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Red Hat Gives up on Fedora Foundation
phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica writes up Red Hat's giving up on the Fedora Foundation: 'In an open letter distributed to the Fedora community earlier this week, Red Hat employee and Fedora project leader Max Spevack states that Red Hat is no longer interested in establishing an autonomous, nonprofit foundation to manage the Fedora project. Instead, Red Hat will revive the Fedora Project Board, which will include five Red Hat representatives, four members of the Fedora community, and a chairman appointed by Red Hat who will possess veto power.'"
When I first clicked on this it said "nothing for you to see here, please move along"... I felt a bit like one of the completely marginalised Fedora people now they have a lovely minority and no veto power
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
I wouldn't say that they're necessarily giving up on Fedora. It sounds to me like they see the value in Fedora and don't want to give up control of it,... ;-)
why are open source proponents turning a blind eye to how Red Hat's actions and nonconducive to the open source ideal?
Name one.
Seriously and with no hand-waving, name one action where Red Hat's actions were "nonconducive to the open source ideal." Back it up with WHY it is what you claim it is. You are going to have a tough time.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
> How corporate involvement affects real open source projects
I dunno. PMD has certainly benefitted greatly from corporate involvement; the reason that the most recent release included support for checking JSP/JSF code was that a corporate-sponsored developer put together a nice JavaCC grammar and did all the integration work.
As the project lead, I'm happy that PMD has new functionality and a larger audience, not least of all because that may lead to more book sales! One can but hope, anyhow.
The Army reading list
Fedora will never be a fully functional production OS, for it's in the conflict with Red Hat's ability to sell its "enterprise" products.
For people who need a stable, secure, easy to maintain OS to run their production systems I would recommend Debian.
I used their products from the 6.x days to 9.0, Enterprise Server 2.x, and Fedora 4. I was mostly happy with them, and was willing to give them a chance after they split off Fedora from mainline Redhat. I then switched jobs to a FreeBSD shop, and I've been a convert ever since, from my workstation at the office to my home machines. The base system is a high performer and stable, and the ports tree is well maintained and much better than RPMs ever were.
After recently trying Fedora Core 5 and Gentoo due to the need to run the new free VMWare server product, I decided that Fedora has gone beyond bloated and sucky, and that if I were to ever prefessionally recommend any Linux flavors, they'd be Gentoo and the free Redhat Enterprise clones (Whitebox, etc.).
I can't say that Redhat has necessarily "sold out" but they're not the company I cheer for anymore. Granted, they *are* pushing good technologies, like Xen, but aside from the fringe benefits of their clout, I don't like them much these days.
Method of processing duck feet
What's going on here? With MS releasing Linux drivers for virtualization, Apple releasing code to run XP on Macs, and now Red Hat dropping the community they created it's like April fools all week!
My head hurts, time to go back to work and ignore all of this (right!)
fak3r.com
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Well if you made the switch, it must be all "people" right? Just because it wasn't the right tool for your job, does not mean it isn't for someone else's.
And I really hope he/she meant "harness" instead of "hardness".
Name one.
They make money off of F/OSS! They're supposed to do everytyhing for free! They're just some corporation with their CEOs sitting in their offices being all corporaty and stuff!
I've tried every FC since it came out. This (FC5) is the first one that ran worth a crap. Although I will admit uninstalling bluetooth support crashed the whole thing and i had to re-install - but that seems pretty typical of my linux experiences.
One thing that just can't happen in open source is to get so many diversified projects to run together nicely - it is not the nature of open source. Not that any one piece is bad on it's own - there is just no single entity accountable for getting them all together and thoroughly tested as a whole. Simple QA at best is all you can hope for, not a year of open beta.
If you're not good at getting the individual pieces to work by themselves, Linux is probably not a good thing to be using.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
I'm willing to bet, were there a way to accurately gauge, we'd find that RH and it's derivites have the largest install base of all the distros.
So yes, they are relevant. Software is written with RH in mind. It might work on other systems, but the target system is RH.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I cant tell whether to mod as funny or a troll....
Here is the link to the email Redhat sent out. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-li st/2006-April/msg00016.html
To say that the article writer has a bias against Redhat would be an understatement. Even when Redhat is transparent they are still lambasted. People want to hate Redhat, but without Redhat we would be much worse off in the Linux world. It's time people admit it.
It appears to make very good sense. Redhat supports a community distribution almost as well as many other players. I didn't like how little community involvement there was initially (especially without extras to start) but it's coming along, albeit a bit slowly.
And bottom line, redhat has so far played well with the community.
Notice that I said "people" and not "all people". Many of my current peers have few good things to say about Redhat (some of them never did to begin with). I'm sure my admitedly anecdotal evidence is not unique in this regard. Redhat may be a good choice for the "suits" but many of us with autonomy in the trenches do not care for it and don't use it when we aren't required to.
Method of processing duck feet
One more reason why Kubuntu is Fedora/SUSE as the major community-led Linux distribution that aims to be easy to use.
neither, you just posted...
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
More than ever.
RedHat is making enterprise quality Linux distribution, i.e. carefully designed, thoroughly tested, and planed support for 5+ years.
Running Linux just for the sake of running Linux is not cool any more. People use Linux to actually get something done. Linux-based projects nowdays spawn for well over 5 years, and they require a solid OS provider.
Fedora is really just a playground. RHEL or CentOS builds of RHEL are a lot more interesting.
"I'd like to ask the Linux community, is Red Hat still relevant?"
Yes.
Red Hat is actually making money from Linux. Why is that relevant? Because they are PAYING people to enhance Linux.
The have spent large sums of money on GCC, Gnome, X.org, and Xen.
Look at the things they have written and maintain and or contributed to.
cairo
glib
gtk+
dbus
LVM2
ext3
gfs and gfs2
JFFS2
SELinux
RedHat has made money from OSS and has put money back into OSS. They are not my distro of choice but they have become one of the business friendly faces that the Suits can trust while at the same time giving back to the OSS community.
Gentoo is more cooler. Ubuntu is the doing well on the desktop but RedHat and Novell/SuSE are the big business Linux leaders.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
IMHO, the problem is that RedHat wanted to see some significant outside sponsorship for Fedora, say from IBM, or perhaps Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu), but they didn't get it.
If they aren't getting the benefit of that sponsorship by giving up control, then why give up that control? It's useful to keep Fedora in sync with their commercial product.
Besides, don't kid yourself, if I need a piece of software, more likely than not, it's been tested on Fedora, if not already packaged and included, and it was probably originally written on or ported to Fedora, so that's what makes it a great distro. I've used them all, and I like Fedora Core 5, and it's not terribly broken as others have claimed. (although I've seen one bug in the login screen).
There's nothing wrong with this. For efficiency, we're going to see more code shared between distributions, and possibly testing, etc. However, it looks like RedHat's hopes of becoming the absolutely dominant distribution by embracing and extending Ubuntu (which is part of Debian), or by aligning itself with IBM, have been put on hold for now.
However, the major distributions are more like one another than they ever have been (compare SuSE and RedHat now with SuSE 6.0 and RedHat 7.0), and they will continue to share more and more code, but it looks like the market for Linux based OSes is large enough that there is enough room to that total consolidation will not happen.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
I, like you; switched from Redhat to FreeBSD, however I don't think I agree with them going "beyond bloated and sucky". Lets face it, Redhat has been doing whatever they want to for YEARS, doing stuff like sticking config files in bizarre locations. The bloat and suck you describe are more attributed to the packages installed being bloated than the hand of Redhat itself (gtk1 vs gtk2 for instance).
One vendor for a software system I work at stick to Redhat/fedora. Why they never went with debian I'll never know. So I installed fedora core 4 with no gui and it's pretty much the same as it ever was. Config files and stuff moved and many things are done differently (surprize surprize) but overall it's nothing drastic.
But yeah, once you get your hand in the FreeBSD ports collection you tend to cringe thinking about the RPM hell of yester-year. It really has gotten better...
I think that a lot of people assume that Red Hat Linux is this big ticket open source project, and therefore, Red Hat the company is bound to some subjective and abstruse ethical code. The GPL is not a manual of moral guidelines for running a business. Frankly a applaud Red Hat and all the other vendors of open source software that have implemented a successful business model around something that is free. For Linux to survive and grow, money has to come from somewhere. So when people in the know have to make the tough decisions, we shouldn't be so quick to criticize them for it.
But you are right about one thing -- XP does work fine on my wife's 233 MHz laptop w/ 128 MB ram. I wouldn't say it screams, but it runs fine, and the only time she complained about the performance was when she put the Sims on it and it couldn't keep up. Of course, Fedora Core also works fine on the same laptop, even with the default gnome window manager, so maybe you just did something wrong.
