Fedora 12 Beta Released

AdamWill writes "The Fedora project has announced the release of Fedora 12 Beta, which is available here. This will be the final pre-release before the final release in November. New features of Fedora 12 highlighted in the announcement include substantial improvements and fixes to the major graphics drivers, including experimental 3D acceleration support for AMD Radeon r600+-based adapters; improved mobile broadband support and new Bluetooth PAN tethering support in NetworkManager; improved performance in the 32-bit releases; significant fixes and improvements to audio support, including easy Bluetooth audio support; initial implementation of completely open source Broadcom wireless networking via the openfwwf project; significant improvements to the Fedora virtualization stack; and easy access to the Moblin desktop environment and a preview of the new GNOME Shell interface for GNOME. Further details on the major new features of Fedora 12 can be found in the release announcement and feature list. Known issues are documented in the common bugs page."

Comments

first

[Anonymous Coward]

POST!

Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Another piece of crap from Fedora.

Re:Great!

[wizardforce]

If you don't like Fedora, you are free to use one of 400 other distros. From what I've seen of the last few releases, Fedora has done a pretty good job of improving the quality of its releases.

Re:Great!

[sbeckstead]

Wow, 400 that beats Microsoft six ways from Sunday.

Re:Great!

[hardihoot]

I've used Fedora extensively and had few problems with it. I can attest that sshfs worked flawlessly for me which was my primary purpose at the time: remote web site administration. I found Fedora to be a solid distro.

The only negative I can really say about it is that the software updater would often crash my Belkin wireless router requiring a factory reboot and reload of configuration file.

Re:Great!

[neoform]

They've also done a great job at banging out full digit releases frequently..

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the last thing I need is some gay hat.

Re:Great!

[nschubach]

Yeah! The kicker is that none of them lock you out of features because you bought "the cheap one."

Re:Great!

[PitaBred]

That's Belkin's fault. Get a router without crappy firmware, and it works fine. I've got a WRT54GL that has DD-WRT on it, and it just keeps running. The original Linksys firmware would die with any moderate torrenting or downloading.

Re:Great!

[Darkness404]

Some do though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xandros more or less does. Then again every time I've used Xandros (usually on an EEE PC) its been a horrible experience compared to Ubuntu, Debian and even Fedora.

Re:Great!

[sbeckstead]

Yeah that may be true but if you have to choose from 400 what features do they all have and how long will it take to find the ONE that has the features that I need. If none of them do, how many have ALL the features so I don't have to choose. I've been told that the beauty of Linux is that if the feature doesn't exist I can just write it myself.
What if I don't have the time, skills or money for that I'll just go with the least confusing solution I can find that has the closest feature set.

I'll trade a bit of money and lock in for the simplicity of buying it off the shelf and knowing it's a multinational company with a huge customer service department.
Just playing Devil's advocate. I've been a Linux fan since kernel version 0.29. But I just can't find a distro that works out of the box. I'm playing with Mint but even that has holes and I just can't download a .exe or a .msi that installs a feature that is missing that I need. Oh what is the command that is like yum for Mint? All the distros seem to have a different way to get missing software but I can never remember what it is and do they all actually get all the dependencies and versions correctly. I seem to never be able to guess which dependent version goes with what it is that I'm trying to install.

Re:Great!

[Qalthos]

Especially when I already have this kickass robe and wizard hat...

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah well it would have to be really fucking broken for them to delay churning out the latest release, which they will have already stopped caring about weeks ago, when development started on Fedora 13.

Basically, from now until it gets released, nothing much will be done to Fedora 12. The time is supposed be be for testing, yet as always there will be numerous significant bugs discovered just after the final version is released, which really feel like no-one actually uses the stuff.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Better news today:

• Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Release Candidate is released tomorrow
• Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Is released next thursday
• Alex Jones's "Fall of the Republic: The Presidency of Barrack Hussein Obama" is released TODAY!

Stay away from Fedora junk.

Re:Great!

[wastedlife]

Most distros are based on one of the major ones but with their own little tweaks toward their purpose. This means that they all pretty much boil down to a few different package management systems, that do their own dependency and version management. Some of the major distros and the package management system used:

Debian: apt
Red Hat: yum
Gentoo: portage
SUSE: yast

I primarily use Debian or distros that are based on it, such as Ubuntu and Mint. If you have a GUI, the simplest will be the Add/Remove Programs. More powerful but still GUI-based is Synaptic. On a command-line, you will use aptitude or apt-get to install software.

With Red hat based distros, such as CentOS and Fedora, I am not quite as familiar although i do some management of a CentOS box. "yum search [query]" will help search for what application you are looking for. And "yum install [application]" will install it. My CentOS box is headless so I cannot help with the GUI portion.

Your best bet with finding the right distro for you is to think about what you are looking to do. One of the base distros will usually have everything but the kitchen sink, but you will probably need to work to get it going. If you are looking to replace your desktop, search for "desktop linux" and see what is popular. You will likely find Ubuntu or Mint. Search for network storage linux and you will probably find Openfiler. Search for linux firewall and you will probably find out about IP Cop or Smoothwall. Search for linux web server and you may find that Debian or Ubuntu Server is a popular LAMP server distro. Since most of these specialize in one area, they are usually easy to configure to do what you want. But if you want to turn something like Openfiler into a general desktop, you are going to be in for a world of hurt trying to do it.

Re:Great!

[Tubal-Cain]

Yes, because release numbers actually mean something.

Re:Great!

[Tracy Reed]

Linux (and other free/open source software) really only comes in one version: AWESOME!

Re:Great!

[hardihoot]

Hey, thanks for that information.

Re:Great!

[sbeckstead]

Thanks, I've used IP Cop or Smoothwall for a voip application. Pretty simple really. I tried to get Ubuntu Server (PPC) installed on my G4 but it didn't recognize the third party IDE cdrom drive and it failed to get past the trying to choose the install media. I haven't tried Debian yet but I suspect it will fail similarly. I'll take a look at Openfiler as I have a small system I want to turn into a NAS.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do I mod you up for hyping my favorite distro?

or do I mod you down for hyping a republitard idiot?

Re:Great!

[AdamWill]

Right, we'll be doing nothing. Nothing, that is, except this:

http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-12/f-12-quality-tasks.html

oh, yeah, the days are going to be fricking *empty* around here. That's just the QA calendar, BTW, doesn't cover release engineering or development team's tasks. To translate, we'll do a full set of installation validation tests on the release candidate images, and weekly blocker bug review meetings at which the entire list of bugs marked as final release blockers are reviewed and managed. I spent most of today managing the blocker bug list, ensuring fixes were being worked on, confirming fixes, and clarifying the impacts of certain issues.

In the four days since the beta freeze was ended, around 200 bugfix updates have already landed in the F12 tree, including the whole KDE 4.3.2. But, yep, we're not doing any work on F12, you're perfectly right. Man, we're lazy.

Re:Great!

[ldj]

Just playing Devil's advocate. I've been a Linux fan since kernel version 0.29. But I just can't find a distro that works out of the box.

Wow, that is just sad. You've been a fan of Linux for well over 15 years, but still can't find a distro that works out of the box? You have a lot more patience than I do. All of the distros that I've been using since '95 (Yggdrasil, Slackware, Redhat, Knoppix, Mandrake/Mandriva, and Ubuntu) have worked "out of the box" (i.e., off the floppies, CDs, internet, etc.) just fine for all of my family's uses. If I spent all that time being frustrated and let down by any operating system, I'd have given up on it long ago.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, in all your posts so far, you have merely displayed your propensity to be lazy and belligerent cunt.

If IT is what you do for a living and you cant even learn how to use yum and rpm: then you don't deserve a job.

Re:Great!

[MMC Monster]

The problem seems to be that when you choose "Linux", you keep trying different distributions.

How about always trying Fedora, and just try again a year later (or some such). Or always trying Ubuntu, or some other popular distro?

Also, with the newer distributions, going to the command line to install an application is generally not needed. Just find the graphical application installation method for the distro (google it), and go crazy.

There are tables of equivalent applications around on the internet as well, for all those little applications that you didn't realize had Linux equivalents.

As an added piece of advice: Create a bunch of bookmarks for websites (particularly responses on forums) that give answers to questions you have. That way, next time you have the same question (even if it is a year later), you can look up the answer much faster.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

or do I mod you down for hyping a republitard idiot?

Alex Jones slams Democrats and Republicans fairly equally. Have you watched any of his documentaries, especially the ones released under Bush?

Re:Great!

[wastedlife]

I do not have any PPC stuff myself, but I often see Yellow Dog linux recommended. I have heard that PS3 development has started to overshadow the Mac development though.

nice

[wizardforce]

Time to break out the VM and try out Fedora again- if nothing else because of the sandbox and frankly, it looks like a fairly impressive release. Maybe even enough to run it right beside Kubuntu.

Re:nice

[WinterSolstice]

I'll be giving it a shot too - ironically, I support RHEL professionally, but have hated Fedora since FC8. It's not even a Gnome/KDE thing, since I use KDE on my PC-BSD laptop and Gnome on my Debian desktops.

I'm hoping to have a good experience with 12 :)

Re:nice

[Alpha830RulZ]

What is to hate? I'm curious. I work with Fedora, CentOS, SuSE and a little Ubuntu, and Fedora has been pretty solid for me.

Re:nice

[WinterSolstice]

You know, I'm not sure :D

It's really one of those look and feel things, I guess. I should probably go to the trouble of putting my finger on it some day.

SELinux probably has a lot to do with it, especially since it pops up like mad unless you do a lot with it. I've traditionally also had very bad luck with wifi configuration (but that's not much different for Fedora than Debian).

Re:nice

[Rantastic]

What's the point of running two distros? No, seriously. I've never understood this in the age of VMs.

Re:nice

[Rantastic]

Unless you meant on two different machines. But if you meant dual booting, then please enlighten me as to the advantages of this setup.

Re:nice

[Alpha830RulZ]

You can turn SElinux off pretty easily, if it annoys you. I don't bother with it. I've had the same troubles with wifi across all versions, as they all seem to turn to Madwifi, and it doesn't (last I tried) support the Atheros chipsets very well yet.

Sounds like for each of us, it's what you're familiar and comfortable with. I hate SuSE/YAST, and have been unimpressed with Ubuntu. But that's probably because I cut my teeth on Redhat/Fedora.

