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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."
Ubuntu? It's years behind Fedora in case of security... *sigh*
/ 2006-June/000150.html
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Security/Features
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-hardened
Fedora is really for those who want to be on the bleeding edge.
If you want a Redhattish distro that is NOT bleeding edge, try CentOS 4.3 (which is built from Red Hat Enterprise 4.3) or the other RHEL descendents like WBEL. CentOS is very solid - but it does not tend to have the bleeding edge stuff (and it will remain supported for years).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
No, you've not had to jump through ridiculous hoops since at least Fedora Core 2, probably earlier. There _is_ just a repo you can add - it's called the Livna repository. It contains all the 'patented' codec support (sound, video, DVD playing etc.) as well as proprietary video card drivers from nvidia and ATi.
See http://rpm.livna.org/
The ridiculous hoop you have to jump through is to simply type:
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-5.rpm
and you've added the Livna repository. All the stuff in Livna now appears in GUI software installer (Applications -> Add and Remove Software) as well as on the command line (using 'yum'). Couldn't be simpler. Livna is an essential repository for a home user of Fedora Core.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
yum works by checking for updates to your current version.
ie. the contents of your /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo read:
the key term here being $releasever which means it only checks within your current release.The only way to make yum upgrade to a newer core version is to download and install the newer version kernel, reboot into that kernel, then tell yum to update. I have used that approach to go progressively from FC2 to FC3 to FC4.
HTH.
Fedora Core is more or less beta testing of software that may eventually end up in Red Hat Enterprise. So by the time a new, say kernel, feature is part of Red Hat Enterprise, then it has been widely tested in Fedora. This means that Fedora is not very stable, but many (most?) Fedora users find this very acceptable.
If you want to have a stable base, then you should use another Linux distro or one of the *BSD.
Fedora is an early integrator of many things; as those things sometimes havent had as many testers yet, you're bound to run into some issues. As some features get integrated into the base of the system, for example, Xen, you cant get a super-stable base either.
Dont worry tho, yum update shouldnt upgrade you, you'd have to run yum _upgrade_ for that, as far as I know. Live upgrades of that sort are not recommended tho.
There are so many software patents nowadays, I'm sure it's impossible to write all but the simplest software without treading on somebody's patent. But to suggest that distro owners should knowingly violate patents is kind of negligent.
I know they're slightly biased, but on the MP3 Licensing web site, there's an extensive list of patents which have been granted in an equally extensive list of countries.
Again, I'd refer you to the MP3 Licensing web page. If you assume a patent duration of 20 years from filing, the first patents may have begun to expire but there's still quite a number of years to go until all the ones necessary to implement a full-featured decoder will have expired.
Apparently quite a number of the big free distros have legal teams who would disagree with you. From what I've used, neither Fedora nor Ubuntu include MP3 playback support and it's precisely for this reason. It's OK you advocating violating patents but these distros are made by non-profit organisations who have a lot to lose if they come on the wrong end of a patent lawsuit. At least they make the effort to make MP3 support available. If you want MP3 support, either pay for a commercial distro or quit whining and take the 2 minutes to install support for your distro. As you say, one day all these patents will have expired and even the free distros will be able to ship with MP3 support out of the box.
Of course, most Linux distros ship with support for 2 excellent audio formats out of the box: Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, both of which are better than MP3. Ogg Vorbis is a lossy CODEC which provides better quality than MP3 at a lower bitrate. FLAC is the lossless CODEC and provides CD quality with 30-60% compression. Neither contain any patents that we know of (that in itself is important) and both work great on Windows too.
Actually updating has zilch to do with the kernel. You can normally do an online update by manually updating (with the rpm command) the fedora-release packagae, and then using yum to update from there.
However this is not the recommended route, and things may be more complex than this (for example requiring you to update yum, rpm and associated packages first). The kernel does not normally need to be updated first, and you run a greater risk of ending up with an unbootable machine if you do so.
There are normally howtos on upgrading using yum available - Seth Vidal typically has notes in his blogs about doing so.
However the recommended and supported upgrade route is to boot from a the new version installation image, and then use anaconda to upgrade - that can do more invasive updates like the udev changes, which are much easier to do with your system being offline.
Maby not the easiest way but I have been doing it since fedora 3:
/dev/sda2 /mnt/source /dev/sda1 /mnt/source/boot /mnt/source
/boot/initrd.img kernelversion
/boot/grub/grub.conf
Insert Fedora core cd #1 and turn on your computer. Boot to the cd.
When the boot screen comes up, type "expert" and hit enter. That will allow you to install to the usb drive. Install as normal, and make sure you install grub to the MBR.
Now, shut down. Boot up with Fedora disk 1 in the cd drive. at the boot screen, type: "linux rescue", and answer the questions about language when they come up. when it asks you if you want it to search for the installation, click "skip this step", and you will be brought to a shell.
mount
mount
chroot
Next, create the initrd, with the usb driver included:
mkinitrd --preload=ehci-hcd --preload=usb-storage --preload=scsi_mod --preload=sd_mod
Now, you have to edit your grub.conf:
nano
put the new initrd file name "initrd.img" in place of whats there. save and exit nano. reboot and it should work
of course your bios needs to be able to boot off usb devices. Hope that helps.
RPM hell? As a Red Hat Network subscriber I enjoy one-click installations of pre-configured software packages that you won't find anywhere else. Plus apt-get works as good as on Ubuntu. Like it or not, RPM is de-facto standard today. Having one more supported format helps, you know?
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.
WOW, I can't believe you prefer the look of Ubuntu to Fedora!
One of my main reasons for not even looking at Ubuntu for longer than about install+1 hour is that it just looks plain ugly compared to Fedora. How weird.... I mean I really hate the brown/orange thing and the Gnome icons and text seem to look years behind Fedora, more like RedHat before Bluecurve or SUSE's Gnome, it's just unfinished.
I was considering putting Ubuntu Dapper LTS on my new fileserver as I don't want to wait for CentOS 5 (RHEL5) and would like to brush up on my Debian skillz, but after playing with Dapper for a bit I'm just not impressed.
I mean, there seems to be so many options for installing software and configuring Ubuntu that it's actually a become a A Bad Thing(tm). With Fedora you install software using YUM and there's one or two "best practice" ways of doing things. Fedora is to Ubuntu as Python is to Perl in that way.
#include <sig.h>
Or you could stick with Fedora and just go to http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/, download and install the Yum repo information and upgrade to a proper version of KDE that way...
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