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Fedora Core 6 Preview
An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this week Jesse Keating announced the availability of Fedora Core 6 Test 1. New items in FC6T1 include Intel Macintosh support (well, mostly), update notification applet, GNOME 2.15, KDE 3.5.3, and the Fedora Core 6 Extras development repository is already available. With FC6T1's availability, Phoronix has published their own preview of this release. The article is focused on an editorial about changes to come for Fedora Core 6, as well as images from Fedora Core 6 Test 1. The next Fedora Core 6 testing release (Test 2) is due out in July, while the final release is due out this September."
I switched to Ubuntu and never looked back. RedHat was cool back in 1998. Now, frankly speaking, Fedora looks ugly.
Yawn...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I started to use fedora a few months ago and really like it. The main problem I find with it is they seem too willing to update too quickly. I was speaking on a forum about the problems I was having (Kernel update 2107 had real problems) I was told "core 5 is very new, it will get more stable over the coming months"... I kind'a feel like they should make core 5 as stable and as good as it can be and keep it going for about a year or two from when it is completely setled. The only reason that I am a little worried is I'm pretty sure yum will update me to core 6 automatically if i forget to "--exclude" everytime I do a update
Still, it is a really lovely distro (I know it sounds like I slagged it off)... but give it a go : D
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Can that be done yet?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Rock and Roll
Do I still need to jump through ridiculous hoops to get mp3 support in rhythmbox and get *any* support in totem?
Out of the box, Totem can't play *anything*.. completely useless.
At least make it like Ubuntu, where I can add a repository that has all the stuff they can't ship in the box.
Red Hat view (or at least did when I was in Raleigh last September) FC as an incubator for RHEL.
I discussed the release frequency and period of support, and they were pretty unsympathetic to the user's point of view. Their requirement is fast turnaround of new releases to ensure a strong test of new technologies / versions of new packages.
This has some upsides, like the multipathing support in RHEL4, Update 3 which means we can finally do away with Veritas on most of our machines. But it can suck for the user.
On one hand it can suck for the user, however, on the other, it's pretty darned nice having the latest release of everything, integrated (mostly) tested and working. True, it's not for everyone - for those people there's RHEL or even Debian. For those of us that like the bleeding edge (in a desktop distro I don't mind, never would I use it for a server though) it's the best thing since sliced bread.
I am NaN
As someone whose been using Fedora since Core 1, this release seems more evolutionary. Even without major changes between releases, the accumulated bug fixes contribute to a desktop that 'works' better and has the functionality I need. We all remember the bad old days of manually mounting your USB peripherals.. well now I have suspend, easy networking (thanks to NetworkManager) and useful stuff like Beagle to play with, so thats quite good progress. This release will be worthwhile just to get the latest of everything, and it looks as if some nice eye-candy will be ready in GNOME 2.16.
I personally would like to see a general reduction in memory usage in GNOME and various apps; it's been moving in the right direction, I hope it stays that way. I believe there is an effort to remove various deprecated libraries to help here.
Bullshit. You probably need to read
man rpm
The ridiculous hoop you have to jump through is to simply type:
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-5.rpm
Why do I have to type something at the command line to get basic multimedia support? Can't they just make a button during the install that you can press to get 'illegal' software. The button could read:
'I want to play mp3 files and I don't care if it's illegal. I take full responsibility for my actions.'
or:
'Software patents don't apply in my country, give me an mp3 player already!'
Why do they make you use the command line? It doesn't make sense.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
I tried upgrading from FC1 to FC5. And guess what? It suceeded.
Throwing my mod points away to respond to this :
I run FC5 at home and Ubuntu, Debian and Mandrake at work. Read this series of reviews of the latest Ubuntu release (6.06), they are not all positive. A significant number say Drake was rushed and not on par with the previous release.
I have tried many distros out there, everyone has their favourite, and in particular Ubuntu is quite good, but there is no clear winner. Most people I read tend to base their impression of Linux on the latest distro they've tried. Usually this shows some improvement over the one they had tried earlier and (incorrectlly) conclude this is due to the distribution being "just better".
