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Red Hat Promises A More Vibrant Fedora
loki99 points out a CNET story about the direction Red Hat's development has taken (and changes in the wind), writing "Michael Tiemann, vice president of Red Hat, admits that after exclusively concentrating on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in recent years, they left those 'early adopters' behind. 'It insulted some of our best supporters. But worse, we lost our opportunity to do customer-driven innovation.' Tiemann said." The recent Boston FUDcon (mentioned in the linked article) is one example of how the company wants to revitalize non-corporate interest.
Not the most carefully chosen acronym!
There's a whole convention devoted to FUD?
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
I, for one, welcome our bright magenta overlords of haberdashery.
Can they promise a non-bloated Fedora? And perhaps one that doesn't freeze on boot when I have my wireless USB mouse plugged in?
Any company, even one as evil and condescending as Microsoft, needs to engage their customers. It is just a rule of business that if you don't listen to your customers they will leave you.
Apple computers, under the steady hand of Steve Jobs is magnificent in this regard. They seem to be leading the market in certain directions, but it is more that Steve Jobs is tuned into the customer zeitgeist that he "leads" the customers by following them and providing them with what they want.
RedHat seems to have finally learned this lesson. After throwing out a lot of goodwill by leaving their best customers in the dust (by bringing out the largely incompatible Fedora distro), they seem to have caught on that they need to be where their customers are, not where they want their customers to be.
Tiemann hopes the current 1,600 or so different software packages in Fedora will grow as high as 3,000 or 4,000 this way.
In other news, Fedora will be the first distro to ship on 50 CDs, containing mostly half assed apps.
I hope this doesn't mean it will be based entirely on the user interface of vi.
Search for "Linux": 404 Results
Search for "Windows": 183 Results
- Justin
..With special guest Maureen O'Gara, Laura Didio and Rob Enderle
My only experience with Fedora came in the form of FC2. It was the closest thing to Linux ME I have ever seen.
The problem Red Hat has had is not that Fedora is slow on the bleeding edge, but the group seems to be ignoring user request for simple feature fixes [citing a 6 month release schedule]. On the other hand by distancing themselves form free (as in beer) distros, RH has begun making money and gaining mindshare in the business world. RH can loose all they want in the desktop end, but as long as they keep the workstaion/support contract end alive and well they will continue to make money.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
I've been following rawhide, and I can tell you there has been much more active development lately. GNOME 2.9 is one of the big things introduced recently. Hardly a week goes by there aren't 100 packages or more that have been patched/updated. It's exciting to follow now.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
You must be studying Java ;-)
Maybe some of us are focused on value rather than just being in search of a job. As a consultant, I find that Linux brings more value to my customers.
Yeah, so you are a troll. Remember what happens when the sun rises? Hint: Read alvismal
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I used RHL9 exclusively for my production servers along with a subscription to Red Hat Network for each machine, for the security patches. I've never needed RedHat's other support services and couldn't justify the cost of purchasing them to my clients. When RH discontinued RHL9 and provided no upgrade path from RHL9 to RHEL3 (re-install from scratch only), I had no choice but to put all the old servers on Fedora Legacy support and plan to use other distributions. I begged for an upgrade installer path from Red Hat salesmen with no effect -- I even had approval from most of my clients to purchase RHEL3 for their machines, but the danger of installing from scratch was too high.
Even now I don't understand why they did that. That kind of move fails Marketing 101.
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
Man, sometimes I wish Slashdot did user-generated polls.
Anyhow, some questions to you Red Hat customers...
When Red Hat started Fedora and then switched its major focus to the enterprise, how many of you stayed loyal to Red Hat, and how many of you went to another distro?
And, of those that left, how many of you are willing to embrace the return of the prodigal son?
VIbrant
vIBrant
viBRant
vibRAnt
vibrANt
vibraNT
vibranT
Redhat have done and are still doing a lot for linux, but as a non-business linux user, I say they can get lost.
-- duh
The problem with Fedora is that it will always be in a conflict of interests with RH "Enterprise" offerings and, thus, it will be held back from becoming a real production OS.
Debian, on the other hand, is excellent, stable, widely supported Linux disro that most people use to run production systems.
We migrated from RH to Debian a while ago and are very happy with change.
Sorry to burst your little FUD bubble but "Windows"... 1,380 results.
The rest have been migrated to or installed since day one with other distributions, and the RH one will follow the same path soon.
Oh man, Red Hat were warned about this two years ago. Every man and his dog knew this would happen, and said so openly here on Slashdot. Now suddenly, RedHat have figured this out. Me thinks they are slow learners. I'm still running the last version of RedHat before this debacle occured, and when I can muster the effort will leave my many MANY years of RedHat behind in favour of Debian.
As a consultant, you will have a lot more customers if you specialize in the Windows world.
Perhaps they're feeling a bit bad about steamrolling the CentOS guys. Whatever affinity/sympathy/allegience I had to Redhat took a major backwards step when they put the arm on a group of folks who were just trying to do the right thing.
See http://www.centos.org/
for details if you're interested. Though I believe they may have taken the article down under threat of retaliation from Redhat's lawyers.
Cheers,
really the best choice of a name? Shouldn't that be SCO confrence or something?
FUDcon is where all the dogs get together and lure all the cats into clothes dryers with clever signage.
I'm gonna git you sucka!
I hate RedHat's distro version upgrade path. Live upgrades are much easier now with yum, but it can still be difficult. Usually much has changed, requiring some packages to be manually upgraded and others forced.
They should get rid of the distro versions all together, no more Fedora Core 1, 2, or 3, just Fedora. I don't see why they can't just push out new packages and make a refresher set of cd images every 6 months or so. Then new installations won't require 600mb of patches right off the bat and everyone will always be and stay current when they update with yum. No more downtime with inter-distro cd or botched live upgrades.
It's been years since I switched from RedHat to Debian at home and although there have been improvements, it's still nowhere near Debian's wonderful system.
If there's one thing I will always regret, it's going with RedHat way back when. Pain in the frick.
I'm in the same boat as you. I tried the redhat enterprise option and the software was a little on the old side. Naturally I tried fedora. Core 1 was pretty nice, but cores 2 and 3 broke a couple of the apps we use. Most notibly components in matlab we depend on. Now I've turned to Debian. We can use stable for the servers and testing for the workstations. Testing is new enough that it comes with firefox, but not so new that it breaks the stuff we need.
It was a shame really. I happily paid for the RHE download. I used redhat for seven years and I think they deserve some support. They are focusing on their corporate customers, and that is where they should go if it keeps them in business. They still support many free software developers and give back to the community.
The only things we have running redhat at school are some rack systems that are behind a firewall. I still have it installed on my desktop at home, but that computer is being replaced by my new powerbook. I still like them as a company, I'm just no longer their target audience.
-- john
It seems to me that redhat has already screwed the pooch in terms of it's desktop niche among the true geeks.
Although I can only speak from personal experience, I've heard a lot of other people echo my sentiments.
I used redhat almost exclusively since somewhere around version 4. I used redhat up until the end (though I stuck with 7.3 and never upgraded to 8 or 9, and I think 8 signaled the beginning of the end). I bought basically ever release, and always recommended RedHat about any other distribution, because it was the distribution I knew best.
When redhat basically abandon their customers, and with the negative things I heard about Fedora, I started looking around for another distribution.
Eventually I switched over to Suse, which is IMHO a much better distribution than RedHat ever thought about being. Now, my money goes to Suse (well, I guess to novell now), when people ask about a distribution, I recommend Suse, and whenever I'm working with a company trying to decide what to run on their servers, I recommend Suse. (Of course, I've heard some nasty things about 9.2, so I'm going to wait around with 9.1 and see if things get better with 9.3, or switch to another distro, probably gentoo).
The thing is, as much as redhat wants Linux to be enterprise driven, it's still the geeks that seem to have a lot of influence in the tides of Linux.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
And to add to that, I believe that all the Windows IT professionals that continue to ignore Linux will end up on the you know what end of the stick.
.com era and won't leave.
The trend towards Linux systems has been steadily going up, never down, and there's no sign of slow down.
When Linux IT jobs begin to out-number Windows IT jobs, it could even bring Information Technology as a viable career choice, one which is not filled with underqualified people that got in during the
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
So which one will you take? RedHat or Mandrake?*
*SuSe seems to be *too* different.
