Submitted by Slashdot published an interview with Fedora Project leader Max Spevack where he answers questions on everything from what has changed since the birth of Fedora Project and its goals, driver support in Linux up to what he considers the worst aspect of the Fedora.
Interview with Fedora Project Leader Max Spevack
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Fedora Universe
Cool,i hope just as ubuntu universe.(repositories)
Edited 2006-08-18 16:07
Not really and in fact quite the opposite. Ubuntu universe is a different repository similar to Fedora Extras. Ubuntu main is similar to Fedora Core and Fedora doesnt have a restricted repository since Fedora is 100% Free and open source software.
What Max Spevack is talking about is unifying the Fedora the two different formal repositories – Fedora Core and Fedora Extras into a single unified one. “Universe” is just a analogy.
Edited 2006-08-18 16:21
<Insert standard rant about quality of Fedora releases and inevitable bugs and issues with every upgrade>
OK, FC3 to FC5 has been a disaster, an utter abomination. It didn’t actually wipe all my data and toast the disk, so in that sense it was a limited success, but in the other important sense of leaving one with a workable system, it sucked ass. This is a quick list of the problems I’m currently having for the benefit of anyone else stuck in Fedora hell. If you’ve not upgraded yet, there’s still time to contemplate CentOS.
* Anaconda upgrade hangs after selecting packages for installation: Seems to be due to a lack of disk space for the chosen package set. Ths wasn’t helped by the installer selecting dozens of OpenOffice 2.0.2 internationalisation packages, because I already had the 1.x i18n package installed. To workaround this, I removed the latter along with a ton of obsolete and -devel RPMs.
* Anaconda upgrade fails to complete: It appeared to have finished but, several hours later, was hung with no message. I rebooted anyway.
* Network performance sucks: Using a VIA-Rhine card, I can’t exchange ping packets over approximately 2000 bytes with an FC2 server. This makes NFS, and hence my entire desktop, terminally slow and the overall experience horrendous.
Possible solutions: Downgrade to last FC4 kernel, upgrade to most recent FC5 updates-testing kernel or build the VIA rhinefet driver (maybe).
Update: It’s an interaction with netfilter/iptables, since it only occurs when the netfilter module is loaded (regardless of whether any rules are present); see bug 187145. I got it working by using the alternative rhinefet driver from VIA Arena; you’ll need this patch for rhine_main.c to compile it.
* Remote clients can’t connect to X server: TCP listening has been disabled in the server (possibly an FC4 change), via the -nolisten option in the /etc/X11/xdm/kdmrc file.
Solution: Delete this option and restart kdm.
Once again, a Fedora upgrade blatently overwrote my KDM config so it could impose its own crappy login screen. (Note to Fedora developers: I want to kill you everytime you do this.)
* Network interfaces swapped: eth1 became eth0 and vice-versa. The mapping seems to be teed off the MAC addresses in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth* files. In fact, initially my 3c59x card was missing because it didn’t initialise when the module loaded at boot time (but did when retried manually); this may be how the NICs came to be renumbered.
Update: Think this was partly due to my getting the MAC address wrong in one of the files, but how the original issue developed is a mystery.
* Yum deletes downloaded headers and packages even if it fails to install them due to conflicts. Hence it fetches them all again on every subsequent attempt.
Solution: You can either set “keepcache=1” in yum.conf or add a “proxy=URL” setting pointing to a caching proxy like Squid.
* Firefox 1.5: When it eventually starts, I find that most of my extensions appear to be inactive, although they are listed, and it is attempting to install a huge set of language packs. This is probably going to require profile recreation.
Update: Worked OK once I’d fixed the network issue; was probably a casualty of slow NFS.
* VMware Server (free beta): Bridged networking didn’t work until I applied the patch archive linked here.
* Avahi, HAL, dbus, etc. active: I wish someone would clarify whether these are required for general system operation or only to pander to the needs of overblown desktop environments like GNOME and KDE.
Someone on LWN recently referred to Fedora as a “technology demonstration” rather than a useable distribution. There is a lot of truth in this remark.
