Kristian is trying to improve rendering across the board. As a result we're cataloging documents that don't render correctly so we can fix them. If (well, when;-) you find some, please send them to krh@redhat.com .
If you could send any documents that don't render correctly to krh@redhat.com (Kristian, the main poppler developer) that would be great. We are building up a "test library" so that we can get everything working.
For those complaining about the sluggishness of Xpdf at rendering pages, we're working on that. We consider that the largest usability problem with Poppler based viewers right now (Evince & XPDF). We've already made the thumbnailer code on the left substantially faster and are looking at doing things like pre-emptively rendering pages as you scroll toward them so there's no lag (in addition to improving the raw pages/sec rendering speed).
Or you could use a PDF/PS viewer that's nicely integrated with your desktop, and has a sane feature-set and good usability. On GNOME we've got Evince, and on KDE there's KPDF. Evince (and now KPDF, I believe) is backed by the Freedesktop.org Poppler library (which is in turn backed by Cairo which can use hardware acceleration for faster PDF rendering). Kristian (as referenced earlier today on slashdot re: wobbly windows) is hard at work on adding nice features needed for desktop apps. Poppler is a fork from the Xpdf rendering code (with the maintainer's blessing, since he was using his own rendering infrastructure and didn't want to mix two backends into Xpdf).
We've been doing a lot of experimenting with making the "core features" of Evince better for on-screen reading, rather than working on the sort of extra packed in features in Acrobat. For example, when you press page down, evince will slightly darken the area on the screen where your page was as it smooth scrolls. That lets your eye track its position much easier, so once the scroll is over you just keep reading without a visual "seek". KPDF is cool too, so either way you swing you've got a good choice.
Acroread 7.0 is using GTK+ for its widgets, but this hardly makes it have a native "feel". Use it for a minute and its pretty clear its a cross-platform app port.
"3) RHEL was very similar in name and the marketing people won (partly because of 2, it seemed reasonable anyway) in which name got changed."
Er, to be clear, RH is very much engineering driven, its just we didn't really care about names as much as they did. Its not like marketing is calling the shots or something:)
I agree the name change was a fuckup. I can tell you what we were thinking though, if its any consolation:
1) We wanted to highlight in big flashing lights what we saw as a very positive improvement to the distro: it was becoming more open to the community. Its been terribly slow going, and we're not like Debian yet, but we're definitely moving in that direction with Fedora.
2) The name "Red Hat" was in the name "Red Hat Linux". You have to defend trademarks to keep them, but clearly a project like Fedora needs to be mungeable, changeable, etc without needing to change the name (or us having to chase after people using the trademark w/o permission).
3) RHEL was very similar in name and the marketing people won (partly because of 2, it seemed reasonable anyway) in which name got changed. Sadly the same group are doing the website, and we in engineering aren't so agressive about marketing our stuff. We should have been saying "Fedora IS RHL" and "We spend lots and lots of time working on Fedora" loudly and frequently until people got the message, but we wrote code instead. *grin* It just didn't seem like a big deal at the time. Live and learn, eh?
In any case, as I've posted over and over on this thread ad nauseum, most RH engineers do most of their daily work in the Fedora context.
I guess I just want people to understand that we haven't been ill-behaved. We might be stupid, but not evil;-)
*nod*, I fully agree that dropping the boxed in-stores in-front-of-peoples-eyes version has been detrimental to awareness of RH (and Linux in general). It was profitable because when you have boxes in all the hundreds of thousands of stores, enough people do random buys (to see what all this linux stuff is about, etc) that even though the hit rate is small, you make real money off it.
The problem was all this better-than-free advertising also wasn't resulting in a lot of people using Linux. Home users who buy Linux in the store, by and large, end up running Windows at the end of the day. When you compound this with the versions in stores often being very old (and creating bad impressions of where Linux stands today...)...
I agree we'd be better off still marketing to home / small business users than ignoring them completely. But in terms of moving Linux from "something that sells because people are curious" to "something that sells because its important and useful to people", Linux has a lot more to offer enterprise customers right now. We want to be selling a product because its useful to people, not because its the latest craze!
RH's never been splashy about desktop, but we've always had a dedicated team working on it (from the early days of GNOME on...), and that team is currently fairly large by RH standards, more than 25 engineers. We've been notoriously bad at hyping our work, but we are doing lots of cool stuff;-) If you're interested in what we're doing, you can checek out my blog. I'm trying to slowly dump out a listing of all the different projects we're involved with. http://www.gnome.org/~seth
"That they were quite willing to drop their long term customer and community base when they thought we were no longer an asset should be noted by those chosing to use their products."
