posting on /., which is why I'm on here so rarely. I just don't feel like getting modded into the basement, because I do like the ability to post and be heard occasionally.

-Ed

Re:How is this news?

[love2hateMS]

Just a comment:

My company buys Red Hat Enterprise licenses (because I advise them to). Personally I use Fedora. The good will Red Hat has built with me over the years is why I keep buying Red Hat licenses at work rather than Suse.

Your only mistake is in assuming that users of Fedora and RH Enterprise are different people. In many cases they are the same.

Re:How is this news?

[wavecoder]

Your only mistake is in assuming that users of Fedora and RH Enterprise are different people. In many cases they are the same.

Actually, that's not my assumption quite as much as my question (I admit, I worded my post to prompt a sizable reaction). More power to you for supporting a company that's helped you - really. I just doubt that the economics works out all that well on the bigger scale, when it comes to making Fedora a truly collaborative effort.

-Ed

Re:How is this news?

[MasterSLATE]

2. The tagline is "New for news, stuff that matters". If you're going to make a point with it, at least get it right. Actually, its News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Get it right.

Re:How is this news?

[dachshund]

Aren't Fedora users the ones who don't need RH Enterprise or just don't want to pay for anything? Seems to me that they're the same ones who, if they convince an employer to go OSS, will also try to do it all themselves, to avoid "evil" licensing fees.

This is probably correct, for a relatively small operation. However, small operations sometimes get bigger, or alternatively, the tech who knows how to fix things gets a different job. Given a shop that already runs some flavor of Red Hat, isn't it likely that future Enterprise purchasing decisions will likely tilt towards Red Hat?

Doesn't see like a bad gamble to me. Anything that reduces market share is probably not good for Red Hat's business, whatever it may be.

Re:How is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

The theory goes that if you really didn't care about your karma, not at all, you wouldn't mention it.

Re:How is this news?

[cTbone]

um, actually it's "Stuff that matters".

^_^

Re:How is this news?

[tvh2k]

I guess that depends on if you're reading the title.gif image or the on the home page.

Re:How is this news?

[wavecoder]

The theory goes that if you really didn't care about your karma, not at all, you wouldn't mention it.

That's exactly what I said - I don't care how HIGH it gets; I just don't want it to be down in the basement, because that means a lot of readers never see what I have to say.

It seems to be a really touchy issue with some of the folks who care a lot more than I do, so I'll avoid mentioning it from now on, okay?

-Ed

Re:How is this news?

[syousef]

What a busload of BS.

I think I made my point very well. I really couldn't give a hoot about the exact wording of the motto. What's the bet this post also gets modded "Flamebait" or "Troll" or "Offtopic" even though I'd argue criticising a slight misquote of slashdot's motto a hell of a lot less on the topic.

Translation of modderation: How dare you criticise slashdot!

Hello! flamebait and trolling relates to unfounded criticism for the sole purpose of upsetting people /stirring the pot. Since I'm criticising the relevance of the article I find it ironic that it get modded "off topic". Come on in all seriousness that article wasn't relevant, wasn't funny and wasn't worth the energy of the mouse click let alone the attention to reading the first few lines of that junk.

I'm not trying to "bait" anyone or "troll". I just would prefer that my time isn't wasted.

You're not suppose to moderate something under as flamebait or troll or off topic because you don't like the opinion expressed. How's that for off topic!

It's sad...

[penguinoid]

when Slashdot has to go elsewhere to look for humor.

Re:It's sad...

[TarlCabbot]

Mod every thing above this up +10. Filtering "news-worthy" news suks

Re:It's sad...

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel like a redneck with a gun after having seen too many lemmings jump, "this sucks."

http://www.joecartoon.com/pages/livenletdive/

Funny and scarry

[oo_waratah]

The comments made about Redhat can be applied to many company supported projects. Now that is scary. It takes a lot more time to be "trusted" by a company than Open Source projects not run by companies. Funny, sad and scary.

We chase away enthusiastic supporters that can really help by not having a process which they can follow to get real access to these systems and make a difference.

Re:Funny and scarry

[Cylix]

What would have been nice is some good examples of why Fedora isn't the project it was touted as. Of course, since I have no involvement in the development process (end user), I'm not sure that the community really is being excluded as a whole.

Yeah, it's a funny commentary on the problem, but without real subsequent features it makes it hard to get a full grasp on the situation.

Obviously, it looks like there is some contention with CVS access of any sorts. Still, there are other means of involvement. Again, a rather lack luster article for those who are uninformed of the situation.

Re:Funny and scarry

[Nermal]

Basically (and this is all explained in the follow-ups to the referenced post and elsewhere in that thread) there are people at RH who are working on setting up community CVS access but getting the machine, the space, the access and devising policies to prevent stuff that could get RH in trouble from being committed, etc is taking a frustratingly long time.

By way of disclaimer, I am an "RH person", but I don't have anything to do with the Fedora and am no more or less informed on the matter than any other reader of Fedora-devel, but here's the short version as I understand it:

The IRC log is funny and probably accurate, but it doesn't give credit to the people at Red Hat who really are trying to make community involvement feasable and doesn't take into account all of the extra red tape (much of it nescessary) involved in doing this within a corporate structure.

Re:Funny and scarry

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora is a snap for anyone with Red Hat experience.

There is nothing particularly different to learn. Works for me.

Re:Funny and scarry

[Cylix]

Oh but I did RTFA ;) I guess we need a new anacronym... RTFT (the final word being thread)

Indeed, I understand the problems as they are pretty much the same problems any corporate environement would have.

I'm really interested to see how the solutions come about.

The kernel is a fine example. As I understand it, Linus used to accept patches, review said patches and apply them if he so deemed. Eventually, if the person was reliable and proven they were given access. (Someone correct me here or feel free to add detail).

Now... stop for a moment and lets look at a bit of something different.

AOL used to give free access to channel moderators and other such content managers in exchange for their services. Tax laws or some other regulation later decided it was time to count these barter personal as employees. Thus, some expenses began coming AOL's way and a great portion of this program was whisked away. I can't quite remember what it was, but I do remember reading about it in a slashdot article.

So in any event, I suspect the same doesn't apply as the individuals are not rewarded. Then again, I would suspect there would be something in the form of liability contractual agreements or something along the lines that says "you will not insert stolen code in these products." Probably something very similar to what employees are made to sign.

It is all probability a non-issue, but I'm just wondering if anyone has considered it.

Re:Funny and scarry

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok - i have a serious question.
My company is heavily reliant on Fedora - I know how dumb this is but it just happened. We were on Redhat and then they started asking for money so we moved to Fedora because it's familiar to our tech staff (file locations, ways of doing things, etc). In order to get updates we had to move as Redhat 8/9 are no longer supported...

But the way fedora runs scares me - i fear that our servers will need to run on bleeding edge forever to stay supported, etc. Constant upgrades are no way to run a business. Just last night i was reading up on Mandrake and SuSe to see how they go. We have one Debian box and it's stable and fine - but to migrate all our stuff to debian would be a nightmare...

Now, in the opinion of the slashdot community, should we think about changing flavours and if so, to which flavour? How do other flavours compare to RH in terms of familiarity. Many of our staff have *only* used RH in the linux world.

Re:Funny and scarry

[Too Much Noise]

Given the sheer number of packages included I doubt RH would have the manpower to review every single one for stolen code. They're packaging F/OSS so it would not really be a big difference if some package authors were to commit to CVS directly in terms of responsability (and it would be for fedora, not RHEL, so the responsability should be lower). In practice setting this up is usually not that easy. And the lawyers have to be consulted anyway.

The issue seems to be RH has been dragging their feet doing this. (see the 'test code, find bugs' theme). ^_^

Re:Funny and scarry

[Phillup]

If you want something that doesn't change very fast... use Debian.

They take forever to update stuff.

(Stable branch.)

Oh... and if they don't have something you want... well... they take forever to update stuff. ;-)

Re:Funny and scarry

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to get updates we had to move as Redhat 8/9 are no longer supported...

If RH 8 and 9 were working, why bother upgrading? Keep a couple test boxes on the side with the same kickstart setup as production and try out new packages from there.

If you really must upgrade, the cheap way is White Box Linux which is a fork from RHEL. Same warm fuzzy feeling as good ol' Red Hat, sans licensing fees. Unfortunately, you'll be in the same boat as with RH 8 and 9 since it's a fork. SuSE is probably the only RH replacement I'd consider since now it has Novell's backing, although I must admit that I've never tried Mandrake, and Debian is way too outdated^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstable for my taste.

Re:Funny and scarry

[Anonymous Coward]

Woo, that fedoratracker.org site is superb, BTW. Promote it loads!

Re:Funny and scarry

[Nermal]

Still working on a couple of issues at the moment. Most notably speed. I haven't made a big deal about it yet because I'm not convinced it will be able to handle the masses banging on it yet.

But thanks for noticing. Please send any bugs/feedback you find to the brads@fedoratracker.org and hopefully it will be ready for the big announcement soon.=:)

Re:Funny and scarry

[Nurseman]

outdated^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstable

Okay, I'll admit, I'm stumped. I Googled, and hit the Jargon file, and even asked arround IRC, what the heck does the ^H^H^H^H mean? From the context I think it's something like "outdated.. um I mean..stable". Help a newbie out here please
Thank you.

Re:Funny and scarry

[Anonymous Coward]

man ascii

Re:Funny and scarry

[Firehawke]

Okay, when last I looked there was no answer yet, so..

^H is the ascii code for a backspace. Something like:

My boss sucks^H^H^H^H^Hisn't so bad ...would just be me backspacing out 'sucks' in favor of something less likely to get me fired. It's an old joke, and pretty tired, but still in common use.

Re:Funny and scarry

[cowens]

Cylix wrote:

something along the lines that says "you will not insert stolen code in these products." Probably something very similar to what employees are made to sign.

That's funny, in the seven or so years I have been professionally programming I have never signed anything that said "you will not insert stolen code in these products." However, I have been required to sign things saying that the company owned my work and I had no right to it.

Poll on mexicans

[Anonymous Coward]

Mexicans. Are they good, or are they whack?

Good
Whack
STFU you racist prick

Article Text

[Anonymous Coward]

Mike Chambers wrote:
I think Red Hat went out on a limb and went ahead and told everyone what
was going to happen with changing to Fedora and letting us in on how
this thing will work in general.

Let me, err, relay how things are looking from outside of RH in the format everyone will understand...

--- BEGIN IRC LOG ---
<rh_pr> We are announcing Red Hat Project! A community-based
distribution!
<oss_crowd> rh_pr: Neat.
<rh_dev> rh_pr: Uh... I'm not ready.
* rh_pr is away: promoting rhel
<oss_crowd> rh_dev: what do we do?
<rh_dev> oss_crowd: I'm not sure.
<rh_legal> rh_dev: don't do anything until I say it's ok.
<oss_crowd> rh_dev: what can we do to help with Red Hat Project?
<rh_dev> oss_crowd: uh... file bugs and help test things.
<oss_crowd> rh_dev: didn't we always do that?
<rh_sales> hey, all, if you really want a stable system, don't use
fedora project. It will eat your brane. Buy RHEL instead.
<rh_dev> rh_sales: stfu
--- rh_pr removes voice from rh_sales
<fedora_us> hey, all, check out our neat community-driven system for
red hat development
<oss_crowd> fedora_us: ooooh!
<rh_pr> fedora_us: I like your name
--- fedora_rh joined the channel
<rh_legal> much better
<rh_pr> We are announcing Fedora Project! A community-driven
distribution!
<oss_crowd> rh_pr: Neat!
* fedora_rh waves
<fedora_us> I'm not dead yet.
<fedora_rh> fedora_us: don't confuse things.
<fedora_us> fedora_rh: does this mean we're merging?
<fedora_rh> fedora_us: maybe
<rh_legal> fedora_rh: don't do anything until I say it's ok.
--- fedora_us joined #limbo
<oss_crowd> fedora_rh: so, what can we do to help?
<fedora_rh> oss_crowd: uh... file bugs and help test things.
<oss_crowd> sigh... didn't we always do that?
<fedora_rh> oss_crowd: I know, let's all go in the circle and say our
names.
* oss_crowd goes in the circle and says their names. This
lasts several months.
<fedora_rh> So, there will be the following features in the next
release of Fedora Core.
<oss_crowd> Uh... Hold on. Who gets to decide?
<rh_sales> We do. That stuff will be neato for RHEL-4.
<oss_crowd> MMkay, then. When do _we_ get to suggest things?
<fedora_rh> oss_crowd: feel free to talk among yourselves.
* oss_crowd talks among themselves about new features.
<fedora_rh> btw, feature X will be disabled in the release.
* oss_crowd glares at fedora_rh
<oss_crowd> fedora_rh: nice of you to tell us while we were sitting
here talking.
<rh_dev> oss_crowd: sorry, it's just not happening.
<oss_crowd> rh_dev: when do we get to decide what's happening?
<rh_dev> oss_crowd: Dunno, I'll ask rh_legal
<rh_legal> rh_dev: ugh, /msg me
<rh_sales> rh_dev: let's not do anything rash here.
* fedora_us gets tired of sitting in #limbo
<oss_crowd> fedora_rh: I want to see more of the "community" part of
the whole "community-based" thing
<oss_crowd> rh_dev: how about at least a publicly accessible CVS/SVN
tree?
<rh_dev> oss_crowd: Yeah, that would be cool.
<oss_crowd> rh_dev: finally, some movement. When is that going to be
up?
* rh_dev is away: talking to rh_legal
* oss_crowd tries to occupy themselves and do things like
fedoranews and fedorapeople.
<oss_crowd> Uh... ping?
<fedora_uh> oss_crowd: what's up?
<oss_crowd> fedora_rh: We're feeling kinda useless. What exactly is our
role, again?
<fedora_rh> oss_crowd: well, it would be really helpful if you could
test some things and file the bugs.

Mark your diaries: May 17th

[reality-bytes]

Okay, only mark your diaries if you are Fedora inclined like me ;)

Fedora Core 2, if on schedule (which, AFAIK it still is) is due to be available from mirrors on the 17th of this month.

The actual distibution is sceduled to start going out to the mirrors on the 14th but I think the mirrors will be requested to keep it locked till the 17th.

