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Red Hat Begins Testing Core 5
Robert wrote to mention a CBR Online article which reports that Red Hat has begun testing on Fedora Core 5. From the article: "The next version of Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat's enterprise Linux distribution is not scheduled for release until the second half of 2006 but will include stateless Linux and Xen virtualization functionality and improved management capabilities. Fedora Core 5 Release 1 includes updated support for XenSource Inc's open source server virtualization software, as well as new versions of the Gnome and KDE user interfaces, and the final version of the OpenOffice.org application suite."
They are actually behind their goals for releases. I've read elsewhere that it should be every 6 months.
"Produce robust releases approximately 2-3 times per year, using a time-based release model: A time for a feature freeze is set in advance, and an expected schedule for test releases is produced before the feature freeze date. (Important feature schedules will be taken into account when setting the schedule for Fedora Core releases.)"
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html
SuSE and Mandrake use version numbers around ten. If Redhat doesn't want to look old they have to advance faster. Basic marketing bullshit 101.
Linux is not Windows
Fedora uses yum as the backend for up2date for its updates, no accounts required.
My experience trying to setup wireless with Fedora Core 4 was brutal. Nothing I needed was in the initial install. With no net connection in linux I had to keep booting into my windows partition to search for any help at all on how to set things up and then download what I needed. And then go back into linux to toil and then fail. And then repeat the process. Eventually I got my card at least detected, but when I activated it the whole machine hung. So I gave up on Red Hat.
Ubuntu detected my wireless card. But has no WPA support.
It seems that Suse will also detect things, but also has no WPA support. They also have no Live CD. Why they can make a Live DVD but not a Live CD is beyond me. Just shave off some crap. All I want to know is if your distro will support my machine or not.
Linux on the Desktop? Not if the user has a wireless card.
The last time I installed Fedora Core 4 off a boot CD I was amazed that to do an ftp install I still had to punch in manually what mirror I wanted to do the install from. Computer games have been grabbing "master server lists" for some time now. Can't something similar be worked into the FTP install?
how is that suspicious? They started in 2004 in October. 4.10 is basedon y/mm. The release schedule is 6 months. They then came out with 5.04. Doesn't this make sense?
As someone who has used FC in production, I can attest to the its stability.
Stateless Linux (from http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/stateless/)
The Stateless Linux project is an OS-wide initiative to ensure that Fedora computers can be set up as replaceable appliances, with no important local state.
For example, a system administrator can set up a network of hundreds of desktop client machines as clones of a master system, and be sure that all of them are kept synchronised whenever he or she updates the master system. We provide several technologies for doing this.
The scope of the project is the entire OS, since we are trying to improve configuration throughout all packages. However, there are some packages which are specific to Stateless Linux:
* readonly-root
* stateless-common
* stateless-client
* stateless-server
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
Why do a lot of the postings to articles boil down to
/ 1732235&tid=110&tid=187&tid=106
"that is crap use this"
Don't these people realize that no solutions fits every situation? It blows the mind.
Anyway, I love Fedora Core. I use it on my desktop at work, Running FC 4 right now. Stable as can be, gives me the tools I need. See, I'm a system administrator. I have about 7 RHEL systems under my administration that I personally over see. Fedora Core allows me to see what will soon be included in RHEL and get familiar with it.
Why Redhat? If you have to ask, you don't know linux or open source. They contribute millions of dollars to opensource and to linux development. Sure they're making a buck off support and I'm glad to pay it, in return I get a rock solid OS that is guarenteed to be there in 7 years. Oh, and Redhat seems to be doing pretty good finacially too, as seen on Slashdot here recently.
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/15
I just don't understand why they are upbraided for that. They're just trying to make a living at linux, same as me. I mean, if you don't want to pay, RH has even allowed (by the GPL) others to make almost identical OS (CentOS), only thing missing is the shadowman.
I can't wait for FC5 to go live, I'll be upgrading.
This space available for rent.
I know this site is for technically literate people, but really!!
"improved management capabilities" I can cope with, but "stateless Linux and Xen virtualization functionality" and "open source server virtualization software" are worthy of the worst type of social science academic paper or local government policy document!
I'm assuming they just mean the final version of OpenOffice.org 2.0, which had been in testing for quite some time.
R.Mo
and the final version of the OpenOffice.org application suite.