Ubuntu is the distro of the week, nothing more. I remember that, a bare two years ago, everyone and their dog was ditching Red Hat for Gentoo. Let's face it: no one talks about Gentoo in the enterprise anymore as the Next Big Thing (tm). While it's sad that some sys-admins are adherents to "distro of the week" fever, Red Hat's recent press release that 99 out of 100 of their biggest contracts stayed on is revealing as to what serious sysadmins are doing.
RHEL has some genuine advantages over most other distros, such as RHN's administration capabilities and guaranteed five-year support. Besides that, the Red Hat brand-name is invaluable, because people know them. They also have tons and tons of money in the bank, so they're far more reliable than Canonical.
In other words, for a company that signed its own death wish, they've been doing quite well lately, and have managed to outlast and survive their competitors. Maybe Ubuntu will be a serious competitor in the future, but they aren't right now.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I see no issue with Redhat doing this. If the Fedora guys are really unhappy about it, I think they should just take their ball and go home (figurativly). The beauty of Linux is the fork()
This has nothing whatsoever to do with Fedora Core the distribution, this is about the Fedora Foundation, a non-profit corporation Red Hat setup for various reasons. It proved unwieldy and not worth the hassle so they shut it down.
This does not affect Fedora Core, you and other Fedora Core users have not been abandoned.
You must not know many people who actually work in corporate environments then. Most third party apps, such as Oracle, are only certified to run on RHEL or SUSE Enterprise. No other distrobution is certified. I can tell you first hand that if you're running Oracle on an unsupported platform, you will get ZERO support from them.
Really.
Try and sell that to your management.
This is a good thing, for Redhat and what is good for Redhat is generally good for linux. Redhat pays many kernel developers and contributes huge amounts of opensource code- enterprise class opensource code.
Since Fedora Core is basically RHEL testing or unstable ( to try to fit the Debian nomenclature, I guess rawhide is unstable, FC is testing, RHEL is stable ), Redhat needs to be able to control where Fedora Core is going and what goes in. Partly to maintain quality control, partly to make sure Fedora goals incorporate the Redhat goals, partly for their legal department to not freak out.
Until another linux company becomes as central to linux in business as Redhat, what is good for Redhat is good for linux.
I think this will have limited impact for people who use Fedora Core as a home desktop (or even business). Probably none they will notice.
For those that use other distributions, this will have almost no impact, because the things they use in their distributions that Redhat contributes will still be high quality and GPL.
No! Never ever compare RedHat with Micr*s*ft!! ;-)
IMHO This sounds like a silly question to me. RedHat is still THE linux distribution. Everyone still makes sure they run on it and more companies support it than any other distro. At least that is the case for servers. Financially I understand they are still the only ones that have actually made money. I still look and try other distros. The next best I think is Suse (Novell).
I welcome them coming back. There is such a thing as too many cooks in the kitchen. I can see that with FC-4 and more so with FC-5 that is happening.
That doesn't make sense. That's like saying, "it doesn't take long to despise *.deb files after running yum." It also doesn't make sense to use terms like "despise" in the context of discussing the technical merits of something, but this is Slashdot after all.
Um-buntu - Linux for hesitant people
Call it a Freudian slip...
One way or the other, they're going to be RedHat's bitch.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I installed FC5 on an old X600 Thinkpad, and it runs great for me, even running KDE. It installed clean and I've seen nothing broken in it yet.
What do you think is broken on it?
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Ubuntu is the distro of the week
Man, that's got to be the longest week ever. I remember reading the same thing 50 weeks ago, when I was making the switch from Fedora to Ubuntu.
I thought this was quite funny. At least, it does not deserve a 0.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
If you're not good at getting the individual pieces to work by themselves, Linux is probably not a good thing to be using.
This is supposed to be the very role that distributors play, so you don't have to.
No, they can't make sure that every bit of software in the world works with their distribution, but the definition of a final release is that the bits included and supported in the release work and are supported.
KFG
Well, Dell distributes RedHat Enterprises Linux.
:)
What does that tell you?
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
*waves hand in jedi fashion*
This is not the distro you are looking for.
We use Fedora extensively in my workplace, and I'm frankly glad that Red Hat is keeping the Fedora project under it's wing rather than spinning it off as a separate non-profit.
Having worked with several non-profits over the years, I can say from experience that a for-profit company will probably be more accountable and responsible, and better at "getting the job done".
We like being the "testing" arm of Red Hat. We get a free, open-source operating system, and Red Hat gets our bug fix submissions and feedback. It's a nice relationship. We also like that some of Red Hat's profits pay for developers to maintain different parts of our operating system. The end result is a very slick, easy to use, and easy to configure, multi-purpose operating system.
I am not so sure that a separate Fedora foundation would do as good a job as Red Hat is doing. Free software zealots will probably disagree, but guess what folks - it takes money and manpower to get things done. There's nothing wrong with a company making a healthy profit, and using some of that profit to give back to the community.
Geez, what is it with people today? Don't they teach reading comprehension in school any more?
Oh really? Seems to me that businesses love Redhat (and the clones like Whitebox) more for than everybody else put together. And Fedora Core is quite popular as well with the desktop user.
RedHat and similar companies (Mandrake or whateverthefuck it's called now, SUSE) have traditionally been the only large companies providing backing for Linux. Other companies like that support. This doesn't mean the distro is any good just because a business uses it.
Desktop users are all switching to Ubuntu. So while Fedora might be "quite popular" it ain't the cat's meow.
yum is very nice. Really, I never did understand why people hated rpm so much. Any sort of package management that also handles dependancies is going to add some complexity, and even then yum and the respositories makes it all pretty much automatic. I'm no rpm fanboy, but it does do it's job.
I didn't say yum's functionality sucked. I said it was slow as hell (ie. poorly written POS). I did say RPM sucked though and it does.
So, they picked a window manager by default that uses a lot of resources. So change it.
I didn't say anything about window managers. It's the distro specific stuff that sucks (boot time, package management).
Barely functional and ugly have nothing in common. And xfce seemed plenty functional to me, and plenty fast. (Of course, I'm still using fvwm as my window manager, the same window manager I used back when I had a 166 MHz box and probably even further back than that.)
Usability and look are often the same thing. Sorry if I wasn't clear but "ugly" to me means it has a bad feeling to it, it's hard to use or whatever. The functionality and look of FVWM or XFCE is crap. It works for sure, but it feels awful compared to a modern system (GNOME, KDE, Windows, OS X).
But you are right about one thing -- XP does work fine on my wife's 233 MHz laptop w/ 128 MB ram. I wouldn't say it screams, but it runs fine, and the only time she complained about the performance was when she put the Sims on it and it couldn't keep up.
I didn't say "Windows XP screams" I said it screams compared to most Linux distros. Make sure you read what others write before responding.
Of course, Fedora Core also works fine on the same laptop, even with the default gnome window manager, so maybe you just did something wrong.
Where did I say it wouldn't work smartass? I said it was slow as hell.
First of all, I just wanted to say that considering what Red Hat has done for the community for over 10 years now I think people give them way too much shit. 99% of the comments knocking Red Hat are rants by idiots who have no idea how much Red Hat does. But in this case I have to ask what the hell they were thinking?
"Incorporating as a non-profit foundation creates immense accounting challenges, and a truly independent Fedora Foundation would be forced to track the cost of bandwidth for distributing Fedora and every single hour of Red Hat developer time used to improve Fedora as well as the legal and administrative expenses associated with perpetuating the project and running the Foundation."
They are just realizing this now?
"In order to maintain non-profit status, a third of the Fedora Foundation's money would have to come directly from public sources. At present, Spevack argues, this just isn't feasible."
They are just realizing this now?
"Giving up" control of Fedora and then taking it back for the reasons listed just smacks of poor planning. Many people have argued "why should I help out Fedora why Red Hat just "takes" those changes and sells them in RHEL". I've always thought that was a retarded baseless argument. But on the other hand plenty of people seem to make that complaint. I don't think Red Hat is going to make many friends in the community by pulling Fedora even closer. I hope they are prepared to deal with the fallout and possible defection of contributors.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
> After recently trying Fedora Core 5 and Gentoo due to the need to
> run the new free VMWare server product, I decided that Fedora has
> gone beyond bloated and sucky, and that if I were to ever
> prefessionally recommend any Linux flavors, they'd be Gentoo and
> the free Redhat Enterprise clones (Whitebox, etc.).
The fact that you still recommend RHEL clones shows that RedHat's influence isn't going anywhere. As long as RH can put out a product that people are willing to clone, they'll do just fine. Because when people and projects get hooked on a RHEL clone distro, there is a better than fair chance that if that project ever hits the really big bucks, that a large government or corporate client will want to toss RH a few big checks for their support and peace of mind.
