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Fedora 20 Released
sfcrazy writes "The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora 20, code named Heisenbug (release notes). Fedora 20 is dedicated to Seth Vidal, the lead developer of Yum and the Fedora update repository, who recently died in a road accident. Gnome is the default DE of Fedora, and so it is for Fedora 20. However unlike Ubuntu (where they had to create different distros for each DE) Fedora comes with KDE, XFCE, LXDE and MATE. You can install the DE of your choice on top of base Fedora."
Heisenbug - nice. A fitting name for a bleeding edge distro.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Are you certain?
..releases of Redhat you had to watch like a hawk again?
I've a spare motherboard and some HDs kicking around, maybe I'll have a go at installing a Redhat descendant for the first time in well over a decade (Has it really been that long a time?..ye gods..'one day you'll find' and all that.)
Can't you do that on Ubuntu too? I thought the different distros really were just installation defaults.
Wait, what? You can't install DEs of your choice on Ubuntu? o_O
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
There has been a minimal Ubuntu install that you can then install your DE of choice on top of since at least 8.04.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora
And even if you install Unity-flavored Ubuntu and want to switch to, say, Cinnamon, just add the PPA and go.
Not sure why Ubuntu is even mentioned in the summary. I'm sure the summary containing a story about someone dying could've been written a little more tastefully.
Is using bcache really this hard? I didn't see any mention of setting up bcache during an initial system install. Essentially like: install everything to /dev/sda and use /dev/sdb as cache? Couldn't this be done if /dev/sda1 was a LVM w/ / on it, maybe with /dev/sda2 as /boot?
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
They were asking for that joke ( fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedUp ). Well, you have to name it something I guess.
That's why CentOS exists, no?
What bugs me though that if you want to uninstall an desktop environment, you cannot just uninstall the particular metapackage, but you must uninstall all the packages separately.
Jesus Christ, how did that make it into a Slashdot summary?
apt-get install gnome-desktop
I only upgrade every couple of years, although most of the time you can upgrade in the background, and not have to change much, if anything on the front end. I went from 11, to 12, to 13 that way.
I'm running KDE on Ubuntu 13.04 (installed from the standard dvd download).
All i had to do is apt-get the relevant (meta?)package .
No need to download the Kubuntu dvd.
We (Fedora) didn't write anything comparing the way we provide desktops to how Ubuntu does it. That's something the person who submitted the story wrote. It's not a comparison we'd find particularly interesting, I don't think.
KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11 and systemd, yes!
I really like Fedora. Been using it since Fedora Core 1 (and Red Hat before that). It has been rock solid for me all these years, and it just keeps on improving.
The new "systemd" internal plumbing system is a joy to use. "journalctl" is the finest new system tool I have seen for many years; it is really fast, and its superb autocompletion reduces typing to a minimum.
"$ journalctl -F _SYSTEMD_UNIT" instantly show all systemd services that has ever written to the log file.
"$ journalctl -b -1 -p err" filters the log file, so that only errors are shown (-p err) from the previous boot (-b -1, current boot is just "-b" etc.).
A tremendous help for newbies who now doesn't need to learn 'cat', 'grep', 'less' and piping in order to do basic log file inspection.
Besides improving my systemd skills, the next spare time project I will try on Fedora 20 is lightweight containers. They seems like a useful addition to full blown virtual guests.
Fedora does not provide an LTS like release. Every release is maintained for 13 months, and new releases are usually released about every six months. The idea is that if you want a more long term release you should really go with Red Hat Enterprise Linux which is based on Fedora.
I noticed huge system slowdown with the introduction of journald. I noticed huge performance loss in reading and writing files on my hard drive. After some investigation I figured out that journald is the cause of all the slowness. After killing the process (multiple times) I figured out that the performance in writing and reading comes back to normal (used to know) speed. After investigating I figured out that after using the system that journald has created around 100-150mb of metafiles in /var/log/systemd and I am quite sure that I never had a software that generated so much logfile information.
Fedora already supports releases for 12 months, as the most recent 2 releases are supported. Fedora 19 has been out for six months, and will be supported for a further six (or so!) months until Fedora 21 is released. In contrast, Ubuntu only supports its releases for 9 months, except for the LTS releases.
You *can* (submitter appears to be a bit confused) but there is certainly no guarantee it will work well. When you go against the Ubuntu way and start making your own decisions it's easy to get well outside of what is tested and supported.
