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What's Fedora Up To? Ask the Project Leader
Fedora Project Leader Max Spevack offered himself up for this interview because, he said, "I look at stories like [your] posting Ubuntu to Bring About Red Hat's Demise and many of the comments about Red Hat and Fedora seem very rooted in the world of several years ago, when the RHEL/Fedora split took place." This is a chance to clear the air, and get an up-to-date look at what Fedora is up to these days. So ask away; we'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Max and (hopefully) publish his answers later this week.
Did I miss something?
Why is Ubuntu kiling you? oh...sorry....
...still no good?
let me rephrase in a more congenial way...
In terms of eventually losing to Ubuntu, why are you?
Ok: About your opinion regarding Ubuntu, what do you think are the reasons for it causing your eventual demise?
Is it true that one of your developers got fired for wearing a Trilby?
Go on, mod me down. I deserve it.
Argh.
It seems to me that 'Linux should be Linux'. Rather, we're seeing articles about one linux distro killing another. We never see "Windows Professional is killing Windows Home". IMHO, Ubuntu's success should be a boon for all Linux distros.
Unfortunately, package management seems to be the great divide. What are you doing to bring One Package Manager to all Linux?
More
A lot of people I talk to say they don't like Linux due to lack of driver support. Is there anyway you see this problem being eliminated? How do you court vendors to support their hardware on your flavor of Linux?
My work here is dung.
You mention that opinions are rooted in the world of 5 years ago. What do you think has changed in the linux world since then, and how does it affect Fedora development?
Daniel
Carpe Diem
I noticed in my latest installation of Fedora, I had to actively seek the MP3 codec. I know this isn't your fault but was this something brought about by a potential lawsuit or did you decide to remove it from the distribution preemptively to avoid possible lawsuits?
My work here is dung.
On the Fedora Project website, there are plenty of reasons listed for Fedora to be your operating system of choice. In your eyes, what is the most lacking aspect of Fedora as it exists today?
My work here is dung.
What are you doing this evening? My date stood me up and I'd be a shame to waste a table for two with reservations for this place being the way they are...
Oh arse
Do you view Vista as a threat to your user base? Do you or people on your team ever change your mind about things or let looming Vista influence your decisions?
I'm hoping that Linux distros are not pressured into adding unneeded bells and whistles in a desperate attempt to compete with Vista. Are you invulnerable from this mentality?
My work here is dung.
Linux adoption has been growing, but very slowly. Why do you think that this is the case? What are, in your point of view, the roadblocks to Linux becoming a serious contender for the desktop at home and in the corporate enviroment and how do you plan to address them?
Quote at the bottom: I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. -- Albert Einstein
Emphasis being on the sticks and stones.
Sticks and stones will break their demos, but your words will never make it the to wiki.
-Nis
Couldn't you guys have come up with a different name to the Fedora repository software?
Oh arse
Do you see Fedora Core as targeted at a particular type of Linux user (developers, server admins, desktop users, multimedia, etc) or are you trying to be all things to all people? Stated another way, what do you see as FC's main (current and future) strengths and weakneses compared to other distros?
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
Have you tried Ubuntu yourself? Is there, in your opinion, something Ubuntu does better than Fedora?
I believe that there is a huge problem with hardware support in Linux right now. To remedy this, the Linux community should work together toward some sort of Linux Driver Standard, similar to Microsoft's WDM Certification. One key way in which the Linux Certified Hardware program could differ from WDM is cost. If the Linux certification process were free for hardware manufacturers, where it is quite costly to become WDM Certified, we may see many of the smaller (and often better) manufacturers writing drivers for Linux just to get marketshare. One of the main requirements for the Certification would be that the driver be entirely open source and under a user-friendly license.
Being the distro responsible for pioneering such a Certification Program could have a huge impact on the number of people using that distro. Why hasn't Fedora taken such steps?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
If Fedora is actually not controlled by Red Hat anymore, and Fedora is user-oriented, why are both the only general-purpose GNU/Linux distributions that disable the NTFS driver from the Linux kernel?
Users do need this option (unlike RedHat's customers, which are organizations as far as I know), and for evidence, Linux-NTFS is one of the projects with the most downloads on sourceforge.
I would like to add that NTFS is part of the mainline kernel. Compiling it as a module will cause it to not take any memory resources other than the few kilobytes on disk that any un-used hardware module is taking, unless of course the user has a mounted NTFS partition.
RedHat's reason for disabling NTFS support was that RedHat is a US-based organization and that they fear patenting problems from MS. No law action was ever taken, and no actual patent was referenced. As far as I know, NTFS is not even patented or patentable. Fedora is not RedHat as you say, so this old reasoning is not exactly valid for Fedora. The IBM/SCO saga also cleared the issue about patents in the mainline kernel.
Unless Fedora will change this simple flag in the kernel config file, I assume it is still controlled (and not only sponsered as some would say) by RedHat.
It seems to me that the general consensus among users when FC was released wavered around "It's redhat minus the money behind it", what improvements in package management, distro consistency (path standardization), and configuration systems do you forsee preventing FC from becoming what some have called "The most craptacular peice of shit since Caldera OpenLinux"?
+5, Truth
I use Planet CCRMA components with Fedora Core 5 and this seems to bring me very close to rivalling what I could do with a Mac running Pro Tools, etc. Any plans to integrate these ideas into the main Fedora package, such as the ability to choose "music" or "recording" on initial install the same way you can choose "home", "office", etc?
Or, really, any plans for any other speciallising options?
Ubuntu Music Project: OSS for music tech geeks
Most of what us "stuck in the past" folks hear about on Linux is development of new server applications or ways that IT can save money by deploying Linux, while simultaneously there are complaints about no "new" development on the platform... merely copying of existing Windows or Solaris or BSD functionality and applications.
My question, therefore, is do you believe this is an accurate representation of Linux development today? Do you believe that the standard user applications are an area that Linux should be developing towards, and what are you doing as Fedora project leader to influence this?
Thanks, and I'll take my answers off the air...
More data, damnit!
