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.
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.
You should see the announcement they posted to the mailing list:
It goes on to link to release notes and such, then adds this note:
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.
Not only that, but in FC6 you can enable Livna right in the installer. So your system will have MP3/DVD/etc. support right at first boot.
Just point it at http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/6/[arch] and those packages will magically appear as install options. Yay!
(link: http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/6/)
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 whole point of Fedora is to be bleeding edge, not to be 100% stable. Fedora introduces bleeding edge features, and Red Hat fixes the features, that's how it is, and that's how it is supposed to be. If you can't cope with bleeding edge features that are not guaranteed to be stable, then Fedora is simply not for you.
Ubuntu makes Fedora look like useless because those teams work hard on bug fixes.
Ubuntu aims for usability and stability, Fedora aims for bleeding edge. Different distros, different goals. Use the right tool for your job.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
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".