I was a "RedHat Man", always using Redhat, for years, until they split their distros between Enterprise and Fedora. I never used a Fedora distro. I switched to Suse and I'm happy with it, and won't switch back unless Suse screws up somehow. Also KDE is a lot nicer desktop environment than Gnome.
I'm glad for this news. The fedora i have now is too dull, and it's starting to warp from staying in my suitcase too long. I need a nice new bright red one
What do people actually in write .NET anyway ?
As a relative Linux n00b, I'd like to say that I do like FC3 and I've had very little trouble, apart from the afore-mentioned USB-mouse-crash-problem. I'd even recommend it to friends and the like.
I've had PCMCIA cards work fine, sound, cedega/EVE-Online and other stuff work without too much of a problem. Maybe I just don't uber-tinker enough...
Fedora and RedHat to me is annoying - I can't bring myself to use it professionally. It changes too frequently and is poorly supported in my opinion, never fix the problems, always upgrade the packages to move the problem somewhere else. Right now I still have machines running RedHat 7.3 running updates on the fedora legacy project. (There are legacy projects to keep the older RedHat's and various Fedora Cores alive because people hate upgrading a working system every 5 minutes.)
6 -beta-theta-gamma-ppr6_pre1_rc5.
n t-Nokia/PIX/etc. Beating a PIX should be real easy.
RedHat died the day up2date stopped working for free. Welcome to CentOS 3 and now CentOS, with up2date replaced by yum (which is arguably better). I've found CentOS to be every bit as good as the real RHEL. Please do what you can to support CentOS, as this is what RedHat was for all of us since what, Version 3.x?
My fondest memories of Linux distributions include: RedHat 6.2, the longest supported Linux, which I used past its deprecation, and Cobalt Linux. What could be better than a Linux that feels like it gets the same support level of Solaris.
Microsoft has messed up in a similar way with Windows 2000. Why no SP5? Why no SP7 for Windows NT 4.0? Why not have an SP every 3-4 months? This is very difficult to deal with general, particularly with software one has to pay for.
Ideally, everyone would do what Sun does with Solaris, and what CentOS (RHEL) does. Release a new update every 3-4 months, and have ongoing patching in between. Sun knocks it up a notch and separates the nice to have patches from the critical ones in the Recommended cluster.
Back to Fedora. RedHat jumped that shark at RedHat 8. I was done with RedHat at version 8. Luckily, CentOS 3 and now 4 (which us running great, SELinux and all) provides us with a way to get a Linux with a 5 year lifetime without changing our applications so that they compile on glibc-threads-of-doom-version-99.09099999-alpha-b
Right now there seems to be one thing missing from LinuxLand, and that's a more complete IPCop. I want IPCop based on 2.6 and a fully working IPSec/L2TP --and-- PPTPd that works with Windows 2000 and Windows XP/2003 clients without any modifications whatsoever. RedHat should craft up someone to heavily OpenWall/SmoothWall/Astaro/IPCop/OpenBSD/Checkpoi
Back to RedHat miffing things up and leaving itself vulnerable to Novell taking over the leadership role of Linux leader. I've found that using Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and non-RedHat Linux like CentOS is pretty much the preferred MO these days. One thing that RedHat needs besides a firewall killer application, is a total drop in Exchange killer like Scalix.
One thing I have to pay homage to Solaris - I really like providing NFS with Solaris. I always set and forget Solaris, its a pain in the arcane butt with a fairly austere userland, but once its configured it runs like a champion. Im curious to see if RHEL 4 / CentOS 4 can provide NFS v4 services but I'm skeptical about it and will probably just use them as clients and leave the job of shoveling out NFS to client to the guys who invented it.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
How can you even compare Microsoft to Red Hat? They're not even in the same league! Microsoft consistently offers top quality products like Windows (with free upgrades), the whole .NET framework, awesome flight simulators, HALO(!), I mean, the list fucking goes on. How can you possibly badmouth Mircosoft?
...put Axel Thimm on the payroll. If it wasn't for him I, for one, wouldn't be running Fedora.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
.... when Mandrake 7.1 hit. Then, of course, I found gentoo and have been compiling ever since.
IMHO, the only reason to run RedHat is because a particular proprietary vendor (such as, say, Oracle) supports only RH with their proprietary app.
I think it was deeply stupid for RH to drop their power-user distros, and Fedora was never a legit substitute. Methinks RH's strategies gave SuSE a golden opportunity to expand in the US market, and probably prompted Novell to buy SuSE.
The next set of infrastructure servers that need to run any kind of proprietaryware, I'm probably going to be recommending SuSE/Novell..
Haberdashery is men's clothing.
I have been using Fedora since version 1.0 and it works well. The one thing I like about Fedora 3 is that all the system utilities have nicely designed UI's designed in Python-GTK. The UI's work nicely and help people migrating to linux from windows. Applications like system-config-network and system-config-services are nice to have so you don't need to remember every command line option.
So Redhat made a mistake and abandoned some users. Big deal it is just another company people! The new direction Redhat is taking with Fedora is a nice step at admitting they made an error and are willing to work with the community to fix it.
Next time you are in a large bookstore like Barnes'n Noble take a look at the unix section. Fedora Redhat books take up a whole shelf to themselves now. Yes, Fedora is that popular now. It works, it is easy to use, you don't have to wait 2 days while it compiles.
The Yum command line RPM dependency updater works great in FC3 and FC4. FC4 is going to rock. Just wait and see.
nah.. Redhat has been good at creating atleast the uncertainty part.. Though based on this they are trying to fix it.
Fedora is the best Red Hat Linux which I've used. I started using Red Hat with 5.2. But Fedora is the best yet because it is so easy to keep it current with security patches and bug fixes. Once you get your Fedora set up the way you like it, there is nothing left to do but occasionally run yum update, which merely amounts to typing yum update and pressing enter.
Too late ... they had a stock of goodwill a mile wide but they threw it away. Customer loyalty (really, any loyalty) is earned, and accrues over time. Can Red Hat get it back? Possibly ... but it will take a significant effort and they will really have to work to build up any sense of trust on the part of the "non corporate" parties out there. Nobody likes being abandoned, particularly after exhibiting brand loyalty not unlike that which Apple receives (of course, Apple has a long history of dumping on loyal customers, but I guess Apple users have short memories.) We'll see, but it's gonna take time.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I started out running Redhat - but when they dropped us Real People(tm) in favor of their Enterprise users, I decided I didn't want any part of them OR their distro. Switched to Suse, and been happy for the last couple of years; I'm not about to switch back just because they finally realized they pi55ed off a bunch of their user base and want (need?) them back again.
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
Did redhat go after $ in the enterprise and lose sight of Linux developers? I'd say yes.
They co-opted the fedora project,gave it ver little resources and virtually *NO* promotion, and tried to downplay it's even existence to all the corporate customers that they are pitching yearly per-server RHN contracts to.
People who had used SuSE before went back and tried SuSE and discovered that SuSE had newer software versions than Redhat
People who might have thought that Debian was only for masochists discovered Ubuntu and decided it was fast, easy, and didn't become "legacy" in 12 months
People who wanted more updated packages and hated breaking RPM dependencies and like to occasionally build things from source or optomize their packages found Gentoo and decided that rebuilding their entire OS could be fun, easy, and that their OS didn't need to become Legacy in 12 months.
Personally, I think that Gentoo is probably the purest Linux distribution, and that if you want the stability of a tried and true distribution that Ubuntu is the best Debian I've seen.
More developers have shifted away from Redhat, and they in turn have been influencing many other people's choice of distribution, and ultimately they are losing mindshare.
I think Redhat has finally realized that they *need* those developers and they're now doing a strange dance to try to pump up Fedora enough to excite the development community, but not enough to dissuade corpoprate customers for paying them for access to patches for RHEL.
"Hey everyone (except corporate customers), look Fedora's great!"
"Hey everyone (except developers), Fedora's unstable and unsupported, use RHEL!"
Before Red Hat 6.0, I thought it was a mess. When 6.2 was released, I migrated all of my systems to it. By the time Red Hat 9 was released, I had all of my systems under Red Hat Network contracts.
