Submitted by Fedora 14 has been released. “The Fedora Project today announced the availability of Fedora 14, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. The Fedora Projects leads the advancement of free and open source software with a new distribution released approximately every six months.”
I’ve been dismayed with Fedora for a while now. A mindset has taken over to attempt to duplicate the desktop experience from other operating systems and Linux distributions. This comes at a cost of resources and “capabilities” that to my mind should be left to these other players. Let Ubuntu have all the aunt Tilly’s of the world… shrug.
Having said that, Fedora 14 has been running here for a couple of days with “systemd” enabled and it has been a relatively enjoyable experience. Setting up daemons to run at boot is actually much easier with systemd than with SysV init scripts.
It was also very nice to offer an interested neighbour a Linux virtual machine. Installed the SPICE client on his Windows machine and he has been happily connecting over wireless to a F14 VM and playing around with it remotely. Pretty sweet.
All ’round good effort.
Interesting about systemd. I’ve been reading about it lately, for those who haven’t heard:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/systemd
Are you noticing any performance boost? I haven’t heard of any other distros implementing systemd yet, but it might make we want to try Fedora.
Yes, it’s faster booting up, say 20 seconds instead of 35. But that may be because i’m booting from a SSD drive; there are murmurs that you wont see any speed up on rotating media. Things probably need time to mature.
Frankly the speed up wasn’t that important to me since the box is rarely rebooted anyway. But the administration features are appealing and worth playing around with.
You can try systemd on Gentoo if you go that way. Open SUSE has developers working on systemd as well and it should appear there for testing soon if it hasn’t already.
Cheers
Weird, the passage of time is. Red Hat was always seen as the Microsoft of Linux. its what Aunt Tilly used because she couldn’t figure out Slackware, the good Linux distro that self respecting people ran.
“I’ve been dismayed with Fedora for a while now. A mindset has taken over to attempt to duplicate the desktop experience from other operating systems and Linux distributions. This comes at a cost of resources and “capabilities” that to my mind should be left to these other players. Let Ubuntu have all the aunt Tilly’s of the world… shrug. ”
Could you please elaborate on that? I ask because Fedora, or more specifically Red Hat, have always been one of the strongest contributors to the desktop components of a Linux system.
Edited 2010-11-04 07:05 UTC
I’m not seeing where they’re chasing Aunt Tilly at all. Sure they include more “pretty” features than a hand built Debian or Slack install but the target user is nowhere near the Ubuntus of the world. It dances too close to the bleeding edge and focuses too much on next generation business tech to ever be truly comfortable for the youtube and facebook set.
Is it possible to get a listing of which order things will start at boot, with systemd?
This is my biggest frustration with upstart: you have no way to tell which order things will start at boot. And every boot can use a different order.
Managing SysV init scripts and runlevels is a pain. But trying to get any semblance of order out of upstart is just as bad.
RC on FreeBSD is dependency-based as well, but at least there you can get the general order that things will start via a simple “rcorder /etc/rc.d/* /usr/local/etc/rc.d/*”
What’s the equivalent for upstart/systemd?
I’m not sure there’s really an applicable concept of “what order things will load in”.
By definition they’re trying to get everything that’s needed started up as fast as possible; this may include starting multiple things at the same time which don’t depend on each other, and when other things that do depend on them get started will depend on how long those previous things took to start, and whether they’re actually needed or in use.
It would be similarly difficult to ask what order the user will start programs or visit web sites in after logging in; the order will depend on what the user has to or wants to do, what messages came into their inboxes, what links they receive in email and chat, etc.
More generally, I really hate to rely on assuming that things are going to start up in a particular order; unless you’re doing cold boots constantly, you may have services starting and stopping at runtime, say as software is updated or new services get activated. To be reliable, the control systems for these should be explicitly set up to ensure that things load each other when needed rather than just hoping everything comes up in the right order… otherwise you tend to get surprised when that next cold boot comes, and the simple manual ordering wasn’t right after all.
Accept your new non-deterministic overlords!
IOW, it’s impossible to get a standard, ASCII representation of the dependencies, thus making the boot process “yet another black box”.
Knowing the exact order things will start isn’t an absolute requirement. But being able to get a dependency graph out of the process most certainly is.
One thing that pissed me off was a bug in a python library for generating the xorg config. The net effect is that the fusion rpms for Nvidia and frglx don’t work right. The bug has been none since mid september and doesn’t look like it will be fixed soon.
The other major bug is that intel’s 11n wireless firmware is broken. That really sucks as the guy at intel can’t seem to find the problem. Plus its weeks between messages on the list about the problem.
Finally, Meego, which has been hyped a lot and I was looking forward to trying, is completely broken. As in you can’t even log in with it. I was hoping to start running it on my laptop to play around with.