In fact the whole of Linux is progressing at a rapid pace. Both Fedora and Ubuntu have quick and frequent release schedules, a large professional and dedicated team, and as a result they are quite solid, but the same is true of many distros out there. I've come to realize that by and large innovations by one distribution quickly permeate all. See the good work of Debian with apt, that of Ubuntu with their automounter and RH's work with sponsoring Gnome and SELinux.
Ubuntu and FC have different, incompatible aims. Ubuntu is not a testing ground for RHEL, they show little interest with SELinux for instance, whereas this is of strategic importance for FC. However strangely perhaps they cover much of the same ground as far as the end-user is concerned.
Saying that one particular distro among the big ones does something "much better" than any other is misinformed. Because of the nature of FOSS, none holds any permanent advantage over the others, as long as they all continue their development efforts.
Redhat hacks KDE beyond the feel and proper use of KDE. Fedora replaces a lot of QT applets with GTK ones to perform a lot of functions. KDEsu is a prime example although there is others.
If you are a KDE fan, than you're being shortchanged if you run Fedora or Redhat products.
SuSE used to be a great product, but 10.1 had so many problems I've lost confidence.
Give Mandrake, Gentoo, Kubuntu a try.
I would like to check this out, but I don't have a spare partition. Is there a live CD of the development snapshot available?
I run Fedora Core (from 2, now at 5) at home. What is this 'RPM Hell' you're talking about?
I just recently updated from 4 to 5 and did some updates and now gnome is totally hosed. My repo list is fairly conservative, updates-released, extras, and livna. I checked on fedora forums last night and apparently it has bitten some more folks as well. What seemed to happen is loss of PNG support (maybe something else as well), which means a lot of icons don't show up and some of the gnome apps simply don't work. It be real, real ugly, I know it is the worst I have seen with any of my linux installs. I'm still finding more stuff that is broken. I think I will be forced to reinstall or go with something else at this point.
I think fast release cycles are *too fast*. Once a year ought to be fast enough. 2-3 releases.....I don't see a need anymore, we have a ton of functionality, what needs to be there is stable and secure functionality. Teh grand supreme fedora overlords council might want to think on that some.
I'm amazed there's no mention of this yet, with all the fuss about XGL and Compiz recently...
The FC development repo (so I assume FC6T1 has it as well) includes AIGLX, a different approach to the accelerated desktop thing. The metacity that comes with Core has support for a few effects (like wobbling windows), but if you want to try the cube and othe compiz goodies, Kristian has an RPM of compiz for AIGLX here. Just install it and voilá: eye candy goodness.
When I went from FC3 to FC4, I was in an excited rush only to be disappointed by some bugs with sound and stuff. I was already accustomed to tweaking and figuring things out, but over the past couple of years, I have grown weary of it and prefer things to just work. As FC5 grew near, I was really hopeful that they learned lessons from the problems of FC4. But somehow, in my continuous updating of my laptop, ATI had finally gotten around to fixing their proprietary driver to allow for suspend to RAM/Disk. I had all but given up on ever having successful hibernation on my laptop, but when I discovered that it worked, I became very excited by the announcement of FC5test#.
I downloaded and installed it on another hard drive. Went straight for suspend and it just worked out of the box flawlessly. I think I might have wet my pants... it was some time ago and my memory is hazy on the details, but there was urination at some point immediately surrounding the event... maybe I closed the lid on my laptop, took a piss and came back to find that the laptop was able to resume where it left off. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was it. Anyway, I decided FC5 wasn't coming fast enough for me.
When FC5 arrived, I was not disappointed in the least. And with only one problem with periodic "yum" updates, FC5 scores an almost perfect record in my opinion.
Now there's FC6 around the corner? Why? I'm REALLY happy with FC5. I don't need FC6. Of course I will upgrade though. FC5 development will slow down and stop eventually. But I doubt I will scramble for FC6 without something really compelling. The improvements from the summary don't indicate anything compelling to me.
As for competing distros? Ubuntu is the name being used most. I still haven't tried it. It's not what I'm used to, and that's reason enough for me... for now. Maybe one day I'll bump into an Ubuntu user with the OS on his laptop and I'll get a demo I can appreciate. But where Fedora Core is concerned, I feel very well supported with RPMs available for everything I can think of. Only on rare occasion do I find myself stealing RPMs built for other distros because it's not available for FC5. And that's mostly due to the "I don't want to get sued" mentality coming from RedHat.