If they don't make it to the release deadline it may lead to some IRC antics rather like the ones mentioned in the article.

Re:Mark your diaries: May 17th

[Dr_Marvin_Monroe]

**anyone**:Yeah, but can someone tell me when I can get my Symbol font to work with Acrobat reader on my box? I've filed a bug report?..I think I've exhausted all leads?...Ok, I'll talk amongst myselves...

Re:Mark your diaries: May 17th

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite possibly a freetype bug.. search the freetype list for more info.

IRC is Funny

[digitalvengeance]

Great demonstration of the relationship. For real hilarious excerpts from IRC, try http://www.bash.org

(Warning: Some quotes may contain questionable content.)

Re:IRC is Funny

[the_mad_poster]

Warning: Some quotes may contain questionable content.

heh... unlike Slashdot? Posting that warning was a little bit like warning people in a porn shop that Playboy might contain nudity.

Re:IRC is Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

...and on that random listing I chanced upon this gem:

<JDigital> Speaking of which, did you know that Slashdot.org just changed its name to Gullible?
<HoJu> Really?

Re:IRC is Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate you.

I've now wasted 3 straight hours of my life at bash.org and I still can't stop laughing. Now I'll NEVER get anything done.

Re:IRC is Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

just wait till you find slashdot. ooh wait...

Re:IRC is Funny

[parksie]

Just wait until you get started on IRC properly :O

Community

[hawkeyeMI]

I am also a bit bewildered about community input. What happened to the old Fedora packages, the project with which they merged? I still use Freshrpms on the Fedora machines I administer. Setting up apt-rpm repositories with them is the first thing I do after an install.

I really think their quality is improving. FC2 test3 is a nice system, and I think adequately simplified for most home users. It's great that they're almost right on the edge of the major stuff (KDE, kernel, GNOME, X, etc), most distributions seem to lag pretty heavily. In additon, the access to ISOs has been pretty spectacular, not something I could say for RH8, RH9.

Re:Community

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am also a bit bewildered about community input. What happened to the old Fedora packages, the project with which they merged?"

http://www.fedora.us/ ? Its the second hit on google.

Best. Log. Ever

[Espectr0]

rh_dev: what can we do to help with Red Hat Project?
oss_crowd: uh... file bugs and help test things. rh_dev: didn't we always do that?
hey, all, if you really want a stable system, don't use fedora project. It will eat your brane. Buy RHEL instead.
rh_sales: stfu
--- rh_pr removes voice from rh_sales

Re:Best. Log. Ever

[Anonymous Coward]

If RHEL can help this guy's copy and paste skills, then I'm sold.

the test list

[Neo-Rio-101]

The fedora test list is very much a bug reporting list. Mainly heaps of uers chime in and beeyatch about how some feature doesn't work or how some hardware isn't supported. Then it is expected that whoever is listening does something.

I doubt most of the regulars actually do any coding.

Uninteresting and Unprofessional

[jhujoe]

Such an uninteresting and unprofessonional story is shocking, even for Slashdot! Is this some kind of joke?

Re:Uninteresting and Unprofessional

[Rahga]

If you want quality content, you need to be a subscribe... Otherwise, the community version of slashdot will EAT YOUR BRANE.

Re:Uninteresting and Unprofessional

[mrseigen]

I think "EAT YOUR BRAAAAAAAAANNNNEEEEEE" needs to become an Overused Slashdot Joke(tm).

Re:Uninteresting and Unprofessional

[Omnifarious]

Who put a broomstick up your behind?

I find such summarizations of interchanges much more enlightening and worthwhile than sanitized press releases. I learned more from that one email about the things I see wrong in Fedora than I've learned in the past 6 months.

Re:Uninteresting and Unprofessional

[youknowmewell]

In Soviet Russia, your brane eats THEM.

Re:Uninteresting and Unprofessional

[Conor Turton]

Its humour. You seriously need to get out more and GET A LIFE. Anyone who cannot see this is a satire, needs to turn their PC off, get some sleep and go meet people in reality.

Re:Uninteresting and Unprofessional

[pyros]

I think "EAT YOUR BRAAAAAAAAANNNNEEEEEE" needs to become an Overused Slashdot Joke(tm)

Overused Slashdot Jokes (tm) eat my brane.

business model

[gandalphthegreen]

Actually, what else could a software company want? Think about it, they're basically developing a product that has features that will eventually be sold to generate revenue. But the best part (for redhat anyway) is that they have a huge and completely free testing and bug-fixing population. What a deal.

Re:business model

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that at least some part of open-source in the first place?

I mean, you open the source so people can see what's inside and fix problems or add functionality if they want.

Re:business model

[_Sprocket_]

But the best part (for redhat anyway) is that they have a huge and completely free testing and bug-fixing population. What a deal.

Name a major software house who doesn't have this.

Re:business model

[$rtbl_this]

Name a major software house who doesn't have this

I doubt too many closed-source software houses have the latter. How are volunteer coders (i.e. non-employees) going to submit bugfixes if they don't have access to the source?

Re:business model

[_Sprocket_]

How are volunteer coders (i.e. non-employees) going to submit bugfixes if they don't have access to the source?

Hmmm. Good point. I was thinking more along the lines of the "testing" and bug-reporting part. But then... that's the mode Fedora seems to be in anyway. :)

Corrected Poll

[Anonymous Coward]

Good

Whack

STFU up racist prick

Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 4.3).

Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 4.3).

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Important Stuff

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# Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
# Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
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Score +5

[miyako]

Score +5
Insitful 70%
Funny 30%
In all seriousness, although the article had a humerous slant, it was true in all the important ways. Redhat really fumbled with the whole fedora thing, and I think this is opening up the way for other distrobutions
I have since migrated to other distrobutions and realize how much I was missting (gentoo level 1 install on the servers, SuSE on the desktop).

Re:Score +5

[schwaang]

The funny message is so true.

But Red Hat's disfocus/distraction in enabling true community involvement (beyond testing and packaging) hasn't kept them from cranking out an excellent distro in Fedora.

Slashdotters have to admit: Red Hat hasn't abandoned their non-paying users after all.

Re:Score +5

[buddha42]

"(gentoo level 1 install on the servers, SuSE on the desktop)"

Uhh... you got that backwards right?

Re:Score +5

[Otter]

Actually, this story is precisely the sort of thing that usually rakes in +1 Informative's as a comment -- from people who don't realize it's fiction and do realize it's not especially funny.

Re:Score +5

[JamesTRexx]

Insitful? No, can't say that I felt inclined to sit in with that article.

Re:Score +5

[Russ Nelson]

Not funny??? Quick, somebody call in a humor transfusion for this guy!

Re:Score +5

[GigsVT]

Red Hat hasn't abandoned their non-paying users after all.

They did abandon their paying customers though. The small businesses and consultants that used to run many Red Hat servers and were willing to pay maybe $60 or $100 a year per server for updates.

I guess in the end it worked out cheaper, since now updates are free through fedora legacy, from White Box updates, or from Debian in the servers I moved to Debian.

Yes, Red Hat took care of the freeloaders, and they took care of the people that can afford $500 per year per server, but they cut out the small businesses that just wanted a Linux they could install and run for at least 2 years or so without upgrading, and were willing to pay a small amount for updates, and didn't need any "support" in the phone-in sense.

Re:Score +5

[miyako]

no, actually I find that gentoo suits my server needs better than any other distro (other than maybe debian), because it's highly customizable and blazingly fast, updates are easy, and it's stable.
Suse on the other hand is nice for just getting a desktop system up and running without having to worry about the details. For a server I want the most bang for the buck and absolute control, gentoo is great for this. For a desktop I just want something to work, and suse fills my needs there.

Re:Score +5

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess in the end it worked out cheaper

Well sorta. These small business customers are probably now leeching bandwidth off a 'community' fedora mirror site at a college rather than paying for what they use to RH.

Re:Score +5

[GigsVT]

These small business customers are probably now leeching bandwidth off a 'community' fedora mirror site at a college rather than paying for what they use to RH.

Yep, I meant to imply a bit of bitterness in that statement, i.e. "cheaper for the people willing to pay, at the cost everyone else". I don't think Red Hat has really helped Linux much in the long run with their current tactics, and has only hurt themselves.

How much it will hurt them is yet to be seen. Red Hat is known to change thier plans at a moment's notice, but their stronger short term revenue will probably make them think twice before making any more changes. I think they might be hurting their long-term revenues though.

Christ...

[Ahkorishaan]

Lighten up people. If you don't want to read the articles then don't, nobody has a gun to your head. No need to flame slashdot...

Re:Christ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lighten up people. If you don't want to read the articles then don't, nobody has a gun to your head. No need to flame slashdot...

Amen...

Now where's the option to filter out Slashdot n00bs again?

It takes away the mystery.

[CaptainCheese]

I like to believe these things happen by magic.
Satirical pieces on the infighting merely detracts from the mystery!

It eaats your branes!

Obligatory....whatever

[jsse]

Topic in #os: hey guyz, stop pickin on irix.
<SCO> w00t! i bought unix! im gonna b so rich!
<novell> /msg atnt haha. idiot.
<novell> whoops. was that out loud?
<atnt> rotfl
<ibm> lol
<SCO> why r u laffin at me?
<novell> dude, unix is so 10 years ago. linux is in now.
<SCO> wtf?
<SCO> hey guyz, i bought caldera, I have linux now.
<red_hat> haha, your linux sucks.
<novell> lol
<atnt> lol
<ibm> lol
<SCO> no wayz, i will sell more linux than u!
<ibm> your linux sucks, you should look at SuSE
<SuSE> Ja. Wir bilden gutes Linux f? IBM.
<SCO> can we do linux with you?
<SuSE> Ich bin nicht sicher...
<ibm> *cough*
<SuSE> Gut lassen Sie uns vereinigen.
* SuSE is now SuSE[UL]
* SCO is now caldera[UL]
<turbolinux> can we play?
<conectiva> we're bored... we'll go too.
<ibm> sure!
* turbolinux is now turbolinux[UL]
* conectiva is now conectiva[UL]
<ibm> redhat: you should join!
<SuSE[UL]> Ja! Wir sind vereinigtes Linux. Widerstand ist vergeblich.
<red_hat> haha. no.
<red_hat> lamers.
<ibm> what about you debian?
<debian> we'll discuss it and let you know in 5 years.
<caldera[UL]> no one wants my linux!
<turbolinux[UL]> i got owned.
<caldera[UL]> u all tricked me. linux is lame.
* caldera[UL] is now known as SCO
<SCO> i'm going back to unix.
<SGI> yeah! want to do unix with me?
<SCO> haha. no. lamer.
<novell> lol
<ibm> snap!
<SGI> :~(
<SCO> hey, u shut up. im gonna sue u ibm.
<ibm> wtf?
<SCO> yea, you stole all the good stuff from unix.
<red_hat> lol
<SuSE[UL]> heraus laut lachen
<ibm> lol
<SCO> shutup. i'm gonna email all your friends and tell them you suck.
<ibm> go ahead. baby.
<SCO> andandand... i revoke your unix! how do you like that?
<ibm> oh no, you didn't. AIX is forever.
<novell> actually, we still own unix, you can't do that.
<SCO> wtf? we bought it from u.
<novell> whoops. our bad.
<SCO> i own u. haha
<SCO> ibm: give me all your AIX now!
<ibm> whatever. lamer.
* ibm sets mode +b SCO!*@*
* SCO has been kicked from #os (own this.)

Re:Obligatory....whatever

[Neo-Rio-101]

This reminds me of some of the fake irc logs between Kim Jong Il, George Bush, and Saddam Hussein that someone on the internet did.

Re:Obligatory....whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, that also reminds me of this hilarious picture where you see several persons whose name I can't remember, doing something really funny I don't quite recall. Don't you remember that picture? LOL ROTFLOL that was a funny picture!

Your post was completely useless. No url, no excerp, no nothing, so why did you feel like posting it? what a waste of free speech space...

Re:Obligatory....whatever

[Neo-Rio-101]

Forgot the URL for that:- so here it is.

Re:Obligatory....whatever

[shadowbearer]

Weirdness - opened that link up, and got the LJ layout, but most of the text doesn't show up. A few of the entries do, but most don't. Haven't had this problem with LJ before.

Latest vers. Mozilla etc. Can't see any text via selecting it - is this a stylesheet problem?

SB

Re:Obligatory....whatever

[swmccracken]

It's 'cause this lj is a lj of GIF files rather than the norm of text.

(Yep, each entry is simply <IMG SRC... )

apt-get updates

[wowbagger]

I do wish they would put the FC2 stuff on an apt-for-rpm server, as they did with the FC1 stuff.

I really like the combination of Synaptic, apt-for-RPM, and Fedora, but as yet I've not seen any of the FC2 stuff avaiable via apt (yum yes, apt no).

The combination of the meta-data fetching of apt, the transaction rollback of RPM, and the avaiability of UIs like Synaptic is really great for system admin.

Re:apt-get updates

[oldosadmin]

Change your /1/ to a /1.93/ in your sources.list.d/mirror.select.list and you'll have FC2test3 when you dist-upgrade!

Re:apt-get updates

[wowbagger]

Err http://mirrors.kernel.org fedora/1.93/i386/stable srclist
404 Not Found
Hit http://download.fedora.us fedora/1/i386/stable srclist
Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora/ 1.93/i386/base/pkglist.os 404 Not Found
Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora/ 1.93/i386/base/pkglist.updates 404 Not Found
Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora/ 1.93/i386/base/srclist.os 404 Not Found
Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora/ 1.93/i386/base/srclist.updates 404 Not Found
Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora/ 1.93/i386/base/pkglist.stable 404 Not Found
Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora/ 1.93/i386/base/srclist.stable 404 Not Found

Re:apt-get updates

[Doppleganger]

Try 1.92, then.

Those are http urls btw.. it's not all that difficult to plug one into the web browser and see exactly what the file tree looks like...

Re:apt-get updates

[damiam]

By '1.93' he meant '1.92'. Or 'latest'.

Re:apt-get updates

[0x0d0a]

I use both yum and apt (mostly yum). They serve different purposes.

Apt is a pain in the ass to use if you use anything other than a blessed combination of packages. Even if you really do know better than RPM what you want installed (and override dependency checking), Apt throws tantrums and refuses to run. Yum, on the other hand, does not.

