Fedora Linux

Ravi writes "Fedora — the Linux that is developed as a community effort, is the sand box of Red Hat. They incorporate all the new features after they have been exhaustively tested into its commercial product, namely Red Hat Enterprise Linux . Fedora has a 6 month release schedule and the most recent release is core 6. In all respects Fedora is the same Red Hat Linux but with cutting edge packages. What I really like about Fedora apart from the vibrant community participating in its development is the mark of quality it has from its association with Red Hat." Read the rest of Ravi's review. Fedora Linux author Chris Tyler pages 650 publisher O'Reilly rating 9 reviewer Ravi ISBN 0-596-52682-2 summary An excellent book on setting up and configuring all aspects of Fedora Linux.

Coinciding with the release of the latest version of Fedora, O'Reilly brought out the new book titled Fedora Linux authored by Chris Tyler. The book is divided into 10 chapters spanning over 600 pages with each chapter catering to a particular topic. Like all books of this genre, this book also starts by explaining how to install Fedora on ones machine. But what is different regarding the Fedora installer is that it provides a lot of flexibility, variety and finer control over the install process. Not surprisingly, the author has dedicated two chapters for explaining the various ways in installing Fedora. The first chapter titled "Quick start: Installing Fedora" covers the basic installation from start to finish. Where as the 10th chapter titled "Advanced Installation" covers the advanced features of the installer such as creating logical volumes and Raid during installation, automating the installation process using the kick start file, installing from locations other than a CD/DVD such as NFS and PXE boot as well as a detailed coverage of the Grub boot loader. This chapter also has a short section explaining how to install and use Xen virtual machines.

At a first glance, one might be tempted to bundle this book with the rest of the books available on this subject. But on close scrutiny, I discovered a certain method to the madness. That is each topic that is covered in the book is divided into 4 broad sections. There is a section titled "How do I do that?" which explains the nuts and bolts of accomplishing the given task. The next section titled "How does it work?" gives a good understanding of the theoretical concepts if any behind the topic, the third section titled "What about...?" introduces potential configuration bottlenecks and any additional tasks related to the topic and provides solutions to them. And lastly, there is a section titled "Where can I learn more...?" which provides a bunch of resources on the web and pointers to the respective documentation which will provide further insights about the topic being discussed. It is really refreshing to see this book take such a unique structured approach to explaining the concepts.

The 2nd chapter titled "Using Fedora on your Desktop" apart from covering details about Gnome and KDE Desktops also provides information about additional topics like configuring the XServer, adding new fonts and configuring sound and printing to work with Fedora. There are topics like partitioning a flash drive which makes this particular chapter quite interesting.

The third chapter titled "Using Fedora on your Notebook" explains how to configure Fedora to handle laptop specific features such as power management, mobile networking and configuring touch pad. This chapter also gives a firm introduction to configuring the networking interfaces be it the ethernet or wireless. One thing which holds Fedora in good stead over its peers is the good set of GUI front-ends available to configure each and every aspect of Linux. And configuring networking is no different. But the author does not limit himself to explaining the GUI way of configuring but also explains how to do it the command line way.

No book on Linux is complete without an in depth coverage of the basic commands used for system maintenance. The fourth chapter titled "Basic System Management" is one of the largest chapters in this book where the author explains all the important commands one might be expected to know to keep Fedora Linux in ship shape. Apart from the ubiquitous commands, I also found detailed pointers in enabling secure remote access to Fedora using SSH.

Package management forms the basis for the fifth chapter. Fedora has a great set of tools which aid the user in a variety of ways in installing, removing and upgrading packages. Fedora uses the software management system called RPM Package Manager. But with popular demand, it has also incorporated an apt-get like tool called Yum which automatically resolve dependency issues. I found this chapter to provide an in-depth coverage of all the tools related to package management in Fedora. For example, the author explains how to roll back the installation of a package to a state 10 minutes ago or for that matter to a previous date using the RPM tool. There is also a section which explains how to create ones own RPM packages.

The chapter titled "Storage management" gives a broad explanation of Logical volume management and setting up Raid. Fedora comes with its own LVM administration tool which makes it a snap to set up and manage logical volumes. The author after explaining how to accomplish creating, resizing and deleting logical volumes using this GUI tool, goes on to describe how to do it the command line way too which makes this chapter really useful. All along the chapter, I found useful tips on tasks such as creating backups of the disk and how to go about doing it, stopping a raid and so on.