I have been using Fedora since version 2 (or) since support ran out on RH9. It's been getting better with each version and the number of applications there are packages for have increased dramatically. I am using version FC5 now and using it in a production environment on several servers. I continue to read that RH/Fedora doesn't support the idea of using FC for a production environment. Is this true and if so what exactly is FC's charter? I mean what exactly is the purpose of the FC project? What do you envision your users are going to do with FC? Are you thinking about end user at all? Where do you see FC in 5 years? Thanks Robert W. Oldfield
Hi, I've been using Fedora Directory Server for quite a while, and it is a fantastic product. I read some rumours that it would be Integrated with FC5, but sadly it was not. When can we expect this to be a standard feature/integrated with authentication and other areas in Fedora? Thanks, Brian
it still comes down to debian vs. redhat-based systems...I don't think that Ubuntu will have much of an effect on Fedora users...
If not, why?
I know that the the Ubuntu numbers that are usually reported are silly, because they are based on Distrowatch, which as 10 year Linux user, was a site I had never been to before questioning the Ubuntu installation numbers, and being refered there.
I also know that you have no interest in getting into a "measuring" contest -- because fedora is not about that. BUT if it were about that -- what do you think is a good way to measure "popularity" of a distro? Any numbers that say that DSL is more popular that Debian, automatically get's questioned in my book. Don't get me wrong, I love DSL, and Debian and even Distrowatch -- I'm just not ready to believe that what is being reported is an accurate representation of who's running what.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
While the Linux Standard Base advocates the use of .rpm packages, what steps are you using to help other distributions use .rpm packages? What are your thoughts about setting up "universal" repositories that are accessible from different distribution architectures? (A single repo that can be used by suse, redhat, and debian systems). What are you doing to go towards that goal?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
What do you view as Red Hat's advantage over Ubuntu that Ubuntu will not be able to easily/quickly replicate?
Why is ext3 still the only filesystem available during installation? Practically every other distro is using reiserfs by default, and allowing whichever one you choose. Why does Fedora only permit ext3?
That's clearly wrong. I only want to install a PostScript previewer. Doing so should not require a filemanager (which I don't need or want), and certainly not a CD burner. But these are added as dependencies due to the clumsy packaging that seems to be increasingly prevalent in Fedora. Perhaps (and I remain unconvinced) there's some aspect of evince that can make use of nautilus being present. But if so, I haven't seen it. I could well believe that nautilus could make use of evince, but not really the other way around. But assume for the sake of argument that it can use nautilus. That still isn't a reason to have it depend on it. Dependencies should be packages that are required in order for another to run, not packages that will merely enable additional functionality. In this case -- the prime function of evince is to view documents, which isn't significantly enhanced by having a file browser present.
Fedora is still my distribution of choice, but it's becoming increasingly hard to use for those of us that prefer to run with a minimal system due to the way that the dependencies have been getting out of hand. Are there any plans to fix this, or is any work already underway to do so? I understand that some consideration has been given to providing "soft dependencies" within RPM (like dpkg's suggested dependencies), which would help. Is there a timeframe for this? Is anything else being done?
I quite understand the focus on getting the system to be usable for the average unskilled user. But the impression I'm getting is that it's being done at the expense of letting those of us that know what we're doing do what we want. Does Fedora have a position on the type of users it's aiming for, or is it still trying to be a general purpose OS?
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
After all these years, the huge improvements to Linux in general, why is it still so hard to get an off the shelf PCI wireless card going? Are you guys making any improvements there?
What differentiates Fedora from all the other Linux distros? Who's your target demographic?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Any plans for a live CD? I'm a long time RH user who switched to Ubuntu after a tried a live CD and found all the hardware on my laptop worked out of the box (even Windows didn't manage that). I guess there are a few live CD's based on Fedora, but that's not really the same as having one official one.
Second question: I have a bunch of RH stock... sell or hold?
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Same question as above but replace Vista with Mac OS X.
What power has law where only money rules.
What brand of air freshener do you use? Do you like incense? Have you ever experienced Febreze scentstories?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I mostly work with installer and kernel issues. FC5 was pretty buggy. I already had one customer ask me why FC5 hangs during install. I told him that if he was using the text mode install that sometimes hangs so he should use the graphical install. Otherwise he should just use FC4 or Centos.
It's like every 6 months a new installer is released and you hope all the bugs from the last one are fixed. Sometimes they are but now a whole new lot of bugs are introduced and you have to wait 6 months only to be disappointed again.
It kind of sucks because I fixed a bug in the driver disk handling for FC5 but another bug was introduced so driver disks support is completely broken and my code cannot be used. I wanted to use driver disk support to fix bugzilla 190063 and other driver bugs.
Could I get a bug fix for this crap or do I have to wait for the FC6 release?
A lot of people seem to believe that FC is just an unstable testing ground for RH Enterprise Linux. This ignores the existence of the truly unstable, baby-eating "Rawhide" development series and the fact that there is support for any FC(n) up to the release of FC(n+2). Do you think there's any truth to it though?
How about along with a analogous Driver STandard, how about a complete Linux version of "WHQL" (Windows Hardware Qualification Logo) which would indicate that a PC would be able to run a (standard?) version of Linux?
Doing this would also help push Linux as a driver towards hardware standards rather than responding to Wintel.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I got scared off red hat - too much buy this and that when i looked (never used it) and then Fedora happened. I still have an impression that rh is better than your distro. I used Suse really from day 1 and i think the split to a community version was handled much better by Novell.
Would i run suse and open suse yes, would i run fedora um no dont think so - question: Why should I even consider Fedora.
I don't buy shit that ain't compatible with linux, see how simple that makes things. I never
ever have driver issues just load and go...
Got Code?
Shouldn't this story have been posted to Ask Slashdot and then the responses posted to Interviews?
[[ the only 15 letter word that is spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable: it may soon be, however. ]]
There is only one qualification program that counts, when linus puts it in the kernel and sprinkles the holy penguin pee on it then it is certified until that point the driver is worthless junk.
Got Code?
I have a suggestion instead. Red Hat should want Fedora to be a runaway hit like Firefox, not just another linux disto. Firefox is a hit because in addition to having features users want, it is easy to install, simple, and cool. My suggestion is for Red Hat to create a distribution that runs easily on Windows. As in click the button and it runs. Here's how you can do it:
.exe program that loads a windows driver that syncs the disks and replaces the NT kernel with Linux kernel.
1) A pre-built image file on C:\ that will be the linux hard drive.
2) A
3) When run, this kernel boots off the image on NTFS.