I felt alienated by their decisions; stability is important to me, but as our customers demand more features we need the updates to the kernels, the newer software packages, the newest hardware support. I was willing to pay to stay on the cutting edge, but unwilling to pay for stagnation.
I'm currently happy with Fedora Core 3 and am glad that Red Hat is supporting that project. They originally had to earn my support and respect and I hope I can trust them with that again in the future.
I hadn't noticed anything other than BETTER quality from the Fedora project compared to previous RedHat offerings. I am using a mix of RedHat 9 and Fedora Core 3 at home and at work and from where I stand FC3 is a HUGE jump past RH9. The hardware support is better, the apps are even better integrated than before and the functionality overall is extermely impressive. Examples:
1. The changes to Nautilus have made file management and access much easier with many conveniences like thumbnails, media previews, photo gallery views, etc... 2. The integration of remote mounts (SMB [ie. Windows file shares], FTP, SSH) is spectacular
3. USB device support is nearly flawless. I plugged in my brand new Epson Stylus R300 and just started printing. I plugged in a USB flash drive and it mounted and placed an icon on the desktop. I plugged in my Sony Mavica CD digital camera and it asked me about importing images into a gallery. The gallery also displayed all the inluded EXIF information. Just beautiful.
4. GIMP 2.0 takes some getting used to, but it looks promising (Just for the record I love GIMP 1.x)
5. LVM2 with kernel support at boot so that you no longer have to deal with the archaic notion of partitions
6. And of course... much improved performance on the same hardware. I have been using the same P4 at work for the past three years. RH9 was OK on it but admittedly a little slow with the default packages. I recompiled nearly everything and got performance more in line with Windows XP on the same box. But... with FC3, the same box didn't need any of the custom compiles and tweaks the RH9 did to get even better performance
Overall, I'd say Fedora has been a rousing success. I RedHat says they plan to put more effort into it, this can only mean greater things.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I think somebody just woke up and realized that Mindshare is the key for RH to become the big player that it wants to be.
It's the key to being the group that sets the standards versus the one that is forced to adapt to and follow everyone else's.
It saves a lot of work in the long run when you have a critical mass of people selling the product for you by default, adapting innovations to your product by default, submitting bug reports, helping in forums -- for free -- simply because it is what they are used to using. A company like MS can take this for granted, but RH really shouldn't.
*waxes cynical*
They must have realized that the bandwidth costs won't be as bad anymore, now that everyone is using torrents.
Not sure if any of the marketing folks at Red Hat are reading this but here's my $0.02:
We use Fedora Core 3 in my workplace on about 20 workstations, and I have called Redhat on two separate occasions to discuss "upgrading" to RHEL. Both times I've spoken with a sales rep, I was seriously underwhelmed by their presentation.
Apparently there is no cross-grade (upgrade?) path from Fedora to Enterprise, and I got a real lukewarm sales presentation from the RH reps. Seems silly not to offer some assistance migrating from Fedora to the enterprise product.
Fedora also has lots of features that RHEL doesn't have in the current version, some of which are quite nice or even ones I might not want to live without. The Evolution Calendar for example, is broken in FC2, and RHEL3. FC3 has a newer version of Evolution in which the calendar works perfectly.
Since I'm going to be doing all the work of keeping patches up to date, and can get newer features and more bugfixes from Fedora, we're sticking with it for now. Either that or move to CentOS.
Sorry, Redhat. I've used and liked your distribution since about version 5 but you folks really need to learn to listen to your customers and supporters.
I used Redhat & Fedora for years. I'd always try a new distro, but I'd end up coming back. And I tried a lot of them, including Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo and Suse.
When Fedora.US first launched, and then was subsumed into Redhat, a lot of user submitted files and extras just seemed to disappear.
Dags and Freshrpms were probably the best place to get the stuff RH didn't supply for Fedora, but even though they're interoperable, I wouldn't say either of them are community driven.
Ubuntu is the first distro that's kept me from coming back to Fedora. From ease of use, it's just as good, if not better, than Fedora. It just seems to do so many small things that Fedora wanted to do, but didn't. Ubuntu ships on one CD, has the power of APT (don't get me started on Yum, and I used APT for years on Fedora / RH w/Freshrpms), and Ubuntu has that community feel to it, even if it is a millionaire funding 'em.
Sorry Red Hat, you came close for many years, but in the end, close wasn't good enough.
Now with FC 4, looks like there will be support [finally?] for Power/PowerPC systems [like the Mac mini mentioned in the article]. Guess this puts YellowDog's FC 2 based distro in jeopardy.
Has anyone tested the latest development of FC 4 for Power/PowerPC? Judging by the boot.iso in the images directory, it looks like it only works on NewWorld ROM based PowerMac and iMac systems...
On a side note, I've been running Ubuntu [Warty] on an older graphite iMac, and have been impressed by it's ease of setup and use...
But if this article is true, and after some testing of FC 4 for Power/PowerPC, Ubuntu might be replaced with FC 4.
You are not root, go away.
We just need need a Fedora Advanced Server 3.0, or 4.0. We need something that exactly mirrors a complete Advanced Server installation like whitebox linux. Even better the kernel ideally should be the same compilation that will be used in the next AS.
We dont need a stripped down, rebranded disro "here this is for you" linux. Just something that will play with all the redhat-certified software and apps out there.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Fedora is useless to me because there is no backing from the 3rd party application providers. It's treated as a strictly experimental distro and nobody supports it. When RH dropped went to their pricey paid support only model I went to SuSE.
With SuSE I can download or buy a set of CD's and install as many times as I want.
I just went there. http://www.search.computerjobs.com/job_results.asp x?searchid=77869142&scope=results&s_kw=windows&sit eid=139&s_jcid=&x=0&y=0
Less than 200.
We switched to Debian from RH 7.3 and now look at Fedora troubles with a detached indifference.
We found Debian to be very good for our needs (financial apps) and I would absolutely recommend Debian to anyone who is still considering what to do with his RH boxes.
The same kind of web app crap that people write in Perl and PHP (but mostly PHP these days).
yeah, because php is really secure
I'm not sure that Fedora is even intended for "production environments", it just seems that the new version cycle is just to often to allow companies to "standardize" anything on Fedora. It's a terrific development OS, and Red Hat will continue to look to it for road test possible additions to Red Hat Enterprise. In the "enterprise", you can't just upgrade you OS willy-nilly every few months to a year, you need stability.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
You were searching within another search.
Try this Windows.
1,379 results.
I welcome you back..
irc.enterthegame.com #linux
Purchased CD Distro's now shipped with personal pleasure devices?
Sorry I have a fiance, I guess thats why I use yOs.
"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'" - DNA
- mp3 player for XMMS. Reason not included: The whole patent issue.
- lame mp3 encoder. Reason not included: Same patent issue.
- FVWM 1 window manager. Reason not included: Old window manager; most people use newer ones.
- Xdaliclock. Reason not included: Old cutesy clock for X; KDE/GNOME/Xfce have built-in clocks.
- The xv image viewer. Reason not included: Not open source software (source included, but "free for personal use only" license); however I did buy a license for this program ten years ago.
Now, some of these packages are ones that RedHat can't comfortable include. Others are. However, having them in an official form instead of having to scour the net and my old CD-Rs after installing Fedora would be nice....and you also don't know the difference between less and fewer.
I'm a RHEL3 AS Customer on about 5 servers (need to run oracle in a 'certified' environment.
RHEL4 has come out, and guess what, they 'recommentd' you re-install, you can upgrade, but it will probably break so re-install and be happy.
WTF!!!, Hey those thousands of dollars you get paid for support should go towards engineers managing things like config file changes (even if its just a these apps have changed configs, your changes have been migrated but please check).
We run Oracle 10g RAC, how in a live production environment am I meant to re-install RHEL4 and then RAC and everything else we run.
It's an absolute joke (Hint to redhat that 'ENTERPRISE' word in the product means you take care of issues like this).
Makes me nostaligic for the days of AIX 4.1 to 4.3.3 upgrades where stuff just worked.
Majorly pissed!!!
It's nice to see that they acknowledge their mistake, years after the fact. I could have told them at the time, you know.