Situations like the above are why RH probably doesn't mind that many beginners are in fact giving up on them. They have already passed the maturity threshold where they are focusing on bringing in that stream of aforementioned big checks, instead of relying on cultivating a large user culture so that sometime down the road, they can start bringing in those big checks.
-jdog
And still, if you look at Fedora Core 5 as a desktop OS which is what its trying to be it's incomplete, buggy, is missing lots of default multimedia packages, the appplication are still way too fragmented.
Fedora is not trying to be a desktop OS. If it was, flash, java and mp3 would ship out of the box.
Fedora is trying to be... something. I'll have to say that it makes a great distro for a home server. And it's got a pretty wide range of software for the intrepid.
My opinion is that Fedora is a workstation distro.
May the Maths Be with you!
166 mHz pentium? Please, step into at least 1999.
:)
Desktops and servers are a small part of the world, numerically they are dwarfed by embedded and other small scale devices. Now you may not find an old pentium in many of these devices but you will find some, and probably more that Sparc, Alpha, and other "mainstream" server CPUs that receive Linux support. I did a quick google of single board computers and I was finding 386 based solutions. I'm having flashbacks to an embedded kernel development job in 1988.
Wow. I've had some problems with linux as well, but never had to reinstall.
Sounds like your'e trolling, though. I mean, the problem you describe is related to the kernel only. How can that say anything about FLOSS' ability to coopoerate and "run together nicely"?
Examples of open source "running nice togehter" include jack with applications like Hydrogen and Ardour, or media codecs like OGG and FLAC with media players (like XMMS).
In areas where a defined protocol or standard exists, open source excels. I mean, look at projects like Apache, Mozilla-projects, Jabber, libxml and many more.
Not that any one piece is bad on it's own - there is just no single entity accountable for getting them all together and thoroughly tested as a whole. Simple QA at best is all you can hope for, not a year of open beta.
;p
Maybe it's just me, but it sounds like you should stop using a Red Hat-based distribution and switch to a Debian-based distribution. Debian takes on the accountability for thorough testing and package integration, and they have years worth of experience with open betas.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
They also distribute Novell/SuSE your point?
Wow, please recommend Oracle on CentOS to your employer and then call Oracle when you have a problem and see how fast you get fired. If you are having bloat problems with a RedHat server, then it's your administrative skill set that requires some bloating. I have lots of RHEL and Fedora servers and I don't have any bloat problems. Our RHEL-64 Oracle cluster WOW'ed me once it was up and running after we converted from Solaris SPARC to RHEL-32 (money savings wow) and now RHEL64 on the same hardware. (sheer performance wow)
As for Gentoo. I'm actually a Gentoo fan and we have Gentoo boxes. Though they where here before I got here and there won't be any more installed as servers. In our environment time is very important and emerge can be a major time sponge! I just don't find Gentoo's emerge pratical in a large server environment. We can do huge image backups of every server we have, so when a major failure happens, we have to rebuild then restore the data. Emerge takes way to much time while services are down.
Seriously. Ubuntu is pretty much a support-it-yourself distribution. Not only is there virtually no (at least that I've seen) enterprise software that's certified to run on it, but you can't purchase as a product with support like you can with RedHat or Suse. I suppose you can get support options from Canonical separately, but I think that's going to be a tough sell to management, since they don't seem to be bundled very well. It's just not a very "corporate friendly" distro.
... well, I can just imagine some of my bosses staring at "Linux for human beings" and wondering what the hell that's supposed to mean.
RedHat, on the other hand, has two different server products, each of which are spelled out for the types of workloads they're designed for. They have a "top of the line" one that they tout is good for CRM/datacenter/ERP/database stuff, and a cheaper one that aims for mail/file/print/web servers. Each one has three different levels of support. You could easily argue that the variations in product lineup (ES versus AS) is mostly marketingspeak, and I might agree with you, but it's the kind of marketingspeak that sells.
If you're looking for a distro to set up as your new print server, RedHat has matrices that basically tell you exactly what to get. If you go to Ubuntu's site
I'm not trying to bash Ubuntu here, it's a good distro (I run Kubuntu on my Linux machine at home), but I think comparing it to RHEL as the GP is doing, is just trying to force it into a market that its not aimed at.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It seems like companies tend to forget their roots. They have some marginal success and start making money and then get scared and seem to adopt the "comfortable" business practices of large corporations... Somebody said that RedHat could become the next Microsoft and I don't think that's a far off analysis.
One of the tools Microsoft, if anyone remembers the old days, used to achieve market dominance was *giving* away sdk's and working with developers, unlike the Apple development products of the time that were very costly. The Microsoft exploded and then began closing the doors. I remember back in the Windows 3.11 day having a great deal of control over my system, it wasn't until 95 that that openess really began changing.
I remember when Amazon went through patenting issues the open community surrounded Amazon and tried to help them stay open. The sucess of that effort, I am sure will encourage debate, but that is not my point... If we as a community abandon a company or project everytime the controllers of that project make a mistake then the Open Source community will constantly suffer.
With everyone reinventing the wheel everytime a project doesn't do exactly what they think is best, we find ourselves with standards and specs that don't apply, tons of vaporware and a bunch of individuals clamoring for recognition and attacking all competing projects...
Isn't the point of the Open Source community to *be* a community? Is there something we can to to help RedHat remember who they are? Or are we doomed to attack everything that we once loved and supported?
I don't know if RedHat can be salvaged, I don't know if RedHat should be salvaged... I just remember a day not to long ago that RedHat was a beacon and something to believe in... I remember a day even futher back where it was Microsoft and even further back Apple.
How does a company stay open and honest if not through the support of it's community?
Tests show that "--more-cooler" is 0.01% faster than "--cooler"
zbuf_ptr==NULL? will retry
Tests show that "--more-cooler" is 0.01% faster than "--cooler"
I always use "--morer-coolerer" myself to get the absolute best performance, but the patch to support it is only in my fork of GCC. I had s&me pr%blems with the TCP/IP stack corrupting corrupting &****H***socket_send:invalid port when I compiled them with that before, but I fixed th^m; Seems to wrk OK^H^Hperfectly now'
Now if I can just get X to start, Gentoo will be even faster.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
They don't ship mp3 due to concern over copyright issues. The same reason they don't ship ntfs support. They have a wiki somewhere that addresses various packages and why they aren't shipped with the distro. That being said someone has put together a nice page called "Fedora Core installation notes" that addresses many common things a desktop user would like including step-by-step instructions on how to install each item:i on_notes.html
http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_4_installat
I've had no particular issue setting up java, flash, quicktime, etc. The only thing I believe I've had issue with is Shockwave, but I hear thats a linux wide issue.
Honestly its also kind of fun setting that stuff up too.
We just hate corporations, not RedHat in particular, until of course we go to work for some startup and get granted some valuable stock options. Then we loooove corporations, at least until our options vest and we can start flaming corporations again.
What are you, a man or a mouse? It's Redhat's trademark, they can do whatever the hell thay want. It's a free country, get off your ass and start your own distro, eveybody else has.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
You only have one account?
Actually, it's interesting but IBM just certified DB2 UDB to run on Ubuntu:
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/db2cert
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
What's wrong with yum? it resolves dependencies, even on manually downloaded rpms, using: yum localinstall. I've never been exposed to apt, my OS instructor harped on it a great deal last semester, but as a novice I've thoroughly enjoyed yum and found it to be relatively painless and easy to use.
In serious production environments you are hardly going to need to install a new release of some arbitrary application on a frequent basis anyway, let alone any applications that go through point releases every few days. Well, maybe if you are running a test environment for the next release of your major application, but even then corporate applications tend to evolve slowly. RPM might not be as proficient as APT, but it's plenty good enough for environments that at most only going to require a few specific applications be installed that are not part of any disto, and should be in "/opt" or "/usr/local" anyway.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Corporates always take decisions keeping an eye on profits. They don't have the luxury to take decisions with philosopies in mind. That is because they are to a certain extent answerable to their share holders.
This is where a project like Debian gains significance. Since it is not funded or controlled by any corporation, it lives up to the philosophy guiding it and will not be swayed by market dynamics.
Linux Help
for all things on Linux
Easy on the racist remarks, buddy.
I am sure RH has a procedure to be followed before they can hand out any patch, no matter how hard pressed a single customer is (as long as the said bug is not resulting in a nuclear meltdown or some such). And they certainly won't just take your patch, thank you for it and then turn around and immidiately hand back to you. You may know your path works but no company is going to take your word for it.
Unlike Fedora or other community driven project, a month's waiting time seems reasonable for the stability-oriented RH to put out a patch.