But the one chapter which I found really comprehensive was the seventh chapter titled "Network Services". Here the author explains how to setup the gamut of network services including but not limited to DHCP server, BIND, CUPS print server, MySQL server, sendmail and more. This chapter spans around 100 pages. There is also a short section providing tips on analyzing the web and ftp logs.

Lets face it. Even though Fedora is a community supported venture backed by Red Hat, it has all the characteristics which propel it to the enterprise level. One of the notable characteristics is the extensive integration of SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux). SELinux controls what a program is and is not allowed to do, enforcing security policy through the kernel. Fedora has very good support for SELinux and has even developed GUI front-ends to make it much more easier to configure. In the 8th chapter, the author explains in detail the steps needed to configure and fine tune selinux on Fedora. This chapter also contain sections which explain the pluggable authentication module as well as other security related features such as configuring a firewall and using access control lists.

The unique structure in which the chapters are layed out makes it more suitable to be used as a reference more than a cover to cover read. The author is eloquent in his narration of the topics and has done a good job of explaining the concepts. I found this book to be an ideal resource for coming up to date with all the system and network administration tasks that can be accomplished in Fedora Linux.

Ravi Kumar maintains a blog where he shares his thoughts related to GNU/Linux, Open Source and Free Software at linuxhelp.blogspot.com. He has also reviewed in a concise way the history of GNU/Linux.

You can purchase Fedora Linux from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Comment on Fedora in general.

[aquaepulse]

For my CSE432 class, Operating System Internals, we delve into the Linux 2.4 kernel code to show examples of how operating systems are implemented. So I, being a lifelong Windows user, decided to setup a VMware virtual Linux box. Started with Ubuntu, but couldn't get the VMTools installed properly.
Format.
Install Fedora, update the kernel packages, VMTools up and running.
Easy.
I like Fedora and this book look like it could make anyone a more knowledgeable Fedora user.

Re:Comment on Fedora in general.

[CastrTroy]

I never found Ubuntu all the user friendly. I don't have any idea where it gets that reputation from. I've never found Fedora to be that much better. The best distro I've found so far is Mandriva. It's the only distro that consistently (for the last 5 years) that I've been able to install and have everything "Just Work". I have tried other distros because every else is raving about Ubuntu, or Fedora, or Suse, or Gentoo, but I haven't found that any of them work as well as Mandriva has.

Re:Comment on Fedora in general.

[Rix]

So in other words, you had little interest in understanding how the system works. You just wanted to point to it and say "Oooo, Linux Pixie Dust(TM)".

package manager need tons of work

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora is a nice distro. The biggest problem I have faced in using it, though, has been yum. But to be fair, it is improving with every version of FC. However, it's very feature deficient when compared to apt -- which is a big big plus for Debian based distros. Also, the various repositories of FC also add to the confusion: which mirrors to use and which mirrors to avoid is not straightfordward (dependency hell) and the combinations of various 'acceptable' repositories can be a confusing issue. The other problem with yum has been its speed: the last time I checked (that was in FC5), it still took ages to do every operation.

Having said all this, I hope yum has imoproved in FC6, yet to try that though.

Re:package manager need tons of work

[Kelson]

One problem yum has had is that it wants to check the network for updates before every operation. This has improved recently, either in Fedora Core 6 or one of the updates to Fedora Core 5. Now if you run more than one yum operation within a period of time -- I think it's an hour, at least by default -- it will use its cached copy instead of calling out to the network.

It still needs to re-read the data, which takes longer than it should, but only has to call out to the network if something is likely to be different, which makes a *huge* difference when you're installing individual packages or querying it with search or info.

Re:package manager need tons of work

[slamb]

One problem yum has had is that it wants to check the network for updates before every operation. This has improved recently ... It still needs to re-read the data, which takes longer than it should, but only has to call out to the network if something is likely to be different, which makes a *huge* difference when you're installing individual packages or querying it with search or info.

Reading and re-reading the data should be quicker now, too.

