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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.'"

51 of 83 comments (clear)

  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 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.

    9. 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.

    10. 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 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]

    4. 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.
    5. 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 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).

    2. 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.

    3. 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...

    4. 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.
    5. 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.
    6. Re:Ah, Fedora by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Did you try Mageia or PCLinuxOS? How were they?

  4. 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 guygo · · Score: 1

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

    2. 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).
    3. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.
  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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
  11. 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 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.

    3. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. Fedora rulzz by messner_007 · · Score: 1

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

  14. 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
  15. 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!