Re:nice

[JackieBrown]

Put grub on it's own partition and you have a nice backup in place.

Whether it is fedora, ubuntu, debian, etc, you can chroot into your main os and fix pretty much anything

Re:nice

[Rantastic]

Or I could just use a livecd to do the same thing and save all the hassle. Just sayin. I've been using linux as my only OS for 10 years, and I've never understood the need to install more than one distro at a time on my computer. If there is some good reason to do it, I'd love to know what it is.

Re:nice

[Anonymous Coward]

How about running another distro on the same computer without the overhead of a virtual machine?

Re:nice

[donaldm]

The most annoying issue with Fedora 11 was KDE 4 which IMHO should have been a beta or even an alpha. I did persevere for a short while but I had to revert my family to Gnome until KDE 4.3 came out. Yes KDE is different to KDE 3 but I rather like KDE 4.3 now.

Another issue I found was pulseaudio (we have discussed this recently) and found it annoying to the point were I actually removed it. Only yesterday I was doing a search on pulseaudio and I noticed the following and followed the procedure. It only took a few minutes and now my pulseaudio actually works.

Basically the above were the only issues I had with Fedora 11 and I have installed it as the primary OS on my company laptop with WinXP Sp2 under virtualisation (I am allowed to do this although MS Windows with company bits was an absolute PITA) so I am looking forward to Fedora 12 which I will install on my home PC first.

Re:nice

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never understood the need to install more than one distro at a time on my computer. If there is some good reason to do it, I'd love to know what it is.

1/ Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio (or in general, normal distro X plus 'studio' distro Y). The real-time kernel in Ubuntu Studio is important for audio production but you don't want to be running it otherwise since it's a bit flaky (in my direct experience with the current release). Yes, you could run standard Ubuntu with the Studio apps etc. installed and reboot between rt/standard kernel, but that amounts to much the same thing but is less reliable (e.g. rt crash hoses common root filesystem vs rt crash hoses seperate studio root filesystem).

2/ Although a LiveCD is quite good for recovery and essential for certain cases (some partitioning operations, recover from completely hose hard drive etc.), it is *very* slow. It's more convienient to have a seperate install which you can boot into in seconds. Also a LiveCD with no persistence can be a pain - you need to potentially set up connections, install extra packages etc. to get it in a state where you can use it for recovery purposes.

3/ Another reason is to provide a completely locked down system for guests (yes, a guest account is probably adequete, but a seperate installation set up not to even mount the main install's partitions is even more secure). Again, you could use a LiveCD but it may need configuring each time and even with that dealt with via persistence on a USB stick, will be much slower and give a bad impression of Linux to your guest/s!

4/ Your preferred distro is stable and works very well for you, but there is some hardware feature not currently supported/working - let's say Double-Layer DVD burning - which you use very occasionally. This feature *is* supported under a somewhat flaky bleeding edge distro's latest version. A LiveCD is no good since it ties up your DVD burner.

I guess for most people the main reason is just experimentation though.

Re:nice

[JackieBrown]

I can boot into an enviroment that I am familair with.

Also, any hardware that requires customer setting that would not be default for a live cd are already set up.

Speed is another factor.

Also, you minize downtime if you are running any kind of server. My wife can still access my printers while I resolve whatever is causing the issues with my main os.

That said, I use a live cd as well. I am not running anything important enough that downtime would realy effect me.

Re:nice

[lien_meat]

I feel about the same way...and I have no idea why!

I actually started out my linux experience with red hat, then I tried the fedora releases starting with 4 (which I ran for a while...) and I think running them dual booted with xp through I think fedora 6 or 7.

My computer fried one day (hardware issue), and I didn't have a way to run linux for about a year (I was in college, and I just used winXP in the labs that year). After that I got my first introduction to ubuntu (6.06 I think) in the Computer Science lab (and didn't notice much difference since I couldn't do any administration, no sudo rights...). About that same time I got a laptop, and by the recommendation of a friend who LOVED/S ubuntu, I installed ubuntu instead of fedora.

I have tried out every single ubuntu, fedora, (open)suse, and many other distros (including some pretty obscure and/or minimalist ones), and I always find that for me, on my hardware, ubuntu tends to "just work" the best and gives me the best user experience, and fedora releases always seem to have an issue that I can't easily work around, or something that just bothers me that I don't want to live with. Suse is usually about the same way, although I LOVE yast (ubuntu needs an equivalent!). I actually always have to have the best luck with debian based distros, and I have no clue why, since I feel I know how to use both red hat based distros and debian based distros about equally actually.

I would like to use fedora more, as I feel it's technically superior usually on any given release (and blue is nicer to look at than brown), but it just never feels quite right, and things tend to not go as smoothly as the ubuntu distro at the current time...so I continue to run ubuntu, and experiment with everything else.

I am an OS fanatic though I think. My laptop is nearly always running some new beta of some distro or some experimental OS (plan9 anyone?) alongside my normal defaults (which is ubuntu9.10 with win7 right now, but I rarely boot win7...I never have a reason to except the occasional game that doesn't work in wine, and I actually prefer both gnome and kde over window's UI by a HUGE margin).

Many launches

[Goffee71]

First Snow Leopard, tomorrow Windows 7, new Ubuntu, now this... its like their cycles are all coming together.
Play the Windows 7 launch drinking game - here

Re:Many launches

[Anonymous Coward]

Get off my lawn!!!

Centos 5.4 is coming soon also.

Re:Many launches

[nschubach]

Your drinking game forgot the shot for every time someone says "Windows 7 is the best OS they've used in years." I can't believe how many times I've seen that posted (cut/paste?) all over the web.

Re:Many launches

[Vancorps]

Windows 7 is the best OS I've used in years!

Re:Many launches

[blitzkrieg3]

Maybe Shuttleworth will eventually get what he wanted after all!

Re:Many launches

[mister_playboy]

First Snow Leopard, tomorrow Windows 7, new Ubuntu, now this... its like their cycles are all coming together.

So in a week or so, all of our OSs will have a terrible case of PMS? Yikes!

Re:Many launches

[DrgnDancer]

Fedora Core is on a six month release cycle. They always look like they're keeping current with somebody :-)

Re:Many launches

[gbjbaanb]

Windows 7 is the best OS I've used in years, and I havn't even installed it yet! :)

Re:Many launches

[IMightB]

redhat 5.4 has been out for weeks now.

Re:Many launches

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora Core is on a six month release cycle

It hasn't been called Fedora Core since FC6. It's just "Fedora" now.

They always look like they're keeping current with somebody

With who? Their users?

Congratulation!

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an asshole!

Re:Congratulation!

[Anonymous Coward]

So are the peeps at Dead Rat.. Drepper and Pöttering springs to mind. Surely there's something to be said about a company that manages to attract the dredges of germany?

Re:Congratulation!

[sbeckstead]

Where do they keep these dredges? They must be near water I guess. Don't they need those dredges in their harbors?

Re:Congratulation!

[sbeckstead]

Stop holding back, tell us what you really think, he's not just and asshole he's an anonymous asshole.

Fedora

[sopssa]

In my opinion Fedora is the best distro out there, a lot nicer to use than Debian (and especially Ubuntu) too. Also their repositories contain lots of software and they're actually put there correctly - hundreds of times I've run into missing or non-working features with other distros repositories.

Seems they're actually also improving exactly what needs to be improved - graphics driver support, sound support, bluetooth support and wireless networking support. Other distros usually seem to go select just some more obscure improvements, but these should affect lots of users.

I like it.

Re:Fedora

[MaskedSlacker]

Hundreds of times? Really? That would work out to multiple times per week, every week, for multiple years (or daily for at least several months).

You sure you're not just making shit up? Or do you just really like reinstalling over and over for no reason?

Re:Fedora

[Stupendoussteve]

Theory: Every time I try to install the same broken package, it fails! I've tried hundreds of times!

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

Have you tried installing Apache on Redhat if you didn't install it from the disk the first time? I gave up.

Re:Fedora

[StarHeart]

Is "yum install httpd" really that hard? I know I have done this before on plenty of servers.

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

By 'Apache' you mean httpd ?

yum install httpd

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

Or do you just really like reinstalling over and over for no reason?
Hey he probably runs Windows on one machine like the rest of us this just goes without saying...

Re:Fedora

[EasyPeasy99]

Well, if you can't manage "yum install httpd", you are better off staying with Win98.

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

Actually I meant the entire lamp stack and I had never heard of yum it's not documented very well and the application yum is not exactly named "install-missing-software" is it. I went with windows XP and the wampserver installation. Works like a charm it installs itself and was trouble free.

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

Pretty sad statement but yeah if you think win98 is better than Redhat linux I guess you're right.

Re:Fedora

[discogravy]

There's a menu item for installing software, but honestly, if you don't know what yum is and how it's used to install software in redhat-based distros -- especially if you couldn't be bothered to google it and instead thought installing windows would be easier -- windows is where you need to be. that's not meant as an insult either; linux is not for you.

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the problem is yum is not intuitively named and RH try to push people into their crappy package GUI. RH documentation has always sucked.

Re:Fedora

[ByOhTek]

I thought redhat was using up2date now?

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion Fedora is one of the worst distros out there. Check out the number of bugs in any version of Fedora that they close as "WONT FIX" on account that a new version is released or about to be released. It's a very high percentage. The same bug gets filed for the new Fedora version but, it too, is marked "WONT FIX" because a new version is coming. Why bother actually fixing a bug when you can just ignore it and close it in six months?!

Re:Fedora

[sopssa]

Is apt-get/apt-cache then?

When you're moving to a new OS you should atleast get to know some basic things about it, and how to install software is probably the most basic one.

But even if thats too much to figure out, you have the GUI installer (not that I've ever used it)

Re:Fedora

[sopssa]

No, they changed to yum, not the other way around.

As of Fedora Core 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, up2date is no longer shipped with the distribution; yum is used instead.

Re:Fedora

[Ephemeriis]

Actually I meant the entire lamp stack and I had never heard of yum it's not documented very well and the application yum is not exactly named "install-missing-software" is it. I went with windows XP and the wampserver installation. Works like a charm it installs itself and was trouble free.

You obviously didn't try too hard.

I'm by no means a *nix guru... I spend most of my time working on Windows machines... And the first thing I do when I sit down at a new computer is look for the mouse.

But it only takes about 60 seconds with a web browser to give you a very complete, concise answer. Seriously. It is literally the first result that comes up in Google. Complete, step-by-step instructions. You don't even need to know what yum is.

