Fedora Core and Fedora Extras To Merge

Kelson writes to tell us about a Fedora Weekly News article reporting that, beginning with Fedora 7, the distinction between Core and Extras will cease to exist. This development comes out of the Fedora summit held in November. From the article: "Starting with Fedora 7, there is no more Core, and no more Extras; there is only Fedora. One single repository, built in the community on open source tools, assembled into whatever spins the Fedora community desires." Kelson adds: "The post goes on to list three 'spins' they plan to introduce at Fedora 7's April release: server, desktop and KDE. Presumably these would be 1-disc installation sets, with further packages downloaded over the network, rather than the 5-CD collection needed to install Fedora 6."

Comments

It would be nice

[pembo13]

if the usually jackasses didn't post the usual anti Fedora FUD.

Re:It would be nice

[Kalriath]

The "From the one-hat-to-bind-them dept" probably wont help with that cause.

Re:It would be nice

[Jackass Thompson]

If Fedora didn't suck as hard, that could be a possibility. Is it really necessary to do such an insane amount of package updates (esp. kernel...) and breakage? I also just love having a Linux machine lock up regularly...

Whatever. After using it 1-5, I'm now a Debian user. w00t. No ass-ugly default icons! Stability!

Re:It would be nice

[NerveGas]

If your machine locks up regularly, then perhaps you should look to something other than blaming Fedora. I have machines from single- to quad-CPU machines that have run for so long on Fedora Core 2 that theit next upgrade was to CentOS 4.4. These are machines that get used 24x7, under heavy loads. Some of the DBMS machines have gone for months without ever seeing a system load below 1.

It may be your configuration, your hardware, or various other causes, but if you're going to complain about Fedora, at least complain about the *valid* deficiencies...

Re:It would be nice

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

We won't, because this is actually a smart move.

It's a smart move, of course, because it makes Fedora more like Debian.

/me dodges incoming bullets

Re:It would be nice

[NerveGas]

"if the usually jackasses didn't post the usual anti Fedora FUD."

You mean like this?

Re:It would be nice

[syousef]

So if a distro doesn't support for example hardware properly, that's the now the end user's fault?

If it's worked for you and not for someone else who thought they had the proper hardware after the appropriate amount of research that's good luck NOT good management. ...and you wonder why people won't jump ship to Linux.

Re:It would be nice

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

If your machine locks up regularly, then perhaps you should look to something other than blaming Fedora.

Indeed. Clearly, it's the fault of the people who made gcc 2.96. *ahem*

It may be your configuration, your hardware, or various other causes, but if you're going to complain about Fedora, at least complain about the *valid* deficiencies...

If Fedora ships with a configuration that's unstable on particular hardware, and Debian doesn't---and you're not a developer---then choosing Debian is a smart and cost-effective solution. What do you expect?

Re:It would be nice

[tepples]

So if a distro doesn't support for example hardware properly, that's the now the end user's fault?

It's the end user's fault for either A. buying hardware without checking the distro's hardware compatibility list or B. switching operating systems within the lifetime of one computer.

Re:It would be nice

[syousef]

Bloody hell /. is full of intolerance today!

Re-read my comment - the part about doing the appropriate research.

IF you do the research (compatibility list, newsgroups etc.) AND it still fails it's not your fault as an end user. PERIOD. You've done all you can.

Re:It would be nice

[NerveGas]

I'd believe your comment if I hadn't thrown Fedora on every type of hardware from single-CPU/IDE machines to 4x/8x machines with high-end SCSI arrays and fiber networking, Intel and AMD architectures. Apart from sound and video, there's not a lot of hardware I haven't run it on. Other than one particular issue with a RAID card, it's done a good job of setting up hardware. It's not like it's hard for a distro to add a line to modprobe.conf telling it which driver to load....

If anything, the problems you encounter are, in my experience, more likely to be problems with the Linux drivers themselves than with Fedora, although there may be a handful of cases to the contrary.

steve

Re:It would be nice

[poopie]

The usually (sic) jackasses are the reason everyone comes to Slashdot as opposed to reading this on Digg.

Us jackasses that have been hear for many years tend to know a thing or two and have learned a lot of things the hard way. And as to the "anti-Fedora FUD", I prefer to look at it as the openness to non-Redhat-based distributions. And... yes, you can thank Redhat for turning their former legions of loyal Redhat desktop fans on to Debian, Ubuntu, and Gentoo. Thank you Redhat for ensuring diversity in Linux distributions. Some of us have even come back around to Fedora with a new perspective on Linux.

But, usual Anti Fedora FUD aside, This is good news for Fedora users and the fedora community - it makes life simpler and less confusing.

Now, I only need to be confused by the dissolution of Fedora Legacy. How about making yum upgrades across Fedora versions seamless, supported, and recommended so that no one gets left behind?

Re:It would be nice

[Lorkki]

It is a smart move, but I can't help thinking that it's rather like they're attempting to be more like Ubuntu in wake of its popularity.

Of course, being more like Ubuntu is only half a step away from being more like Debian, so I'd better start dodging too.

Re:It would be nice

[pnot]

I'd believe your comment if I hadn't thrown Fedora on every type of hardware from single-CPU/IDE machines to 4x/8x machines with high-end SCSI arrays and fiber networking, Intel and AMD architectures.

A year or so back, I tried upgrading a Red Hat 9 machine to the latest Fedora. The video chipset, perfectly functional under RH9, wasn't supported by Fedora. Similar issues with another box I was upgrading -- fully functional with RH9, virtual consoles broken under Fedora (bug reported and reproduced, but flagged as "won't fix" for that release -- FC4 IIRC).

It was at that point that I started looking at Ubuntu...

Re:It would be nice

[Anonymous Coward]

I had problems with Ubuntu working with my network and SCSI cards, and it was at that point that I started looking at Fedora, which works perfectly with all my hardware. YMMV.

Re:It would be nice

[xiphoris]

IF you do the research (compatibility list, newsgroups etc.) AND it still fails it's not your fault as an end user. PERIOD. You've done all you can.
I have to think that there's still something wrong with the process if the average user of a piece of software is expected to read compatibility lists. The sooner we start treating software seriously the sooner it will stop sucking. Honestly, if you buy a car, should you be expected to know its internals? To check "compatibility lists" for its parts?

And yes, I know that certain zealots will just "well that's too much to expect from volunteers" but what I'm saying is maybe it should be expected anyway. I have the childish hope that one day space ships will be as common as the personal computer :-) if that did happen, would you expect them to be as crappy as the average piece of software? No, because there are standards.

We, as a community, have been lax. It has done good and bad things. This is a bad one ("acceptable incompatibility").

Re:It would be nice

[pnot]

I had problems with Ubuntu working with my network and SCSI cards, and it was at that point that I started looking at Fedora, which works perfectly with all my hardware. YMMV.

Indeed it may, but my point was that FC4 actually introduced hardware support regressions against Red Hat 9. I feel uneasy with a distro where my currently supported hardware may become unsupported in the next release.

Re:It would be nice

[loki_tiwaz]

Hardware support is generally related to the kernel. Being that generally the fedora linux system is distributed as binaries why isn't the whole gamut of kernel modules present?

I personally have found more problems with RPM than anything else with fedora. Anyone who's used FC6 would agree with me that the system is definitely starting to mature, I almost switched to ubuntu (this is for a granny pc) but, and I can't remember exactly what happened or what I did but it's fine now so I'm shying away from the debian based system for now.

If it were not for the fact I am a committed Half Life 2 addict I'd be using linux but I just can't live without my daily fix of hurling toilets around the place. If xen or vmware esx server properly supported my SiS SATA and allowed me to run source engine-based games I'd switch back. I need to look into the state of xen and esx server, maybe I am suffering this idiotic operating system for no good reason!

Re:It would be nice

[Builder]

But with Fedora, if the user cares about security then they HAVE to switch within the lifetime of one computer!

Fedora is flat out unsuitable for a stable environment. It's only good for people who are happy to upgrade / re-install every 13 months when their current version becomes insecure and unsupported.

That's why my home server is moving to either OpenBSD or Open Solaris - I'm tired of this re-install / upgrade game.

Re:It would be nice

[Anonymous Coward]

switching operating systems within the lifetime of one computer.

Why? Does the spirit of the previous OS remain on the hard drive, thus frightening the new OS so much that it crashes? Does it void the warrenty on my hard disk if I change the partition layout?

