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Fedora Core 6 Released
Shadowman writes "Fedora Core 6 has been released. Recommended download method is via BitTorrent. For more information, see the release notes or the Fedora homepage.
Slashdot interviewed the Fedora Project Leader back in August."
I literally just installed FC5 on a machine this morning.
As someone always comments on Fedora's (and by proxy, Red Hat's) multimedia support, here it is from the horse's mouth:
15.3. MP3, DVD, and Other Excluded Multimedia Formats
Fedora Core and Fedora Extras software repositories cannot include support for MP3 or DVD video playback or recording. The MP3 formats are patented, and the patent holders have not provided the necessary patent licenses. DVD video formats are patented and equipped with an encryption scheme. The patent holders have not provided the necessary patent licenses, and the code needed to decrypt CSS-encrypted discs may violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a copyright law of the United States. Fedora also excludes other multimedia software due to patent, copyright or license restrictions, including Adobe's Flash Player and and Real Media's Real Player. For more on this subject, please refer to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems.
While other MP3 options may be available for Fedora, Fluendo now offers a free MP3 plugin for GStreamer that has the necessary patent license for end users. This plugin enables MP3 support in applications that use the GStreamer framework as a backend. Fedora does not include this plugin since we prefer to support and encourage the use of patent unrestricted open formats instead. For more information about the MP3 plugin, visit Fluendo's website at http://www.fluendo.com/.
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
I mean, did you check with the site, try a torrent link out. You're gonna get a nastygram from the FC team if you didn't.
Does FC6 include Firefox 2?
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
But does it come with GNU Iceweasel?
Just. One. More. Day.
:(.
Damn, now I'll have to install Firefox 2 myself
Oh, PS, the release-notes page is down for maintenance:
"Fedora Infrastructure Logo
Down for Maintenance
Fedora Project Infrastructure is currently unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience this outage may cause. Thank you for supporting Fedora Project.
Fedora Infrastructre Team
For status updates and information on what systems are affected please visit fedora wiki
Fedora is a trademark of Red Hat, Inc.
The Fedora Project is maintained and driven by the community and sponsored by Red Hat, Inc.
Legal | Trademark Guidelines"
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Means many people are interested. Chinese proverb.
Seriously, people aren't using red-hat any more.
I was a Red Hat and Fedora user until FC5 pissed me off for the last time. I really don't care at all about FC6. Wake me up when Ubuntu 6.10 is released.
Come to me, son of Jor-El! KNEEL before ZOD!!
Okay, I got it out of my system now...
ZOD!!!!!
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
Torrents are up. The Fedora websites seem to be down (fedora.redhat.com) and overloaded (fedoraproject.org), but if you can get the latter to load, it does announce "Download Fedora Core 6"
Through the magic of Bittorrent I'm downloading the official release faster than their server can manage right now.
Fedora Core 7 alpha 1 was also released today, a trend which we will keep up through FC 1000
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Things I'm finding interesting are:
Section 9 (Desktop Effects) Looks like its just AIGLX, not Xgl (in fact there's no mention of Xgl).
Section 17 (Virtualization) FC6 uses Xen 3.0.2, I know Xen was in FC5 but I haven't had a chance to play with it. The release notes mention something about it being connected with the installer, so perhaps I'll get a chance.
Section 22 (Package Changes) Interesting removals IMHO are: mozilla, xscreensaver, gkrellm. I'm sure all can be found in the Fedora Extra's Repo or some place similar. I'm not a big fan of where some of the desktop apps are going (eg. I hate gnome-screensaver), but the beauty of Linux is it's quite simple to solve this problem.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Dag
Cheers! /P
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The installation process failed to access the hard drive! I have no clue what it means, but just so you know, the hard drive has undergone installations of Suse, Ubuntu, and Fedora Core previously. Currently my drive houses a dual boot Windows/Suse and I was planning to overwrite Suse with FC6. However it seems like FC6 chickened out at the very onset so Suse 10.1 stays on my drive.
Face your daemons!
I'm to lazy to go look for it... Could someone point us the way to an installer that gives us mp3, dvd playback etc all at once. I seem to recall that something like this exists somewhere.
The modified version of KDE that ships in Fedora 6 is really buggy and unpolished. There's been talk for two years about placing KDE in Fedora Extras so that it will be better supported by the dedicated KDE community, but Redhat seems to keep refusing the help and treating KDE apps as second-class citizens.
Some of the Fedora 6 changes (like taking away MP3 playing capability from KDE music players) are justified on a legal basis, but other changes (like using a 4-year old window decoration and widget styles) are at best the result of ineptitude or at worst a deliberate attempt to make KDE look bad and outdated.