Did I miss some news? Have they actually stopped development of Open Office?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Everybody knows you can't use version number over 9. Why do you think Apple went to "X" and are holding it there? At the same time, point releases are so 1990 - Look at how Sun abandoned them entirely by dropping the "2" from "2.7". Microsoft, on the other hand, decided that people don't like numbers, so have thrown them out entirely.
Redhat got up to 9, and had to reset the counter with Fedora Core. The next step is to build your version numbers up again (since point releases are passe). Mark my words - once it hits Fedora Core 9, they will rename it to "Fedora NG R1" or something silly like that.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
In Synaptic, click Settings / Repositories, click Add, tick the Universe box, click OK. Now search for WPA again and you should see the package. Except if you don't have a working network connection :-(
You'll also notice more packages available: my Synaptic has 17,000+ of them, heh.
The description and whitepaper on Stateless Linux reminds me of how lab computing used to be back in college (around 1996) where all of our lab computers didn't have harddisks but would boot from an image on a Novell Netware server (via network PROM boot). All the programs and the user's data would reside on the server but the processing power used would be the client workstation's. Seems to me Novell would be one of those companies who'd be interested in this approach and would get on the Fedora Stateless Linux bandwagon. It would be nice if the two companies would actually work on this since the Fedora project is neutral grounds.
I think Stateless Linux is a great idea. In fact, I think Gnome should be extended so that a session can span several computers where the person logs on to. Then we could couple up distributed computing on top of that and make it part of the Stateless Linux-Gnome system.
Exciting times!
They are advancing fine, every major release deserves a major number. These aren't minor releases, Core 4 was the first distribution using the new GCC 4.0 at the time, it also has default Xen support and a new yum manager that is much faster than the old one. Also Fedora Extras was establsihed with Core 4 and a bunch of other stuff. There have been similar milestones with the other Cores (such as integrating SELinux). Each core is a significant advancement over the previous core and deserves a major number change, not a minor number. I'm understating the improvements here. They aren't doing this to inflate their version number, it just so happens that enough people are helping out that they can get kick ass releases out pretty fast, not to mention Red Hat pays many engineers to work on it 5 days a week. They have however recently cut back their release schedule from every 6 months, to every 9 months to allow them to spend more time fully developing certain functionalities that can't be coded in a 6 month timeframe. Also for the curious minded, the Fedora community just finished up a fairly long community discussion about its new logo. The way that the winning logo was designed I thought was neat, you can read about it here.
Regards,
Steve
Give the user a complete non-working system?
At the point where the STABLE system does not detect the networking correctly or cannot configure the user should right then and there be able to grab the UNSTABLE stuff which in all likelihood will get their networking to work, albeit unstably.
up2date is being retired in favor of the yum front-end "pup".
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
The Fedora devs are pretty involved with OpenOffice. When Core 4 was released it was shipped with OpenOffice.Org 1.979 or something like that. Obviously Core4 has since been update to 2.0, but they are either referring to 2.0 or maybe 2.1x which is still in development but will be more stable by release time (and Fedora will be undergoing a ton of testing and stability checks over the next 3 months now that the test releases are out). Fedora was the first distribution to have OpenOffice.org use a native interface, they tend to have the coolest stuff first, mainly because the Fedora developers code large portions of the code themselves (in contrast to many other distributions which simply package up other people's programs and call it a distro without really contributing any code back).
Regards,
Steve
There is a very good reason for having to tell the installer where you want to download the files from. In an organisation with several systems, you would be better of copying the RPMS directories from the CD/DVD's to a FTP/NFS/HTTP server on your own network. Point the installer at that resource and you can install the whole lot a great deal faster than over the internet.
Here is what I do.
1) install say FC4 on a server box. Select EVERYTHING.
2) then setup a cron job to do a daily "yum update". Add some logic in the script to detect if there has been a kernel update and reboot if required.
3) Copy the CD/DVD stuff into an FTP/NFS/HTTP accessible place. I prefer NFS as I can then use the X version of anaconda.
4) Setup another cron job to run on a daily basis to package the rpms downloaded to the master system into your very own yum repository.
Then on the other systems, point the installer at the master server and bingo, it all loads quickly. Once your system is booted, point yum at your own repository and update. No traffic over the internet etc etc and its much faster.