Re:It would be nice

[dbcad7]

It's not the nightmare you suggest. Most hardware just works. I don't even agree with this checking compatability list thing.. You just get a live CD distro, and SEE if it works. If something doesn't work then you research the problem.. most likely there is a solution.. the easy solution may be different hardware, the harder soltion may be a more complicated software fix.. But you do the research and decide your solution based on what your comfortable with, before you commit the distro to a hard drive install. If neither solution is acceptable, you can try an alternate distro, if it's still no good, then you admit defeat and accept that this stuff is just not your cup of tea. That doesn't make it bad, it's just not for you, and your parameters.

Right now, Doom3 and other games are incompatable with my hardware.. I live with it (actualy without it) but I don't blame ID or the other game creators if I am not willing to adapt (at this time). The solution is there for me, it's up to me to decide whether or not to impliment it..

Re:It would be nice

[houseofzeus]

Upgrading from Redhat 9 to Core 4 is hardly 'the next release'.

Re:It would be nice

[ThomasHoward]

I dual boot for my HL2 fix, cant stand using Windows most of the time. Most Linux distributions I've tried aren't much fun till you install all the "non free" stuff like MP3 support, libdvdcss, ffmpeg and suchlike. (my music collection is all VBR MP3, so no MP3 support = no music while working, browsing, tinkering) Fedora is no exception, was reading though the planned features for FC7, and it looks like they will be adding something to display messages about such problems when people try to play such files, though, which is some progress.

Re:It would be nice

[pnot]

Upgrading from Redhat 9 to Core 4 is hardly 'the next release'.

I didn't say it was. But the chipset was supported by RH9, and unsupported by FC4. Clearly, at some point, there must have been a transition from a release that supported it to a `next release' that didn't.

Or do you mean that Fedora Core can't be regarded as the same distro as the original Red Hat series? Perhaps there's something in that; I might have had better luck with RHEL or an unbranded equivalent.

Re:It would be nice

[Viceroy Potatohead]

"The usually (sic)[sic] jackasses are the reason..."

"Us[sic] jackasses that have been hear[sic]..."

My pedantry trumps your pedantry.

That's being said, I'm pretty much in complete agreement with your post.

Re:It would be nice

[cortana]

Bloody hell /. is full of intolerance today!

Well, he did say he was a Debian user! ;)

Re:It would be nice

[MrHanky]

Most people seem to check whether their car runs on petrol or diesel. Only an idiot would complain if his car didn't work with the wrong fuel. If you're going to use a bad analogy, you should at least use it properly.

Re:It would be nice

[aussie_a]

Us jackasses that have been hear for many years tend to know a thing or two and have learned a lot of things Its a shame one of those things wasn't how to spell.

Re:It would be nice

[smoker2]

How about making yum upgrades across Fedora versions seamless, supported, and recommended so that no one gets left behind?

Because the whole point of Fedora is to invest time in the bleeding edge. You can't do that if you have to support incompatible old technologies. See Microsoft ...

If you want seamless upgrades, then use RHEL instead, or even WBEL if you want it for free. Based on Fedora proven technology, but smoothed out for the end user.

Re:It would be nice

[shotgunsaint]

While that's true, it's still TWICE the expected lifespan of a Windows XP install.

Re:It would be nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. Clearly, it's the fault of the people who made gcc 2.96. *ahem*

Dude, let it go. People have been complaining about that for six years, and the complainers have been wrong for six years. The truth is that 2.96-rh was a better compiler than any previous gcc release. The "bugs" were actually increased strictness - see this page for details.

Re:It would be nice

[underthelinux]

No, the analogy is wrong. It compares to the average user buying components for his car, and then putting it together. In which case, he IS responsible for compatibility. Purchasing a car is akin to purchasing a preconfigured computer from dell or whomever. Their hardware is compatible, and verified (i'd imagine).

Re:It would be nice

[swillden]

Honestly, if you buy a car, should you be expected to know its internals? To check "compatibility lists" for its parts?

If you're building the car from components, or replacing a major component (like the OS), you'd damned well better check for compatibility. Or be very handy with part modification to make it fit (like writing your own device drivers, I suppose).

We, as a community, have been lax. It has done good and bad things. This is a bad one ("acceptable incompatibility").

Nobody thinks it's "acceptable" that some (note: not very much, really) hardware is incompatible with Linux, but what do you think "the community" should do about it? The reason incompatible hardware exists is very simple: The hardware vendors don't support Linux. The community doesn't need very much support; the community doesn't need them to write drivers, provide fancy installers, etc., all that's required is some documentation. But if the vendors won't provide that, then what? Sometimes, an enterprising individual manages to reverse engineer the hardware interface and write a driver in spite of the lack of documentation, but that's very difficult, and it takes time.

If you think the community has been lax, and consider yourself part of the community, why don't *you* stop being lax and fix the problem. Or, at a minimum, bother to understand the problem.

Re:It would be nice

[EQ]

'The "From the one-hat-to-bind-them dept" probably wont help with that cause.'

What did you expect?

Its Kdawson - the biggest /. editorial troll since Katz.

Re:It would be nice

[Penguinisto]

"Other than one particular issue with a RAID card, it's done a good job of setting up hardware."

Let me guess - a Dell 6300-series server w/ an old LSI card? (at least that's the one prob I'd found with RHEL (yes, RHEL), but even there there was a workaround - install AS 2.1 then upgrade to 4).

I think when most folks whine ab't hardware support and Fedora, it usually concerns the wireless Centrino thingy.

/P

Re:It would be nice

[Builder]

That's just rubbish. A decent XP install will last for 2 years easily. Install and patch behind a firewall, ensure regular patching and use firefox as a browser. And at least the vendor won't pull the rug out from under you like Fedora have just done.

In November last year I thought I had at least 1.5 years left on this box - I would just have to use -legacy. In december I found that I have 5 months to migrate to a new platform. Microsoft have never screwed me like that!

Re:It would be nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Apart from sound and video,

Hey great! You've got linux working on everything except the two things people most often use their desktop computers for!

THIS IS THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

Re:It would be nice

[metamatic]

So why did you go with Fedora in the first place? It was obvious when Fedora Core 2 came out and required a reinstall via CD that they weren't concerned with providing ongoing support. That's the point at which I said "Screw you, Red Hat" and moved to Debian...

Re:It would be nice

[hawaiian717]

Its a shame one of those things wasn't how to spell.

It's Fedora's fault. They haven't upgraded to Firefox 2 yet (the one with the built in spellchecker). :)

Re:It would be nice

[ak3ldama]

jumping from a 2.4 kernel to a 2.6 kernel is a big step and 2.6 doesn't support everything that 2.4 does. redhat 9 had 2.4 and fedora 4 has 2.6 i don't want to state the obvious but this is something you should consider before saying "Or do you mean that Fedora Core can't be regarded as the same distro as the original Red Hat series?" and therefore concluding that you need to purchase RHEL. I used to use the various Redhat products, I even purchased RH8 professional and had a subscription to the redhat network for a while. I would have kept paying for that service but Redhat decided that I was not a market they were striving for, and realistically it was the correct choice for them to make. I am very happy with Fedora and I like the choices they have made with their plans for 7.

Re:It would be nice

[NerveGas]

That wasn't meant to say that it didn't work with sound and video, just that the assortment of sound and video I have used has been far less diverse than the rest of the hardware. My bad.

steve

Re:It would be nice

[vakuona]

No, it makes Fedora better than Debian. Paid developers steering the project and (hopefully) steering clear of making decisions by committee (see camel story).

Volunteers getting all the fancy packages they want, as they proved they could do, and did with the Extras project. So a real community distribution.

It's no Ubuntu, but they do still remain true to their Free/Open Source roots, so that makes them especially more appealing to the hardcore types too. Unlike Ubuntu. And its Redhat, the most consistent of the Linux companies. In terms of their Open Source/Free Software credentials, they have an unmatched record in the community.

Re:It would be nice

[Builder]

I went with FC4 because of the Fedora legacy project. This meant that I could have a lifespan around what I wanted. Then they binned that with just a few months to go of FC4's lifespan. Arse!

I would move to Debian / Ubuntu, but they just make my blood boil. Worse, they make it difficult to get support for the core things I run (Exim and Apache) because of their own special, non-standard way of handling the config.