I know this can be done with existing technology (or at least the hard parts are already working). The NTFS driver can write to an existing file if the size does not change. Linux kernel can init on an already powered up machine and reset the hardware. I know Red Hat does a lot of kernel work and other developement, so I know you guys capable of doing this very quickly.
This gives the vast majority of users a way to download linux like any other program, run it without rebooting into some scary 'repartition' software, and still get the full benefit and experience of linux. In fact, immediately after downloading they just click the program and say "Yes" to "Shutdown Windows and start Linux?" and 20 seconds later they are in a Fedora core system. If they like it, they can install a normal Fedora directly onto the system. If they don't like it, just delete the image file.
My question is, will you at least consider doing this? Something like this would be huge for linux adoption and therefore Red Hat mindshare.
Where do you see Fedora in the near future? Do you see it as more of a server-oriented distro, or are you preparing to make it more user-friendly and desktop oriented?
Warning: Corny karma killing post above.
The number one feature I hear lauded in Ubuntu is, "It just works. It recognized all my hardware and it all just worked."
I'm keen to try the latest 3-D desktop, and it would be great if mythtv were included in Fedora. But the number one most valuable feature is still working hardware.
For example, Lexmark publishes their Linux Driver Development Kit, but no actual Linux drivers. Fedora doesn't have a driver for my Lexmark printer. That's not necessarily the fault of the Fedora team. But there are issues here that could be addressed by all linux distros.
What can be done to make it easier and more attractive for hardware manufacturers to provide native linux drivers? (I.e., why is it so hard for the manufacturers to do this themselves? What can be done to make it easier?) Also, what can be done so that a working Gentoo or Ubuntu driver means a working Fedora driver, and vise-versa?
And finally, how much effort is consumed banging away on every oddball piece of hardware out there to get them supported, versus the effort spent to squeeze in the latest new gee-wiz app?
While Ubuntu has a clear, selfless mission, it seems to me the Fedora project misses this. I'm sure while Fedora was still within Red Hat, its mission was simply commercial. "It must be good so we can make money." That mission no longer applies, and http://fedora.redhat.com/About/ almost sounds like Fedora is just a rejected part of Red Hat, left Free so that they could attempt to profit from community contributions.
Is there an objective in the Fedora Project? One that is clear and may motivate developers to join? Or is it here really just to reduce costs for the Red Hat team?
Yesterday, I saw my 2.2 GHz desktop (running FC5) spend over a second drawing a single button under heavy loads.
Thats 2.2+ billion cycles. Billion, as in B.
I spent a few moments asking myself how in the world this could even happen, especially with how strong the typical PC is today. 2.2+ billion cycles to draw a button is something that would have horrified coders even 10 years ago, let alone 15-20 years ago. This sort of thing should really be viewed as unacceptable in terms of performance, but it's often ignored if it's even brought up at all.
GNOME vs. KDE issues aside, What are you doing anything in the line of filtering out bloated code from future version of the distribution?
(and yes, it's not my hardware, Gilligan)
Fedora has a very strong sense of purity in keeping its distro Free, and I like this (no, I don't mind having to visit Livna for MP3, etc.). Further to the goal of a completely Free system, can we expect to see the Fedora project becoming more vocal about Free drivers, and standing besides our neighbours in the OpenBSD community (amongst others) in pressuring hardware providers for open specifications?
Which direction are you heading in:
Server, or end-user desktop?
The two worlds are seperate and should remain so.
I will admit that I have a chip on my shoulder. I was a happy user of Redhat. I loved it. It was reasonably priced, it gave me a reliable way to maintain my OS and it just worked. I chose RedHat after testing several other commercial versions of Linux. I had a whole shelf full of boxed Linux distros before I finally settled on RedHat. I was a real fan and a strong supporter. I bought your boxed products and paid a subscription fee for support. I was the kind of customer I would love to have.
Shortly after I had paid the one year subscription fee for your support network your company sent me an email that basically said, we don't want your business, and oh bye the way, we are keeping your money and cutting off the service you just paid for. Your idea of compensation was to offer me a discount on the same product at a much higher price. In other words, you robbed me and then tried to extort even more money from me. You are nothing but thieves. Even Microsoft has never actually taken my money and given me nothing in return.
After that experience I was forced to waste time seeking a new distribution and converting all my computers. The time cost to do that was much greater than the dollar value of the service fees you stole from me. If you count my lost time and revenue I am out several thousand dollars because of you. So, you might say I am a little bit biased against your company. I wouldn't actually spit on you if I were to meet you face to face, but I would like to.
OTOH, I found Debian and found that I had been paying RedHat for something I can get for free from Debian. Recently I converted my desktops and laptops to Ubuntu, an even better solution than Debian, and again for free.
So, considering that there are better versions of Linux available from honest organizations, organizations who have never robbed their customers, I have to ask WHY DO YOU MATTER. Aside from suckering stupid big companies into over paying for your software, what service do you provide that is even worth the time to read about?
Stonewolf
This is actually the worst of the million of worthless linux distros out there.
I am curious as to why you don't ship the actual source to the binary kernel you ship?
Yes, I realize that I can go through a somewhat obscure(*) process to get a particular vanilla kernel and apply all the same patches which will build me a functionally equivalent kernel. But it's not actually compatible with the binary that a system gets from the install process.
The reason for this is that the "EXTRAVERSION" parameter in the Makefile is different than what is used to build the distro. Which means that I can't build mainline kernel modules and use them with the installed kernel.
It appears that you are in violation of the GPL since it's not possible to build the same binaries from the source you distribute without going through some contortions.
(*) it's fairly obscure if you are not a redhat fanatic. again this might be an area where redhat is in violation of the GPL since you must distribute the code in a format commonly used. since redhat is the only distributes their source in such a fashion it is arguable that this method of source distribution is not common.
I suspect the major reason the word "Ubuntu" is on everyone's lips these days is they are the last piece in a complete stack. Debian has always had the hearts and minds of a lot of serious developers but had a justified reputation as 'not for mortals.' Ubuntu completed the sequence. Unstable is where the developers live, Testing is where it settles down, Stable is for servers and now Ubuntu gives access to end users and desktop deployments. Especially with the LTS series the Debian world now offers a total end to end solution.