We have about 7 RHEL servers at work, all with very costly support contracts and I have to say: this has been my experience with Redhat support as well. THEY SUCK. Before anyone bashes the shit out of me for not being a *nix guru and being able to fix these boxes when they break (and they do), thats why we chose to pay support dollars. To bridge the gap between my mediocre linux knowledge and having someone at our beck and call when stuff breaks I dont know how to fix. Unfortunately the level of support they give is about what I'd expect using community forums for an open source project. Completely expected and just fine when its community members helping other members - but a total butt-rape when its a TON of yearly dollars, allegedly to get 'expert' support.
Yeah - I probably didn't HAVE to reinstall - I just chose to. Removing bluettooth somehow killed gnome - when I started X I got the very very basic window manager. I could have messed around trying to figure it out, or simply reinstall, leaving bluettooth and some other stuff out.
The reason for the installation is OpenNMS. It is an XML/Java based app. It takes days just to track down compatible versions of RPMs to make it work. Then you have to deal with the "no two linuxes are alike as far as where the files are" problems. That is the kind of problems I'm talking about. There is no one who insures that when you install product A it will work. You have to do the work yourself. I don't want to start a flame war, but that isn't something I worry about with MS. Not that there isn't an occasional problem, but significantly less of a chance for problems than in OSS. And that is because a huge amount of time and money is spent insuring every product runs out of the box. MS used to go to the local EggHead and buy 1 copy of every single program during testing prior to release. I'm sure they don't still do that, but I am sure they do something like that. There is no single entity in OSS that can take on that responsibility, time or financially.
It doesn't reduce the value of OSS, but it is a very real difference that must be understood.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
Suits: 1
Dirty Hippies: 0
People are giving up on Redhat.
...
I decided that Fedora has gone beyond bloated and sucky, and that if I were to ever prefessionally [sic] recommend any Linux flavors, they'd be Gentoo and the free Redhat Enterprise clones (Whitebox, etc.).
I am only guessing by professional, you mean business. So let me get this straight--you are looking to professionally recommend a Linux distro and you are complaining about a distro that is openly NOT a professional distro not being professioinal enough. How does that make sense? See Red Hat's brief explanation here:
https://www.redhat.com/apps/download/
It's all about target audience. Red Hat Enterpise Linux is all about being a stable production OS. Fedora Core is all about being on the bleeding edge of Linux technology.
Stability comes at the cost of lots of testing and debugging time. That's why a production-class OS like Debian or RHEL is always a bit behind in the software it includes.
If you like having the latest and greatest, and are willing to accept the risks that go along with that (there's a reason "cutting edge" became "bleeding edge," after all), Fedora is a good choice. If you want a production OS, you shouldn't even consider it. You should instead go with RHEL, one of the free rebuilds like CentOS, Debian, etc.
Um, CENTOS is just Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat won't release binary RHEL ISO's for free, but because of the GPL they have to provide source. So they do. Then CENTOS scrapes off the "Red Hat" logo, recompiles that source, and ships it as CENTOS.
You're still using Red Hat.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I meant to type is "more leet" but I couldn't remeber if it was l337 or not.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
1. Red Hat is not abandoning Fedora Core. They had plans to create a nonprofit foundation to run Fedora, but those plans didn't work out.
2. CentOS works just like Red Hat because it's literally a clone of Red Hat. They take the open source RPMS from RHEL, remove or replace anything trademarked or non-redistributable, point updates to their own servers and rebuild. The result is a Linux distro with the same structure, library versions and software set as RHEL.
The reason Red Hat isn't mentioned by name on CentOS' website anymore is that RH's lawyers called them up and insisted they remove the trademarks. So now whenever Red Hat is mentioned on the website, they refer to it as "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor."
People are giving up on Redhat
These numbers beg to differ. People have a habit of projecting their personal opinions, or what might work for an enthusiast desktop/server, on the rest of the professional world. In fact, the professional Linux world has pretty much two players: Red Hat and Novell, and despite what Distrowatch rankings might imply, Red Hat has been consolidating its lead.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
I just love it when the MS astroturfers around here (ACs all) tell me that the world I live, breathe, and work in every day is simply not possible. It was impossible 11 or 12 years ago, when I first started using Slackware Linux, it was impossible 3 years ago, when I finally wiped the Windows partition off of my last dual-boot machine, and it's impossible now that I'm running FC4 exclusively. Yes sir, the end is near, armageddon for FOSS is just around the corner. Better pony up for summa them MS licenses and knuckle under to those EULAs again while there's still time! Oh, the humanity!
The progress made in the FOSS world (and Linux in particular) since I first encountered it is nothing short of stunning, and I have no doubt that you would have insisted back then on the "impossibility" of what we all can take for granted today. And don't underestimate how much nastier Microsoft and other proprietary vendors would be to deal with if it weren't for the threat of FOSS.
As is often the case, I read versions of reality here that repeatedly bear no resemblance to my actual experience. I've only very rarely had any problems at all with FC or any of the other Linux distros I've used, and what problems have come up I could resolve quickly myself with nothing more than a Google search. I'm sure there are bugs I have yet to encounter, but I'm confident that I'll be able to deal with those the same way.
Perhaps I'm doing something wrong?
Hardly a fair comparison - if all you installed on the Fedora system was what was required to run a web server and skipped all the GUI stuff, it would probably come close in terms of the time requirement.
As much as I've been disappointed with Fedora (it panics on i915 and i945 chipsets. Other distributions don't) I liked that RedHat was going to spin it off into an independent foundation and it was going to become a more stable distribution. Why? Because variety is good, and competition is important, even in, er, nay, ESPECIALLY in the open source "market"
I've disliked RedHat ever since they killed off the desktop distribution, but I'm sad to see their greed destroy what Fedora might have become, before it really had any chance to move forward.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The Fedora Foundation was never meant to be "an autonomous, nonprofit foundation to manage the Fedora project". It was meant to be an independent patent holding entity which would defend Free Software from patent infringement suits. The article has it all wrong, even though it's very clearly stated in the open letter to which they link.
There's a lot of that going around. It seems people get through "Fedora" and assume they know what the next word is going to be.
People who don't read the article? Standard for Slashdot.
People who don't read the summary? Rare, but I can see it happening.
But people who don't read the headline? That seems silly, even for this place.
Indeed. Even the trolls can't keep track of what they said.
I didn't say the `distro was any good'. I was countering the poorly thought out `I'm sorry but everything is Ubuntu nowadays' claim you made.
Sorry, but NOT everything is Ubuntu nowadays. Sure, it might be growing rapidly, and might be the most popular distribution now, but NOT everything is Ubuntu.
They are not ALL switching to Ubuntu. Many, maybe, but not ALL. Don't they teach simple logic in school nowadays?
You must do different things with your systems than I do on mine. I boot rarely enough that I don't really care how long it takes (and I just checked my other `fast' computer ... 35 seconds, from the moment that grub started loading the kernel to the time that the gdm login screen appeared. Just how fast do you want it to be? Perhaps Ubuntu can do that in 25 seconds (warning: made up number) but if so ... who cares?) and I only average a few minutes on `package management' per week. A much bigger issue is how quickly my applications come up and run, and (a much smaller issue) how quickly I can get a given application installed if I need it (package management, but yum makes that very quick and easy), and I'm very happy with that.
Yes, apparantly your version of `ugly' is very different from that of the rest of the world. I've found fvwm to be perfectly functional, and xfce was as well when I tried it. I've looked at the default window manager that Fedora Core gives you, and it's very `pretty' (read: eye candy, opposite of `ugly' for most people) and seemed functional enough to me, but I didn't really care for it. Same for KDE, though it's less `pretty'.
The functionality of fvwm is just fine, thank you. (It does lack eye candy, however -- I won't deny that.) Of course, it's not installed with Fedora Core -- I had to compile it myself -- so it's probably not a good thing to whine about when talking about FC.
And perhaps I wasn't clear enough -- I've found that 1) Windows XP is plenty fast, even on the slow hardware of that laptop, and 2) Fedora Core was similarly fast. Boot time is a bigger issue on the laptop, as it's booted up more often, but even so, it's fast enough. And even looking at boot times, starting from when grub loads the kernel, up to the gdm login screen is 73 seconds. For XP, it's 40 seconds -- so yes, Windows boots faster. But I don't care much about how fast the system boots -- I care about how usable it is, and both FC and XP are plenty usable. (Note that XP does a lot more stuff after the login screen appears -- there's a minute or two after you've logged in where the system is dog slow because it's doing ... something ... and pounding on the disk. So they've just delayed some of the bootup activities, which seems a good trade-off to me for a desktop system.)