Even KDE is IIRC only maintained by external volunteers, Ubuntu is built around the idea that they decide and you use what they decided on. If you want to make choices there are plenty of better distributions to use.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The biggest differences between them are admin tools and init/rc stuff as well as the language the tools are written in. The packaging systems (RPM vs .DEB) are really not as great a difference since they accomplish essentially the same thing overall. The biggest packaging difference is how they name things and where they put them; this is also the most frustrating difference.
You'll notice that most general/new-release distro reviews are superficial, noting things like application/kernel version numbers and what DE is chosen and what default apps are installed -- all meaningless since any DE and most any app and most any kernel can be installed on any distro. These are reviews written by newbies for newbies. Apparently the people who know the significant underlying differences don't write reviews or don't know enough about other distros to draw a meaningful comparison.
Here's a review I wrote comparing Mageia with Fedora, which I hope is not the typical kind of review.
http://maximumhoyt.blogspot.com/2013/01/mageia3-beta-vs-fedora18.html
Why not compare these to Ubuntu? Behind the scenes where it matters, it's too different from Fedora/Mageia for me to get a handle on it without obtaining a more intimate knowledge of Ubuntu, something I have no real need or desire to do. My only gripe about Ubuntu is that too much software is developed for it that is reliant on Ubuntu-specific scripts and such things that it cannot easily be used on other Linux distros; HOWTOs written for Ubuntu are so Ubuntu-specific that they are rendered almost useless for any other distro (they seem to be written by the same folks that write the superficial reviews).
sfcrazy and others do Fedora and Ubuntu a disservice by making these uninformed and superficial comparisons.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I think a lot of people don't realise how easy it is to switch desktops in Ubuntu - just install the appropriate packages from the standard repositories and choose whichever you want to use at login. Occasionally you run into minor conflicts, but the major DEs generally co-exist quite happily. You don't have to go with, say, Xubuntu just because you want Xfce. The spinoff distributions aren't just standard Ubuntu with alternative desktops, they also have very different collections of default packages, so that you might get, e.g., Abiword and Gnumeric instead of LibreOffice. The last time I tried this, I actually found it easier to get what I wanted by installing the basic Xfce package on top of standard Ubuntu, rather than hunting around for what was missing from the default Xubuntu.
Canonical, of course, wants to promote their own specific flavour of Ubuntu, so it's in their interests for the non-Unity spinoffs to have distinct identities with different names, and not to provide a choice of DEs in the standard installer.
Not if you use software RAID, you're not - there has been no supported way to upgrade since Fedora 16 if you do something bizarre, like mirror your drives.
Unless this got fixed in 20 and the bz was never updated.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
May I ask the Fedora people to offer a long term Fedora distro or maybe a rolling release or maybe switch from 6 Months to every 12 Months ?
If you install Fedora release n on Day 1, you don't need to install Fedora release n+2 until 13 or 14 months later (assuming you want updates).
Something like Arch's approach of continually rolling updates is actually starting to look like the better idea, since they have to pay attention to breakage and upgrade issues.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
He's on 1st post.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
They have a long term release - it's called Red Hat.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Yes, the Cat is out of the bag already.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The problem with installing flavor A and then apt-getting DE B is always that you end up with a gazillion different utilities which clutter up your menus and are confusing even to the seasoned linux user. You can do it, and it may be reasonable if you are evaluating DEs prior to a decision, but it's not pretty. Given Ubuntu's targets they are doing it right IMHO.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Exactly.
What was wrong with linking directly to Fedora site.
I'm so sick of these spamvertisement sites that rush up a page and post it on Slashdot, that I virtually never click the first link.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I think there was a systemd bug that caused syslog to freak out. But besides that, systemd-journald is lightening fast and lightweight on a proper systemd distro like Fedora. It on takes 300 K memory (+3 Megabyte shared mem) on my desktop system. I haven't seen it even suck up 1% CPU time ever.
systemd often keeps logfiles around for longer than many syslog implementations that uses a simple cron/time based logrotate. Since the journal is indexed size isn't really a issue.
You can tweak the maximum size etc., but it unless you are starved for space, a couple of hundred megabytes for many months of log files aren't bad.
Also, systemd-journald logs much more that any sysvinit/syslog implementation is capable of, especially stuff that happens early in the boot process.