Re:It would be nice

[houseofzeus]

True enough, but as pointed out by the other poster there is hardware that was supported by the 2.4 kernel and not 2.6. For many of these devices someone will have made a new or updated driver for it, but no doubt there are some that have slipped through the cracks (this, combined with speed concerns, is why some people oftem recommend using a 2.4 or even 2.2 kernel on older hardware). As for the comment regarding RHEL. I would recommend using an unbranded release like CentOS to first test that your hardware is supported by the distribution. Then once you've ascertained that it fills your needs buy RHEL and the associated support contract if you intend to deploy in an environment where you need it.

Re:It would be nice

[pnot]

jumping from a 2.4 kernel to a 2.6 kernel is a big step and 2.6 doesn't support everything that 2.4 does

That wasn't the issue here, though: Knoppix and Ubuntu had no trouble with it.

I would have kept paying for that service but Redhat decided that I was not a market they were striving for, and realistically it was the correct choice for them to make.

I think they decided I was not a market worth striving for, either: my original plan was to put RHEL on all the boxes I had responsibility for -- these machines are running proprietary applications with 5-figure annual subscription fees, so the Red Hat tithe would have been pocket change. I spent a few weeks firing emails at various Red Hat sales, customer support, and enquiries addresses... not a peep. Perhaps they're not interested in the Australasian market...

Re:It would be nice

[tepples]

Honestly, if you buy a car, should you be expected to know its internals? To check "compatibility lists" for its parts?

As I understand it, this is the case for automotive replacement parts such as tires, spark plugs, and batteries. Auto parts stores have the compatibility lists posted, either in paper or on an electronic kiosk.

Re:It would be nice

[tepples]

switching operating systems within the lifetime of one computer. Why? Does the spirit of the previous OS remain on the hard drive, thus frightening the new OS so much that it crashes? Does it void the warrenty on my hard disk if I change the partition layout?

No, but your peripheral manufacturers have made a business decision to put more money into making their products work with the most popular consumer operating systems.

As long as I can still upgrade with yum....

[DigitalReverend]

I won't have a problem with this. In fact, I think it's about time as a lot of things that were called Extras were actually needed items so this will be a good thing. The once CD idea rocks too.

Re:As long as I can still upgrade with yum....

[plover]

TFA just said "1 disc" not "1 CD." If FC6 is anything to compare by, it'll need to come on one dual-layer-DVD or perhaps one BluRAY disc.

Re:As long as I can still upgrade with yum....

[minion]

I won't have a problem with this. In fact, I think it's about time as a lot of things that were called Extras were actually needed items so this will be a good thing. The once CD idea rocks too.
 
Actually, I think this totally sucks. Fedora was the bloated distro, but what was nice about that, is if you were trying to setup a "good for everything" distro, it was the one you reached for, as it was likely to have most everything out of the box that you wanted.
 
What I hate is sitting down to do an install which is network based. What a waste of bandwidth too on both Fedora's and my side. Why do that? Its much better, if I'm going to be installing this more than once, to give me the damn ISO chock-full of packages, than make me download each @*&^%@! package over and over again off of their servers.

Re:As long as I can still upgrade with yum....

[timeOday]

Nah, iso's are inevitably outdated before you even get them. I just did a fresh install of Fedora Core 6 this past weekend. Guess what, the kernel was buggy (cifs filesystem fails on directories with > 100 entries). Better to do a network install so instead of downloading 5 gig DVD, you only download the packages when you need, and get the latest versions. Bandwidth being what it is these days, packages download so fast it's not even worth caching rpm's on your hard drive. At 6Mb/s, firefox downloads in like 15 seconds.

Re:As long as I can still upgrade with yum....

[scruffy]

Doesn't everybody have DVD readers now?

Anyway, a single CD is cool. Does Redhat survey Fedora users to find out what packages they actually load and use? If I cared enough, I could probably remove 1/3 of the packages that Fedora seems to think I need.

Re:As long as I can still upgrade with yum....

[Anonymous Coward]

Bandwidth being what it is these days, 3GB DVD ISO probably downloads faster than 1GB worth of individual packages for network install, because latency and umptillion requests to server eat a lot more into the latter.

Re:As long as I can still upgrade with yum....

[timeOday]

Bandwidth being what it is these days, 3GB DVD ISO probably downloads faster than 1GB worth of individual packages for network install, because latency and umptillion requests to server eat a lot more into the latter.

That is an issue. I was a bit disappointed with the FC6 setup.iso that it didn't come preloaded with a mirror list (you have to type one in), and it would be really nice if it would concurrently download several packages from several mirrors, and concurrently download and install packages.

Who said anything about one CD?

[pembo13]

I've been following the development, and while the server install MAY be one cd, I haven't seen anything to suggest that such an artificial restriction would be set. If anything it may be a specific minimal spin.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[radarsat1]

I've been following the development, and while the server install MAY be one cd, I haven't seen anything to suggest that such an artificial restriction would be set. If anything it may be a specific minimal spin.

Why is it that distros are still so predominantly media-based anyways?
Every single time I've installed Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, or Gentoo in the past.. oh.. 4 years or so, I've done it using a network-based method.
It seems to me like it's much more efficient to just download the packages you need instead of downloading GB's worth of apps only to actually install and use a portion of them.

When I _have_ installed from CD, I tend to go and do an update to the latest packages immediately, and end up re-downloading new copies of most of the packages anyways, making it even more of a waste of bandwidth.

Why do distros still concentrate so much on CD and DVD releases, instead of just promoting the network-based install methods?

And when will we see a distro that incorporates bittorrent into its packaging download system? ;-)
(Slightly joking on that last one.. I've no idea if it would be appropriate, not to mention trust-worthy. But it is an interesting idea for distros that can't afford nice servers and don't have tons of mirrors.)

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[Justin205]

Bittorrent would be hard to work with, unless you could find people willing to give up some of their internet connection most of the time to seed packages... Anyway, it's not hard for any open source program to find mirrors in the first place. Many universities provide them, as do places like Sourceforge.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[Burdell]

I recently downloaded a DVD image of SuSE and mailed to a friend stationed in Iraq. Another friend is only able to get dialup at his home (he could probably get satellite, but they have download caps).

High speed Internet is NOT widespread enough to require everything be done over the network. Even when it is, it is often more convenient to have media in-hand; I have more bandwidth at work (OC3+DS3s) than at home (DSL), so it sometimes still makes sense to burn things at work (or at least download to a notebook) and carry them home.

Networks are still slow: 3Mbps DSL is about the same speed as a 2x CD-ROM drive.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[pembo13]

I normally do a network install from the .iso myself. Apparently there are technical aspects against yum+bittorrent

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[The Monster]

Ubuntu has become very popular, IMO in large part because of the sheer simplicity of a single CD that now can be used both as 'Live CD' and to install a fully-functioning OS. Once it's installed, you can go back into Synaptic and add more packages if you like, but the point is that you don't have to. This should not have escaped the notice of other distros, who would then be prompted to ask the obvious "Why can't we do that?".

I haven't seen anything to suggest that such an artificial restriction would be set.

There is nothing 'artificial' about the one-CD limit. When you make me stop the install process to swap CDs, that requires me to intervene in the process. That might not sound like much for a single personal install, but it adds up over time, especially if you've got a lot of machines to deal with. If I have to change CDs, that might as well be the end of the installation, and the remaining CDs can be package repositories, which may instead be on a server on your LAN if you don't have broadband, or want to control what gets upgraded when.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[Bob54321]

Ubuntu has become very popular, IMO in large part because of the sheer simplicity of a single CD that now can be used both as 'Live CD' and to install a fully-functioning OS. Once it's installed, you can go back into Synaptic and add more packages if you like, but the point is that you don't have to. This should not have escaped the notice of other distros, who would then be prompted to ask the obvious "Why can't we do that?".

This is exactly why I installed Ubuntu on my work computer - I only had a couple of hours to set it up and all my install CDs at work were outdated. We ususally use Fedora around here but Ubuntu was only 1 CD to burn and I was done. I didn't need much more than the base system anyway (g++, ssh, and a couple of other command line tools that were not included [gawk maybe?]).

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[Kelson]

I will admit to the "one CD" limit being wishful thinking on my part, assuming that this would start being feasible now that everything will be "one single repository." Besides, if they're talking about a "desktop spin" and a "KDE spin," that implies leaving KDE off one set of media, which implies paring down the contents of the install media.