I wouldn’t know about issues trying to upgrade between versions, but I do know that I’d take a clean Fedora install over Ubuntu any day of the year.
Why’s that?
Familiarity mostly.
I can get a Fedora system dialed in precisely the way I want it in a fraction of the time it would take on Ubuntu. Everything is where I expect it to be and mostly everything works like I expect it to.
Well, I would similarly take Ubuntu over Fedora, any day. I know my way around the Ubuntu system and I can easily shape it the way I want it. I also like Ubuntu’s package management better, but mostly it is because I just like Ubuntu.
I think I will try Fedora out again soon, maybe when I get a new computer or something… I have already installed FC5 twice on an older PII box, on which it really didn’t get to show much of the better sides. I liked it anyway, I just like Ubuntu better.
* Avahi, HAL, dbus, etc. active: I wish someone would clarify whether these are required for general system operation or only to pander to the needs of overblown desktop environments like GNOME and KDE.
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-services-fc5.html
I know, damned difficult information to come by. I mean it requires a google search for “fedora 5 services” and clicking the second link.
DBus is used by even by non-desktop software like BIND in Fedora and HAL is a general hardware abstraction library and Avahi and for auto configuration of networks and increasingly used by software outside of GNOME and KDE
Dbus and HAL is written and maintained by Red Hat and all the above three software is freedesktop.org efforts.
“<Insert standard rant about quality of Fedora releases and inevitable bugs and issues with every upgrade>”
My x86_64 machine began as a normal Athlon64 machine running FC3/x86_64; I then replaced the board with a Tyan Thunder K8WE with two Opteron 248 CPUs (SMP kernel, different network, graphics and IDE chipset) things worked out of the box. (I did to manually run “yum install kernel-smp kernel-smp-devel” and move the OS partition from a single IDE drive to an LVM over SCSI Software RAID)
A couple of months later I upgraded the machine to FC4 x86_64. No problems what-so-ever.
Two week after the FC5 release, I upgraded the OS to FC5, again, no problems what-so-ever.
A couple of months ago I replaced the 2 x 248 CPUs with two 2 x 270 dual core Opterons the machine, again no problems-what-so-ever.
Does it mean that Fedora doesn’t have bugs? Nope. Does it invalidates your own experience? Nope.
It -does- mean that YMMV. -Don’t- assume that just because your FC3 to FC5 upgrade failed, all of us had the same experience.
BTW, beside ranting, did you bother to open Fedora bugzilla tickers about your problems?
Edited 2006-08-18 21:15
Quote:
“This goes back to what I wrote near the beginning about the importance of upstream. If everyone is pushing their latest work back upstream, and the maintainers at the top level have the time and resources that they need to keep everything in order, then most GNU/Linux distros are going to feel pretty similar once they are installed. Which is why I think a lot of the OSS “religious wars” don’t make a lot of sense.”
I do too. However, if you talk to any of the developers of any other distribution, I think that this Philosophy is pretty common amongst the people that do the work. It seems to be primarily the end users of distributions that want to fight about what distribution is the best. I think that this is because a lot of end users see thriving communities like Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Debian and they want to become involved. Some of the ones that do not have the skills required to contribute code seem to thing that they can help by telling the rest of the world how wonderful distribution is and why all of the other distros suck. It is sad really, because all it does is distract from the achievements of the developers, testers, and documentation writers that do the real work. It would be nice, from a Linux standpoint, if all of these people stopped evangelizing for their distro and started evangelizing for Linux and open source in general.
Few distribution concentrate this much on getting their patch upstream as Redhat/Fedora did for example Aiglx to Xorg. However those distros you mentioned not always working this way. They maintained their own patches although partially because they can’t get a patch to upstream quality. This is not about evangelizing distro.
And for sure they should thought out it better before they rushed their stuff on the wild. And you don’t have to believe on me, just google for troubles they gave to a lot of people. You can partially blame cheap components and lack of hardware specs, but they have their part too. The idea was good but the rush was very bad.
I would like to know what the next steps will be to bring Fedora more in line with other distributions. It is a real mess that so many unnecessary backend differences exist.