I'd been using Red Hat since about 4.0 or so (not RHEL 4.0 -- Red Hat 4.0); every time a new major release came out (which tended to suck, as all the Red Hat X.0 releases did) I'd try it, because I'd be able to get free CD's from my university. That university? NCSU, where some of the founders of Red Hat got their start.
I did move away, because I got frustrated with the bugginess, and with rpm and its complete lack of dependency handling. This was around Red Hat 7.2 or so, I think. I tried upgrading my installation entirely with rpm, which I would not recommend to anyone. I understand they have better tools for this now, but at the time I switched to Gentoo and never looked back.
However, I never stopped installing Red Hat on some machines, to try it out, and for others to use. I'll be the first to admit that Gentoo isn't for everyone. I installed Red Hat 9.0 on an old box for a little fileserver, shortly before they suddenly discontinued support for it. I've always appreciated their network install feature, and that was a factor in doing it.
Soon after, I tried out FC1 on another machine--I was unthrilled. They broke binary compatibility, and discontinued the top used and recognized Linux distribution for *that*? I bet Microsoft, SuSE, Novell and IBM all sent them a nice big Christmas card that year.
So, to Red Hat; a note from one of your former enthusiasts: too little, too late. Maybe if you shape up your act, you'll get a share of the next generation. But you won't get a lot of us back, for a while. Hopefully you'll learn from this, and not go the way of the SCO (or Corel either, for that matter).
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Don't forget that Redhat's CEO Matthew Szulik Also recommended that desktop users use Windows instead of Linux around the time that they dropped their desktop distributions in order to focus on enterprise Linux.
Redhat lost a fair amount of goodwill from the community with that decision and that announcement, as long term paying (and non-paying) customers were left high and dry without an upgrade path and with the clock ticking on support.
From the commercial perspective it was also a miscalcuation on Redhat's part. Leaving the desktop Linux space left the field open for their competitors, Novell's Suse notably benefitted, as did other commercial distributions that ex-Redhat users migrated to.
Redhat's realisation of their mistake is the reason the Fedora project exists. That they were quite willing to drop their long term customer and community base when they thought we were no longer an asset should be noted by those chosing to use their products.
I really appreciate the effort that a lot of folks put into Fedora. In fact, I think I started testing it out around FC1 test1. Everything works great here.. on multiple boxes. And if I need help..since I live on freenode, I can ask in #fedora ...generally nice folks.
Look all flames aside. I've been using Linux for my workstations, home, etc, for 6 years, and Fedora has never let me down.
Mod this how you see fit. Peace
I thought Linux was free.
FC1 -> RH10, FC2 -> RH11, FC3 -> RH12.
:-( ) transparency is morphing into allowing community involvement.
RHEL represents an additional 'feature' (long term support, etc) above and beyond what was ever offered for Red Hat Linux.
The Fedora bits really truly are Red Hat Linux. We don't sell them in a box anymore, but one of the major reasons was that stores tended to have really ancient versions. It made money, but it also had people getting bad impressions of Linux. Most people actually using Red Hat were downloading and burning ISOs anyway (I'm sure most slashdotters were/are in that category).
Most engineers inside Red Hat do most of their daily work on Fedora. We have Fedora deadlines, Fedora freezes, we work to stabilize Fedora, add features to Fedora, etc. Fedora dominates our working lives.
That the RHEL product is occasionally forked off Fedora and stabilized even further than Red Hat Linux ever was gives Fedora yet another feature: more money for Red Hat to hire engineers, who once again spend most of their time working on Fedora. Everyone wins.
It is regretable the name change caused so much confusion in the community. Fedora isn't and wasn't Red Hat abandoning Red Hat Linux. The names RHL and RHEL were too similar. Additionally, RHL was a Red Hat trademark that had to be protected and would have restricted redistribution in ways that aren't a problem with the name "Fedora". Name change + more community openness != RH abandoning Fedora. We didn't communicate this well. We suck!
In fact, the change from Red Hat Linux to Fedora *added* a great new 'feature' to RHL/Fedora: greater community transparency. Essentially all Fedora development is done on open mailing lists, etc. Gradually (far too gradually
As to how slowly this transition has gone... well, its frustrating. Most engineers inside RH are frustrated by it too. The good news is that the CVS servers are about to go public. Took far far too long, but once again Fedora is *STILL* miles ahead of where Red Hat Linux was in terms of community involvement, AND it has more Red Hat engineering hours going into it than Red Hat Linux ever did.
Anyway, we market and sell Fedora differently, and we support it differently (but most slashdotters never used RH support anyway since they were downloading ISOs) but from an engineering/release engineering perspective... Fedora IS Red Hat Linux. Isn't that what most of ya'll care about? Yes, I know there will be people here who were using supported RH9 in an enterprise context, and we did screw up that transition, and I'm truly sorry about that. But as a percentage of slashdot readers who were using RH9, its very small.
-Seth
...if the only reason that the Fedora books take up a whole shelf is because no one's bothering to buy them anymore...
RedHat better do something. I own their stock. That baby needs to MOVE.
That reminds me, my A#1 Mandrake stock, I think it
moved a nickel. That's $5000. sitting there moving a nickel.
PS BURN MICROSOFT BURN!
Red Hat is a public traded company and is for profit, they therefore have nothing to gain from making Red Hat easy to use because they can screw you over with support cost. So Red Hat does not care about you, they care about the stockholders. Fedora has proven this; what software junk it is. I use Slackware and refer newbies to Knoppix. The End, Good Bye Red Hat!!!
To tell you the truth, my Windows services are mostly aimed at legacy needs. Currently this is where I spend a majority of my time.
Don't get me wrong. I can do almost anything on Windows I can do on Linux. I just usually recommend Linux because it is cheaper both in the short and long run in the experience of my customers.
Look--- if you focus on value, you will get more customers. In under a year of being in business, I have built an international customer base. And as Linux adoption continues to increase my customer base will continue to do well.
I work with Windows, Mac, and Linux. Some of my customers primarily work with Windows because they have to (legacy app compat requirements). But other customers keep moving to Linux bit by bit. Indeed this week, I have a business network application going in with Linux workstations and servers.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I run FC3 on x86_64 and find it quite okay after fixing certain nuances by hand. (Random hangs with kudzu, 2 minute hang if USB storage drive is attached while booting etc.) Bad part is that Fedora as a distro doesn't get enough attention from the developers at Redhat. With limited developers, they obviously have time to fix only things which affect their customers. 10 out of the 10 bugs I submitted (they are serious ones) never got attention despite people confirming them.
Quick and easy geekdom quiz for your 'friends':
"Red Hat Promises A More Vibrant Fedora"
The above statement is about:
A) Fashion
B) Design
C) A former Linux favorite trying to please the early supporters they've left in the dust in favor of enterprise money.
I've always found it the case with each distribution, you need to go out and find the stuff that you are used to using which isn't in the distro - and it will often be stuff other people don't care about.
Quick define search on Google:
less: (nonstandard in some uses but often idiomatic with measure phrases) fewer; "less than three weeks"; "no less than 50 people attended"; "in 25 words or less"
fewer: (comparative of `few' used with count nouns) quantifier meaning a smaller number of;
Both can be used. Bitch at someone using the wrong "you're"; you'll be more useful to humanity that way.
The official upgrade proceedure for Fedora:
l ist/2004-M ay/msg03201.html
-put in the new CD
-boot to CD
-run installer in upgrade mode
That totally screws those of us with headless servers in datacenter. Someone will reply that you can use yum/apt-get and just update your sources, but I was told SPECIFICALLY not to do that BY FEDORA DEVELOPERS. I was informed that going from FC1 to 2 via apt or yum WOULD break things, and that my only option was to go onto fedora-legacy once FC1 was phazed out.
Nice one, jerks.
See this thread for details:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-
When Linux IT jobs begin to out-number Windows IT jobs, it could even bring Information Technology as a viable career choice, one which is not filled with underqualified people that got in during the .com era and won't leave.
And for some reason, human nature will radically alter and the Linux IT world won't be filled with underqualified people hoping to make a buck too?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
The best RedHat Linux starting from post-7.0 era was RedHat 7.3. It was a well-polished distro without experimental stuff.
Then they turned their users into rabbits. They introduced UTF-8 in RedHat 8, and that broke a lot of apps for non-English users. Also they did something strange with their kernel so that e.g. LT WinModems stopped working (but they worked well on LinuxFromScratch).