Both apt and yum fetch metadata. Apt is lighter on the network to run the first time since it fetches all metadata as a gzipped file. Yum stores each header separately. As a result, yum can deal more lightly with the network after the first run, since a single updated package doesn't necessitate an entire download of the repository metadata file -- just the single header that was used.

I agree that having a front-end for yum would be nice. Oh, and yum bogs down on systems with a vast number of packages sooner than apt does, probably thanks to being written in Python.

Re:apt-get updates

[0x0d0a]

The major third-party repositories aren't yet up-to-date last time I checked -- dag, for instances, currently lacks FC2test3 builds of their packages.

Re:apt-get updates

[Anonymous Coward]

Yum sucks if you are a modem user.

Yum also sucks if you need to repair your system. I did something very stupid and ended up losing lots of the entries in the rpm database (the files were still there and everything ran/booted fine). I tried to use yum to rescue the situation... and it crashed spewing python errors (and I really do dislike python)... I tried apt, and it worked just fine rescuing my rpm database from my stupidity.

In short, yum is a pretty much an all-round suckfest IMO.

Re:apt-get updates

[0x0d0a]

Yum sucks if you are a modem user.

You mean the fact that it hits the network to check for updates when you run it by default, as opposed to apt?

Use the -C flag, which tells it not to do so.

I include "alias yget yum -C install" in my .zshrc.

Yum also sucks if you need to repair your system. I did something very stupid and ended up losing lots of the entries in the rpm database (the files were still there and everything ran/booted fine). I tried to use yum to rescue the situation... and it crashed spewing python errors (and I really do dislike python)... I tried apt, and it worked just fine rescuing my rpm database from my stupidity.

I have entirely blown away my RPM DB and recovered from it (multiple times) by running "yum provides" and install commands automatically in a script with no problems, so I know that this is definitely not always the case.

Re:apt-get updates

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the fact that it hits the network to check for updates when you run it by default, as opposed to apt?

No, I mean that it downloads vastly more than apt when updating its lists.

Worst of all, it doesn't handle modem disconnections. If your IP changes and the socket times out, it just sits there dumbly. I'm sure most devs at redhat have nice big fat pipes, and maybe that explains why *anything* worked on by Red Hat guys seems to have this misfeature.

In Soviet Russia

[Anonymous Coward]

Computer with fedora boot you!

Get it? Red... Soviet... Oh, nevermind.

hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

EAT YOUR BRAAAAAANE

Re:hahaha

[MarkJensen]

The parent post here isn't "offtopic". The post was just pointing out what (s)he thought was an amusing part of the dialog.

Oh well, it was just an AC, so it didn't affect anyone's karma, if that was important....

I DEMAND MY SEX WITH A MARE OPTION

[ThinkAboutYourBreath]

I SHALL NOT BE DEPRIVED.

Hello, and THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING

Yes that's right, THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING. Why you might ask? Well it's simple!

Your brain usually takes care of breathing FOR you, but whenever you remember this, YOU MUST MANUALLY BREATH! If you don't you will DIE.

There are also MANY variations of this. For example, think about:

1. BLINKING!

1. SWALLOWING SALIVA!

1. HOW YOUR FEET FEEL IN YOUR SOCKS!

1. THAT ANNOYING SONG THAT GETS STUCK IN YOUR HEAD!

In conclusion, the THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING troll is simply unbeatable. These 4 words can be thrown randomly into article text trolls, into sigs, into anything, and once seen, WILL FORCE THE VICTIM TO TAKE CARE OF HIS BREATHING MANUALLY! This goes far beyond the simple annoying or insulting trolls of yesteryear.

In fact, by EVEN RESPONDING to this troll, you are proving that IT HAS CLAIMED ANOTHER VICTIM -- YOU!

If it were OSX...

[l33t-gu3lph1t3]

check out this new modification of itunes i'm working on! *OSX_admin bans amateur_developer* check out this new app I have for osx! that app now belongs to Apple computer systems, and since you're not old enough to legally sign our dev agreements, you've lost rights to your code you helped with too

Can we PLEASE get some decent Mods?

[jonman_d]

Who the hell modded this funny?

A) The damn guy coppied and pasted it wrong. If you read the actual article, you'll see he reversed oss_crowd with rh_dev, which completely destroys the whole intention of the satire.

B) He just copied and pasted (wrongly) something from the article, with no additional input of his own! I'm not saying he's trolling, or creating flamebait, but come on! Maybe if he'd copied/pasted it correctly, and then added some of his own lines, a Funny moderation would be justified, but there's not a single word of his own authorship!

Please, mods, use some discression (and read the articles AND the comments you're moderating). Thanks.

Re:Can we PLEASE get some decent Mods?

[Anonymous Coward]

He didn't reverse them. Perhaps you should read the article again, and note how most speakers are directing what they say (a common IRC tactic). When it was copied and pasted and posted, the browser is seeing the nick in the angle brackets and thinking "Oh! Mis-formed HTML! I'll ignore that!" and not showing the nick of the speaker. A common mistake. Specifying "Code" as the post type for the slashdot comment allows the nick to remain:

<oss_crowd> rh_dev: what can we do to help with Red Hat Project?
<rh_dev> oss_crowd: uh... file bugs and help test things.
<oss_crowd> rh_dev: didn't we always do that?
<rh_sales> hey, all, if you really want a stable system, don't use
fedora project. It will eat your brane. Buy RHEL instead.
<rh_dev> rh_sales: stfu
--- rh_pr removes voice from rh_sales

Re:Can we PLEASE get some decent Mods?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up, grandparent down. The oss crowd and rh dev are not reversed.

Re:Can we PLEASE get some decent Mods?

[Espectr0]

rh_sales, is that you? :)

Sorry preview ate the irc names... And i didn't intend to get modded funny, i was just sharing something funny i saw for all those people that don't RTFA.

Comeon just get a grip and be nice.

It even gets better:

<fedora_rh> oss_crowd: it's the open-development, proving-grounds for new technology component of Red Hat, as opposed to RHEL.
<rh_sales> Told ya it'll eat your brane.
--- rh_pr kicks rh_sales from the channel (you're a dolt)

(off topic: how to get irc names or anything with <> displayed properly while recognizing the tt tag?)

interactions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean that the developers have sex with one another and members of the community?

all distributions suck

[trance9]

some distros suck more; the paradoxical think is that none of them suck less.

i am probably going to use fedora because it has a stable release schedule. that doesn't mean it sucks any less; but other distros suck more. what it really means that means if someone asks me what i am running i can say "fedora core 2" and that means something. that means if i have issues with some software the guy who got my email reporting whatever bug knows what i've got and can see if my problem can be replicated.

try that on debian. debian has no coherent release schedule, and at this point it's not even clear they are EVER going to have another release: the current "release" has been delayed *years* already, and debian users are quite pleased with that. debian users just incrementally apt-get upgrade "unstable" and claim that is OK.

but try figuring out how to file a bug based on that--what exactly is debian unstable? it's a huge moving target, it really doesn't mean anything, and by the time the guy gets around to looking at my bug it's likely radically different. debian needs to get its shit together and get back to 3-4 month releases. apt-get upgrade is really not the answer. i also like rhat's "best of breed" philosophy versus debians "here have everything" philosophy: i don't want to choose most of the time; and when i DO want to choose i probably know what i'm doing well enough to manually install. so most of the time, i want the distro to choose for me.

so where does that leave me? i've got a rh9 that is end of life and i reall don't want to switch to the debian chaos. i'm hoping to go fedora, but you guys say it sucks. enterprise is no good for my home box, it's not worth paying an "enterprise" license for home.

so, here is a plea: make fedora core not suck more than other distros. i don't need support from redhat for my home system; i do need stable planned releases. and guess what? whatever i use at home is likely going to determine what we pay for at work, so it's not like there isn't a business interest here in making me happy. if i do get forced onto debian at home, it's only a matter of time before i advocate for it at work as well.

Re:all distributions suck

[trance9]

sometimes also my typing sucks more, and paradoxically it never sucks less. sorry about that bizarre first paragraph there, i do hope you know what i meant.

Re:all distributions suck

[the eric conspiracy]

so where does that leave me? i've got a rh9 that is end of life and i reall don't want to switch to the debian chaos

- Fermi LTS
- Suse downloadable versions
- Whitebox
- Fedora community support for RH9

Are all interesting options.

Re:all distributions suck

[sirReal.83.]

debian has no coherent release schedule
I know, it sucks. That's why I'm helping.
Are you helping?

try figuring out how to file a bug based on that--what exactly is debian unstable?
What? When you report bugs, the version of the package you're using is reported along with it. That is, if you're using the reportbug tool, which there's really no reason not to be doing. But really, the first thing you should be doing before reporting bugs is to upgrade. It's irresponsible to file bugs on old packages, especially if the new version already has fixed that bug.

Re:all distributions suck

[trance9]

am i helping with debian? no. i am not using debian. i am not going to use debian if i can help it, so why would i help? i help by using distributions that get this right, thereby giving them larger market share.

as for filing bugs: maybe you are some kind of purist who thinks i should only be running software that i installed with apt-get, but last i checked things like WebLogic and Oracle did not come as free software .deb's, and yes i do sometimes need to file bugs against these behemoths.

if i were at one of these corps. and i got a bug that says "doesn't work on debian unstable" i would toss it in the trash. i'm also not really interested in doing a lot of work finding every library they link in and sending that list to them, nor would that really help.

saying "it doesn't work on fedora core 2" means there is a high probability that they have in their QA lab a "fedora core 2" machine which they can try and replicate my bug on.

here is how i am helping debian, by providing some worthwhile advice: debian developers reading this, get a clue--give me a stable release version number system that i can use to report bugs.

given all my whining here you may simply say "debian may not be for you", and that was my exact conclusion as well.

Re:all distributions suck

[love2hateMS]

I've been using Fedora since day 1, and quite honestly I love it. I haven't played with the pre-release Core 2 stuff yet, but Core 1 runs like a dream.

As far as the interaction with Red Hat, think about it this way: What other distro allows you to post a message to a mailing list and get an answer from Alan Cox himself? Red Hat genuinely interacts with the users, listens to them and tries to help them.

I can't even count how many times I have seen the Red Hat guys help users who clearly aren't running any of their Enterprise products.

Re:all distributions suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on. Only because your a debian (l)user, that doesn't mean that the other distributions suck as well. SuSE has well defined releases. Slackware also has regular and well defined releases. Conectiva linux has releases as well. Only debian doesn't have them (well, and gentoo now).

Re:all distributions suck

[obi]

Well, if you're using Oracle et al, I suppose you're not using it on your desktop, in which case you'd probably want to have rock-solid "stable" instead of "unstable"?

If you really are using big closed/third-party apps on "unstable", I'd still wonder why bug reporting would be so problematic - these kinds of things are most often compiled statically, no? So what exactly would make the bug depend on your environment?

If it's still a problem, I'd say your way of reporting bugs is still likely some ways off. Saying "Doesn't work on FC2" doesn't say much. Some basic analysis of the problem and mentioning the versions/intricacies of your platform is probably much more valuable for the developers.

Re:all distributions suck

[maskedbishounen]

I'll never understand this silly concept of "I want someone else to choose my packages!" Honestly. As a user of the Larry the Cow distro ;), I'm the exact opposite. I -don't- want to use it, much less have it installed, unless -I- am the one who decides it's needed/useful.

On that note, who the heck cares about release cycles? Are you going to dump your installation only to reformat and use the newly packaged release? Surely you have more sanity than that. In which case you would merely use your package-updating tool (which you should do periodically anyway), regardles of if there's a "new release" or not. Bugfixes/updated packages come out all the time, regardless of "new releases", after all.

I'll go ahead and admit now that I mostly use linux on my servers. Rather, I don't really run anything that isn't (a server). :P

I don't know. "Home users". Ugh.

Re:all distributions suck

[trance9]

stable often just doesn't cut it because it is too old; the only reason to suggest it really is that it is a known platform. solution: use redhat/fedora, where you get something that is as stable as "unstable", but also has a known version.

i've faced bugs in the field that took weeks to diagnose, so saying i didn't analyze it is just kind of side-stepping the issue, crossing you fingers, and hoping it doesn't happen to you. when it does happen to you, you'll appreciate it if the developers at the other company can run the exact same version of the exact same distro you have, so as to eliminate as many possible variables in debugging.

Re:all distributions suck

[IdleTime]

Oracle is only supported on RedHat AS 2.1 or RedHat ES 3.0 and UnitedLinux 1.0.

If you have it installed on anything else, the first message from Oracle Support will be, in case you have a problem: "Please install on a supported platform and reproduce the problem and file a new TAR. Case hard closed, status HCL"

Re:all distributions suck

[Anonymous Coward]

> I know, it sucks. That's why I'm helping. Are you helping?

Well, that's nice. But the latest delay to 2005 was purely for political reasons, How are you going to help that?

Re:all distributions suck

[pben]

It sounds like you should really look hard at SUSE. SUSE has a fixed release schedule, every six months, at least for the last three years that I had used it. There is good support for closed source stuff like Oracle. It seems that if Red Hat is named to cover the USA market so is SUSE to cover the European market.

The biggest adjustment for a Red Hat user is a more logical file placement, i.e. /opt is actually used for something (KDE Gnome Mozilla) /usr/bin only has the command line stuff. I personally like the SUSE layout. The other problem is that if you use YAST you need to use YAST for all of your configuration because it will trash anything you change with a text editor. The other problem is they just became a part of Novell which has a horrid history of screwing up every purchase of software company that they have done. They say they will do it right this time, honest. We will see. The only free download of SUSE is via FTP. That isn't that bad if you have a fast connection, the DVD is great if you don't.

I have jumped to Debian Sid because I have built up my experience with SUSE over the last three years and I like having the latest stuff only a couple of weeks after it is announced for next to no cost. A few bug reports and putting up with few broken packages is OK for home use. You are right about it being Unstable. I guess that is why the official name is Unstable.

Re:all distributions suck

[trance9]

Yeah, I am not running oracle at home, but the scenario is real: I have a lot of other software, though, that is not installed via a .deb, and when it doesn't work I would like to know how to file the bug. In particular, various JDK's, bitkeeper, mplayer, WebLogic, nvidia drivers, etc., are all things I've manually installed into my systems and sometimes wanted to report bugs against.