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

what exactly did you google, I couldn't even guess.

Re:Fedora

[Ephemeriis]

what exactly did you google, I couldn't even guess.

"redhat LAMP install"

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

Yeah I figure that out after I noticed the link. Wow, who'd have guessed that you had to install the c++ compiler to get a web-server and database system running. And that dependency chain was amazing.

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

Yeah, does that work from the CDs I had no access to the internet.

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

Oh one little detail I failed to mention. I had no access to the internet I only had the redhat install disks. Does that change how it gets installed?

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

And THIS is why it's not the year of Linux on the Desktop.

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

It's got many good points. I'm running it on one computer at the moment.

It has some obvious downsides compared to Debian, though. For example, it seems to lack Debian's policy requiring all programs to have manpages, so locating documentation is sometimes tricky; a number of core programs seem not to install any documentation at all, preferring instead to refer to their websites, which is utterly useless when one wishes to refer to the manual while offline.

The software installation is also disappointing. Yum works perfectly well, and even has some advantages over apt-get, but it is so slow. There isn't a decent interface, either; yumex makes yum look fast, while the PackageKit GUI is dumbed down so far as to be essentially useless. There doesn't seem to be anything comparable to aptitude, i.e. a no-nonsense front-end that provides a powerful interactive UI even over a basic ssh connection.

The final annoyance is Fedora's constant insistence on telling me to reboot. No, Fedora, I do not need to reboot my server just because you upgraded dovecot. Restarting the dovecot service will be perfectly sufficent to make sure there aren't any stale open files or shared libraries hanging around. Sigh.

But at least it doesn't constantly "upgrade" to broken drivers and then refuse to include the fixed versions, like Ubuntu does.

Re:Fedora

[wastedlife]

You were trying to install a webserver without internet access? Where then did you find out about and get wampserver from? On a base install of windows there is no AMP stack and nothing telling you how to install software that you are looking for.

Re:Fedora

[trickyD1ck]

thank god!

Re:Fedora

[Tubal-Cain]

I've never tried Red Hat but you can use disks as repositories in Debian, Ubuntu, and openSUSE.

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

Hilariously, the basic LAMP stack, sans "c++ compiler", can be installed using just:

yum install php{,-mysql} mysql-server

Alternatively, if you want all optional PHP modules as well:

yum install php\* mysql-server

Which is even easier. And yes, yum works with local install media.

Fully looking forward to the next logical step in the progression, which presumably is "I failed to mention I DIDN'T HAVE A COMPUTER"

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously never worked on more than one machine; try running an enterprise and you'll understand how you can have something happen hundreds of times. Last week I was trying out Ubuntu to see if it'd work better on my Dell laptop but I *repeatedly* ran into the same types of problems the GP mentions. One update I installed a bunch of audio/video software and somehow it hosed my wireless. Thinking I had installed something in networking by mistake, I reinstalled and verified 10+ times that I was only installing multimedia related software and before I knew it I was without wireless again. Monday I went back to Fedora because even though my bluetooth is hosed with it at the moment, I've never once lost wireless because I installed video software. Hell, I've never lost the use of ANYTHING on it thanks to a non-related package e.g. if I update bluez, I expect that bluetooth might die but not my video card.

Re:Fedora

[h4rr4r]

So are you a troll or an idiot?

Because with the story you are laying out here it is one or the other.

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

I brought it on a CD, I had been using it as a test environment while developing the web site. I had asked them to install Linux and they had obtained the Redhat CDs (a distro with which I was unfamilliar but he had to follow mil specs and RedHat was the only one approved at the time) and installed but the windows only admin didn't actually install the server version and the install version he used didn't install the AMP portion by default. The network was an internal Military only network and not connected to the internet. I tried to install the AMP stack but not finding anything that stood out in the docs that came with the CDs and there not being any reason that I would type "yum install httpd" randomly or even "man yum" I failed to get it installed. It turned out that my test environment was better suited to their admin's skill set anyway so we went with that. I had wanted them to use Linux because I thought that it might be a more suitable environment for a webserver but hey learn something every day I guess.

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

obviously horatio there are far more things in your philosophy than you dreamt of.

Re:Fedora

[Abreu]

"I have told you a million times not to exagerate!"

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

What does a box with no Internet access do with Apache?

Re:Fedora

[Abreu]

...aaand this is why Ubuntu will continue to gain users

Seriously, "linux is not for you"? I have never seen such a bad answer in the Ubuntu wiki or forums...

Re:Fedora

[Ethanol-fueled]

Try Bitnami stacks. Much easier than setting everything up piecewise. Here's the LAMP for you.

Re:Fedora

[ebuck]

Well, if you can't manage "yum install httpd", you are better off staying with Win98.

Pretty sad statement but yeah if you think win98 is better than Redhat linux I guess you're right.

That's not exactly what the grandparent poster said. The grandparent poster said something more like, "Since you haven't learned anything since Windows 98, you should stick to the operating system you're proficient in."

Re:Fedora

[Sillygates]

yum is very simple and there is a man/info page on it.

Installing a lamp stack is easy, and future yum updates will patch the entire stack. That being said, I'm assuming you're running an exernally facing lamp stack. What's your patch story? How are you getting your security fixes?

In my specific deployment, I drop packages on an http server, and I have yum clients running on a few hundred systems (I find these packages with a simple mirroring command rsync -avz rsync://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/......). After I test the updates, I put them in a repository that all the systems know about. All of these systems poll my repository for updates every 2 hours, and autoinstall/patch.

As a standalone dev box, I'd assume you'd be running a gui, and fedora will automatically show you popup notifications to update, as a massive deployment, you can do something like I do (or pay for an up2date subscription, if you choose that route...).

I believe that the only problem you have is a refusal to any research/browsing whatsoever, and you are blaming your misunderstandings on the operating system.

Re:Fedora

[dakameleon]

Good thing this ain't the Fedora forum, then.

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

run a webserver on an internal non internet connected network. Answer your question genius?

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

whooosh!

Re:Fedora

[Martin Blank]

At a risk of feeding the trolls...

Mount the CD
Navigate to the RPMs directory (not sure where it is off the top of my head, but it's not buried too deeply)
Run "rpm -Uvh [nameoffile.rpm]"

If it comes up with dependencies, add them to the line. It's not that hard to do, and easily found in most search engines.

Re:Fedora

[Martin Blank]

Fedora is a bleeding-edge distro. It's not something I will recommend to casual or new Linux users, because there are a great many things in it that can cut one deeply. In the past, I've spent weeks waiting for some irritating bug to be fixed or feature to work as promised, trying various things that have on occasion broken my system state so badly that a reinstall was the only sane way to get back to something usable.

That said, I've been running Fedora as my primary non-server Linux OS since about FC3. I've learned a great deal about the internals of Linux by working through all of those problems. I am pondering whether to upgrade my notebook to F12 Beta; on the one hand, the last couple of upgrades from 9 to 10 and from 10 to 11 went well; OTOH, it's pretty much working where I want it to, and moving to a beta right now seems like it's possible to open some major distractions.

Re:Fedora

[StarHeart]

Then your best bet would be to create a local repository out of the contents of cds, or a dvd. Which should be a basic thing you are going to do anyway if you have more than a few servers that don't have access to the internet. Then you would mirror in updates, and let them update from that.

There is graphical software that will let you install stuff straight from discs, and even ask for the right disc.

Re:Fedora

[apoc.famine]

Hahahahahahah.....I was about to mod you down, but that's FUCKING PRICELESS!
 
You tried to install Apache....on a server...which wasn't connected to the internet......
 
I once tried to turn on a light which wasn't plugged in, and that didn't work either.....
 
Seriously, if you suck that badly at trolling, don't troll. It makes you look dumb. Stick to setting up your servers in your cave - you'll be far more successful in that endeavor.

Re:Fedora

[AdamWill]

It's worth noting that we tweaked the Fedora 12 release cycle somewhat, and this 'Beta' release is equivalent to the 'Preview' release from previous cycles. It's more akin to what the rest of the world considers a Beta - i.e. it's feature complete and changes from here on in will only be for bug fixes - than our previous 'Beta' releases were.

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

Day late and a dollar short there chief.

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

The point here is that with the wampserver executable installer I had to simply double click the exe and bingo everything installed, no dependencies to worry about and it was set up and running in 15 minutes from a base install of windows. I did have a windows admin handy and all we had to do was make sure that port 80 was free by killing and making manual any webserver service that might have been running in a base install of XP (I don't know if IIs is installed by default in a base install of XP professional) and the wampserver installation came with a tray piece for admin, phpmyinfo pre-installed and the mysql administration tools pre-installed. copy my web site files to www directory, edit the httpd.conf file from the pull out in the tray menu. run the phpforum installer and bingo done and going home. I had hoped that the Linux install would have gone similarly (it usually does when I'm dealing with a web host provider) but I was frustrated.

Re:Fedora

[AdamWill]

well. um. it does. yum takes care of the dependencies for you. all you have to do is tell it what you want to install.

try as I might, I _really_ can't see any qualitative difference between the two. You seem to be assuming that it's blindingly obvious that you should use this 'wampserver' thing to install the stack on Windows, but I've no idea why. I'd never heard of it until I came across this thread. How did you magically know that the right tool to use to install the stack on Windows was 'wampserver'? I'm betting you didn't; you either did research yourself and found this tool, or you were given the benefit of this knowledge by someone else who had. How is that any different from doing a couple of minutes of research yourself to learn about yum, or being told about it by other people in this thread?

also, you didn't answer the question about updates, which is rather important. Does this 'wampserver' thing take care of keeping the whole stack up to date with security updates for you?

Re:Fedora

[Martin Blank]

I appreciate the change, but I'm also making my decision based on recent non-Fedora performance. Three upgrades at work over the last month, all meticulously planned, have had something unexpected -- and in one case completely undocumented -- go wrong on them.