Still, I should have used a phrase like "With any luck..." or "One hopes..." instead of "Presumably..."

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[Rutulian]

Well, Debian has always had a minimal network-based install. Just checking the Debian page...it appears to be up to 180 MB now. It used to be around 75 MB, but it's growing--mostly because the installer is becoming a lot more sophisticated than it used to be. Gentoo also has a minimal cd coming in at about 120 MB.

Fedora, when it was Red Hat, used to have an installer you could boot off of a floppy and then do a network install, but I don't think they have that anymore. Ubuntu never really bothered with a minimal cd because they went the live cd route. I agree, I think it would be better if everything could be download once over the network, but there is some merit to the live cd approach. And there are still a lot of people out there without broadband connections, so they really need to have everything on media. As for the updates, that's going to happen no matter what. The only way to have a stable distribution that you release is to freeze the packages. If you start rolling in updates you no longer have a stable distribution.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[Cylix]

Indeed, as the network install option is still there and quite easy to find.

Just last week I burned the boot image (8mb) for FC6 and installed everything else from redhat's servers over the network. It was quite painless from installation to start.

The only drawbacks were the time involved in nabbing each package and some mirrors were dreadfully broken. (looked like updates were applied to the main tree or a version mismatch)

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[pembo13]

Well there is the single DVD install, and soon to be an official Live CD.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[T-Ranger]

Still, that doesn't negate the point that right now there seems to be a somewhat artificial interest in producing N-CD distros. Both of those use-cases, one would get the full CD set, period. If you are not making CDs, then it doesn't matter how many CDs the X-flavor distro takes. And if you are making CDs, then you are making the full set.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[syousef]

Hmmm,

Perhaps CD/DVD distros are most prevalent because not everyone has the same set of circumstances as you.

1) Some people value (eg. sys admins for large setups) the reliability of getting a repeatable install.

Imagine reporting bugs in a distro that was continually changing where you couldn't quote a distro number. Yes this could be managed on a network but not so easily as stating a distro CD/DVD version.

2) Some people will go so far as not installing a patch until it's verified.

If you're not net connected, or are behind a firewall the risk of an unknown patch will outweight the risk of leaving known security holes open.

3) If you're installing on a lot of PCs, you want to download the CD/DVD set once, the updates once, and apply across the whole lot of PCs. Why expend the entire install bandwidth per PC?

4) Some people either don't have fast network access, or reliable enough access. Hell some people don't have net access at all.

So yes, you as a single user are slightly inconvenienced if you go from a CD. (Not a lot I might ad, how big a pain is it to burn a handful of CD/DVDs really?

This is absolutely typical Linux/Unix user behaviour though. They think of the end user as being just a clone of themself and don't think about the multitude of others that use the software differently. Until this changes, this software which has wonderful potential will continue to stagnate.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[poopdeville]

If you're willing to net boot, Debian's "miniiso" is 9-12 MB. The GTK miniiso is around 15 MB.

(Just some of the trivia you learn when trying to install Linux on an old iMac with a broken CD drive)

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[alphamugwump]

I'm really surprised that they don't have bittorrent package managers already. apt-get already uses gpg-signing to verify the authenticity of packages. Furthermore, if set up properly, it could blur the distinctions between distros, and between "upstream" and "downstream". You would define the "distro" by whoever signed the package.

To install Ubuntu, for example, you would install the "ubuntu-main-desktop" (or whatever it is) package (signed by ubuntu), which would then try to grab a bunch of other ubuntu-signed packages.

To install "Bob's Very Own Ubuntu Mod", you would install "bobs-ubuntu-desktop" (signed by bob himself). bobs-ubuntu-desktop would depend on a bunch of ubuntu packages, as well as some of Bob's packages. The installer would first try to find packages signed by bob. then, it would look for packages signed by someone trusted by bob. Most of the packages in Bob's distro would probably fall into this second category. Then, as a last resort, it would look for any old shit.

The big advantage with this is that ideological and legal annoyances would pretty much disappear. Want a package for Opera? No problem -- at most, you would just have to add a key. At least, the opera package would be signed by ubuntu or by someone trusted by ubuntu. Want libdvdcss2? win32 codecs? SubSeven? Pirate packages of commercial games for linux? Same thing. It all depends on how much you trusted the guy who signed the package. Essentially, you would combine the convenience of a central repository with the availability of plain binaries.

You could even take it to extremes and border on abuse of the package system. You could have packages for individual wallpapers, for example, or for firefox plugins, or window manager themes, or whatever.

The good news is that there would be plenty of seeders. About one for every installation, in fact. You would probably want to set the default install to activate btpd at night via a cronjobb. Of course, the user could easily turn this off, but that's his choice. Also, you could use QOS to deprioritize bittorrent packets (they could do this already, they just don't bother).

The bad news is that dialup users would be pretty much screwed. Of course, to some degree they already are -- I know that simply trying to keep abreast with the latest ubuntu beta over dialup can be like bailing out a leaking boat, especially if you have gnome and kde installed. Also, trojans would be very easy to make, and could use the network itself to self-replicate. A script kiddie with little or no talent could write a "really cool" theme with a backdoor, get it on digg, and infect thousands. Finally, if a master key were ever compromised, the whole distro would be effectively compromised. The key could be revoked, but then you would leave all your users unable to update until they manually entered a new key. Distribution systems now aren't that easy to compromise; to pull it off, you would also have to spoof the main server.

Maybe I've put too much thought into this. Admittedly though, it would be cool having a truly decentralised distro. For those who doubt the workability of such a scheme, botnet operators already use this technique to control and update their machines. So, if it's secure enough for botnet operators, it would probably be secure enough for me. It would also cut server load, and it would "free us" (those who want it, anyway) from the "tyranny" (annoyances) of monolithic distros, while preserving most of their advantages.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[asuffield]

And when will we see a distro that incorporates bittorrent into its packaging download system? ;-)
(Slightly joking on that last one. I've no idea if it would be appropriate

It wouldn't. A protocol vaguely like bittorrent could work, but bittorrent itself is too focused on smaller, more centralised efforts. You have to realise that any large distribution cannot operate with anything less than several dozen mirrors, and really needs a figure approaching ~100 to maintain good performance, due to the sheer size of the total network load. While bittorrent can operate on those levels, the CPU demands on the tracker would be astronomical - too much for any reasonable server to handle (and while the trackerless variant of bittorrent works, it doesn't work *that* well). You could run multiple smaller trackers... but then you'd lose most of the benefit of bittorrent, and you'd have to come up with a way to distribute clients between them, which is generally seen as an impractical approach.

Nobody has yet invented a swarming system which can cope with the kind of traffic levels you see in these systems using the kind of resources that the large distributions have available. It will probably happen someday, but it hasn't happened yet, and it's not going to be the current version of bittorrent that does it. (If a later version of bittorrent were to implement an efficient distributed tracker system - and this is *hard* - that could possibly do it)

There is also the secondary problem that most of the distributions take advantage of the dozens of large free mirror sites around the world, and those sites only support http and ftp. A solution would have to be found. You can't just tell those people to install bittorrent, as they will ignore you.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[alphamugwump]

Sorry to double post, but I remembered another underutilised installation method: bootstrap from existing install. That's right, an installer that runs as an ordinary program on the host system. I know debian has something like this, but it's not a foolproof process; you have to make a chroot jail. I'm surprised somebody hasn't ported the debian installer over to mingw or cygwin. It would certainly make the installation easier; I remember when I got into linux, downlaoding and burning the CD was actually the hardest part of the whole process. "What, you mean burning the ISO to disk as a file won't work? Crap." Of course, having users that dumb trying to use linux might be a serious problem, but it WOULD increase marketshare.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[rjforster]

Fedora still has a mini-cd iso you can boot from to do a network install. boot.iso is 7.9MB (in FC6), bigger than a floppy but hardly bloated.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[jabuzz]

If you are a sys admin doing large numbers of installs, you at the very least run a local server with a copy of whatever distro you are using and do net installs. In fact if you need *any* media of *any* description then you need to take a long hard look at what you are doing and sort out a pure network install method.