So yeah, that's the only beef I have with Fedora Core -- the "we don't support MP3 because we're scared" thing. Did the patent on GIF run out already? How much time left on MP3?
All of that may be true, but it doesn't answer the question. Will FC6 address the problem of updating. Will it be more seamless, effortless (will I still have to manually install the NTFS kernel mods to access my legacy windoze discs) etc etc. Will this version 'just work'.
Some people just don't seem to understand that hoards of developers hacking away on two or three different distros that are trying to fill the same space is crazy, and that all that duplicated effort is wasted.
To fuller illustrate what I am talking about, Gentoo is sufficiently different for its development to NOT be a waste of time. That is NOT duplicated effort, it is not only worthwhile, but it shows clear demonstrable benefits to its users. Ubuntu and Fedora competing for the same space is ineficient, of no benefit to anyone and actually limits the pace of improvments since effort is duplicated.
Eventually all the many distros out there will die off because the teams that develop them will get old and lose interest in working for niche products. We will eventually be left with a small number of distros that are really distinct and that have very large teams working on them. It is better for the users if this happens sooner rather than later, so that we can reap the benefits of accelerated development and suff that 'just works' now.
Sadly, there are still people who think its acceptable to have to add a repository to Fedora just so that you can play MP3s for example. It is precisely this sort of backwards thinking (remember the people who used to argue that 'no one needs a gui; command line is good enough for everything' where are they now?) that holds back the creation of a 'better than mac' distribution of Linux.
We only need one general use distribution of Linux. Its goal should be that it 'just works' with everything you throw at it. It should have an unambiguous single route to install, update and remove software. It should use one desktop. Nothing should be allowed in it that does not come with comprehensive illustrated documentation....etc etc....
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
The command you are looking for is yum, not rpm.
I've always wondered, why did RedHat go away from RPM to Yum? AFAIK Yum's been usable in its latest versions, but frustration over how unusably slow Yum was in several incarnations of Core is the reason why I stopped using RedHat. Forcing Core to use rpm (and have apt-get available!) stopped being worthwhile for me.
Can someone explain what advantages Yum had over RPM that make it worthwhile putting up with its frustrating sloooo(grind! grind! grind!)ooowness?
Even when Yum became usable, it still seemed pretty darn slow compared to RPM -- so I'm guessing it must do something better, but what that might be has never been clear to me.
I'm still on FC3. So can one go form FC3 to FC6 directly?
Simpy
I share some of your opinions with respect to peoples inpressions of differrent distros. Throw in any new release and you are bound to get better and newer software. That is the way Linux works.
I'm not to sure how Ubuntu fits into this though as my impressions have been very negative with this whole distro. I believe it is highly overrated and it appears that the rest of the commnuity is starting to catch up with that opinion. This from a huge amount of experience with differrent Linux installs going back to before Redhat5 and my attempt to use Ubuntu on a AMD 64 platform. Ubuntu was the worst distro on AMD 64 by a very large margin. When Fedora came out with the new release and AMC 64 support I jumped on it and have been very pleased.
Now I have heard much whining in this thread about the pecularities of Fedora such as the pattened software issues. Frankly I have to say that if you are to stupid to over come that little issue you really need to think about training wheels and Apple computer. On the postive side Fedora allows one to keep abreast of the latest technologies in a number of areas. Whether it be the latest GCC release or native Eclipse or something of similar newnest Fedora gets you there on a stable platform. Not many distros fo this as well as Fedora nor do they cover the breadth of bleeding edge apps and keep things usable.
Not to sound like a sounding board for the Fedora fan club here but I needed to vent. At one time I was trying several distros a month just because I found the whole concept of Linux so compelling and interesting. On my main machine I've always returned to Redhat and now Fedora. That isn't because Fedora is perfect as no distro is, just that they produce a very nice leading edge distro that works well. Maybe some day linux will be so stable that a bleeding edge distro won't make sense, at that time I might change my tune. That day however is very far off into the future.
Dave
Did they put the "Install Everything" button back in yet?
If not, I'm not interested.
