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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'll 2nd that. Way too many times to see Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS users posting about problems as a result of packaging issues. And didn't some big Linux fan make a switch away from RedHat because of RPM issues?
Redhat does currently have a more profitable enterprise so maybe the reason has more to do with RedHat corporate and/or employee backing.
IMO, the customers are going to pay for this as a result since Ubuntu is more consumer oriented and has a good history with their application package management.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I've used both, and for what little it's worth, I disagree.
For one thing, with yum I don't need to know what package name I want to install. I can "yum install certtool", and it will determine that certtool is provided by gnutls-utils and install that package. IIRC, apt-get can't do that.
I can also ask yum to install a package that's in the local filesystem, along with whatever it requires. apt-get can't do that, either.
Half of the docs that I've seen indicate that debs should be built by hand, and then the results should be packaged. I don't know what the deal is there, but rpm has always used the "spec" file to build and package software, which is a more repeatable process. Deb has "rules" now. If they were always there, I'd like to be corrected on that point. The fact that there is documentation for other processes suggests to me that the deb build process has been much worse than rpm's.
Beyond all of that, Fedora is building some really nice tools on top of rpm for automated rebuilds and packaging. Basically, all of the tools that they use to manage the distribution are open source, which makes it much easier for someone else (like Intel) to build a distribution based on Fedora's tools.
I know that Ubuntu attracts a lot of users, but I can definitely see why developers would prefer to use Fedora's tools as a base.
And didn't some big Linux fan make a switch away from RedHat because of RPM issues?
That was ESR. He forced rpm to remove a package, even though rpm warned him that other packages needed it in order to function. Surprise of surprises, his system stopped working just like he was told that it would.
It was in no way rpm's fault that his system broke. ESR thought he knew better than rpm, and he was wrong.
The only reason I could think of switching to Fedora from Ubuntu is if you had a nVidia 8200 motherboard. The Fedora Core 9 kernel version (2.6.25) supports it, and the one in Ubuntu 8.04 (2.6.24) does not.
KDE support in Fedora may be better as well, I haven't looked at it in a while so I'm not sure. KDE is stagnant as hell in Ubuntu/Kubuntu land for now (no LTS support for KDE in 8.04, etc.), due to all the churn with the very beta-like and some would say ill-planned KDE 4.0 release.