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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."
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.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
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.)
beginning with Fedora 7, the distinction between Core and Extras will cease to exist.
I think the DOJ refers to that as "bundling".
Push Button, Receive Bacon
So if a distro doesn't support for example hardware properly, that's the now the end user's fault?
...and you wonder why people won't jump ship to Linux.
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.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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?
http://outcampaign.org/
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.
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.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
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.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
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.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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.
I stole this Sig
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/7