When I can apt-get dist-upgrade from a previous FC release, then I'll consider installing it. Reinstalling from scratch every 6 months is not what I consider a smooth upgrade path.
Based on http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu%2C+fedora+%7 C+fc5+%7C+fc4+%7C+fc3%2C+RHEL+%7C+redhat+%7C+red+h at%2C++suse%2C+debian&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all at Google Trends, my belief is that RH and Fedora are losing ground while Ubuntu is making a serious run at becoming the most popular distribution.
I'm still using FC5 on my desktop for now, largely because I found it the simplest to 'extend' with non-vendor apps and drivers (such as the proprietary ATI drivers and the intense multimedia support available via the Livna repository to replace the frankly useless sound and video "support" in the vanilla FC5). I am fairly likely to stick with it either until FC7 or until Ubuntu reaches the critical mass where most app and driver vendors explicitly support it as a preferred distro.
yum runs on top of RPM much in the same way that apt runs on top of dpkg (in debian systems). You can use apt with rpm (haven't used redhat in a few years though, but I would presume its still the case) if you like. Or, you can just use plain RPM and find the packages you need manually.
I can count at least 10 times I've seen this post in fedora threads (including bad grammer).
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Why did u leave trolltalk?!?!
...let me reply to some of the posts here:
H HHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Did they put the "Install Everything" button back in yet? If not, I'm not interested.
Waaah!
New KDE, new Gnome, an updater, and CUPS? Yawn...
Waaaaahh!
I switched to ${ANOTHER_DISTRO} and never looked back.
Waaaaaaaaaahhhh!
If you are a KDE fan, than you're being shortchanged...
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggghhhh!
I'm REALLY happy with FC5. I don't need FC6.
Waaaah!!! Waaaah!!! Waaaaaaaaaaah!!!
The main problem I find with it is they seem too willing to update too quickly.
Waaaah waaaah waaaah waaaah waaaah!!!!!
Out of the box, Totem can't play *anything*.. completely useless.
Wah wah wah wah wah, wah wah wah, waaaaaaahhh!
Why do I have to type something at the command line to get basic multimedia support? Can't they just make a button...
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGH
[DISCLAIMER: This post is a joke. This post is only a joke. Had this post been intended to deliver actual derision or condescension it would have been supported by bad analogies, the anecdotal 'evidence' of a single user, and/or numerous mentions of other Linux distributions that are not germane to the current discussion. I apologize preemptively if anyone's fragile psyche was offended by this post. Additionally, I don't really have the authority to speak on Artie Lange's behalf.]
Don't you have someone you'd die for?
Looks like *BSD such as OpenBSD, NetBSD, or FreeBSD are also on the downward slope with Redhat but not as badly:C +FreeBSD+%7C+NetBSD+%7C+DragonflyBSD%2C+fedora+%7C +fc5+%7C+fc4+%7C+fc3%2C+RHEL+%7C+redhat+%7C+red+ha t%2C++suse%2C+debian&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all
http://www.google.com/trends?q=BSD+%7C+OpenBSD+%7
I've used Fedora on servers and workstations with no stability problems. I have servers running Fedora with years of uptime despite the heavy loads and interesting uses I put them under.
My only real complaint about Fedora is it's use of yum which I don't feel works as well as competitiors such as rug (command-line component of Red Carpet). If they coould bring yum's quality up to snuff I'd be pretty happy with it. It'd be nice if they could calm some of the fighting between offical and unoffical repos too. That's partly related to the poor quality of yum so it's all one issue IMO.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Every comment I have read so far is about problems , when something is in this early stage they are not problems , any software designer knows you run beta versions and fix bugs but there not problems I assure you, can anyone tell me about a software program that has had no bugs in it or problems with it?
Ubuntu is just the latest buzzword distro. I've yet to see anything about it that really sets it apart anymore than any of the past buzzword distros. There are hundreds of distros but in my experience only two really matter - Debian and RedHat, now Fedora, are the ones that have stood the test of time. Most other distros are children to one of those two.
Rather than forking off endless similar child distros I'd rather see the distros work together. Why not merge the Debian and Fedora development efforts? Is there any real difference of goals so large that the teams couldn't, over time, resolve the differences?