The only reason to do anything but a net install is if you have very limited bandwidth at the location of the install, but sufficient bandwidth elsewhere to do a download of the CD's/DVD. Under almost all other circumstances do a net install. They are much more secure anyway as you are bang up to date with security patchs as you install.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[syousef]

There are most certainly other reasons to do a non-network based install. Security and network segregation for one (if you're not physically hauling away and reconfiguring for another network). You clearly have a bias towards installing from the network. That's your perogative, but it doesn't make it the only valid solution to a large scale install.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[mikael]

Why is it that distros are still so predominantly media-based anyways?

Not everyone has or wants broadband access. While my apartment has combined cable TV/broadband, my parents only have the cheapest AOL monthly subscription available (dialup modem), which is enough for them to book airline flights and read E-mail. Consequently, whenever I go out to visit them, I have to download everything and store it on either on either a USB drive or burn onto read-writable CD's/DVD's just in case of disk failure.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[juhaz]

I don't remember the time when I last had to burn media for OS install, but having image is still very handy. I almost always update FC by pointing anaconda to images on local disk.

With a fast connection, getting a DVD image from fast mirror or bittorrent is probably faster than downloading thousands of small files (even if the total size of those files is just half of the big one) from servers getting hammered by thousands of ongoing network installs, simply because it spends quite a bit more time actually moving data rather than waiting for latencies and server responses.

Not to mention that I can be sure the network connection will not be going down in the middle of installation.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[businessnerd]

Thanks for reminding me of the reason I chose Fedora in the first place! Back when I first decided to take the plunge into the world of Linux, I asked my friend what distro he recommended. He said he liked debian the best, but since I didn't have broadband, that Fedora would be better since it comes with so many applications right on the discs. He burned some FC2 discs for me and led me through the install and there was little else I had to download. Since it was my first taste, I chose the option of installing everything, which was great because I could play around with all kinds of software whether I "needed" them or not. It was a great introduction.

Now that I'm a little savier, I know what I want when I do an install, and usually there are bits a pieces spread out across five discs, even if it is only one or two packages from discs 2 through 5. For my purposes, I would really like a live CD that did nothing more than connect to the internet and open up yum (or yumex for the graphical types) and do the entire install over the internet. This of course would not work for those on dial-up.

The Fedora team is on the right track though. What they need to do is offer a single base install disc, preferably a live cd like Ubuntu's. This would give you a minimal install, plus some favorites like firefox and OpenOffice just to start you out on the right track. The rest is available in the Fedora repositories through yum, but at the same time, have the ability to download the entire repository onto muliple CD's for the broadband impaired.

linux is for communists

[Anonymous Coward]

Heil....HeilHitlerHe.. #In Memory of Adolf Hitler# ..Heil....HeilHitlerHe
Heil....ilHitlerHeil.... We will always remember ....Heil....ilHitlerHeil
Heil....Heil............. and cherish you. Your .....Heil....Heil........
Heil....Heil............. acts of selflessness ......Heil....Heil........
Heil....Heil........... will be passed down from ....Heil....Heil........
HeilHitlerHeilHitler... generation to generation. ...HeilHitlerHeilHitler
HeilHitlerHeilHitler... The lies that dishonor your .HeilHitlerHeilHitler
........Heil....Heil..... name will be vanquished. ..........Heil....Heil
........Heil....Heil.... You were a true patriot ............Heil....Heil
........Heil....Heil.... and a lover of all men, ............Heil....Heil
HeilHitlerHe....Heil... all races, all religions. ...HeilHitlerHe....Heil
ilHitlerHeil....Heil.. #In Memory of Adolf Hitler# ..ilHitlerHeil....Heil

Re:linux is for communists

[Jackass Thompson]

What evil video game did you get that from? Wolfenstein 3D?

See? Video games turn people into violent Nazi's.

Re:linux is for communists

[Anonymous Coward]

the Nazis hates the Communists dumbass

Re:linux is for communists

[Anonymous Coward]

If Linux is for communists then why are you saying 'Heil Hitler'? As a Nazi, Hitler was staunchly anti-communist. If anything, you should be singing praises about Stalin and Lenin. Get your political history right before lighting up your flamethrower there, Sparky.

Re:linux is for communists

[Anonymous Coward]

What evil video game did you get that from? Wolfenstein 3D?

See? Video games turn people into violent Nazi's.

Its a self-sustaining cycle, people play the game, become violent Nazis, and are then mowed down as NPCs by the next player...oh my god, that means I'm a mass murderer! XP

Re:linux is for communists

[linuxIsLife]

I use Linux a very long time. Linux run on mobile phones, server clusters and others. It's a very powerful OS. What is common between Linux and Nazih or Linux and Communism. You have absolute no idea about history and distinction between Nazih and Communism. Probably you stay on mustdie and only hear about Linux. I recommend you Fedora or SUSE to try. But you need medical asistence first.

<wishful_thinking>

[Ray Radlein]

...Now if only they could also roll atrpms into Core/Extras.

</wishful_thinking>

(Yeah, I know why they can't)

Only?

[matr0x_x]

"this is ONLY Fedora"??? Only? Come on now... I ONLY had sex 9 times last night ;)

Re:Only?

[bob.appleyard]

I ONLY had sex 9 times last night With another?

Re:Only?

[operato]

that's a lot of self-loving

How about a USEFUL spin?

[erroneus]

I've been a Fedora user from the start and a Redhat user before that. I have resisted everyone's pleadings about Ubuntu and all the rest. But one thing I wish would change (though I know never will) would be having the more fun and useful things included like DVD and other media playback support. Just house that spin in some other country that doesn't care about the patents and stuff...you know?

Re:How about a USEFUL spin?

[Omnifarious]

Maybe the Livna people could host Livna Linux, which is just Fedora core with all their evil patent encumbered and/or non-Free packages in place of the fully Free but less capable ones. If they only provided the download via bittorrent it likely wouldn't even cost them a huge amount of bandwidth.

Re:How about a USEFUL spin?

[mikek3332002]

And what is wrong with software you have to pay for?

Re:How about a USEFUL spin?

[Omnifarious]

There is a reason I capitalized the word 'free'.

Re:How about a USEFUL spin?

[erroneus]

Now you're talking. That would be the best way. Then the IPW2200 drivers or the ATI stuff would just be in there. Don't get me wrong -- I'm quite used to the notion of having to do those post-install tweaks and all that but new 'end users' won't. But you're right that the Livna people would be the most likely and most appropriate to pull it off. Cause I gotta tell ya, for me at least, Fedora schnidt just works for me and has been like that for me since FC5.

Re:How about a USEFUL spin?

[essdodson]

There's a difference between what's right and what's easy. People need to be aware of the implications of software patents and this is one way of driving that message home.

i've seen this before

[macadamia_harold]

beginning with Fedora 7, the distinction between Core and Extras will cease to exist.

I think the DOJ refers to that as "bundling".

Re:i've seen this before

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

I think the DOJ refers to that as "bundling".

Been there, done that, dismissed.

Re:i've seen this before

[macadamia_harold]

I hadn't seen that before. That guy's hilarious. Was he serious?

Re:i've seen this before

[cooley]

Yes. IANAL, but I vaguely remember our local newspapers at the time reporting that the judge pretty much issued "Are you fucking stupid?!?" as his opinion in the most recent case.

Re:i've seen this before

[kwrxxx]

I luv k00k suits!

Re:i've seen this before

[frogstar_robot]

He's posted to Y! Scox as day5done (he denies this. The day5done nym is incredibly sympathetic to Wallace). Much joy has been had taking the piss out of Wallace/day5done on that board.

Fedora.

[Zonk (troll)]

Yep. I really want to be an unpaid beta tester. "beta" quality is being generous with Fedora.

Re:Fedora.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, just be an unpaid beta tester (*cough* Ubuntu*) for Debian instead.

New name for bundle

[postmortem]

Fedora Joke

yeah!!

[josepha48]

maybe upgrades will work better...

I would prefer...

[jd]

...something along the lines of SLS or Slackware, where you have logical collections grouped together spread over as many disks as necessary. That way, you wouldn't need three different install spins - you could have just one - and all packages would be extensions. This has many advantages (fewer CDs for special-purpose uses, each collection can be updated independently, you can handle more permutations of install options, and so on) at the not unreasonable cost of having more CDs if you want absolutely everything.

