Fedora Core 6 Released

Re:In Other FC News... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-10-24 04:32 · Score: 1, Interesting

what i thought fc7 was already rolled and ready for dist in books... whats this fc6 non-sense...

http://www.amazon.com/Fedora-Core-Red-Enterprise-L inux/dp/0071486429

(yes, I realize its pre-order, but still impressive)

Fedora 6 patches to KDE are buggy, unpolished by billybob2 · 2006-10-24 04:43 · Score: 5, Interesting

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and widget styles) are at best the result of ineptitude or at worst a deliberate attempt to make KDE look bad and outdated.

Not to troll, but... by MikeRT · 2006-10-24 04:44 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.

Re:Not to troll, but... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-10-24 05:10 · Score: 0, Interesting

I have to agree with you. Fedora is a nightmare, especially with SELinux causing kernel panics....and dont even THINK about downloading the FC6 ISO and trying to upgrade. I tried to do that with FC4 to FC5 only to find out after it didnt work that doing an upgrade, "is not recommended".

Fedora is dead as a distro. The absurd patent restrictions that no other distro obeys, and to sum it up Ubuntu, have killed it off. The people who work on it are literally wasting their time, making a distro that competes with Ubuntu, which is the best desktop distro out there.

No one has managed to explain to me why Fedora is even being worked on at all. If all the developers who are working on disparate desktop distros would join together and work on a maximum of three distinctive desktop distros (Gentoo, which is unique, Ubuntu, the people's Linux, and one other) the users would benefit by orders of magnitude. Instead, they bicker like children (see the latest debian debacle) and chip away at their little ghetto distros instead of working for 'the big prize'.

And thats a pity.
Re:Not to troll, but... by turbidostato · 2006-10-24 05:26 · Score: 2, Interesting

"The vast majority of experiences that I and every other person I have met with Fedora have been profoundly negative on some level." /TROLL MODE ON
That only means that you and almost every other person you know is dumb enough not to read documentation about the tools they try to use. /TROLL MODE OFF

"When is the Fedora project going to start fixing its bugs instead of just pushing out bleeding edge packages?"

Plain simple: never.

It is not as if it were a deeply hidden fact; it's even on the fundational papers from RedHat/Fedora. It is known from day O that Fedora's main goal is being Red Hat's testing field for bleeding edge technologies both from the technical and the "social" points of view. From the technical point of view that means its software will be *always* less than polished; from the social one, it only makes sense to open the "build process" as it currently is to gain knowledge about what is well recieved and what, even if hyped, it is not, in order to move RHEL accordingly (once the software is properly polished out of Fedora's suffering).

In sort: Fedora is, and it always has been kindof a "beta" aimed at technoenthusiasts, aficionados and redhat-involved hackers.

"Hey, I'm just saying that it blows my mind how bad Fedora has been for everyone"

It is *NOT* so bad for everything: it is really good for Red Hat Inc. and Red Hat hackers (meaning people that hack/develop on the Red Hat platform not only people that work within Red Hat). But yes, it is quite bad for unknowledgeable people that uses Fedora under false assumptions.

Just exactly the same happens whenever somebody tries to use a hammer as a teaspoon, and you can imagine what the usual name for someone that uses hammers as teaspons is.

Re:Who cares? by loconet · 2006-10-24 04:55 · Score: 2, Interesting

Agreed. I used to be a long time Red Hat user but dropped it as soon as they stopped support for their desktop version. I moved to Suse and then Ubuntu (besides trying dozen of other dists and bsds). Although I had never used Linux as my primary desktop OS (it has however been my primary application server at work and home for years), thanks to Ubuntu's ability to take away the headache of spending countless hours fetching for obscure modules, compiling unsupported libraries, etc, in order to get my hardware or a piece of software working, I am now using Linux as my primary desktop OS and can't say I have much to complain about. Ubuntu just works (most of the time). Is it ready for my mom/dad/MySpace-sister? I don't think so IMO, but it is closer than ever and getting there fast.

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Re:Bah - that's what Livna is for :) by spevack · 2006-10-24 04:57 · Score: 2, Interesting

Having suport inside of anaconda (the installer) for third party package repositories (like Fedora Extras) is one of the new features that I am most excited about.

Obviously the general case of that feature is that you can specify your own URL for external repositories -- be they livna, dag, or your own custom repo.

Re:Mandatory Zod quote by Speare · 2006-10-24 05:11 · Score: 2, Interesting

It's interesting that they chose to call this release "Zod." The traditional Red Hat maintainer of XFree86/Xorg, Mike Harris, for a long time went by the alternate nickname of "zod" on IRC support channels and the like. He left Red Hat a little while ago, and now this release bears this name. I have no idea if there was any intentional connection.

ObTrivia: In case you missed the other fifty explanations, General Zod is the leader of the Krypton villains in Superman II.

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Re:Who cares? by binner1 · 2006-10-24 05:37 · Score: 2, Interesting

I cut my inlaws over to Ubuntu this past (Canadian) Thanksgiving weekend. They're happy so far. I only had to install gtk-gnutella and a few other comfort type apps on top of the default install. I transferred all of their old data from their ntfs disk (left intact in the event that they hated ubuntu) and they're good to go.

I guess I did have to grab the mplayer codec package to satisfy a few of their media dependencies too...

The cutover was eased by the fact that I've had them doing:
a) running with limited user rights in XP [this was the only way I was going to continue providing support]
b) using firefox only
c) using thunderbird for mail
d) running gaim for im

I set their OO.o defaults to use the ms office formats so that they didn't have to futz with file extension changes when sharing docs and presto, chango, a perfect setup for their needs.

The funniest thing I've heard so far was the following from my sister-in-law:
SiL -> Hey Ben, what do I use to scan the music I just downloaded for viruses.
Me -> Don't worry about viruses any more.
SiL -> Interesting!

(The last line is a direct quote.)

-Ben

who maintains rpm? by j1m+5n0w · 2006-10-24 06:27 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.

Re:Yes, but... by muszek · 2006-10-24 07:08 · Score: 2, Interesting

That's not exactly true.
Apps are _sometimes_ backported, but only when they appear at current_stable+1 repositories. That doesn't happen very often.
Edgy (6.10, to be released in a few days) has FF 2.0, but only because they started with beta. Breezy (released a year ago, iirc few weeks before FF 1.5) didn't have FF 1.5 - it had 1.5.0.7. It wasn't even backported from Dapper repos (there were too many dependencies... for example gnome help was (maybe still is) rendered via FF). So unless you wanted to try some alternative way of installing FF 1.5, you had to wait till June 2006 (over 10 months).

On the other sie, I remember myself feeling really bad about this "I don't get the newest and greatest stuff" deal when I migrated to Linux 18 months ago. But now, 99% of the time I couldn't care less. Sure, sometimes I really want some new version (recent case: x-moto, a cool game, got a new version that introduced neat new features... luckily it's been backported to Dapper), but the fact that I have almost all of my software being upgraded almost automatically is just so much more important. I'd say the time spent on maintaining my system decreased at least 10x since I dumped Windows.

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