Even the past Fedora preview releases have occasionally had some bad bugs. I did help out on the 9-10 and 10-11 upgrades. I'm probably going to sit this one out for my own sanity. :)

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

Ok you haven't read everything here so I'll lay it out for you. I designed and coded a website. I used wampserver (yes I researched what tool I could use on a windows box to install a wamp stack there are several) on my system at home to do the coding and testing because I didn't have a Linux server handy and it was confidential and I couldn't put it on a computer connected to the internet. When I went to the customers site I had it on the CD with the web site files. I had asked the customer to install Linux on the intended server. I didn't know that he was installing Redhat, a distro that I am largely unfamiliar with. When I got there I learned that he had prepared the machine with Redhat Linux on it but he had installed a workstation version that did not include the AMP stack. I struggled with the attempted installation because I had no internet access and only the CDs to install from. I did not have time to start from scratch. I had never heard of yum. I discovered that the guy was actually a windows admin and he also had a windows box with a fresh install of windows XP pro handy. With one executable (that I had fortuitously brought with me) I installed my test environment and had the site up and working. However I had wasted a considerable amount of time trying to get Redhat up and working.

And yes the tray tool that you can use to administer the wampserver package does check for updates and take care of installing them. So yes I get the security updates. However since my client is not on the internet I have to take him the upgrade package on a disk anyway.

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an appropriate answer. You don't seem inclined to want to learn about the OS, you want everything handed to you with absolutely no effort on your part. Every OS is going to have a learning curve where you have to learn a bit. Even Windows. Most people have no idea how to change the screen resolution in Windows and they have to search on the Internet or ask someone.

You couldn't seem to be bothered to do either, and here you are complaining about it. If you can't learn, then maybe Linux isn't for you.

But I guess this is what the "no child left behind" education system gives us.

Re:Fedora

[Hucko]

Actually pp is shaping up to be both... with the troll bit being an accident.

Re:Fedora

[koxkoxkox]

So, you feel more comfortable in a system you know and for which you researched online beforehand than on an unknown system without Internet ? How is that surprising ? How is that the fault of Redhat ?

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

So you are a revisionist? Cause that isn't how everyone else saw the history going down.

Re:Fedora

[vikstar]

Thanks for reducing the user base of linux, and undoing some of the hard work that goes into making linux a contender.

Re:Fedora

[the_womble]

He could not find the software installer in the start menu. He needs a geek friend to help him with his computer regardless of what OS he uses. In some ways, something that can be locked down for him like Linux may be more suitable. Its much the same way that my wife and kids use Linux.

On the other hand, why a naive user is installing a LAMP stack is not apparent to me.

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent down. This guy's a troll.

Re:Fedora

[colourmyeyes]

Your trolling: 10/10. Bravo.

/slow clap

Re:Fedora

[hairyfeet]

Uhhhh...dude? Did you not bother reading the multiple times the guy said he was on a secure INTRANET and therefor you could yum all damned day long and it ain't gonna do squat because there is NO Internet on the secure side?

I swear Linux guys are as bad as the cloud computing guys sometimes, thinking everyone is hooked to the Internet 24/7. He should NOT HAVE TO know a crapload of RPM commands to simply install something off the CD, and if he does need to know a bunch of commands I would say the problem is the installer sucks. I mean really, how damned hard is it to have a list of installable software pop up when he puts in the Red Hat CDs anyway? And folks wonder why non IT folks think Linux is hard.

Re:Fedora

[crhylove]

I disagree. There are plenty of easy to use distros out that replace windows in every way. Linux Mint is a favorite of mine. I install it on Grandma's Machine with Open Office, show her how to export .pdf, and never get another phone call.

Windows is for teen age boys who want to get viruses and the latest game.

Mac is for people with too much money, and too fancy of a haircut.

Re:Fedora

[Daengbo]

Ok you haven't read everything here so I'll lay it out for you. I designed and coded a website. I used wampserver (yes I researched what tool I could use on a windows box to install a wamp stack there are several) on my system at home to do the coding and testing because I didn't have a Linux server handy and it was confidential and I couldn't put it on a computer connected to the internet.

A confidential project for an internal military network that you coded from home? (Yes, I know that's a fragment.) I hope I misunderstood.

Signed,

A former MI soldier

Re:Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

But it only takes about 60 seconds with a web browser [tinyurl.com] to give you a very complete, concise answer

The first link in your Let-Me-google-that-for-you results points to:
this page

blah blah blah...
ote: to install applications from source code, you will need a C++ compiler (gcc++) installed. This is generally taken care of, but I've had enough queries about it that I've added this note to avoid getting more! You can use your distribution's install CDs to get the proper version of the compiler. Or, if you are using an RPM based distro, you can use a site like http://www.rpmfind.net/ to locate the correct RPM version for your system. (You will obviously not be able to use/rebuild a source RPM to get the compiler installed, as you need the compiler to build the final binary RPM!) On a Fedora system, you can do this command:

su - root
yum install gcc gcc-c++

Log in as root

Because we will be installing softwa...
blah..rpm -qa

in conjunction with grep to filter your results:

rpm -qa | grep -i apache
rpm -qa | grep -i httpd
rpm -qa | grep -i php
rpm -qa | grep -i mysql

while the first link from "wamp install" is:
this

1 Download the latest release of Wampserver 2
2 Optionally add as much Apache, PHP and MySQL releases as you want
3 Work with a development environment that reproduces exactly your production server

Seriously WTF... if even installing Open Source software is easier in Windows than in Linux... then I understand why people is reluctant to move to Linux. (e.g., where are the portableapps for Linux?, download-click-use)

Re:Fedora

[shentino]

"mount the CD"

So that's what that little hole is for...

Re:Fedora

[ramymamlouk]

I haven't tried wampserver myself, but I'm sure it will be bloated with all the DLLs etc (dependencies), which will overwrite the already installed DLLs (if you had any), leading to killing the very meaning of shared "Dynamic Link Libraries".

Re:Fedora

[wastedlife]

I am honestly surprised that running wampserver in XP can pass for milspec. Also, I can understand your frustration in in using an unfamiliar distro without the aid of google, but you really shouldn't blame Red Hat in this case. In XP it was easy because you are used to it and knew about wampserver and had a copy with you(nice to hear they added an updater, last I used it they did not and updating was an annoyance), but if you did not have it with you, installing an AMP stack in windows would have been impossible. If they had a copy of Red Hat, I'm surprised they didn't have any of the documentation. I also thought Red Hat had links to the local documentation in the main menu on the desktop. Unless of course the admin chose workstation and no GUI during the install, which would baffle me.

Re:Fedora

[randomsearch]

I used Red Hat / Fedora from 1998 to 2007, when I switched to Ubuntu. The difference at the time was not too great, but I disagree about the package managers. yum was a pain in Fedora - so slow, unresponsive and the GUIs were terrible. Ubuntu's package manager GUI, about to be majorly upgraded, is comparatively wonderful. RS

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

Well partially, I knew that all the packages I needed were there on the CDs, it was simply not obvious where to find the info to install them or how to install them after I found them and the rpm program that I remembered vaguely using didn't seem to be helping. If they were self contained packages like everywhere else in the computing world (.msi, .dmg, .pkg or whatever) even just executable it would have been a snap. That's what I'm blaming, not Redhat specifically it just happens that Redhat was the distro that I was given.

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

No there was no actual confidential material present on my home system. I thought that obscurity was the better part of security in any case I isolated it mostly because it had to work not connected to the internet and I didn't want the files and structures laying around on a hosting server.

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

Didn't and doesn't seem to have any problems. I use on a daily basis for a production project server (dotproject).

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

Unless of course the admin chose workstation and no GUI during the install, which would baffle me.
But that's what I was presented with, keep in mind he was a Windows Admin. A smart person but not at all familiar with what he was installing. Since "Linux" web servers don't usually have a GUI interface why would you need that? It's getting rather tiresome hearing all these people make excuses for the lack of a unified installer strategy for Linux. Even In windows where there are literally hundreds of installer packaging tools they all work the same way to the user. Even in the documentation how long would it take me to figure out how Redhat installs packages. With Windows I just had to know where the package was and double click it. With Redhat, I knew the packages could eventually be found but had no idea where to look for the install instructions.

Re:Fedora

[AdamWill]

in terms of what it actually installs, wampserver isn't exactly 'self contained' either. It installs a bunch of separate bits which depend on each other, just as you get by installing a collection of packages on Red Hat. All you'd have needed to duplicate wampserver functionality on RH is a trivial script - or just a saved rpm command line - which installs the appropriate package set from the discs.

Yeah, there is an actual issue here in that RH's dependency-resolving package management tools do not work by default on the disc media. In some distros, e.g. Mandriva, they do. In an ideal world, RH's would too. In practice, just about every real-world RH deployment has access to a package server; even if it's on a secure network, you'd usually have a private repository available on the network for the servers to use, so you can do proper package management and tracking. So that's why this just isn't seen as a real big problem for RH.

You can hack it up relatively easily, if you need to - copy all the packages off the disc(s) into a directory somewhere, run 'createrepo .' on the directory, and add the directory as a yum repository in /etc/yum.repos.d/ . Yeah, it's a bit of a trick that takes some knowledge to figure out, but let's face it, that's what sysadmin work _is_, no matter what OS or software you run. I don't think anyone's yet met the syadmin whose job consisted exclusively of reading the manual and clicking the handy desktop icons. You used exactly the same kind of knowledge-based shortcut in using wampserver on Windows, as pointed out before.

Basically, we're not disputing that, given the situation you're in, it happened to be easier for you to install on a Windows box than a Linux one. We're just pointing out this is, to a large extent, because of your particular situation and skill set. It's not something you can generalize out, or legitimately argue means there's some kind of significant problem for Linux. It's just one of those things.

Re:Fedora

[wastedlife]

There is no unified installer strategy because different distros can be as different as an Xbox is to an Xbox 360 or Windows XP or Server 2008 Core and those all at least come from the same company. All of them have a Windows NT kernel, yet all of them are very different in the way you install and configure software. "Linux" is just a kernel, and the distros are different operating systems based on that kernel. Sure, they will share lots of other software for want of not reinventing the wheel each time, but the software installation is done in a way that suits the group or company that develops the distro. Some of them will find that another tool is better and drop their own (I believe Red Hat dropped up2date for yum), but for the most part the package system is what keeps people using one distro over another. Gentoo's portage can be configured to optimize everything to your specific hardware. Debian's apt is known for excellent dependency handling. I'm not sure what advantages yum and yast have, because I have not worked with yast and yum seems nearly identical to apt in my limited use(maybe its just a matter of rpm vs deb files?).

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

You just made my point. Done here

Re:Fedora

[sbeckstead]

Um, when were you in the Mobile Infantry, I thought they didn't exist except in a Heinlein book. Oh maybe you meant Military Intelligence sorry, they're mostly fiction too. I was Army Chemical Corps.