In practice what I did when I was running debian was see if I could replicate the bug myself on a different distribution, like RedHat, and then file based on that. Note that it's worth nothing to the developer to list the libs you depend on: they're NOT going to install just that combination just to check out your bug. For a corp. shop the odds are they DO have common systems already set up in the lab, like "fedora core 2" and "suse whatever" but I can guarantee you they won't have the exact version of "debian unstable" you found your bug on.

Eventually I decided that was retarded to have to replicate it on another system--it made any support I got worth absolutely nothing on debian--and just overwrite Debian with RedHat.

There's no question that apt-get is a better package manager than rpm, but that doesn't help much when the distro itself is run by people who can't figure out how to get a release out more than a few times a decade.

Re:all distributions suck

[sirReal.83.]

By participating in discussions on mailing lists and IRC. This much should be obvious.

Re:all distributions suck

[sirReal.83.]

I can guarantee you they won't have the exact version of "debian unstable" you found your bug on.
Remember when I said you should update before filing bugs? This is why. Make a report with a current Debian distro, and developers will only have to update to get everything you have.

Re:all distributions suck

[nizram]

I know, it sucks. That's why I'm helping.
Are you helping?

Nope. I am feel there are other projects more worthy of my time.

Currently I just choose what distribution is best for me (Fedora).

Re:all distributions suck

[pgilman]

"some distros suck more; the paradoxical thin[g] is that none of them suck less."

for me, the answer was to move to BSD. the BSDs - openbsd, freebsd, and netbsd - are excellent, free (in both senses), totally community-driven, unencumbered with the sort of corporate bullcrap that's going on in much of the linux world, and they run all the same software that you've become accustomed to under linux.

serious unix users owe it to themselves to check these systems out; they really are superb - if you doubt it, poke around netcraft for a while and see for yourself.

cheers,

- pete g

Re:all distributions suck

[paroneayea]

You obviously don't use gentoo :)
yes, I am biased.

Re:all distributions suck

[Anonymous Coward]

And as Joe Random User your pull is...?

Re:all distributions suck

[trance9]

Updating before filing a bug does NOT help, unless they investigate the bug the very same day I submit it. What if they don't get around to looking at my bug for three months? How can they possibly figure out exactly what version I had at the time I submitted the bug?

Sorry, it just doesn't work. Nice as the apt-get system is, it is not a substitute for a proper release cycle. Period.

Re:all distributions suck

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what you're saying is, you need to update your own stuff to the most recent, possibly buggy, release.. and then the developer needs to update their test system to the most recent, possibly buggy release.

And then if the update introduces more problems, you need to send those bug reports on to them....

Re:all distributions suck

[trance9]

I'm a "home user" in the sense that I have linux at home, at work, and everywhere else, and I want the distribution to choose for me 99.9% of the time--on servers, at home, and everywhere.

A long time ago I used to try and choose everything for myself, very carefully. I got bored of that, and now I have better things to do with my time. I want the distro to make 99.9% of the choices for me: i want it to choose the window manager and theme, i want it to choose a wordprocessor, an SMTP server, an NFS server, http server, etc., etc., and i really don't care how or what it chooses so long as it works.

There ARE three or four packages that I do care about enough that I want to choose for myself. In those cases I will hand-install into /usr/local by downloading the source and compiling and configuring it myself. I will be actively involved in the mailing lists, and familiar with all the current issues, because it's my job, or because I'm just very interested. But I only have energy and time to do that for three or four software packages.

For everything else, I want the distro to choose for me, and I want it to make a reasonably good choice. So, I prefer redhat over debian, because redhat makes choices, whereas debian tries to give me options. I don't want options: options represent the work of figuring out which one is best. I want the smart guys who made the distro to decide what IMAP server works best with everything else they've stuck on.

Re:all distributions suck

[sirReal.83.]

As I said before, the reportbug tool inserts relevant package versions into the bug report before sending. If your behemoth applications don't have decent, version-enabled bug reporters... that's not so much a problem with Debian as the buggy, reporter-less software and the users who file worthless reports now is it?

Debian should release more, but it's not going away without a suitable replacement. Period.

Re:all distributions suck

[Paul Jakma]

When you report bugs, the version of the package you're using is reported along with it.

What about the versions of packages it depends on? What about the version of the compiler used? What about the version of the compiler used for each package dependency package (because each package may have gone into unstable at a different date, and built with different compilers)? etc..

Spending time looking into problems that end up being to due transient breakage in dependent or core packages is a frustrating, especially because of the difficulty of diagnosing, eg compiler problems. Personally, I'm very wary of bug reports for software running on debian unstable.

Re:all distributions suck

[alienw]

How the hell is using /opt logical? How is it logical to put X in /usr and KDE and Mozilla in /opt? /opt should not be used for anything, it just needs to disappear. The standard UNIX place for putting programs is /usr, and there is no reason why KDE, Gnome, and Mozilla can't live there. /opt is a Solaris abomination and deserves to die its rightful death.

Re:all distributions suck

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that debian goes two years between releases is a virtue when you're a Ph.D student who just wants a stable workstation. Can't remember how many times I wasted an afternoon upgrading RH et. al. Argh. I'll take stability, thanks.

Re:all distributions suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, some people just want an OS, not a Club House.

Re:all distributions suck

[Anonymous Coward]

> /opt is a Solaris abomination and deserves to die its rightful death

At least on Solaris /opt is reserved for 3rd party packages, and not stuff that comes off the OS CD.

Re:all distributions suck

[drsmithy]

You could, y'know, maybe *pay* for Redhat's distro...

Re:all distributions suck

[mbanck]

What about the versions of packages it depends on?

Incidently, they are reported as well.

What about the version of the compiler used?

Build-Dependencies do not get logged, but if you really need the info, you can usually gather it. Debian uses the same gcc compiler for all packages by default, so you just have to look back when the package got uploaded and check what version of gcc was current back then.

I've done a lot of Debian packaging but never needed this kind of information though.

Michael

Re:all distributions suck

[molnarcs]

"so where does that leave me? i've got a rh9 that is end of life and i reall don't want to switch to the debian chaos."

Hey, I still use RH 8.0 (Psyche) - works fine here ;)

bash-2.05b$ cat /usr/compat/linux/etc/redhat-release /usr/compat/linux/proc/version
Red Hat Linux release 8.0 (Psyche)
Linux version 2.4.2 (des@freebsd.org) (gcc version 3.3.3 [FreeBSD] 20031106) #4 Sun Dec 18 04:30:00 CET 1977

Seriously though - if you are not unconfortable with the command line, why not try FreeBSD? Its as stable as Debian and packages are as up to date (well, except for the linux kernel :o)) as in Fedora. I only say this because I know exactly your dilemma - I had the same thoughts half a year ago...

Re:all distributions suck

[0x0d0a]

The main thing that I'm not comfortable with about SuSE is that they're about the least open of the major distros. I remember reading an interview with their CEO about how "people shouldn't expect everything to be free". SuSE does not provide free ISOs of their product for download, unlike Red Hat and most other Linux vendors (they do have a "live" version that only runs off the CD for download -- effectively a demo version). RH is one of the most open distros (aside, obviously, from Debian) -- RH has moved to "open" versions of software well before they're ready (like Mozilla), eliminated MP3 support due to patent concerns at one point, provides ISOs of their product for free, provides a public Bugzilla server (unlike SuSE) that lets end users see the same thing that Red Hat developers do and input their own bugs, and donates vast amounts of money (funding of many open source projects), developer time (two major areas of RH patches are gcc and the kernel), server space and bandwidth, and political oomph to the open-source community above and beyond the bare amount of effort required. I'd much rather see Red Hat stay the dominant Linux vendor (though I'm not sure if they're capable of doing so -- seems that the folks that are less nice tend to win out).

Re:all distributions suck

[trance9]

And I said before just having the versions of the libraries you depend on doesn't cut it, as the QA lab is simply *not* going to have the tools or the time to produce just that configuration in the lab. They *will* have all the major released versions of all the major distributions already set up and waiting for use.

Re:all distributions suck

[IANAAC]

...and they run all the same software that you've become accustomed to under linux.

No they don't - CCRMA

Some of us would like to do more than server stuff with Linux.

Re:all distributions suck

[pgilman]

" No [the BSDs] don't [run all the same software [as] linux."

ok, you got me. you pulled out a fringe-case example of some low-level, kernel-specific - linux-specific - software as an "exception" to my statement.

here's my original assertion amended for the literal-minded who need to have everything spelled out for them:

the BSDs run the vast majority of the same general purpose software that you've become accustomed to under linux.

that said, though, it's also worth noting that at least one of the BSDs has a linux binary emulation layer which can run a lot of linux binaries.

" Some of us would like to do more than server stuff with Linux."

my statement doesn't say nor imply that BSD can be used for "server stuff" only, nor is that the case in fact. "workstation" software like GUIs (including gnome and kde, etc.), mozilla, xmms, mplayer, etc. are available as well.

i use BSD on my laptop and most of my other computers as well; your perception that BSD is only for servers is as erroneous as that of a windows user who might believe the same to be true of linux.

in conclusion: while there is, of course, software specific to any given platform, the BSDs and linux, as "unix-like" operating systems, share the vast majority of the software that they run. for the vast majority of users (that is, users not tied to a platform-specific application), the BSDs are generally functionally equivalent to linux, and represent serious, mature, capable alternatives to that system.

Re:all distributions suck

[IANAAC]

Actually, my intent wasn't to say the BSD coulnd't ever run something like CCRMA, rather that even Linux just now is beginning to come into it's own for a DAW. Truthfully, I still don't think it's up to the same level as Mac/PC apps, but it's getting there. It's in large part due to hardware support that still isn't in the BSDs. I have no doubt that BSDx could recompile and run the vast majority of those apps. But you'll never get audio professionals to look at that platform because it simply won't run with a lot of the hardware out there that's being used. I would also point out that because CCRMA is "obscure" for BSDx, that doesn't mean it's obscure on Linux. There's a HUGE push to get things like latency down to a minimum that you don't see happening on BSD.

Mainly agree

[Scott Richter]

What I'm saying is, with the decision to split Fedora from the core product lines, Red Hat essentially removed their own motive for expending huge amounts of time in evaluating user input, particularly user-submitted code.

I think they made it so Fedora would basically run itself, probably owing to the fact that, with OSS, you have 9 useless twits submitting useless patches for every useful one (and I'm being generous here). This way, if Fedora develops something, it gets improved, integrated, and included in RHEL.

It's simple economics: where's the money in it? "User loyalty," you say. Really? Aren't Fedora users the ones who don't need RH Enterprise or just don't want to pay for anything? Seems to me that they're the same ones who, if they convince an employer to go OSS, will also try to do it all themselves, to avoid "evil" licensing fees.

Pretty much.

It seems to me that Red Hat is just looking out for number 1 by not spending huge amounts of time with non-paying users; even when those users have valid input, the time involved in building a trusted developer base makes it prohibitive.

Why bother when you can get input from people developing/using RHEL? At some point, you have enough "help."

Here it is....in color :-D

[tvh2k]

Color HTML-ized version

Two purposes of RH Fedora

[Ben Escoto]

It may be useful to distinguish two ways in which Fedora was supposed to be different from the previous series.

1. Fedora was supposed to strike a different compromise between being stable and being up-to-date. It should come out frequently, try new and exciting features, and have the latest versions of everything.
2. The community was supposed to have more of a say in the overall direction. With RH Linux, the company decided which packages would be included in the main distribution and what the defaults would be. With Fedora US (and thus presumably RH Fedora) the users submit and check packages and decide overall direction.
   

RH Fedora is a success with respect to #1, but has failed at #2. I run RH Fedora and it seems to be a reasonable stable and up-to-date distro, and tries out features like SELinux. As other people have pointed out, FC2 is on target and should be released soon.

But as far as #2 goes it is a failure. There has been no integration with Fedora.us and, as the dialogue shows, RH still decides on all the packages and defaults in a relatively closed way.

Some people have asked why RH, being a for-profit company, could open up development. There seems to be an obvious answer: so the community could help it more. RedHat could still exercise a high degree of control as long as it contributed heavily to the new community project. That's why many people were excited at the new structure---it implied that RH was still committed to develop the distribution, but would make sure that the community was heavily involved as well. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth their effort to "open it up."

Why is this flamebait?

[penguinoid]

So I said that Slashdot has a lot of humor, so much that I get all the humor I need right here.

Wouldn't modding this flamebait mean that lot of people don't think haveing a lot of humor on Slashdot is a good thing?

Re:Why is this flamebait?

[Anonymous Coward]

Crying like a bitch about the moderation does help a flamer. Fucking n00b.

Ditch Fedora - Go Debian Unstable

[brunes69]

Debian is the original community project,, and no one does it better. It runs on umpteen platforms, has the most packages of any Linux distro, runs apt out of the box, is a joy to install using Knoppix, and you can be sure that in 10 years it will still be around, no matter what corporations come and go, since it is totally community driven. And compared to Debian Unstable, even Fedora seems out of date ( apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade once / day usually ends up doing around 20+ packages )

RedHat isn't formally supporting Fedora anyways, so I don't get it, what is the incentive?

Go Debian!

Re:Ditch Fedora - Go Debian Unstable

[daemonc]

" ( apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade once / day usually ends up doing around 20+ packages )"

So, I admin a lab with 50+ computers, and I configure them to download and install available updates nightly. As an admin, do you think I want to come in to work every morning and have to wonder what new bugs have cropped overnight? Sure, they'll probably be fixed by tomorrow, but what about all the users bugging me NOW?

If you seriously think that Debian Unstable is an alternative to Fedora, you need your head examined.

Re:Ditch Fedora - Go Debian Unstable

[Karn]

After the Fedora deal, I switched all my servers to Debian stable (with a few packages from www.backports.org.) Debian unstable/testing is just not as nicely polished as Redhat for the desktop, so until some really slick looking Gnome/KDE defaults come to Debian testing or stable, or Userlinux actually happens, I have no compelling reason to switch desktops from Fedora. I am interested however, for the simple reason that I don't want to have to worry about managing two different distros for my servers and workstations.