`Works fine' implies some amount of performance. Even if every function works properly, if it takes 8x as long as one would expect it t
Other niggles: There is no support for the Pentium 2, 3 or 4 architectures. RPM is configured to reject anything with an arch above i686, you have to instruct it to specifically ignore architectures for RPMs. It's simply a case of modifying the arch compatiblity test, but they haven't done that.
(I know, most of the code won't change, but it would be nice if they made the effort to compile to architectures people use in practice. Since they've already got an "unsupported" unit, it would also be possible for them to rig up cross-compilers to most of the standard architectures and make an "experimental" distro for a bunch of platforms. Linuxfromscratch is good, but tedious.)
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)
That Fedora would die. My bad, back to dependency hell :) And to think that Oracle, cherished partner, only needs 20 steps to get that god awful java installer going... Well, you can't blame me for hoping.
And about the article, pfft, I'm on slashdot, I don't RTFA :D
In what way did they say, "piss off" to the Open Source community?
As you say you "wouldn't look for anything free from Red Hat," it sounds like you think they've discontinued Fedora Core. This, in turn, implies that you have yet to read the entire headline (never mind the summary or the article).
Not going to bash you because frankly, Redhat support sucks. Badly. I'm even surprised someone opened the parents ticket because I can't even seem to get that privledge. A one time fee is one thing but $500+ a year per server is just a cash grab I am no longer being a part of. Thinking you are getting "support" or a company to fall back on (ie blame) when you buy Redhat is bull.
Look into using CentOS, that's what I've been moving our servers to. We are down to 8 that use RHEL only because the sub is still active.
For the sake of completeness, here is a link to the *full text* of the email that was sent to the fedora-lists with the Foundation announcement.
A pril/msg01022.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2006-
People are giving up on Redhat... I used their products from the 6.x days to 9.0... if I were to ever prefessionally recommend any Linux flavors, they'd be Gentoo and the free Redhat Enterprise clones (Whitebox, etc.).
I called this back when Redhat dropped its free desktop Linux.
If the linux hackers arn't using it at home, they won't bring it into work.
There's no place like ~/
"No commercial company can sustain that amount of development and give the product away. Period. Time will prove this correct.
I just love it when the MS astroturfers around here (ACs all) tell me that the world I live, breathe, and work in every day is simply not possible."
Are you in fact a commercial company that has been giving away your products for free for several decades?
The previous post's claim was that devoting R&D money to deveoping products that you give away for free is an unsustainable long-term business model. I'm not sure that I agree, time will tell, but it has nothing to do with whether an individual person like you or me can happily *use* those free products.
And so are many of us. That's how Windows made it into the workplace, everyone already knew it from home. If there were only more games for Ubuntu it's enterprise future would be certain.
I'm not sure I agree with you there.
I think Windows became the standard home OS because it was the standard business OS, and it became that because of the partnership between IBM and MS. A lot of people who had the money to buy PCs when they were new (and far more expensive than they are now, relatively) went out and bought Compaq clones of the machines they were familiar with at the office.
If what you say is true, than the Apple II would have become the enterprise standard microcomputer, because it was practically the standard-issue home computer in the early 80s. But companies bought IBM, MS-DOS based PCs by the bushel-basket, and once the clones came out this had a trickle-down effect to the home market that pushed out Apple. (There was also the issue of pricing.)
I think you'd have to rewrite a lot of history if your hypothesis of the home market driving the enterprise one was correct. I think it's generally almost always the other way around, although I suppose you could argue that this might change in the future.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Slashdot: New for nerds, stuff that matters.
Sometimes I wonder how low the standards for nerdom has gone. Most top-level comments here are the same old "I don't like Fedora (I like so-and-so)" comments disguised to sound like there was a lot of wisdom in it. Heck, some don't even go to the trouble of making their comments look smart. Many of the RedHat/Fedora detractors either a) don't reference the actual article, or b) spout utter nonsense not even backed by passable facts (or both).
For goodness sake, could the nerds be smarter and make comments that are more constructive. Where's the intelligence? People just sound like whiners.
I spent a year on FC3 banging it hard with development, new code builds, rebuilds, competing code bases, competing Yum repos, dependency Hell chewing gum fixes, and still managed to do all sorts of email, doc writing, newsgroup browsing, video watching and transcoding, audio file listening and cleanup, everything you'd do on the net with Windows. Even got my USB webcam working on it easy. Never broke it totally. Managed to fark it when I used the partition utility from System Commander to move and resize the ext3 partition. Then parted and fsck couldn't do jack with it. Hardly Fedora's problem. Had I used parted to begin with, it probably would have worked fine.
FC5 was a pain to install, refusing to do a graphical install no matter what command I used to force it, and booted to run level 3 and made me edit inittab to get it to boot the gui.
Ubuntu was quick enough, but I'm not a fan of Debian anything, so I keep that in a VMWare sandbox on a Windows workstation.
I'll go with Fedora for personal messing around. Red Hat for production.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
The last time I went through rpm hell was in the days of Redhat 7 or 8. apt-4-rpm and yum have completely eliminated rpm hell for years now.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Touché.
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
1. Red Hat is not abandoning Fedora Core. They had plans to create a nonprofit foundation to run Fedora, but those plans didn't work out.
RTFA. The Fedora Foundation was supposed to be a NPO to "own" patents developed for the technologies that Fedora/Linux/RedHat was wanting to keep "open" for the community. It has NOTHING to do with the OS project itself. Your Fedora Core is perfectly safe and not even affected by this.
The reason Red Hat isn't mentioned by name on CentOS' website anymore is that RH's lawyers called them up and insisted they remove the trademarks. So now whenever Red Hat is mentioned on the website, they refer to it as "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor."
Understandable.
"RedHat Support, how may I help you?" "Yeah, I'm running CentOS..." "Wait, that is not our product." "What? Don't #%@!$%@ me, buddy, it says so right on their site!!!!" "Well, it's not us, we can't guarantee it, and we certainly aren't going to spend time and money supporting something that isn't tested by our QA teams."
Makes sense to me. Call me crazy.
One of the other motivations behind the Fedora Foundation was for legal standing. Just like the FSF makes contributors sign over their rights so that there is one entity in control of all the copyrights, the Fedora Foundation was going to serve that purpose for Fedora. The problem being that the Fedora Documentation is released under a very liberal license, no sense on signing over there, the Core and Extra repositories are collections of projects coded by other entities (such as Red Hat, Novell, or individual contributors), so standing doesn't make sense there, and for specific Fedora projects like the Fedora Directory Server, Red Hat bought and open sourced all of that source code so Red Hat has the standing for the time being. There is no purpose for starting the Fedora Foundation to cover legal issues like "standing" because it is a non-issue for Fedora right now. Fedora has access to all of Red Hat's lawyers, but as a separate foundation, they'd need to fund their own lawyers and track many other expenses. Just because its non-profit doesn't mean those problems go away.
And this one was the real killer, a non-profit needs to have 33% of its revenue come from public donations (thats how you prove you're benfitting the public). Red Hat dumps a ton of money into Fedora, but here is an excerpt of things they'd have to track from the email:
To sum it up, Red Hat wants to keep dumping more money into Fedora to make it even better, but if the Fedora Foundation was created then every dollar Red Hat put into Fedora would be another 30 cents that needs to be raised through charitable donations. Essentially, putting more money into t
Maybe, just maybe, you should read the e-mail rather than the sensationalist headline. It is nothing like the headline/summary are saying.
Regards,
Steve
Simple QA at best is all you can hope for, not a year of open beta.
No, you surely can't
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Why yes, yes I do:
Right here.
[/shameless self-promotion]
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
I don't want to start a flame war, but that isn't something I worry about with MS. Not that there isn't an occasional problem, but significantly less of a chance for problems than in OSS. And that is because a huge amount of time and money is spent insuring every product runs out of the box.
I can only imagine 3 possibilities:
* You live in a fairy land I have no access to
* You have no experience with MS software
* You are a paid MS astroturfer
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
The reason for the installation is OpenNMS. It is an XML/Java based app. It takes days just to track down compatible versions of RPMs to make it work. Then you have to deal with the "no two linuxes are alike as far as where the files are" problems.
On their website, OpenNMS offers downloads for the following OSes:
CentOS 3, 4: rpm
Debian Woody, Sarge, Sid: deb
Fedora Core 1-10: rpm
Mandrake 8, 9.2, 10: rpm
RedHat 7-9, RHEL 3, 4: rpm
Solaris 8, 9, 10: gz
SuSE 8, 9, 10: rpm
Plus source in tar.gz
I find that actually pretty impressive. If the packages they create for the distros don't work, contact OpenNMS. Their software is GPL, so there should be no problem creating working packages distributable by the distros themselves if they choose. (Ubuntu Dapper at least has none)
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
When I do a "yum -y update" does that mean I probably will have a broken system after a fresh distro install?
