Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Fedora Project Turns 10

Posted by Unknown on from the here's-to-ten-more dept.

darthcamaro writes "It was ten years ago this past Sunday September 22nd, that the Red Hat sponsored Fedora project was born. The first Fedora release didn't come until six weeks later in November of 2003. Over the last 10 years the project has transformed itself from being entirely controlled by Red Hat to being a true community effort. In a video interview, the current Fedora Project Leader, Robyn Bergeron talks about the past and the future of Fedora. 'We need to think about how we're actually making the sausage,' Bergeron said. 'I think we can try and abstract and automate the things we have to do a lot, so our really awesome people's brains can be applied to solving problems that aren't yet automate-able.'"

83 comments

  1. Not controlled by Red Hat? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The summary implies Fedora is not under the control of Red Hat. However, since almost all the key people at the Fedora project are employees of Red Hat, I find it hard to believe Red Hat isn't running the show.

    1. Re:Not controlled by Red Hat? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You wouldn't be wrong (mostly).

      While it's true that a lot of the development work targeted to a specific Fedora release (just look at their Feature Lists in the planning part of the wiki) is led by Red Hat employees it's also true that anyone can propose and work on any feature they want.

      It's no coincidence that a lot of the features listed in each release in the past 2-4 years can be tied back to general enterprise features, after all Virtualization is one of Red Hat's main public focuses at the moment. The last 3 Fedora Project Leaders were selected from the community and then hired by Red Hat to perform that role, it's not Red Hat planting their own people in. The seemly control over the project only comes from the sheer number of Red Hat employees working on the 'upstream' of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

      Of course, when you look at the most vocal contributors within the project, you could also argue that Red Hat do control the project, most of the controversial features and decisions (that also often impact other distributions) do come from Red Hat employees, and due to the vocalness/ideologies of the few, the many are ignored.

    2. Re:Not controlled by Red Hat? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      So what if it's controlled by Redhat? That's a good thing! Hell of a lot better than distros ruled by some egomaniac dickhead or circlekjerk committee of autistic freaks.

      There was a time when geeks actually liked stuff that worked well but around here with all the hate I see spewing for Apple and Redhat (the two biggest UNIX vendors) it seems like geeks have become so afflicted with oppositional defiance disorder that they put scoring cheap points against some "man" ahead of the most advanced technology. Grow up man.

    3. Re:Not controlled by Red Hat? by rubycodez · · Score: 1, Interesting

      we're not talking about red hat linux, we're talking about fedora. see, that's the problem. red hat gave all of us who introduced linux into the enterprise the finger and said we couldn't use red hat at home or on a trial machine at work. they locked down their update repository to only paid subscribed machines, quite unlike the other leading distros and not in the spirit of open source. After all, money should be made on *support*, not access to code. then, to add insult to injury, red hat made fedora a separate distro so people could be guinea pigs for trail balloons and random brain farts of red hat.

      so people like me, who administer hundreds of servers, dumped red hat. I've actively been phasing out redhat on hundreds of servers in favor of two other distributions at my employer who has over a million users. At my last employer, I lead the same effort, with clients who have billion dollar plus IT budgets. I'd like to introduce you, red hat, to a little known Dr. Dolittle character, the fuck me?-fuck you!

    4. Re:Not controlled by Red Hat? by ApplePy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      so people like me, who administer hundreds of servers, dumped red hat. I've actively been phasing out redhat on hundreds of servers in favor of two other distributions at my employer who has over a million users. At my last employer, I lead the same effort, with clients who have billion dollar plus IT budgets.

      Seems to me those are the types of companies with the types of budgets that can both pay for RedHat's subscriptions, and benefit from them.

      And it should be mutual... as I understand it, Red Hat *Enterprise* Linux is geared toward just that target market. As handsomely paid as I'm sure you are, I'm not sure why I'm picking up a tone of sour grapes in your post. Also, if you want RHEL for free, there is CentOS... which is still based on work done by the evil Red Hat Corporation.

      And really, it's not that much different than the business model of other Linux companies. SuSE doesn't give you their enterprise stuff for free, nor does Ubuntu. None of it bothers me. As far as I'm concerned, Linux has always been free for nerds... and someday, when my company has a billion-dollar budget to upgrade our cloud, we'll no doubt be writing checks, happily, to RedHat.

      --
      That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
    5. Re:Not controlled by Red Hat? by kthreadd · · Score: 2

      The summary implies Fedora is not under the control of Red Hat. However, since almost all the key people at the Fedora project are employees of Red Hat, I find it hard to believe Red Hat isn't running the show.

      Fedora is not controlled by Red Hat, but Red Hat is a large contributor to Fedora and thus has a large de facto control over Fedora.

    6. Re:Not controlled by Red Hat? by Gavagai80 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sheesh, there's nothing wrong with Red Hat tying their brand name to only what they're providing support for. You're perfectly free to install CentOS if you want RHEL without support, and Red Hat is perfectly free to not want their name on it or for their reputation to take the hit when you can't make something work without the support.