For a Meego adapation, Smeegol should be better (as Meego is already build on a large chunk of OpenSuse tech).
With Fedora 12 Constantine having aggregated all my ext partition, thus wiping off my Ubuntu distro, as a (new) default behavior, I do not trust Fedora anymore. Sure this sounds childish, yet loosing loads of data and 1 week to reconstruct my partition tree to salvage my other partitions that have suddenly disappeared even from Windows has made up my mind about this specific Linux distro :/
Kochise
you started installing a new OS and changing partition table without proper backups?
I think the blame should be pointed at someone else for the data loss.
I wanted to install over Fedora 10 on a already partitioned HD. If in 2009 it’s not possible to just do that without pain, I just kill the cause to avoid further consequences. The place holder for Constantine was waiting, the swap partition also. Why have I to reconfigure everything from scratch ? Windows install from Windows 2000 asks for a partition and limits itself to the one selected, without aggregating the neighborhood :/ Plain and simple : Linux is coded by coders, for coders, in a coder mindset (“I don’t care for the rest of the crowd”)
Kochise
I have just installed Fedora 14 on a spare partition on my hard disk. I just selected “custom installation” and selected my spare partition. I have Kubuntu 10.04 LTS and Arch Linux on the same disk (I use a separate partition also for User directories).
It works perfectly. No data was lost at all. I can still boot the other two Linux OSes just fine.
partitions get deleted because people just click “next,next,next”
thats what I was thinking. Think people click next when it says ‘remove all partitions and install fresh’
This default behavior is non intuitive. If the HD is partitioned, why would I want to “format everything and take the whole place” as first choice ?
Kochise
that is true. Might be worth filing a bug/feature request for Anaconda not to do that.
If memory serves me right, the default behavior (Delete everything) was replaced in F13 (I think).
F13 and F14 have a far different main partition window.
– Gilboa
Edited 2010-11-06 15:22 UTC
As I’m no going to give it a retry, I do not care. But thanks for the info, obviously I was not the sole person who encountered a problem there :p
Kochise
Ditto. If you have a complex set up, you have to know what you are doing and pay attention to the screens that are displayed.
Its worth noting that Windows 7 with all of its user friendliness would also have killed the partitioning by default.
uh, no, Windows 7 would not of, it presents a list of partitions, just like most linux distros, and asks you what partition to use.
There is no default, as it will sit there patiently forever waiting for you to choose a partition.
Edited 2010-11-04 20:51 UTC
Still should have backups.
I have a backup of everything on a external hardrives, and all my code is backuped on dropbox and SVN.
Learn’t that lesson once and once was too many times.
“With Fedora 12 Constantine having aggregated all my ext partition, thus wiping off my Ubuntu distro, as a (new) default behavior, I do not trust Fedora anymore”
Heh, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature (a nice one IMO)
.
This is your own fault. Customize is the key, I’ve installed Fedora 14 yesterday, but I keep Fedora 13 as my for a little while till I have applied all my customizations to Fedora 14 and I find it stable enough, like I did with 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 (Two partitions for my OSes).
I’ve a T61p which I like very much an I was pleasantly surprised with Nouveau, I could even run compiz with only some minor glitches. I will keep it running Nouveau for a while till I find something I don’t like about it, but at this rate it could be a permanent thing soon. I like it!
Fedora is a distro for Virtual Machines and other places where you don’t mind total destruction, including that of your hardware.
With Fedora, if it compiles, it ships. It probably works on the developer’s machine.
Many times(meaning separate CRC-checked DVDs, different versions on different hardware) I can’t even make it past the low-res setup because of random crashes.
My best guess is that most developers and testers run a completely different kind of hardware from the open-ish stuff I have.
Don’t take me wrong, I love Fedora and its users. They are the ones keeping the most ugly Linux bugs away. Now if we had someone to filter out Debian and Canonical “fixes”…
Not sure exactly what you mean by that. Fedora is pretty bleeding edge, which means they ship upstream packages pretty soon after the upstream releases it. Most of the problems I’ve found with fedora are from upstream.
It is no secret that most Linux “upstream” developers use Fedora and are/were/will be employed by Red Hat. It still doesn’t make it a stable and tested distro.
Mr. Torvalds merges a a patchset in GIT and someone in Fedora packages whatever comes out when you enable all the optimizations.
I’ll take any downmod I get, and I will admit that it feels faster, and it can be controlled with some work, but a normal Linux user really doesn’t want Fedora near his data.
Depends on your definition of a normal linux user.
Fedora was born out of the idea of it being a testbed.
For that they have my respect and we all benefit from them.