Compare to RedHat's stack. Rawhide maps to unstable, only less stable. More accurate would be the Fedora Test releases compare to Unstable. Fedora roughly maps to Testing and RHEL to Stable except it is only available bundled with a service contract. It is probably safe to say few developers develop on rawhide, from what I see on the mailing lists at least, most appear to use Fedora and add some packages from Rawhide/Dag/livna/etc. For the corporate world RHEL is worth every penny, as the RedHat financial statements attest. But you guys don't have anything to offer in the vast space between the deveopers and the major site installs.
When you dropped RHL I grabbed the RHEL source and started White Box, since joined by at least three more rebuild projects. However a new user understands none of that, only seeing Red Hat's offerings, which has nothing for them. They see Fedora Core, which has an expiration date not much longer than milk. Installing a new OS is traumatic enough, the thought of being forced to do it twice a year is right out, especially if they actually do it once and fight the war to get a working system. (drivers, media support, etc) And if they do invest the time to learn linux the Fedora way, unless they work at a site that is a candidate for RHEL there isn't any place to use that knowledge in the real world. Hint: Most of the Linux machines in production use aren't candidates for RHEL. Try selling management on a RHEL support contract that costs more ANNUALLY than an NT license for a file/print server. Critical web server, yes. Oracle server, no problem. But most places start smaller.
Compare to Ubuntu. Most users DO know Ubuntu is Debian based. But unlike Debian, Ubuntu compromised Free Software principles enough to make it fairly easy to get a working machine. So a new user can get going fairly easy and they aren't told they MUST upgrade annually, semi-annually preferred. And once they learn, Ubuntu LTS can be used for real work and it is only a small hop to Debian for a server or Sid to participate in development.
Democrat delenda est
I've noticed an increase in the minimum memory requirements for a basic Fedora install. I run Fedora on several machines, from an old 166MHz Pentium machine with 64M of memory, to GHz AMD64 machines with 1G of memory.
Ideally, I'd like to run the same version on all of them. However, FC5 has raised the minimum memory requirement from 64M to 128M, excluding the older machines.
Is there a specific technical reason for increasing the minimum requirement, or is it because a lot of packages are being included to make the system user friendly.
I'm sure the 'minimum' text only install includes a large number of packages that it does not need.
I appreciate the excellent work being done to make the full desktop install more user friendly, but please remember that a lot of Fedora installs are for text only servers.
Amen!
Thank you for completing the though process that I simply could not.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Will FC6 have a OLPC install option? It would be great to put it through its paces, even without the target hardware.
It would also be nice to have a stock Fedora that could be used to revive aging hardware in "developed" countries. I would love to provide a mainstream Linux distro to all my customers who need to upgrade their 64MB Win9x PCs.
What's better than a free OS with free apps? A free OS with free apps that can run reasonably on existing hardware.
I noticed that you have broken out the Server and Desktop into CentOS and Fedora.
What are your plans for the future? Where does Fedora plan to live and how can people go from Fedora into CentOS or RHEL like you will be able to with Ubuntu?
Also are there any Fedora initiatives for Mobile Devices? Any kind of WinCE alternative planned? You would be the best to do it as you are also involved in the OLPC project.
Thanks
Software Defined RFID - The Rifidi Emulator
When will yum be torrent based?
I have tried every release of Fedora since the split from RedHat. Needless to say, GUI functionality absolutely sucks in every single one of them. Further, you make it a royal pain in the ass to make any changes to installed software and actually reflect those changes in various areas of the GUI (such as pull-down menus and the like.) My question is, why does Fedora suck so badly? As a followup, when are you going to stop sitting around jerking each other off and actually do something besides simply update packages in release N from release N-1 and call it new?
What is being done about the many needless cross-dependencies between packages?
To use a concrete example:
I was having problems with an update (from Rawhide) due to a missing Perl module (not yet updated) causing Spamassassin to fail to update. Now, I don't *need* SA installed on my workstation - I do the filtering at the mail server, so I tried to remove SA - only to find that Evolution *REQUIRES* SA.
In my humble opinion, Evolution shouldn't require SA - it should *use* SA if SA is installed and otherwise get on with its life.
There are MANY dependencies like this in Fedora - packages that REQUIRE other packages only because the second package is needed to provide optional functionality in the first package.
I realize that some of this is due to the upstream package creator - some folks don't understand how to dlopen() a library at need rather than just linking to it, or don't understand that libfoo.a.(b+1) should be compatible with a program linked for libfoo.a.b (incompatibilities should drive a libfoo.(a+1).0).
Some of this, however, is due to the spec file created by Fedora.
So the question is, what is Fedora doing to fix this (e.g. trimming spec files, pushing for some form of "recommended" field in RPM, pressuring upstream developers to clean up dependencies, getting library developers to follow the version numbering scheme they are supposed to, etc.)?
www.eFax.com are spammers
I'd really like to see this question (and the extensions to the questions mentioned in the trail below it). Please mod up so it gets asked.
just an analog boy living in a digital age.
Many Linux users and developers see Conary as the logical successor to RPM for package management. Will the Fedora Project use Conary? If so, how do you see the change to Conary taking place? If not, what reasons do you have for not wanting to use Conary?
Cheers,
Tom
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
that the 'minimalist' install of Fedora Core has gone the way of the dodo. I'm not 'hard-core' enough to migrate to Gentoo, but I do like to cherry pick my packages for installation. Each release of the FC installer seems to make this more difficult. Is this intentional or is it a side-effect of making FC an all-in-one distribution for end users who want everything done for them (windows crowd)?
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Why can't I have a 1 CD "minimal" install? I installed FC4 with a single CD and installed what I wanted from there. Can't do that with FC5.
And why does it install pointless crap like ISDN and Bluetooth in a "minimal" install?
Bloat is not a feature.
So, you have a problem with system-config-packages?
Or up2date? Or yum?
Your struggling to understand the command line to rpm is equivalent to someone trying to do everything in Debian via raw dpkg commands.
I'm sorry if your struggles left a bad taste in your mouth but I wouldn't be caught dead using a package manager that uses the ARchive format behind the scenes. Talk about old and busted.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Is it possible for you to provide, as default, the installation CD with the following functionality?
It should ask which all data it needs to store. The user selects the data (directories/files).
When the installation is done, in the $HOME, we should have the stored data back.
I know the FS is different, and that we need to reformat the whole HD, but this would help the multitude of people who wants to change from Windows to Linux.