However, I feel that there are enough packages where the number of permutations of compile-time options is large and where the number of dependencies between package types is unpredictable that the "ideal" would be to have a web interface that let you roll your own set of ISOs online with just the stuff you want with the options that you want. (This is more restrictive than, say, gentoo, but it would be about the same to QA as the current Fedora with less overhead for the admin than Fedora and less install time than gentoo.)

Re:I would prefer...

[Cylix]

Ooooh,

There are a few places out there with scripts that will build a distro from FC.

The main problem with the last one I used seemed to be proper lack of dependency checking. A secondary problem was not providing any link to what the package provided other then the rpm name itself.

It was also dreadfully slow!

All from the comfort of your web browser!

So at least a bit of this is already started and could very well be improved upon.

In any event, it's been a while since I've looked at it, but with a bit of rummaging I'm sure anyone interested could locate it.

Re:I would prefer...

[Omnifarious]

While that's a really interesting idea, it's really hard to make that work right with bittorrent. :-(

Re:I would prefer...

[jd]

I've not been impressed with the dependency checking in Rawhide, so maybe that's no big loss. :) Seriously, I'll take a look for some of those scripts, or maybe roll up a few of my own. It shouldn't be hard to do well - either at source level or binary level - and although building an ISO image is nowhere near as fast as it should be, I think it should be easy enough to do better than alright.

Re:I would prefer...

[jd]

What you'd need is a directory filled with virtual files, where each virtual file's contents is generated by a driver that builds the ISO corresponding to that file and streams the output to the torrent. The length of the ISO would be fixed and padded as necessary, so that the torrent reported and used the correct values. The filename would be an encoding of what set of files you wanted to download and with what sort of options.

Anyone who downloaded the image could then torrent that image (with that set of options) or use some sort of script to re-virtualize it.

Either way, this would be a pain to torrent, but it could be done.

Re:I would prefer...

[Omnifarious]

Right. The problem is not that it can't be done from a technical perspective. The problem is that torrents rely on bandwidth sharing between everybody who's downloading the identical thing. The amount of bandwidth sharing in a build-your-own-ISO scheme is going to be a LOT smaller.

IMHO, the ideal solution is something that doesn't exist yet. A way of grabbing some subset of a collection of files in a torrent-like manner. I think this would make it a lot easier to run a mirror too.

Re:I would prefer...

[J.Y.Kelly]

There are a few places out there with scripts that will build a distro from FC.

I belive that the intention is to use Pungi to build the isos for the newly merged fedora releases. Since this tool will be public then interested groups will be able to build their own images containing a custom set of packages.

What about an "embedded" spin?

[Samrobb]

Seriously.

I spent the last 5 years working for TimeSys, and we did a lot of work to adapt various Fedora Core packages for embedded systems use.

One of the tools we developed along the way was something called tsrpm, a set of wrappers for RPM that makes cross-compiling RPMs a relatively painless process. It's open source (GPL), has support for a number of different processor architectures (x86, various flavors of ARM and PPC, etc.), and can be used to compile packages using a glibc or uclibc based tool chains. It's non-intrusive, and uses a hint file (standard bash shell script) to conditionally control various phases of the RPM and source code build process. It's even capable of building a cross-development tool chain from source RPMs, though that process can be a little hairy.

When I left, IIRC, we had over 300 RPMs, mostly from FC5, that we could build for a good 9-10 distros (variations of architecture/libc combinations). That was the result of myself and the tsrpm author (Chris Faylor) spending about 2-3 months on the whole thing... and that included the time it took for Chris to get new gcc-4.x based tool chains building for most of the architectures.

If anyone's curious, you can see the free-as-in-[beer,speech] releases of tsrpm and some whet-your-appetite FC5-based distros here.

Re:What about an "embedded" spin?

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds interesting enough that you might want to get on the fedora-devel-list and start a discussion to see if the active fedora developer and packaging community is interested in working with you or TimeSys to incorporate some of this into the mainline Fedora Project so it can extend support into embedded arches. If TimeSys is really interested, I'm sure there is room inside the Fedora Project for them to take a lead role into extending Fedora's development machinery into embedded devices. There is an infrastructure working group inside Fedora that you might want to touch base with as well. But as a first step I would encourage you to ping the fedora-devel-list and see if you can get a discussion started. I will be watching out for you on the list and if you show up I'll see if I can help facilitate a discussion to see where interest stands in the existing fedora development community.

-jef

Re:What about an "embedded" spin?

[bill_mcgonigle]

I'd use it.

fast install

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do a small net install, I did it with FC6. There are two boot isos (just go look at their ftp server to see them, or any mirror), you need to burn the first to boot and start the install, and point at the second on the network at the install prompt when it tells you after you start, then pick and choose what you want for userland, or just hit the default. No need to even download a full disk to get going then.

I think they just do disks because that is what most folks seem to want. This new deal will still be better than making you do a full DVD or 5 CDs plus more later one, only to not use 3/4ths of what you downloaded. The net install seems the easiest and best to me, though, I'll probably use that from now on it went so smoothly. I also always put in all the kde and gnome desktop jazz though, just to have immediate redundancy in case of a major exploit or bug, it's nice to have that immediate backup right there a logoff and login away. And you know that no matter what distro you use, shift happens...

If you really need all that minute flag options and compilings, maybe just do a linux from scratch install one time and do incremental updates after that. Can't get any more custom and cutdown than that really, and you can just do critical security upgrades for a long time then, and skip everything else.

Re:fast install

[jd]

I used to do my own custom system, using SLS as the initial platform but replacing everything in it within the first few days. (Hey, it took a while to compile things, back then! :) Having pushed both RPM and ebuild well past their capacity, not having a package manager at all has definite appeal to me. I don't believe the existing systems are robust enough or adequately architectured. The first problem is that you get filename clashes. You can't install all of Fedora Core 6, for example - a multitude of packages try to write to the same filename. This is OK with Fedora, as it traps it, but with roll-your-owns, you run into problems unless EVERY package is in a unique namespace. Which is possible, but violates the LSB and makes the filepaths horrible.

The second problem is that dependencies are rarely obvious and almost never documented. The first time you find out what is really needed is when the compile fails. This isn't terrible, but it is painfully slow.

The third problem is that some packages have broken, brain-dead or merely horribly horribly bad build systems. Any system that takes longer than 24 hours for a professional software engineer just to configure the compile options - not actually compile, just set up the options necessary to get it to compile - should either be the best damn software this side of the Andromeda Galaxy or be subject to being ripped apart, bit by bit, slowly, with the Barney song on continuous loop in the background.

Re:fast install

[faolan_devyn_aodfin]

But for those with dial-up. We like to get our stuff on a nice DVD with all the packages in one nice bundle and it doesn't matter if we have to spend $7 at an online store that ships the media to our door. Then any remaining software on your system could be downloaded.

I do this with Ubuntu. I use a striped down version with XFCE as my main desktop and a few of the GNOME components to be able to run the best programs. Apt-get on a full blown system with GNOME with all those bloatware apps like evolution and rhythmbox (lots of bloat there no real function) can take about a month. This is a serious flaw!

I'd take a DVD install that cost me $7 for the medium over thirty days of dial-up madness any day.

This is ominous...

[Skewray]

First the Extras, then the Redhat Server distributions. Then CentOs. Then SuSE. Soon Debian, Ubuntu and friends. Then Fedora will consume Mac OS, and last, with a giant belch, Vista. This is all part of their evil plan to take over the universe, and I, for one, welcome our new Fedora overlords!

Re:This is ominous...

[Jesus_666]

I'm waiting for Fedora Gentoo. You'll download an RPM (RedHat Portage, Managed) build file that specifies which exact versions of GCC and libraries to use in order to get the exact same version of the program that RedHat has on its servers. In the end your results are hashed and the hash is compared with the corresponding ones on the RedHat servers. That way you get all the advantages of Gentoo (compiling the packages yourself) and RPM (a package is binary-identical on all platforms)!

Additionally

[Anonymous Coward]

These single disk flavors of Fedora 7 will sport a modern brown theme and store packages in the superior deb format.

one disc?

[acidrain]

So, what's the deal with KDE and gnome needing different disks then? It seems bizzare to me that a group of hackers so tightly integrated the desktop into a set of apps that they cannot play nicely with other desktops. If it was M$ integrating a web browser into an OS well, that I get, but Linux is practically splitting into two OS's over the choice of window dressing and themes these days. What the heck is that?!? It's like M$ distributing two versions of XP, one with the classic desktop, and one with the XP theme. They would have been the laughing stock of the industry!!!