The repository data is stored in a giant XML file which is incredibly slow to parse. Back in the day, it would read this file in every time you ran yum. Last year [1] they added a SQLite cache, so this step could be skipped if the data hadn't changed.

Relatively recently, they added a separate yum-metadata-parser written in C that dramatically reduces the time the parse step takes. Take these changes together and what used to take 45.5 seconds every time you ran yum now takes 7.5 seconds only if the data have changed. [2]

It sounds like they've done as much as they can without changing the transferred data to be an indexed binary format (with the associated forward/backward compatibility complexity).

(I'm not running Fedora Core 6, so I'm not sure if this change made it in.)

[1] - Looks like yum 2.3.1 introduced the cache, around March 2005.

[2] - See this message introducing it around May 2006 sometime after yum 2.6.1.

Re:Missing a Chapter

[Anonymous Crowhead]

Yeah, it sucked when RedHat decided they needed to concentrate on making money or they were going to go out of business.

Misleading Summary

[mpapet]

They incorporate all the new features after they have been exhaustively tested into its commercial product, namely Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Really? I thought it was the other way around? It was when I last tested it.

In all respects Fedora is the same Red Hat Linux but with cutting edge packages.
No, it's not!
1. No support. (This matters to some. Not me though)
2. Buggier. Look at the distros created with the Enterprise source code. That's a production ready OS. FC is not.
3. (b)leading edge everything where applicable. Comparable to Debian unstable IMHO.
4. Red Hat's Management/Sales probably don't like "free as good as paid version" statement either.

There are a few great distro's out there and FC is probably one of them, but not for production equipment. Every version I have recently tested I've ended up with randomly broken systems after applying patches. I never knew when or what to watch out for.

Debian stable and copycat Red Hat Enterprise distro's make it into production just fine. The path from Debian Testing versions to Stable is quite good as always.

Re:Misleading Summary

[Kelson]

They incorporate all the new features after they have been exhaustively tested into its commercial product, namely Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Really? I thought it was the other way around? It was when I last tested it.

The sentence is poorly structured, hard to parse, and has a few grammatical errors (they/its), but is not backwards. It could use a couple of commas:

"They incorporate all the new features, after they have been exhaustively tested, into their commercial product..."

Re:Misleading Summary

[Nikademus]

1. No support. (This matters to some. Not me though)

Indeed. Better support at ubuntu forums. But, I think the support is better at ubuntu forums than at any RHEL forums.

2. Buggier. Look at the distros created with the Enterprise source code. That's a production ready OS. FC is not.

Indeed, FC is buggier than RHEL. But RHEL is buggier than most other distros too. Not a reference in my mind.. Especially in package management. I don't even count the problems in RPM database I have had.

3. (b)leading edge everything where applicable. Comparable to Debian unstable IMHO.

Not really, it's bleeding edge, but bleedier than debian unstable. Debian unstable is stable compared to FC.

4. Red Hat's Management/Sales probably don't like "free as good as paid version" statement either.

It is not "as good" as paid version. Paid version sucks and FC sucks even more, so FC sucks more than the already sucking "paid version". It seems that you have to pay for support in buggy applications, like Oracle or the likes, and you don't have to pay for stable applications like postgresql.

Now honestly, I have had much more issues with RHEL (which is usually more stable than FC) than with debian unstable. I know I will be modded down for this post and I know I will probably be flamed by RH zealots, but FC sucks and is probably one of the worst distros. In my mind FC stability is even worse than windows, sorry for this. That doesn't mean I would use windows, but I certainly wouldn't use FC either in a production environment (or even on any of my desktops).

Re:Misleading Summary

[frodo from middle ea]

Using Fedora on a production system, and then complaining about stability is like using Win XP Home on production and complaining about stability/scalability.

Different OSes for different needs. For Desktop use Fedora, for servers use RHEL/CentOS .

Sales Push?

[Dimes]

Without(seriously) trying to be a Tr*ll, this really felt like a sales pitch.

I am not talking about Fanboy Fawning either, but more like "out of a brouchure".

Really, its not a review, but a list of talking points....no critical review, no Pro/Con.....strictly Pro/Pro.

Why is this a book review?

dimes

Re:You didn't "setup" a VMware virtual Linux box.