All in all I find that "systemd-journald" is extremely fast and resource lightweight, and I just love how well designed and documented the systemd tools are.
Yeah, it seemed to me to simply be a way to throw some gratuitous denigration and farts in the general of Ubuntu.
People can't seem to just report the news these days, they have to color it and use it as a springboard for their own
pet peeves and preferences. Something learned from the mainstream media I guess.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Ubuntu isn't even really an exception. You can still install the barebones "server" flavor, then drop whatever DE you want on top of that. Or start with one DE, then install another DE alongside it. As far as I'm concerned it is just a nit-picky detail of what they happen to promote as the default distribution image.
Well Fedora must be better, of course. It's at 20 but Ubuntu is only at 13.
Sounds like what Fedora really needs to do is simply fix FedUp so that it doesn't grow cluttered.
Personally it's been about 8 years since I used Fedora so I don't know what's up over there. But the aggravation of reinstalling every 6 months drove me from Mint to Kubuntu a couple years ago, and the latter has made the every 6 month upgrades a breeze. No need for a rolling release as long as the distupgrade can run in the background while you carry on as normal and applies with a simple reboot.
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I read his comment just fine, my comment about CPU, as you would have understood if you had read carefully what I wrote, was a general observation that systemd-journald is a really fast lightweight daemon that doesn't consume much memory, or _even_ CPU time. (BTW, I can't fathom any scenario where a daemon does so much RW that it causes a system slowdown, without that daemon sucking up CPU time.)
The OP may have experienced slowdown problems after his upgrade, but systemd-journald in it self wasn't the cause of it. Yes, I can imagine problems upgrading from eg. F17 to F19 without modifying the config files, since the systemd journal wasn't persistent in early Fedora versions, and running both systemd-journald and syslog may double the amount of disk writes.
Are where you will find syslogd and init scripts. Get away from your wibbly-wobbly daemony-waemony way of doing things, and let the admin adjust startup stuff and view logs via simple text edit commands.
Anyone know when RHEL7 is out?
Amusingly, the ./ motd below reads "Heisenberg may have slept here"
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I have two boxen with Arch and two with Fedora (19 and Beta20), I use the Fedora as my 'personal' machine and keep /home on a separate partition to make staying up with the 6 month cycle easier, although I do skip the occasional release.
I had my parents on a Fedora box, but quickly saw that I needed a longer term, lower maintenance solution, and have them on Arch for several months now.
I switched from Crux to Arch years ago but got off it when I had some update breakage issues or something that peeved me (or caught my eye elsewhere, so many distros, so little time and all that), but have been toying with it again for a year or so and it is rock solid and no throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so far.
Anywho, to make a short post long, Arch is a good idea for someone who doesn't mind getting a little grease under their fingernails now and then.
I have plenty of common sense, I just choose to ignore it. -- Calvin
Or go with Centos, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and has free as in beer binaries.
More to the point, you'll still need to periodically log in to the original default DE to use the system configuration utilities, because the alternate DEs you add on from the repository later usually aren't complete installs of all the tools that can be used to configure the system.
Of course, if you're a long-time Unix/Linux hack, you don't use those fancy GUI tools in the first place, so it won't matter to you. And from what I've seen, people who are experienced enough to apt-get an alternate DE (or a few of them) on a system are the only ones who are also experienced enough to not need the GUI tools. Mom and Pop Joe User need to have everything installed for them all at once from the original installation to get anything done.
Like it or not, to most of the "general" user community, Unity is Ubuntu, much though it sucketh donkey testicles.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Not in my experience. Over the last 4 years my PC has run every version of Fedora and has /home on a pair of mirrored drives which I set up using anaconda on what I'm guessing was F11. I don't always upgrade as new versions are released but it is running F19 right now.
I grant that "not supported" is different from "it ain't gonna work" but for me at least; it worked.
I don't know if anyone's tested it recently. It may work with fedup. 'use software RAID' is a misleadingly vague statement of the problem, though; IIRC it was only ever broken if you *have /boot on RAID*, which is rather different from just 'using RAID'.