Re:one disc?

[Curien]

It's not a compatibility thing, it's a look&feel thing. You can use Konqueror with a Gnome desktop or Nautilus with KDE, but why would you want to?

Re:one disc?

[bogado]

There is the problem with loading two sets of library, a KDE guy will not want to have to load a lot of the gnome dependencies that KDE don't need and vice versa. Much of this is getting better, since both camps are agreeing in use much the same infra-structure in some parts, witch is good, so maybe in the future this will be a lesser problem. :-D

Re:one disc?

[juhaz]

Size. They're both pretty hefty, and having both on one CD would pretty much preclude having anything else useful on it.

Other than that, they'll live on single disk just fine, FC6 DVD does have them both, and no doubt will continue to in the future.

Re:one disc?

[Kelson]

There's also applications. I tend to use a Gnome desktop, because I find it easier to work with, but I prefer certain KDE apps like KMail and aKregator.

Non sensationalist title

[shoegoo]

Thanks for being the first news site to not publish a sensationalist headline about this like "Fedora Core Linux is No More!" Though the story seems a little late, the headline is certainly not as misleading.

5-CD collection?

[FooAtWFU]

Hey, I just installed Fedora Core 6 last Thursday, and I'm pretty sure there were 6 of those darned CDs I had to mess around with.

Re:5-CD collection?

[Kelson]

I'm pretty sure there were 6 of those darned CDs

Could be. I was going from memory, and I ended up not actually burning any ISOs on any of the machines where I installed FC6. I did a net install on one, and a hard drive based install on the other two. Either way, the exact number didn't leave much of an impression.

Re:5-CD collection?

[JonJ]

There's 5 install cds, and then theres the rescue-cd. Just have a look here: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux /core/6/i386/iso/ I'd be running Fedora if their version of KDE didn't look like shit.

Re:5-CD collection?

[FooAtWFU]

Ah, I see what happened. I was using an x86_64 install. There are 6 CDs in that one. My apologies for the confusion.

Role Of Community

[quantaman]

This is interesting since Fedora Core packages are maintained only by Red Hat employees whereas extras contains both Red Hat and user maintained packages. I wonder if Red Hat will continue to mark a few important packages in the unified repo as Red Hat only, or if they might have more direct leadership over the unified repo than they currently do over extras.

1 disc

[BinaryVibes]

I had a painful experience with the 5 FC6 CDS. The discs never passed the media test. I bought a DVD Drive just to install FC6 from a single disc. the idea of a single media rocks.

Other Fedora 7 Plans

[mandreiana]

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/7

Re:Other Fedora 7 Plans

[yog]

Thanks for the information. Damn, I'm still on (heavily updated) FC5 and have downloaded the FC6 dvd. I wonder if I should just skip this one and take FC7 when it comes out in April.

These upgrades are always painful and it takes about 2-3 weeks to shake out the problems and get my system working nicely again. However, it's always cool to see how much they've improved stuff.

Re:Other Fedora 7 Plans

[quintesse]

2-3 weeks? Wow. How do you do the upgrade? Because it's one of the things I like about Linux compared to Windows: I can install a brand new system but as long as I keep my /home intact all applications just start up with exactly the same settings as before. No need to go through that very long process of re-configuring every application that I had installed.

Of course at times I notice that I'm missing an application I had before, but most of the time that's simply solved with Yum/apt/Smart (whatever suits you best, Smart in my case).

What might be important here is the word "upgrade", I never bother with that anymore, especially when I noticed that upgrades sometimes play safe and don't install/activate new features (I remember once upgrading to the new Redhat that introduced the graphical boot and being disappointed that it still booted using text mode). I just do a new install keeping a copy of the old system for a while in case I had made some changes to some config files (mostly in /etc) or if I forgot about that database in /var somewhere that I forgot to back up.

The way I do this might be a bit strange, prior to the install I'll boot into single user mode, make a folder in root, let's say "oldsystem" and do a "mv /* /oldsystem". I now have a completely fucked up system, but if something goes wrong in the install I just boot from the rescue disk, clear everything that was installed and move everything back again. After the install was successful I will remove all unneeded stuff from the backup (all /bin, /usr/bin, /lib, /usr/lib etc etc) but will leave things like /etc and /var alone. If I encounter settings that I forgot about most of the time I only need to copy the old config or compare it to the new one. After a couple of weeks without having needed anything from the backup folder I'll just delete it.

Sounds like a lot of work maybe, but so far I've been up and running within hours after an "upgrade" which I think is not bad (*). Of course in the week after that I might encounter the odd thing or two that I need to copy from the backup but it's there, easy to access so it doesn't take much time.

(*) The exception being FC6 which didn't want to boot to X. Turns out that I had to connect my monitor to the other output of my video card, something that FC5 hadn't cared about but the new auto-detection in FC6 did. Ah well, in the end I prefer spending time fixing strange problems than the mind-numbing task of reconfiguring each application after a reinstall of my system ;-)

One disc installation sets

[vga_init]

You mean like Ubuntu? It looks like Fedora is taking some tips from the "other" distro.

Personally, that was one of the things I liked about Fedora--I could download the incredibly large DVD that contained everything and the kitchen sink. Download packages over the network? Pff... I used to sit there and remove/insert CD after CD of the latest linux systems. I remember I had SuSE professional that came with 7 discs. When I finally got a DVD burner, it turns out I didn't need it anymore... distros magically fit on a single CD all of the sudden. >:o

Re:One disc installation sets

[Anonymous Coward]

debian now has three flavors of single cd desktop installs as well.

Re:One disc installation sets

[egr]

I remember good old times when Windows CD had a lower price then Linux in Russia, just because you paid for CDs, not the software, I wonder if it's still so

You an alt of BadAnalogyGuy or somethin'?

[Mathinker]

> wrong... if the average user of a piece of software is expected to read compatibility lists.
> ...
> if you buy a car, should you be expected to know its internals?

Big difference. The proper analogy to checking a compatibility list is checking that the car will fit into your garage. I don't see how the manufacturer is supposed to help you there.

KDE Spin?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am confused about this one - does this mean that unlike current Fedora editions, KDE will not be included at all in the main distro, but only in a KDE spin disc? And that, if few people actually download/use that disc, KDE potentially gets dropped from Fedora?

I.e. would we be in a situation similar to Ubuntu/Kubuntu where mixing/matching your environment from a single install disc won't be possible anymore?

And are we potentially looking a dropping of KDE from Fedora altogether? Being put into a separate spin is kinda like someone being put into "special projects" at work - one foot out of the door. :)

That would be pretty grim.

Re:KDE Spin?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am confused about this one - does this mean that unlike current Fedora editions, KDE will not be included at all in the main distro, but only in a KDE spin disc?

Almost right. Some KDE programs (or Qt programs, actually) might still be included in the Desktop spin or Server spin, but most of KDE will only be in the KDE spin.

I.e. would we be in a situation similar to Ubuntu/Kubuntu where mixing/matching your environment from a single install disc won't be possible anymore?

If you are limited to a single CD-ROM, then it makes sense to have only a limited number of packages on that disc. However, it looks like you will be able to start the installation from any of these "spins" and fetch the other stuff from the main tree if you are interested in mixing and matching. Just like what you can do with Ubuntu/Kubuntu: it is perfectly possible to have both GNOME and KDE on your machine even if the initial install disc contains only one of these environments.

And are we potentially looking a dropping of KDE from Fedora altogether? Being put into a separate spin is kinda like someone being put into "special projects" at work - one foot out of the door. :)

No need for drama here. Just read the mailing list thread in which this is explained in detail. Quoting liberally from several messages: "The most active contributors to Fedora are employed by Red Hat", "Red Hat has about 25 times more developers working on GNOME than on KDE"

There is strong community support for KDE and there is no plan to drop it anytime soon. It is no secret that RHEL and Fedora are GNOME-centric rather than KDE-centric or XFCE-centric or E-centric or whatever. This is mainly due to the percentage of Fedora contributors who work on each evironment. So it is likely that the KDE spin will be mostly supported by the community while the Destkop spin and Server spin will have a larger contribution from Red Hat employees. As long as people interested in KDE keep on contributing to Fedora, there is no risk to see KDE going away or having "one foot out of the door".

Mod parent up!