- a lot -
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
Many people say that Linux in general will never make it to "the next level" (whatever that may mean) because the community wishes to keep Linux fully open. It is difficult to make something on the hardware level fully Linux compatiable without re-using GPLed code. This means hardware/software vendors would need to open their code on their associated drivers/software to legally make their product fully Linux compatiable. Closed source vendors see opening their code as a major threat to their business, as the openness could reveal intellectual property that their competitors could exploit to take away market share. Do you see any way that a happy medium could be reached with vendors that require their source to be closed?
ALWAYS label your volumes so they have UUIDs.
l #sysfsmatch
Never put bare drives into a RAID. Partition them, set the drive-sized slice to 0xFD, and enjoy device name independance.
Actually the answer you are looking for is udev. You could name your disks via their serial# or some such but there are too many guides and documents and scripts out there that rely on the simple first-seen-first-labeled sd[abcde...] nomenclature that they aren't going to make that the default.
Check this out:
http://www.reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.htm
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I consider myself a regular user of redhat and Ubuntu for non-linux development work , have tried both systems for atleast a year, to me the definition of a useful system is where i am able to get my work done productively. The biggest snag I find in most linux system is the install process of software. Most of the time users have trouble with some package version or the other , is fedora looking at any solutions which makes resolutions on conflicting packages automatically ( I know yum is there, but is not the default process of installation). I found it relatively more easy using apt-get on ubuntu . Sundru
its now time to something new :)
http://www.secgeeks.com/
http://www.coderlance.com/
Hell, in the days of yore, when the IBCS module was being maintained, you could even run binaries from SCO UnixWare or Sun Solaris within Linux at native performance. How different do you need to get?
If you want to be really fancy, then any program with a sufficiently comprehensive symbol table aught to be "relinkable". For any given tuple (called function, desired library set, available library set), it will often be possible to return a fresh pointer to an existing library which will handle the call in the manner expected, and optionally a tiny conversion routine that handles differences in the API or ABI to conceal the difference. That's just a matter of building a comprehensive database of what libraries are out there and what can be used as a drop-in replacement (or at least abused as one with the right glue layer).
A universal package manager would be good. RPM is unstable when handling thousands of transactions - a not uncommon sight if you're using the development files and wait more than a day or two between yum updates - so the sooner Fedora/Red Hat dump it and write something more scalable, the better. I've been tempted to write something that's interoperable with rpm and apt, and that meets my requirements for better scalability and improved robustness, but time is not something I've had a vast amount of, of late.
Another problem is in some of the configuration stuff. Gentoo and Fedora have almost nothing in common in the
Finally, there is the problem of namespace conflicts with programs. Not merely different versions of the same program, but totally different programs with the same name. To solve this, the binary directories */bin and */sbin need to be virtualized as well. Have the real programs in unique locations, then have the specific combination of desired applications mapped onto that user's view of the standard binary directories. Different users could, therefore, be running totally different programs by calling the same application name.
(This also improves security, as it means you can't merely "not run" programs for which you have no permission, they don't even exist in your userspace. It could re-use a lot of the ideas in SELinux and eliminate some of the shortcomings of it - such that it would be possible to get webservers or other complex configurations running properly, because you could visually see what is reachable from what.)
So, all in all, there's plenty of room for improvement in compatibility and there has been some backsliding at times. This isn't necessary and could be corrected at any time.
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)
How would rate hardware support in Fedora vis-a-vis Ubuntu or Suse? I found it lacking in comparison.Being a old Linux user, of sourse I would have compiled kernel and would have got my display and hard disk working(which is a i915GM and Sata disk).But sadly I am no longer the young guy, who would spend days just compiling kernel. I have been, a big Redhat devotee since Redhat linux 7.0. But today, I find myself using Ubuntu on my notebook and on my desktop I am thinking of putting SLED 10. While rest of the Linux distros are, scrambling for some innovation in package managment, how is Redhat moving? Yum sucks, doesn't it?
Could we please have a *single* CD base install? Then folks can add on whatever they wish after that point. That was the whole point of "extras", wasn't it? Downloading 5 CD Isos or a DVD makes it rather difficult for those on slower connections or who live where they get charged per minute fees for telco connections, etc. Not everyone has a multi megabyte speed/ no caps limit for their net connection. And it is more than possible to have a robust decent full install on one CD, many other distros have proven that.
Second (compound) question if allowed. Don't you think multiple releases per year are excessive due to the nature of the huge amount of packages that need to be tweaked along with many kernels? Wouldn't it be better and lead to somewhat more stability and acceptance to have one release per year instead of hurrying and trying to force two or three releases? Seems like as soon as a full point release is out, then soon thereafter-too soon- the next version in "beta" is out. Uhh.. can this be explained? Which one exactly are folks supposed to be using/testing and sending in bug reports on again with that sort of policy? Perpetual alpha/betaware has a place, but so many folks got shut out of a paid/supported version when the big RH/Fedora split happened (RH lost my cash injections when that happened), that there's no middle ground and reasonable alternative - you have the choice of "free as in beer never finished to the point of stablility for more than a few weeks brand" or "very expensive long term supported RH workstation" releases. Something in the middle between those two extremes just might be worthwhile and also be well received by the community.
In light of the recent aquisition of JBoss, what are the plans for Java support in Fedora ?
Do you expect to see a major performance improvement in the gcc based java, or are you hoping that Sun to will change the restrictions on the Sun JDK ?
I'm trying to get my own package into fedora-extras and it's a real nightmare to do. Getting sponsored is nigh-to-impossible. And my intended participation appears to be frowned upon because I do not plan on participating more than with this one package. Is this nightmare built-in by design?
On that basis, I'll ask my question: Users are forever complaining about a lack of drivers, but the drivers they are often presented with are a very small subset of the Open Source drivers that exist. Is this a problem Fedora will be addressing, or will it be largely left to such drivers being absorbed into the mainstream kernel?
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)
The problem isn't with their packaging system in any way. The problem is with evince; due to its bloated nature and attempt to be a viewer for every type of image file imaginable, it does in fact depend on Nautilus and other packages that would appear to be unrelated. Basically, Red Hat has no choice but to offer such dependencies, as that is what the software demands.
If you want only a PDF or PS viewer, then try something like Ghostscript/GSView, or xpdf. Even the display program of ImageMagick might be suitable for your needs. Unlike evince (and much other GNOME software), those programs follow the UNIX tradition of doing one task, and doing that one task well.