Re:Ditch Fedora - Go Debian Unstable

[proxima]

(apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade once / day usually ends up doing around 20+ packages)

RedHat isn't formally supporting Fedora anyways, so I don't get it, what is the incentive?

Let me be the first to say I'm a big Debian fan. I use it on several computers. However, using Debian unstable on my main workstation for about a year was not the most pleasant experience. I don't remember everything, but I'll list a few of the more major annoyances:

1.) Some of us really don't want to download 20 (or over 100) packages, many of them the same update as last week, just to stay up to date with security holes.

2.) Though Debian fans love to say "just use unstable if you want the latest", Debian unstable is often _not_ faster than Fedora or Mandrake at getting the latest version of X, KDE, GNOME, or many other applications. IIRC, it took some time before Debian unstable got KDE 3. Yes, you can add additional sources (which I, actually, do with FC1 on my main workstation now to get the very latest KDE - kde-redhat)

3.) Debian Unstable is not the first priority of the Debian Security project. As such, I wouldn't trust a Debian unstable computer with any directly open ports to the internet, as even the latest "apt-get upgrade" may not fix security bugs that are fixed in Debian stable.

4.) At times, Debian unstable can truly be unstable. For a few weeks sometime last year (January?), KDE broke. A workaround was found a short while later, but it took a few weeks for the packages themselves to be fixed. Depending on what you have installed, Debian unstable can feel rather buggy.

All of this led me to install Debian stable on my computer last spring, which stayed until I got a new computer this February. I found that so long as I grabbed the latest KDE from kde.org's unofficial Debian packages, the system felt pretty new. However, I started to wish for a more updated feel with regards to fonts (which often look terrible in Debian, especially unstable, and I'm not the only one who couldn't quite figure out how to fix them). A more updated application set and the same ability to apt-get a bunch of packages made Fedora feel really nice on my new workstation. Fonts are beautiful, and the kde-redhat project does a nice job of packaging up the latest and greatest KDE. When I do apt-get upgrade, I often get some larger or non-essential upgrades, but it doesn't seem to be the quantity that I went through with Debian unstable. I didn't have to put much fuss into getting my system to look great _and_ have the niceties of the apt system.

I kept browsing the Debian-devel mailing list, hoping to see some sign of when we might see a new release, but some legal and technical issues seem to be pushing it back quite a ways. Therefore, I'm now a believer in the "Debian for the server" mentality. Never before has my desktop looked and functioned so cleanly, with OpenOffice now using some KDE widgets (thanks to the packaging from kde-redhat, I wouldn't have realized it was available otherwise). There was a strange problem with Mozilla in Debian where the occasional line of text would have part of the characters "shifted" a few pixels, which was very distracting. That made me switch to Konqueror way back when, and I still don't use Mozilla much at home - but it's nice to know that in Fedora the Mozilla fonts look great.

Sorry for the long rant, but I think I've got a decent perspective of one user who's tried both Debian unstable, stable, and Fedora on the desktop, and to me it just isn't worth the hassle to use Debian.

Re:Ditch Fedora - Go Debian Unstable

[ZeeTeeKiwi]

You can be sure that in 10 years it will still be around

... Actually in 10 years you can be sure that woody will still be around and sarge will be released "Real Soon Now" (TM).

This not [just] a troll. Like many others I guess, I seriously wish the debian community would allocate a little more importance to shipping a current set of apps.

I'm about ready to give up on debian. I have already given up on RH/fedora as too commercial and schizo about the desktop. I used Mandrake for a while, but it was too buggy. p. Currently I'm helping out with Userlinux (yes I know its debian based!) and I hope this project doesn't let me down.

Re:Ditch Fedora - Go Debian Unstable

[oo_waratah]

It is interesting to see RedHat argue for the same Stability that Debian has had forever. RHEL has a 2 year release cycle and so does Debian stable.

I notice that there is no comment to the middle ground, testing is a good one to go with and has (sometimes) faster updates to security fixes.

Stable is really meant to be stable, it should work predictably first, reliably second.

Re:Ditch Fedora - Go Debian Unstable

[proxima]

I notice that there is no comment to the middle ground, testing is a good one to go with and has (sometimes) faster updates to security fixes.

This isn't from personal experience, but I've read that testing is actually the slowest to receive security updates, as patches spend some time in unstable before getting moved to testing. I believe this was in a discussion on debian-devel at one point, as it isn't on Debian Security's FAQ. The consensus was that testing was as slow or slower than unstable when compared to stable

Stable is really meant to be stable, it should work predictably first, reliably second.

Reliably is a basically synonym for predictably:

"1. Capable of being relied on; dependable[...]
2. Yielding the same or compatible results in different clinical experiments or statistical trials."

I would think that "reliable" is one of the major goals of Debian stable.

Re:Ditch Fedora - Go Debian Unstable

[rsax]

So, I admin a lab with 50+ computers, and I configure them to download and install available updates nightly.

snip, snip

If you seriously think that Debian Unstable is an alternative to Fedora, you need your head examined.

The way you worded your comment was that each workstation downloads updates automatically from public servers - you rely on someone else's release procedure to automatically install updates on your computers. If that's the case then I'm sorry but you need your head examined or have your system administrator license revoked. A more sane way of administering multiple/similar computers would be to download updates on one server, have some QA in place to make sure those updates will perform the way you want them to and then have your workstations download updates from that server or another one where you finally upload the tested packages. If you do it like this then Debian unstable, Fedora, SUSE, etc will all perform the way you want - stability wise anyway.

Re:Ditch Fedora - Go Debian Unstable

[0x0d0a]

I have already given up on RH/fedora as too commercial and schizo about the desktop. I used Mandrake for a while, but it was too buggy. p. Currently I'm helping out with Userlinux (yes I know its debian based!) and I hope this project doesn't let me down.

If RH wants to make money on RHEL, that's fine, but giving people bogus impressions that RHEL is vastly more stable than Fedora is not a viable long-term strategy. They really need a greater dose of straightforward honesty.

SuSE also does the desktop, but SuSE is currently about as commercial as it gets, if that sort of thing turns you off -- if you don't like RH for that reason, you definitely aren't going to like SuSE.

Re:Ditch Fedora - Go Debian Unstable

[42forty-two42]

Try gentoo - the x86 branch has always been stable for me, and the unstable ~x86 branch can be mixed with the stable safely. ~x86 had KDE 3 within hours of release IIRC.

Re:Ditch Fedora - Go Debian Unstable

[proxima]

When I gave the stage 2 CDs a shot in Feb, the athlon xp disks locked up on boot. I didn't have to time to do a full stage 1 install (having never done it before), so I gave up on gentoo for a while.

I've been thinking of trying it out, as I think there's a new set of CDs out. It wasn't my image, either - I redownloaded them and reburned the CDs, same problem. Not quite sure what was failing, but I didn't have time back then to figure it out.

Re:Ditch Fedora - Go Debian Unstable

[daemonc]

Good point, and I should also have mentioned that I am lazy.

In the case of Fedora, SuSE, and Debian Stable, it is fairly safe to skip the internal testing step.

Why? Because the only updates between releases are bug fixes and security updates, which have already gone through testing and QA.

FC... CF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes my mind does nasty tricks: one day I mistyped Fedora Core acronym... seconds later I expanded it to a game I played years ago, Cannon Fodder. And now this IRC confirms I am not alone when thinking FC is a different name for old RH, if you didn't buy it, you helped testing and not much more.

-1 Troll - Do you even know how Debian works???

[brunes69]

Ok, for one - filing a bug using reportbug is going to tag it with the exact package version, you can't get more detailed.

Another thing - comparing Debians release schedule to RedHat is like comparing apples to oranges - that is, ripe apples to rotten oranges. Debian has a *VERY* firm concept of a release - that is, a Debian relase is *STABLE*. It is rock solid. No holes, no bugs, nothing. They will test and test the release, and delay it if necessary, until done.

RedHat et. al need to meet release deadlines because they have to shove out "the latest and greatest" to make $$$. Debian has no such problems - that's why Debian Stable puts all other distros to shame when it comes to reliability and stability. It may not have all the whiz-bangs, but it is *_rock solid_*.

Aside from that, you're obviously trolling with this comment "and at this point it's not even clear they are EVER going to have another release: the current "release" has been delayed *years* already". Debian Stable was released July 2002. They are not "delayed by years". There is no fixed date when the next release will be out - it will be out when it is out.

That said, this is why most people in the know *do* run Debian Unstable and apt-get update && upgrade daily, because it is desktop where stability is not as mission critical. Hell, when there is a bug, it's usually fixed by the next day I find.

Re:-1 Troll - Do you even know how Debian works???

[trance9]

see above why your arrogant "use reportbug" does not solve my problem.

Re:-1 Troll - Do you even know how Debian works???

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"RedHat et. al need to meet release deadlines because they have to shove out "the latest and greatest" to make $$$. Debian has no such problems - that's why Debian Stable puts all other distros to shame when it comes to reliability and stability. It may not have all the whiz-bangs, but it is *_rock solid_*."

RedHat makes no money on Fedora whatsoever. Fedora essentially *is* "RedHat Unstable". RedHat's stable line is their bread-and butter.

"Debian has no such problems - that's why Debian Stable puts all other distros to shame when it comes to reliability and stability."

I have had no problems with Fedora Core 1 with either reliability or stability. My system has been up for months without issue.

"It is rock solid. No holes, no bugs, nothing."

Bullshit. Software *always* has bugs, and it *always* has security holes.

"Debian has a *VERY* firm concept of a release - that is, a Debian relase is *STABLE*."

Translation: Debian doesn't regularly release with fresh packages. Their only releases are filled with stale packages like GNOME 1.4 and KDE 2. Their "testing" release is actually an ongoing release which constantly changes.

Sorry, Debian nuts. Your favorite distro frankly sucks from a business sense.

If you want to run modern packages in a business setting, Debian makes it far more difficult to keep every system in sync. With Fedora, you can run Fedora Core 1 on every system and recieve security updates as they are released - just as you can with Windows. With Debian, you have to run Stable if you want a single set of packages with only security upgrades.

The whole "Stable"/"Unstable"/"Testing" thing runs completely counter to the rest of the industry. Microsoft releases a new OS every few years and then only releases incremental bug-fixes and security upgrades. Thus, when you are running "Windows XP", you are running a specific set of packages with a specific configuration system and specific interface. How is a business supposed to get support for "Debian Unstable"? Are they supposed to thell the support company the versions of every package on their system? What if they want to get security upgrades without signifigantly changing their system?

With Debian, a business would be forced to use Stable if they wanted a stable, supported platform. Unfortunately, stable is filled with old packages. Fedora Core 1 is tested and stable. You can call up LinuxCare (or another corporation), tell them that you are using "Fedora Core 1", and get support for configuration and other issues. You can't do that with Debian Unstable.

"That said, this is why most people in the know *do* run Debian Unstable and apt-get update && upgrade daily, because it is desktop where stability is not as mission critical."

You just admitted that Debian's releases are so old that people "in the know" are using an unstable release. With Fedora, you get a tested, polished release with modern software. There isn't a need to worry about your packages changing (or not working) tomorrow because you ran "apt-get update && upgrade". You can get security patches and still keep everything the way it is.

Re:-1 Troll - Do you even know how Debian works???

[Doctor_D]

Bullshit. Software *always* has bugs, and it *always* has security holes.

I think the previous author meant release critical bugs. Debian *will not* make a stable release until they are happy that there are no release critical bugs, and things work together. Of course there will be serious bugs and security compromises found--but that's why Debian does the security updates as well as point releases every few months or so.

"Debian has a *VERY* firm concept of a release - that is, a Debian relase is *STABLE*."

Translation: Debian doesn't regularly release with fresh packages. Their only releases are filled with stale packages like GNOME 1.4 and KDE 2. Their "testing" release is actually an ongoing release which constantly changes.

Let's see Debian doesn't have to meet any ridgidly imposed deadlines, so they don't have to relase a shoddy product, and then quickly have to follow up their release with a slew of patches/service packs/errata. Show me a commerical software vendor that releases fresh packages that don't have a mile long patch list shortly after release. Our buddies at Microsoft? Nope, they always have a service pack shortly after release of a new product. RedHat...nope, same thing. Sun Microsystems? Well they still ship GNOME 1.4 with Solaris 9, so no, not exactly fresh.

Sorry, Debian nuts. Your favorite distro frankly sucks from a business sense.

Oh really? How so?

If you want to run modern packages in a business setting, Debian makes it far more difficult to keep every system in sync. With Fedora, you can run Fedora Core 1 on every system and recieve security updates as they are released - just as you can with Windows. With Debian, you have to run Stable if you want a single set of packages with only security upgrades.

The whole "Stable"/"Unstable"/"Testing" thing runs completely counter to the rest of the industry. Microsoft releases a new OS every few years and then only releases incremental bug-fixes and security upgrades. Thus, when you are running "Windows XP", you are running a specific set of packages with a specific configuration system and specific interface. How is a business supposed to get support for "Debian Unstable"? Are they supposed to thell the support company the versions of every package on their system? What if they want to get security upgrades without signifigantly changing their system?

With Debian, a business would be forced to use Stable if they wanted a stable, supported platform. Unfortunately, stable is filled with old packages. Fedora Core 1 is tested and stable. You can call up LinuxCare (or another corporation), tell them that you are using "Fedora Core 1", and get support for configuration and other issues. You can't do that with Debian Unstable.

"That said, this is why most people in the know *do* run Debian Unstable and apt-get update && upgrade daily, because it is desktop where stability is not as mission critical."

I personally work with a few Fortune 500 companies, and the thing they tell me they want over everything is stability, uptime and reliability. They do *NOT* want cutting edge. They will *NOT* install patches that haven't been out for at least two months, unless it's a patch for a bug they've encountered or a security update. And even then that patch has to be soaked and tested in their development environment for at least two weeks before it gets approved to be applied in their production environment. So if you work in an environment with any sort of real change control, just blindly applying updates is not acceptiable.

So, for a corporate setting, with real change control policies, Debian Stable makes perfect sense. It follows the same protocols that you would have from a true commerical vendor. Long release cycles, and security and bug fixes during the life of said re

Re:-1 Troll - Do you even know how Debian works???

