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

Oh, the fools...

[A beautiful mind]

citing a desire to use RPM package management

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.

Re:Oh, the fools...

[MSG]

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.

Re:Oh, the fools...

[MSG]

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.

Re:Intellectual property issue

[laptop006]

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

Dependencies

[xaositects]

I hope Intel has a good rehab program in mind to tackle the dependency hell...

Well... Um...

[pushing-robot]

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...)

Re:Intellectual property issue

[Qzukk]

The package metadata does not contain the license beyond whether it's considered free or non-free, however every package is required to include usr/share/doc/[packagename]/copyright with the text of the license.

*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.

rpm -qa --queryformat "%{NAME}\t%{LICENSE}\n"

[thule]

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?