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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.
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?
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Wifi as well.
Umm it supports all the others too, when booting from the CD, rather than just hitting enter, type: linux xfs/jfs/rieser etc etc, and those filesystem types will be available to you in the installation program.
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?
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?
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?
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
You've hit a key issue: the niggling little dependencies on things like nautilus by many other core packages, or the X libraries to use emacs, helps create a dependency problem. Similarly, the dependencies on MySQL and PostgreSQL and SQLite by software like bugzilla that can use any of the 3 databases force installation of all of them. Nautilus is one of the worst, since there's no graceful way to disable it entirely and prevent a software update from restoring its use, and it tends to be a real CPU sink. Ripping it out by the roots yanks dozens if not hundreds of other packages with it.
If we paid the Fedora Core authors, we could tell them "spend the time to split out the dependencies into sub-modules". But that does take some work and some cunning: the software authors often do not have these split out gracefully, and it means writing patches on top of the original software. But getting them to go harass the bugzilla authors to split out dependencies is asking a lot from them. It's often simpler to buy a bigger disk and just install everything as asked, and not worry about a few unnecessary Megabytes here or there.
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.
An incredibly good question, many people seem to feel like another poster who wrote (note: i don't really agree with it but it does sum up the sentiment really well):
"Fedora is unstable testbed material for RedHat to use folk as guinea pigs, certainly not suitable for corporate use. Fine for personal web server use or perhaps coloc OS for small business that have geeks with time on their hands, if the occasional kinks and hiccups aren't too annoying. "
If one does not want to spend money on RHEL, and is told Fedora Core is not for production envirioments, what does redhat sugest to do? Go use another not redhat distribution?
Of cource i'm well aware of CentOS, Scientific linux, etc. However they don't seem to solve that general impression of 'either pay, or use someone else's distro if you want to use 'production envirioment' class product.
Wouldn't it be better to embrase CentOS and re-label it to 'Fedora Enterprise' and welcome all those users into Fedora's/Redhat's arms? Even if its just to take away the confusion, and stop the 'myth' (or reality?) of "We don't have a free production enviroment product"
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.
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)
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)
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?
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.
You're right: gv and xpdf are designed to do one thing, but they also follow the UNIX tradition of not following User Interface Guidelines, working together with other programs, and being a butt-ugly looker.
Evince is not bloated. It's part of a larger system: GNOME. It supports GNOME drag-n-drop, shares the same widgets, etc. You can't blame Evince for being part of GNOME just as you can't blame xpdf for depending on X.
The imp hits!
Error 25 is a disk read error, says the all-seeing eye of Google. It may be caused by bad sectors in the disk. Now, most Linux installers I've seen don't bother checking the disk for bad sectors during creation of file system since that takes a lot of time, so it's entirely possible that either grub.conf or the kernel happens to be sitting on a bad sector, leading to the error you described.
Windows could still be able to use the disk just fine, by either marking the bad sectors as such in the file allocation table or by simply not storing anything important there.
As for a solution, the command "fsck.ext2 -c /dev/hda1" will search and mark bad blocks as such (assuming your boot partition is /dev/hda1, change that if needed), but of course it requires getting the system running first. The OS installer likely has an option of checking the disk for errors as well, but I can't tell for sure since I've never installed Ubuntu. Finally, make sure that the boot partition is located at the beginning of the disk and is less than 500 MB in size, since otherwise the BIOS of the machine can cause problems.
Occam's Razor says that the simplest explanation that fits all known facts is likely to be most usefull. And the simplest explanation that fits "disk read error" is that the disk is faulty.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.