Fedora 9 Preview Cleared for Launch

According to a post made yesterday to the Fedora announce mailing list, a Fedora 9 preview has been cleared for launch. "This is a Preview release, it is fairly close to what the final product will be like. This is the most critical release for the Fedora community to use and test and report bugs on. This is the last major public release before the final GOLD Fedora 9 release on May 13th (we hope). [...] Live images, KDE Live images, CDs and DVD options are available. http://torrent.fedoraproject.org has a section marked 'F9-Preview.'"

Comments

Re:The beta was interesting

[Oxy the moron]

As usual, mod parent down. Link is a fake. Must be fun to spend all day trolling /. like this...

Perl a big deal for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Perl 5.10 will be integrated with Fedora 9, but not with Ubuntu 8.04. I like both desktops a lot, but I might switch back my home use to Fedora if they're going to be on the cutting edge for Perl releases, especially one so hugely important as 5.10 (if you don't know, 5.10 is the first release to incorporate many features from the spec for 6.0, so it has smart matching, a switch statement, defined-or, and a number of other useful Perl 6isms).

Differences

[Oxy the moron]

Anyone have a link, or know off-hand, the major differences between this and the latest Ubuntu release? I realize there's the APT/RPM difference, but aside from that, what is notable?

Re:Differences

[Phisbut]

Anyone have a link, or know off-hand, the major differences between this and the latest Ubuntu release? I realize there's the APT/RPM difference, but aside from that, what is notable?

KDE 4, among other things.

Re:Differences

[zedlander]

Fedora vs. Ubuntu

Re:Differences

[pembo13]

Major difference? Well I can't enumerate them, but I can generalize things you'll see in Fedora compared to Ubuntu

• Continued work SELinux
• Continued work NetworkManager
• Continued work on PulseAudio
• Some other stuff that will make its way to Ubuntu once the bugs get worked out within Fedora (and upstream)
• Less specialization (ie. as a desktop) just a general operating system with utils and applications
• Work towards upstart (something Ubuntu already has I believe)
• Think I saw a few threads about ext4
• Think I saw a few threads about full disk encryption
• Jigdo support for sucking down images

Re:Differences

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks! That's a really useful resource. I'm a slackware-till-I-die kinda guy, but for friends-and-family consulting that is perfect.

Re:Differences

[QuantumRiff]

the Apt/RPM is a huge difference. I used to love Fedora, and (still) run RHEL at the office on our servers. RHEL is fine, as I don't play and experement and try new things on it, but Fedora got to be a real pain in the ass with RPM Dependancies. I would find an RPM of something I wanted to install, it required me to first find and install another RPM, etc. Sometimes one of the dependant RPM's would not install, because I had a newer/older version for another program. Apt-get has worked flawlessly for me, and the HUGE pool of apps that just work has made it so I almost never have to search for .DEB files. I think the only change I had to do was add google's APT repository to Ubuntu, and it keeps picasa and google-earth up to date.

If the RPM system gets a huge makeover, I would probably play with Fedora again. It may have already been done, I switched to Ubuntu at 6.04.

Re:Differences

[Oxy the moron]

Thanks much, that was a very helpful link!

Re:Differences

[fyrie]

First huge difference between the two is that Ubuntu has professional support if you want it. Another huge difference between the two is that Ubuntu typically only gets security updates and major bug fixes during a version lifespan whereas Fedora continually gets application updates over its version lifespan as new versions of individual apps are released.

So you could say that Fedora stays a little more bleeding edge throughout the version lifespan, and Ubuntu stays a bit more stable throughout the lifespan of a version.

Re:Differences

[arakon]

That comparison dates from 2006... have anything more current?

Re:Differences

[QuantumRiff]

after looking at the reply above to Fedora vs. Ubuntu it appears that the package management has been drastically improved with Apt-Yum. I will have to play with Fedora again.

Re:Differences

[lantastik]

Distro Kombat!!
dundun..dundun..dundun..dundunDUNdun

Fedora
Ubuntu
Slackware
Gentoo
SUSE
Yellow Dog
etc.

dun.dun.DEN.dun.DEN.dun.dun.DUN
Distro Kombat!!

Re:Differences

[Phisbut]

I would find an RPM of something I wanted to install, it required me to first find and install another RPM, etc. Sometimes one of the dependant RPM's would not install, because I had a newer/older version for another program. Apt-get has worked flawlessly for me, and the HUGE pool of apps that just work has made it so I almost never have to search for .DEB files.

Comparing RPM to apt-get is apples to oranges. Either compare RPM to DEB, or yum to apt-get. I never had to bother with dependencies when using yum, just as you've never had to bother with dependencies using apt-get.

Re:Differences

[pembo13]

A discussion about RPM and DEB, and suprise suprise, you mention Apt but not yum. Here's a tip: `yum localinstall RpmIManuallyDloaded.rpm`. The size pool of apps have little to do with RPM v. DEB as far as I know.

Re:Differences

[Wowsers]

Fedora continually gets application updates over its version lifespan as new versions of individual apps are released. You've described how Mandriva works. Does anyone other than me actually use that distro? It was released a few days ago an I must have blinked and missed any mention of it's release here. Still, installing the development branch to test applications or all of Mandriva before release is... interesting.

Re:Differences

[Warbothong]

It seems pretty accepted that RPM has "dependancy hell" issues. The HUGE problem with package management, for me, is that there are a lot of people saying RPM should be ditched in favour of Dpkg or some yet-to-be-made system, but ALL of those arguments are essentially arguing for a packaging standard.

Well, RPM *IS* the packaging standard in the Linux Standard Base (see http://refspecs.linux-foundation.org/LSB_3.2.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/pkgformat.html ). Thus a standard Linux system should either use the RPM package system or have an equivalent system which can install RPM packages in addition to its own (note: dpkg can't do this, and alien doesn't count).

Therefore the call for standards is essentially a call for everyone to use RPM, whilst it seems pretty well known that RPM has serious problems. Of course, RPM has a *HUGE* inertia which means it won't be leaving anytime soon either.

PS: When I used Fedora back in the Core 3 days I used Apt4RPM and Synaptic (this is before I discovered Debian), don't know if it's still going though.

Re:Differences

[RiotingPacifist]

Another important difference, is that Fedora is much closer to a server distro, RHEL, and so learning how to administer one will have you pretty much sorted on the other.

Re:Differences

[morcego]

Which is entirely expected, if you consider (I do) Fedora as the development version of RHEL.

Re:Differences

[lsolano]

I've use Mandriva for quite a long time. I've tested many distros, and Mandriva is the one I like most. Fedora is a great choice too.

Re:Differences

[kripkenstein]

Major difference? Well I can't enumerate them, but I can generalize things you'll see in Fedora compared to Ubuntu

[...]

• Continued work on PulseAudio

Not sure what you mean by that. Both Fedora and Ubuntu use PulseAudio these days. But of course there might be differences between them in how well they use it.

So, I just booted up the Fedora Preview to see just that, the reason being that in Ubuntu sound stutters if your CPU isn't very powerful (typically when you minimize/maximize a window or some other activity that causes a brief spike in CPU). Here is the bug, which I guess won't be fixed before release.

Sadly I was unable to test PulseAudio on the Fedora 9 Preview. First, I couldn't get my microphone to work, even after fiddling with all the little options for quite a while (note that this is a desktop - the mic hardware is very standard). So my plan failed to record something then play it back and see if it was smooth.

Next I tried to go to one of my existing partitions, to play a music file from there. Fedora wasn't able to mount them, and gave an embarrassing error message, I don't remember the exact words, but something along the lines of "Don't show these error messages".

And sadly the Fedora live cd doesn't come with any sound samples in the Music or Movies folders.

So I have no idea how well PulseAudio works in Fedora, sadly, because I was considering installing it if it did better than Ubuntu Hardy, whose stuttering sound bug is quite annoying. Looks like I'll stick with Ubuntu for now.

Re:Differences

[proxima]

Comparing RPM to apt-get is apples to oranges. Either compare RPM to DEB, or yum to apt-get. I never had to bother with dependencies when using yum, just as you've never had to bother with dependencies using apt-get.

I completely agree. Since my distros of choice over the last 5 years have been Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu, I've had a fair bit of experience with both yum and apt-get. Yum, at least as of the Fedora 8 install on my desktop, is simply not as good (IMO) as apt-get in Debian or Ubuntu for two reasons:

1.) yum is slow, horribly horribly slow. I think it may have gotten a little better in Fedora 8, and I've heard that they're putting serious work into it. Hopefully Fedora 9 will be better, but it never ceases to amaze me how long it takes to do a "yum search" to look for a package compared to "apt-cache search".

2.) The package repositories for Ubuntu (which is derived from the huge repository from Debian) are larger and more complete, at least for the random software I tend to look for. Again, Fedora is gaining in this regard, the community-supported package setup is starting to rival Ubuntu's universe, making this a huge step up over the old RedHat 7/8/9 days compared to Debian at that time. When it comes to software outside of either repository, RPMs tend to be more common than debs, which is an advantage for Fedora.

So yum (and the standard underlying repositories) are behind in those respects compared to apt-get, but the difference is shrinking. In yum's defense, I think they implemented package signing as a default requirement before Debian did, but I could be wrong on that.

I've run Fedora on my desktop for a while, but Kubuntu on my laptop. I honestly don't know what I'll install on my desktop next. I usually skip every other release, and since I'm on FC 8, that means waiting until FC10. This might be good anyway; I'm a KDE user, and KDE 4.0 just doesn't look feature complete. Best to wait until KDE 4.1 polishes everything a bit more, perhaps. I'm debating whether to try out the latest Kubuntu on my laptop when it's released this month to try out KDE 4.0.

Re:Differences

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of when Eric S. Raymond loudly complained that his Fedora system unaccountably stopped working ... when all that he had done was to log in as root and start deleting random system libraries.

Re:Differences

[Znork]

"dependancy hell" issues

Dependency hell isn't really a function of the package format, the issue is intrinsic to reasonably complex software dependency environments, and the hell is what you get for not using an automatic depsolver. Of course, as there originally wasn't one that handled RPM's (like apt for debs), it's tended to get the blame.

When I used Fedora back in the Core 3 days I used Apt4RPM and Synaptic

These days you'd probably use yum and yumex. Using yum-priorites for repos and you'll have very little trouble even with several third party repos active.

Re:Differences

[Anonymous Coward]

Never mind the X vs Y package management argument, can somebody tell me why Fedora's own GUI updater program (and most of RH/Fedora's configuration programs) can't repaint the GUI properly?

I use a modern dual-core PC and the RH/Fedora configuration programs leave the screen unpainted for up to 30 seconds. What's up with that?!

Re:Differences

[nzeer]

Comparing rpm to apt is just wrong. rpm is a packaging format, while apt is a package management system. Comparing rpm to deb would be fine. Comparing yum to apt would be fine. As a side note... yum is a very capable package management system nowadays.

Re:Differences

[DF5JT]

"You've described how Mandriva works. Does anyone other than me actually use that distro?"

Yes. I've been through all of the major distributions over the past 8 or 9 years and I think I finally found the one I will continue to use. Minimal pain in installing the distro, minimal pain in administrating it, minimal pain in switching both my GF's X60 and my own T60 over to Mandriva.

Extremely helpful people in the forum and apart from SUSE's sucky yast the only distribution that has a central administration tool for all services, hardware drivers, user management and virtually everything under /etc. No need to touch an editor, though you are fine if you want to. And if you do it it the right place, changes will be seen in the GUI administration tools.

Ubuntu simply doesn't cut it on my notebook for a variety of reasons and neither does Fedora: Lack of proper suspend/resume, broken framebuffer console plus a bugzilla with people that have a weird attitude towards usabilty.

Thanks Mandriva, you are one hell of e polished and stunning distribution.

Re:Differences

[miro f]

Can't people just show the default look?

kind of ironic that the Fedora Core pic is all browns and oranges, whereas the Ubuntu pic is all blues.

Re:Differences

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, for one thing Ubuntu 8.04 has a focus on the desktop. Hardware actually works out of the box. Wireless works out of the box. Fonts look beautiful out of the box. The desktop feels snappy and responsive. You don't need to patch together several incompatible repos to get the software you need, etc.

Just forget about Fedora 9. Install Ubuntu instead and be happy.

Re:Differences

[init100]

it never ceases to amaze me how long it takes to do a "yum search" to look for a package compared to "apt-cache search".

This is because apt-cache only searches the local cache, while Yum always ventures out onto the 'net to fetch the latest package and file lists.

Re:Differences

[Anonymous Coward]

Synaptic still works great in Fedora 8.

Re:Differences

[proxima]

This is because apt-cache only searches the local cache, while Yum always ventures out onto the 'net to fetch the latest package and file lists.

I know that used to be true, but when I just tried it yum gave no indication that it was going out and retrieving any file lists (but perhaps it still was in the background). For me, that seems like a dumb default setting. The "apt-get update" system seems to work well: update your repository info when you want to, and work with it from then on. That way if you do a few searches you aren't looking for updated repository info for each and every search. Even if there is a way around this with a command-line switch, it still seems like a dumb default.

Re:Differences

[rohan972]

Jigdo support for sucking down images

Who want's images? Just put the install kernel and initrd in /boot and boot into the installer, install via http or ftp. Download just the packages you want to install.

For the Fedora 9 Beta:
http://ftp.ndlug.nd.edu/pub/fedora/linux/releases/test/9-Beta/Fedora/i386/os/isolinux/vmlinuz
http://ftp.ndlug.nd.edu/pub/fedora/linux/releases/test/9-Beta/Fedora/i386/os/isolinux/initrd.img
For http install you would need either:
http://ftp.ndlug.nd.edu/pub/fedora/linux/releases/test/9-Beta/Fedora/i386/os/
or
http://ftp.ndlug.nd.edu/pub/fedora/linux/releases/test/9-Beta/Fedora/i386/os/Packages (the first I think)

Re:Differences

[Anonymous Coward]

yum in Fedora 8 is actually blazingly fast when compared to that of FC6, for example. I was really blown away after the (FC7/8) release. And more so when I installed Ubuntu and apt-get. Yes, there is still work to do.

Re:Differences

[chasd]

1.) yum is slow, horribly horribly slow. I think it may have gotten a little better in Fedora 8, and I've heard that they're putting serious work into it. Hopefully Fedora 9 will be better, but it never ceases to amaze me how long it takes to do a "yum search" to look for a package compared to "apt-cache search".

There have been several improvements in speed and memory usage to the yum in F9. I think the plan is to see if any issues crop up after F9 is released before pushing an update to F8. The performance of yum has steadily improved F7=>F8=>F9. Try a recent Fedora to find out. Also new in F9 is PackageKit, which is attempting to allow for different backends besides yum. If you have a problem with yum, you might want to contribute to any work on a backend of your choice.

2.) The package repositories for Ubuntu (which is derived from the huge repository from Debian) are larger and more complete

There are add-on repositories for Fedora, check them out if you need something not included in the "Everything" Fedora repository. I am continually surprised that when I find an interesting application on the Internet that it is usually already in Fedora, or in Rawhide and I can rpmbuild it myself.

I'm a KDE user, and KDE 4.0 just doesn't look feature complete. Best to wait until KDE 4.1 polishes everything a bit more, perhaps. I'm debating whether to try out the latest Kubuntu on my laptop when it's released this month to try out KDE 4.0.

There is a KDE Fedora LiveCD, try that out to see what you think of 4.0.3

Re:Differences

[Anonymous Coward]

apt-get is nice and all, but I have to say I prefer aptitude. It tends to do "the right thing" about dependencies when you remove packages. At least in my experience.

Re:Differences

[proxima]

There are add-on repositories for Fedora, check them out if you need something not included in the "Everything" Fedora repository. I am continually surprised that when I find an interesting application on the Internet that it is usually already in Fedora, or in Rawhide and I can rpmbuild it myself.

It's been my experience that the more repositories you add, the more you run into issues of conflicting package offerings between them. I try to avoid it if at all possible and simply use the "official" community-supported stuff.

Re:Differences

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. On one of my systems I run PCLinuxOS. It's RPM-based but uses apt-get. I'll bet yum could be used with DEB's too.

Re:Differences

[Undead NDR]

True if you don't use the -C flag. A fair comparison would be apt-cache vs. yum -C.

Re:The beta was interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I need an admin to delete that post, it's a virus do not click it.

Feature List

[Nos.]

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/FeatureList

Fedora 9 is more innovative

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora is one step ahead. Fedora 8 already included PulseAudio which other distributions are only including in their recent/upcoming releases.

Now in Fedora 9,

There are a number of major new features
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/FeatureList

http://freeipa.org is one. The new GDM is another. The amount of virtualization improvements have surpassed any other linux distro by far.There are also other minor enhancemen
ts like kerneloops package installed by default. Refer http://kerneloops.org for more details.

Fedora 9 Not Ready

[nmb3000]

I dunno. I hear that Fedora 9 is really lacking in important functionality. Why would I want to install something so obviously half-baked like this?

With serious issues like this, obviously 2008 won't be The Year of the Linux Desktop (Really This Time, We Mean It).

Re:Fedora 9 Not Ready

[sfire]

Actually, if you read the bug report, and https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=439858#c22 It says they won't be shipping swfdec if FC 9.

Re:Fedora 9 Not Ready

[IBBoard]

OMGWTFNooooooooo! YouTube won't work with one of the alternatives for playing SWFs that isn't even going to be shipped in F9 by default. What a tragic loss that will be

If your life revolves around YouTube then what's wrong with going to Adobe and getting their Flash/Shockwave plugin? It works perfectly, it has the same version number as the Windows one, and it's basically the same process as Windows for newbies (download, install, use).

As for half-baked - a quick skim of the thread seemed to imply that it's partly the fault of upstream (the original authors) and not necessarily Fedora (although its "completely free" ethos wouldn't have helped with the Livna repo requirements).

Re:Fedora 9 Not Ready

[abirdman]

There's no 64 bit version? At least the last time I tried, and had to dick around with ndiswrapper. I still don't know exactly what I did, but for now it works. I don't want to try and explain how to do it to anyone. And I'm not sure I want to try it again-- I don't even know if I'm using the swf alternative or the Adobe version. But for now, Fedora 8 works pretty fine for me.

Re:Fedora 9 Not Ready

[RiotingPacifist]

He got moded informative? I thought he was going for funny tbh!

Its not fedoras fault they cant package adobe flash and that gnu flash replacements arnt ready yet.
If you want flash just install adobe flash32 to firefox32, all you need is tar, if anything flash is going to install easily on a fedora system because adobe offer a rpm, but even on a 64bit ubuntu system i have 0 problems setting up flash.

Re:Fedora 9 Not Ready

[RiotingPacifist]

There arnt many 32bit plug-in, its probably easiest to install a 32bit browser (hell even firefox aint going to break the 4GB limit).

Re:Fedora 9 Not Ready

[debatem1]

Congratulations- you've been trolled.
On a more serious note, last I heard it was a pretty big deal not having viable flash alternatives for 64 bit.

Re:Fedora 9 Not Ready

[firewalkergr]

No need. Fedora includes nspluginwrapper which allows most 32bit plugins to work with 64bit Firefox. (Well flash on x86_64 works for me.)
You only have to do this only once :
1) Go to adobe site

2) Click and install the repo package with Package Installer

3) Use Add/Remove software or Yumex or whaterver to install flash-plugin

The same goes for closed source drivers and various codecs, you can add repo's from freshrpms or livna.

Re:Fedora 9 Not Ready

[Gavagai80]

> what's wrong with going to Adobe and > getting their Flash/Shockwave plugin? They don't actually have a Shockwave plugin for Linux, though fortunately there aren't many sites left that require it.

like it, but

[thermian]

This issue of not having media codecs other then the free ones is a real deal breaker for me.

Yes I know, they aren't 'free as in freedom'. Sad, but true. However, when I install desktop linux I don't want to fart about trying to find media codecs. They should be there, in the install, or immediately available via an obvious link once installation is complete. It should be a one click and done experience, has to be really.

Yes I could find them myself, but I'm not really the problem, since I'm pretty much addicted to linux for everything but desktop. I'll remain a fan, and live in hope of a decent out of the box desktop experience.

No, the problem is the vast numbers of techno numpties who won't use linux as long as it has this glaring hole in its out of the box state.

Mark me as troll if you wish, but this is a serious issue that the purists don't want to confront. In spite of what they beleive, ogg is not enough...

Re:like it, but

[fyrie]

Most of that stuff is available in the livna repository. Standard procedure is to install the livna repo immediately and download the non free packages.

Re:like it, but

[thermian]

Yup, but would the aforementioned person new to linux and uninformed of such things know about this? I'm not disputing that repositories exist, its more that they aren't made seamlessly available.

The problem is that the desktop experience has become, thanks to the almighty Microsoft, (whose name we speak in hushed tones, lest they smite us with their stick of smiting), have defined the desktop as being a place where even a moron can get a decent experience with minimal work, or none, in some cases.

It's that we have to beat. It's ok for us technically aware folk to be impressed by the superior process scheduling of linux compared to windows (well, gets me hot), but a numptie is unlikely to even know such things occur, they're going to try and play an mp3, dvd, or video (with a non free codec), find that it doesn't work and give up in disgust.

Re:like it, but

[fyrie]

I do need to add that I do agree with the OP in the sense that it would be great if there was a way right out of the box to automatically go and download this type of stuff, maybe with a disclaimer saying that they aren't sanctioned as free that would be a CYA for Fedora.

Re:like it, but

[Anonymous Coward]

As a fedora user, I'll bite.

First, blame those that made the codecs non-free, not those who suffer because of it. There is nothing that they can do about non-free codecs and there's no use complaining.

Beyond that, it's not exactly hard to add non-free codecs. Add the livna repository and you'll be able to get them off your package manager. There may not be any flashing banners telling you how and where to download non-free codecs, but it's not hard to do either.

Finally, you shouldn't need non-free codecs as soon as you install the operating system.

Re:like it, but

[robmv]

Fedora has exactly what you want http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureCodecBuddy

Re:like it, but

[Nushio]

Yup, but would the aforementioned person new to linux and uninformed of such things know about this? I'm sorry, but I highly doubt that a person "new to linux and uninformed of such things" would install linux.

If indeed said person were to install linux, he'd follow a guide. There are plenty guides available that list as part of the installation instructions, instructions on how to get mp3, xvid, dvd, realplayer, java and flash running on your system, be it Fedora, Ubuntu or Mandriva.

More often than not, its a "Linux-Hippie" the guy that ends up installing Linux. Said "Hippies" usually know their way around the distro they install, and tend to install everything the end user will ever need.

Re:like it, but

[jd]

I think conventional wisdom is that in Microsoft's case, it is a chair of smiting. It's not simply a Microsoft problem, however. It has a lot to do with software patents, price gouging and dodgy attitudes towards reverse engineering throughout the industry. Yes, it costs money to develop high-end codecs, and it is entirely reasonable for corporations to try to make a profit from their work, but that argument only goes so far and current practices go way beyond reasonable.

Re:like it, but

[Phisbut]

Yup, but would the aforementioned person new to linux and uninformed of such things know about this? I'm not disputing that repositories exist, its more that they aren't made seamlessly available.

The aforementionned person new to linux will get Ubuntu. Fedora is not a distro aimed to ease desktop use at all cost, it is a general purpose operating system with lots of tools that happens to have a desktop. Ubuntu, on the other hand, is trying to deliver the full desktop experience to the user.

Re:like it, but

[thermian]

I'm sorry, but I highly doubt that a person "new to linux and uninformed of such things" would install linux.

Yes, and they never will until it becomes so simple that a person with little or no knowledge can do it.

This is what I'm getting at. Those people are in microsofts pocket, and will be until a fully media capable linux distro can be installed easily, without detailed knowledge.

People can, and do, install newer verions of windows who fall into this catagory. It's them, the ones who want to upgrade, that we should be attracting.

Re:like it, but

[IBBoard]

The only problem with that is that it leaves Fedora in basically the same situation as shipping them. They ship as a "completely free" distro (i.e. no non-free software, including stuff they can't ship because they're US based and there may be patent restrictions) to keep clean and legal. If they started saying "press this button to get free codecs that may breach patents" then they've lost that position.

At the end of the day there are two choices: 1) pick another distro (probably European based like SuSe) that doesn't have such a strict "free software only" ethos or 2) do the simple thing and add the Livna repos like I did. A couple of minutes adding the repo and picking packages and you gain MP3, MPEG, WMV, QuickTime and everything else, plus drivers (if you want them and don't build them yourself) VLC and a number of other apps.

Re:like it, but

[fyrie]

I was under the impression that Codec buddy points the user to purchasable codecs, not the free (as in beer) codecs in the livna repo.

Re:like it, but

[pembo13]

Will you contribute to RedHat and Fedora's legal defense if/when they are sued?

Re:like it, but

[the COW OF DOOM (tm)]

Yeah. It'd be great, if it wasn't illegal.

Here's the thing: it's not solely a matter of principle. Fedora has to play by a harder set of rules than Ubuntu. Fedora is backed by a public company, based in the US, so they answer to US law and Red Hat stockholders. And under US law, CYA just isn't enough, especially when there's multi-billion-dollar global megacorps who will take any opportunity they can find to sue you into oblivion.

Everyone would dearly love to be able to include mp3 codecs and ffmpeg and all that non-Free stuff. But they can't. So Red Hat and Fedora keep fighting the good fight - lobbying against software patents, pushing for open standards - and still people give them shit because they have to click two places instead of one to get MP3 support.

Way to focus on the big problems, people.

Re:like it, but

[RiotingPacifist]

Does Suse ship with codecs?
I know ubuntu doesnt but they recently changed the default repos to include them, so end users who click though end up pressing a ""press this button to get free codecs that may breach patents" and dont complain.

Re:like it, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Then go buy a copy of Linspire, it has the non-free codecs installed.

Re:like it, but

[IBBoard]

I'm not sure. A guy at work uses it but I've never tried it much. From what I've picked up it might not ship with them but it's a bit closer to Ubuntu's "Restricted Packages" than Fedora's "they're out there, but because of potential legal issues and lack of freedom then we can't tell you where".

Re:like it, but

[techno-vampire]

The aforementionned person new to linux will get Ubuntu.

I've been using Fedora along with Windows for a number of years now. My sister has an older machine (800mhz) and Win2K was getting slower and slower, even with all the firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware stuph. In fact, it was the anti-virus that was slowing it down more than anything else; the daily scans took forever and made it almost unresponsive. Then, she tried a Live CD of Ubuntu. In less than 15 minutes she knew it was for her. The next morning, she installed it. The first time it rebooted, it let her know she needed proprietary drivers for her nVidia Geoforce video card and got them. It's now her main OS, and Win2K is the Dark Side to her. I'm happy with Fedora, and will be moving from 8 to 9 when the time comes, but I'd never have suggested it to her. Fedora's a geeky, bleeding edge test bed of a distro, and all she wants or needs is something that Just Works. That's why there are so many Linux distros: different people need and/or want different things, and no matter what you want in the way of Linux, there's at least one distro that's right for you.

Re:like it, but

[radl33t]

It should be a one click and done experience, has to be really. I have feisty and the version before feisty on my 2 machines. I think they both presented me with an obvious link when I first played an mp3. Told me I should be aware of the laws of my country or some such nonsense.

Have they taken this feature away? I think my ubuntu must be at least a year out of date.

Re:like it, but

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not because of them being purists. The relevant codecs in fact are free software and all that.

Fedora is based in the US. In the US, we are blessed with these lovely things called patent laws. In particular, it is legally iffy for Fedora to distribute things like MP3 codecs and such. Really, the way to fix this is to get rid of the stupid things altogether... software patents are ridiculous.

(And a lot of the non-free stuff isn't re-distributable anyway, so they can't package it. Ubuntu's flash "package" is just a script that downloads and installs it. Might as well use the rpm Adobe provides.)

Re:like it, but

[robmv]

you are right, it points to the Fluendo codecs, I do not think it will ever point to Livna, because they are not legal in some countries (stupid software patents)

Re:like it, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Your sister runs Linux? Can I ask her out?

Re:like it, but

[Pros_n_Cons]

They find out how to install MP3 by typing... "fedora mp3" into google which returns a webpage called "How to play MP3 files in Fedora" That gives you step by step instructions with screenshots.
Hey did you know that people use to have to download winrar or winzip to unzip files? no no its true! people actually can figure out how to search the net for software. Windows users even can find things like divx on their own or what a pps, pdf or a .torrent file is or what a nero .nrg file is.
sheesh people will figure out how to type in fedora mp3, or fedora faq into google.. its okay they will figure it out i promise. "newbies" are alot more likely to search google with "fedora mp3" than sitting down at an ubuntu box and typing in "apt-get search *mp3*" or whatever the command would be to install mp3 support.

Re:like it, but

[techno-vampire]

I don't know. I have no idea if you're capable of asking her out. However, I seriously doubt that any AC would meet her standards, or that you're old enough to interest her. (Hint, here: I'm a 'Nam vet and she's my older sister.)

Re:like it, but

[Murrquan]

The times are changing ... for a lot of people, the web is their media player, and so long as they can access YouTube and the TV networks' websites they're good to go.

By default Fedora does includes CodecBuddy, which explains the situation to new users and points them at Fluendo's webstore, where they can buy legit media codecs. Notably, the Fluendo .mp3 codec costs 0 Euros.

Having said all that, I wouldn't recommend that a new user try out Fedora anyway, simply because there's so much setup work to be done. And I say this as a Linux newb who went to Fedora cold-turkey, straight from Windows XP, and lived there for over a month. I was determined; but for anyone else, I might recommend Ubuntu. That, or a custom Fedora install set up by a person who knows what she's doing.

Re:like it, but

[thermian]

sheesh people will figure out how to type in fedora mp3, or fedora faq into google.. its okay they will figure it out i promise
Sorry, but you're wrong.

You and I could, because we know about such things. However you are labouring under the misapprehension that most computer users even know you need extra software to run certain types of files.

Thanks to the wonders of Microsoft Windows, many computer users don't even know about things as basic as partitions or folders outside 'my documents'. If you don't believe this, you obviously haven't spent any time working in tech support...

Re:like it, but

[Pros_n_Cons]

im aware of that. i spent yesterday telling someone they dont have a 1 gb of hard drive, they have 1gb of ram. But _everyone_ knows what google is. And i made the point that the software to run powerpoints, divx movies, flash, pdf, torrents isn't included in windows they still figured out how to get it. they can do the same in linux. We're not talking about compiling or changing variables here. we're talking about running one command here rpm -Uhv http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm that will give them access to almost any application they could ever desire. If they can figure out the windows system of tracking down torrent clients and kazaa codec packs then surely they can install a livna repository.

Fedora isn't meant for some lady who isn't sure what hotmail is or types with two fingers, neither is ubuntu for that matter.. NO OS is made for people like that. they need to go through this thing called a learning curve. Fedora wasnt built for those people. neither is Ubuntu. you can't have a 6 month upgrade cycle and at the same time say its for a lady who uses two fingers to type. They need to learn some things. I'm of the opinion learning what free software is should be one of the things we encourage them to learn.. especially new users.

Re:like it, but

[thermian]

Don't get me wrong, I agree with you, people should know. I'm just constantly depressed by the level of stupidity that Microsoft products seem to actively encourage.

A few weeks back I discovered that my son, 14 years old, who has used windows exclusively for five years, didn't even know what a sub-folder was.

I'd often wondered why he kept so many files on his desktop. Turns out he didn't even know it was possible to move them elsewhere.

Talking to some of his friends I have found that they also have a similar level of knowledge of operating systems.

Whatever happened to the idea that youngsters knew more about computers then their elders? It certainly was true when I was a kid, but these days it seems that if it ain't WoW, it ain't interesting.

Re:like it, but

[dasmoo]

Because of the mixed licensing of some of these packages, the distros are not allowed/afraid to redistribute the content.

Re:like it, but

[Anonymous Coward]

these "new to linux" people can all fuck off. it is part of the deal that it is a bit more complicated. don't like it? go home.

Re:like it, but

[dasmoo]

I always found that fedora was an ungeeky kind of linux. It always wants me to install a gui, it has curses based menus for changing the network, firewall etc. It just always seemed as though it was trying to hold my hand through the whole thing.

Re:like it, but

[debatem1]

Most people don't install their own copy of windows either. It either comes preinstalled or the same technical class that installs Linux did it for them. I have a feeling that if more people installed Windows on their own laptops you wouldn't hear so much about how hard it is to install Linux.

Re:like it, but

[debatem1]

Real programmers use butterflies.
http://xkcd.com/378/

Re:like it, but

[debatem1]

Whatever happened to the idea that youngsters knew more about computers then their elders?
I know some pretty cunning old people. Not sure I'd care to test my tech prowess against maddog Hall.

Re:like it, but

[Anonymous Coward]

> Sad, but true. However, when I install desktop linux I don't want to fart about trying to find media codecs.

It's not very hard to fix.

# rpm -i http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm
# yum install vlc mplayer gstreamer-plugins-ugly kdemultimedia-extras-nonfree

Re:like it, but

[Artuir]

If codecs are an issue, why not just go grab VideoLAN? They have all sorts of Linux variants, including one for Fedora. I'm not an OSS junkie so I don't know if it's relevant to Fedora 9. However, windows doesn't exactly come with all of the codecs in the world either.

Maybe I misunderstood, though. My userID is over 1,000,000 which makes me a nub.

Re:like it, but

[lowen]

If you try to play an MP3, even Fedora 8 will, through 'Codec Buddy' show you how to get a legal MP3 decoder from Fluendo.

It is illegal for Fedora, based in the US, to include or provide links to (thanks to the concept of contributory infringement) MP3 decoders that do not have a patent license for MP3 decoding. The Fluendo decoder, which is a no-cost but closed source fully legal patent-licensed decoder, works very well.

Re:like it, but

[Mr0bvious]

BUT, this is simply not a good option for new users, not only for the reasons given by others but these unofficial repositories tend to become out of sync at times. An example:

Just a few weeks ago, I did an update which updated my kernel, upon reboot, hmmmm, why's my video looking weird.... Hmmm where's my 3d desktop gone?? Oh, it seems the nvidia driver I'm using from livna isn't up to date... Fiddle and fart-ass around for an hour or so and decide to go for the dkms one from freshrpms, this installed and worked, but no compiz... Wait for a few days, update comes out for nvidia driver at livna, swap back and all is good again.

Now, there is no way this is acceptable for a new user. Sure, no rocket science here, and my system continued to work the whole time (well done), but not enjoyable and damn right frustrating for a new user.

This type of event occurs significantly more often when using 3rd party repositories. While I use them I don't think they are a suitable solution for a mainstream distribution that relies on them to be "complete" for desktop users (the market we're trying to reach out to!).

Re:like it, but

[howlingmadhowie]

i don't think anybody likes the current situation apart from lawyers and microsoft.

Re:like it, but

[Richard W.M. Jones]

The problem is that the desktop experience has become, thanks to the almighty Microsoft, (whose name we speak in hushed tones, lest they smite us with their stick of smiting), have defined the desktop as being a place where even a moron can get a decent experience with minimal work, or none, in some cases.

Last time I checked, Windows out of the box couldn't create PDF files, display DivX movies, open tarballs, can display but not edit DOC, PPT, can't display web pages properly, can't create ZIP files [maybe it can do this one now?] etc. It doesn't have a system where you can install one of 1000s of programs just with a few clicks from a menu (and for free). It doesn't have virtualization or a SQL database or any programming languages at all.

Rich.

Re:like it, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Win2K was getting slower and slower, even with all the firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware stuph. You don't say!

Re:like it, but

[arkhan_jg]

Most media codecs are covered by US patents. That means that fedora cannot legally distribute them for free - as a US company, they have to obey US law. Most places outside the US do not allow the patenting of codecs, so places are available to download those codecs legally and easily for free - as long as you're also outside the US.

On this basis, the 'vast number of techno numpties' won't use windows either, as the set of modern codecs you get to start with are a rubbish mp3 decoder and WMA/WMV support. No x264, no AAC, no xvid, no FLV etc etc out of the box.

Paid for distros usually have the licenced codecs included, as part of the cost, so they're even better than windows.
But until the US gets sane laws with regards patenting mathematics, free (as in beer) distros based or heavily distributed in the US cannot include patented codecs without taking a huge risk of being sued.

Re:like it, but

[digitalhermit]

Sounds like an interesting person...

I'm not going to say that the mere act of installing and using Linux makes one interesting... But, if I were to play the odds, I would say that a Linux-using, no-nonsense person with life experience is probably a heckuva lot more interesting to talk with than the average.

what about youtube ? is it working ?

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

if it doesn't work tove may end up killing linus... and since she's 5 time finnish karate champion, that'll be pretty damn easy for her.

like he said: youtube no workee, wife no happy.

Re:what about youtube ? is it working ?

[Anonymous Coward]

*6*-time Finnish karate champion, according to wikipedia:

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds)

Re:what about youtube ? is it working ?

[Anonymous Coward]

YouTube functionality works just fine once you add the adobe-linux repo and install flash-plugin-9.0.124.0. It does on occasion flip out, but thats been the case with the adobe linux port for quite some time.

What is broken in Fedora x86_64 variants is Java plugin support from Sun. The icedtea plugin works great in most circumstances for small stuff, however larger java applets wont run without the Sun JRE. That JRE works fine in i386 but breaks because Sun has not released a 64 bit port for it yet.

SELinux is a pain in the ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

SELinux causes more problems than anything. I always end up disabling it so I can actually use some of my network services.

Re:SELinux is a pain in the ass.

[thule]

... thus the "continued work". Fedora has been trying to strike a balance and get rid of the separate 'strict' and 'targeted' by making better rules. It takes time, but I can tell you targeted works pretty good for me right now. It was easy for me to add an extended rule for an exception I needed. The 'continued work' is making good progress.

Re:SELinux is a pain in the ass.

[pembo13]

I have been using SELinux on my homeserver without having to do any custom rules. I would imagine that if I was using it as a pure server, and not also as a MythtTV terminal, it would work even better.

Re:SELinux is a pain in the ass.

[Znork]

I'd agree it used to be, but since F8 and CentOS 5.1 I'm using it across most my machines. With setroubleshoot the logging is very clear and many alerts will even tell you exactly what to run to fix the problem. The more complicated stuff isn't worse than following the FAQ link and then sending the actual audit alert through audit2allow and some other commands to update the policy to allow whatever it was complaining about.

Personally I think it's painless enough now that I can use it to coddle my inner paranoid.

Re:SELinux is a pain in the ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

The more complicated stuff isn't worse than following the FAQ link and then sending the actual audit alert through audit2allow and some other commands to update the policy to allow whatever it was complaining about.

So now, with a few clicks of the mouse, you can make changes to the core security policy without fully comprehending either the cause of the alert or the impact of allowing access? Yea, that's real good security all right.

BTW, what's to keep some malicious code running with root rights from changing the security policy? I'm guessing absolutely nothing.

If I enable it, SELinux doesn't allow a lot of programs to function correctly. If I make SELinux passive, it fills my log file with alerts. If I disable it, life is good.

Re:SELinux is a pain in the ass.

[init100]

BTW, what's to keep some malicious code running with root rights from changing the security policy? I'm guessing absolutely nothing.

Sure, but if you've got malicious code running as root in the unconfined_t domain, you are already in big trouble. If it runs in a restricted domain, it cannot change any policies.

If I enable it, SELinux doesn't allow a lot of programs to function correctly.

Like what programs? I have SELinux enabled and enforcing both on my Fedora 7 home desktop, my Fedora 9 Beta VM on my work Mac and on CentOS 5.1 on the new blade servers at work. I haven't really had any significant troubles in any of those environments.

If I disable it, life is good.

Except if one of your applications is exploited, there is nothing that stops the entire account running the exploited application from being compromisedd.

selinux

[Crispy Critters]

I really like selinux. The best part about it is this: Whenever something is broken, I uninstall selinux, and then whatever-it-is works again. I wouldn't know how to fix the system if I couldn't uninstall selinux.

(I am not denying that it is important or useful. I just can't understand how to make it work.)

Re:selinux

[davidkv]

Try using setroubleshoot, if I remember correctly it's even installed default in Fedora 8.
Anyway, it pops up a notice saying what was denied access and why, and more or less how you can grant permission for that program or what have you.

Then again, you could also run SELinux in permissive mode by running "setenforce 0 (or Permissive instead of 0)". Absolutetly no need to uninstall. Permissive will let you se what would have been denied.

I'm running Fedora 8 here and most of the time SELinux does not complain. The few tweaks I've made were mostly no-brainers.

Re:selinux

[init100]

Please run SELinux in permissive mode instead of disabling or even uninstalling it. If you ever would like to activate it again, running in permissive mode ensures that the proper security labels are maintained, while disabling or uninstalling SELinux causes the system to perform a time-consuming relabeling of all filesystems if/when SELinux is re-enabled.

Besides, if an application is giving you troubles, why not file a bug report in the Red hat Bugzilla? Post the output of setroubleshoot (the GUI application that explains what went wrong and why) in the report, and the Fedora developers can probably determine how to best change the security policy.

Re:selinux

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes even permissive mode breaks things.

'looks' good

[linuxbeta]

some screenshots over at The Coding Studio

Re:'looks' good

[IBBoard]

I wish they'd do something better for the window titles. Yes, I know it's different to the other distros, but it just doesn't look good. It may just be the compression on those images, but the new version looks even stranger.

On the plus side, at least they ditched some of the original 'Sulphur' desktops. Those would have just made the default desktop look terrible.

calling 2005

[thule]

The merging of core and extras has helped quite a bit with this. I personally never really had much problems with rpm hell. I've had even a less problem ever since apt-rpm and yum. Now I have even lesser problems with a single huge repository and a couple of extra repos for proprietary codecs and drivers. It's been *really* smooth for me.

Re:calling 2005

[cbart387]

Now I have even lesser problems with a single huge repository and a couple of extra repos for proprietary codecs and drivers. It's been *really* smooth for me. I agree. The only issue I've had was with a livna package overriding a package from an 'official' repository and causing yum to not complete an update. If you use the extra repositories I'd recommend the protectbase plugin. It provides a way to give precedence over certain repos so that you don't make yum mad.

Re:calling 2005

[Znork]

Even better, use priorities so you can protect repos you are more dependent upon over peripheral ones.

After setting up yum priorities I don't think yum has had any dependency problems even with three or four external repos active.

Re:calling 2005

[cbart387]

It sounds like it accomplishes the same task. Is there a particular reason that you advocate priorities over protectbase?

Re:calling 2005

[Alain Williams]

It sounds like it accomplishes the same task. Is there a particular reason that you advocate priorities over protectbase? Priorities allows you to have a heirarchy of levels, protectbase is either on or off.

Re:calling 2005

[Znork]

It can accomplish the same task, but it can also accomplish more. For example, say you have a mythtv machine with mythtv installed from ATrpms. In such a case you may want to protect the base OS from ATrpms, but also protect ATrpms from, for example, livna updates. Or you might have a music workstation running CCRMA packages and want to protect those from lower priority repos, while still retaining base protection.

The difference is probably most noticable if you run some of those high complexity mass-dependency apps, but as it can do the same as protectbase too, I prefer to use priorities instead :)

Re:calling 2005

[cbart387]

Neat, thanks for the explanation. I've never had a very complex hierarchy of repos, mostly the base + livna. So ,currently I don't have a need for it. However, I agree with you that it makes more sense since it can perform as protectbase does. I'll give it a try when I upgrade to Fedora 9 :)

Did the yum-based upgrade make it into the tag?

[ZedNaught]

There was talk of a yum-based upgrade path that cleanly updated the necessary libraries first and then the executables. Was that implemented with this tag?

Re:Did the yum-based upgrade make it into the tag?

[the COW OF DOOM (tm)]

There was never any talk about yum-based upgrades. Upgrading a live system is total insanity.

You're probably thinking of PreUpgrade, which is like a yum-based upgrade but without the insanity.

See the interview here for more info:
http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/04/15/interview-fedora-developers-seth-vidal-and-will-woods/

Re:Did the yum-based upgrade make it into the tag?

[ZedNaught]

Yes PreUpgrade, that's what I had read about - in a post saying that live upgrading via yum was insanity even though possible. Thanks for setting me straight . My memory works in strange ways : )

Re:Did the yum-based upgrade make it into the tag?

[Anonymous Coward]

Upgrading a live system is total insanity. Except that we have live upgraded many Solaris 8 and 9 systems recently to Solaris 10 without any trouble whatsoever - and we felt safe every step because of the fallback capability. So no it is not insanity to live upgrade unless you have careless OS vendors to deal with.

Re:Did the yum-based upgrade make it into the tag?

[Anonymous Coward]

It usually works fine in Fedora too (with either yum or apt-rpm), it's just not the recommended method, it may not work (e.g. for migrations like LVM 1 -> LVM 2) and it may require manual fixup (e.g. for switches like 2.4->2.6, udev, libata etc.).

Distribution biais

[fcrozat]

Strangely, no Slashdot moderator have approved stories about Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring being released last week but they approve a story on a release candidate for next Fedora.

Looks like Slashdot want to favor some distributions.

Re:Distribution biais

[Anonymous Coward]

Mand-who?

(easy there pardner... I'm just a foolin' with ya)

Re:Distribution biais

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it has something to do with Manda.. Manwich.. Mandriva.. whatever being a bugged shitless piece of crap distro from the cheese eating surrender monkey Frogophone empire?

Seriously, I'd rather hear about Gentoo and Slackware than Mandriva. It only makes sense that distros like Suse, Ubuntu, and Fedora are going to get the limelight. Mandriva has nothing to offer over them.

Re:Distribution biais

[n0dna]

I downloaded the ManDribble live cd last week. Checked the md5, burned the image and verified it. It hung during the boot process. I threw it away.

Same as it ever was.

Changing the name from Manrape to ManDribble didn't seem to help.

I know I'm flaming but the distro has always been, and always will be, crap.

Release Candidate?

[IBBoard]

I'm a bit confused about the "final release" thing at the moment. I was going to wait for the RC ("22 April 2008 - Release Candidate 1" according to the schedule) and possibly install that, but now they're saying

This is the last major public release before the final GOLD Fedora 9 release on May 13th

which implies the Release Candidate might not be a 'release' as such, just a specially tagged nightly build.

Oh well, I guess at least it'll get the spit-and-polish it deserves. I just need to wait until May to install it now.

Re:Release Candidate?

[the COW OF DOOM (tm)]

Correct: RC builds are not announced or mirrored worldwide. They're candidate images for testers to work with. They are publically available, though - anyone who's interested in helping can be a tester.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA is a good place to start if you're interested in testing Fedora.

Otherwise, the next major public release is F9 final, scheduled for May 13.

Debian/Ubuntu User asks: What's the big deal?

[Qbertino]

I'm serious: What's the big deal?

What does Fedora offer?

Does Fedora have a neat zero-fuss hardware recognition and will it install and run out of the box just as fritionless as Ubuntu or Knoppix?

And what about switching desktops and WMs? Can I switch from Gnome/Metacity to KDE/Kwin to Fluxbox to Enlightenment with zero fuss without the Fedora desktop manager (whichever it chooses) looking like shit or X-Free, X-Org or whatever fucking up my screen-resolution?

Will multi-source audio work out of the box? (wether with esound demon or whatever ... gosh, just asking this question brings back those memories ... )

What about generic wireless stuff and extra function keys and all that? Especially on those new sub 1000 Euro laptops popping up everywhere? If I get a fairly cheap generic laptop with all of todays bells and wistles, will I be able to scrap Windows Fister and slap Fedore over it and utilize all the extra features or will it take a week of expert-tweaking (which I don't have time and nerve for anymore) to get those things running?

What's with Flash? Java? The server stack, LAMPhp ( ... I'm a web-developer)? Zero fuss install/uninstall/upgrade/dependancy tracking and resolution? Or will I be hand-hacking my way to a safely running PDT Eclipse roundtrip debugging enviroment with XDebug (as with every other OS on this planet)?

What's with DVDs? Will I have to install 6 players of which only two kinda-sorta-maybe work 75% of the time or will there be *ONE* (1) DVD player that actually plays DVDs without getting into a hissy fit over CSS (I'm willing to install a Fedora DeCSS package by hand from a 'non-offical' source for that or do any other documented non-hacky actions in order to prepare for that)

What's with Video? What's with 3D?

Fedore Fan Crew - here's your chance to get a Debian/Ubuntu guy to give Fedora a try next time around. I'd like to read your thought on the issues above. Thanks.

Re:Debian/Ubuntu User asks: What's the big deal?

[bockelboy]

For me, it's simple - it gives me an idea of what RHEL might look like in a couple of years. I have access to a couple tens of thousands of servers which run various RHEL derivatives. I have access to none that are Debian derivatives.

Re:Debian/Ubuntu User asks: What's the big deal?

[427_ci_505]

>Does Fedora have a neat zero-fuss hardware recognition and will it install and run out of the box just as >fritionless as Ubuntu or Knoppix?

Multiple monitor setups are problematic, but other stuff works well.

>Will multi-source audio work out of the box? (wether with esound demon or whatever ... gosh, just asking this >question brings back those memories ... )

If by this you mean multiple programs can output sound at the same time, then yes.

>What about generic wireless stuff and extra function keys and all that? Especially on those new sub 1000 Euro >laptops popping up everywhere? If I get a fairly cheap generic laptop with all of todays bells and wistles, will >I be able to scrap Windows Fister and slap Fedore over it and utilize all the extra features or will it take a >week of expert-tweaking (which I don't have time and nerve for anymore) to get those things running?

On F8, with a Broadcom wireless card, I needed to cut the firmware out of the windows driver. That was annoying. After that it works well. I wish I had an intel card.

>>What's with Flash?

On an i386 it works fine. Just make sure to install an extra package that allows the sound to work with Pulse Audio. With that said, at least one of the versions of Adobe's plugin isn't too stable...

>>Java?

Seems to be doing ok.

>>Zero fuss install/uninstall/upgrade/dependancy tracking and resolution?

Yum does seem slower than apt-get, but I haven't had any problems with it besides.

>>What's with DVDs? Will I have to install 6 players of which only two kinda-sorta-maybe work 75% of the time or >>will there be *ONE* (1) DVD player that actually plays DVDs without getting into a hissy fit over CSS (I'm >>willing to install a Fedora DeCSS package by hand from a 'non-offical' source for that or do any other >>documented non-hacky actions in order to prepare for that)

mplayer or vlc should handle it, after installing the necessary pkgs.

>>What's with Video? What's with 3D?

The open source radeon driver seems to be working well with my older hardware.

>>Fedore Fan Crew - here's your chance to get a Debian/Ubuntu guy to give Fedora a try next time around. I'd like >>to read your thought on the issues above. Thanks.

I'd try a livecd. Just be aware that most of the software won't be there, since there is only so much that can fit on a livecd. I use debian on my other computer. So far, I'm liking fedora better. But debian is still pretty good.

Re:Debian/Ubuntu User asks: What's the big deal?

[rohan972]

Fedore Fan Crew - here's your chance to get a Debian/Ubuntu guy to give Fedora a try next time around.

Why? I use Fedora and CentOS, with an occasional boot into Ubuntu. Quite happy with CentOS+rpmforge, sometimes recompile packages from Fedora to fill my needs. Ubuntu looks good, but I don't see what I would gain that would be enough incentive to switch, since I would have to learn things to make Ubuntu behave the way I want.

For an experienced user of one of them, what is so different about the other that would motivate a switch?

Cool, I thought slashdot was hiding fedora

[Pros_n_Cons]

When fedora beta didn't make slashdot (not even linux section) and ubuntu beta was front page 2 days later i thought slashdot had a bias. Was kinda surprised to see this.

I been using this release fedora 9 since alpha and everytime I updated i saw alot of improvement. Still need to report a laptop bug (with mouse pads not working right) but other than that this release should be good to go on my box by release date.

Re:Cool, I thought slashdot was hiding fedora

[glitch23]

Still need to report a laptop bug (with mouse pads not working right) but other than that this release should be good to go on my box by release date.

Um, what kind of mouse pad do you have that makes it so complicated?? 1. Open mouse pad package 2. Place pad on desk 3. Place mouse on pad 4. Move mouse. You have a bug with that somewhere?

And yes, I know you meant touchpad....I hope.

MOD PARENT OFFTOPIC

[gzipped_tar]

Don't click that. It may crash your browser.

Re:MOD PARENT OFFTOPIC

[Vectronic]

Although it is Offtopic of the Article... I was simply being more explicit than the AC poster "It's a virus do not click it"

Thats where the original Yahoo.com link ends up... and what the name of the trojan is...

it wasn't until after I thought about crippling the url incase people might ignorantly click on it...

Re:MOD PARENT OFFTOPIC

[gzipped_tar]

I'm terribly sorry. I was browsing at +1 and failed to follow the parenting threads, and was wondering why you are getting this to post...

Re:MOD PARENT OFFTOPIC

[init100]

Even with Firefox and NoScript?

Re:MOD PARENT OFFTOPIC

[doombringerltx]

I haven't clicked the link, but when I've been seeing those yahoo trolls people have been saying it leads to last measure. Last measure will work in firefox, but noscript will stop it. Also an interesting side note, last measure has been open sourced under the BSD license, so check it out if youre interested.

madwifi replaced by ath5k

[shutdown -p now]

It seems that Fedora 9 uses ath5k instead of the good old madwifi for Atheros chipsets. Given that ath5k is far from stable yet, I wonder why?

Re:madwifi replaced by ath5k

[Anonymous Coward]

Because, as a previous poster correctly pointed out, "Fedora's a geeky, bleeding edge test bed of a distro".

I would normally say something like "so you can be unpaid beta testers for RHEL", but since Red Hat has thrown in the towel (executive summary: Linux on the desktop is impossible), I guess it's because Fedora's a geeky, bleeding edge test bed of a distro.

Re:madwifi replaced by ath5k

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that Fedora 9 uses ath5k instead of the good old madwifi for Atheros chipsets. Given that ath5k is far from stable yet, I wonder why? Because madwifi is proprietary and Fedora will never include it?

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives

Also because Linux wireless subsystem maintainer works for Red Hat and does know what will cause instability and what will not and can selectively backport patches from the git tree he is maintaining.

Re:madwifi replaced by ath5k

[Jimithing DMB]

Fedora 8 is currently defaulting to ath5k as well. Fortunately, atrpms provides madwifi including regularly updating the kernel modules.

To use it though you have to force the ath_pci module to load for the card. The way I did it was to start by locating the card in the /sys filesystem. If you do lspci you should be able to find the card pretty easily then look for the matching number in /sys/bus/pci/devices. An ls of that directory will show a list of symlinks to the real device directories. Find the matching one and cat /sys/bus/pci/devices/____/modalias. That will give you a rather long string of various letters and numbers beginning with pci:. Once you have that, add alias pci:____ ath_pci to /etc/modprobe.conf.

There's probably some GUI tool for it somewhere I guess but the particular machine I did this for is a pure server. I actually use the madwifi driver as an access point and for that the easiest method I came across was to set options ath_pci autocreate=ap in /etc/modprobe.conf. It seems that the madwifi drivers predate Fedora's built-in wireless config tools so there's no real great way to use the nice system-config-network tool to get AP mode with madwifi.

Then again, as far as I know there's no way at all to get AP mode with ath5k so I figure I'm ahead of the game.

Re:madwifi replaced by ath5k

[mapnjd]

They've been doing the same with Intel cards too - putting the new (borked) iwlwifi drivers in instead of the working ipw3945. So on Fedora 8, I'm stuck with an old kernel and AT RPMs to make it work.

I tried a Fedora 9 livecd and iwlwifi did work now - last time I tried Fedora (7.04?) that still came with ipw3945 and openSUSE 10.3 has a GUI that lets you choose which driver you want (cool!).

I mean kudos for getting bleeding edge drivers working but infite dumbness for screwing over all Intel Wireless card owning users since FC7.

Re:madwifi replaced by ath5k

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora never came with the ipw3945 driver which required the proprietary ipw3945d. Fedora does not ship non-Free software (except firmware, which only has to be freely redistributable, but a daemon which runs on your host OS is most definitely NOT firmware).

Re:madwifi replaced by ath5k

[Anonymous Coward]

ath5k is based on the mac80211 stack, which was originally developed by DeviceScape for wireless routers and thus most definitely supports host mode, so unless there's a bug in ath5k which breaks it, host mode is supposed to work.

That's a similarily, not a difference.

[SEMW]

Anyone have a link, or know off-hand, the major differences between this and the latest Ubuntu release? KDE 4, among other things. Both Kubuntu 8.04 RC and Fedora 9 Preview are available with KDE4.

Re:That's a similarily, not a difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

But Fedora 9 actually uses it as the default KDE and the only KDE desktop, unlike Kubuntu which still defaults to KDE 3. (Of course, KDE 3 libraries are available to run KDE 3 applications.)

Rabid Debian/Ubutu fanaticism is still rampant

[Anonymous Coward]

Good to see slashdot readers are still rabid rampant debian/ubuntu fan tards. With the amount of bullshit posted on this page I really wonder if you people are secretly against open source. You really are like a bunch of 5 year olds "my dad can beat your dad".

Re:Rabid Debian/Ubutu fanaticism is still rampant

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, sorry to break the bad news to you. Ubuntu is popular. I'm not sure if Ubuntu will give you rabies, however.

Re:Rabid Debian/Ubutu fanaticism is still rampant

[ettlz]

It's a bit like the Canon vs. Nikon debate.

I'll leave you to decide which is which.

Re:I'm using Fedora 9 right now

[Omestes]

That wasn't a Haiku, by either western definition, and most assuredly not by eastern standards.

It's either blank verse, or a VERY bad attempt at using slant rhymes.

Does this explain /. trolls, they really just wanted to be poets, but couldn't quite make it?

They mistook the "T.S." in "T.S. Eliot" as an imperative. "Troll Slashdot, Eliot!"

I like Linux but...

[Choozy]

I'm sorry, I hate the fonts. It's my one gripe about fedora or ubuntu. I'm probably going to marked troll for this but Windows has better fonts. There I said it.

skamper

[Anonymous Coward]

since redhat has decided against future devel of the desktop, fedora 9 begs the question: "Why bother?"