      --
      This space intentionally left blank
    7. Re:Not controlled by Red Hat? by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 1

      I felt the same way ten years ago. I've come to accept the state of affairs. Fedora isn't bad at all for a workstation, and in fact, much more useful than RHEL Desktop, due to the newer packages available.

      Out of curiosity, what are you switching all of those servers to?

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    8. Re:Not controlled by Red Hat? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So what if it's controlled by Redhat? That's a good thing! Hell of a lot better than distros ruled by some egomaniac dickhead or circlekjerk committee of autistic freaks.

      And how is that different from fedora? The Advisory Board chairman is a RedHat employee chosen by RedHat who can veto any decision make by the board. 4 members are appointed and the other 5 are elected. The 4 appointees are guaranteed Red Hat acolytes and the other 5 elected members usually are filled in with an assortment of RedHat employees and other "circlejerks". But this board isn't really all that important since they do not have any meaningful say over what technologies (usually RedHat originated) will be included in future releases. That's where the Fedora Engineering Steering Committe comes in. It makes all the technical decisions about the direction of the project and thus holds the real power over it. This committee is entirely made up of RedHat employees. In addition, every fedora project lead has been a Red Hat employee. The whole "Fedora is a community driven project" is an utter lie. Just like it is for Gnome. Both these "community projects" serve the corporate goals of Red Hat. You'd have to be fool not to see that.

    9. Re:Not controlled by Red Hat? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "we're not talking about red hat linux, we're talking about fedora. see, that's the problem. red hat gave all of us who introduced linux into the enterprise the finger and said we couldn't use red hat at home or on a trial machine at work."

      Fedora is free to use at home and at work.

      ". they locked down their update repository to only paid subscribed machines, quite unlike the other leading distros and not in the spirit of open source. "

      Fedora updates are free, just like like other leading distros and they are free in both senses of the word (beer, speech).

      " After all, money should be made on *support*, not access to code. then, to add insult to injury, red hat made fedora a separate distro so people could be guinea pigs for trail balloons and random brain farts of red hat."

      Yes, Fedora is a free distribution. Remember, release early, release often. That's the beauty of the bazaar: throw everything out to the crowds and see what happens. If you don't agree with that there's Microsoft and Apple who still use the rigid control model (nothing wrong with that, but it's not the Linux model).

      "so people like me, who administer hundreds of servers, dumped red hat."

      Is this unusual? I administer *thousands*. That's thousands per admin, which is way more than the 50-60 industry norms.

      " I've actively been phasing out redhat on hundreds of servers in favor of two other distributions at my employer who has over a million users. "

      Good for you. Ain't choice grand? Good thing that over the past few years, Red Hat has been one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel making many of those enterprise features available to all. But I though you were talking about Fedora, not Red Hat.

      " At my last employer, I lead the same effort, with clients who have billion dollar plus IT budgets."

      That's wonderful! My IT budget is smaller. Our overall IT budget, yes, is in the hundreds of millions, but I manage only about $3M. With that $3M I need to support several VMWare clusters, remote offices and data centers, over 200 developers, 50 applications, 50,000 users a day on the web systems, training, research and maintenance. My budget is actually one of the smallest in the company but I'm proud to say we get lots done with it. But I digress. Your efforts at those previous billion dollar companies (and there are only a few) appear to have been in vain, as all of them have increased their Red Hat footprint in previous years. Oh well, maybe next time.

    10. Re:Not controlled by Red Hat? by someSnarkyBastard · · Score: 1

      Rebuttal: RHEL derived Linuxes such as CentOS and Scientific Linux are actually able to maintain binary compatibility with RHEL They have access to the same source as the paying customers, they just don't get the updates quite as fast because of the delay between Read Hat publishing the patch and the third-party package maintainers compiling and uploading said patch to their respective repositories.

      Fedora has always billed itself a test-bed for new, potentially unstable technologies. You don't want potentially broken packages? Don't use Fedora.

    11. Re:Not controlled by Red Hat? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      That's one of the reasons Linux used to be perceived as business hostile - people who are in no way contributing to Red Hat's top nor bottom line making demands of what Red Hat should do. Red Hat deserves credit for figuring out how to make a profitable business out of Linux, and send the freeloaders elsewhere. I'm not sure what purpose Fedora really serves - Red Hat could just as easily have partnered w/ Debian for its development inputs, and embraced competing technologies, such as apt.

      One thing that the 'free software' crowd needs to get is that selling services is not always the only way of making money - companies need to be able to make money from selling software as well, and even GPL3 allows it. Red Hat deserves credit for figuring out how. Those who refuse to pay can always just download something like Mint or Trisquel and run w/ it.

    12. Re:Not controlled by Red Hat? by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      rebuttal, Red Hat obsfuscates the build process so users of Centos and Scientific Linux are at risk. Red hat, just say no.

  2. Fedora community effort by real-modo · · Score: 4, Funny

    I commend the Fedora project for sustaining and growing the popularity... of Arch Linux, Linux Mint, and Debian. Good community spirit, people!

