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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.
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...
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.
Exactly. Plus, in my experience, Ubuntu runs faster on a default setup then Fedora (Tested Fedora 8 vs Ubuntu 7.10 and an alpha of 8.04, on a 1.5 Ghz Intel M CPU with 512 MB of RAM, both were installed with the same amount of swap, and both were on default Gnome desktops), Plus, installing packages were always quicker on Ubuntu then Fedora, most likely do to the speed of Deb compared to RPM (but could, possibly be differences between my Wi-Fi card driver, but I don't think it would affect that much).
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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?
Disclaimer: Fedora package maintainer.
You are not the customer.
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!
Easy:
$ sudo apt-get upgrade firefox
Hard:
$ sudo synaptic --dist-upgrade-mode
Is this a trap?
Stop it. This is a total troll and is 100% FUD. Fedora isn't a "trial" version at all -- it's a bleeding edge distro made for people who don't need commercial-grade support for their distro, but they want a Red Hat based system. Plus, Fedora isn't just "usable," it's awesome. Far from being a collection of bits and pieces, it's a coherent, organized collection of software -- in short, it's everything you expect a distro to be. You should check out: This and this.
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.
s/facts/opinions/
HTH. HAND.
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".
Bonus question - is the Debian based answer going to be any easier than "yum update firefox"? (That's exactly the command I used to upgrade an old CentOS 5 box I had to FF3)
I've built literally thousands of packages. RPM is just fine. Some distributions and some repos are fucked (which is just as true for dpkg) but the package format is just fine.
...or the poor tech support guy trying to explain what dependency hell is? God help us.
my mom posts on slashdot.
With Ubuntu, you get a more friendly/usable Debian. Ubuntu is pretty much to Debian as Fedora is to RHEL when it comes to new/unpolished features/kernel/software. Granted both Debian and Ubuntu are available for 0$ but that doesn't change the fact that Ubuntu is more usable because the distribution is more flexible. (Blah blah opensource, blah blah centrino drivers, blah blah licensing, blah blah xorg, blah hardware support).
I've used Debian and Redhat before I started using Ubuntu and I totally appreciate how Ubuntu is more usable / user-friendly. I just want something that works and cannot really be bothered into getting involved in semantic/pedantic arguments about how commerical/non-opensource software shouldn't be bundled with a true opensource distro. Oh that and I used apt for Redhat for a while because I couldn't handle RPM (or up2date).
I've never used ubuntu, and I'm not about to argue over which is better -- they're both linux, they're both great, they're both OSS, etc. Let's try to be better than fanboys here. I don't care which is better. I'm also not interested in your tinfoil hat conspiracies of "No matter how you cut it, Red Hat wants to, and needs to make Fedora inferior to RHEL in order to sell it, either in features, stability or someway else." That's dumb (d-u-m-b dumb) -- they offer commercial support for one, and not for the other, they don't "need" to make fedora worse. Stop being so crazy. I'm interested in letting you -- and others who read this comment -- know that fedora is a great distro, it's not a demo, it's not of inferior quality to Red Hat, it's just built for a different audience.
--dist-upgrade-mode is for upgrading to the next release of your distro, such as for ff2->ff3 (via eg ubuntu gutsy->intrepid).
You're right that "upgrade" only upgrades to the latest version available for your distro. Some distros offer multiple independent versions within one distro (eg) both Python2.5 and Python2.4. In that case:
$ sudo apt-get install firefox3
I still can't see this as any reason to switch from one package manager to another. :(
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.
I have to disagree here. I use RHEL5 on my office desktop, Fedora 8 for the server in my garage, a recent Ubuntu release on an old beater laptop, and used to run Sparc Debian (Sarge) on a variety of old Sun gear. I would say this gives me a fairly good understanding of the differences. Here's my unsolicited opinions
I'm trying not to be a troll here, but it sounds like very few of the voices here have recent experience in both areas.
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.
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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?
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.
You just like Debian is the testing ground for Ubuntu? It would in fact be much more precise to describe Fedora as a testing ground for Ubuntu too, since the technology pioneered there drips back into Ubuntu. Ubuntu is probably a nice distro, but it is not known for its technological contributions to Linux, unlike e.g. Red Hat or Novell who pays a lot of software engineers to improve or develop core Linux software, that e.g. distroes like Ubuntu can use.
Intel needs to give people a real distro, not a "trial" version of RHEL.
There you go again. Fedora is a real distro and a fine one too, a good mixture of the most modern software and maturity. Please state what kind of software Fedora lacks to become a "real" distro.
I have using Linux for many years, and one thing I don't get about distro fan-boys like you is why you need to bad-mouth other distros than you favorite-distro-of-the-month, especially when you are unable to back it up with technical arguments.
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)
That are some really impressive technical arguments you gave there - not! I wonder if you actually know what DEB or RPM is? Please give an actual example why rpm is outdated to dpkg? Well, you can't. Try to read 'man rpm' one day to get a overview of what you are talking about.
Is this to do with LSB requiring that RPM be available?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
DEB in most ways is superior. (Note: Not trying to start a flame war, but merely stating facts)
If you want to state the "facts", try detailing something that the dpkg tools do, which rpm tools do not. Otherwise, you're just flaming.
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.
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.
You only have generic support for Nvidia cards so you should use the repo "Livna" which provides much better drivers. Whenever I get a new kernel I enable the "Livna" repo to actually do the update since you have to go to "Livna' anyway to get the drivers. Less hassels and only one reboot for the new kernel with the new Nvidia drivers to work properly. Total down time 5 minutes.
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.
If you put on Fedora 9, KDE 4.0 is IMHO annoying (I switched to Gnome) so you are best off sticking with Fedora 8 which has KDE 3.5 and you can even run Compriz Fusion quite well (the Wow is now!!) if you like that.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
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"
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