The vast majority of experiences that I and every other person I have met with Fedora have been profoundly negative on some level. Version 1.0 was nice on my machine, and 2.0 didn't slip far, but 3.0 and especially 4.0 were just total piles of dog shit for everyone I have known. I watched as an entire CS class composed of people who ranged from total newbies to gentoo and debian rabid partisans couldn't get it installed on hardware that RHEL and SuSE 10 had not 1 iota of a problem working with. My girlfriend, who actually has a little bit of experience writing kernel modules, spent two days trying to get Fedora 5 to install on her work machine. Rinse, repeat for every other person I have met who has used Fedora post v 2.0.
When is the Fedora project going to start fixing its bugs instead of just pushing out bleeding edge packages? OpenSuSE has its problems, but it is significantly better than Fedora and Ubuntu makes Fedora look like useless because those teams work hard on bug fixes. Fedora doesn't even do Core 5.0, 5.1, 5.2 then 6.0. It's like very release they just cross their fingers and pray that the bugs will go away.
Hey, I'm just saying that it blows my mind how bad Fedora has been for everyone I know, how much griping I have seen about it online, and yet... things never change. I for one have given up hope for it since being severely burned on version 3.0 (had it kernel panic in the middle of a demo, trying to run Tomcat of all things!) and then having 4.0 refuse to even install on the same hardware that 3.0 worked on.
yes, one only needs to install the livna-release rpm in order to have yum set up to get the missing packages.
But it would be a good idea for someone to offer Fedora+Livna respin DVD/CD's, that have all the missing packages on the disc.
Ever since I installed Kubuntu i threw a black stone to the dark days of Fedora Core Installations ...
Since then i can completely install linux systems on any laptop and PC without writing a single script
and without having to compile my own kernel modules.
http://www.google.com/
ANOTHER release? How many are they going to have?
Maybe they should have programmed it right the first time: then they wouldn't need to come up with ten new releases every week.
Nvidia is keeping me away from desktop linux... vista can count on my money. Tried Core 6 & ubuntu 6.10, and am ready to write-off linux until I buy a new system 3 years from now.
Really, have any of you actually used Fedora's KDE? The parent is correct, at least for releases up to FC5 (haven't tried FC6).
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
The last version of Redhat-Linux/Fedora with a ".0" was rh 8.0.
Past that, it was rh9,fc1,fc2,fc3,fc4,fc5,fc6.
I would tend to agree, if you don't need bleeding edge, then OpenSuse or Ubuntu would be a better fit.
But there are things that I have needed to be at the bleeding edge, so fedora+livna works for me.
Is there any reason to care about Fedora now that we have CentOS?
/etc, then write conversion tools for each OS to move from XML to /etc files?
/etc/ are simple concepts that should not require looking up some random guy's BNF.
Also, I spent the day mapping configurations between Debian and RHEL. It was not fun.
Could someone please, pretty please, come up with some kind of XML file to abstract everything commonly found in a linux
Then we could have one configuration tool for the XML file, instead of having to use hundreds of tools (system-config-foobar, dselect reconfigure foobar) or learn hundreds of config file parsing languages.
99% of configurations done in
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Is this the best way to download firefox 2.0, with the fc6 distro?
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
They mean gratis, not that this plugin necessarily gives you the freedoms of free software (for those of you who live in countries saddled with software patents). You could install and run this plugin but doing so would be installing non-free software on your machine. For the rest of you, the Fluendo GStreamer MP3 plugin is free software, licensed under the MIT X11 license. Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement, talked about this during the first GPLv3 conference when discussing what was then known as the "Liberty or Death" clause of the upcoming GPL. The GPL strives to not only create software freedom (the freedom to share and modify computer programs) but defend it in the face of new threats like software patents (patents on algorithms used in computer software):
I discussed this some more at the time on my blog.
Digital Citizen
Whenever I hear someone talking about a new distro release I think to myself, "Great, but your package manager isn't apt." Does anyone actually prefer rpm to apt?
and still is.
First, the shipped kernel had to be updated right away to allow other modules such as video drivers or ndiswrapper to work.
Second, kudos for FC/ RH team for putting the dmraid in boot time, allowing FC5 to be first and only distro with support for most motherboard fakeRAIDs, that are widely present today. However, dmraid booting was broken as soon as you get first kernel update (original kernel was useless).
Then there were daily updates. I can't keep it up-to-date no matter why: it takes 10 minutes just to resolve dependencies, while Ubuntu updates its own system in that time.