Re:Fedora

[crhylove]

Also, as an addendum, Windows is MUCH harder to install than the latest Ubuntu. Ubuntu pretty much was functional out of the box last install. I installed Windows 7 on a generic old emachine the other day, and there was no sound.... I went and found a driver, but Ubuntu did it OUT OF BOX, and was faster and had Compiz. Of course it was an ugly shit brown color, but that's why I usually use Mint.

Re:Fedora

[ByOhTek]

well, previously they had gone from yum to up2date...

Is John Kerry under that fedora?

Re:Fedora

[wastedlife]

Had you been given Windows Server 2008 Core to use as a web server, you would very likely have been in the same position. IIS might have been installed (no SQL or PHP support is on the Server 2008 disc), but without the ability to access some documentation, you would have been in the same state as if you were with Red Hat(look at instructions for IIS + PHP + MySQL here). Your point that "linux" does not have a unified installer strategy is just as valid with Windows. My point is that there are valid reasons for different installer strategies among distros, not just excuses.

Re:Fedora

[MaskedSlacker]

In Re Your Sig: Really? I wasn't aware that Mexico was known for its public health system.

Re:Fedora

[IMightB]

Uhhh dude, you can set yum up tp pull from the install cd's

here's an example /etc/yum.repos.d/myrepos.repo file.

[rhel5cdrom]
name=RHEL5 CDROM
baseurl=file:////mnt/cdrom/Server
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-mxlogic

then do

yum install mysql http php

It's not hard secure intranet to not, just spend about 30 seconds teaching yourself how to do it. Seriously, this thread is like people going:

DUDE you mean I have to dbl click on it?!?! windows sux0rs

Re:Fedora

[hairyfeet]

And you HONESTLY think all THAT is easier than having a simple GUI pop up with a list of software? Dam just....damn. I stand by my earlier statement, no damned wonder that non IT types hate Linux. When you don't NEED to have an assload of CLI memorized simply to do basic tasks like install from a CD or set up wireless, let me know. Until then I've got Windows 7 headed my way from Newegg.

Re:Fedora

[AdamWill]

That's not an 'assload of CLI', it's a *configuration file*.

If you want to admin anything without encountering a configuration file...well, good luck. And no, just because something consists of text rather than pictures, that does not mean it's bad.

Re:Fedora

[Sillygates]

Uhhhh...dude? Did you not bother reading the multiple times the guy said he was on a secure INTRANET and therefor you could yum all damned day long and it ain't gonna do squat because there is NO Internet on the secure side?

Uhhh...dude. I run yum on my intranet. My yum repository is on my intranet.....The machines arn't pulling updates straight off the internet. Do you even understand what's going on here?

12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm currently running an old Slackware release, and thought I'd upgrade to a more recently-released distro today. So I downloaded this beta to give it a try, and it has failed me.

It just wouldn't boot. So I downloaded the ISO image again, checksummed it (it passed), burned it to disc again, and tried to install once more. And again it failed.

I had a similar problem years ago with one of their earlier releases, on an entirely different system. It just wouldn't boot.

Frankly, I've had enough. Fedora is shit. I don't care what features they may have added, but if the installation disc doesn't even BOOT on my systems, then it's totally useless to me.

So I'm still on Slackware for now. Maybe I'll try Ubuntu instead. I hear they actually give half a damn about the quality of their releases.

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

You should definitely solely base your opinion of Fedora on 1) an incident years ago and 2) a beta version. I mean, why would anyone download and use an actual release?!? That's just crazy talk.

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't agree more with the sentiment, but as a KDE user, I'd recommend the RC of opensuse instead. Knock on wood, suse is the only distribution that *never* has failed me, and I've been through a bunch over the years.

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't agree more with you! I tried installing Fedora Core 1 on my computer yesterday after using the CD as a coaster for five years and it WOULDN'T BOOT. Fedora is obviously a piece of shit!

In all seriousness, if you don't get on with Fedora what on Earth are you thinking going for Ubuntu? What's the bettings in a week or two you'll come back complaining about the childishness of it and how they try and hide you from the guts of Linux? Stepping from Slackware to Ubuntu will be like reading Noddy books after Proust. Plus, "they actually give half a damn about teh quality of their releases"? Wow.

Wow.

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[couchslug]

Was the CD burned at slowest speed setting, using media that works with other live CD .isos?

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[jjohnson]

Really? You fail to do something that millions of other people do without issue, and the problem is Fedora?

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... test after burning, not before??? dumb shit.

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[AdamWill]

"Couldn't agree more with the sentiment, but as a KDE user, I'd recommend the RC of opensuse instead."

or, for the exact same amount of money, you could try both and see which you prefer :)

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

What the heck is wrong with Slackware anyway? Stay with Slack and get 13, it's just out.

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[crhylove]

MAKE IT LIIIKEE## TENABRAAAYYYYY##@@!!!

these other words are here to limit the percentage of caps in my original post. In case you were wondering, yes, it is satirical. I enjoy the occasional amusing flame war on a disused game website as much as the next guy. I hope this is enough non-caps.

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

For what its worth I have a fedora proof box as well. Ubuntu, Debian, Mandrake, Gentoo, Suse, ( heck BeOs 5 ) have no problem with it. Fedora does. Weird.

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Download a free file? Do you think I'm made of money? Help me light this poop I found!

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[donaldm]

A friend of mine downloaded Fedora 12 Beta and found it would not boot on his laptop. I tried the same CD on mine and it worked without any issues. It is rather odd considering my Fedora 11 DVD works on both machines so there could be a problem with his laptop reading CD's although my laptop is over 2 years older than his.. To say Fedora is shit because the media does not boot in your machine is not trying to analyse the issue and deserving the label of "troll".

Its better than windows!

[Anonymous Coward]

There. I said it.

Re:Its better than windows!

[sbeckstead]

A poke in the eye with a sharp stick is better than windows, what are you saying?

Re:Its better than windows!

[longfalcon]

clearly you haven't used VMS.

*shudder*

Re:Its better than windows!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything is better than Windows. Except for trolls like you.

Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Picass0]

I've used Fedora since it was split off from RH, and I used RedHat going back to 5.2. For most of that time it was one of the best supported distros from the user community point of view. More recently the pendulum appears to have swung to Ubuntu. Aside from package management what are the differences I would notice by giving Ubuntu a try this time?

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Anarke_Incarnate]

Lots and lots of brown, and shit that spontaneously stops working. That was just my experience, your mileage may vary. There's more to it than just package management. There are other differences when going to a Debian based distro, like managing initialization and system tools. I'd recommend OpenSUSE which also releases a new version in November.

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd back that. I like openSuSE. I don't use Linux all that much anymore -- Vista on my home machine (no issues with it either; either I got lucky or problems have been overstated) and OSX on my laptop -- but the only distro I tried this time that I could properly stomach was openSuSE. I know Fedora/RedHat well from back in the RH8 days through to about FC3 or 4 from adminstering a small network of them, but for some reason I can't settle with Fedora any more, and CentOS (and Scientific Linux) irritate me. No idea why, just one of those things.

The other I'd recommend at the minute would actually be Arch, if you want a bit more hands-on than openSuSE will give you. Otherwise I'd just stick with openSuSE, it does what I want. (Or did until I got the Macbook and started using OSX.)

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu isn't a steaming pile of horseshit like Fedora is.

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[dHagger]

..."brown, and shit"... was that intentional?

Seriously, I have to agree about Ubuntu. I've been using Ubuntu since 6.10, and for the last few releases things have deteriorated. They are pushing things into the distribution before they are ready and/or doing a poor job integrating them. Pulseaudio has never worked OK for me. Notification OSD does not work at all for me, placing notifications outside of the visible area, and replacing a system that works fine. Multi-monitor support (except for fixed configuration in xorg.conf) has been partially broken on all the 6-8 computers I've tried it on. The beta of Kubuntu 9.10 did not have working multi-monitor support at all!

So I'm currently running Windows 7, which beats the *brown* out of Ubuntu. At least on my new shiny hardware. I'm thinking about trying another distribution, just have not decided which one yet. Fedora sounds nice (especially the thing about improved sound and video), you recommend OpenSUSE, and I've also heard a lot of good things about Mandriva. Decisions, decisions...

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Anarke_Incarnate]

as an FYI, I used to use Mandrake and moved TO SUSE. The integration of tools is better. YaST for ease of use is near unbeatable.

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Kelson]

Pulseaudio has never worked OK for me.

Pulseaudio has never quite worked right for me, either, and I use Fedora. In my case, audio either works or it doesn't, and I haven't quite been able to nail down a consistent pattern.

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Alpha830RulZ]

I have to differ. I absolutely hate YAST. It probably means I'm getting old and rigid, but I find Fedora/CentOS's positioning of the admin tools so much easier to find. I've not yet gotten updates working properly on SuSE, which probably has something to do with the furshluginer network and firewall configurations foisted on us here.

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[epine]

I deliberately maintain a heterogeneous home network involving OpenBSD, FreeBSD, a daily flavour of Linux, an iMac (not my own), and Windows clunkers that can be pulled out of a closet if truly necessary.

I've never had an OpenBSD lemon, but then I tend to ask less of it. It has a defined role. FreeBSD rocks, when it works at all. The 5.x series was about as stable as the Apollo 13 re-entry. I've mostly used it as a web application server. The FreeBSD mojo is a little different than the OpenBSD mojo, so I never feel entirely at home there. I feel like a Brazilian in Portugal.

My primary desktop has been Linux since I retired my Windows 2000 box. At first it was Debian, but the Woody to Sarge upgrade cycle left a sour taste, so then it was FC4 and FC6, followed by Ubuntu.

I had a surprisingly good run on FC4. Everything I needed to do actually worked. Ubuntu has been hit and miss. On a good day, I forget what desktop I'm running. That's the ideal. One of the Ubuntu upgrades borked something to the point where I had to install from scratch. I decided to switch back to Fedora, but that release of Fedora made a total hash of my video card setup. Rather than diving into the arcana of xconfig with a heaping dose of new and improved, I went right back to Ubuntu.

It's pretty much impossible on any given day to say that X is better than Y. Every one of these projects has a few burrs under the saddle. I don't use my desktop for multimedia. Prefer not to install Flash at all, if I can get away with it, don't listen to music, don't play games. I'm not here to have a consumer experience.