[Anonymous Coward]

You "set up" the box. Maybe you should stop taking CS classes and enroll in remedial English classes instead.

Perhaps it was a typo (missed the spacebar). Nevertheless, the omission of a space hardly warrants a grammer flame. My rule of thumb is this: If the mistake makes the message difficult to understand, then you might want to bring it to the other person's attention (if you are feeling like an anal jerk on a given day). If the only reason the mistake is bothering you is because you have a 2x4 piece of wood rammed up your ass, then maybe you should invest your time in going to the convenience store to get some laxative.

Re:More widely used than you'd know

[Pharmboy]

I hate to say "me, too", but "me, too". I started losing faith when RH9 came out so fast after 8, especially considering how happy I was was the whole 7.x line. (and even 6.1) I still have FC1 on a couple of boxes, and unfortunately FC4 on a couple as well. What has kept RH on those boxes is the fact that I simply know RH's quirks/methods better than anything else.

What is ironic is that everyone is bitching about how it took 6 years to go from xp to Vista (which I won't migrate to) but I felt the opposite. I am tired of learning new operating systems just for the sake of learning new operating systems. I don't buy computers to run operating systems, I use operating systems to run PROGRAMS.

Eventually I will have to make the switch to Debian (which seems to be the best for NOT changing the version every freaking 6 to 12 months), but have just been too busy running the actual programs to learn a different Linux version.

I prefer Debian and here's why...

[Anonymous Coward]

As Bruce Perens said it a while ago:

Fedora project is obviously intended to look like Debian. But unlike Debian, Fedora is an extremely unequal partnership. "Fedora" is where the community developers are supposed to build Red Hat's product, while the certifications and vendor endorsements are held back for the high-priced "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" brand. This is especially obvious in recent certification announcements: the Common Criteria certification will go to "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", not "Fedora". And of course the entire steering board of the Fedora project are Red Hat employees. Red Hat recently announced a second draft of the leadership structure for Fedora, in which they have eliminated voting, expressing the need to keep control in the hands of Red Hat's management.

But the most ludicrous aspect of the Fedora project is that with Fedora, Red Hat seeks to achieve what Debian did long ago. Because they can't (and shouldn't) control Debian, they decided to re-invent the wheel. It would take them years to achieve a fraction of what Debian already has.

If you need a stable, easy-to-administer, well-established, production OS, I would suggest Debian.

Review

[retsil]

I have to agree that the review is very poor and misleading. I like the book, I like Fedora and I think that it is underrated. But, this review leads the reader to think Fedora is something which it is clearly not. Could someone re-write a decent review?

Re:More widely used than you'd know

[SatanicPuppy]

8 & 9 definitely sucked. Those were both crappy, mediocre distros, especially considering how excellent the Valhalla (7.3?) distro was...It's still a hugely popular distro for web hosting companies.

I was pretty pleased with Fedora Core 2-4, felt like they were modern, without being bloated and slow like 8 & 9. FC5 was a real dog, though, so I don't know what to say about that. In all, I tend to use Fedora more than any other distro. It's got its issues, but when you use it enough, you just sort of tune them out by default.

Redhat and Fedora have their moments of brilliance, but you really have to watch 'em, they can bite you. Definitely not an automatic upgrade, whenever the new one comes out.

Fedora for Enterprise?

[postmortem]

What a joke. FC6 on day of release had already 20MB of software updates. Day later - 100MB. So called great updater has to download whole RPM package for a minor update.

I can't imagine anybody in large corporations wants to spend all their time and bandwidth propagating bleeding-edge software updates.

Re:sex wIth a gnaa

[ettlz]

Oi, noob, you forgot the Goatse link. It's trolls like you that give the GNAA a bad name.

Re:Missing a Chapter

[slamb]

Wake me up when the book has a chapter entitled "How Red Hat Software broke its covenant with the linux community" talking about how the supported stable free version of the software disappeared, to be replaced by a beta test program for RHEL.

There never was such a convenant, and RedHat releases all the source packages as required by the GPL. This means you can download a RHEL-based stable, free distribution recompiled by a third party in the form of CentOS. My company tends to buy RHEL where we want paid support or where we have to buy an operating system with hardware (Dell offers Windows or RHEL at the same price). We use CentOS elsewhere. It's the same software, and it's free and legal.