For example, I had KDE 3.5 and I decided to get the Kile package. Peace of cake it should be. The file itself on Debian systems (Ubuntu) is about 4MB. In FC5 - it took 100MB of downloads to get it running. And when I was done, I checked for updates, and there were another 500MB of minor updates waiting to be resolved and then updated. And system was up-to-date day before.
This quick FC6 release just tells me it is going to be same story. Sorry, but I'm not going to try it, although I've tried releases 2 to 5 and RHEL - Ubuntu just works, and it works FAST.
I'm guessing one of Fedora's single main problems is rpm. I haven't used Fedora myself, but I did use RH 7, 8, and 9...I'll never forget how relieved I was to move to Linux From Scratch.
rpm has a number of features which IMHO should not have been implemented at all (subpackaging being the most egregious in the list, although the macro format would be close) which are used on a routine basis. The specfiles are consistently of a hideous standard from what I have seen as well...they are utterly incomprehensible when there is no sane reason for them to be whatsoever. Don't even get me started about how loose most people usually are with dependency lines in specfiles, either. Then there are the horror stories about mangled databases and trashed installations, etc. In short, it's a completely broken system...I wouldn't touch it with a forty foot pole for use on any computer, production or otherwise.
I was initially skeptical of Fedora and stayed on Redhat 9 until FC2 came out. Since then, I've used each release of Fedora on a multitude of systems including desktops, servers, laptops (including my Powerbook G4) and I've had relatively little trouble with it. Yes, there were issues like getting the nVidia drivers to work with the first build of FC5 and so on, but nothing that I haven't faced with other Linuxes.
I don't want to read
It's actually been released, right?
"You and your third dimension."
A while back someone made an interesting observation about the Red Hat and Fedora release cycles. Every 6-10 months they'd release a new version, and every 3 or 4 releases was a major departure from the previous one.
Red Hat 6.0, 6.1, 6.2
Red Hat 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3
Red Hat 8, 9, Fedora Core 1
Fedora Core 2, 3, 4
etc.
Red Hat 8 was a big departure from Red Hat 7.3, but RH9 and FC1 were more refinements than major changes. Then FC2 jumped to the 2.6 kernel, added SELinux and such, which was refined further. IIRC X.org replaced XFree86 in FC5, which tracks as well.
From that standpoint it hasn't changed much -- they've just changed the numbering scheme.
Narf! Zod! Egad!
Had just finished downloading FreeBSD 5.4. On a shitty shitty SHITTY PC, using Wget for Windows, over a very slow Internet connection.
Then I looked on Slashdot and found that FreeBSD 6.0 had just come out. Literally 20 seconds after the discs had finished burning.
I'm still pissed about that now.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Did you notice that this story is actually about FC6? Your post is almost completely irrelevant.
First, the shipped kernel had to be updated right away to allow other modules such as video drivers or ndiswrapper to work.
Yes. You needed to wait a whole week or two for those proprietary hacks needed to be updated, because they are broken by design. ndiswrapper, the proprietary ATI & nvidia drivers, madwifi, etc. are all available for FC6 already:
http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/6/i386
Second, kudos for FC/ RH team for putting the dmraid in boot time, allowing FC5 to be first and only distro with support for most motherboard fakeRAIDs, that are widely present today. However, dmraid booting was broken as soon as you get first kernel update (original kernel was useless).
Another complaint about the original FC5 kernel. File under: "would have been relevant in April, maybe"
Then there were daily updates. I can't keep it up-to-date no matter why: it takes 10 minutes just to resolve dependencies, while Ubuntu updates its own system in that time.
Dep solving is much, much faster with FC6, and metadata is downloaded in the background so you don't have to wait for that either. But I'm sorry you lost ten whole minutes of your life.
This quick FC6 release just tells me it is going to be same story.
Quick release? All Fedora Core releases are about 6 months apart. In fact this one took seven months, so it is longer than the previous releases. I thought you had used FC2-FC5, so you should already know this.
So, yes, seven months ago the original release of FC5 was not very good. Fine. Enjoy "Flatulent Dik-Dik" or whatever the next Ubuntu release is. But please refrain from commenting about FC6 until you actually know something about it.
Nice troll.
FC5 was a giant step up, among Linux distros at that time. FC5 received many 'so-so' reviews, which tarnished the image. There was a long discussion about this on the fedora mailing list.
Yeah...I'm going to agree with this. I've been a RH user from their very first distro, and they used to be great, but with great reluctance I'm going to switch now. My impression is that the RH quality is definitely down and steadily falling.