    1. Re:Fedora community effort by amiga3D · · Score: 2

      I've been running Fedora 19 for a few weeks now and it just doesn't feel as smooth as PClinux OS did on this machine. It has been stable but then it's been years since I've had a linux distro that wasn't stable. It's not that it's bad, it just isn't as good as some other distros I've tried. I know one thing, the recent trend in linux desktops I do not like. I think Ubuntu right before they dived into unity had about the best desktop of ANY operating system. Then they proceeded to fuck it up. The fedora desktop makes unity look.....slightly less shitty.

    2. Re:Fedora community effort by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yea- I agree. I can't imagine touching Fedora, CentOS, or RHEL. I congratulate Redhat on there contributions and will stop there. When Debian came into being they fixed the RPM problem. When Linspire came into being they fixed the ease of use problem, when Ubuntu became popular they fixed the integration and support issues, and now we are left with a fairly stable although tad buggy set of distribution derived from Ubuntu with bad to acceptable set of desktops. If I could combine what we have today KDE 3.x alongside decent easy file / application search I'd be in heaven. KDE 3.x has some nice features related to Konqueror. You could type alt+f2 and then enter gg: for google search or dict: to look up a word. Very convenient. Amongst other abbreviations. I'd probably ditch Konqueror today for a webkit based browser or firefox. The main issue I see today is the lack of support for free software. I think Trisquel and the FSF have it right. We need to say 'no' to the inundation of non-free software. It's hindering support and turning GNU/Linux into an even worse version of Microsoft Windows. Fortunately you can at least work around it in the hardware arena by buying only free software friendly hardware (ThinkPenguin makes it easy). The problem then only lies with stupid plug-ins like Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, and a few other things.

    3. Re:Fedora community effort by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No kidding, Red Hate/Fedora sucks. That package system, what is it, Red Plugging Mucus. Yesh, it sucks.

    4. Re:Fedora community effort by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Konqueror is WebKit based. Konqueror used KHTML. Apple took KHTML and created WebKit. Nokia took WebKit and put it in QT. Konqueror now uses WebKit from QT.

    5. Re:Fedora community effort by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I agree - I first used Fedora Core 3, and like it because it gave me fantastic control over what was installed, how it was installed, and what filesystem it was installed on. My wife's Win XP laptop took a dump and refused to first network, and then stopped booting. I installed Fedora 19, hoping to relive the experience of the earlier distributions - god, what a mistake. I am now looking at ANY OTHER distribution; the Fedora 19 desktop sucks diseased ass, to put it mildly - plus, you have almost zero control over the installation, or the file system, or what default packages are loaded. I might as well have purchased Windows 8 - it sucks, too, but doesn't pretend to give you a choice, it just is...

    6. Re:Fedora community effort by real-modo · · Score: 1

      I know one thing, the recent trend in linux desktops I do not like. I think Ubuntu right before they dived into unity had about the best desktop of ANY operating system. Then they proceeded to fuck it up. The fedora desktop makes unity look.....slightly less shitty.

      I agree with all of that.

      [lawn mode] I remember using fvwm and Nextstep back in the early oughts... Those were the days, when there was so much promise, so much potential in desktop environments. It was all in front of us, still to do. And the people seemed so talented...

      It all went wrong in 2010, it seemed. Probably earlier, in reality.

      [lawn mode off]

    7. Re:Fedora community effort by sodul · · Score: 0

      I commend the Fedora project for sustaining and growing the popularity... of Arch Linux, Linux Mint, and Debian. Good community spirit, people!

      I second that. I started using linux on PPC (Suse on a PowerMac G4) back in 2000. Then used RedHat at work, started using Fedora at home. Dependency hell was a nightmare, especially the upgrades from Fedora 1 to 2 then 3 !!!! Everything including X and drivers had to be reconfigured all over again. Switched to Debian just after Fedora 3, then to Ubuntu around 2007. Still use Ubuntu server every day.

      I had to use RedHat at work in recent years and every time it is dependency hell all over again. Even with paid support we still had major pains with it.
      With Ubuntu I get 99%+ of the packages I need without having to recompile the world. I don't care for Unity since I use Ubuntu as a solid server system that has a large set of supported packages that all work together and are not many years obsolete (yes I look at you RedHat). For the little Linux UI needs I have I'm very happy with Lubuntu (runs very nicely on a 256MB RAM VM).

    8. Re: Fedora community effort by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Please tell us why it sucks.

    9. Re:Fedora community effort by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 1

      Konq can use webkit, or it can continue to use KHTML. Its a config option. I'm not sure what the default is.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    10. Re:Fedora community effort by yanyan · · Score: 1

      I started out with Gnome when i first discovered Linux in 1997. In my first job in 2000, my time was split between KDE, which i used at work, and Gnome, which i used at home. Soon after i switched to Fluxbox and never looked at anything else.

      It's a shame what's happened to the Linux desktop. All that potential slowly going to waste, what with the "let's clone the windoze UI" and big egos and community squabbles and no sense of direction.