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian has a *VERY* firm concept of a release - that is, a Debian relase is *STABLE*. It is rock solid. No holes, no bugs, nothing.

"Stable" in the context of software versioning means something like: development tools and software interface are expected to remain the same. There will probably be new versions for a stable release, but these are patches to fix bugs... not to add (or to subtract) features.

In this context, "stable" does not mean that the software has no bugs.

Re:-1 Troll - Do you even know how Debian works???

[fire-eyes]

Debian Stable was released July 2002. They are not "delayed by years". There is no fixed date when the next release will be out - it will be out when it is out.

If another isn't released by this July, that'll be two year s (why the space is there, i don't know).

Much of what you've said points at a major problem with the debian community: it's crass attitude.

Gentoo welcomes these folks, the debian community tells them RTFM.

Re:-1 Troll - Do you even know how Debian works???

[Paul Jakma]

Fedora essentially *is* "RedHat Unstable".

No, Rawhide is "RedHat Unstable". Fedora is a stable release.

I agree with the rest of your post, other than:

The whole "Stable"/"Unstable"/"Testing" thing runs completely counter to the rest of the industry.

Which is incorrect. That model is fundamental to the rest of the industry. The major difference is visibility. With open-source it is done in the open, with more closed models of development, visibility of "unstable" is typically restricted to in-house and "testing" to a limited set of customers (support customers who have reported a problem and/or early access programmes, eg MSDN for MS).

To continue on with the general theme of your post: It is indeed very easy for Debian users to deride other distro's as "unstable" when their "stable" is so by virtue of being eons old and never changing. More to the point, the Debian user themselves will almost certainly not be running "stable" themselves, either on their desktop or even their servers.

As a long-time RHL user, who considered his options when Fedora was announced, that was the one major problem I had in considering Debian. I want a stable system, but I do want to have access to reasonably up to date packages. To have to add "unstable" to my sources list to use Debian is as attractive as adding "rawhide" to my sources list on an RHL system. And defeating the point of a strongly versioned operating system.

A constantly changing distribution is about as useful as a never-changing one.

Re:-1 Troll - Do you even know how Debian works???

[Anonymous Coward]

No holes, no bugs? Are you really that much of a zealot?

Here's something you might want to think about. Debian Stable ships with Mozilla 1.0. Now, since Mozilla 1.0, the browser has become considerably more reliable -- a huge amount of bugs were fixed, particularly between 1.0 and 1.2.

So if you're running Debian's Mozilla on Debian Stable, it is in fact LESS reliable than other distros. And this applies to many, many other packages too, particularly on the desktop.

So stop with the zealotry. Yes, Debian is well-tested and pretty solid, but it's by no means invincible, and the early software releases in Woody make modern desktop distros such as Fedora considerably more reliable in many aspects.

Re:-1 Troll - Do you even know how Debian works???

[molnarcs]

"Let's see Debian doesn't have to meet any ridgidly imposed deadlines, so they don't have to relase a shoddy product, and then quickly have to follow up their release with a slew of patches/service packs/errata. Show me a commerical software vendor that releases fresh packages that don't have a mile long patch list shortly after release."

This is a typical Debian myth: being up to date and being stable can't go hand in hand. Its a poor justification for KDE 2 in the their most recent "stable" release. Being current and being stable isn't impossible! A case in point: FreeBSD. 4.10 comes with kde 3.2.2, gnome 2.6.x, well, the latest and the greatest - yet it is arguably as stable as any Debian release. If it can be done with fbsd, it can be done in linux as well.

Once deb users can see beyond that myth and deb devels begin to take such criticism seriously will debian as a distribution flourish again. I emphasised distribution, for I think debian ceased to be one, and became some sort of framework, a base on which other distros can be based on (like knoppix, lindows, meppis, whatever).

Re:-1 Troll - Do you even know how Debian works???

[0x0d0a]

Translation: Debian doesn't regularly release with fresh packages. Their only releases are filled with stale packages like GNOME 1.4 and KDE 2. Their "testing" release is actually an ongoing release which constantly changes.

I think you people may be pushing things for different uses.

For a server, modern doesn't really matter. OBSD is much more creaky than either, but has a good deal of reputation as a server because of exactly that -- not much changes. Admins don't have to do major upgrades. Debian stable is the closest Linux approximation of OBSD that I can think of (RHEL is much less of one).

While Debian stable may be quite feasible for a webserver, it's awful for a desktop (or anything else that requires up-to-date packages).

Fedora and Debian stable don't really compete. RHEL and Debian stable *might* be considered competitors.

Re:-1 Troll - Do you even know how Debian works???

[Knuckles]

If another isn't released by this July, that'll be two years

Which still only means that there were 2 years between releaeses, not that it's delayed for 2 years. Unless you suggest that initially they had planned to release Sarge on the same day Woody was released.

Personally I run Woody + backports on my desktop, and I really could care less whether I have the latest release of boa or some such. For stuff where it matters, http://www.backports.org is great, and Gnome and KDE also have backports available. Stable + backports is the perfect combination for me, and I hope Debian will make official backports in the future

Confused over Fedora

[superpulpsicle]

I am just confused by the state redhat is in over fedora.

One day no one in redhat gives a damn about their free distro, wanting to put all the focus on advanced $erver. The next day they want to hit deep in the community again.

Re:Confused over Fedora

[maelstrom]

Same thing with desktop. First they start spouting crap that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, the next thing you hear is that they are coming out with a desktop distro. Get some real leadership again RedHat, I switched to Debian because of this crap.

Re:Confused over Fedora

[hdparm]

I have a feeling that people, including you, unjustifiably get too impatient and upset with what Red Hat is trying to achieve.

Red Hat has historically been pioneering distro in many aspects. They have most of the time provided great ballance between the usable desktop and stable, full featured server. In last few years, great automated support for Red Hat systems as well.

Times have changed though. Like it or not, everything about Red Hat has to be looked at through different prism. They are very successful corporation, with positive cashflow, dramatically increased quarter to quarter profits, big cash reserves and a stock value increase of > 300% in year and a half. You don't muck around with all that after trying hard for more than 10 years. There are also obligations to shareholders and some of the toughest customers around.

Still, they are trying their best to stay loyal to the community (because they are not forgetting how did they come by at first place). They've given us arguably the best Linux distribution there ever was (FC 1), with even better one to follow in few weeks. They will use it for the paid-for product but that's how it is in OSS world. You and I are free to do the same. Sure, there are teething problems with building additional support infrastructure but they will be overcome soon.

If this is not good enough for you, move to Debian but give Red Hat a credit for all good things they've done. 'Thank you, Red Hat' would be more appropriate farewell than your rant.

Re:Confused over Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you misunderstand the frustration many people have with RedHat. Many, including myself, were loyal followers of RedHat. We liked the overall ease of use in setting up and maintaining RedHat. I for one bought every other release because I felt it was the right thing to do and wanted to see RedHat and indirectly Linux succeed. I signed up for RedCarpet and was happy.

And then it happened. "Sorry, but we're not doing the non-enterprise anymore.." I think the tone of the email that was sent pissed me off more than anything. It was if I had stolen from them.

I looked at Fedora, for all of 5 or 10 minute after the install attempt. It was half baked. I couldn't run a stable system with it.

So I did the next best thing. I switched to Debian.

Debian is really great in some ways and really sucks in others, but you know what? They'll be there. They aren't going away. They'll continually get better.

Adios RedHat! Don't let the door hit you in the ass!

Actually, friend, it's quite the opposite

[Anonymous Coward]

The page uses a couple simple SSI statements, so that only people who do NOT use IE get (have?) to see pornography. IE users get hit by a fairly fresh IE exploit that crashes their web browser, but no porn.

Re:Actually, friend, it's quite the opposite

[gujo-odori]

I'm running Konqueror 3.2.2 and saw only the "You don't have IE" message."

But thanks for confirming that it does indeed use IE's "advanced technology" ;-)

This isn't a good article...

[MarkJensen]

With the time spent generating a fake (and, yes, amusing - don't get me wrong) IRC chat, this seems to be more of what a typical /. poster would write in response to an article.

This, as of itself, isn't really article material...

Re:This isn't a good article...

[Mr_Icon]

I am, and it *was* a response. :)

I th4nk you for your time

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD has always [tux.org]? Are you IGs perhaps numbers. The loss

Red Who?

[Anonymous Coward]

After the RH9 EOL, I jumped ship pretty quick. I tried installing yum and adding new packages with that and it was a pain. It would grind and grind and then declare that the dependencies couldn't be met..and no mode to just download the damn packages without installing them.

And RPM is just a huge mistake.. I swear I have to release the friggin' DB locks 2-3 times a month.

FreeBSD, Gentoo, Debian .. the future.. now just get me a commercially supported, guaranteed availability rsync server, streamlined gentoo with stable package versions and life will be good.

RH was fun while it lasted.

Re:Red Who?

[Anonymous Coward]

"and no mode to just download the damn packages without installing them."

# yum --help

Usage: yum [options] <update | upgrade | install | info | remove | list |
[...]
--download-only - only download packages - do not run the transaction

Sounds like an ad for Debian

[noda132]

This is exactly why I love Debian: it's the community. Yes, many Red Hat employees are deeply involved in the GNU/Linux community; but it seems to work both ways with Debian: the members of the GNU/Linux community affect Debian's direction substantially.

Red Hat ships its software as a "complete package", so to speak. You buy the CDs and put them in and install, and that's what you've got. Debian is much more of a "work in progress" that you can actually become a part of. You download the 50-meg install image which fetches a snapshot of what the developers are working on. That seems much more honest to me, because GNU/Linux is a work in progress and always will be.

Of course, some of Debian's politics suck. I run testing on servers and unstable on desktops because stable is just so damned old that it's almost useless. A six-month release schedule like GNOME's would solve this, IMO.

Re:Sounds like an ad for Debian

[Russ Nelson]

It's exactly why I hate Debian: it's the politics.

Re:Sounds like an ad for Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

> I run testing on servers and unstable on desktops
> because stable is just so damned old that it's
> almost useless. A six-month release schedule like
> GNOME's would solve this, IMO.

A couple of points:

By using testing for your servers, you are giving yourself the worst of all possible worlds. Testing has no security updates, and new versions have to go through unstable for several weeks before they can trickle into testing. Testing is the "please root me" version of debian.

Also, for servers, a 6 month release cycle for your operating system is far, far too frequent. Assuming the number of services on the system are kept to a sensible minimum, leaving the base os stable while tracking new versions of the important services is the most manageable way to go.

backports.org is a great way to keep a stable base with newer key items. Backporting your own packages is pretty straightforward using source packages too.

-Mark

Re:Sounds like an ad for Debian

[HBI]

Which is exactly the reason I use Gentoo. However, with the recent departure of Daniel Robbins and the upcoming Not-for-profit board of directors, i'm not so sure things will be better there either.

I would gladly pay drobbins a RHEL license fee for each of my boxes if he'd go back to running Gentoo and avoid the damned politics, please.

Re:Sounds like an ad for Debian

[Karn]

I run stable on my servers, and in some cases install a few packages (2.6 kernel, Samba 3) from http://www.backports.org.

Looks like more Astroturfing

[ZeekWatson]

This is a dead serious comment.

Whats with all the talk about Fedora on /.?

As a professional software developer, I know a lot of people in the industry.

I don't know *anyone* who is using Fedora.

I don't know *anyone* who wants to use Fedora.

So who exactaly are these people who are using it? Who are these people who are advocating Fedora? Why in real life are they nowhere to be found?

Time to put on your tinfoil hats. Redhat is Astroturfing a huge community behind Fedora. Seriously! Fedora is stillborn but hyped by a few people as if its the next messiah of OSes.

Well sorry Redhat, I ain't falling for it! Seems you have tricked plenty of suckers though. Hopefully I can educate a few of them here.

For those of you who don't know what Astroturfing is, it is faking a grass roots movement.

Re:Looks like more Astroturfing

[Russ Nelson]

Hi, Zeek. I run Fedora. Fedora is the next messiah of OSes. Think of it as Debian without the bullshit. Or ... at least that was the plan.
-russ

Re:Looks like more Astroturfing

[Christianfreak]

• I'm not associated with RH
• I like Fedora
• I use FC 1 (even on a server)

Sure there aren't droves of people using it yet but that's because a lot of people haven't even left Redhat 7.3 yet.

Fedora is an easy to use (especially after adding apt) stable distro. It has some backing from Redhat so my employer likes it. I don't do distro politics, I use what works for me.

Re:Looks like more Astroturfing

[sloanster]

Hi Zeek.

I'm an IT professional. In my spare time I play FPS games such as UT2004, and do other fun stuff with my computer. I run Fedora core 1 on the desktop, and I've also been deploying FC1 to production servers, with excellent results. I've been migrating older RH servers to fedora, and consider it to be a fine, current linux distro. Is it the be-all and end-all of OSes? no, but neither is anything else I've ever seen.

Re:Looks like more Astroturfing

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it the be-all and end-all of OSes? no, but neither is anything else I've ever seen.

What else have you seen? Sounds like you've only seen or really know RH/Fedora Linux and maybe Windows. Maybe you should get a clue before you post!

Re:Looks like more Astroturfing

[pyros]

I have Fedora Core 1 installed on all three of my home machines (custom built SMP desktop, and two laptops). I would use it at work too but IT only allows RHEL.

Re:Looks like more Astroturfing

[sloanster]

I know I shouldn't feed trolls like this nutcase (especially an anonymous hit and run coward) but just for the record, over the past 10 years I've used and professionally administered solaris, irix, freebsd, and hpux, as well as a number of linux distros including slackware, suse, redhat{4-9}, rhel, fedora, and others.

I don't use ms windows on my own time, but I do sometimes use it at my day job for some menial, company mandated tasks.

You might be a geek...

[Mr_Icon]

If your name is in the blurb, and you can count more than 5 accusations of being a baby-raping faggot at -1, you know you have succeeded as a geek. :)

Re:You might be a geek...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey dumbass mods, you might want to mod this up since he is the one that WROTE THE IRC LOG that this whole thing is about...

That and the post is pretty funny when you know who wrote it.

BTW, Squirrel Mail Rules! Thanks for all the hard work Konstantin!

I like using these!!!!!!