So the questions: What is Fedora doing to improve the quality of the kernels and drivers? What is the purpose of all the tweaking? Some folks use stock kernels with Fedora, why all the messing around?
Today, the popular view is that Linux is highly stable and can be run out of the box by a WalMart customer, but I just had to reformat after Fedora Core 6 pre barfed after a yum update fried X totally and irretrievably. (And before someone says anything, yes I'm fully aware that running alpha-grade software is risky. That's half the fun. I burn out machines on a regular basis. It's just a little disconcerting when a highly-stable industry-standard package throws up over the disk and video card.)
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)
I have used Redhat Linux since 4.x in 1998.
When Redhat changed their version types, I supported them with RHEL, and use Fedora for personal use and experimental systems.
One thing is missing from Fedora Core 5, is the "Install Everything" option.
I was really surprised by this, as every person I know used it on every version since it was created.
Why was this removed?
Is it really that difficult to keep?
Will it be added back in?
I checked FC6 test 1, and it was not there.
Please add it back into Fedora.
It is too clumsly and slow, to manually add every package from the cd's or DVD.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
Ubuntu... Great distro or the greatest disto?
Many, many years ago, Redhat created the RPM package format and it was better than any other commercial Unix distro package management. And then... pretty much nothing.
I'm being overly harsh. But the only significant changes in RPM have been: cryptographic signing and yum/smart (to automatically handle dependencies). There is a book on the RPM format (Maximum RPM), but it doesn't cover signing or anything later. Suse added incremental RPM patching (an absolution life saver for dail up users), but that hasn't made it into standard use.
deb packages offer optional interactive configuration and many nice ways to handle relationships between packages (mostly at a user level). It certainly hasn't solved all the issues (build reproducibility, macros that make things "just work" on multiple distros, 32+64 bit systems, etc), but it's hard to argue that deb packages aren't better.
The rub is that all these improvements could work in RPM, too. It's just that RPM seems stagnant. Will RPM ever evolve?
"There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet"
Please state whether you agree with the above statement and discuss why or why not.
What kind of danger do you see in RHEL clones to FC's market? I use RHEL at work and it is by far the best OS I've ever seen. At home I use FC and in spite of your claims it just doesn't measure up. I've started looking into whitebox and CentOS for home use. What are the reasons why I should stay with FC and not switch to a RHEL clone? Also what is being done to make FC more stable, robust, and feature-rich like RHEL?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I experienced the same problem, as well. And I must agree, it is not whining in any way to make such a situation known. For us small business folk, any company that pulls such a stunt will never be considered again. We just can't afford to be mistreated in such ways, and for our own financial safety we will never forget how Red Hat wronged us.
Like the earlier poster, I was lucky enough to move to Debian. And I must concur, I also found Debian to be far more secure, stable, reliable and of a higher quality, all at basically zero cost to me. Of course, I made a donation to SPI, just because their software was of such a great quality, and the community support so fantastic.
For me, one of the things that would move Linux from being a great development machine to a great desktop machine is the inclusion OpenGL based windowing system. The smooth window animation, the ability to shrink all the window to thumbnails for a quick overview, snappy transparency built into every window... These things aren't necessary, but they provide some nice touches that make a user interface feel like home.
What is current plan for AIGLX? Is there going to be more collaboration with XGL? Are you working with NVIDIA to get the needed extensions in their driver so it will work with AIGLX? Do you expect that AMD's purchase of ATI will result in better Linux drivers, that can be used for this project? By what Fedora Core version would you expect to be including AIGLX by default, able to be enabled with the click of a button?
where will kde be in fedora in the future? behind gnome or alongside it?
;)
i am a kde user and i hope that it can be placed alongside gnome instead of behind.
there are some programs missing here and there. i cant find kbluetooth for the 64bit arch. thats two problems. kdebluetooth is not core nor extras not even livna but kde-redhat. there is gnome-bluetooth-manager which is sorely lacking in features. and yes kdebluetooth is available for the 32bit arch.
i hate the programs menu's arrangement. its too cluttered and before any gnome advocates tell me to use gnome i want to tell them that the kmenu CAN be organised. look at mandriva!. there is even a browsers submenu under internet.
packaging. i hate the fact that i cant get rid of noatun. its part of the kde multimedia package. there are some packages that are a catch-all for an entire group. its big and ugly and it deprives the end user of removing the specific package (s)he doesnt want.
where is system-config-cpanel? a wrapper for all the system-config utilities?
will system-config-lvm ever have decent features?
why are some totally useless packages installed by default eg. i dont have a pda but kpilot is installed (again dual problems.. lumped together and not wanted)
the dvd iso still has some empty space on it. will the dvd become a dual use? live cd and installation media? it would be nice to play a game or two while fc installs. use the dvd as a repair media.
why are installation questions being asked during "firstboot"? like selinux! i disable selinux which means i actually begin using my pc on "secondboot(R)"
enuf ranting!
i hope the constructive criticism will make the distro better.
_ In Egypt Networks: Network Solutions with a Twist
I've been using Fedora Core on my desktop for the last 3 years (and RHL before that). It seemed sufficient for me until I tried SLED 10 a few days ago. I must say I'm surprised that though both FC5 and SLED 10 are based on Gnome 2.14, the experience was a whole world of difference (in favor of SLED if it still isn't obvious). I've been hearing great things said about the Ubuntu desktop experience, as well.
My questions are: How much priority is Fedora giving to improving the Desktop experience? And what concrete steps are on its list towards achieving a better desktop experience?
What exactly is Fedora aiming for, anyway? If its aiming at being a server distro, then why is it being touted as a testing ground for new technologies when we know that servers need stability? If its aiming at being a desktop distro, then why is it months (if not years) behind fellow commercial and free distributions?
While servers are essential, people need desktops to work from (even if it means managing said servers).
If Fedora Core is too good, it steals away paying RedHat customers. If it's too bad, Ubuntu steals away Fedora Core users.
What makes you optimistic that a significant space will continue to exist for Fedora?
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
- Grouping packages by functional use (but not as course a grouping as the old RH install)
- Listing packages in organization categories much the same as SourceForge
- Libraries only visible in an 'expert' mode
- Packages dynamically select libraries needed
Since the vast majority of desktop installs are users - not writers of the technology, this or a similar way of extracting the minutiae, will make a killer distribution and a formidable Windows competitor.Currently most distros have their own bugs database (bugzilla), security teams, productions teams and even sometimes they share the same patches for open source software. How do you see a process of integration of these common efforts? What major steps are required to achieve a Linux unity and unification?