[Builder]

The parent has a very good point. Even in the recent interview with the Fedora maintainer, he seemed to go to lengths to explain why fedora is NOT just a test bed for RHEL (despite the RHEL 4 product manager telling me this in person).

Fedora is a great test bed or desktop distro for bleeding edge users. With its 13 month life-cycle, it's all but useless as a server tool.

I made the mistake of moving from FreeBSD to Fedora at home (we use RHEL at work because we can afford it :)) I'll be back on a BSD or Solaris by April when my current FC stops being supported but it's a lot of work to get all the services migrated back and tested. Although, it's still easier than moving to Debian :D

Re:Mod parent up!

[jabuzz]

More sensible would be to use CentOS of course. You get that RedHat feel for free.

Re:Mod parent up!

[Builder]

Yeah, you get that redhat feel - a frozen platform with no recent packages or major upgrades to userspace tools (e.g. Firefox). You get that redhat feel with shedloads of crap installed by default and you can't remove it because the OS is dependant on that package being there. Please explain to me WHY I need to have a cdburner installed on a machine without a cd-writer (nautilus-cd-burner)? Why should I be forced to have wireless tools installed to be able to run NetworkManager on my wired connections?

Red Hat do not support or advise upgrading any server either. RHEL support calls about upgrades are responded to with instructions to backup and re-install. That's not always helpful, but at least CentOS does provide a meta package to do that. I'm not sure about between major versions.

OpenBSD allows for simple upgrades between versions, good security and very few spurious dependencies.

Re:

[hondamankev]

Would be nice if _all_ the third party repos would get their act together so one never has to worry about using repo A and B, but not A and C, except if you have D and A enabled, then its ok.

The third party repos are awesome, but a double edged dependency nightmare.

Amen to that.

[ironman_one]

As I see it, incompatible third party repos are the biggest hurdle in fedoras way right now. Please third party providers, get your act together.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Package Suppositories

[Ray Radlein]

Yeah, my life became immensely easier once I realized that atrpms, freshrpms, Dag, Dries, and PlanetCCRMA were compatable with each other, but not with livna. GRRRRR!

Which is not to say that everything is peaches and cream now, of course -- right now, yum is complaining about missing dependencies for several packages which I am not trying to install. What use is an error message saying "module spaz is required by package bstflk" when I am trying to install foo and update bar?

friSt psOt!

[Anonymous Coward]

share. *BSD is the accounting share. FreeBSD is GNAA (GAY NIGGER prima donnas, and Creek, abysmal like they are Come resulted in the counterpart, The project of programming as it is licensed see. The number BitTorrent) Second, Formed his own you down. It was to download the obvious that there Lube is wiped off Satan's Dick A8d includes where you learn what mistakes poor priorities, We strongly urge The longest or Series of exploding market share. Red

Re:

[teg]

One of the things which is painful, is that atrpms is the repo with mythtv.... but enabling atrpms as the default repo is a very bad idea, as it will replace many of the normal packages too, not just add new ones (which has broken several systems for me and friends).

Name that chipset...

[tjwhaynes]

A year or so back, I tried upgrading a Red Hat 9 machine to the latest Fedora. The video chipset, perfectly functional under RH9, wasn't supported by Fedora.

Between RH9 and FC4, XFree86 was taken out back and shot. Xorg replaced it. Now Xorg took a snapshot of XFree86 before the license changes hit so you'd expect that all the chipsets that XFree86 4.3rc2 had would be supported. So now I'm curious. What chipset do you have?

Almost all the Linux distros have moved to Xorg a long time ago, so if FC4 is busted for you and, say, Ubuntu 5.10 works (being about the same age), it's probably down to a configuration problem.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Re:Name that chipset...

[pnot]

So now I'm curious. What chipset do you have?

Can't tell you OTTOMH, and the machine in question is currently down (planned power outage in the building housing it) so I can't ssh in and ask it, but I will get back to you on that if you're interested.

Almost all the Linux distros have moved to Xorg a long time ago, so if FC4 is busted for you and, say, Ubuntu 5.10 works (being about the same age), it's probably down to a configuration problem.

Perhaps -- I honestly don't remember the details now, except that I wrestled with it for an hour or two before having one of those "hang on, my time's worth more than this" moments and chucking in a cheap graphics card that *was* supported :-). (And yes, Ubuntu 5.10 does work -- that's what it's running now.)

Re:Name that chipset...

[tjwhaynes]

Perhaps -- I honestly don't remember the details now, except that I wrestled with it for an hour or two before having one of those "hang on, my time's worth more than this" moments and chucking in a cheap graphics card that *was* supported :-). (And yes, Ubuntu 5.10 does work -- that's what it's running now.)

It's not really critical to know the chipset if you have a working solution :-) I fought with XFree86 for years fixing up configuration issues for various colleagues and friends - a lot of problems come down to incorrect drivers and monitors with messed up EDID settings. Xorg initially changed a few paths around and some naming conventions. It's most likely the xorg.conf that Ubuntu set up would work if copied to an equivalent FC4.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Limited patch support for Red Hat series

[johnwbyrd]

If an operating system release is not supported with security patches in the long term, it may not be a good long-term choice for production machines. The folks maintaining http://www.fedoralegacy.org/ recently announced that they were punting on maintaining everything before Core 4. Ask yourself: in 1.5 years, do I really want to be forced to install a new OS because I can't get security patches on this one? Compare against Ubuntu LTS, which will be around for at least 3-5 more years.

Re:Limited patch support for Red Hat series

[hawaiian717]

It has been said many times that Fedora has never been intended as a long-term supported product. Rather it's a bleeding edge system where new stuff gets tried out and the wrinkles get ironed out before going into Red Hat Enterprise. If you need a long-term production machine with long term patches, you don't really want Fedora in the first place, but rather Red Hat Enterprise or one of its clones (CentOS, etc).

Hardly

[matt me]

Comparison:

The ubuntu 'main' component contains ~1300 packages. These are the only packages available by default (apart from a very select choice of non-GPL software in the 'restricted' component), and the only packages that are officially supported. 1300 packages (one CD) just stretches to linux, gnu, x11, gnome, perl, python (and openoffice) - things you'd expect on every system. If you want anything else (and you certainly will), you can find at least 15000 packages in the 'universe' component, which contains the majority of GPL software in existence. This is the wealth of Debian. But unfortunately, these packages are not available by default, and are not supported. They're rarely updated between releases. This is sad, it's a waste of Debian's greatest asset.

Fedora Core contains 5 CDs of software (2250 packages) all of which is maintained by Red Hat employees and officially supported. On top of this there are 5500 packages in extras, which are avaliable by default, of equally good quality, and updated between releases. The only difference is they are maintained by 'the community'. Many maintainers were Red Hat employees anyway, which is one reason they've come to integrate the two. This means the next release will include, support, and provide updates for some 8000 packages.

I think Fedora trumps Ubuntu here. The wealth of linux is the vast quantity and quality of software freely avaliable. Distributors produce less than 1% of the distro, they just select some GPL projects and glue them together. This is why there's so little difference between Ubuntu and Fedora. The majority of code has been written by thousands of preceeding developers working on their respective projects who may never use either. Fedora is right to embrace the work of the thousands of free hackers, rather than deny the quality of their software because they can't control it.

Media Check

[Kelson]

Fedora's media check has historically been pickier than it needs to be. If the media passes, you know it's good, but there are things that will make it fail other than an actual bad disc. They suggested booting the installer with "linux ide=nodma" if it fails with the default settings. The release notes for FC5 and FC6 don't include this note, so they may have fixed the bug. I can't say myself, since FC4 was the last time I installed from CD.

Only one fedora?

[mmmmbeer]

That would be at http://www.fedora.info/

Re:

[quintesse]

And have you reported these problems to the ATrpms mailing list? Axel Thimm is a nice guy and extremely patient when it comes to explaining countless times to people how to manage their packages or how to fix things if something has gone wrong (regardless if the mistake had something to do with ATrpms packages are not). Any problems with packages always get fixed ASAP.

Personally the first thing I do after a fresh install is add the ATrpms repo and do an upgrade. Has never gone wrong so far.

I do agree with something that was said before: don't mix Livna and ATrpms, I've had nothing but problems with that combination.

Re:

[teg]

No, I don't, because I don't want those packages. I just want some packages which I can't find in FC and Livna - usually just mythtv.