Pft. I wish all the people posting crap like this could see inside Red Hat. Virtually all of our engineering work (with the exception of some dedicated people doing backporting of features as per enterprise requests for RHEL... e.g. the reason why RHEL3 already had the most desireable kernel 2.6 features despite being 2.4 based) goes into Fedora (and before that Red Hat Linux). It always has. It always will.
As always, Red Hat continues to increase its engineering resources. Far far more work goes into a current Fedora Core release than ever went into a Red Hat Linux release.
There was never a magic change of heart when we realized we were deserting the Linux community. There was a tragic, stupid, and avoidable communications fuckup. We probably should have renamed RHL -> Fedora at a different point than RHEL appeared. But anyway, Fedora isn't and never has been abandonware, or our "second best effort".
Ironically, one of the things Red Hat, as a company, has been bad at is pimping itself to the community. We do tons of the "shit work" that keeps Linux going (who do you think pays for most of glibc, gdb, gcc, a huge chunk of the boring work in gnome, lots of upstream kernel work, etc etc) but fail marketing our efforts to get m4d pr0pz. Red Hat engineering has always prided itself on doing most of its work upstream instead of maintaining large patch sets in-distro (which most companies haven't done, and still don't do). The day we don't, you'll hear Alan Cox screaming from inside Red Hat;-)
See http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=140118&c id=11733413
The short version: inside RH engineering we find it very bizarre that people consider RH Linux and Fedora to be different. As engineers we're doing the same old stuff we've always been doing. We work on fedora deadlines, we polish and stabilize fedora releases, etc. To us, Fedora IS Red Hat Linux. Now if you want somebody to feed you marketing spiel, you're not going to get that for Fedora, but most people here never needed that aspect of RHL;-)
Just like RH Linux releases, some are better than others. Red Hat has often been the distro pushing forward large architectural changes (like the NPTL stuff, or more recently SELinux) that make Linux better, which is largely the reason for this variance. You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs, *grin*.
I think FC3 is a really good release, personally (compared to FC2, for sure, which sucked). *shrug*
RHEL represents an additional 'feature' (long term support, etc) above and beyond what was ever offered for Red Hat Linux.
The Fedora bits really truly are Red Hat Linux. We don't sell them in a box anymore, but one of the major reasons was that stores tended to have really ancient versions. It made money, but it also had people getting bad impressions of Linux. Most people actually using Red Hat were downloading and burning ISOs anyway (I'm sure most slashdotters were/are in that category).
Most engineers inside Red Hat do most of their daily work on Fedora. We have Fedora deadlines, Fedora freezes, we work to stabilize Fedora, add features to Fedora, etc. Fedora dominates our working lives.
That the RHEL product is occasionally forked off Fedora and stabilized even further than Red Hat Linux ever was gives Fedora yet another feature: more money for Red Hat to hire engineers, who once again spend most of their time working on Fedora. Everyone wins.
It is regretable the name change caused so much confusion in the community. Fedora isn't and wasn't Red Hat abandoning Red Hat Linux. The names RHL and RHEL were too similar. Additionally, RHL was a Red Hat trademark that had to be protected and would have restricted redistribution in ways that aren't a problem with the name "Fedora". Name change + more community openness != RH abandoning Fedora. We didn't communicate this well. We suck!
In fact, the change from Red Hat Linux to Fedora *added* a great new 'feature' to RHL/Fedora: greater community transparency. Essentially all Fedora development is done on open mailing lists, etc. Gradually (far too gradually:-( ) transparency is morphing into allowing community involvement.
As to how slowly this transition has gone... well, its frustrating. Most engineers inside RH are frustrated by it too. The good news is that the CVS servers are about to go public. Took far far too long, but once again Fedora is *STILL* miles ahead of where Red Hat Linux was in terms of community involvement, AND it has more Red Hat engineering hours going into it than Red Hat Linux ever did.
Anyway, we market and sell Fedora differently, and we support it differently (but most slashdotters never used RH support anyway since they were downloading ISOs) but from an engineering/release engineering perspective... Fedora IS Red Hat Linux. Isn't that what most of ya'll care about? Yes, I know there will be people here who were using supported RH9 in an enterprise context, and we did screw up that transition, and I'm truly sorry about that. But as a percentage of slashdot readers who were using RH9, its very small.