Given how far crypto has evolved in 5 years and how important encrypting the data on a laptop (or any computer for that matter) has become, what (if anything), are you doing to make this easy or even feasable?
I think a lot of people still would like to see Linux mature into a Windows alternative.
I know you say that you only want open source programs, but this really limits any distro from being a true windows alternative. Without DVD, MP3 and a DRM system, and 3D graphic hardware support.
What are you doing to make Fedora a more friendly for people wanting to switch from windows?
From useing Fedora core 5, while being a little bit more advanced computer user. I was able without too much trouble find outside support for installing the MP3 and other must have software. but still had problems with the 3D hardware support.
For a Desktop to work must have the following:
Support for popular files formats
3D graphics hardware support for games
Ease of use finding files and transfering files from a windows system. Right now the file setup blows alway most windows users!
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
I've tried several different distros, and so far none of them have played Grand Theft Auto San Andreas "out of box". What's stopping Fedora from doing this, and what's stopping the other linux distros as well? Is there a part of capturing market and mind share that is somehow negative, or is it your opinion that Wine is just not ready for primetime, and if so, why?
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Nothing wrong with it intrinsically. But using AR for storing files in a file went out with a.out.
It lacks some of the metadata that you can tack on with cpio or even tar (in that with tar you can always add your own custom record types since you control the libraries parsing it).
I guess I was just trying to pick on dpkg in a senseless way in the same way that people get mad at RPM because it's BINARY (oh no!) and using bare RPM they run into dependancy issues (use a higher level tool, durr).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Has there been any more thought on bringing out the other products acquired from Netscape? I'd love to be able to deploy the Calendar and Messaging Servers.
Back to the question - one group convincing a manufacturer to release specs helps all linux distributions.
Fedora Core 5 removed support for the old linuxthreads implementation. This prevented several fairly old binaries from running. Normally this would not be considered a bad thing, but many current versions of commercial software on linux require the use of the licencing software flexlm which will not run on Fedora core5 due to the linux binaries not being updated for many years and the new owners (Macromedia) have no plans to update their licencing software. Why was support for linuxthreads removed and are there any plans to add it back in later versions of Fedora?
I'd like to see fedora release a liveCD, not a dvd, but to slim down to a liveCD release. Comments?
YaST is part of SUSE. Ubuntu is Debian-based, so it uses apt.
Are there any plans/discussions about having Fedora use entirely (open source AND) free software, such as to get an FSF endorsement? Fedora is already pretty close to being there, but there's still a few nonfree things, like gnuplot (which is in core). I don't see how this could hurt Fedora, and it doesn't seem very hard.
Staring at a white background [on a computer screen] while you read is like staring at a light bulb — Maddox
Perhaps the AMD-ATI merger could result in free drivers from ATI.
Staring at a white background [on a computer screen] while you read is like staring at a light bulb — Maddox
Do you have any major surprises in store for Fedora Core 6? Have you considered releasing a home version of red hat again? Come on, non-corporate workers like the Shadowman too :)
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
Is Redhat planning to do anything about its excessive conservatism, or at least bring back packages like kernel-unsupported? It may have been an advantage to be "stable" some years ago but now its getting to the point where redhat just seems "outdated". /etc/rc.d/functions to kill all similarly-named processes when removing a package, etc)
Some examples:
-no syslog-ng, only the antique and awful syslog
-no tripwire, aide, samhain or equivalent
-no mail virus/spam scanner of any kind
-only one (useable) filesystem supported
-no VPN software except the worst ones (cipe and pptpd), ie no openvpn, vtun, openswan, etc.
-massively outdated packages (quagga, to name just one)
-general reluctance to fix minor issues not present in other distros (the "sendmail starts for 15 minutes" bug that has been around for years, lack of the several-years-old dateext extension to logrotate, the tendency of
Personally I find RHEL almost unuseable on the server-end - and to make it useable (install the above, compile your kernel, etc) you have to basically give up official support.
The FC5 installation tools seem to have taken a step backwards.
I have FC4 installed on a range of machines, from old 166MH Pentiums to 2GHz Athlon machines. The FC4 install was a breeze, and everything went according to plan.
I tried to upgrade them to FC5, and I found all kinds of problems.
The older machines don't have enough memory (64M and FC5 requires a minimum of 128M). All I want these machines for are simple headless servers running things like backup DNS. They don't have bluetooth, they don't have wireless or USB, they don't even have a mouse.
At the other end of the scale, the FC5 install fails on the Athlon machines. I haven't worked out exactly why yet, but I think it is because I have a nVidia graphics card. Why this causes problems for the text mode install I don't know.
As I said, the FC4 install works fine on both the low end and high end machines.
The FC5 install won't install on either.
I've stuck to using Fedora because it gave me a good stable general purpose system that worked for both text only servers and a good development desktop system.
I have just convinced my non technical brother that he should move from Windows to Linux, but there is no way that I can recomend FC5 if he has to spend a day on Google to find out that he needs to type "linux text ide=nodma nofb skipdde" on the command prompt just to install it.
When and how will Fedora take over the Linix desktop world? Also, when will you get my laptop modem, wireless card, sound card and graphics adapter working?
This article, Fedora Board chair looks ahead asserted, apparently incorrectly, that you were interested in better package management, Conary in particular. Is it possible that Red Hat will swallow its pride and adopt a package management system that looks more like a distributed SCM?
Gentoo > Fedora, nuff said.
since debian has already fostered a vast collaborative community of developers and contributors, why reinvent the wheel with the fedora project? it seems to me that if the gnu/linux community spirit were agregated into one focal point, progress would be attained much more rapidly. right now, every application developer has to create at least 3 packages (if not more) to support most of their users (tgz, rpm, and deb). and each distribution spends a significant portion of their efforts on redundantly repackaging upstream applications. also, proprietary applications tend not to be written for gnu/linux because it is too much effort (because all distributions are slightly incompatible with all others).
so my question is: why doesn't redhat utilize and contribute to the collaboration that already exists? why not utilize debian as the redhat community core with some rebranding, extra redhat utils, and minor repackaging? why not free up your engineers to do real work, rather than redundant repackaging? why not unify the community?
