Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Fedora Core 4 Quick Tour

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the some-joke-about-core-samples-would-be-funny dept.

linuxbeta writes "redhat.com says the new Fedora 'has just turned 4' and it 'purrs', 'hums', and 'mesmerizes'. Has Steve Jobs taken over Fedora's marketing dept. or is this release something to really get excited about? OSDir has put together a quick tour of this fresh release in KDE and GNOME desktop flavors. Release Overview. You be the judge."

4 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. "Unrestricted"? Not to me. by zorn · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I find it interesting that the release announcement claims that FC4 is "unrestricted" when in fact it has a very important restriction - GPL. Given Linux's rise in stature, we should be more careful of our claims.

    --
    / is the root of /all/evil.
  2. Re:Why do they bother by jd · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Well, "yum" makes for some horrible screenshots, and kudzu isn't much in the way of eye-candy, either. :) Seriously, there's nothing in Red Hat or Fedora that won't/can't exist in other distributions, except what is under the hood, and those components don't display anything.


    Personally, I don't think the reviews are nearly strong enough for Fedora, Linux in general, or indeed any computer technology.


    Imagine having a chart showing all of the options that have been developed over time, for that specific product. Now compare the product with that entire chart, both as a percentage for each feature AND across all features.


    We would rapidly see that the "specialized" tools do very well at one or two things, but that's it. That more generalized tools generally (but don't always) suck at everything they do do, which is still only a drop in the bucket of what they COULD do.


    (This is one reason I like specialized tools. They don't pretend to to everything, and I can always bolt them together, because that is how they are generally designed. Many specialized tools should, always, beat one universal tool.)

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  3. Re:Broken right out of the box by dougmc · · Score: 2, Insightful
    So the default configuration out of the box does not work with Windows shares. That's not reasonable!
    Security is not always free. Often some functionality needs to be given up to keep a system secure.

    In this case, the default firewall either needs to be opened up (or an option given to open it up if you need this functionality), or this functionality needs to be documented as `not working with the default firewall'. It's probably a good candidate for a release note mention in it's current state, but isn't serious enough to prevent the release of FC4 until fixed.

    Personally, I think a default configuration of `secure' is better than a default configuration of `everything works'. Things that are broken by the security should be documented, however, with instructions included on how to open things up to get the functionality you need.

    This is how Linux gets a reputation for hard to use and hard to configure.
    ... and the opposite is how Windows gets a reputation for being insecure. If you think Linux (and we're painting with a really wide brush here, as there's dozens of very different Linux distributions out there) is bad in this regard, take a look at OpenBSD ...
  4. Working Correctly Right out of the Box by HopeOS · · Score: 2, Insightful

    My OSX-based Mac at home does not allow Windows SMB messages through its firewall either. Does that mean that all OSX installations are "broken right out of the box," too? Blocking SMB by default sounds perfectly reasonable to me; there are no Windows computers on that network anyway.

    SMB is a non-essential port. If you want that protocol, open the firewall. Welcome to modern secure computing.

    -Hope