"Yum has a nice man page that explains the other options. Unfortunately on the nw-9 base image we forgot to include the "man" program for displaying man pages.
There's no accounting for this sort of incompetence.
KFG
No, but I've written a lot of closed code that is no longer useful to anybody because the companies that owned it folded. The point is that we don't have to rely on any one company - or any commercial company at all, for that matter - to keep the FOSS coming and improving. It's nice that some companies can build a business model around it, but I'm certainly not depending on that.
Uh, how was that a troll? Let me guess: some RedHat suit has mod points today.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
A nit, if I may. Fedora is not "RHEL testing" at all. Fedora (Core and especially Fedora Extras) is an open development project with everything and the kitchen sink. Some of the improvements and other interesting bits are lifted from Fedora and ported into the next RHEL, but Fedora stands on its own as a distro.
-- Moderation in all things, exceptions to all rules --
I'm not sure what your point is? You call me a liar, but then confirm what I said - the need to make the stuff work yourself. Make up your mind. Which one did you download and install and it "just worked"? None? then troll someone else asshole.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
I point out obvious contradictions in someone's argument and get modded flamebait? What gives? (I know, I know...I must be new here.)
Don't you have someone you'd die for?
$YOUR_DISTRO sucks and no one should use it. $MY_DISTRO is much superior in every regard.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
You may nit away but RHEL 3 was essentially RH 9. RHEL 4 is essentially Fedora Core 3. RHEL 5 will likely essentially be FC 6 or so... The base software is the same. Bug fixes, support, ISV certification etc. are the value of RHEL.
The Debian nomenclature doesn't quite work as I originally indicated, but it is pretty close.
FC is closer to a test for RHEL than some people like to consider. A very polished, useable, great test.
Consider the following from the fedoraproject.org website:
"Why should I pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux when Fedora Core is free? What is the relationship between Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux?
Both Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are open source. Fedora Core is a community project and serves as the base platform on which RHEL is built. The cost of RHEL comes from the subscription, which provides assorted certifications and support for additional architectures, as well as 7 years of enterprise support. Red Hat also enhances its RHEL offerings with additional software and with certification programs. Despite the misinformation that others spread, the base RHEL distribution is open source, and the complete source code can always be downloaded from [WWW] Red Hat's FTP servers. "
At install time, the documentation says you can install XFS and reiserfs by: boot: linux xfs boot: linux reiserfs reiserfs isn't compatible with selinux
Don't forget Cygwin and eCos!
Okay, they aren't Linux, but Cygwin is fantastic for a unix geek stuck on Windows, and while I haven't had occasion to need or try eCos it sounds like a really nifty project.
I dislike *using* RedHat OS'es because I don't like their admin tools (don't get along with hand-editing; don't seem to do what I want quickly) or their package manager (too much dependency hell) I have no problem with the company and am glad it's giving so much code to the community.
How does it feel to be as ignorant as you?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
It's ok, apperently not many people here bother to read anything to do with Fedora, not sure why.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Does that mean that mono will be available in fc6?
fedora = red hat enterprise beta ..don't do their beta testing for them for free!!!!
Of course, for those who bothered to read RedHat's open letter, they will know that Fedora will continue to live on, "business as usual" as far as the average user is concerned. All that's changed is the organisational/support structure that RedHat has been providing which deals with open source and which serves as a central point for all those open source patents. It hasn't worked, so they're going for a simpler approach.
Yes, I'm oversimplifying, and generalising, so sue me for having a contrary view. Too many people seem to be doing just the opposite... </rant>
As for RedHat trying to do anything evil... would anybody who reckons they are like to try to guess how many patches they've contributed just to the Linux kernel tree as a result of bug reports for their enterprise products, say in the last year? Anyone?
RHEL does not compete against freely distributed software, otherwise CentOS and others would have killed it off already
RHEL competes with other vendor supported *nix's and windows server editions.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
if you are using any normal linux in a safety critical environment you are an idiot, and should be arrested for reckless endangerment.
there are operating systems designed for maximum reliability and fault tolerance hardware wise. unless designed for fault tolerance a physical failure in the device could have a catastrophic effect far worse than sudden complete failure
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
You might be interested in BLAG Linux. It's Fedora without all the bloat, and aimed at the desktop user.
http://www.blagblagblag.org/
Thanks,
Stephen Clement
s.clementmonkey@sympatico.ca, remove the 'monkey'.
One thing that's really cool about Linux is that if you don't like one particular distribution, there are a dozen or so competing distributions that you can use instead. Now I personally like Fedora and RedHat. I've comfortable with the tools and quality of the distribution. Yet someone I know, who's a Linux guru, prefers Ubuntu. Another one prefers Gentoo. And there are arguments for Slack or SuSe, Mandriva, Debian, DSL, and what have you. If you don't like it, move on to another distribution. It's really that simple. If this business model doesn't work for Fedora/RedHat, then so be it.
And you know what? I'm really sick of people who don't contribute anything but hot air jawing on about how offended they are about this change. Whatever the distro, they are some damn fine programs available for Linux that don't cost a cent except for maybe a CD or some bandwidth charges. Having to purchase software for my small business only makes me appreciate the hard work of the community -- RedHat and Fedora included -- much more.
I don't see how calling someone who is from India an "indian" could be interpreted as a racist remark - you fat asshat american socialy correct bullshit spewing nazi :)
Oh yeah - and the 14th tech I opened a case with - the one that read the content and understood english - forwarded it to engineering and had the patch back to me in less than 6hrs. Its the first 13 idiots that delayed me a month in getting an official RHN patched set of samba RPMs.
However, we push Postgresql whenever we get the chance, as it gets the job done for most of our needs. In fact, the primary reason we haven't totally ditched Oracle is more for political face-saving of the managers who wrote the huge check for Oracle ("You paid *how* much?!? We could have deployed a *dozen* beefier servers running Postgres for the cost of the 2 Oracle boxes you bought."). Our apps are mostly coded in-house, so there's not much to gain by going with a commercial DB.
As far as the "time sponge" qualities of emerge, I can't argue the point too much. The FreeBSD ports collection can suffer the same thing (especially for the desktop -- KDE and OpenOffice being the two big offenders for long compile times). I like to look for the silver lining, and consider the source builds a good burn-in for new systems (in addition to bonnie++ and memtest86).
To Redhat's credit, I do miss kickstart installations. That is a nice feature. (Yes, I know they bit this feature from Sun's jumpstart.) I understand that FreeBSD's "sysinstall" can be automated, but I haven't seriously dug into it yet.
Method of processing duck feet
Once again - I don't see how calling someone who is from India an "indian" could be interpreted as a racist remark.
So I take it your a curry loving asshat scab that has forgotten Americans created all the IT jobs you ignorant foreign scab fucks are just now getting educated enough to steal away from us.
> ...their package manager (too much dependency hell)....
You are either basing that on five year old experiences (which were horrible, I was there too) or not using the right tool for the job. These days only real propeller spinners need to manually invoke rpm. Up2Date and Yum take all the dependecy hell out of package manangement. Using rpm manually in this day would make about as much sense as a Debian user using dpkg manually instead of apt-get.
And no, apt-get isn't the answer despite people continuing to attempt to hammer it into RH based distros. As long as you stick to i386 it sorta works but it doesn't deal with bi-arch at all so if you load up an x86_64 machine you will soon have to abandon apt. Yum and Up2Date work though.
Democrat delenda est
It's the pain and suffering endured when trying to add an app to an RPM-based system that isn't part of the distribution or the few 3rd party places that support your platform (freshrpms, dag, etc.).
I often find it easier to compile and install from the raw tarball than fight with RPMs that aren't in the mainline distro.
My latest foray w/ FC5, for example, had me frustrated with my inability to get pine installed via RPM, either binary or source RPM. I'm sure I missed some obscure "rpmbuild" flag or repository option in the yum conf file, but I just couldn't get the damn thing installed. I don't care *what* anybody else says, if it's a src.rpm file, it should "just work" with an RPM-based system.
Granted, ports and portage aren't perfect. Sometimes ports aren't well maintained (or not at all -- but not everything is rolled into RPMs, either), and I must resort to a tarball installation. I just don't like dealing with RPMs anymore. I worked with them for 5 year at my last job, and after using freebsd/ports, I avoid them whenever possible.