Yesterday I was checking out crypto performance as part of sizing my network backup regime. I did an scp loopback test on a number of machines, which primarily tests AES CPU load, but also network stack agility.

time scp some_big_file.tgz `hostname`:/dev/null

Two of my Linux boxes crashed shorting afterwards: one a current Ubuntu, the other an antique Fedora. There was a console message on one of them about an illegal truncation request on /dev/null after the copy completed. I had an ssh-agent running to avert password prompts. My agent froze when one of the remote Linux machines died. These are machines that ordinarily don't crash at all. I was able to kill X on one of the crashed machines, but it was still borked enough to require a reboot. Strange.

My perception of the difference between Ubuntu and Fedora is that Ubuntu has some funny elements in its culture, whereas Fedora is a little more burdened by decisions long ago in its heritage. Ubuntu feels more like an immature first marriage, Fedora feels more like a wary second marriage (that can't shut up about SELinux due to some bad experience in a previous life).

The only thing I know for certain is that Fedora has a lot more talent available concerning everything to do with Java than Ubuntu. Java is relatively low on the Ubuntu totem pole. "apt-get install eclipse" will work on Ubuntu sometime after the release of Perl 7. Not that it matters all that much, if you have nothing else to do than figure out for yourself that it doesn't matter much.

I often wish my life was simple enough to declare "if it can't be done on OpenBSD, I don't want to do it". OpenBSD is far and away the most enlightened monastery. I'm not the kind of person to declare "my OS rocks [because I've decided to content myself with everything it does well]". I'd rather say "my OS rocks because it forces me to content myself with what can be done well". If only I could afford the ascetic luxury.

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[MMC Monster]

As someone who has been using various versions of Ubuntu since 5.04 (Or maybe 4.10. I Can't really remember), pulse audio is *finally* working on Ubuntu 9.10, as of a couple days ago. Hopefully they don't break it again prior to releasing it in ~10 days.

Actually, if 9.10 is released as it currently stands, it'll be the first version of Ubuntu that just plain works on all my desktop computers. The caveat is that they probably moved to grub2 a little early, but at least they'll get all the kinks out by 10.04. :-)

As an aside, I just moved to ext4 for /home, and it works without a hitch. Can't wait for btrfs and easy drive spanning and mirroring.

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason: Red Hat and Fedora are the ones that get work done.

Ubuntu did not have the man power and developer community to handle the issues during major changes.

It looks like Fedora is settling down a bit. This usually ends up with a more stable Ubuntu build on Fedora technology.

Ubuntu needs more core developers on the main projects.

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[the_womble]

I am currently using Mepis on my laptop, and PCLinuxOS on the family desktop.

My laptop had lots of problems with Kubuntu and MInt (which is Ubuntu dervied) and all of the problems with Mint came from Ubuntu.

I have used Mandriva in the past, and like it a lot. It has had very few hardware problems, it has a reasonably big repo (that is a problem with PCLinuxOS) and a helpful community (though its a pity Adam Williamson is no longer there).

Mepis is pretty good as well. It has the advantage of the huge Debian stable repos with more up to date apps in its own repos. There is an annoying EULA on installation though.

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Anarke_Incarnate]

You would much rather have system-config- than the simple "yast2" for GUI and "yast" for curses?

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

"Never have I seen someone talk so much while saying so little."

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Daengbo]

Agreed. Ubuntu doesn't seem to have enough core developers for what they try to do. My feeling is that they have grown out of control. The original "one CD with limited options and only the best software" mantra that made Ubuntu 4.10 interesting has been cast off, universe and multiverse are huge and unmanageable, and core technologies are broken every release.

When your default applications have blocker bugs (F-Spot photo manager sidebar is invisible, F-Spot doesn't work on a supported platform, included plug-ins don't work on Totem movie player or Rhythmbox music manager, or Brasero burning application can't burn a DVD, for starters) and well- and long-supported chipsets with open drivers fail to work with new versions (RaLink wireless and i945 graphics), there really is no reason to release.

Canonical needs to step back, Ubuntu needs to consolidate, and both need to focus on "just works in default install" issues.

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, I have to agree about Ubuntu. I've been using Ubuntu since 6.10, and for the last few releases things have deteriorated. They are pushing things into the distribution before they are ready and/or doing a poor job integrating them. Pulseaudio has never worked OK for me. Notification OSD does not work at all for me, placing notifications outside of the visible area, and replacing a system that works fine. Multi-monitor support (except for fixed configuration in xorg.conf) has been partially broken on all the 6-8 computers I've tried it on. The beta of Kubuntu 9.10 did not have working multi-monitor support at all!

you could replace ubuntu/kubuntu with fedora core version 10 here
it breaks and breaks and breaks itself constantly

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[donaldm]

Pulseaudio has never worked OK for me.

Pulseaudio has never quite worked right for me, either, and I use Fedora. In my case, audio either works or it doesn't, and I haven't quite been able to nail down a consistent pattern.

Try this forum . Pulseaudio is now working fine for me.

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[RiotingPacifist]

I've used ubuntu for a while but am on fedora a few pro ubuntu differences are:
*Yum is much slower than apt (ok so it is a package management difference but this is my biggest grievance with fedora)
*Kubuntu does not use pulseaudio by default (well didn't last time i used it, but I'm actually starting to like PA)
*Default apparmor profile, does not step on your toes (with Fedora 11 I ran into problems with selinux blocking me from sharing my files that meant i had to configure selinux, with ubuntu's default apparmor profile i never had to touch it)
*Ubuntu installs are much more stable (as in no new packages) than my fedora install (with updates enabled)
*There are a lot of user maintained hosted by canonical (PPAs), I haven't seen anything similar for fedora (I haven't used them on ubuntu so they may suck)
*Apparently ubuntu 9.10 is moving to grub2
*some software that is avalible in ubuntu is not in fedora (and visa-versa)

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[renoX]

What is weird is that Fedora and Ubuntu have two totally different goals: Fedora is the testbed for RHEL so it's expected to run on the bleeding edge and having issue whereas Ubuntu is supposed to be the Linux's desktop for every users, but given all the issue I hear about Ubuntu and PulseAudio and other, they're not very good at providing a stable desktop.. Sad..

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[lien_meat]

I will definitely agree that release quality of ubuntu has deteriorated but I'm pretty sure some of your issues are hardware specific (I realize this doesn't make it any better...). For example, I have a crap laptop with intel965 graphics, and 9.04 and 9.10 are the only releases that actually made hack free multi-monitor support a reality for me. Before that, I always had to hack xorg. Also, Kubuntu 9.10 alpha 6 worked with both vga and svideo out for me out of the box (you have to go into system settings...), but I didn't test hdmi yet cause I dont' have a cable right now. Pulse audio was TERRIBLE in 9.10alpha 6, and not good at all in 9.04 either, and crapped out on me almost weekly, but right now (9.10beta) it's working impressively well, so much so that I'm actually not hating pulseaudio (that's saying alot). So, for me, pulse and my video are MUCH better than they have been in the past. I agree though, ubuntu needs MUCH better regression testing, and also they need to make sure that things actually work as they are supposed to before they try to put it in a distro. I think fedora tends to do better with this, but that said, I've personally had better luck getting ubuntu working in the end than I have with fedora. Generally ubuntu works a bit better with my hardware(I've tested/run every single fedora release since 4)...but I know for a fact this isn't true for everyone.

Not a particularly exciting release

[Improv]

For those of us who are happy with our hardware support and don't use virtualisation, there's nothing I see in this release for us. Maybe Fedora 13 will be more interesting.

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[Anonymous Coward]

Go suckle BillG's penis you wanker

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[jroysdon]

Looking at the list, I agree. Being a Fedora user, I tend to skip versions just because I don't want to spend the time to get all my one-offs working again. I skipped from FC6 to CentOS5 for a year on my desktop (based on the same major release versions), then went to F9, and now F11. CentOS5 is still solid and loved on my servers.

Fedora just has a twice a year release cycle they're expected to meet. That means sometimes you're just getting many incremental release updates and nothing major. I'm still curious to see what version will make it to RHEL6. I don't think they'll have time to pop out F13 to use as the foundation for RHEL6, but perhaps, since RHEL6 doesn't have to release until 2010 Q1, which could be as late as March.

Myself, I'll try it in VirtualBox and play around, but I probably won't move of my main laptop until F13. But I may try it in another LVM partition and finally blow away my left-over F9 space (I kept that partition just in case I had to dual-boot over to figure out something I'd forgotten, even though I do have backups).

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[gr8_phk]

I agree. My Fedora sequence has been: 3,4,5,7,9,10, and now 12. The pace of improvement has slowed down to where it's not that exciting, but that's actually a good thing IMHO it means things are "good" and "stable". I'm still unhappy that 12 doesn't seem to have the driver for e1000 wireless in the install (you can yum it from the other repo but not until final I guess). I believe that is in 2.6.32 kernel, so it should make it for Fedora 13.

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[wayland]

Those of us with multiple GPUs (screen cards) and/or multiple input devices also have cause to rejoice.  The multi-screen-card functionality has been mostly broken in recent versions of X, and if I understand correctly, this should be fixed in a recent version of X which I understood was supposed to be in F12.  But I could be wrong.

You'll note that this is also the first version of Fedora to come with Perl 6 :). 

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[Improv]

Hmm. Perl6 is kind of tempting, although I imagine it'll only be really interesting once people port most of CPAN over to it.

I probably should not be surprised to hear that a number of other people skip boring releases of Fedora - I don't know a lot of other Fedora users - it seems that apart from the conservative sysadmin types, most people are using Ubuntu now (well, except for the Gentoo ricers).

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[armanox]

I don't know too many people that are still using Ubuntu - they switched to either Fedora or Debian.

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[grcumb]

Hmm. Perl6 is kind of tempting, although I imagine it'll only be really interesting once people port most of CPAN over to it.

From the Perl6 FAQ:

Will I be able to use Perl 5 modules with Perl 6?

Yes; this will likely be achieved by embedding a Perl 5 interpreter, which is what Pugs, one of the prototype Perl 6 compilers, does now. The syntax for using a Perl 5 module is:

use perl5:Module::Name;

So go ahead, move on to Perl 6 and enjoy yourself.

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[jeffstar]

Systems with NVIDIA graphics chips also gain initial support for suspend and resume functionality via the default Nouveau driver.

that seems like a big one!

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[AdamWill]

Um. Nothing was really *broken* that I can think of, but F12 does improve the situation here. Systems with multiple monitors connected will boot in span mode (display spanned across all connected displays) by default (as long as the driver uses RandR 1.2; that's the case for intel, ati and nouveau, the default drivers for 95% of all graphics hardware out there), and spanning multiple monitors work on NVIDIA cards (with the default open source nouveau driver) out of the box now (in F11 it wouldn't work in span mode unless you made a manual xorg.conf tweak). Those are the major differences to F11 in this area.

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora 12 is designed to be the base of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

That makes it more conservative and stable. The main reason for this is that the developers are paid to get stuff done for RHEL6.

Fedora will again be more experimental when RHEl6 is out and the Red Hat employees start working on their RHEL7 target.

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got it backwards. Fedora has more users than Ubuntu. Ubuntu just has the loudest fanboys.

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome shell ?

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[alukin]

May be enough revolutions? I'm glad that this release is quite evolutionary and madness started by Fedora 9 is calming down.

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, paychecks at RedHat vary based on Fedora Version Number mod 2.

You're an idiot.

Bluetooth PAN tethering support in NetworkManager

[shic]

Really? Only last week I was looking at NetworkManager - and it didn't support this - even in the development version... based upon the information I could find.

What gives?

ATI Driver Issues

[KJACK98]

I've been a loyal fedora user since Fedora 8 when I made the switch to it for my primary OS. I upgraded to Fedora 11 from Fedora 8, and now my system has been constantly becoming unresponsive, even the xconfig changes mentioned on their errata page reduced the freezing but still get it randomly. As for the commercial ATI drivers, they suck and all I get is a black screen with a blinking cursor so I for one am praying they have finally resolved this issue in the next release.

Re:ATI Driver Issues

[oddityfds]

The release notes mentions an experimental ATI driver that you could try.

Re:ATI Driver Issues

[Segod]

I installed mine manually using this as a guide:
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17603

But if you run the command:
yum install mesa-dri-drivers-experimental
it should hopefully clear things up for you.

Re:ATI Driver Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because you don't love KMS enough. You need to have more faith. Even attempting to configure X implies that deep down you just don't truly believe, since true believers have no xorg.conf.

Re:ATI Driver Issues

[Eil]

Did you file a bug report? If no, did you check to see that a bug report existed?

Re:ATI Driver Issues

[madbavarian]

I feel sorry for the folks putting this release together. They got handed a hot potato and it isn't clear how they are going to stabilize this distribution in time for the real release in a month. I installed the 64-bit version on two AMD machines (one laptop and one desktop) and both of them have issues with random lockups after 10 minutes or so. In addition nfs4 with autofs stopped working. Ironically default nfs4 was supposed to be one of the new features of this release. Last time this happened it was some weird nfs4 interaction with IPv6. I guess not even Red Hat is taking IPv6 seriously and making the developers eat their own dogfood.

In any case, I'll probably wait a while after the real release before I roll it out to the rest of the machines. It reminds me a bit of the old X11 releases where the word on the street was always to wait a month or two before installing it and let some other poor slob work out what is broken and how to work around it.

Re:ATI Driver Issues

[kdekorte]

If you have an ATI video card try adding 'pcie_aspm=off' to your kernel command line in grub. It disables some advanced power management (that is in the Linus kernel, but enabled in the Fedora kernels), but it sure made my system with an ATI HD3650 video card much more stable. There are a couple of bugs open on lock up issues.

Re:ATI Driver Issues

[AdamWill]

"I installed the 64-bit version on two AMD machines (one laptop and one desktop) and both of them have issues with random lockups after 10 minutes or so."

May well be https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=517625 , if they also have AMD graphics adapters. Try booting with pcie_aspm=off as a kernel parameter. If that helps, add a comment on the bug report to note that you have the same problem, with output of 'lspci -nn'.

Re:ATI Driver Issues

[RiotingPacifist]

nomodeset, I had similar symptoms (well not completly random i could also trigger it on demand with a firefox profile (only one particular profile), i disabled modestting and now all is good

Pulse Audio

[BassMan449]

I've used Fedora since Fedora Core 4 and am currently running 9,10, and 11 between different machines. I prefer Fedora over any other distro (having tried quite a few different ones in VMs before settling on Fedora). The only serious issue I've ever had with Fedora that I really wish would be fixed is the way the audio system works. They have tried pushing everyone over to pulse audio which overall I think is a great idea, but the problem is pulse audio isn't compatible with everything and when something tries to directly access ALSA or OSS it can break the whole sound system. So far I have had problems several times with me losing sound on my entire system with updates. I've also had it happen 3 or 4 times in a row. I know the whole ALSA, OSS, or PA debate is more than just Fedora but I think that is one of the biggest issues in all the distros that needs to be looked at and considered carefully.

Re:Pulse Audio

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree with that. Audio has been so weird on Linux.

Personally I think all distros should just dump all the external complicated audio crap and go back to straight OSS. Practically everything supports OSS (it's a simple API) and the latest version of OSS supports everything ALSA/PuslseAudio/etc does. Straight, bare, plain, and simple. I can't figure out why they don't just do it already. Seems to be mostly a political issue because the OSS developers don't get along with the kernel developers or something. Bunch of freaking twits, the lot of them.

Re:Pulse Audio

[AdamWill]

http://lwn.net/Articles/355542/

Re:Pulse Audio

[donaldm]

Try this forum, I followed the configuration method as detailed in by the person in the forum for pulseaudio and it worked on my machine. Baring that try a search on "pulseaudio howto". Ok I am repeating myself in this discussion but the configuration as detailed (it is very quick and simple) actually worked for me. It could also work for you so at least give it a try.

Re:Pulse Audio

[kramulous]

For weeks and weeks audio didn't work on my machine. I tried all sorts of things. Well, honestly, I did a two second search and tried one thing. It's just that sound is not that important for my work machine so I don't really care.

Then, all of a sudden it started to work. It turned out that all I needed to do was reboot after updating (kernel or something). Lucky I had that client that did some nasty stuff with memory that required me to reboot. I couldn't remember the last time I rebooted.

Re:Bluetooth PAN tethering support in NetworkManag

[armanox]

Send feature request to Red Hat and Fedora teams? They wrote Network Manager afterall.

Re:Bluetooth PAN tethering support in NetworkManag

[Anonymous Coward]

Works fine in the F12 beta. Teterhing my iPhone is seamless.

Why don't they try fixing Fedora 11 first?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many times have you been able to do a 'yum update' or 'preupgrade' without having to worry about whether the system will be able to boot correctly?

How many times has anaconda crashed mid-install, or failed to detect your RAID and decided instead to wipe individual drives without really telling you, or any number of other nagging problems?

'Bleeding-edge' isn't an excuse by any measure; I never run into any problems when upgrading FreeBSD regularly and its ports tree stays far more current than Fedora's yum packages ever will manage.

Re:Why don't they try fixing Fedora 11 first?

[quantaman]

How many times have you been able to do a 'yum update' or 'preupgrade' without having to worry about whether the system will be able to boot correctly?

0, though I did read see warnings about some scenarios in the readmes. I don't know what the problem would have been as I didn't try.

How many times has anaconda crashed mid-install, or failed to detect your RAID and decided instead to wipe individual drives without really telling you, or any number of other nagging problems?

'Bleeding-edge' isn't an excuse by any measure; I never run into any problems when upgrading FreeBSD regularly and its ports tree stays far more current than Fedora's yum packages ever will manage.

0, though I don't use much RAID.

There are areas like sound which do seem to cause problems for a lot of people (though I think that's typical for most PulseAudio distros). And pushing KDE 4.0 does seem to have caused some real issues for a while. But when people claim stability problems like the ones you've described I think it's important to remember the plural of anecdote is not data.

Re:Why don't they try fixing Fedora 11 first?

[gilboad]

"How many times have you been able to do a 'yum update' or 'preupgrade' without having to worry about whether the system will be able to boot correctly?"

Around 99.9% of the time.

"How many times has anaconda crashed mid-install"

Aside from a known bug [1] (a well documented common bug), zero (or at least as far as I remember). And I've been using Fedora since F2 on machines ranging from PII/366 laptop to 24 core monsters.

"...or failed to detect your RAID and decided instead to wipe individual drives without really telling you, or any number of other nagging problems?"

0.
Granted, I may not be as "successful" as you are- as I only manage ~20 different Fedora machines (as a side job) - but who am I to argue with your well documented arguments... (You forgot about RPM-hell. If you're taking the time to spread FUD, at least do it right!)

- Gilboa
[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=501057

Be weary of upgrades if your /boot is small

[Da w00t]

I was bit by the preupgrade CLOSED NOTABUG "bug" where preupgrade requires a sizeable chunk of (temporary) disk space in /boot during an upgrade from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11. I ended up with a system that was unbootable, but repairable. No CDROM made things .. interesting, to say the least. I use pxeboot and kickstart to do all my installs because I hate having to swap CDs/burn DVDs

I don't recall exactly what I did to work around the huge file "needing" to be in /boot, but I think I had a local copy of the install medium on disk, and softlinked the big file from /boot to where it actually resided. Then preupgrade went smoothly.

Re:Be weary of upgrades if your /boot is small

[Anonymous Coward]

Great! well done fedora :( Another major install issue that is hidden away / not a bug *sigh*. I'm starting to think I should use ubuntu instead!

My last install I was "forced" into creating a /boot partition, which I left at the default 100meg (due to the ext4 issues with the liveCD and having no blank DVD media around, or any desire to wait hours to download the full install dvd iso image).

So now having done what I was told to get my F11 install I'm going to have to wipe rather than upgrade for F12 and this isn't a bug! It is a good job it's open source and they don't have customer revenue to lose that sort of decision is just plain crazy! It's mad to tell your customers - "you followed our instructions last time but we've just decided to screw your upgrade path because you didn't guess that more space might be needed for the next release".

And of course my /boot is at the beginning of the disk so re-sizing just isn't an option :(. My current /boot is only 16 meg, why on earth would I think that 500meg was needed?

Re:Be weary of upgrades if your /boot is small

[AdamWill]

There is an easy way out of that, though it may not be totally obvious: don't use your existing /boot partition for F12, just wipe it out and leave it as empty space, make sure the bootloader gets installed to the / partition. F12 doesn't need a separate /boot partition if / is ext4 any more, as F12's grub supports booting from ext4 (F11's didn't, which is why you needed the separate /boot).

