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.

Comments

Re:Intellectual property issue

[laptop006]

Except that deb packages (by policy) do include that info.

*NOT* exactly

[DrYak]

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.