There is really no need for yet another distro that does essentially the same things so I really see no point in Ubuntu or any of the other forks. If you're going to fork off your own distro then at least do something radical with your new direction.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I installed and ran it on a new iMac with the Intel Duo Core processor with no problem. Install was pretty easy and all the rough spots were actually in Mac OS. The install didn't configure the monitor very well though.. setting it at 800x600 isn't so great. They'll have to do some more work on driver support too as I wasn't able to get the monitor to it's full 1680x1050 resolution and the sound doesn't seem to work. Networking does work. Haven't had time to try out the other hardware yet but it seems usuable for basic stuff. I expect it'll be pretty nice by the time it goes stable.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I'm not sure that having several distributions is so bad. Fedora cannot be the one true Linux distribution, its aim is to eventually improve a commercial server distribution. It's not so incompatible with comfortable end-user experience, but it does mean FC will not include mp3 playing because they feel they can't take the risk, however small. Remember that FC has all the weight of RedHat behind them. They have money, they can be sued.
On the other hand Ubuntu has the potential to be the One True Linux distribution like everyone thought Debian would be back in the day. However they are finding out right now that it is more complicated than they thought, if 6.06 is any indication.
With all due respect, you are falling into the trap of thinking that putting all the manpower resources on a single project (the OTL distro) will imply greater progress. In fact larger teams lead to more red tape, even with FOSS. Developers will argue endlessly about the proper implementation of such and such feature and will split.
It is inevitable that FOSS like so many other human endeavours leads to disagreement. The great thing about FOSS is that even when people disagree they can continue to collaborate. Everyone take their sources home and duke it out.
In other words, I'm not sure a federated effort at building the OTL would succeed any better than the huge collection of distros we have now. Remember that at the time of Apollo/Soyuz great orbital meeting, the Russians were amazed that the Americans had two large manufacturers of hand calculators : TI and HP. This was unthinkable in ideal communist terms, Both had interesting but incompatible features. Yet the competition brought out the best in both competitors.
Exactly. What has competition ever done for us. Look at the US Auto Industry in the 70's when they had stopped competing with each other, today the dominate the world. Look at the mess competition has made out of the cell phone market, costs have held their own with inflation, and only a few major metropolitan areas now have coverage because they can't afford to put up new towers.
No wait, that was in opposite land. The lack of real competition in th eUS auto-industry led to them getting their asses kicked, their efforsts to end that competion via quotas caused them to leave the mini car segment and move into higher end segments, we know how swimmingly that has gone too. In the celluar industry more competition has netting dramatic drops in costs and a focus on coverage and reliability.
Competition is the big advantage Linux has over Windows, with the key advantage that due to open source, better ideas can be quickly adopted by the competition, raising all distributions...
I installed FC6T1 on a P4/Intel 865/1GB RAM system today, and already there were 125(!) updates, so it's something under very active development. The default kernel (2.6.16.xx) works, but the updated kernel 2.6.17.xx results in kernel panic (apparently, trouble with the LVM). There was also some dependency issues with a library required for updating nfs-utils, so I had to uninstall that. Other than that, it seems to be working all right. Appearences wise, it seems very similar to FC5, and seems to be more of an incremental update. This problem with kernel updates was something I encountered with FC3 as well, at which point I had to switch to CentOS 4.3 which has been very solid so far. Fedora Core may have the latest and greatest, but practically it is still a toy as far as stability/maintenance requirements goes. It will be interesting to see it mature.
OK, so Fedora looks better than ubuntu. True - but that can be changed (and it's more of a color scheme choice thing than actual graphics). /etc in FC is the most non-standard, confusing setup? (at least from an ubuntu/debian/gentoo standpoint, those three being the distributions I have much experience with)
OK, so Fedora is "bleeding edge". It crashes more, yup. Whats funny is that I was working on a programin project on ubuntu... I had everything working just fine. I scp the code over to a FC4 machine only to find that several of the libraries are too old and don't have the feature I need. So... FC is bleeding edgu but out of date at the same time... thats just sad.
Oh, and am I the only one who thinks that
That's exactly my point: updating or installing software using Yum or Apt or Aptitude resolves dependencies for you. It seems it's only trolls who don't know that the repositories of managed software are best used with clever package managers like these.