Many of us, myself included, were formerly RedHat users but we learned that they don't give a fuck about us when they shifted from free RedHat to Fedora, and haven't looked back since.

For a company that doesn't give a fuck about open source, they sure hire a lot of people to develop it. I can't find it now, but somewhere there's a webpage with a list of all the open source projects RedHat has developed, maintains, and contributes to. It's amazing how much they've given back to the community, and how many idiots like you there are who are deliberately blind to it.

Can someone please mod the parent down as a troll? And someone else please post a link to the page I can't find?

Re:Missing a Chapter

[Per Bothner]

I'm curious what "covenant" you imagine Red Hat broke.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Re:/vertisement... Stop it.

[SoapDish]

Ravi was kind enough to provide a book review for slashdot. It is only common curtesy to give him a little attention.

Also, without that little explanation on who Ravi is, I would have no idea. The fact that he writes about linux (even though it's a blog), and has written other reviews makes the entire review a little more credible.

my observations with core 6

[Doppler00]

Okay, I recently installed Fedora Core 6 on a new computer for my class, here are my observations as an infrequent Linux user:

-Frequently crashes on I/O errors (I assume a bad driver, not working well with dual core?).
-Inconsistency between control panels (too many tools do the same thing, scattered around the system).
-File sharing is a _little_ easier to setup, but I still had issues with it. Why can't a right click a folder, set permissions, and share?
-Fonts are still INCREDIBLY UGLY and illegible even after almost 10 years of Redhat.
-Still can't play .MOV files (i.e. movie trailers)
-Can't play divx out of the box
-Flash wasn't installed with Firefox.

Yeah, there are probably ways I could fix the last three, but come on, these should be standard. Are any other flavors of Linux ready for the consumer desktop? I mostly just use it for research, because it's a good platform for that. I can't stand it though for just a desktop OS. I've done slackware before, even scarier to me. Any other distro suggestions?

Fedora's version of KDE lacks polish, attention

[billybob2]

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.

Confusion

[TheoMurpse]

Fedora the Linux that is developed as a community effort

Well what the hell do you call the other five billion Linuxes (Linuces?) out there? Aren't they community-developed as well? Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, DSL, FeatherLinux, etc. I mean, Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat, so if Fedora is a "community effort," then surely Knoppix, Mandriva, and other corporate-associated Linuces are "community-developed" as well!

Re:You didn't "setup" a VMware virtual Linux box.

[1u3hr]

Nevertheless, the omission of a space hardly warrants a grammer flame.

More of a spelling flame I'd think. And on that subject, it's "grammar".

Re:Missing a Chapter

[LnxAddct]

This is Red Hat's list: http://www.redhat.com/opensourcenow/leadership/dev elopment.html
This is Red Hat's contributions according to the Fedora Project (gives more detail about Red Hat's role in projects) http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions
This is just another list of different projects: http://sourceware.org/projects.html

A lot of people underestimate how much Red Hat does. They have significantly more code in the kernel than any other entity, they are also responsible for a very large part of the GCC development, and most of the recent big improvements in GCC can be attributed to Red Hat. They also do a ton of dev for Gnome and have done wonderful things with GCJ. People give them a lot of shit, but a lot of OSS development would slow down drastically if they were taken out of the equation.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Gentoo?

[Fred_A]

The main trick to installing Gentoo is to religiously follow every line of the installation guide. If you derive from it, you should be able to explain why (i.e. be an advanced enough user to know what you are doing, which typically doesn't require to be a wizard, but not a newbie either). Oh and the installation CDs didn't come with vi. I wasted quite some time figuring out that the editor was a thing called nano (which I had never heard of at the time).

I used it for a few years because it was the only functional fully 64 bit distro out there at the time and found it to be fairly easy to use if you read the documentation (which is quite good). Its drawback is that you actually have to read the doc (even if you've already installed a dozen other distributions) or it won't work very well.

After that, it's all a matter of taste of course. It's neither better nor worse than the others, it has advantages and drawbacks. And of course basically it installs the same stuff as everybody else. If you have some spare time it's interesting to try as a fairly different approach to a common problem though.