Fedora Core 3 Test 2 Available

p0 writes "Fedora Core 3 Test 2 is now available for downloading. The official .torrent tracker is here. It is also interesting that the Fedora Steering Committee has transferred Fedora Core 1 into the Fedora Legacy Project. If you would like to know the proposed development and release schedule for Fedora Core 3, you will find it here."

Comments

Alternative download location

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I get it via Windows Update automatically?

Re:Alternative download location

[angrykeyboarder]

Thanks to "Trustworthy Computing" Microsoft won't be offering FC3 via the windows update mechanisim. Enterprisze users are free to download it from our Enterprise site, fedora.micsosloth.com

Obsolescence

[alatesystems]

I can't believe how fast the FC1 has gone into legacy. I know this isn't RH supported, but I think I'm going to have to switch to an RHEL rebuild like WhiteBox.

For the interested, we use WhiteBox at work on one of our AMD 64 bit servers and it works like a champ. They added yum, but other than that it's binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Chris

Re:Obsolescence

[dtfinch]

I use CentOS. It's nearly identical to WhiteBox, but with seemingly better community support, rather than having the appearance of being a one man project.

Re:Obsolescence

[Godeke]

Fedora Core has the stated goal of being a development operating system for those who wish to be on the edge of development, not a stable operating system for running your enterprise. The fact that you would have to "switch" to something else tells me you are using Core for the wrong purposes.

Core works great for my desktop, because it doesn't matter if it gets blown away (everything is mirrored to my server) and I do want to work with the latest-and-maybe-greatest. For other applications, *please* switch to something that has the intent of being a platform and not a development base.

Re:Obsolescence

[rdieter]

I can't believe how fast the FC1 has gone into legacy.

I can. Though I can't seem to find it documented anywhere off the top of my head, redhat has stated that they will only support (ie, provide updates) for the current and 1-release old version(s) of Fedora Core. Now that FC3 is around the corner, that means FC1 is being pushed out of the nest.

Re:Obsolescence

[Mark Hood]

It didn't even last a year! From the roadmap:

Fedora Core 1 / Cambridge
21 July 2003 - Test 1 (originally called Beta 1) release
25 September 2003 - Test 2 release
13 October 2003 - Test 3 release
5 November 2003 - General Availability

That's what, 10 months from release to 'legacy'? Even Mac OS X takes longer that that between 'forced upgrades' :)

Mark

Re:Obsolescence

[menscher]

It went into legacy right on schedule. The problem is that "legacy" is a support state without meaning. They continue to provide the infrastructure for people to contribute patches, but they do not provide patches, or quality control, or anything. As a result, no patches ever get released. Conclusion: you have to upgrade to a currently-supported release, just like you would if Legacy didn't exist.

Oh, for those who don't believe me, check out bug 1345 which I submitted on March 4. It was ignored until September 7, when it was deemed too old to bother with.

Don't get me wrong... I think Fedora is the best free distribution out there (RHEL being better due to marginally better support). But they really need to have a longer life-cycle if they want people to stick with it. And that primarily falls to the Legacy team, which just isn't cutting it.

Re:Obsolescence

[superpulpsicle]

Yes but if you read the release_notes, half the time there is nothing really that new from the version jumps. It's just a slightly more updated gcc or something. You can download whatever whenever individually. There is no need for these massive fedora updates.

Re:Obsolescence

[c0p0n]

So basically you're saying that FC is useless for enterprise usage, aren't you? Have you read their "about" thing on the FC site?

The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software.

FC is a general purpose linux distro, great for desktop and great for enterprise (although I'm a gentoo boy).

Of course it will never be widely used on a normal production environment, as it happens with gentoo, where software updates should only be done to fix bugs, and major software update (eg, an upgrade) should be made from time to time.

Re:Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

I think using FC for enterprise would be foolish idea, yes. A quarterly release schedule is just a bit too aggressive for enterprise installations. (And with the "only six months" obsolescence plan, you pretty much have to move to each release...) I love it on my desktop though.

In an enterprise installation you need to do some pretty heavy testing before each major update. Heck, even a bug fix needs to be validated, which takes time. Annual updates are my preferred approach, unless something *really* needs the features of a new version. Otherwise the wasted resources of testing become a bit onerous.

As far as the stated goal, I think they have created a generally useful product, but they have also achieved the unstated goal of driving people away from Core for enterprise use. I suspect they were hoping that would be to Red Hat's Enterprise solution, but it appears many are looking elsewhere.

Do we really..

[Anonymous Coward]

need an update on every single non-final release of Fedora?

Those who care are on the mailing list or check the website.

It's disrespectful to the other distros.

Re:Do we really..

[Goyuix]

You do realize, that the latest updates to Mandrake were also /.'d

Re:Do we really..