Then they added NPTL in RedHat 9, before the needed features appeared in the official stable kernel. And many other "improvements" that led to e.g --enable-redhat switch invented for ALSA drivers "configure" script.
In fact, I stopped using RedHat when they released RedHat 8, and switched to LinuxFromScratch then. LFS was using almost pristine upstream sources (no such heavy mods as RedHat did in 8.0+ that led to someone saying "RedHat is not Linux"), and worked well. LFS was the bleeding edge of the stable and proven technology, not a real bleeding edge. It was good until LFS 6.0 when they introduced udev (and were pioneers in that).
So now I am a happy Debian Sarge user. I am free to configure my system as I want, staying away from experimental and broken stuff, and defaults are failsafe, proven and good.
I said that they were shitting on their early adopters and the people that made redhat what it was back when they first started doing this crap. I'll also add, that not only because of the way they did it, but also the speed in which they did it, I stopped using Redhat about 2 years ago when I saw the writting on the wall.
Granted I had an advantage, I had friends that were RH employees. Even though they didn't out right tell me what was coming, I was able to read between the lines.
I'm not a cheapskate, and I would have been happy to stay with redhat...IF they hadn't moved the way they did.....
Switched to Debian, never looked back.
My rule of thumb with OSes is to give them three major releases to work out the major user-visible kinks, then investigate whether the system is worthwhile, mediocre, or unusable (or somewhere in between these three points). The OS distributors pick their schedule, and I live with whatever schedule they pick (including allowing for any delays they wish to have). I think that your kind words about FC3 goes a little too far on the rosy side. In no particular order, here are some user-visible problems with FC3:
Digital Citizen
Don't forget that Redhat's CEO Matthew Szulik Also recommended that desktop users use Windows instead of Linux around the time that they dropped their desktop distributions in order to focus on enterprise Linux.
Do you really, honestly think that Linux is ready for aunt tillie?
And no, Red Hat never dropped any distro. They've always had a desktop product and still do - RHEL3/4 desktop if you want to pay for support, and FC / CentOS if you don't.
I don't quite understand what you're complainig about. You tried RHEL but you found its packages a little bit dated, so instead you have switched to Debian which is based on packages that are at least a year older than what RHEL is based on?
BTW, which version of matlab are you using? I have no problems running the latest version of Matlab (7) on either RHEL or Fedora Core 3.
Last I used RedHat, was version 6.. I moved to Gentoo shortly thereafter, but I'm curious .. what does a RedHat user move to?
Are there RH-like distro's out there worth the salt of a new partition?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I will always have a place in my heart for redhat linux. It was my first linux...
And I continuted to use it until I installed a bunch of RH9 boxes and learned that they were pulling support which meant I had to migrate all the systems I just built to something else...
Redhat screwed me and countless others...
At that time I switched those machines to SuSE and have been happy ever since. At home I run Debian testing and am also pleased with how well it has worked out...
have I missed or found the need to switch back to RH? Heck no.
I helped to make RH what it was by supporting them and telling everyone I knew about them...talking them up and such...and they stabbed me in the back...they took the work of thousands of people in their community and declared it their own. My guess is now Fedora downloads are comming to a trickle and they suddenly see how much they valued the troubleshooting, ect that folks did for them for FREE.
I guess all those licenses they are selling aren't generating enough revenue to do the kind of innovation and bug detection the community used to do for them.
Honestly I'd be happy to see redhat get back in the free distro game. They better make it damn good though...good enough to grab new users as us old timers would be wary to ever switch back...
idiomatic with measure phrases is a polite way of saying, "wrong when used for exact measurements of finite numbers."
I dunno, the last guy to call me a lord of haberdashery got punched right in the face!
2 posters who say "Hey, fedora rocks" as Anonymous Coward, they must be from Red Hat !!!
Oh, they're going to "vibrantize" it!
Let's say the server crashed hard or was hacked, you'd have to install from scratch anyway, right?
Let's say you decided to go with HREL3, you'd test on a different server before doing any upgrade, right?
They didn't fail Marketing 101 or they passed CS 101 and econ 101. How much would it cost to handle all upgrade options, convert configs, upgrade secondary software without impact....?
If you can't take your client from a base install to a working system, they're hosed.
The moment I saw Red Hat set the sun on the "little people" of the Linux community after making RH9 their last release was the moment I knew RH would cease to be (inaccurately, technically-wrongly) equated with "Linux" in peoples' minds.
Now, SuSE seems as close to being "king" of the Linux desktop as any distro (along with Gentoo), because unlike RH, they had the foresight not to abandon the very customers writing and testing the code to whom SuSE sells it back on a DVD. Nobody I know uses Fedora, and those who've tried it say it's buggy as hell; congrats Red Hat - you've lost mindshare. The question going forward is: can you earn it back? We shall see, but in time, and with money, yes, probably.
I knew it was an idiotic decision on RH's part from the get-go; good to see I'm right once in a while... If you turn your back to your customers, your customers turn their backs on you - it really is that simple.
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
"Fedora and RedHat to me is annoying - I can't bring myself to use it professionally. It changes too frequently and is poorly supported in my opinion, never fix the problems, always upgrade the packages to move the problem somewhere else. Right now I still have machines running RedHat 7.3 running updates on the fedora legacy project. (There are legacy projects to keep the older RedHat's and various Fedora Cores alive because people hate upgrading a working system every 5 minutes.)"
..which is included in Fedora Core.
It's more like every 6 months, and if you have to manage too many machines for that to be comfortable, maybe a free OS isn't right for you.
"RedHat died the day up2date stopped working for free."
It's still free in Fedora Core.
"...with up2date replaced by yum."
"Please do what you can to support CentOS, as this is what RedHat was for all of us since what, Version 3.x?"
As someone who's used every release since 2.0, this is really perplexing. RHL was always a low-cost system with a high amount of potential for getting things done. I tended to buy the major releases as a show of support but otherwise downloaded the images for expediency. It was always at least in my interest to keep up with releases--most of the software I cared about was either included, written by myself, or written by others who also kept up with RHL releases. Being that they were 6 or so months apart as well, I know I've lost very little, if anything, in the transition to Fedora Core. All that's been lost is the cachet that the name Red Hat brought to the distribution--the bits are the same, and for right now the people assembling it are the same.
You seem quite focused on the cost of full support being unacceptable above everything else.
And "Red Hat" IS TWO WORDS.
I would just like to say "thank you" to you Seth, and everyone else inside RH, for working to bring us the latest and greatest with Fedora, and the stability and support with RHEL. I use both.
Also, I have never quite understood, what all the confusion was about regarding Fedora vs RHEL. After the first week or so after the announcement, I though that it was abundantly clear that Fedora was the Bleeding Edge Distro and RHEL was the Corporate Oriented Distro that made PHB's feel warm and fuzzy, 'cause they paid someone for support. And that the software developed/stabilized/proven in Fedora would eventually be integrated into RHEL.
My biggest beef with RH, is the Sales/Marketing side of the company. They make it very difficult to get additional RHN Entitlements and are not very timely.
Again, thanks!
I started out using Linux quite late, only in 1999 in fact, and the first distro I used was RH6. I was amazed at the number of Redhat boxed versions floating around our company, and, in most companies to be honest. RH was looked at as being cheap, powerful and flexible compared to Windows. It was fun learning the ropes of the commandline with RH.
Later, a few years back, I had to use Linux for a company internal project, which I mightily fucked up, sadly, but because RH had just gone on to the FC1 story, there was no way in hell we were paying for RHEL for something that was just a test bed installation. I tried SuSE, but dropped it when, for the life of me, I just couldn't get MySQL to run, and eventually went with pure debian sarge and no GUI. It ran solidly for months with no down time.
The project was a disaster, which is my fault, but debian sarge, despite its age, was fantastic in terms of stability.
I'm an OSX user these days, but I'm thinking of installing debian on my old PC simply for that amazing stability which no other distro has had for me.
But I don't want an operating system that vibrates! What the hell? I'm a guy for crying out loud!
It's SuSE/Novell for me, they drive much harder :)
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
For me the problem never was the change to Fedora. I used FC1&2, and you could tell from the two that they were just following RH8&9.