Method of processing duck feet
You forgot some of the most important ones, namely they coded and maintain the entire 2.6 linux CPU Scheduler and the 2.6 Virtual Memory Manager. Yes, you can contribute a large part of 2.6's great performance to Red Hat. They also wanted an open source Java implementation so they started GCJ to compile java code natively. Open Source runs all the down from the top to bottom at Red Hat, even one of their VP's is the guy who originally coded the GNU C++ compiler. Here are two non-complete lists of other projects Red Hat either entirely codes and maintains, or contributes large portions of code to, keep in mind that they don't list everything: Sourceware Projects and Red Hat Contributions. This move by Red Hat has been given a bad spin by those reporting it, the Fedora Foundation's expenses and other requirements would have killed off Fedora, if anyone read the e-mail they'd see that as it is all clearly laid out including some numbers. Its good to see not everyone is buying into the sensationalist headlines and /. trolls though.
Regards,
Steve
Personally, I think Redhat should scrap RPM, adopt DEB as a package format, and position themselves as a support agent for Debian or their own flavour (ie, validated stable packages for enterprise, or whatever) of it.
Why waste time/money on developing Fedora that could better spent on fixing bugs in / consolidating Debian?
My 2c anyway... I used redhat 4-1 - 6.2 previously before testing out Core 4, Debian / Slackware / FreeBSD between them...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
"As far as the "time sponge" qualities of emerge, I can't argue the point too much. The FreeBSD ports collection can suffer the same thing (especially for the desktop -- KDE and OpenOffice being the two big offenders for long compile times). I like to look for the silver lining, and consider the source builds a good burn-in for new systems (in addition to bonnie++ and memtest86)."
Couldn't you just do 'make package' when installing ports, and tell portupgrade on one machine to make packages of everything when it runs and then have all of your other boxes grab packages via and internal NFS share, or FTP server?
As for Gentoo, I'm clueless about weather this could work as I only have experience with the BSDs, but it seems logical that it could as long as Gentoo supports the building binary package like FreeBSD does.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
You mention economics.
You are right, but you miss the point that naturally follows:
Because the operating system market is held hostage to a monopolist, the only market reaction left to those who want to compete, is to give a product away free, or at greatly reduced cost.
This removes the barrier of entry to new players who may want to innovate in the operating system market. We are now seeing the divergence of distributions in features, intended use, and many other properties.
What will we see in the future, I predict that Apple's model of development will be copied by those trying to do a "Desktop Linux":
1. Open source core OS, much like Darwin which is open source.
2. User interface and selected apps as closed source.
I think FOSS will remain dominant in the server space, because there is money to be made in the support arena. However in the desktop space a hybrid model will emerge where FOSS and non-FOSS will merge creating both a commercial opportunity for developers, and a compelling product (or range of products) for consumers.
Redhat, who supplies all of the OS for my servers, has a compelling model in the server space and are making money- as is IBM. FOSS as a business model is not only compelling, but profitable. It has not reached it's potential.
Redhat effectively taking back control of Fedora appears to me to be of little or no impact to where FOSS is going. After all, they have to bow to market realities. If they make their userbase angry, they'll lose business to other distributions with more liberal policies.
The only way you will see FOSS return a mostly "hobby OS" is of the market corrects to the point where there are multple OS choices in the same market segment. Until then, FOSS will continue to pressure commercial software in the market, and gain momentum with users and admins.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
I think it is closer to Rawhide -> experimental, FC -> unstable, RHEL -> testing, to be honest.
Wow, they did it again - it's history all over again.. free software from RedHat suddenly switches to a fee-based product once it gains ground and popularity.. And us non the wiser :)
RedHat launched Fedora at the same time it killed the idea of internally developing a desktop-ready Linux distro. Fedora - sponsored by the community - was meant to rise up and take control of the desktop, leaving RedHat to concentrate on the more lucrative enterprise / server market.
Unfortunately, Fedora hasn't got a tenth the marketshare of the Debian-inspired upstart, Ubuntu.
RedHat's decision to take more direct control of the Fedora project is a tacit acknowledgement that its strategy of ignoring the desktop in an effort to succeed there has failed. It is apparent that RedHat now knows that in order to win the desktop, you actually have to concentrate on it, nurture it, and grow it as if you mean it.
I think it is important to realize that the email states that one of the primary reasons for switching away from the foundation and back to a project is that the foundation would eventually limit how many resources (money, bandwidth, etc.) Redhat could contribute to Fedora. This is a problem, because Redhat does not want to cut back on Fedora, but rather increase contributions.
> Here's another funny thing: if you choose to incorporate as a non-profit entity in the United States, then you subject yourself to a number of rigorous IRS tax tests. One of these tests is the "public support test." If you say you're a public charity, well by golly, you have to prove it. If, within four years, you aren't collecting fully one third of your money from public sources, then you're not actually a public charity.
[snip]
> As an intellectual exercise, let's ignore all of those numbers for now except for bandwidth.
[snip]
> So let's take a conservative guess and say that the bandwidth cost for distributing Fedora comes to $1.5 million a year. Yes, even though we have BitTorrent trackers and Fedora mirror sites worldwide.
>
> That means that a public Fedora Foundation would have to raise $750k in public funds -- remember the one-third public support test -- every single year, just to pay for *bandwidth*, assuming no growth and no other expenses.
>
> So what would happen, under such a scenario, if Red Hat were to decide to spend more money on Fedora? Because that's exactly what Red Hat wants to do.
Not to be confused with:
U-bum-u -- Linux for *sshats.
Obligatory on-topic remark: Ubuntu is not just the "distro of the week" in comparison with Red Hat. The guy who said that earlier needs to try U-bum-u.
You call me a liar, but then confirm what I said - the need to make the stuff work yourself. Make up your mind. Which one did you download and install and it "just worked"
:)
You said in the GP: 'It takes days just to track down compatible versions of RPMs to make it work. Then you have to deal with the "no two linuxes are alike as far as where the files are" problems'
You don't express yourself very clearly here, but you can only mean that it is hard to find an installer package of OpenNMS itself, or that it's hard to find its dependencies. Finding the package itself obviously is not hard, since they are all on the site. Finding the dependencies should be either a no brainer or simple for the supported distributions if the OpenNMS packages work.
I have no idea if the packages work, but there is no reason why they shouldn't. That's why I said that if they don't, you should inform the OpenNMS guys. "There is no one that ensures that stuff works" is simply not true, as others have pointed out in this thread: the distros do that. OpenNMS should work with them.
As for trolling, I don't. It's just that you wrote so many false things in this one post that I kinda flew off the handle. If I look at the thread, I'm not the only one. Oh, well, you're my freak no anyway
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Complete FUD. Development on Fedora tomorrow will continue exactly like it did yesterday.
And yet if you consider their 2005 Balance Sheets:
Total Current Assets:
RHat 385,253,000 vs NOVL 2,009,053,000
Total Assets:
RHat 1,134,036, vs NOVL 2,761,858 (where Red Hat's long term investments make up somewhat)
Total Current Liabilities
RHat 139,199,000 vs NOVL 752,930,000
Total Liabilities
RHat 772,365,000 vs NOVL 1,366,022,000
Total Stockholder Equity
RHat 361,671,000 vs NOVL 1,386,486,000
Note the difference between market cap and Stockholder Equity (which is based on book value rather than market value). All I'm suggesting is that it isn't as simple as comparing market caps. Consider also the cash flows:
Net Income
RHat 45,426,000 vs NOVL 376,722,000
Total Cash Flow From Operating Activities
RHat 122,217,000 vs NOVL 500,414,000
Change In Cash and Cash Equivalents
RHat ($321,135,000) vs NOVL $376,834,000
It doesn't look like either is ready to purchase the other, but suggesting that Red Hat is "Red Hat is worth about 60% more than Novell" is perhaps naive. It is surely easier to imagine Novell buying Red Hat in the future than the other way around.
eh? Most RPMs in FC and RHEL packages are supplied as .i386.rpms, which are optimized for pentium4, but using only i386 instructions. This is because due to the pentium4 architecture's long pipelines, non-optimal instruction ordering hurts performance a lot. For the architectures in between, it's less critical, and running pentium4-optimized binaries on a Pentium 2 is no usually terribly harmful. For exceptional components (the kernel, glibc, openssl libraries), i686.rpms are supplied as well as the i386.rpms. These are also pentium4-optmized, but use the entire i686 instruction set (including CMOV, which, as an aside is why these won't work on some other non-Intel i686 architectures).
Unless you've done extensive profiling, I doubt you have any solid evidence to indicate that rebuilding other chunks of the OS in ways different to the above will result in significant performance gains. If you have, present your evidence to the distro vendors and the community, and I'm sure they'll listen, willingly or not. :-)
It seems to me Debian is the only big community driven distro left on the field (Gentoo has a big audience but, somehow, I feel the requisite to recompile everything from source limit its adoption)
I hope the debian benefits from the contribute of those that do not want to support RadHat enterprise (a debian based scientific distro, to superseed the rh7.3 based we have now (SL) would be great).