We've been working on making non-stable Fedoras more manageable for day-to-day usage lately, with pretty good results. I'm on Rawhide (F21) already and it works fine, nothing is exploding. It's fairly feasible to run Rawhide day-to-day for an experienced user, these days - nirik (Kevin Fenzi) runs rawhide full-time, updated daily, on one of his workstations, and blogs about it at http://www.scrye.com/wordpress/nirik/category/rawhide/ (as a part of the 'make rawhide suck less' efforts, a kind of long-term public record of how it's going).
These days I usually bump to N+1 the day N comes out, run it till it's released, bump again.
19 had MATE and Sugar spins too. We didn't change the spins loadout for F20 at all (well, I think we dropped some that no-one tsted any more).
I only upgrade every couple of years, although most of the time you can upgrade in the background, and not have to change much, if anything on the front end. I went from 11, to 12, to 13 that way.
Why upgrade when it is very easy and usually much quicker to do a fresh install in your system file-systems. For me to do two machines it usually takes about 6 to 8 hours and that includes downloading the DVD, checking the download, creating the boot-able USB key, installing the new OS in the appropriate system file-systems making sure you don't clobber your personal data (ie /home) followed by customization and updates. Actually most of my time is spent surfing the web or playing a game rather than actually doing any work.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Hint: apt-get install XXX-desktop converts your Ubuntu into a XXX desktop variant.
Ubuntu does create different distributions to make it easier for the user. and so that they don't need to install software initially that they won't be using.
'use software RAID' is a misleadingly vague statement of the problem
It's disingenuous of you to accuse me of being misleadingly vague when the very sentence [that you fail to quote] says " if you do something bizarre, like mirror your drives". It's clearly qualified - blame shifting is not becoming. The ironic 'bizarre' is there to indicate just how common this configuration is.
Yes, /boot is mirrored on mirrored drives, just like /, /home, /var, etc.. Every server I've ever seen with mirrored drives has /boot mirrored because if one drive fails you still need to boot (which is why one mirrors drives in the first place).
The Fedora Project empirically doesn't care about this incredibly common use case in the server world. I see from the release notes that most Fedora installs never even need an MTA, so I'm guessing desktops on SSD's are now the current focus.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I thought is was "interesting" when F16 overheated two different models of Macbooks, where the "uninteresting" distros somehow weren't able to foil the operation of the fans.
Its also "interesting" that the F18 system I'm on now reported that I have only 15 minutes of operation left because battery #1 is at 10% (nevermind that battery #2 is at 100%).
Even more hilarious (and "interesting") is the way Fedora handles dual monitors on a laptop (not an Apple this time... at least the 'F' people can devote some neurons to the Thinkpad line).
Perhaps a dozen more examples of interesting times on Fedora come to mind at the moment. It occurs to me the 'F' people don't compare their distro to the likes of Ubuntu because they can't bear to.
You *can* (submitter appears to be a bit confused) but there is certainly no guarantee it will work well. When you go against the Ubuntu way and start making your own decisions it's easy to get well outside of what is tested and supported.
From my experience, vanishingly little in the way of desktop-user vertical integrations (Ubuntu's strength) meets with rigorous testing on Fedora. In fact, much of that "ucky" obsessing over details and connecting code in the between layers is precisely the kind of thing they frown upon.
Even KDE is IIRC only maintained by external volunteers, Ubuntu is built around the idea that they decide and you use what they decided on. If you want to make choices there are plenty of better distributions to use.
More power to them, then. The kinds of choices you're implying concern only a thin sliver of the techie demographic. Once users feel they have a stable interface to their system, they start feeling more confident about making choices that are important to them-- instead of the kind of choices that amount to coders trying to impress each other.
My nas machine has been running fedora since f12, five drives with /boot mirrored on all of them, not a problem upgrading.
Now that Fedora comes with systemd as default, I see more and more comments like "systemd is installed and default in more and more distributions" and I would like to use the opportunity to say that not only this is not true, but it will absolutely not happen for quite a few distros.
While I love the ideas behind systemd, and it undeniably works very well (it wouldn't have been adopted otherwise), it does have it's disadvantages. One of the most important ones is it is Linux-exclusive, which means that any distribution and any software that wants to be available for other platforms, simply cannot use it. That is the case, for example, for Debian.
It would be great if different alternatives used the same commands for the same things. That way I could always use them in any CLI or script, knowing that everything will work, no matter what. Some functionalities will not be in all systems, so this may not be so feasible, but most basic functions should work like this.
How much wood would a woodchopper chop if a woodchopper would chop wood?