Re:You might be a geek...

[Mr_Icon]

Hehe... Well, it's even funnier that way. :) Thanks for kind word -- I don't really do that much on Squirrelmail these days, but I still follow the project closely.

Cheers,
--icon

I hope you don't mind...

[Anonymous Coward]

But I've submitted your comment as an article. Hopefully it gets accepted.

There is a little something more.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does Panasonic (et al) make their own off brand? There are people who want the goods but not the assurance that comes with the brand. Fedora keeps people, at least to some degree, from going elsewhere. For home Fedora, but when an enterprise OS purchase comes along, they evangelize for the brand they know. If redhat killed off the freebies and didn't have an off brand to push people to, Suse, Mandrake, whatever would start looking better to a lot of people in a couple of years when it comes time to evangelise for that purchase.

At the same time they've got one important piece of information. Thing people will pay money to have addressed, and the realm of fedora where they get input on things people find mearly desireable.

Wow... reads like a Microsoft chat log...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow... reads like a Microsoft chat log...

It would be funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

...It would be funny if it weren't so painfully fucking accurate.

Welcome to 2004. Here's the rundown, incase you fell asleep:

o VA now pimps SourceForge as a tool to help companies ship jobs overseas. Go ahead, count the number of times you see the word "outsourcing" on their page. Thats right -- That lovely free hosting space your project has? Salesmen inside VA now point to projects like yours and go "See? It works! Now you can fire your employees, and replace them with this handy-dandy website!" They're making an example out of you. Wise up.

o Red Hat isn't interested in talking to you, looking at you, or hearing from you. Be sure to read the fine print at the bottom of the page..the part that reads "The Fedora Project is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc."....Those friendly folks at Red Hat just want you to keep the mill wheel turning, cranking out those security fixes and updates for them to sell. It's real simple. You grow the grain, cut it, and haul it all to the mill, where they'll bag it, and sell it, and let you go hungry. Now, in 2004, rather than being part of the business model, you are a distraction to the business model -- Sorry! No more Red Hat for you! (Fun Fact: They were making money off their end-user desktop distribution -- just not enough to justify listening to your noisy and distracting comments.)

Yaaay! Open source is GRRRREAT!

..will the last one out please turn off the lights?

Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag

Re:It would be funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, don't forget that IBM commercial. Outsourcing won't stop until all the jobs are elsewhere, and there are nothing but managers left on this side of the pond.

Re:It would be funny...

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

Be sure to read the fine print at the bottom of the page..the part that reads "The Fedora Project is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc."....Those friendly folks at Red Hat just want you to keep the mill wheel turning, cranking out those security fixes and updates for them to sell. It's real simple. You grow the grain, cut it, and haul it all to the mill, where they'll bag it, and sell it, and let you go hungry.

1. Please point me to a free distro with guaranteed support.
2. Please point me to a producer of a free distro that compensates the work of volunteers.

That's not insightful, that's a troll.

Re:It would be funny...

[mark_lybarger]

seems pretty insightfull to me. guess it's all in the eye of the beholder.

anyway, people who used RH for free didn't get support. rh figured that some corporate people were installing software on 5 boxes and getting support for only one. but rh user base has always been after something that's not restricted on # of machines they can install it on and such. they're after the big bang for the buck now. and they're looking very Microsoftish with their licensing issues.

next point. compensating volunteers. news flash, volunteers don't expect to be compensated. they volunteer to do something they enjoy doing. sometimes it can be a bitch, but more often than not, it's something they genuinly enjoy doing. these people are to be highly commended for their efforts. again, RH has become a whore in this respect.

Re:It would be funny...

[labratuk]

With the outsourcing comment, you're making one of two points:

1. People's jobs are being replaced by an object.

2. People's jobs are being moved out to India and similar places.

In response to:

1. Get used to it - it's not new. That's what technology does. That's one of the points of technology: replacing humans. Do you also oppose tractors because they steal jobs from honest hard working farm hands? Do you curse the day the weaving loom or spinning jenny were invented? Surely you shouldn't even be posting using this devlilsh electrons controlling electrons black magick, robbing work from telegram boys.

2. Ah-boo-hoo. What makes you think you have any more right to a job than someone in India?

Re:It would be funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

So if you can replace employees by a website, were those employees really adding anything to your company in the first place? Hell, if all I'm doing at my job is some nearly-automated tasks that can be equally well accomplished by a few lines of code with a nice interface, then my superiors would be irresponsible if they let me continue on instead of buying the replacement.

Gives a new meaning to that old joke, "Be quiet or I'll replace you with a very small shell script!" If I can be replaced that easily, then I'm obviously doing something wrong.

And if you hate getting replaced by software or cheap labor, then I'll tell you what my boss told me back in '98: learn a new skill every 6 months, or you're obsolete. Prove your value every year, or your career is dead.

Best advice I ever got.

Re:It would be funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

You grow the grain, cut it, and haul it all to the mill, where they'll bag it, and sell it, and let you go hungry.

Redhat has demonstrated a real commitment to the GPL. With Redhat you get to keep any grain that you cut, hauled, or milled. And you get to keep the bag, too. Oh, and you get to eat the grain that others cut, hauled, and milled.

Now, wait, how can you eat all of your grain, and all of theirs, too? "This doesn't make sense," you protest.

Software isn't grain. Your rant shows a fundamental ignorance of what OSS is all about. Anyone who is dissatisfied with Redhat can take what they like and make their own distro. Lot's of people here rave about Gentoo. That is one person who decided to benefit from the GPS in more than a "Free as in Beer" dimension. One person thought they had a better idea. Now look how many people agree.

Don't give me this "They won't let me" garbage. They go out of their way to let you. You can do anything you want with the code. You just can't tell them what to do. Big deal. If you have a good idea, let's see it! If you're just a sideline whiner, go back and think a lot harder before you complain just to be noisy.

Re:It would be funny...MOD PARENT UP PLEASE

[Anonymous Coward]

way too true. sad.

Re:Funny and scarry - Normal Operating Procedure

[kale77in]

The larger the company the more time they generally spend {wasting money, wasting time, shuffling deckchairs, etc} by changing direction all the time. To save face they never explain to outsiders (in this case, their constituency) how the high-level managers responsible have {impossible work constraints, petty political agendas, no idea}. If they were watched the way sports teams are, they might behave a little differently.

But as it is, so many companies seem incapable of simply choosing one competent and respected project manager, with a generally known and respected vision, and simply backing them for a twelve-month period. It's not like there aren't enough such people in the FLOSS community. But that's just not how business works, most of the time.

Ahem?

[Doktor Memory]

Now, I'll be the first to admit that (a) my tinfoil hat has some large pits and holes from the air corrosion here in NYC, and (b) I am but a bear of very little brain, and thus may not completely comprehend the astounding master plan of our new RedHat overlords... ...but it seems to me that if RedHat were organizing an astroturfing campaign for Fedora based around /. articles, they might, maybe, just possibly, do it by submitting stories that portrayed Fedora in a positive light, unlike this story?

mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

'nuff said

Re: mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

cmon, +5, Scary

They take forever to update stuff.

uh, scary

As an IT person who deals with linux...

[Ayanami Rei]

I have zero problem with that notion. We use Fedora on desktops/laptops as appropriate, and use RHEL on servers that warrant it.

And let's not forget, the projects that Red Hat picks to include in Fedora are getting a lot of user-facetime that helps them improve, independant of how it helps Red Hat. (Minus changes Red Hat makes to that software to make it work in their environment if required)

Debian posters cleared the fog

[youknowmewell]

At one point I was considering using Debian. I liked the idea of a totally community-based distro, and I also liked how Debian stuck to using only free software.

But now, after using Fedora Core and liking it, I haven't wanted to switch. Still, Debian has been tempting. Until now.

I realize now that the Debian community has a few too many loud-mouthed zealots for my taste. Way too much left-winged "down with the big man!" for me, thanks. Red Hat/Fedora Core seems to have a much more mature community than Debian does.

And if I was to ever consider switching to a different distro which is completely community-based, then I'd probably go for Gentoo anyway.

I think enough people know that RH/FC and Debian have different places in the Free Software community, and that they both can peacefully coexist together in the community. It's just seems there are a few who feel a need to push their distro so much as to start spreading FUD about other distros. Childish and distasteful.

Re:Debian posters cleared the fog

[Anonymous Coward]

We're not all zealots, I mean, have Linux zealots kept you from using Linux?

I use Debian because I was trying out Linux for the first time, and did the "distro-shuffle". After lots of tweaking, I found Debian to be the only one that worked. After more tweaking, I got unstable running. I was very happy to have the "latest and greatest".

I love APT, and I'm well settled into the OS.

I have tried Fedora on two computers, seeing as it wasn't out when I first got into Debian (Last March). It's nice, but I never got Up2Date to work, it just crashes. And yum dosn't work either, asking for help only got rude responses that I was too stupid to configure yum properly. After that, they pointed me at some repository to add to yum.conf, but a mirror, and I still needed to do something with that to the Fedora.us repository, ugh.

Every OS, and distro for that matter, has it's zealots. Just learn to avoid them, and learn what's best for you.

Re:Debian posters cleared the fog

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry if the last part didn't make much sense. It's late at night, and I didn't proofread.

Re:Debian posters cleared the fog

[youknowmewell]

I know not to generalize a whole group; however I see alot of FUD on both Slashdot and Newsforge being aimed at RedHat to "convert" people to Debian. (admitedly, there will be some people posting on both /. and NF that spread FUD)

My theory is that RedHat, or any corporation for that matter, will automatically be looked at as no-good doers by liberals. And because Debian is the ultra free software distro, it will attract people who don't want anything to do with corporations. Of course, it's not true of all Debian users, but I believe that the ratio of people with left-wing ideals will be higher in the Debian community than in the RedHat community. And typically (there I go generalizing again) liberals are more vocal than conservatives. Of course I have nothing to substantiate any of these claims, but I believe it to be not far from the truth.

This gets back to the point that the Debian zealots (and RedHat zealots) should just realize that both distros have a place and application and that there is enough room in this world for the both of them to exist. So stop with the FUD already!

BTW you may already know this, but you can use apt with FC. You can download it using yum (sort of ironic :P).

Are security patches issued for old FC versions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will the Fedora Legacy site do that?

If not, it would be foolish to use FC on a server since you would have to constanly upgrade it 3 - 4 times a year to stay updated with security patches... Or you could try and keep track of every app on old versions so you can roll out security updates yourself(who has time for either scenario?).

Give them some time

[Anonymous Coward]

Same thing happened with the Mozilla project for quite some time but look who far they reached. Fedora will find its way, just give them some time to adapt to the new environment.

What a deal.

[Tony-A]

RedHat: huge and completely free testing and bug-fixing population
I dunno about completely free, but there's plenty of ways to make that level of testing much more expensive, exorbitantly more expensive.

Enterprise Customers: get software that is stable and advanced that would otherwise be exorbitantly more expensive. There is a major difference between 5-nines and 4-nines. The difference is not in what it does but in what it does not do. Also 5-nines tends to go together with heavier loads, which further compounds the difference.

Testers and bug-finders: get to play with the bleeding edge. If you're fast enough you might find a bug before anybody else does.

Freeloaders: might run into something "interesting" occasionally.

Unless it's botched badly, looks like win-win-win-win.

wine

[dsb]

or winex or whatever is the latest and greatest working yet in test3 or for that matter in 2.6.x yet?

I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

by this article. Is it okay to flame RedHat, or not? I've spoken against RH over the whole Fedora/RHEL thing, and have been modded down for it.

So help me out here. Rather than modding this comment, reply as follows:

• Speaking bad about Linux = troll. That is just the way it is.
• RH is greenlighted. They are Linux, but the RHEL thing sucks.
• How dare you point out the reality of groupthink by openly questioning how to participate in it!! Troll!! Troll, I say!

Thanks.

Re:I'm confused

[0x0d0a]

Basically, it comes down to this (which I've been steadily posting in every Fedora/RH story since the whole fiasco started):

* Fedora originally was a third-party project to package lots of software for Red Hat. Red Hat decided to add a bunch of Fedora's packages into their mainstream repository. This is the complete and total extent of how users have been affected by Fedora. More packages.

* Red Hat's salespeople apparently (and in retrospect, quite unfortunately) decided that it would be a really opportune time to try to get some money by telling business people that the merged Fedora/Red Hat wasn't particularly stable or reliable. In reality, the merged Fedora is exactly the same as RH 9 and previous releases. Mass Slashdot confusion ensues, and a number of people who dislike RH for one reason or another (distro grudges, etc) promptly propagate and distort this.

* The original Fedora announcement contained a lot of references to how the merged Fedora was community-driven. In reality, not a whole lot was changed. You can still submit bugs, test packages, submit patches and the like -- but you could do all that before.

* The original Fedora respositories (found on fedora.us) are still up, and being updated, and are not always the same as the Red Hat merged Fedora repositories. This causes a great deal of confusions (especially since people mirroring the repositories may be mirroring one or the other).

Basically, the merging of Fedora was a good idea technically (merge a bunch of well-made packages into mainstream Red Hat) that was completely and utterly mishandled from a PR point of view. It was tied to attempts from various RH people to move people to RHEL, to differentiate RHEL from RH/Fedora, and to involve more people in the project. It's kind of like .NET was for Microsoft -- unclear, confusing, had far too many things under one name, and ended up being kind of nice but not all that astounding.

If I were RH, I'd get the fedora.us repositories synced up *now* *permanently* (or work out a name change or something). I'd release a press release describing the whole situation so that there's *finally* an authoritative document so that the 90% of folks out there that are confused by the complicated situation have a single source to be pointed to.

Seriously, RH does some great engineering work, but SuSE seems to be a hell of a lot more competent when it comes to doing business deals and presenting a solid image. Someone up at Red Hat needs to grab the damn reins and tell the Fedora integration people and the PR people to have a consistent story and to clarify things for users. I can very definitely say that the rampant speculation and ongoing uncertainty is a Bad Thing for Red Hat.

Here's the situation from an outsider's point of view:

* RHEL is a "production server" distro. It has one major selling point -- it is infrequently updated. This wouldn't work very well for most Linux users (Linux people tend to want the latest-and-greatest), but it's awfully nice if you don't want to hassle with upgrading your system every six months. This is a pretty decent reason to purchase the system. It's kinda like Debian stable -- a cross between a slower-moving OS like OpenBSD and the more rapidly-changing Linux.

