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
Linclips also has a short screencast on some of the default functionality.
That screencast is in Flash, and we all know that Flash is evil.
Thus, Fedora must be evil by extension.
Fedora is the development branch for RedHat. If Fedora is evil, RedHat must also be evil.
Microsoft is well known for being evil.
We all know that RedHat is a competitor to Microsoft.
Ergo, RedHat is the next Microsoft.
QED
(Yes, this is a joke. Laugh.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I don't believe there is any power way to evaluate a linux distro than screenshots, except for maybe it's logo.
We're up to *five* CD-ROMs now?
Finding God in a Dog
I new to Linux and am still running Fedora Core 3. Am I right in thinking that to upgrade to FC5 I have to basically backup anything I want to keep and reinstall everything? Is there no easier way of upgrading?
Summation 2
Would this distro work for an old laptop - UMAX 233MHz 256MB 3GB? I have one lying around and was thinking about creating a wireless terminal to check email and possibly display pictures. A basic Core 4 installed fine but the UI wasnt very responsive sometimes. Thx for your help.
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.
There are some pages: installation guide, installation notes which should be valuable starting points.
Am I the only one that thinks it is awesome that playboy.com mirrors the distro? They should have 'customized' it. (Special backgrounds, prepopulated bookmarks, etc.)
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
So if I wait for 2.6.16 kernel on FC5 is that going to break with nVidia too? I saw a comment in the 2.6.16 story saying that doesn't work either (may have been distro specific).
Damn people, I understood the 4K stacks thing - make a good decision for good reason and let nVidia catch up. This utter disrespect for drivers used by a large number of people is really unacceptable. Actually, when a disto fails to test with drivers used by a large portion of their userbase, it is the user who feels the disrespect. Please don't make excuses - that's disrespectful too. Just get FC6 right.
That said, I'm downloading FC5 now ;-)
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...
If you prefer something that looks like RH but evolves at a more stately pace, may I suggest CentOS. This is RHEL built from the the Open Sources.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I want my.... I want my KDE....
I want my.... I want my KDE....
Now look at them desktops, that's the way to do it
You get your DCOP from your KDE
That ain't working, that's the way to code it
Widgets for nothing and your glyphs for free.
Bow that ain't working, that's the way to code it
Lemme tell ya, them guys ain't dumb
Maybe get a glitch in your brand-new icon
Maybe get a glitchy core-dump.
We gotta install ISO 9000
Custom language packs
We gotta move those partition boundries
We gotta move that Berlin GUI
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)
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
From the Fedora website: "The ATI graphics drivers are proprietary and many kernel developers consider this driver to violate the GPL license of the kernel. Fedora Core does not include proprietary software. Fedora Suggests: Consider using a graphics adapter from Intel or any other manufacturer that supports open source with full specifications and/or source code. Note that ATI adapters will usually work well using the drivers included with Fedora, but accelerated functions (OpenGL) will not be available. " This is exactly what is keeping a lot of people from using Linux. Fedora's hard-nosed stance against non-GPL software is laughable. This advice sheet is fine for someone building a new machine, but I'm not going to go out and buy some shitty Intel chipset just so I can use Linux. The whole tone of the forbidden items page is "We purposely broke that feature because it conflicts with our idealogy, but that's ok, you don't really need things like hardware 3D acceleration and the ability to play your mountainous library of MP3's anyway." It's not the fact that the NVidia drivers aren't included that bothers me, no OS bundles that driver, it's the fact that Fedora people and a lot of Linux zealots seem to have the "change your hardware to things we like" attitude as opposed to "we don't include support for that because of , but here's how you can add it yourself."
This is a hobby OS. It is the developement tree for RHEL. What is so hard to figure out here? It is not a beginner distro, it is a testing ground for new ideas and functions. The entire point is to test things, and separated by name so that people like your professor cannot sue RedHat when something doesn't work as it should.
Point release version numbers don't really apply to something that is perpetually beta. There are dozens of Fedora based distros...ever notice that they all make changes/mods for better security/hardwaredetection/userinterface/etc..
I know this is a flame, and some fedora fanboys will mod be down for this and flame me, but please...do look around> this is a perpetual beta. If you want the 'good stuff' pay for it, or download something that has another couple of steps of tweaking built in.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
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)
And it is people like us who will make sure that ATI and nVidia will never change their ways, why should they? People still keep buying their stuff even if they have to jump through hoops to install the drivers.
;-)
Now, truth be told, I said "us" because I use the proprietary drivers as well and I am happy they exist but I also agree that ATI and nVidia must be pushed as hard as possible to open up more and Fedora/Redhat/Debian (and probably others) can't do that if they tell people "you shouldn't use those drivers, but this is how you install them".
You make a decision and you stick by it.
I have decided I _need_ my daily FPS-fix
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
I've never understood why some people bitch about getting stuff for free. So, tell me, Mr. Coward: Does that single CD also contain an office suite, multiple SQL servers, a full suite of programming languages (C/C++, perl, ruby, python, java, and more), dozens of games, etc. etc. etc? No? Then you better count the CDs for MS Office, SQL Server, Visual Studio, etc. etc. etc. When you get done, let us know how many you come up with.
(Actually, I guess I have to agree with you: It *is* sad that XP is a single CD because you don't get very much for your money)
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
Then why does the Ogg Vorbis FAQ say, "it is completely free, open, and unpatented"?
Why does the Flac FAQ describe it as an "open patent free codec"?
Please explain in what sense they are encumbered.
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