That is a good point, though. I don't think we'd actually noticed that particular unfortunate consequence chain until you pointed it out. I'm not entirely sure there's much we can _do_ about it at this point, though. I'm sorry about that.

Base Fedora Version for Redhat EL 6?

[butlerm]

So, does anyone know when Redhat Enterprise Linux 6 is supposed to come out, and whether it is going to be derived from Fedora 12 or some earlier version? Redhat EL 5 is getting a little long in the tooth. The kernel is still 2.6.18 plus patches.

Re:Base Fedora Version for Redhat EL 6?

[gilboad]

I'd venture and guess - mid 2010.
It should based around F11/F12. ... But as I said, I'm guessing. (Call it an semi-educated guess)

- Gilboa

Most "Features" Have Nothing To Do With Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the features announced have nothing to do with Fedora and everything to do with the Linux Kernel, the X Window System and the respective desktops. This means that any distro with these components will have these features.

What makes Fedora unique among distros? How has that changed or been improved? What has been done to integrate all that FOSS into Fedora? What patches have been applied to the Kernel? What are the admin tools? Anything new in the install process?

Just listing features of software others have independently developed tells me nothing about Fedora as a distro.

Re:Most "Features" Have Nothing To Do With Fedora

[armanox]

Most of these features that are listed are from the Red Hat and Fedora teams, and some make it upstream. DRI2 is pushed by RH/Fedora, Network Manager was created by Red Hat, and Fedora adds features to GNOME that have made it into upstream. Fedora stands out because they have many features before other distributions because Red Hat contributes much code to these projects.

Re:Most "Features" Have Nothing To Do With Fedora

[AdamWill]

Actually, most of the features described have been written mostly by Fedora contributors. The full release announcement text - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F12_Beta_Announcement - gives explicit credit for many of them.

Since it's Fedora's policy to contribute all possible work to upstream projects, of course other distributions benefit from this work. We don't play the game of having 'exclusive' features to trumpet in our distribution, we play the game of improving the F/OSS ecosystem for all. We don't really see that the fact that many other distributions will also benefit from this work doesn't mean they're important new features for Fedora users.

Of the features mentioned in the Slashdot story:

X.org improvements: Red Hat employee and Fedora project member Ben Skeggs is the major upstream contributor to the nouveau driver and implemented all the nouveau improvements described. Red Hat employees and Fedora project members Dave Airlie and Jerome Glisse are two of the major contributors to the ati/radeon driver and implemented many of the radeon improvements described. RH employees and FP members Adam Jackson and Kristian Hogsborg are major contributors to the intel driver. Adam and Dave also do substantial work on the X server itself and implemented the default support for multi-display spanning.

NetworkManager improvements: these were implemented by Red Hat employee and Fedora project member Dan Williams.

openfwwf: this is upstream work. We are, however, the first distribution to include it by default, as far as I'm aware (do correct me if I'm wrong).

Virtualization work: this is all contributed by the Red Hat employees and Fedora project members who make up the virtualization team, including Mark McLoughlin, Cole Robinson, and Justin Forbes.

Moblin integration: this is a co-operation between the Fedora project and the Moblin project. Fedora itself serves as part of the foundations of the upstream Moblin project (they do draw on other distributions as well for certain things).

GNOME Shell: maintainer and leading contributor is Red Hat employee and Fedora project member Owen Taylor.

Re:Most "Features" Have Nothing To Do With Fedora

[Daengbo]

I respect Red Hat and Fedora for being such pure FOSS organizations. Kudos. You guys prove that you can have your cake (be FOSS) and eat it, too (make a good profit).

RHEL6

[GoochOwnsYou]

My contacts at Red Hat say that F12 will be the basis for RHEL6, only they plan to do some additions like they are pushing to get btrfs out the door in time.

Re:Bluetooth PAN tethering support in NetworkManag

[AdamWill]

"Really? Only last week I was looking at NetworkManager - and it didn't support this - even in the development version... based upon the information I could find."

Well, take a look at http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/2009/07/10/unwire-with-networkmanager/ .

Note there's two types of Bluetooth tethering (two possible protocols) - DUN and PAN. Some mobile devices can only do one or the other, some can do both. Only PAN has been implemented so far, there's no DUN support yet unfortunately. That's coming, probably for F13.

Ubuntu is for homos

[gatkinso]

Sapiens that is. Har.

Don't change just to change. That's how we got Obama and see what a cluster fuck that is?

Re:Ubuntu is for homos

[dAzED1]

ok, your comment stays unmodded, and mine gets modded as troll?

First, Obama wasn't a change for the sake of change - there was an election. You had to either choose someone, or not choose someone. You couldn't maintain status-quo by simply not showing up. So, considering a change of some sort was going to happen, you had to choose which sort of change you wanted. But just as the problems weren't caused by Bush, they also certainly weren't caused by Obama either. The american political system is much bigger than that, and hides well the fact that people like the speaker of the house is, in many ways, more powerful than the president.

Further along that same vein though - you also do need to "change" your desktop every so often (more often than you are forced to change the president). Within months you at the very least need to do patches. I started with Slackware back in...whatever the hell year that was mid-90s. I've been through many distros since then. You change based on what your needs are, you change to become experienced in the alternatives, and you change because we're an adapting, growing world.

I gave up on Ubuntu some time back because it took tasks I always found to be easy (changing xconfig, for instance) and made them difficult - by burying extra configs and such in various places. An upgrade one day and suddenly selinux is enabled on my home desktop (overkill imo) and most of my crap stopped working. Etc, etc, until I just got rid of it and went back to gentoo - which of course, by now, I've dropped.

But guess what? with the backing from IBM, with more and more people signing on to it - you need to learn it. Or at least, use Debian. There are some fundamental differences between Debian and distros like Fedora/RedHat - and if you don't know them, you'll be at a loss when faced with them.

If your career doesn't put you in jeopardy of that (ie, you're not in IT, research, banking, or engineering) then...stick with whatever does what you currently need to do. Watching trends and planning for the future isn't a worthless task however. Anyone who has watched Shuttleworth's efforts and not seen how successful they'd be wasn't paying attention, and as such people who need to be versatile have at least, by now, familiarized themselves with the Debian distro (if they weren't already familiar with it). Ubuntu had a HUGE grassroots thing going for a long while, and did a great job of converting those efforts to a viable corporate option while not leaving their initial fans out to dry. I commend Mark for the great job he did there. Doesn't mean I like Ubuntu - I'd rather run off a livedvd from various other groups than use Ubuntu. But it's got undeniable appeal, and isn't something that is "change just to change"

Re:Ubuntu is for homos

[True Grit]

Don't change just to change. That's how we got Obama and see what a cluster fuck that is?

And the previous admin promised to worship the status quo, yet gave us an even bigger cluster-fsck.

Sorry, but this old anti-change rhetoric just don't cut it anymore... not after that last moron.

Stop digging your hole

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit posting you fuckwit.

Re:Stop digging your hole

[sbeckstead]

no

So maybe.

[pottymouth]

.. there's support for multiple monitors in KDE now... maybe... PLEASE!!!

I've been running 11 for a few months now and it's .... ok....

Fedora is fine

[kokoko1]

Before switching to Fedora I was using Slackware for almost two years and now I am using Fedora from last 3 and half years. I thinks Fedora is the best Distro out their, I am using it as my primary OS on my work and home laptops (F10, F11) without any issue. At work I use wireless Internet, Fedora support Intel base wireless cards out of the box, at home i use wired network. At my previous job as sysadmin (telecommute) our all servers were running xen/UML virtualization and host/guest OSs were Fedora. I remember we have to upgrade the host/guest OSs using yum and the whole process of upgrading online was easy. someitme we get into issue which get resolved in no time. So IMHO Fedora is the best Linux distro and with my past experience i do not find any issue using Fedora as Server OS.

Neither

[Daengbo]

Mod him Informative for providing release dates.

Mod him Off-topic for recommending Ubuntu in a Fedora story.

Never mod because you agree, disagree, like, or dislike a post. There are no mod options for "+1 Agree."

Yeah, I know you were making a joke (and it was cute), but this needed to be said.

Ext4

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they still have their strange definition of default (As in the default filesystem is ext4) ? Where they mean you can only install to an ext4 partition unless you waste 5 times the bandwidth downloading the install DVD rather than an install CD (and you only work out to do that after you've tried installing the CD version 3 times). I believe LVM is also the default, in the same sense.

Re:Bluetooth PAN tethering support in NetworkManag

[zdzichu]

Obviously, you are mistaken. If you do not see bluetooth PAN options, it may be: 1) BT PAN disabled/unavailable on your phone; 2) bug in NM -- google for fedora 12 network manager test day, it was tested back then.
Also notice, that BT DUN (I think more popular than PAN) networking is coming to NM after release.

"Experimental" 3D support?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Tthe R600 is two generations out of date. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but it's taken 3 years to get experimental 3D support? Am I missing something fundamental? If I'm not, that's pretty appalling turnaround regardless of development model.

Re:"Experimental" 3D support?

[int69h]

Bug fixes accepted
Writing 3d video drivers isn't exactly like banging out "hello world"

http://www.x.org/wiki/radeonhd

Re:"Experimental" 3D support?

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD/ATI only released the documentation for R600 in December 2008. Having experimental 3D support in October 2009 isn't that bad.

Re:"Experimental" 3D support?

[AdamWill]

Um. It's not, really, given that AMD has only started providing useful specifications relatively recently, and writing 3D drivers ain't exactly a walk in the park. Compare that NVIDIA is, what, 11 years old and we don't have usable open source 3D support for any of those chips yet (nouveau is getting there, though). _You_ try reverse engineering a 3D graphics card and see how far you get.

r700 and r800 are very similar to r600 as far as writing driver support goes, and AMD have provided those specs much faster, so r700 and r800 (and future generation) support should come fairly soon.

Fedora - audio done right

[Oxyde]

What I like most about Fedora - audio is done right. On Ubuntu it is a mess. Read Lennart Poettering blog to learn why.

For those complaining about Ubuntu...

[Anonymous Coward]

...being obese, did you try #!CrunchBang?
Here: http://crunchbanglinux.org/
CrunchBang is an Ubuntu-based distro that uses the mini iso install of Ubuntu and uses Openbox as a WM.