.1 is better, and .2 .3 rocks" RH8,9, FC1,2, were all really all .0. They changed too many things inside every time, and broke a lot of apps. (think NPTL, KDE, SELinux, Xorg, a huge ton of kernel patches [1], and so on)
The problem is that RH8&9 were in no way comparable to the RH 5.X, 6.X & 7.X i used before:
- i was accustomed to the ".0 is shitty, but
- why the hell did they choose YUM ? this thing was a big load of sh**. the only first useable version of YUM is the new 2.1 lines. to me it really looks like the NIH syndrom (well, ok, it was yellow dog's system, but the development changed at all with the involvment of RH). so i know there were arch support problems with APT, but they could have helped the APT guys with that. and of course there's also URPMI, that works great too.
- support, combined with no "online upgrade path" through, precisely, YUM. this is big issue. you have to download and burn CD every time. it just plain sucks (on a sidenote, i live in France, where bandwidth costs nothing, but CDs/DVDs are quite expensive because of an (in)famous tax for "protecting" musicians). and anyway, there are a lot of machines i do not want to upgrade every 6 months or so. i tried to go fedoralegacy for a while, on a 7.3, but the updates are coming slow, and while it could be ok for a desktop or even server behind a good firewall, for non-critical jobs, i'd never recommend it as firewall or mission-critical internet server.
- the price for RHEL. it's madly expensive. unaffordable for a home user or a small company.
so now i don't use any RHEL/FC. i have debians[2], a mandrake, few WBELs, and even an OSX. and i won't go back.
[1] i don't know what they did with these patches, but in FC2, around 2.6.8, they introduced something that just prevented my old loki games from working. this being a wife's requirement, i had no choice but using a 2.6.7, and then changed to Mandrake, on which everything works like a breezes, despite its 2.6.10.
[2] actually Debian isn't very much a better option. these guys f*cked up their distro as well. now hardcore geeks prefer gentoo, and for most "normal" users/geeks, their stable is just too old. didn't try any Debian-based distro, though, but heard some were great.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Face it, they've completely trashed all the brand equity in the "Fedora" product line.
The brand image of Fedora invokes the image of 'betrayal', 'lack of support', 'flipfloping', 'bugs' and nothing of any good that I can think of.
Red Hat Linux was a product many of us had trusted and upon which we could rely. Acknowledging this by killing the Fedora line and bringing back Red Hat Linux would help us see that you really understand what you've done.
This current announcement that sounds like they merely want to change the color of Fedora sounds like they just want to paint over their problems while the core remains broken.
There, it's more vibrant.
To be honest, Fedora is a very good dist, but the lack of multimedia and the consequent messing around to get it, hangs like a millstone around the project. I'm sure RH could have a post-install step tied to some kind of OS X download site + click and run which would make it easy to install additional packages.
Why would you learn either unless you're fluent in Hindi or Punjabi and are willing to work for $10/day.
Somehow i still don't get it.
;)
In the last months i had several Situations where to decide which distri to take.
In a larger project i was at, we took sles8 and rhel.
There had to be setup several small machines with "standard installation". Allthough we didn't need X or such, the machines where full with unneeded software. And the packages we really worked with had to be built by ourself anyway because the pre-packaged versions where fairly old.
So where is the clue now?
I get Distributions rather inflexible with no packet management at all (as mandrake or debian) and too old Software so i have to build and package it myself anyways....
If you start to build your own stuff, you fall out of the supporters update cycle anyhow, so what is the right descision here?
Next Project i had was getting smb-Servers to authenticate to an ADS Domain. I needed a very recent version of samba/winbind/kerberos so i took a sarge hoping it will be declared "stable" somehwen in the next few months.
I hope you get the problem
I suggest you reread his posting:
> Now I've turned to Debian.
> We can use stable for the servers and testing for the workstations
While I don't know RHEL, I doubt that it is as up to date as Debian testing (which need not be a bad sign).
Most notibly components in matlab we depend on.
Certin aspects of the java interface would crash. The version of gcc which shipped with fc3 would compile the mex functions. These are the first two to come to mind, but there were also other issues.
-- john
I use FC3 as it's seems the best GNOME 2.8/project utopia desktop at present, but the work on Ubuntu Hoary looks so promising it might make FC3 redundant .
I anyone out there using the pre-releases of Hoary? Are they usable yet?
I scanned the headlines too fast and thought I read:
"Red Hat promises a more violent Fedora"
I have to admiit that we have switched almost everything off of Redhat and over to SuSE now, but here is what our company wants.
We want Redhat Enterprise with no support but the ability to download updates with up2Date. We want this not as a lease but we want to own the product. The unsupported version of Enterprise would cost around $60 (for the media) and could be loaded on as many machines as you wish, but the RedHat up2date serverice would cost a small fee for each server. Say around $50/year per server. Specifically you could buy a certain number of "active" servers in up2date and then actually have more, but you would have to switch servers in and out of the active pool. This allows companies like ours to have a development, testing and production environment without having to spend a fortion on the OS.
We want to be able to buy a support contract with you that has a certain number of calls. An example is that we could call 10X for $1,000 a year. That would make our management happy. If we don't buy that contract then the calls could be something like $400 a call. If we buy something like 50 calls then the price should go down.
Basically what I have just described was RedHat 7.1. It was supported by Oracle and other 3rd party vendors. We want that back and Fedora isn't it. You have forced us to look at things like white box linux (good product), and eventually switch to SuSE (great product, but the registration is a bit odd and the updates have caused problems).
Hope this helps. You have a great product and a great individuals working for your company. You just made a huge mistake and it needs to be corrected.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
For me Fedora has been flakey. It pains me to say that Windows XP has been rock solid without crashes. I know there have been bugs open forever. Would be nice if there were some fixes, but I imagine they've been open forever because fixing them would be difficult.
Ok, I normally don't respond to myself, but I thought some other things.
Stop the war with Sun. You may be gaining marketshare away from Sun, but you are gaining far more from Microsoft. Sun is a competitor with a small fraction of the total I.T. world. You could crush them out and still only have s small fraction of the I.T. world. Yet you could gain say 10% of Microsofts world and be much larger than Sun.
Next on that same topic. Start shipping Suns JVM + Tomcat with your systems. Set us the system so a Java developer can hit the ground running. Also allow us the way SuSE does to get the Nvidia drivers and other things that we have to agree to a license to. I can't tell you how nice it was to see all that with SuSE (JVM, Tomcat, Java) and wonder why the RedHat guys kept telling me they "couldn't" do it. It now appears that they didn't want to do it, not that they couldn't do it.
So in short. Sun is ok, Microsoft is your enemy. We need a way during the install or update to get proprietary software loaded if required by us (the client).
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
You made a ton of Gentoo users out of us. Deal with it..
Red Hat are probably the most closed company I've ever seen. They may still do a lot of development and contribute in code and investment (hardware certification, etc.) but at a personal level, I'd rather deal with Microsoft than with Red Hat.
:)
When Windows server 2003 launched, I needed to get familiar with it, so I went to Microsoft's site and downloaded a 120 day eval copy. Using this, I was able to get familiar with the changes, etc.
When RHEL3 came out, I needed to do the same. Now, I'm an RHCE, so I've paid them a lot of my money directly (600 quid just for the exam), and sent even more money their way by recommending Red Hat wherever I went.
Do you think I could get an eval ? Fuck no! I called the Guildford office in London, I called the head office in the USA, I e-mailed, I tried everything.
Two months later, I had an interview at an investment bank, and they asked if I had experience with RHEL3. I explained that I didn't, but I had experience with RHEL 2.1AS as well as their free versions.
Microsoft 'get it' - they realise that if they help me learn their products, I can get a job using their products and they will sell more of their products. And I've never given MS a penny for training or certification.
Red Hat ? This bastion of freedom, this shining light of openness won't let me trial their products - they won't give you a thing to help you unless you pony up more money.
Sure, I could have spent the $200 on RHEL3 workstation, but with that attitude why should I? SuSE were quite happy to provide a trial version of SLES and now that's what I sell to all of my clients. I don't lose out, SuSE gains, and Red Hat lose out on a couple of enterprise contracts. It's all good
After running RedHat exclusively on our network since 1995, I felt betrayed when they made the switch. It seemed like they "forgot who brung 'em to the dance". Sure, I could have moved to RHEL or Fedora, but I don't need the support that's part of RHEL, and after they rather suddenly dropped the RH line, I figured the same could happen in the future with Fedora.