  3. Ah, Fedora by pseudofrog · · Score: 2

    There are many, many things I love about it. Looks great, decent community support, supported by a company that does many good things for Linux.

    But, once again, I had an installation that failed to boot after an update last week. It's just too bleeding-edge for my tastes, and it has a tendency to have rough edges. Back on Mint (KDE), which lets me leech off of Ubuntu's repos without feeling dirty.

    Still, glad it's around, and I'll inevitably try it again in the future.

    1. Re:Ah, Fedora by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That interview with Robyn is close to proof that the Fedora team smokes altogether way too much pot to be supporting a distribution, that might be part of the problem.

      Paraphrased starting around 2:20 in the interview:

      "Um, interesting, you know, yeah, I think some of that is, er, I... don't recall anybody, uh, asking for that, really. I mean, if you want to buy a thing in the cloud, then, well, yeah... like, for some people, a year is, like fine, but, you know..."

    2. Re:Ah, Fedora by blackiner · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I pretty much have had the opposite experience... I decided to try fedora out on my main machine after 19 came out and I was pretty impressed. It never fails to boot, no app crashes, everything is stable and fast. Upgrades have been installing just fine too, I was getting tired of the hastle of maintaining Gentoo, and Ubuntu has given me kernel oopses stalling the entire boot process since it is so slow to upgrade the kernel.

      Ah, actually I just remembered I DID have a failed boot, last week too. That was when fedora upgraded to 3.11... basically, the nvidia driver is incompatible at the moment. Any chance you are using the blob drivers? And yeah I guess this makes my previous statements seem a little silly... (I do kind of consider it an nvidia problem though, as you can't get the blob driver from official fedora repos).

    3. Re:Ah, Fedora by pseudofrog · · Score: 1

      Nope, Intel graphics. The switch was during the move to 3.11, although the 3.10 version didn't boot either.

      I was also disto-hopping quite a bit to find out which KDE's installation worked best out-of-the-box (Gnome 3 devs finally pissed me off enough to give up despite my positive feelings toward the overall environment, and Cinnamon just doesn't do it for me quite yet). Fedora's KDE environment was actually quite nice -- it handles docking/undocking my laptop with a second monitor best, and it provided the best hardware support.

      I'd still like to make Fedora my go-to distro, but it's just on the side of too unstable for me right now. It just needs to be a tiny bit more conservative and I'll be back.

    4. Re:Ah, Fedora by blackiner · · Score: 1

      Ah sorry to hear that, hope you enjoy Mint at least! Also, gentoo is ridiculously good at packaging KDE, pretty stable even if you use stable packages, but that distro is a bit of a... committment...

    5. Re:Ah, Fedora by ApplePy · · Score: 2

      That, right there, is my biggest beef with Fedora -- they push out kernel updates in the repos without waiting for nvidia modules to match. Of course, akmod solves that problem, but it's definitely one bugaboo of having to get drivers from rpmfusion instead of them being a part of the main repo. They were doing better for a while, but recently, the problem is back. What was it, over a week, the nvidia module was behind? All it would take is a little communication and coordination, I should think.

      Fedora is indeed superior on external monitors for laptops, but since I use my laptops for field work, I don't like having to dick with them, never knowing when some update is going to break something. I don't have time for it. I run Mint on the laptops now. One with Cinnamon, one with KDE. Going to KDE on the second one, too, soon as I get a new SSD for it. Never, ever, ever liked Gnome. Mint is polished, stable, usable by non-techies, and I feel good about migrating Windows users to it.

      Fedora is still my go-to non-GUI server distro though... as long as I stay a version behind. I've gotten used to the structures of Fedora since the days of FC3, and I suppose it's more habit than anything.

      --
      That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
    6. Re:Ah, Fedora by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Back on Mint (KDE), which lets me leech off of Ubuntu's repos without feeling dirty.

      As if using KDE wouldn't make you feel dirty. It's the nerds' ultimate wet dream of UI design, completely incoherent mess for ordinary users.

      That being said, there's nothing wrong in you being nerd, and this is a (super-)nerds only news web site. Just keep that in mind. Most (like 95%) of computer users on this planet have no formal education for using them, and just want things to be usable. Super customizable panelbuttonhell isn't that. It's for special interest group users like you.

    7. Re:Ah, Fedora by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, you have 4 tiers of options as I see it. If you want to try the bleeding edge, submit (many) bug reports and help the community from that angle, run fedora-current. If you want to avoid the worst bugs, but dont mind submitting a bug report here and there but mainly just want to use it, then use the previous fedora release (current and last are supported). If you want a long support lifecycle, and are a small player or medium player who wants a free distro and can look after yourself - use centos. If you work for a cashed up large business and want to pay for priority support from redhat, then get RHEL. Its a model that works for many, including me. I run centos on production servers at work, and fedora-previous on my workstation.