I don't know exactly why, but I don't agree with other commenters that it's just a matter of FC being on the "bleeding edge." RH was far closer to the bleeding edge in the early days, and yet they did better. Perhaps there's a fine line between being daring and innovative, and being careless and arrogant, but I've the feeling RH has crossed it.
I think the danger here to their business model is that they'll drive the more conservative users away from their FC testbed. Which means their ability to pick out what will work well in their business-oriented RHEL is going to become poorer.
Here is an interesting article from Linux Weekly News: Who maintains RPM? Makes you wonder about the future of that package format. Unfortunately, it would not be an easy thing for Red Hat to switch to apt or anything else, we'll probably have multiple incompatible package formats for a long time to come.
I followed that soap opera on the redhat dev list. I won't name names, but the FC5 graphics were referred to as "teletubbie vomit". There was also a long drawn out discussion about the inclusion of things like proprietary audio and video codecs.
I'm not sure if the ability to download from repos like livna from the installer now are a result of those discussions.
And from what I've seen on here and digg, the main instigator is interested in Linspire now. A shame, because his complaining, as untactful as it may have been, may have actually helped the situation.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
As a frequent visitor to slashdot, I can tell you that nothing irritates me more than the dozens of double standards that exist amongst the posters here.
If anyone else would continuously have buggy releases, they would be deemed a crap distro (Mandrake anyone?). Fedora continues to drop half-assed releases, and this same tired "only a test bed" argument keeps coming up - as if Fedora didn't have the same 6 month release cycle that Ubuntu and SUSE had.
My first Linux distro ever was Red Hat, and I can tell you that it's always been hit or miss. It has always been the most inconsistent disro in Linux. Either it works perfectly for this user, or it's a total nightmare for the that user. Broken build systems, favoritism towards GNOME, "enhancements" that resulted in security holes... all of this has been happening for years. Are you going to try to convince me that Red Hat Linux 8.0 was a test bed as well? Since you really want to split hairs, most Linux apps are "unofficial" releases. Does that resolve them from having to function properly?
This is not a test bed. This is Red Hat being Red Hat, and having no incentive because they're faithful following with continue to make excuses for their shortcomings like they always have.
Talking to Fedora devs at linuxworld Boston, it was all about jiggly windows.
YAWN.
Are they shipping a Network Manager package that works better than the command line tools yet? Oh, only if you use a wireless chipset that one of the Fedora devs happens to have on his laptop, eh? That's what I thought.
Seriously, I have nothing against the Fedora team - this is not meant to be a flame - but their priorities are so far away from mine (mine include bulletproof wireless access and security managment with WPA, 802.1x, etc.) that they are unlikely to build anything that will work for me.
Jiggly windows, I just don't even see that as worth advertising... you can get that from a 1970s era mainframe, just by taking some 1970s era drugs.
"My girlfriend, who actually has a little bit of experience writing kernel modules" - dude you are like soooo lucky to find a girl like that!
Anyways, my honest question is this - when a new "FC" comes out, is it really ready for real, for running on production systems?
I really needed my system back up ASAP, and decided to go with FC5 instead of using the rc2 or waiting for the real FC6, because I figured FC5 was fine for my uses (really a headless server, unless the s*** hits the fan and I have to put a monitor on it). Did I do the right thing with using FC5? I probably could've used a different distro, but so far I've only used RH9 and FC4 (until this new FC5 install).
Do they have the standard (Centrino) Wifi drivers working yet?
Sheesh...
The ipw2100/ipw2200 driver is in the kernel package.
The firmware is freely available from http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/ or the livna repo.
HTH HAND kthxbye.
I've only done two installs of FC5, and only about a dozen FC4, but have had no problems other than the one above in this small sample size - where are people having these problems? Am I avoiding these problems by replacing the kernel with a newer one immediately after install?
All:
I'm going to post this because I think it's going to be helpful.
Fedora is my favorite distro, even though it's frustrating.
The main reason why it's frustrating is because Fedora doesn't bother to update their release images once they hit "gold", which is when the distro gets into real testing, and then the bugs start showing up. They're already moving towards the next release.
But I love how many choices of repositories I get for prepackaged goodies for Fedora (Livna, RPMForge, FreshRPMS, PlanetCCRMA, etc.) so I stick with it.
Here's how I do installs, and it's always worked successfully for me:
1) Download the CD1 and CD2 isos for the release you're interested in. Don't bother with the latest and greatest, just the one that's the oldest yet has all the features you need (SELinux, Xorg, whatever)
2) Plan ahead and visit a few of the repositories you want to incorporate into your installation (Livna, RPMForge, Extras, etc.). Download any "setup" RPMs, GPG keys, or yum conf.d entries and put them onto a USB memory stick or something.