After looking at about a dozen Linux distributions as possible successors to RH, I decided to start migrating our boxes to FreeBSD and couldn't have happier with the result.
Asking if I would ever consider going back to RedHat is like asking if I'd consider going back to an ex-spouse who left because she decided she had become "too good" for me and was heading out to greener pastures. I was loyal to RedHat like many others, and bought a release at least at every major upgrade to help them succeed. They took my loyalty, used it to become successful, and then dumped me when they figured (erroroneouly, it seems) they didn't need me any more. In my mind, that speaks volumes about their loyalty and commitment to their customers. Just think what everyone would be saying if instead of RedHat, it was Microsoft pulling something like this!
From now on, we're BSD only around here, and if we do change, it certainly won't be to RedHat!
I may not be very smart, but every move you make teaches me something.
Exactly, I suggested that they change the name to: "Fedora User Committee CONference" or FUCCON but that didn't go over well for some reason.
There is something to be said for paying someone to do the gruntwork for your benefit as opposed to say Slackware. Those guys glow with pride at how hard and obscure and slow it is to get anything useful done. The "Slackware Way" and "You WILL LEARN the distro" is really just the pretty face of arrogance and being a secret member of the supersecret He Man Club.
Bah - Ever since Linux stopped being a viable desktop OS for low end underpowered machines and Win95/98 continues to be functional in that space and Linux instead generally forked to the highest of the high end machines the idea that spending a lot of time bit twisting twisting twisting twisting ad infinitum, at least on the desktop has approximately zero charm and zero practical benefit. So write a check and slap it on.
RE:When Linux IT jobs begin to out-number Windows IT jobs, it could even bring Information Technology as a viable career choice, one which is not filled with underqualified people that got in during the .com era and won't leave.
this is where a lot of anti-Linux fud comes from, a bunch of MCSE point & click admins that just want to click buttons to admin their systems and they are scared as hell of having to actually learn something like Linux knowing they will have to edit script files and other conf text...
Ya know... way back when they axed most of my dept and killed off end user support and the original box set, there were MANY MANY people within the company that said that this exact thing would happen...
It was said emphatically in meeting after meeting that doing something like locking out the very large and devoted community of Red Hat supporters was a Very Bad Thing[tm] and would not be a Good Thing[tm] at all in the long run.
Nice to see some vindication, even if I dont have my job there any more...
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
The brand image of Fedora invokes the image of 'betrayal', 'lack of support', 'flipfloping', 'bugs' and nothing of any good that I can think of.
How is Fedora any less supported than Slack, or Gentoo, or Debian, or even BSD?
The fact is, it isn't unsupported. There are tons of resources -- free as in beer resources -- more than were ever avaiable for RHL 5,6, 7.3, or even 9. What eaxctly do you need? A guy on the phone? Well, that's going to cost you just like it would with any commercial UNIX product.
What people don't get is that almost nothing has changed since the days of RH9. RHEL and FC are one in the same -- one just spends more time cooling on the window sill. When I sit down at a RH9 or RHEL3 or FC2 box, I can hardly tell the difference. I could care less whether it were named after a hat or any other peice of personal apparel.
Fedora was a PR disaster, but at its heart, technically, Fedora is still quite an OK distro.
None of the ones I've tried (Mandrake, Ubuntu, Debian) are really any better (some things work better and some worse) and their yum/rpm combination works really well now. I find that in general Fedora is pretty much the usable latest-and-greatest, usually in need of some debugging but with versionning present. Right now it's udev, SE-linux, making USB work right and other assorted bits.
Fedora is still 100% Free, which isn't true for many other distro, and they push both Gnome and KDE, trying to make them work better together, which is the right approach. Under which other distro would you get Inkscape (gnome vector drawing app) and Scribus (kde DTP app) working so well together ?
Myself I would be happy to play the debugger to some extent, in exchange for functionality and responsiveness to problems. So far I found that it is possible to get stuck for long on little problems (for me it was syncing problems with my Zire 71, a recurring nightmare. No sooner was it fixed that a new release made it impossible again). The RH engineers are pretty good at giving an answer, but not so great at fixing the problems in the current distros.
What RH needs to do is slow down the pace of Fedora just a bit and maintain the distro they do have instead of replying things like "wait for FC(n+1), it will be fixed then". Right now this is the stock answer if things get sticky and this is not really acceptable.
Perhaps instead of forcing a new distro down the throat of users every 4-6 months they should move to a 9-month schedule which would insure people would only have to upgrade every 18 months or so, instead of every year right now (FC releases are only supported for 2 releases by RH, and legacy support hasn't really kicked in). Either that or they should support 3 releases at the same time instead of only 2.
I've found that by the time the distro is abandonned by RH it has only been running well enough for a few short months, and that if you want to move to a distro which will be supported for a while you have to move *two* distributions ahead (i.e FC1 to FC3), which is a bit risky, as RH makes significant changes along the way. Packages disappear, new ones come in their place (or not). You have to relearn how your distro works in non-trivial ways and you don't have much time to learn.
This is a poor way to reward all the users who've been doing all the free debugging for them, I reckon.
On the other hand it is very nice to see the pace of (positive) change in Linux. There is simply no comparison in functionality between RH9 and FC3.
That interview isn't any more "self promoting" than most. Want self-promotion? Try reading an interview from Ellison or Ballmer.
RedHat was good at introducing user to Linux, but when Fedora was introduced, me and some Linux newbie friends moved to Debian, and now there is no reason to go back. apt-get remove fedora
If only Fedora would release a version that includes the bug-fix to fully support SATA drives I'd be happy. Core 3 won't install on my PC as it doesn't like my SATA controller & drive. It times out waiting for the drive during installation, so the partitioning application doesn't see any drives and won't continue. This is a major flaw that wasn't in Core 2, but was introduce in Core 3. A major oversight that has left a lot of people really annoyed.
Fedora is supported (security updates) the same way as FreeBSD Unix or Slackware Linux. The only difference is that the EOL of FreeBSD is 2 or 3 years.
I had sunk a substantial portion of my career into RedHat by the time these support changes began. I work for a fortune 500, and there was and still is a major effort (mostly driven by Oracle) to dump proprietary UNIX, but I have chosen not to be a part of it.
I have become very lukewarm to RedHat's distro. I have migrated all of my on-the-side jobs to OpenBSD (just because I don't like to patch).
When I have an application that requires RedHat, I've run Whitebox or Centos, unless there is a real need for support (which is very rare).
RedHat made a conscious decision to dump small business users and concentrate on large. We are gone, and we are not coming back. Why should we? For another knife in the back? I'll pass.
A fedora is traditionally a men's hat, but like all staples of menswear, it has been adopted by women's fashion from time to time.
Blue jeans, windsor knot ties, penny loafers, sport jackets, baseball caps, white tube socks, wingtips, boxer shorts, the list goes on.
Go to the Victoria Sercret online catalog, and you will even see "boyfriend" tailored sweaters... tops which were specifically designed to look as if she might have borrowed them from your closet (even though the colors are ones you would probably not wear.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I run Fedora on my laptop, and it works pretty well for me. But the stability isn't good enough for production. We use RHEL for that.
Totally OT, but whenever I see the word haberdasher, I think of Spinal Tap:
Nigel Tufnel: Well, I suppose I could work in a shop of some kind or... or do um... freelance... selling of some sort of... um... product, you know...
Marty DiBergi: A salesman, you think you...
Nigel Tufnel: A salesman, like, mabye in a haberdasher, or maybe like a... um, a chapeau shop, or something... you know, like: 'Would you... what size do you wear, sir?' and then you answer me.
Marty DiBergi: Uh... seven and a quarter.
Nigel Tufnel: 'I think we have that...', you see, something like that I could do.
Marty DiBergi: Yeah... you think you'd be happy doing something like---
Nigel Tufnel: 'No! We're all out, do you wear black?', see, that sort of thing, I think I could probably muster up.