According to Chris Blizzard (mozilla hacker and generally cool guy) who's one of the people spearheading this project. He had a great presentation at FUDcon (Fedora conference) today, and demoed some of the cool bits of the directory / auth server (key auth where you pull out the key and encrypted messages are unreadable in thunderbird, similar for web pages in firefox, etc). They haven't finalized the license, but it sounds like the current front runner is GPL (with an exception to allow some forms of commercial linking... sort of a slightly stricter LGPL).
They're not releasing the code immediately because they don't want to dump "useless bits" onto the web and claim its a release. They're currently working hard to get it buildable by mortals, which is a tricky problem when you have a codebase designed for building in a magic build environment inside one company. When I asked Chris when they'd be dropping the first functional code, he said no exact dates but "on the order of weeks". Sounds pretty good given the 1.8 million lines they're wrangling to the ground;-)
Red Hat acquired the Netscape/iPlanet directory server (LDAP) code from AOL, along with the original team working on it (i.e. its not open source and dump software). Its about 1.8 million lines of code, and RH is releasing it as free / open source software ASAP. Chris Blizzard of mozilla fame had a great presentation at the Fedora Conference (FUDcon;-) today about their progress. Very cool stuff.
Blizzard wants to learn from Mozilla and not release the code until a standard build system (such as autoconf) is in place... You can imagine with that much code its going to take a little time to work through in a new build system, but his current estimate is they'll release the first functional useful code "on the order of weeks". There are some smaller chunks that are going to have to be rewritten owing to dependencies on external proprietary code we did not acquire, but it looks like nothing really bad, and the core should be coming along quickly.
This codebase is one of the major commercial directory servers in use, is supposed to scale to giant enterprise loads, and is (according to some RH hackers who just got their hands on it internally) much easier to setup than OpenLDAP. It comes with a nice GUI config interface, etc. Naturally, it'll be integrated into Fedora pretty quickly, and hopefully Debian, Gentoo, SuSE and other distributions too.
Slashdot Mirror
Kristian is trying to improve rendering across the board. As a result we're cataloging documents that don't render correctly so we can fix them. If (well, when ;-) you find some, please send them to krh@redhat.com .
If you could send any documents that don't render correctly to krh@redhat.com (Kristian, the main poppler developer) that would be great. We are building up a "test library" so that we can get everything working.
For those complaining about the sluggishness of Xpdf at rendering pages, we're working on that. We consider that the largest usability problem with Poppler based viewers right now (Evince & XPDF). We've already made the thumbnailer code on the left substantially faster and are looking at doing things like pre-emptively rendering pages as you scroll toward them so there's no lag (in addition to improving the raw pages/sec rendering speed).
Or you could use a PDF/PS viewer that's nicely integrated with your desktop, and has a sane feature-set and good usability. On GNOME we've got Evince, and on KDE there's KPDF. Evince (and now KPDF, I believe) is backed by the Freedesktop.org Poppler library (which is in turn backed by Cairo which can use hardware acceleration for faster PDF rendering). Kristian (as referenced earlier today on slashdot re: wobbly windows) is hard at work on adding nice features needed for desktop apps. Poppler is a fork from the Xpdf rendering code (with the maintainer's blessing, since he was using his own rendering infrastructure and didn't want to mix two backends into Xpdf).
We've been doing a lot of experimenting with making the "core features" of Evince better for on-screen reading, rather than working on the sort of extra packed in features in Acrobat. For example, when you press page down, evince will slightly darken the area on the screen where your page was as it smooth scrolls. That lets your eye track its position much easier, so once the scroll is over you just keep reading without a visual "seek". KPDF is cool too, so either way you swing you've got a good choice.
Acroread 7.0 is using GTK+ for its widgets, but this hardly makes it have a native "feel". Use it for a minute and its pretty clear its a cross-platform app port.
"3) RHEL was very similar in name and the marketing people won (partly because of 2, it seemed reasonable anyway) in which name got changed."
:)
Er, to be clear, RH is very much engineering driven, its just we didn't really care about names as much as they did. Its not like marketing is calling the shots or something
I agree the name change was a fuckup. I can tell you what we were thinking though, if its any consolation:
1) We wanted to highlight in big flashing lights what we saw as a very positive improvement to the distro: it was becoming more open to the community. Its been terribly slow going, and we're not like Debian yet, but we're definitely moving in that direction with Fedora.