Fedora doesn’t just package whatever Linus puts out. That is deeply underestimating the amount of work that goes into Fedora. Even if you are talking about Fedora kernel, Red Hat has three full time engineers working to take care of it besides the dozens of kernel developers working in the Linux kernel alone.
Typically, there is a bunch of patches waiting to get upstreamed that requires forward porting to the new kernel. Then patches get developed or cherry picked from other trees in response to bug reports. Typically packages get put in updates-testing repository first for a considerate time period of positive karma values. A recent change is the update policy at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Updates_Policy which has fairly strict guidelines on what is being pushed as updates.
Look I’m not implying they don’t do their best. I’m sure Linus doesn’t want his kernel to fry NICs either.
Linux has 12.6 millon LOCs, it’s not like adding three people can ensure quality even if they are excellent. Especially if they are not coordinated with the other people doing the same job.
Linux in general gets the manpower but not the coordination. A normal company would assign about 600 highly trained people/month to do a review of the commits to such a huge legacy system(not saying it’s enough; I’d add a zero or two). Linux probably gets a lot more, but what guarantee is there that everyone isn’t looking in the same “fun” places?
In the end both Linux and legacy systems end up with bugs that aren’t found until an army of testers hits the code. Legacy systems don’t run on zillions of different hardware and software configurations, though. A company writing drivers for Linux may do a lot of testing on their hardware but once it is upstream it is as good as untested.
You need a zillion computers and a zillion testers to debug Linux. This means the money a company would need to test Linux professionally would be out of the reach of most if not all.
Fact is Fedora users hit untested code and do the testing for free at their own risk of losing data and hardware. If you understand that, then go ahead.
If that is your definition of “untested code”, then noone really is doing testing and development with 600 people. So what are you comparing with? I have no idea.
So … Ubuntu has how many people ensuring the quality of kernel code?
Funny you say that. One of the “Programmers” that was recently hired where I work has stated that he’s been running Red Hat and Fedora forever, and the person telling me this said “He knows Fedora like you know Debian.” Well, I know Fedora as well as I know Debian as well, and that is why I wouldn’t trust Fedora for anything but a test desktop that I update carefully. Debian is rock solid in stable, just like Red Hat and CentOS. Fedora isn’t meant to be a production server like this “Programmer” is trying to set it up as… If he really knew Fedora like I know Debian, he wouldn’t attempt to set it up for VMs on a production server.
Spice does look cool though, I wanted to set up a Fedora 14 server to play with SPICE on my N900
Will have to give that a go when I am not tracking down weird ftp issues, or asterisk freaking out on me.
I’m not saying Fedora is a bad distribution at all, I’m saying that it’s not meant for production servers, it is as Red Hat says, an experimental distribution to test and create technologies, then stabilize them for RHEL.
I actually went with F13 on my mother’s laptop, since at the time it was the only one that really worked at all on the Hybrid graphics system that is on it. Not sure if the new Ubuntu does or not, but F13 runs really well on it, so haven’t changed it.
is ldc support (D on LLVM). I would expect experimental builds of gdc (GCC D) and google Go (Jetbrains has preliminary support).
I downed the 64bit ISO. sda6 had 10GB Ubuntu 10.04, Fedora would only say can’t update your install. Tried both install choices on the first menu. Rebooted to Windows Heaven , to Delete / format sda6 as fat32 , then Fedora 14 installs. Thats a new one ! Fedoras Grub fails with bootmgr missing to boot win7 (made win7 the default at install).Haven’t had that for a while. Had to use c option root (hd0,1) makeactive chainloader +1 boot to get back to win7. Couple of Bugs. Now to find Chrome and some repos.
Did you make sure you select fresh install, upgrade doesn’t work with anything other than a previous install of Fedora, I upgraded to F14 from F13 (64-bit) from the DVD. I have the Google, Google-chrome, Adobe, rpmfusion and dropbox repos.
My grub.conf is getting a little messy; quadruple or more boot setup: winxp, win7, ubuntu, fedora and whatever happens to be the flavor of the month
Edited 2010-11-04 16:22 UTC
I have to admit, I’m not too crazy about Fedora’s concept of being a bleeding-edge playground for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to based off of. I’ve tried to like it many times over the years, but I always leave it disappointed. I’ve found it to be too unstable at times, and accept technology long before it is ready (ie. KDE4). Yet, all this stuff has to happen *somewhere* before it can become common among distributions, making this both a strength and a weakness.
IMO, Fedora’s last KDE4 version was quite nice plus it had plymouth/kernel mode setting, which was cool since it allowed high-res graphics right at boot… haven’t heard much about this latest version, I guess I’m off to read some reviews. If it’s got enough interesting stuff, I might just download a copy and try it out in a VM.