This is "REAL WORLD LINUX SYSADMIN". As Fedora is a test bed for RHEL than the majority of users who run FEDORA will appreciate this sort of approach.
The one great thing about Linux is that there is a Linux Distro that will fit the way you want to work. Be it SUSE, Deviant (sorry Debian), Gentoo or DSL.
Finally, 99.99999% of people who do a FTP install of Fedora couldn't care less about the way dumb ass things like computer games work with network master server lists. Again, this is REAL WORLD LINUX Sysadmin. "Welcome To The Machine!"
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
I keep trying to install linux because I've used it in the past and like it. At this point it's like battered wife syndrome.
You think wireless security is optional and call me an idiot?
I think getting networking working is fundamental. And if that means giving the user the option of using an unstable piece of software then that is what must be done.
> upgrading from an already unstable FC2 to FC3
/etc/alternatives convention, NVIDIA's drivers are not RPMs etc. There is an absolutely a need for properly packaging these softwares (and there are efforts underway -- JPackage for Java, ATRpms for Nvidia etc).
I admit it is quite easy to break FC and make it unstable (even inadvertantly). In my experience, unstability has been primarily a result of installing software not packaged properly for FC. For instance, DRI nightlies are tarballs and not well built RPMs, Sun's Java RPMs don't use the
I completely agree with you that FC is not perfect, and has fewer software packages than Debian -- thus tempting FC users to install 3rd party packages that haven't received as much attention or testing. But that is quite different from saying that FC itself is unstable. Ofcourse, it would be much nicer if FC included that software in the core system in the first place. Perhaps someday.
XenSource is the company, Xen is a modified linux kernel pair that allows multiple opperating systems to run on the same physical hardware. It is different that other virtualisation because it uses a kernel hack rather than complete emulation of the foriegn host to create this environemnt. Because of that, it has a very small overhead - typically under 4%.
They have Xen kernels in the package list for FC4, and I used them without much difficulty. I thought it was rather nice, I set the virtual machines to auto start upon bootup of the parent kernel. Another nice feature is that virtual machines can be transfered "on the fly" while still running, between different physical hardware on the same subnet.
Looks like (for me) that my use of Fedora Core is falling into the same pattern that I always had with the earlier RedHat releases - every other one.
I started on RH 5.1. Briefly hit 6.2 on the way to 7.x. Still have a number of servers running 7.x.
Never touched 8.x, and was moving into 9 when RedHat EOL'd their "RedHat Linux" product.
Now, I'm using CentOS for most of my (smaller) servers, and Fedora for personal use. I used Fedora Core 1, never touched Core 2, now happy on Core 3. Haven't touched 4, but am considering 5.
Why upgrade on each one, unless there's some OMFG Do0d feature you just gotta have...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Just as a side not to those of you who are unaware, Xen is probably the coolest thing to ever happen to computing evar. It is a paravirutalization system. How many times have you fired up VMWare or VirtualPC and wished you didn't have to run as heavy of a Host OS? Well.. Xen is your answer. Xen is a special kernel all unto it's own that boots directly on x86 and presents a new virtual architecture to the guest OS. This new virtual architecture (think PPC vs. x86 vs. amd64) is called 'xen'. And when your OS is compiled to operate on top of the Xen kernel, you get EXACTLY what was mentioned above: a system that boots a very minimal "OS" that plays host to your VMs. Not only that but at speeds that are near native! So Redhat is making the right move by incorporating this into Fedora (and eventually their commercial offerings). Now, the only other thing that needs to be done is make Xen work for grandma. Then you'll never have to ever worry about fixing people's PCs ever again...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
http://sources.redhat.com/ecos/ http://sources.redhat.com/redboot/ http://sourceware.org/jffs2/ http://cygwin.com/ http://people.redhat.com/mingo/exec-shield/ http://sourceware.org/insight/ http://sourceware.org/cluster/ http://sourceware.org/systemtap/
and don't forget ext3 is largely bankrolled by redhat.
there's lots more. just because you're unaware of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
why don't you ask them?
why don't you ask them?
yes. sure, redhat employs kernel devs like alan, ingo and arjen. redhat also pays to employ gcc and gdb developers. and others.
yep.
really? who wrote rpm then? should you not then lambast mandrake and suse for using rpm, because they didn't write it?
sure there are legitimate gripes about fedora. that's no reason to make stuff up.