I used to use Red Hat for versions 7.x, and I find the same problem with Red Hat as with other distros. I used Red Hat, Slackware, and Ubuntu over the course of 3 years and still install it occationally to find out how things are going in the Linux world. However, one thing as always bothered me. I would always run into issues with the quality of the software. Some programs like Gnome always worked well for me, however others didn't. I always felt a lot of sofware wasn't "solid" and was not really stable. Every time I would try out a new release, I would see new features or configuration tools, but things never real became more solid.
For example, package managers will break if you try to install software using other methods. Or software crash easily. I often see that many distros release with a plethora of bugs. For example, on Fedora Core 5, I ran into an issue where SELinux policies prevented printing services from working after an upgrade. Or when I tried to set up a dual-head display using a nVidia card (which was well supported) on a different machine, FC5's config utility wouldn't work. When I was running Ubuntu 5.04, I tried to install Fluxbox, but the packaged version had a bunch of errors, so I installed it by hand and broke the package manager. After I lost my Ext3 file system to a corruption, I stopped trusting Linux to be stable. It seems to me that there isn't enough Q&A being put into many distros and that many programs are written in such a manner that they only work in the most common of situations.
So, the question I have is, what is being done to ensure Q&A and improve what's already there rather just keep adding features and compounding the problem? When are we gonna have Linux distros that are rock-solid stable beyond just the out-of-the-box configuration but still functional and user-friendly?
Thanks,
RJ
fedoralegacy.org supports *very* old FC releases and it is the "stable Fedora" you was talking about.
Rawhide (development) = the absolute latest versions from version control
testing releases = testing snapshots from Rawhide (taken when it was feezed in a "stable" state)
stable releases = stable supported releases (with updates - where they even have testing and stable flavors)
You can't really compare Fedora repositories/releases with Ubuntu ones. But:
- Rawhide is like Ubuntu unstable I guess. Although it is more stable just before new FC is getting out than after that when the new technologies are getting in (when development for the next release begins). Perhaps the same is true for Ubuntu as well though.
- Latest stable releases are sort of like Ubuntu testing I guess. Although they are not buggy or anything. They just contain newer software. They are as stable as software in that age can actually be. Everything possible has done to make it stable. (In Debian at least this is not always the case. The packagers tend to submit more fixes just before stable is getting out... I don't know about Ubuntu policies about this though.)
- Older stable releases are sort of like Ubuntu stable I guess. They have been around longer and have older software. Fedora Legacy supports them for quite long time period. A Fedora release support does not end when a new one gets out. This is a misinterpretation from many Debian/Ubuntu lovers.
Of course then there is centos.org which is an open version of RHEL which again is based on Fedora. But centos.org is not a Fedora project. I personally believe Fedora Legacy is better because when I set up a fresh new server the choise is latest stable Fedora (because it contains latest stable software available - fresh new projects usually require fresh new software). I can then have that supported over a long period of time. Just like I would choose Ubuntu testing and have support for that by Ubuntu as long as that release is supported (first as testing and later as stable). There is no such thing as "testing flavor of CentOS".
So a "stable Fedora" indeed exists. The flavoring is just a bit different than in Debian/Ubuntu. But don't say Fedora isn't supported the same way as stable Debian/Ubuntu because that is not true at all. These projects (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian) are all open projects. The differences are not that big. Open your mind.
Oh and the mp3 etc. issues... Just enable livna and all is fine. Don't make such a big issue about that. Actually I feel it is great that Fedora is a totally free and open distribution while I still have the choise to use the "non-free" packages when I really need them.
I have made RPM packages and debs. I must say RPM is *way* easier and ideologically works better. Making debs is complex and I feel unconfortable that debs don't contain the original sources unchanged (they rename the tars) and have all patches just applied in (one big diff is confusing and it is hard to make changes to it).
.so dependencies is a great feature. I've had tons of situations where this has made packaging in debs a really hard task.
And, RPM's automatic
RPM is more right. It lacks some features perhaps, but generally it is more right than debs are. Oh, and most of the "features" people tend to talk about are actually yum/apt/smart features by the way...
At the recent OSCON in Portland I attended the BOF of both Fedora and Ubuntu.
The impression I got from the Fedora one was that the future was oriented to features of interest to big enterprise.
I.e. IPV6, SELinux, etc.
The impression I got from the Ubuntu one was that the future was oriented to the individual user.
I.e. better integration, more packages, more attention to laptop features and support forums etc
It is hard to quantify it, but the difference felt very real. Comment?
Softcoder
Are you planning a live CD version?
Q: Compare and contrst Fedora and Ubuntu. What does Ubuntu do better that can be used to improve Fedora. What has Fedora already done that is influenced by Ubuntu. What should Ubuntu learn from Fedora. How can Ubuntu and Fedora improve commonality and create synergy in the community.
Some topics that might be in the answer:
apt-get vs yum
package manager front ends
single CD install that also serves as a live distro
community based package repositories to extend the base package set
configuration GUIs, utilities
LSB
Q: What can we learn from Apple's recent success with the Mac product line. How does Fedora characterize the reasons for their success. What can Fedora learn from looking at the Mac in terms of user experience. What are the compelling reasons to use linux and Fedora over Mac for a tech savy user. What elements of the "slick" UI should we acknowledge and try to create.
What should the top priorities of the linux community be to make linux on the desktop likeable by a wider (non-technical) audience. How can Fedora achieve success with both the tech savy and the "not-so-savy" the way that Mac has.
What does Fedora think about the GPL version 3 ideas that are floating around? Should we be lobbying congress for protection from DRM evilness or using our assets as barter to negotiate safety from it? What sorts of DRM issues has Fedora already had to deal with and what is the Fedora view of DRM?
How important does Fedora perceive virtualization to be? What sorts of things is Fedora doing to be virtualization friendly? Does Fedora talk to VMWare and/or Xen about "stuff". If so, what sort of "stuff"?
As an avid tester of various OSes my main problem with Linux is the ease of installation and removal of programs, drivers, and packages. Microsoft has made improvements with add/remove program selection which usually works with most programs. MacOS has made it easier by just allowing you to drag the application to install it and throw it into the trash to uninstall it. What is Fedora doing to prevent the casual user from having to enter the terminal to install and uninstall certain programs, drivers, and packages?
-wondergod-