    8. Re:Ah, Fedora by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 1

      You have a lot of moving parts to keep in sync to keep binary blob video drivers working in fedora, kernel updates, xorg updates and the drivers themselves. I don't see why a distro should reward a binary driver company for their bad behavior and punish firms like intel ( and amd which occasionally does some work on the open source driver) that publish source. As a user of the source drivers, I'd rather not have them coordinate anything. If nvidia wants to keep up, they should all fedora development is in the open. Its not a mystery when they are doing things.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    9. Re:Ah, Fedora by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Did you try Mageia or PCLinuxOS? How were they?

  4. Fedora community effort by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    I commend the Fedora project for sustaining and growing the popularity... of Arch Linux, Linux Mint, and Debian. Good community spirit, people!

  5. 10 years, now I feel old by Neo-Rio-101 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I remember installing the first Fedora on my Pentium 4 machine with 1G of RAM.

    Ten years ago!? Say it ain't so. Feels like only yesterday.

    --
    READY.
    PRINT ""+-0
    1. Re:10 years, now I feel old by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I remember installing Linux 20+ years ago. Ah, Slackware and your 2 foot tall stack of 1.44" floppies downloaded off Fido Net over the course of several weeks.

    2. Re:10 years, now I feel old by guygo · · Score: 1

      I'm with you! I started with FC3... yow!

    3. Re:10 years, now I feel old by antdude · · Score: 1

      I remember Red Hat Linux (v5-v7; bad v8!) before Fedora! I think I ran them on original Pentium 1s and AMD XP Athons.

      --
      Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
    4. Re:10 years, now I feel old by NJRoadfan · · Score: 1

      It likely doesn't feel that long because Pentium 4 machines from that time frame are STILL in service for day-to-day use. Yet back in 2003 it wasn't all that common to see machines from 1993 still in service for day-to-day use. I can't say I have ever used Fedora Core, just the early Red Hat Linux (4.x-6.x) and CentOS.

  6. what an unfortunate name... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    *tips fedora*

  7. 8 Comments by noobermin · · Score: 2

    Great job slashdot! 10 years for a significant linux distro and even if it isn't your choice, it is historically significant in that regard. These comment threads are riveting!
    May be we should have inserted some bit about the government or liberals or guns into this article to get some clicks.

    I for one, congradulate them and wish them the best.

    1. Re:8 Comments by sv_libertarian · · Score: 1

      I'm a gun owner and I use Fedora.

    2. Re:8 Comments by real-modo · · Score: 1

      Anonymous congratulations, the best kind. Almost as good as anonymous insults.

      Already congratulated them. Good esprit de corps, pity about the project guidance, software, and documentation.

      Tried Fedora back when it was still Red Hat, community edition or some such. The installer was good. That was the high point, though. Persevered about two months, and then went back to FreeBSD for a while. I read reviews from time to time, and comments here, check out the web site... and see no reason to try Fedora again.

  8. Fedora's out-of-fashion problem by Mister+Liberty · · Score: 1

    Fedora. Installed it once -- not for myself. Supposed to be rock solid.
    Maybe so, but the corrollary was -- a bit of stifness, old hat (pun
    intended), -- in short: not very HIP, COOL, SIZZLING.

    If Fedora could get that, a bit of grease and pizzazz, I would try it
    (albeit on a VM first).

    Anyways -- as it is: sincere congratulations!

    1. Re:Fedora's out-of-fashion problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Doesn't sound like you know what you're talking about, bro. Fedora has the most bleeding edge shit of any distro but of course at the expense of stability and compatibility...maybe you installed Debian by accident or something.

    2. Re:Fedora's out-of-fashion problem by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 1

      Or, if you are coming form arch, I could see it being a bit old.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
  9. A skunk works project is underway by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    so that by this time next year, Fedora Project can turn it up to 11!

  10. Fedora + PlanetCCRMA = audio production OS by ffflala · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Installing the PlanetCCRMA http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/ collection of packages on Fedora has been my preferred open source audio production installation for quite some time. There isn't really all that much in the way of audio production distros, I guess because a real-time kernel is necessary for audio multitracking, which presents a lot of problem for most other use cases.

    This has been one area where Fedora has consistently stood out among its peers. For a short time, Ubuntu Studio was almost the perfect fit for this niche, but the complete incorporation of an early, incomplete, and buggy PulseAudio killed that chance.

    I think that dates to around Fedora 7 or 8. Since then, I have yet to come across a cleaner & more efficient combination for Linux based multitrack audio production.

    1. Re:Fedora + PlanetCCRMA = audio production OS by ffflala · · Score: 1

      I imagine there were some people who rejected the terrible production of the early Louis Armstrong recordings, too.

    2. Re:Fedora + PlanetCCRMA = audio production OS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      oh, that is silly to say.
      Have you ever used Ardour?
      Or the incredible JACK?
      You know a Mac isn't better for someone who values Freedom, and Music production.
      Some musicians simply don't like to be chained up. That is why we are free to choose. Enjoy using your Mac, but don't be so naive on Slashdot.