I have been using the stable release for a long time. When I felt packages were becoming too old I swtched to debian unstable and lo! the only distro more up-to-date (that I can think of) is gentoo but my packages are already compiled; updating a program is just a command away (apt-get, of course), and I did not experience any critical bug that apt-listbugs did not warn me before the installation.
I work daily in a mixed windows/unix environment and I have never had an issue mounting samba filesystems or operating with printers (but maybe you need something more complex).
Are you really talking of _your_ experience or just because you have heard "debian is oooold". Give debian a fair chance, it's not manna from heaven but it's worth a try.
This is FC3, because FC5 is a brand new release, but :
[gowen@localhost] sudo yum install pine
Setting up Install Process
Setting up Repos
<snip due to lameness filter>
Reading repository metadata in from local files
dries : 3312/3312
dag : 4359/4359
updates-re: 910/910
legacy-bas: 1652/1652
extras : 2297/2297
legacy-upd: 742/742
base : 2622/2622
Parsing package install arguments
Resolving Dependencies
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Downloading header for pine to pack into transaction set.
pine-4.64-1.1.fc3.rf.i386 100% 13 kB 00:00
---> Package pine.i386 0:4.64-1.1.fc3.rf set to be updated
--> Running transaction check
Dependencies Resolved
Transaction Listing:
Install: pine.i386 0:4.64-1.1.fc3.rf - dag
Total download size: 4.6 M
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
(1/1): pine-4.64-1.1.fc3. 100% 4.6 MB 00:20
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
Installing: pine 100 % done 1/1
Installed: pine.i386 0:4.64-1.1.fc3.rf
Complete!
There's only one word for that : hellish
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
If you're running into RPM dependency hell, you're doing it wrong. For years now, RedHat has included up2date (and with Fedora, yum) which does all the dependency resolution for you. In FC5 there's even a gui tool where you just click on the package and it does everything for you (downloads, resolves dependencies) and it's a single command to add other software repositories such as Livna to get things like DVD players and MP3 players.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
You _hugely_ underestimate what RedHat does for the community. From a previous comment, it's not just Xen, but these are the projects where RedHat is probably THE main contributor:
[quote previous poster]
- gcc
- glibc
- SELinux
- udev
- Xen (which you mentioned)
- GNOME
- Many other parts of the kernel
- X.org
- Fedora Directory Server (bought for millions, open sourced, development continues)
- NetworkManager
- Dogtail
- Open Source Java (gcj and Classpath)
- Internationalization (Input Methods, Translation, Localization, etc.)
[end quote]
RedHat in particular spend a great deal of money improving gcc. Even if you use BSD rather than Linux, this is extremely important to you. Without a good compiler we are ALL stuffed, and RedHat contributes greatly to gcc. RedHat also contributes greatly to Gnome, putting highly paid developers onto the Gnome project.
If you don't like RedHat very much you probably aren't that well informed about just how much they contribute. Their contributions directly help their competitors, too.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
In any case with a *single command* you can add the Livna repository, which lets you install DVD players, MP3 players, nVidia 3D drivers, ATi 3D drivers using either the Fedora Core 5 GUI software tool or using yum in a terminal. No desktop Fedora user should be without the Livna yum repository.
Personally, I find FC5 to be one of the best development desktop distributions around. Yes, I've used Ubuntu and it's nice - but for a development desktop, nothing I've used comes close to Fedora Core 5. Not even Windows.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I might move my SuSE10 environment to Kubuntu sometime in the future but first I would have to make sure that Oracle 9i and 10g are useable (Oracle is not supported on SuSE9/10 but it can be convinced to install and run). SuSE isn't making it easier, to be able to install Oracle on SuSE9 or 10, you need the old GCC package, which SuSE doesn't hand out, in source or binary, unless you have your support account with them (read you already purchased an SLES licence). If you have one of these licences, you wouldn't be installing SuSE10 either, unless you are a hard core user. Alternatively, you can do what I usually do, download GCC from GNU and recompile. Anyway, I digress.
The reason there are so many distributions is because there are so many solutions to the same problem: Having a nice environment to work with.
LOL - the reason that's so funny is because my girlfriend is an indian
(one of the hotel indians, not a tech scab)
Right, like permanently destroy cdrom hardware, or destroy all your data during partitioning - two problems that have cropped up in FC releases. Redhat is quickly shaping up to be the Microsoft of the Linux world, at least in terms of quality, or lack thereof.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"I dislike *using* RedHat OS'es because I don't like their admin tools (don't get along with hand-editing"
/etc.
What you probably don't notize is that what you really dislike from Red Hat is that it has managed to be not "open" anymore. Of course the software is still open source-licensed but, as you yourself said, when you try to really *use* it, beyond the tone of redhat wizards and admin tools, you are pissed off; if you try to patch and recompile some tool you need, you loose "certificality" (whatever it means), so while its software is still open source, the distribution as a whole is much like Microsoft's "shared source": you can see it but, behold, you can't touch it.
"I have no problem with the company"
What you probably don't notize is that your disgust for the way Red Hat-the distribution works comes directly and unavoidingly because of the fact that Red Hat-the company *is* a sucessfull company. Being a company it is obvious it couldn't offer you support for whatever hack you migth do to the software they bundle; being a company they try really hard to reach as most niches as it can, and the biggest one is, obviously, that of Windows, and if taking the Windows niche means putting a lot of graphical wizards to ease things to the tone of mouse-driven sysadmins over there, so be it, even if that means you will never be able to use vi again on any file under
The most major one (with no fix that I'm aware of) is that starting a new GUI program from a terminal window doesn't give focus to the new program. This makes things like xmame -fullscreen impossible to use.
The installation problems that I ran into include the fact that Privoxy doesn't update properly between FC4 and FC5 (it crashes on start until you uninstall Privoxy and reinstall it from scratch), and Squid loses its configuration until you rename squid.conf.rpmnew back to squid.conf. Not large problems, but a bit of a head-scratcher until I figured out what was happening.
Having said that, with the exception of the focus problem listed here I have solved everything else and am most happy with FC5 on this computer.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
"In a professional environment, you'd have a difficult time justifying your decisions using criteria such as 'bloated' and 'sucky'."
I wouldn't. 'Bloated and sucky' means 'error and bug-prone'. 'Error and bug-prone' means 'loosing money-prone', and 'loosing money-prone' means 'Big no-no' in every professional environment (at least when used in reference to making business decisions involving Linux).
"switch to a Debian-based distribution. Debian takes on the accountability for thorough testing and package integration"
And what makes you believe that such "thorough testing and package integration" will be found on other "Debian-based distributions", not being Debian itself?
This is true, but not exactly "user friendly". "User friendly" means having the options in the menu, since all the code has to be present for the options to be usable in the first place. It also means they're still missing many of the other filing systems Linux supports.
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)
Thanks, that's what I thought. Just one note. I don't think distcc would work with the BSD ports systsem as most ports I've run into can handle the multiple (`make -j3`) jobs.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Well, ok but you literally said "You cannot install .." meaning it's
not possible. That's a long way from just not being user friendly.
You seem to be claiming that you can justify using terms like bloated and sucky by *not* using those terms and choosing to use better reasoned and more well-defined terms instead. That was more or less the same point I was trying to make.
You craft a string of equivalences (ostensibly) to show that bloated and sucky obviously mean the same thing as fiscally irresponsible (or as you put it, losing money-prone). I would contend that equally obvious (and much more commonly used) meanings of bloated could be 'has more packages to choose from than I actually need' or 'has too many install CDs'. As for sucky, I'd as easily interpret that to mean 'I am unfamiliar with the idiosyncrasies of this distro' or 'I am biased'.
Don't you have someone you'd die for?
"As for sucky, I'd as easily interpret that to mean 'I am unfamiliar with the idiosyncrasies of this distro' or 'I am biased'."
You could. But not on a "professional environment", since talking about what you don't know is regarded as highly unprofessional in "my professional environment". By bloated I mean unnecessarily overfeatured in an non-organized fashion; by sucky, I mean that it sucks. Both are directly related to "fiscally irresponsible", as you put it.
The most major one (with no fix that I'm aware of) is that starting a new GUI program from a terminal window doesn't give focus to the new program. This makes things like xmame -fullscreen impossible to use.
This is due to Metacity's (the window manager) "experimental strict-focus-approximation feature" recently introduced upstream:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326159
There is a modified Metacity RPM package available for FC5 which has a patch to configure the window focussing behaviour:
http://intgat.tigress.co.uk/rmy/metacity/fc5.html