Fedora Project Turns 10

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Posted by Unknown on Monday September 23, 2013 @12:05PM 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.'"

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Not controlled by Red Hat? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-23 12:10 · 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 · 2013-09-23 13:33 · 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 ApplePy · 2013-09-23 16:04 · 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.
3. Re:Not controlled by Red Hat? by kthreadd · 2013-09-23 18:37 · 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.
4. Re:Not controlled by Red Hat? by Gavagai80 · 2013-09-23 19:16 · 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.
  
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Fedora community effort by real-modo · 2013-09-23 12:23 · 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 · 2013-09-23 12:45 · 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 · 2013-09-23 13:04 · 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.
Ah, Fedora by pseudofrog · 2013-09-23 12:41 · 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 · 2013-09-23 13:45 · 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 ApplePy · 2013-09-23 16:22 · 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.
  
  --
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10 years, now I feel old by Neo-Rio-101 · 2013-09-23 12:47 · 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.

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8 Comments by noobermin · 2013-09-23 13:19 · 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.
Re:Fedora's out-of-fashion problem by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-23 13:30 · 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.
Fedora + PlanetCCRMA = audio production OS by ffflala · 2013-09-23 13:40 · 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.
Lots of trolling here in this thread by TheGoodNamesWereGone · 2013-09-23 16:27 · 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.
User since '97 by MSG · 2013-09-23 16:58 · 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.
Re:Building nVidia drivers for Fedora Core by ApplePy · 2013-09-23 18:08 · 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.