2) The name "Red Hat" was in the name "Red Hat Linux". You have to defend trademarks to keep them, but clearly a project like Fedora needs to be mungeable, changeable, etc without needing to change the name (or us having to chase after people using the trademark w/o permission).
3) RHEL was very similar in name and the marketing people won (partly because of 2, it seemed reasonable anyway) in which name got changed. Sadly the same group are doing the website, and we in engineering aren't so agressive about marketing our stuff. We should have been saying "Fedora IS RHL" and "We spend lots and lots of time working on Fedora" loudly and frequently until people got the message, but we wrote code instead. *grin* It just didn't seem like a big deal at the time. Live and learn, eh?
In any case, as I've posted over and over on this thread ad nauseum, most RH engineers do most of their daily work in the Fedora context.
-Seth
I guess I just want people to understand that we haven't been ill-behaved. We might be stupid, but not evil ;-)
;-) If you're interested in what we're doing, you can checek out my blog. I'm trying to slowly dump out a listing of all the different projects we're involved with. http://www.gnome.org/~seth
*nod*, I fully agree that dropping the boxed in-stores in-front-of-peoples-eyes version has been detrimental to awareness of RH (and Linux in general). It was profitable because when you have boxes in all the hundreds of thousands of stores, enough people do random buys (to see what all this linux stuff is about, etc) that even though the hit rate is small, you make real money off it.
The problem was all this better-than-free advertising also wasn't resulting in a lot of people using Linux. Home users who buy Linux in the store, by and large, end up running Windows at the end of the day. When you compound this with the versions in stores often being very old (and creating bad impressions of where Linux stands today...)...
I agree we'd be better off still marketing to home / small business users than ignoring them completely. But in terms of moving Linux from "something that sells because people are curious" to "something that sells because its important and useful to people", Linux has a lot more to offer enterprise customers right now. We want to be selling a product because its useful to people, not because its the latest craze!
RH's never been splashy about desktop, but we've always had a dedicated team working on it (from the early days of GNOME on...), and that team is currently fairly large by RH standards, more than 25 engineers. We've been notoriously bad at hyping our work, but we are doing lots of cool stuff
-Seth
"That they were quite willing to drop their long term customer and community base when they thought we were no longer an asset should be noted by those chosing to use their products."
;-)
Pft. I wish all the people posting crap like this could see inside Red Hat. Virtually all of our engineering work (with the exception of some dedicated people doing backporting of features as per enterprise requests for RHEL... e.g. the reason why RHEL3 already had the most desireable kernel 2.6 features despite being 2.4 based) goes into Fedora (and before that Red Hat Linux). It always has. It always will.
As always, Red Hat continues to increase its engineering resources. Far far more work goes into a current Fedora Core release than ever went into a Red Hat Linux release.
There was never a magic change of heart when we realized we were deserting the Linux community. There was a tragic, stupid, and avoidable communications fuckup. We probably should have renamed RHL -> Fedora at a different point than RHEL appeared. But anyway, Fedora isn't and never has been abandonware, or our "second best effort".
Ironically, one of the things Red Hat, as a company, has been bad at is pimping itself to the community. We do tons of the "shit work" that keeps Linux going (who do you think pays for most of glibc, gdb, gcc, a huge chunk of the boring work in gnome, lots of upstream kernel work, etc etc) but fail marketing our efforts to get m4d pr0pz. Red Hat engineering has always prided itself on doing most of its work upstream instead of maintaining large patch sets in-distro (which most companies haven't done, and still don't do). The day we don't, you'll hear Alan Cox screaming from inside Red Hat
-Seth
See http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=140118&c id=11733413
;-)
The short version: inside RH engineering we find it very bizarre that people consider RH Linux and Fedora to be different. As engineers we're doing the same old stuff we've always been doing. We work on fedora deadlines, we polish and stabilize fedora releases, etc. To us, Fedora IS Red Hat Linux. Now if you want somebody to feed you marketing spiel, you're not going to get that for Fedora, but most people here never needed that aspect of RHL
Just like RH Linux releases, some are better than others. Red Hat has often been the distro pushing forward large architectural changes (like the NPTL stuff, or more recently SELinux) that make Linux better, which is largely the reason for this variance. You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs, *grin*.