[Anonymous Coward]

Here at /., we love our Fedora and Debian.. ;-)

How lovely :(

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed FC2 just 2 weeks ago or so because FC1 just didn't get any RPM updates anymore. I appreciate the team doing great work, and making great progress, but if this means that the repositories for FC2 will become unsupported now already, I'm giving FC up. I'll switch to Debian or something instead.

Community?

[duffbeer703]

What is the Fedora community?

Seems more like an open beta to me.

Any personal opinions on RHEL clones?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whitebox, Tao linux, Scientific Linux, CentOs?

Any other RHEL clones?

chock full of goodies:

[t482]

GCC 3.4.x - Precompiled Headers (Speed up) and C++ improvements (and more coming)
Kernel 2.6.8
KDE 3.3 - which includes a much improved KDE PIM groupwhere packages.
X.org x11 6.8 - with translucency & Drop shadows
GNOME 2.8 - New Admin stuff and a lot of other features
Evolution 2.0 - Offline IMAP & WebCal support
SELinux
IIIMF - Standardized Asian character input
Wow!. Torrents are available

Re:chock full of goodies:

[t482]

A nice presentation from a tlug describing the changes.

Re:chock full of goodies:

[sharkey]

Any word on being able to use the Java SDK of choice with the "official" FC-packaged Tomcat?

Re:chock full of goodies:

[t482]

From the presentation(slide 16) tomcat is no longer part of FC.

Really?

[SeanAhern]

It is also interesting that the Fedora Steering Committee has transferred Fedora Core 1 into the Fedora Legacy Project.

Really? I'd love to know where the source of that information is. I see no mention of it on the Fedora Legacy Project site. In fact, the fedora legacy download site only has up to RHL9.

More info, please!

Re:Really?

[Eye of the Frog]

uummm.....http://fedora.redhat.com/
Front page news.

Re:Really?

[SeanAhern]

Front page news.

I see. Thanks for the pointer.

I hope someone tells the fedoralegacy.org people about this. :-)

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am kinda surprised too.. Not much of a notice that they were making such a transition and sad that it starts today.

And you pay for it with more than money.

[jbn-o]

And with MacOS you pay for software you can't inspect, share, or modify as well as the free software parts. Perhaps you would be willing to trade in some money to extend the support on Fedora Core? Fedora Core seems to me to be a pretty good deal considering it helps me retain my software freedom and I can hire someone to keep old versions updated if I care to.

is it faster or slower than 2?

[josepha48]

I upgraded from fedora core 1 to fedora core 2 and gnome desktop got much much slower. So did kde. I also noticed that they switched to xorg. xorg in fedora core 2 is slow. No really really slow, and used up about 72 megs of ram. Run that with Gnome and a gnome panel or two and mozilla firebird, and I saw about 80% or my memory being sucked out the window, and I have 512 megs of ram / 1.2Ghz AMD CPU. I'll probably try fedora core 3 when it comes out, but if it is like this, I may switch to using gentoo on my desktop. Fedora does not make it easy to use the openbox window manager ( read gdm does not allow it as a selection ). They do not make it easy to use any of the other window managers that they include, except windowmaker. Why include this stuff it you are going to make it more difficult for someone to switch to it. It only confuses the end user.

I thought I had a fast PC then I installed fedora core 2 and it seems as slow as my old P233 with 64megs of ram did.

I'm not trying to be a troll, or flamebait, I'm just kinda supprised that the performance is as bad as it is, on my system. I'd really like to know if anyone else is experiencing performance degradation with thier fc2 system and what they did to overcome it?

Re:is it faster or slower than 2?

[darkwhite]

Runs with no hiccups on my P2-350 with 512M of PC100 RAM. Not blazingly fast, but no annoying slowdowns either.

Re:is it faster or slower than 2?

[Bad Boy Marty]

I don't know about performance of FC3T2 (yet), but I'll throw in my 2 cents on Gentoo. Yes, it allows you to build everything from scratch with as many (or few) compiler optimization flags as you like, but from my experience, it takes way too much attention to get it installed at all.

For me, I'm not sure it's really worth spending a day or 2 of really paying attention to the install. For others, it may be worth it. I just found it to be annoying to need to spend that much effort just to get a functioning Linux running.

Re:is it faster or slower than 2?

[digitect]

I use FC2/GNOME on a P3-450, 262Mb RAM (PC100), and although it is not fast, it is quite usable. I always have at least Evolution, Firefox, Pan, text editor, XMMS, and a shell or two open with no swappage that I notice. This is with an ancient nVidia RivaTNT2(32Mb) video card, and a 1Gb swap partition. I've been a Red Hat user since 5.0, although IIRC, my FC2 was a fresh install over my existing FC1.

I've noticed that themes can make a big difference, but with default BlueCurve and a few others (Digital-Cream, munja-remix) it's not bad.