    3. Re:Fedora + PlanetCCRMA = audio production OS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you want an "audio production OS" by a fucking Mac

      Mac will soon dead as a serious desktop/laptop platform. Apple is bent on turning OS X into a walled garden dumbed down iOS style toy. They don't care about power users anymore.
      It would be very stupid to centre any sort of new semi-pro setup on a platform like this with a very limited life.

    4. Re:Fedora + PlanetCCRMA = audio production OS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Try to get out of your mom's basement once in while, moron.

  11. fedora sux as bad as i thought it would by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You think i'm trolling? Have you suffered through 10 years of redhat red headed stepchild syndrome?
    NOBODY uses this distro for anything useful. It's a linux masturbation playground for people to cheap to get red hat certified.

  12. You mean it gets worse? by ulatekh · · Score: 1

    So what if it's controlled by Redhat? That's a good thing! Hell of a lot better than distros ruled by some egomaniac dickhead or circlekjerk committee of autistic freaks.

    You mean there are distros where the rulers are bigger jerks than the ones running Fedora? God forbid.

    Recently I had some spare time to devote to open-source programming (*cough* unemployed *cough*), and part of it involved submitting several packages to Fedora. One guy went ape shit on me and accused me of "spamming the review queue". I've learned to expect apathy from the maintainers of open-source projects, but outright hostility?! Holy crap. Then I had another run-in with another jerk who couldn't have possibly been more small-minded and mean-spirited. (I remember both of their nicks, but am withholding them to protect the guilty or whatever).

    After that, I lost all desire to contribute. I have to put up with enough pointless vitriol at work; there's no way in hell I'm going to put up with it in my free time.

    If the Fedora people are considered relatively pleasant compared to other maintainers...then I'll be finding something else to do in my retirement. I was going to write lots of open-source code. The hell with that.

    --
    "Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
    1. Re:You mean it gets worse? by idunham · · Score: 1

      I haven't seen any behavior like that in Debian or Ubuntu, and suspect that PP is referring to the product rather than the means.

      I expect that when PP refers to "egomaniac" he has Shuttleworth's comments about Canonical-developed software vs. other software (mostly RedHat, by chance) in mind.
      As far as getting along with the maintainers goes, Ubuntu's certainly not bad.
      But he doesn't agree with the decisions they make, so he thinks they suck.
      [flamebait]
      Frankly, I think that unity and gnome-shell are both misconcieved abominations, and KDE, Xfce, and Gnome 2 all seemed somewhat like shovelware.
      IceWM is the best window manager, and who needs a desktop? They always end up getting loads of garbage thrown on them.
      System init sucks in one way or another, all the time, though I'd rather use * + OpenRC or an LSB-conformant system atop sysvinit or kin than either upstart or systemd.
      Those who get annoyed by Canonical working on Upstart have probably forgotten their history by now...
      [/flamebait]
      (It's good when it's fast, but it's important to be able to see how it works. No, "You can get the source if you want. You'ld better know C well." is not all there is to seeing how it works. Give me a script I can read.)

      For "circlejerk committee..." I suspect he means either Debian or Gentoo. And I can't speak about Gentoo.
      For Debian though, I'm more pleased with what the Debian developers come up with than with Red Hat.
      Now that some of the old Debian developers have moved on and there are several contributors from Canonical, the average seems to be fairly tolerable.
      You will really draw fire if you are persistent in disagreeing and not persuasive, or if you phrase things in a provocative way. Debian users and developers all seem to go by the rule "flaming where flaming is due," and are well able to dish it out. But it's quite possible to avoid that.

      Now if he meant to refer to Arch, ....

    2. Re:You mean it gets worse? by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      One guy went ape shit on me and accused me of "spamming the review queue". I've learned to expect apathy from the maintainers of open-source projects, but outright hostility?!

      It's not the first time I hear this story. The hostility of OSS people seems to be a recurring thing. I think it might already be time to find out why this phenomenon happens and whether the situation could be improved somehow.

    3. Re: You mean it gets worse? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Package reviews are handled basically in a peer-to-peer fashion. One reviewer's actions don't really speak to the project itself.

  13. Lots of trolling here in this thread by TheGoodNamesWereGone · · Score: 2

    Ya pays yer money and gets what yer pays fer. Perhaps a bad analogy, as Fedora is free. But it's positioned itself as a bleeding edge distro so there're going to be rough edges, and anyone who installs it knows this beforehand. I have plenty of complaints about Red Hat, but the Fedora people deserve praise IMHO.

  14. Building nVidia drivers for Fedora Core by ulatekh · · Score: 1

    I DID have a failed boot, last week too. That was when fedora upgraded to 3.11... basically, the nvidia driver is incompatible at the moment.

    Yeah, the nVidia drivers don't always make a timely appearance in RPMFusion, do they.

    Not to worry. Boot into the version of the kernel without an nVidia driver, download the source to buildsys-build-rpmfusion (i.e. "yumdownloader --source buildsys-build-rpmfusion"), install it, edit SOURCES/buildsys-build-rpmfusion-kerneldevpkgs-current so that they match the version of the kernel you're building for, then build and install/upgrade buildsys-build-rpmfusion and buildsys-build-rpmfusion-kerneldevpkgs-current. (Use "yum-builddep SPECS/buildsys-build-rpmfusion.spec" to install the build dependencies, if necessary, before building.)

    Then download the nvidia-kmod sources applicable to your video card (my current one takes "nvidia-kmod-304xx"), build it, and install the packages you need. (It'll build more than you need.)

    Voila, nVidia drivers for your current kernel.

    I had to do this twice recently, for kernels 3.10.10 and 3.10.11 (on FC18).

    --
    "Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
    1. Re:Building nVidia drivers for Fedora Core by ApplePy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yikes! If it were that complex, I'd have dropped Fedora already. It's a bit simpler than that, luckily...

      yum install akmod-nvidia

      As long as you have kernel-devel, akmod will build your driver when you boot your new kernel.

      --
      That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
    2. Re:Building nVidia drivers for Fedora Core by ulatekh · · Score: 1

      Sigh...I long for a geekier time, when those instructions wouldn't have been considered complex.

      Still...thanks for the heads-up on akmod-nvidia (or, for me, akmod-nvidia-304xx). Worked like a charm!

      --
      "Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
  15. User since '97 by MSG · · Score: 4, Insightful

    My first Linux distro was Slackware, and it was damn educational. I had to do a lot of stuff on my own. A little less than a year later, I tried Red Hat Linux (4.2) and never turned back.

    I tried Debian a few times early on, and the system would always break when I applied updates. Break, as in, it would either no longer boot or I could no longer log in.

    Debian was what I wanted in a distribution: committed to Free Software. Red Hat angered a lot of users when it split off Fedora, but I never understood that. Fedora was the distribution that I wanted Red Hat to be. Free Software and community driven. Since apt and yum came into the picture, Red Hat's distribution has been the best of the bunch. The company maintains their commitment to Free Software, releasing the code to acquisition after acquisition, and leads all others in developing GNU/Linux.

    Thank you Red Hat. There are too many negative comments here. I love Fedora.

    1. Re:User since '97 by Burz · · Score: 1

      Fedora overheats my laptops and gets other hardware issues wrong besides. I wish Qubes weren't based on it, but the project leaders would rather have jobs/contracts with RedHat than Canonical.

    2. Re:User since '97 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My first Linux distro was Slackware, and it was damn educational. I had to do a lot of stuff on my own. A little less than a year later, I tried Red Hat Linux (4.2) and never turned back.

      I tried Debian a few times early on, and the system would always break when I applied updates. Break, as in, it would either no longer boot or I could no longer log in.

      That's hilarious because that's why I stopped using Redhat. I upgraded I think it was from 7 or 8 to 9, and due to a weak password could no longer log in. No warning in the docs. Just tightened security controls that meant the password was rejected not just on change but also at login. This was when PAM (pluggable authentication module) was introduced. I did get the system running again, but I stayed on that version for the life of the system and booted into it less and less.

      These days I run Windows 7 with VMs when I want to play with Linux stuff. Only way to go if I want to run certain software.

    3. Re:User since '97 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My first Linux distro was Red Hat 5.2, which was certainly usable (after some some xf86config magic), but made me want to claw my eyes out after getting stuck in dependency hell when installing almost whatever. Also, being on dial-up, this was quite a nuisance, since the "oh, you also need this package" info meant constant interruptions before a program was ready to run.

      When I tried Debian 3 I was just blown away by apt-get. I take care of a Fedora server in an organization, and it works equally well as per dependencies now, but Debian won a place in my heart by being the first distro that actually felt easy to use (I never understood its reputation as "hardcore", which lingers even now to some respect).

      So, I guess the moral is that our images of distributions are often formed after how they felt when we first encountered them. I can definitely say that Red Hat single-handedly put Linux on the map for me, so their contribution has been of utmost importance for me in this regard.

    4. Re:User since '97 by MSG · · Score: 1

      Your recollection is off. PAM was in the distribution at least as early as version 4, and has never checked complexity at login. The old cracklib module that was used to check complexity doesn't even offer that service.

    5. Re:User since '97 by MSG · · Score: 1

      OK, so there were two things I wanted Red Hat to have that Debian did, back then: more community involvement and apt.

      Apt came along eventually, and then was replaced by yum.

      At the same time, there were a lot of things that I liked better about RPM. RPM packages were PGP signed long before debs. As far as I could tell from the documentation, debs were either all or mostly built by hand where RPM packages were built using a script included in the src.rpm. Last, Debian used to have mirrors for everything except for updates that fixed security problems. I never could make any sense of that; it seemed completely backward.

  16. Calling it a community effort is a joke, right? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Anyone visiting the so-called community knows it's not only controlled and shadow-driven by RedHat, it's really violently against anything that could not help RedHat explicitly. Fixing bugs? You gotta be kidding me. Not unless RH or a RH customer has an issue.

    It's a joke.

    Ubuntu is even worse, but calling the acerbic Fedora a "community" is a joke.

