Slashdot Mirror
Fedora Core 5 Available
Jan Slupski writes "New release day today. Fedora Core 5 CD images are now available for download (i386, ppc, x86_64) on the ftp servers or via the torrent page." Linclips also has a short screencast on some of the default functionality.
It appears as though FC5 contains a bug which prevents none GPL modules (read nVidia) from being used.
Has this been fixed in this one yet, or is it worth waiting a few more days for the fix to be rolled out?
(It was identified too late to be pushed to the mirrors)
Info about it is here.
liqbase
Short answer is no.
From http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems
MP3 encoding/decoding support is not included in any Fedora application because MP3 is heavily patented in several regions including the United States. The patent holder is unwilling to give an unrestricted patent grant, as required by the GPL. Other platforms might have paid the royalty and/or included proprietary software. Other Linux distributions not based in a region affected by the patent might ship MP3 decoders/encoders or they might have included proprietary software. However, Fedora Core cannot and does not ship MP3 decoders/encoders in order to serve the goal of shipping only free and open source software that is not restricted by software patents.
Fedora Suggests: If possible, use patent unrestricted formats such as Ogg Vorbis (a lossy audio codec that has better quality than MP3), or FLAC (a lossless audio codec).
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
Someone on the target webpage asked how to disable SELinux. I don't really feel like making an account on that website, but you should edit /etc/sysconfig/selinux.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
No, all you need to do is get the CDs or DVD and boot from them - you will be presented with the alternatives of overwriting the current install or upgrading it to FC5. It is a very good idea to backup your data just to be sure, but I've never had any problems going from one RedHat/Fedora version to a newer one.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
If you've done that very basic and important step, then you can upgrade -- or even install a new system from scratch -- without fear. (There may, however, be a few hours of tweaking involved, to install printers and the like.)
The same works for Windows, too, btw -- and can save you from losing all your data when XP destroys itself and you need to recover your system.
Finding God in a Dog
NetBSD may be a better choice for older hardware, as it consumes less resources than recent versions of Linux. Note that this is not an anit-Linux troll, much of that extra resource hungriness seems to come from the added functionality rather than superfluous bloat - and despite my personal preference for NetBSD, I'm considering putting FC5 onto my PowerBook, as there appears to be support for Java on PowerPC Linux.
I never understood why Redhat chose Fedora.
Fedora is a hat. You see the "Red Hat" logo? The type of hat the guy is wearing in the logo is called a Fedora. Given that the hat is named after a Frech play, I don't think that anyone is really worried about what it means in Portugese.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I've built many linux machines over the years (with several different distros) and I've learned through experience that best practice is to keep system files and user data on separate volumes. Either create a dedicated partition for /home or use another physical drive entirely. I've had too many upgrades go bad and didn't have the time or patience to poke around to find the cause, so the quickest and best solution was to format and start over. Just my 2 cents.
I had a professor who loved Fedora and made his classes use it. In particular, he made us develop and deploy web apps onto a Fedora Core 4 system that each team built and wouldn't let anyone use Red Hat Enterprise, even though we had a department-wide site license that allowed that use. For most of the people there, it was their first experience with Linux and damn were people turned off to Linux by it.
.0 to .1. Fedora doesn't even do point releases.
1) It was slow.
2) It was a bitch to install... the installer kept freezing halfway through or dying on certain packages for certain teams.
3) The whole system would sometimes get unwieldy.
IMO, it is the worst beginner's distribution because of how little time there is between releases. It takes the cake from Mandrake. Knoppix, Ubuntu, SuSE, RHEL, these are good distributions to start with. Fedora is not. It's cobbled together compared to these distributions. Just look at how much time has been put into the changes in OpenSuSE by comparison, just to go from
I know some consider it trolling and some love Fedora for various reasons, but I have seen it make people say that Windows kicked ass compared to Linux because the Fedora installer alone just crapped out on them so much that it wasted their time. If you want to introduce someone to Linux, use any other major distribution, even if you have to **buy** it from RedHat or SuSE. I used to be one of the "Linux guys," but the experience for many was so painful, and Linux got such a bad name among those with no prior experience, that out of embarrasment I had to remind people that I am first and foremost a Mac and BeOS guy, not a Linux fan. The Linux users really got undeserved egg on their faces based on how bad FC 4 was for most of the students, and what they were doing was not so hard that it should have been happening.
The Fedora Download page, which is according to the announcement message supposed to redirect you to one of the mirrors, does not work - it redirects to ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com which is (of course) busy. So let me allow to advertise my mirror - if you are in Europe, I have still about half a gigabit of bandwidth free at
ftp://ftp.linux.cz/pub/linux/fedora-core/5/
-Yenya
-Yenya
--
While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it has to be. --Linus
Just download and install fedora-release.xx.rpm
Next, "yum upgrade"
And you don't even have to reboot...
A good one for older hardware is VectorLinux. The standard edition uses icewm and Rox filer, which is nice and fast.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Yes, you made a few typos. The command is actually:
:P
yum update
Don't worry, it happens to the best of us
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
This answer is valid to April 2010: No, and it won't. I think we can safely say at this point that ogg isn't taking over mainstream and that once it is freed, ogg will go back to a very very little niche. It'll simply take another four years.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Playboy.com also mirrors Firefox, Thunderbird, Apache, FreeBSD, and CPAN. Playboy uses FOSS in it's operation and wants to give back to the community by providing mirrors.
Just as a personal note, I compile my own kernels, using the vanilla kernel patched with Andrew Morton's patches first, then with whatever of Red Hat's will still apply cleanly. Andrew Morton's -mm patches adds a lot of extremely useful functionality, for me, so that's my patchset of choice. (There are some nice real-time patches out there, too, but they're generally not compatible with other patchsets, making them a pain.)
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)
Remember, you can get the free version of RedHat from CentOS
http://www.centos.org/
No silly annual payments just to get support.
I personally use knoppix / debian since RedHat started charging for support.
People need to know CentOS is out there.
If like me you don't have broadband, you can get it from budgetlinuxcds.com on DVD for only $5
The problem isn't distributing a codec, the problem is you can't legally have a GPL implementation in a jurisdiction where the patents on those formats applies (like the US). In the example of MP3, the patent holders grant free license for ditributing a decoding implementation, I believe. But that's not liberal enough to be compatible with the GPL, because the license could be revoked.
The Fedora FAQ page shows how to easily add mp3 functionality to FC4, FC3 etc.
http://www.fedorafaq.org/#mp3
I expect that the same steps will be available once yum packages are ready for Fedora 5
For years I have used The Unofficial Fedora Faq located at http://www.fedorafaq.org/ to install all of the software missing from the Fedora Core downloads.
I agree with everything on that page, except for Java support. I develop Java and suggest that anybody who wants to develop serious Java applications use the official Java JDK from Sun. Otherwise, everything else is spot-on to help make Fedora a serious Linux desktop distribution.
You currently can't run Windows under Xen as Xen requires the OS to be modified to run under it. Until the new CPUs with virtualization are out you can't use Xen to run Windows.
Right now, though, there is a good free (beer) alternative: VMWare Player. I've been using it with a Win2k guest and it works great. A bit sluggish on Athlon XP's (2500+) and lower, but it feels almost native on an Athlon 64 (3200+).
To create a disk, install qemu and use the following command to create the disk:
qemu-img create -f vmdk disk.vmdk 15G
To create your *.vmx file use VM Builder (it's a webapp).
Open the VMX file in VMWare Player and install Windows normally.
To install VMware Tools, just download an old version (tar.gz, not the rpm) of the Workstation or the betas of the Server. There is a "windows.iso" file in the archive that has everything you need.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks