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Intel Switches From Ubuntu To Fedora For Mobile Linux
An anonymous reader writes "According to a report on heise, Intel is switching from using Ubuntu to the Fedora Project for the second version of the Intel supported Mobile & Internet Linux Project Moblin, citing a desire to use RPM package management." So far, of the various subnotebooks I've been glancing at over shoulders at OSCON, though, most of the ones with an easily identified operating system seem to be running Ubuntu.
Short story: RPM packages include license information, DEB packages do not. Looks like intellectual property is an issue even in the FOSS world after all. Good luck with Fedora, Intel, you'll need it.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
I like Fedora and don't even hate RPMs like so many. I perfer Ubuntu on my desktop and I cannot figure out why you would want to switch to Fedora over Ubuntu. It's just more usable than Fedora. Though for more advanced setups Fedora is a better (as it more simple) option.
There might be valid reasons to pick Fedora instead of Debian based systems, but package management is not one of them. Debian's package management is absolutely superior compared to everything else that I know about out there.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Is that not like switching to a different brand of cola? What kind of lame reason to switch distros is that?
I hope Intel has a good rehab program in mind to tackle the dependency hell...
Fedora by design isn't a *real* distro. It is a testing ground for RHEL. Now, Fedora is usable, and nice and all. But Ubuntu is a *real* distro, you don't have to pay for the "full" version. With Ubuntu, you get Debian cleaned up. With Fedora you get all the bits and pieces that make up RHEL in a developer-oriented way.
Intel needs to give people a real distro, not a "trial" version of RHEL.
And by the way, RPM (at least the "true" RPM versions) seem to be outdated and DEB in most ways is superior. (Note: Not trying to start a flame war, but merely stating facts)
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Ever since yum became part of the standard Redhat distro, I have had almost zero trouble with rpm packages. With the repository aware wrapper on top of rpm, dependencies are resolved automatically, just like apt. With the main repository getting larger and larger, there is less reason to use 3rd party repositories that could lend to dependency issues. The main reason to use a 3rd party repository is to add support for proprietary codecs and drivers.
There is even talk of removing the rpm command entirely so that all package management goes through yum.
I've long used RPM, and honestly, it's almost easier to compile from source that to use it. It's horrible. Particularly in it's problems with upgrading packages with dependancies.
So, let's say I have a debain based set up a full year out of date. It doesn't have firefox 3, which I want. I don't have the latest versions of GTK, and associated libs etc. The terminal window is open, what's the process look like? Go!
I think that The Register has a nice take on this:
[...] Interestingly, Hohndel was SuSE Linux's chief technology officer prior to the company's $210m acquisition by Novell in 2004.
I keep turning this over in my head, and keep coming back to the same scenario:
Steve Ballmer, in the Throne Room of his secret volcano lair: You begin to understand the true nature of my diabolic plan: If we cannot make Windows better, we will make Linux WORSE!
Anonymous Intel lackeys: Yes, master!
Steve Ballmer: Now go! Take these Fedora DVDs and install them on every Linux computer you find! Soon the foolish rebels will be BEGGING for Vista!
Steve Ballmer rips a bolted-down chair from the floor and holds it above his head, cackling devilishly, while his lieutenants and lackeys scramble for the exits.
==
(...with apologies to all three happy Fedora users...)
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
This whole article is fodder for flamebait but speeds for yum have significantly increased especially with the introduction of packagekit. Dependencies are a problem in every distro so I'm not even going to bring that one up.
I gave up on Ubuntu two years ago and haven't looked back once. Debian is nice, don't have a problem with them. It's as stable as fedora, once you figure out where to go for reliable repos. That or you could just compile from source. Ubuntu is another story. Most of the hotfixes they use just don't make any sense. The people who have developed a name within that community make things more complicated than they should be. To see this, do a server install and then install only the packages you need. You'll see exactly where they're cutting corners.
Fedora has been consistently stable but again, the community cuts corners and you can see this by doing a base system install and adding up on it. Even then, Fedora is much more bearable than Ubuntu.
I will give credit to Ubuntu though. I miss aptitude and hate having to query packages through yum. That and at least their community isn't as apathetic as the Fedora community. It seems like they could care less about attracting new users most of the time but they are fairly knowledgeable. I guess that's the opportunity cost you'll have to end up with unless you actually purchase support for Red Hat products.
My 7yrs with Linux distro's sums up to this: Mandrake -> Red Hat -> SuSE -> Red Hat -> OpenSuSE -> CentOS -> Debian
HOLY CRAP are DEB packages so much less painful than RPMs. All my machines have gone Debian (server) or Ubuntu (workstations) and I haven't looked back. Talked to a guy using OpenSuSE very recently and when he said he was having problems with RPMs, I couldn't hold back my scoffing snort ... what's more, I was nice enough to try.
RPMs can burn in the dependency hell that they came from.
/rant
Actually it has nothing to do with RPM vs Deb. It's apt vs yum. Install apt-rpm in Fedora and see how fast you can install stuff (Actually, it has to do with yum updating the package lists every run vs apt just doing it with apt-get update).
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Now, I'll preface this with a disclaimer that I avoid Fedora generally. I got reminded of why during a recent attempt to use it and follow it, it really punishes the users with inconsistant updates even after release.
That said, RPM dependencies are no more convoluted than deb dependencies. The difference is that originally, RH distros had only the rpm command and debian out of the gate recognized the need for both dpkg *and* apt. RPM distributions each have at least one repository management strategy now (YaST, yum, etc etc). So dependency hell is not one of their worst problems (though I do prefer some apt defaults more than yum, I won't say yum isn't up to the task).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Stupid bickering amongst "which packaging system is better" is a sure way to keep people away from your OS.
Grow up. Sit down with all the people involved. Pick one or create a new one which has all the best parts of all the others. I don't know why/how and I don't care.
As long as stupid crap like this isn't standardized in Linux, there's never going to be a "year of the desktop for linux".
...or the poor tech support guy trying to explain what dependency hell is? God help us.
my mom posts on slashdot.
take the parent
and mod him up real good ;)
Python? Maybe they Intel wanted to use a query like the above to get a listing of each package with the license information. I had no idea the .deb did not support this feature.
Apology accepted.
PS. I didn't know anyone else here was happy with it.
PPS. No, really I am.
Debian's package management is absolutely superior compared to everything else that I know about out there.
Debian's package management *IS* the best.
But this has *nothing* to do with the DEB format.
Debian's package management rocks because :
- "apt-get" & friends are very well designed to track dependencies (compared to Slackware's TGZ system, for example, which does no tracking by design).
- Huge efforts from the community have gone into building the official repositories in a coherent manner. Thus every package has a clear and non ambigous dependence on other packages (I've seen minor distros where the distro's original package have broken dependencies because the actual needed package got renamed, but the packages needing them didn't get updated)
- Debian is a huge honking distribution with a crazy amount of packages. Most of the time, you only need to get packages from the default repositories, which where well designed as said before.
- As the repositories are well designed and coherent : it's easy to target for 3rd party package maintainers, and produce packages whose dependencies relate nicely to the rest.
- DEB is mostly only used by Debian. Other distro using DEB are usually variants of Debian (for example: Knoppix is basically Debian-installed-on-an-image and Ubuntu is a very close derivative of Debian), they are not unrelated distro. Thus if a user picks up a .DEB somewhere, chances are high that the package will work, because it was designed for debian to begin with.
Whereas RPM are used by pretty much everyone else - sometime by distro that have nothing in common (RedHat is mainly used in RedHat derivatives, but openSUSE for example has some Slackware in it's ancestry - thank fully they have also participated in important efforts such as UnitedLinux and LSB to make the distro compatible with others). A Fedora user may pick a RPM from a random site on the intertubes thinking it will work, but, surprise, it was designed for a distro with a different layout or organisations.
- apt-get & friends are fast (openSUSE has nice depencencies solving systems in YaST, and has good quality 3rd party repositories like Packman - but all this is bloody slow compared to apt-get)
So in short, Debian package management is good because of the software handling it and even more because of the quality of the repositories.
The exact same could be imagined with RPMs.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I *think* what Intel wants is this command:
rpm -qa --queryformat "%{NAME}\t%{LICENSE}\n"
I didn't know that .deb didn't support this. Can anyone provide a similar dpkg command?
Is this to do with LSB requiring that RPM be available?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Tovolds himself uses fedora... and intell contributes to the linux kernel.
wishes, A Beautiful Mind is not A Mutable Find....
Try again...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I wasn't sure why Intel would choose Fedora over Ubuntu either until I remembered the maintainer tools that Fedora has been working on.
It's not just RPM that Intel is after. Fedora has made a concerted effort over the last three or four releases to provide all the tools a group would need to make their own customized Fedora-derivative distro. I can't remember the software names off the top of my head, but groups like Fedora Unity use them to create more updated "spins" of Fedora releases.
So all Intel has to do now is build their own repository manager server and they can have automated testing, building, and packaging of any packages they want, up to and including the entire distro.
... And so it comes to this.
Someone pointed me to deb file format, and it does appear the file format does not support a license key/value pair.
BTW, to query a file instead of the rpm database it would be:
rpm -qp --queryformat "%{NAME}\t%{LICENSE}\n" *rpm
Fedora's RPM system is an absolute disorganized nightmare when it comes to RPM. Now Mandriva has done a few things right. They are disciplined about how they setup RPMs so you don't get dependancy Hell. Also. urpmi has far superior package deployment options when compared to yum.
For example. urpmi can do parallel installations of Authorized packages using SSH, and Kerberos simultaniously. Yum cannot. You have to setup your own mirror. urpmi can use LDAP to standardize the synthesis or hdlist. Yum cannot.
I really wish there were more advancements in this arena.
What does it spit out when a package has multiple licenses depending on the binary inside that package. I seem to recall some KDE sources (at least in the past) having multiple licenses on different bits of code in the same source tarball.
It prints whatever the packager typed into the .spec file. So you could get something like this:
$ rpm -q --queryformat "%{NAME}:\t%{LICENSE}\n" openoffice.org-math
openoffice.org-math: LGPLv2 and LGPLv2+ and MPLv1.1 and BSD
As other people have posted, every deb should have /usr/share/doc/$pkg/copyright to describe the copyright and licensing info. This is simply a file in the package's data, not the package metadata.
Putting license info in the package metadata has been discussed on the deb-devel mailing list (possibly with tags, eg. "gpl", "bsd", whatever), but one problem raised was that plenty of software contains code under varying licenses, so you always need to check the specific source to find particular licensing details.
...to pay your $699 licensing fee you cock smoking teabaggers!
I thought they moved most, if not all, that info to sqlite.
Double troll on YOU, troll-issuer.... Humourliess twit.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Deb is very hell dependency just like RPM is but at least RPM is working on it with a new version unlike deb
Intel, how about supporting the LSB Package project so that once solidified will allow systems to install both RPM and DEB packages, as well as any others. Once software is easily installable cross-distro, distros will be reduced to mere collections of specific software, and you won't need to make silly decisions like that based on formats because any format will be possible.
Take a look at, and help with, the Burgdorf Packaging API, the current proposed solution in the making.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
"So far, of the various subnotebooks I've been glancing at over shoulders at OSCON, though, most of the ones with an easily identified operating system seem to be running Ubuntu"
OLPC started with FC7 and recently jumped to Fedora 9