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."
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.
But does it come with GNU Iceweasel?
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.
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 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.
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).
Yeah, Linux should be more like Windows. The OS comes with *no* useful software, and it's up to the software vendor to test the software on every possible install platform. I'm sure that wouldn't delay software releases for longer than the time period already present between most distro revisions.
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
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.
> 99% of configurations done in /etc/ are simple concepts that should not require looking up some random guy's BNF.
/etc/passwd format, or any of the other two dozen odd /etc files it parses. I'm not saying it's not a worthy goal, but some battles aren't worth choosing for most people.
Your new version is going to have to read the old config file formats for compatibility for bob-knows-how-many years anyway, so now not only do you need to support XML, you still have to support J.Q.Random's BNF, and a converter between the XML and the old config format.
Good luck getting the glibc guys to support a new
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
It's actually been released, right?
"You and your third dimension."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good lord, I thought the Gentoo Handbook was bad. If a distro isn't meant for experienced users then it shouldn't require this crap.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
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.