Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
You could try http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm. That will add livna's rpm repositories to your yum configuration. After that it should be straightforward to install stuff like mplayer or xine (yum install mplayer xine).
It's traditional for us to have some sort of "whimsical" or "funny" release announcement that accompanies all of the serious stuff. The full link to it is here:
i st/2006-October/msg00008.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-l
It wasn't flamebait, just paranoia. FC uses the same default theme style for both GNOME and KDE (called "Bluecurve" in FC5, at least). Don't like the default? Pick another.
The missing default support for formats (such as MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3) that rest on shaky FOSS distribution grounds has nothing to do with Fedora's KDE. Of course it's exluded from the GNOME apps too, and it's as easily fixed with KDE as it is with GNOME. Add your favourite 3rd party RPM repositories and use yum.
There is no anti-KDE conspiracy.
> 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.
Huh? Most desktop Linux users like running the latest and greatest which is clearly not what CentOS is intended to do. That's why Fedora and the Ubuntus exist, for desktop users to have all the latest versions before they're completely tested.
Not to mention that Fedora is essentially the test bed for RedHat, which is what CentOS carbon copys itself from. So essentially, if you use CentOS, you need people to use Fedora to ensure your copy of CentOS is tested properly.
> 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
Good idea. I nominate you.
Use Fedora Unity for respins including all updates.
That's like saying "does anybody actually prefer ruled paper to soy sauce?" Apt and rpm are differnt things. Apt and yum are roughly comparable, apt and apt4rpm (availalble for fedora and RH) are quite comparable, but rpm is more like dpkg, not apt.
I tried to address that myth -- the "Fedora is just a trial ground for RHEL" statement -- in the interview that I did *on this very site* a couple of months ago.
0 8/17/177220
Rather than repeat a lot of that stuff here, I'll just post the link.
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/
There are lots of folks out there who use Fedora as a production server. There are many other who choose to use RHEL, or CentOS. But just because there are multiple choices doesn't mean that each distribution has to be pigeon-holed into things that it "is for" or "is not for".
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.
Actually the developers have said that Firefox 2.x will be a FC7 target and won't be released for FC6. Their reasoning was that there are too many other packages which depend on firefox to release a major update within a release.
There are however a couple of people working on Firefox 2 rpms for FC6 (and 5) which will install into /usr/local and will work alongside v1.5 so everyone's happy.