Marty DiBergi: Yeah, do you think you'd be happy doing that?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, I don't know, wh-wh-what are the hours?
once Redhat dropped support for the Fedora. I am not moving back.
Red Hat has to do something. They failed to corner the enterprise Linux market. And they even failed to corner the Linux-on-Oracle market, despite being partially owned by Mr. Ellison. As an Oracle DBA, I will go with Suse over Red Hat, every time.
Did I not call it?l d=1&commentsort=0&tid=110&tid=106&tid=163&mode=thr ead&cid=7379049
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=84550&thresho
Yes, very sad day. The free Red Hat Linux may not have been bringing in cash, but how well can enterprise do on its own? I mean, if all the redhat linux hackers out there switch to a different flavor, won't they bring that flavor to the workplace as well? Feel's like this is the death of redhat.
There's no place like ~/
I don't see a need for Fedora anymore, and I think Red Hat sees this. They are just now realizing that if they don't up their PR efforts to seem like a good citizen of the open source world... they will lose all the free coding and beta testing that they thought they could count on from Fedora users.
Linux users now have a truly free distribution, backed up by a real community, which is user-friendly and based on debian.
>> upgraded my laptop
fine. i'm talking PRODUCTION SERVERS. If you F-UP your laptop, you can load from scratch. i've got hundreds of clients on our production servers. I CAN'T AFFORD A RELOAD.
these servers also have custom rpms and other from source software installed. i don't "apt-get upgrade" and I SURE AS HELL DON'T "apt-get dist-upgrade"
only a stupid sys-admin would upgrade from one major release to another by laying the new operating system directly on top of the older one.
>>Also, please tell me what's wrong with RPM. Don't bring apt-get into this.
you're talking LAPTOPS.
ALL BETS OUR OFF AT THAT POINT, YOU KNUCKLE HEAD. anything breaks on your PERSONAL machine -SO WHAT?
sheesh.
>>I'm tired of people saying RPM sucks, and then comparing RPM to apt-get. I know, it's the "cool thing" to make fun of RPM
oh please quit your whining. the number of linux followers who crap on RPM...ARE IN THE MINORITY.
quit chasing windmills.
While they're a tiny minority, OS X admins are so much worse.
Don't blame the language. Blame the programmers.
This is a stolen sig.
You got called on your bullshit, and then you changed your story. Well done.
You originally wrote:
A reply pointed out the obvious fact that both the up2date application and up2date service for Fedora Core are free. You then wrote:
So, basically, you were wrong on "up2date isn't free" and now you're trying to hide that by claiming that your point was "the product life cycle is too short"?
(Because, in case you hadn't noticed, Red Hat do provide security updates and patches for Fedora)
People don't seem to get it! It is obvious and Red Hat has talked around this issue but the facts are right there staring you in the face. Red Hat decides the direction, feature set, and development of Fedora. Anything outside of what will help sell the next version of RHEL to corporate america is outside the development of Fedora. Where is the QA and beta testers for Red Hat Enterprise Linux?
It is you! You are the ones who are being used to QA and beta test the next version of RHEL so that they can later rebrand Fedora Core X as RHEL version X and sell it for X number of dollars. The next step is for you to start all over again with the next version of Fedora, working hard to provide free labor to Red Hat corporate.
If you really want to be part of a community distro. I mean a community where the contributions are a two way street. I would adivse you to choose another distro.
Why would anyone want to do free QA and beta testing to help Red Hat's quarterly financial reports? Red Hat should hire and pay a larger QA and beta test team for RHEL and open up a truely free community distro where people outside of Red Hat corporate can participate ans developers, maintainers, and most importantly VOTE/choose the direction of where the next set of features will be developed for the next version of Fedora.
Until then, this is not a community distro of Linux. Simply a misuse of the Free and Open Source community resources for the financial gain of one company.
No, but it won't be as easy. During the few years of the .com boom, you could say "Yea I have windows skills!" because you run it on your home PC, and get a 70K/yr job doing IT administration. Now these same people have work experience, while still having no real skills. Sure, they can read a manual and install some systems.. but actually being GOOD at it takes more then that.
.com, but there's an overwhelming amount of ones that aren't great.
I'm not saying this applies to everyone, there's a lot of great admins out there that got in because of the
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
When RH first announced Fedora it was made out to be a great community project, but in reality the community is barely involved. It's been so long that Ubuntu has come along and stated many of the same aims as Fedora (e.g. a core of supported stuff and then lots of packages maintained by third parties) and is already acheiving them where Fedora has failed to even integrate the fedora.us tree that inspired the whole project. Running a fedora box with multiple repositories is a serious pita because the various third party repositories will not work together to stay compatible.
Meanwhile Ubuntu can whip anything they want in from Debian, and allow people to very easily submit and maintain packages.
This *is* the single thing that will make or break Linux for end-users. They quite simply have to be able to get all the software they want without having to compile it. That means third parties have to be able to get their packages into distros easily, be they volunteers maintaining useful/interesting/new packages, software projects providing official packages directly to the distros, or ISVs supplying packages into seriously non-free trees (if the distro policies allow for it).
I hope Fedora can acheive their aims, it would certainly do a lot for Red Hat's credability, not to mention accelerate their products. It would also create a more complete counterpart to Ubuntu.
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
It's support for *your* controller that Fedora doesn't have. I have a Dell PowerEdge 750 running with (2) SATA drives running software RAID 1 without problem on Fedora Core 3. Why does the Dell PowerEdge have support? Because it's Dell, and Dell sells their server with RedHat Linux installed. If RHEL has support then Fedora will too. If you want support for your controller on Linux talk to *your* manufacturer. Desktop motherboards with SATA will not get support until after server motherboards anyway. Most servers will more advantage of SATA features than most email/web browsing desktops.
The market didn't solve the problem - the community did.
There is a very significant difference here.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
When Fedora came out I went back to Windows XP on my work laptop. As it turns out, when I moved out of consulting into engineering I was on the right OS for the product set I work with (Solaris or Windows - I don't have a Solaris laptop). As for home, my brand spanking new 15" PowerBook fully loaded is set to ship on or before 3/1. You guys lost me with the Fedora stunt.
Wrong. The market ultimately solves all problems. The only reason the Linux community exists is because that Linux and its source can be had for free, and large businesses will pay Linux and *nix clone hackers to move their systems off of commercial systems to the free/open ones to save money.
Again, the FREE market makes the choice. Not you, and not some community that wouldn't exist if it weren't for paying Fortune 500s.
Read some Ayn Rand, your starting to get a bit Vlad for a westerner, if you know what I'm saying.
don't insult the sales and marketing team of your own company... it would be better if you brought it up internally
I have an old box with the Intel 815 graphics chipset on-board. Whilst RH7.x, 8, and 9; Suse 9.1; Xandros 2,3; Ubuntu; and Mepis all run perfectly on this box, FC3 installs up to a point, then simply freezes up with the screen showing some nice garbage. The real irony is that both FC1 and FC2 ran on this box -- why has Fedora 3 DROPPED support for the i815 chip?????
Debian lacks of...
up-to-date packages
installer
bugless packages (stable has more than any Linux distro/*BSD flavor)
unstable is more unstable than Fedora. Stuff easyly breaks on unstable. You have TONS of updates to download everyday. It changes more than Fedora.
Why Debian when you have Fedora and can get everything installed on it? You even have Debian's only lovely thing: APT and synaptic combination on Fedora.
Why Debian?
It's full of politics!
And for some reason, human nature will radically alter and the Linux IT world won't be filled with underqualified people hoping to make a buck too?
Actually, I am using that as a metric for the growth of Linux, and noticed this starting to happen as of last year.
I have been using Fedora since version 1.0 and it works well.
Right on. Even FC1 was better than RHL9, and it's been steadily getting better.
The one thing I like about Fedora 3 is that all the system utilities have nicely designed UI's designed in Python-GTK. The UI's work nicely and help people migrating to linux from windows.
I agree. To boot, system-config-* tools also have good text mode ncurses based UI's, and the best of all is despite all that, they still don't hide the actual config files and command line tools under layers of obscurity. Best of all worlds.
I, for one, never understood what the fuss among desktop users was, since Fedora is technically the same distro RHL was, even though I can understand why people with cheap'ish support contracts might get upset.