Fedora Project Turns 10

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.'"

Comments

Not controlled by Red Hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not controlled by Red Hat?

[ApplePy]

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.

Re:Not controlled by Red Hat?

[Gavagai80]

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.

Fedora community effort

[real-modo]

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

10 years, now I feel old

[Neo-Rio-101]

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.

Re:Fedora's out-of-fashion problem

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[ffflala]

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.

Re:Ah, Fedora

[blackiner]

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).

User since '97

[MSG]

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

[ApplePy]

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.