  17. Fedora still comes with proprietary firmware? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#Fedora

    I can kinda sorta grudgingly see why Linux would accept such firmware when it was new and unimportant. Now it could easily demand free firmware and the hardware makers would comply in a heartbeat. It's time to kick the proprietary firmwares to the curb where they belong.

    Fedora should join the effort.

    1. Re:Fedora still comes with proprietary firmware? by kthreadd · · Score: 1

      Yes. Fedora has the policy that the firmware it includes does not have to be free software, it only has to be freely redistributed without restrictions.

  18. Fedora rulzz by messner_007 · · Score: 1

    I am a happy user of Fedora from Core 1 ... a beautiful distro ....

  19. Happy Birthday, Fedora! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Congratulations to everyone at RH who has kept this going for a decade. And to all of the community members who take FC and turn it into something like a usable distribution. Maintaining a distribution like this for ten years is a great achievement.

    That said, it is now about ten years since I've used Fedora. FC1 didn't actually boot (they shipped with a broken kernel, I think-or maybe it was a bad version of grub?). It didn't play nice with XFS. Upgrading from RH9 was...interesting. Things were almost working by the time FC2 came out, which unfortunately reset the broken-meter. I decided I didn't want to be an unpaid beta-tester for RH, and haven't used it since.

    I guess release engineering was never really the strong suit of any distro, but I credit Fedora with pioneering the "continuously broken" release cycle which was later successfully copied by openSUSE and, latterly, Mozilla. Would that they had patented it (perhaps as a business method?), and threatened to sue anyone who implemented release-first test-never without licensing it from them!

    More seriously, FC obviously fills a niche, both for RH, who gets to use it as a testbed for RHEL, and for its users, who get to play with the latest software (whether it works or not). As much as people used to bemoan the platform fragmentation (back when they were still waiting for the year of the linux desktop), I've always thought progress depended on diversity, and the survival of a community-accessible RH-compatible distribution clearly contributes to that.

    Can we have some hat-shaped cupcakes?

  20. Fedora contributions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Haaaa, fedora, the portal to hell that brought us pulseaudio, systemd, plan to remove cron, syslog, decided to fsckup the filesystem hierachy they forced into the standards... well the very source of many of the things that made me give up on gnu/linux. It doesn't look this is going to end soon, I expect they decide to use a dbus based service to manage network communications and rewrite the kernel in glib objects.

  21. To the tune of Itchy and Scratchy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They break and break
    and break and break and break
    the Red Hat Fedora show!

    I used to like Fedora. Until recently, when their mission seems to be to break anything and everything that has worked and been stable for years. System startup, Gnome, how to upgrade, compatibility with two previous versions - it gets broken.

  22. Love it by RedHackTea · · Score: 1

    I used to be an Ubuntu & Linux Mint fanboy, but I am all Fedora these days, baby! And if you don't like GNOME, Fedora makes it pretty easy with Package Collections to install LXDE, MATE, Cinnamon, etc. I really don't know why people complain about systemd or SELinux. For systemd, you'll only need to use "systemctl status/stop/start X" and hostnamectl or read the nice Wiki page on how to create a service. For SELinux, just realize that it's all about labels. For samba shares, stamp folders/files with a special label; for root/home, stamp folders/files with a special label. The main reason I switched is stability. Eventually, my Ubuntu or Mint install would start getting glitchy from updates (just standard "apt-get update/upgrade", no "dist-upgrade"), and I'd have to find the problem and downgrade/remove it. The main glitches for Fedora are in GNOME, not the underlying system. As far as old computers, I use SliTaz or Lubuntu.

    --
    The G
  23. redhat are commies! by Nuclear+CLA+Boy · · Score: 1

    redhat should add CLA and pay more attension to the POWER-users!

    --
    CLA is always preferred by any POWER-user!
  24. Sausage Brains by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "We need to think about how we're actually making the sausage,' Bergeron said. 'I think we can try and abstract and automate the things we have to do a lot, so our really awesome people's brains can be applied to solving problems that aren't yet automate-able."

  25. Keep coming back to Fedora by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I started out on RedHat 6.2. That was quite some time ago, and since then I have tried just about every distro out there (even rolled my own based on slackware for a short time), but for some reason I keep coming back to Fedora. It's not like Ubuntu or OpenSuse that both have a slick user experience from the start. However, when you go under the hood, you still still get what you expect (something you get with slackware and debian, but (IMO) not with Ubuntu and OpenSuse).

    It's not like i'd ever install it on a server, but for my pretty vanilla desktop needs it does what it has to. I like all the additions, despite most of the bad rep they have gotten (Systemd is great, firewalld, PuleAudio (disabled it in the beginning though. Now it works like a charm), SELinux is nicer than Apparmor (up until recently I disabled both though), and pokit). Heck, I even like yum...

    They are doing most things right, and I don't really have to care any more. Where most distros had a tendency to get in my face everytime I tried to get shit done, Fedora stays out of the way. I just don't do a sysupgrade when I have a deadline.

  26. A decade of shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Grats on the 10 years of shit