3) Do a rescue boot. Make sure your network card and disk drivers are being detected. Now go ahead and partition your disk, and maybe set up LVM or whatever. I find it easier to do this using the command line tools than with Disk Druid... I mean it's alright but the point and click interface is slow when I know what I want.
4) Reboot, and do an install. BUT! Don't bother selecting packages. Just go for a "Minimal" configuration.
5) Boot up from the new installation. You'll notice Firstboot doesn't run, etc. etc. Do a yum update kernel. Then do a yum upgrade. At this point you'll have all the latest packages for your base system, which (in my experience) is many times more stable than the gold image. You'll also jump a few kernel revisions, and get better hardware support right off the bat. This process shouldn't take too long, since you did a minimal install.
Reboot!
6) Make sure you boot the new kernel at next boot. Remove the old kernel. Now stick in that memory stick and setup your new repositories.
7) yum install gdm redhat-artwork (you really want to do this first)
8) For gnome: yum install nautilus gedit gnome-panel gnome-session
For KDE: yum install kdebase kdeutils
9) yum install "my application 1" "my application 2" "my application 3"
Steps 7, 8 and 9 will take care of pulling in a lot of dependancies you would expect for an interactive desktop. 7 should get you your GUI (since gdm depends on Xorg and such). 8 gets you a desktop environment. And 9 gets you the applications you want.
If you want to make sure you can compile code, try this one:
10) yum install gcc-c++ gcc make binutils glibc-devel libstdc++-devel
That should get you everything you need to (configure, make, make-install), minus any -devel packages that something is expecting to find.
While some people may disagree with this method of doing installations, I find that it helps me keep the installed images lean, and so it takes less time to do a full system update by just issueing a "yum -y update" every month or so. It takes forever to do that if you do a full system install with the DVD ISO or whatever.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I have used all of the major distributions, including every version of Fedora Core except FC2.
I think Fedora is Great! It's my favorite distribution for playing with bleeding edge developments smoothly and easily (aside from KDE).
There are a few things I keep in mind:
- If you are making a desktop system for personal use, create a home partition. That way you can blow away your OS partition for future updates if needed, without losing any important data.
- The released version without updates will be buggy. I will often wait until a month after release, then install and immediately run an update. For example, Fedora Core 5 out of the box was almost unusable for what I needed, but Fedora Core 5 with updates may be my slickest and most productive linux desktop environment.
- You have to install third-party packages for anything of dubious US legality, such as mp3 codecs and dvd support. However, there are a few sites (freshrpms, livna) that make this simple and painless. Personally I like that Fedora draws the line where they do, and keeps a clean distribution.
- Explore the distribution, extras, and third party repositories. You have more to gain if you attempt to use what they provide instead of try and shoehorn in something on your own. Also, upgrading to future Fedora Core revisions will be easier.
Live Long and Prosper on the gleaming but sharp brim of Fedora!
Could someone that has done the GNOME default desktop install post the disk numbers needed? If only a few are needed, that could reduce the pressure on the servers. Thanks, --AC
If you want a distro that just installs everything in one shot, without much prompting, then by all means, use Ubuntu. Or Mandriva.
Fedora is more for someone who already has an idea of what they want. Or at least an idea of the names of software that does what they want to do.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Is FC6's installer better?
Suse 10.2 alpha 5 worked better i would wait on suse 10.2 beta.
Is it possible to use ASP with MySQL for the database?
I've noticed the cool new GUI installer for it.
However, the big question for me about Xen is will it support a clipboard between guest and host OSs?
In other words can I copy info via the clipboard out of, say, XP running on a guest session and paste it into a Linux app running on FC6?
Tech Public Policy stuff
Is there any way to upgrade a happy running FC5 system to an FC6 system ?
ATI cards are really hard to support properly with anything besides Windows in general.
Unless you're talking about an R100 or R200, then you might be in good shape.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Ok, I work for a rental company and we had Fedora 5 or 6 on a couple of our machines for a customer. Before you murder me, I have no choice in the matter. I need to get it off my machines and my imaging software is not doing so well. I've used Fdisk to remove the partitions (my area of trouble) and now when I reload Windows Xp back on it I get no Windows boot screen, all it tells me is grub; in a DOS/Safemode format and no DOS command I know is helping. What the heck is grub? Any tips or tricks? Fedora seems to be a pain to remove. Just a tip for those of us who are lesser mortals amongst the nerd gods that reside here.