* Fedora is not unstable or flaky or beta or development any more than the earlier RH releases were. It is quite usable for "serious" work. However, it is updated more frequently than RHEL, and has a shorter EOL.

Not to be a total Mandrake fan boi...

[msimm]

But that irc log was hilarious. Just thought I'd point out that Manrdrake Club includes things like community RPM voting, so if you really think application/feature X is the best thing since sliced bread you can add it, then the other users will vote on it and finally SOMEONE (maybe Mandrake Soft, maybe community member) will put it through the paces (testing > release..possibly). Mandrake seems to be a lot of what Fedora wants to be, only it is, already. And don't forget they release ALL their software under the GPL. Thats pretty amazing for a commercial project.

"facetime"

[Anonymous Coward]

your mind has been polluted, this is a reminder that you might want to clear it out before it gets completely leveraged by marketing.

A bit too funny (at least if you're drinking water

[Anonymous Coward]

Nearly passed out when a bit too much water went down the wrong pipe. Thanks for nearly killing me :o

Brane?

[Phidoux]

It's going to eat my brane? Huh?

Politics

[KMSelf]

Yes, Russ. The democratic process has always been one of the messier aspects of democracy.

Dictatorship keeps its messes tidily confined in killing fields and torture labs.

For corporations, it's the sales & marketing departments, and the executive suite, but same thing.

Re:Politics

[noda132]

Yes, Russ. The democratic process has always been one of the messier aspects of democracy.

I hope you're not talking about Debian. Debian is not a democracy and never will be. Can you imagine what the system would be like if features were created simply because of popularity? The end result would be a complete mess. Most developers and users do not understand the bigger picture; only a few are able to plan out an entire system.

Debian is a meritocracy, which works much better.

Then again, so is GNOME and it's released once every 6 months. That works much better.

Re:Politics

[Russ Nelson]

You're comparing one form of politics against another. You don't have to use politics to organize a society. You can use markets, although we both know what you think about THAT idea.
-russ

Community-based distro

[Dwonis]

For the sake of argument: If you, as a user or a developer, wanted a community-run distribution, why would you flock to Fedora, rather than using Debian or Gentoo or any of the other community-based distros?

Re:Community-based distro

[mikefoley]

Because you're comfortable with supporting RedHat installations and don't have the time to learn a new quirk?

Alot of people in Slashdot think everyone has the time to learn a new way of doing something just because it's cool. There's lots of people who are way over worked and it's just enough to keep things up and running.

Re:Funny and scarry [but definately true]

[tyler_larson]

If you want to develop a new tool and have have the bazaar dev model work like ESR told us all it should, then Fedora is a great place. I remember when Fedora was first getting started, I offered to start development on a much needed tool, and I got no less that 7 different offers for help from other non-RH participants in just a week. The prospect of having your tool built under the oversight of RedHat, and almost guarantee that it will be included in the distro is enough already to get all the outside support you need. Fedora was a brilliant idea. It was executed horribly, however.

Offical support and direction was difficult to come by. "Read the docs," they said, but there was precious little written about how we were to proceed. Common questions were: how should we communicate, where should we host the project, how do we best get our product to integrated into the RH environment. All the "offical" Fedora components were hosted on RedHat's own CVS server and had entries in RedHat's official Bugzilla site. What about our project? We're writing for Fedora, for RedHat. We were even given the go-ahead by RH staff. Now when do we get CVS and Bugzilla? We want to start building here.

RedHat staff has been "very busy" trying to answer our questions and satisfy our reasonable requests. Apparently there's red tape everywhere--legal and logistical issues enough to make a man cry. Stuff can be fixed, but it takes time.

We sit and twiddle our thumbs hoping for some answers. Status updates are few and generally cryptic. RedHat is still "very, very busy" and is apparently making progress.

In the mean time, other commitments have commanded my time and I've had to abandon my post as a Fedora developer--at least for now. Now I look back and wonder how much I actually got to contribute.

It was a wonderful environment. Your work was almost guaranteed to be included in the distro (assuming you were filling a posted need). And I, a nameless nobody in the Linux world, had on multiple occasions asked questions and gotten prompt, insightful answers from both Eric Raymond and Alan Cox. I really felt like I was doing something important.

But the delays and disorganization, good heavens. What frustration is was to try to get any offical assistance or direction from RedHat. Their developer support infrastructure was nonexistant at best. To borrow an old metaphor, they were building a passenger jet in the air with Fedora, and we the passengers expected to be joining something a little more ..erm.. functional than we experinced.

Fedora's not a bad idea. It's a great idea. I was (and still am) fairly excided about the whole prospect. But it would have been nice if RedHat had prepared itself and built some sort of support system before bringing the rest of us on board.

I'm still disappointed that wlan-ng not in distro

[ishmalius]

After several years, this replacement for the wireless part of PCMCIA has been so much nicer and reliable. I was thinking for certain that even if it is not part of the standard distro, the kernel could be compiled to support it, and it would be on Disk 4 as an option. Supplying it this way would at least obviate the need for kernel source install/configure/build.

Why would the nice Fedora people leave it out?

Re:Funny and scarry - Normal Operating Procedure

[Donny Smith]

>The larger the company the more time they generally spend {wasting money, wasting time, shuffling deckchairs, etc} by changing direction

Oftentimes it's not even "changing direction", it's just fscking around thinking they're very busy while nothing's being improved...

The whole idea of Fedora is somehow hard to understand (its neccessity) - what IS it - a community project or Red Hat project or neither (both).
I am fairly dilligent in submitting bug reports for OSS apps and OS that I use, but because of this ambiguity, I am not so enthusiastic about donating work to Fedora (I've never been to the Web site...)

Re:I'm still disappointed that wlan-ng not in dist

[hughk]

I get really confused by RH's PCMCIA support. I have one laptop with the Xircom combo LAN/Modem card. It didn't work in RH 8, it worked in RH 9, it had problems again with RH 9 and Fedora 1. Maybe the driver has fundemental problems (although it works ok under Knoppix) but my feelings is that there are some issues with PCMCIA support in general.

The instability myth.

[chrome]

I'm working in a company who moved to Fedora for the same reasons, but I can't say that being current particularly bothers me.

Fedora is more 'bleeding edge' than Debian, but thats also a way of saying it's 'less stale'. Its not as bleeding edge as the Test series of Fedora which have had some odd problems.

We've been running Core 1 since it came out, in over 50 machines. We havn't had a single kernel panic or software component failure in any of them.

How do we manage it? We have a local mirror of the Fedora Core distribution, and we also mirror the updates. We don't integrate the updates into our distribution until we've tested them - unless they are trivial and not likely to cause a major problem.

So, for most applications, like webservers and mailservers, I don't see what the issue is. Fedora isn't any less 'stable' than any other distribution. Who is to say that staying up to date is more or less stable than having 2-3 year old code that is only patched to fix specific, known vulnerabilities?

With no actual evidence of a problem, its hard to know if there is a problem or not. If we see evidence of Fedora being unstable, or unsafe to use, then we'll re-evaluate the situation - but right now Fedora is doing everything we need to to do and more.

Re:The instability myth.

[forrestt]

The instability insn't in the quality of the code that is in Fedora, it is more in the lines of how long it will be supported. Once Core 2 is out, Official support of Core 1 will stop. Thus if you are running a corporate web server on Core 1, when Core 2 comes out you have 3 choices if you want to stay with Fedora:

1) Stop patching the system
2) Patch with unofficial patches
3) "Upgrade" to an untested platform (Core 2)

From a business standpoint, none of these choices are advantageous. Although I will attempt to do #2 until such time as #3 can be trusted, I am not trying to sell my strategy to a PHB.

Re:The instability myth.

[chrome]

Core 2 is tested, its been through four revisions so far. I don't think its a problem.

A lot of the work for Core2 is the Gnome and Kernel upgrades, and testing to make sure that the system is stable under 2.6.x.

We've been running Core 2 in production since Test 1, and its had hundreds of millions of hits so far with no problems.

I don't see the problem running Fedora. Sure, if you need to run Oracle on it or some application server that needs a specific version of Red Hat Enterprise or SuSE or whatever to be supported, then spend the money on it - its obviously important - but for 99% of your task, Fedora is fine - more than fine!

RedHat spent a lot of work on the Kickstart stuff, I now have ks.cfg files for any new server I build and I can rebuild that server just by changing a symlink on the kickstart box and then putting in a boot CD and rebooting. All my configs are rolled into RPMs, any custom apps whatever are RPMs, they are specified in the ks.cfg and the location of the yum archive is specified in the sources file ... yes, I know debian can do all this, but debian is .. stale :)

With Fedora, I have a *fast* stable system, that never gets stale, and includes the latest technology (such as nptl) which can really help a lot of apps (like Java apps for instance).

The thing I'm trying to say here, is if you were with RedHat 9, and you found yourself installing Fedora Core 1, don't freak. Its fine. Upgrading to Core 2 is simple and can be done just with up2date, we've done it several times here with no problems .. as long as everything is RPMd properly, you should be fine.

Re:The instability myth.

[forrestt]

Sorry, I guess I was not clear in what I was trying to say. I didn't mean that Core 2 wasn't tested in and of itself, I meant that it wasn't tested with whatever production code you might be running. You can't do a valid test of the system until the final revision. You can do a preliminary test, but it will not be a valid test if something changes (and it probably will). My personal belief is that there will not be ANY problems. However, from a business perspective, not a technical one, there is a risk that there will be problems (albeit, IMHO not much). If you are willing to take that risk that is fine. Some companies are not willing to take that risk, and want a distribution that will prevent them from needing to take it. This is where the enterprise level products come into play, this is how they are more stable. Stable in that they will not change as much, not in that they will crash less.

Re:The instability myth.

[chrome]

Its a matter of convincing the business that its actually not in their best interest at times to insist upon that kind of stability.

For the Java stuff we run, we see increases in performance with every major release of fedora/redhat - most recently due to the nptl stuff. If we were still running RH 6.2, the machines would all be trojaned, and we would need twice as many of them - the JVM would run like shit on that old kernel.

For *very very* few applications, its important to keep the platform stable - and the only one that I can think of here at my company is Oracle. The rest of what we run is either in-house Java or Open Source, and both of these types of applications benefit more from an up-to-date system than a stale/stable one :)

I do understand your point, but I think a lot of people give up when it comes to explaining the difference between stable and stable to business decision makers. Its all about presenting your case successfully.

I've found that Keynote on a Mac with the spinning 3D cube transition usually does the trick ;)

Who's on first?

[donheff]

Darn - I didn't know all this was going on in the background. Who is who here? I use yum against fedora.us to keep updated and it *seems* to work well. But they sound pretty confused and fed up on IRC :-) Am I safer (from a vulnerability perspective) in updating from fedora.redhat.com?

WHo in their right mind.. ?

[brunes69]

Who in their right mind would run an unstable distro in *any* production environmnent?

If you're running Fedora in a production lab you admin, *you* need *your* head examined. Fedora is no more stable than Debian Unstable, in fact I would say less stable.

Re:WHo in their right mind.. ?

[daemonc]

"Fedora is no more stable than Debian Unstable, in fact I would say less stable."

I'm interested to know how you came to this conclusion. Debian Unstable *is* unstable. I can't see why anyone would expect otherwise, given the name.

Fedora Core is stable, in the sense that the only updates available between releases are bug fixes and security updates, which have gone through QA and testing.

I use Debian Unstable also, so I know you can't claim that it meets the above definition of stability. Perhaps your definition of "stable" is different from mine?

RH Should OpenSource Fedora, just like...

[rolling_bits]

RH Should OpenSource Fedora, just like Sun should OpenSource Java. Oh wait...

release cycle..

[Hooya]

i've been running RH since around 95. i was pretty happy about it despite others i knew who were using linux were making fun of my for using RH. whatever. then the RH announced EOL for the 'free' (as in beer) distros. so i mozied on over and got FC1 and am running *the* file and print server on it. no problems. it's all well and good. except, *the* webserver happens to be running RH5.x or some such. i can't upgrade because there are many deps of in-house apps. and because RH EOLed 'em a long time ago, i'm without security patches. yet, these machines are patched. wonder how? debian! i've been replacing the RH packages on an RH machines with debian packages of about the same version but patched..

so i got me thinking and decided that the hamster wheel of upgrades is really not very fesible for outfits that have tons of in-house software that would take months to migrate (we're still trying to get all of our php3 stuff to php4 -- the empty() change did a number on us). instead what we do need is:

1) a distro that is stable (not from uptime perspective -- just about any distro of linux is good for that) but from a change perspective.

2) backported bug/security fixes. (i'm still running 2.2 on a number of boxes. and no i can't upgrade)

Debian was the *only* solution. so here i am, on a debian workstation with "unstable" having just configured 3 boxes for a web-cluster with debian "stable". do i need gnome 2.x? sure on the workstation i do. not on the servers tho. i run from MS for it's constant upgrades. why would i want that from linux? the constant upgrades suites the suppliers. not outfits with a huge committment to their own software infrastructure. i don't want the latest and the greatest. give my stability (package/release etc) any day over the newfangled whiz-bang xyz feature.

also, i'm reading a lot of negatives about the community around debian. my experiences have been just the opposite. i've learnt a ton in a matter of a few days with the help of folks at #debian. i feel more comfortable with debian (after about 2 months) than i ever did with RH (after about almost 8 years).

But, to each his own. the beauty of FOSS.

RHEL clone

[Tigen]

"enterprise is no good for my home box, it's not worth paying an "enterprise" license for home."

You could use a clone of RHEL:
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org

I don't normally see this option mentioned for people who want to use commercial software that is only officially targeted at RHEL, but don't want RH support.

Can't get that far

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think we'll ever get to the potential fun in the link: we're still in stitches over the name (Konstantin Ryabitsev).

Re:Are security patches issued for old FC versions

[Christianfreak]

Fedora Legacy is issuing security patches for RH 7.2 - 9 so I don't know why they wouldn't for FC 1 when it reaches end of life.

Also FreshRPMs continues to provide security updates for these OSes as well.