I think FC3 is a really good release, personally (compared to FC2, for sure, which sucked). *shrug*
-Seth
FC1 -> RH10, FC2 -> RH11, FC3 -> RH12.
:-( ) transparency is morphing into allowing community involvement.
RHEL represents an additional 'feature' (long term support, etc) above and beyond what was ever offered for Red Hat Linux.
The Fedora bits really truly are Red Hat Linux. We don't sell them in a box anymore, but one of the major reasons was that stores tended to have really ancient versions. It made money, but it also had people getting bad impressions of Linux. Most people actually using Red Hat were downloading and burning ISOs anyway (I'm sure most slashdotters were/are in that category).
Most engineers inside Red Hat do most of their daily work on Fedora. We have Fedora deadlines, Fedora freezes, we work to stabilize Fedora, add features to Fedora, etc. Fedora dominates our working lives.
That the RHEL product is occasionally forked off Fedora and stabilized even further than Red Hat Linux ever was gives Fedora yet another feature: more money for Red Hat to hire engineers, who once again spend most of their time working on Fedora. Everyone wins.
It is regretable the name change caused so much confusion in the community. Fedora isn't and wasn't Red Hat abandoning Red Hat Linux. The names RHL and RHEL were too similar. Additionally, RHL was a Red Hat trademark that had to be protected and would have restricted redistribution in ways that aren't a problem with the name "Fedora". Name change + more community openness != RH abandoning Fedora. We didn't communicate this well. We suck!
In fact, the change from Red Hat Linux to Fedora *added* a great new 'feature' to RHL/Fedora: greater community transparency. Essentially all Fedora development is done on open mailing lists, etc. Gradually (far too gradually
As to how slowly this transition has gone... well, its frustrating. Most engineers inside RH are frustrated by it too. The good news is that the CVS servers are about to go public. Took far far too long, but once again Fedora is *STILL* miles ahead of where Red Hat Linux was in terms of community involvement, AND it has more Red Hat engineering hours going into it than Red Hat Linux ever did.
Anyway, we market and sell Fedora differently, and we support it differently (but most slashdotters never used RH support anyway since they were downloading ISOs) but from an engineering/release engineering perspective... Fedora IS Red Hat Linux. Isn't that what most of ya'll care about? Yes, I know there will be people here who were using supported RH9 in an enterprise context, and we did screw up that transition, and I'm truly sorry about that. But as a percentage of slashdot readers who were using RH9, its very small.
-Seth
According to Chris Blizzard (mozilla hacker and generally cool guy) who's one of the people spearheading this project. He had a great presentation at FUDcon (Fedora conference) today, and demoed some of the cool bits of the directory / auth server (key auth where you pull out the key and encrypted messages are unreadable in thunderbird, similar for web pages in firefox, etc). They haven't finalized the license, but it sounds like the current front runner is GPL (with an exception to allow some forms of commercial linking... sort of a slightly stricter LGPL).
;-)
They're not releasing the code immediately because they don't want to dump "useless bits" onto the web and claim its a release. They're currently working hard to get it buildable by mortals, which is a tricky problem when you have a codebase designed for building in a magic build environment inside one company. When I asked Chris when they'd be dropping the first functional code, he said no exact dates but "on the order of weeks". Sounds pretty good given the 1.8 million lines they're wrangling to the ground
Red Hat acquired the Netscape/iPlanet directory server (LDAP) code from AOL, along with the original team working on it (i.e. its not open source and dump software). Its about 1.8 million lines of code, and RH is releasing it as free / open source software ASAP. Chris Blizzard of mozilla fame had a great presentation at the Fedora Conference (FUDcon ;-) today about their progress. Very cool stuff.
Blizzard wants to learn from Mozilla and not release the code until a standard build system (such as autoconf) is in place... You can imagine with that much code its going to take a little time to work through in a new build system, but his current estimate is they'll release the first functional useful code "on the order of weeks". There are some smaller chunks that are going to have to be rewritten owing to dependencies on external proprietary code we did not acquire, but it looks like nothing really bad, and the core should be coming along quickly.
This codebase is one of the major commercial directory servers in use, is supposed to scale to giant enterprise loads, and is (according to some RH hackers who just got their hands on it internally) much easier to setup than OpenLDAP. It comes with a nice GUI config interface, etc. Naturally, it'll be integrated into Fedora pretty quickly, and hopefully Debian, Gentoo, SuSE and other distributions too.
-Seth