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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.
The name is supposed to be funny/ironic.
The Free desktop that Just Works
I'm not sure it's a matter of it being bloated - more at just disorganized such that bloat is the end result. For example, Mepis and Ubuntu Linux each chime in at just one CD and it contains all of the essentials. An office suite, web browser, e-mail, and a GUI of some kind. With Fedora, you download four CDs worth of stuff, the majority of which the average user just plain doesn't need. But, Fedora is not organized such that the basic essentials are grouped on the first CD, making the other three extraneous. Instead, it's sprawled out evenly across four of them. The progress bar even shows that OpenOffice spans two CDs.
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.
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
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.