“It is time yet again where the next Fedora Core installment (this time, Core 6) begins to grab the attention of red-hat-wearing penguins and other GNU/Linux enthusiasts. Yesterday was the inaugural test release of Fedora Core 6, which is targeted at die-hard Fedorians, and any other users wishing to get a glimpse at what Fedora Core 6 will hold in store.”
Read more here.
Fedora Core 6 Preview
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I’m really looking forward to FC6.
I’ve got FC5 on my laptop and was thinking about replacing it with the newest Ubuntu but since the plans for FC6 seem really promising I guess I’ll just stick with FC5 until FC6 is released.
I’ve gotten a bit disenchanted.
I had been using RedHat since 4.2. And when they released Fedora I went with that tine of the fork. People complained about being RH’s perpetual beta testers, but I dismissed it. Fedora was a new community project. They were working on setting it free to be something like their version of Debian, and the quality was pretty good, considering they were just getting started as a project.
Fast forward a few years. They are not a new project anymore, and now RedHat has stated (in very explicit terms) that Fedora is too important to them to let out of their control.
My CD Burner stopped working as of FC4. The bug was reported in late July, 2005, about 3 weeks after the initial release. I added myself as a CC on that bugzilla ticket. In Jan, 2006, the person it (finally) got assigned to responded. He said he didn’t have time to look into it, but he was filing the bug upstream. He also assured us that the upstream maintainer was *very* responsive. A few weeks later, the upstream maintainer responded and asked for us to get the CVS and test a patch which didn’t work. The real fix didn’t make it into Fedora until the release of FC5 in March, 9 months after the bug was released in FC4.
By this time, I had moved, very happily, to CentOS 4.
But after hearing about how wonderful the wiggly windows in FC5 were, I broke down and decided to see what it was all about in early May. But most of the screen was missing during the install. I know the installation well enough that I did not need to see the screen to be able to click in the right places.
But then my Radeon 9100 couldn’t do anything above 640×480. So I checked Bugzilla. The bug had been reported in March, a few days after the release of FC5. But it had not been assigned yet. (I never saw any wiggly windows, BTW.)
You know what? I used to poo-poo comments from people claiming that Fedora was beta quality software.
Now I question whether the current Fedora has achieved beta status. It seems that current Fedoras do, after all, “Eat Your Brane”.
I’m currently running Ubuntu 6.06LTS just for evaluation, and I must say I’m pretty impressed. I may well end up going back to CentOS. I probably will; I like to use what I have my customers using.
But if I’m gonna be a beta tester, or alpha tester, I want to get a response that is somewhat more reassuring than “I don’t have time to look at this, I’m filing it upstream”. Especially when the company sponsoring (indeed, controlling) the project is the *premier* Linux distributor on the planet.
And there’s more. Silently dropped support for RAID controllers. Refusals to reissue install CDs with critical problems that prevent installation. Stuff that I dismissed at the time… until I realized that it had become standard operating procedure.
Edited 2006-06-23 19:42
Your experiences with Fedora are very concerning indeed. I have been using exclusively gnu/linux for the last 5 years and among the mainstream distros I tried, (for me) noone came even close to the usability and quality of Redhat/Fedora. There is a reason for that and it’s _not_ that fedora is indeed _that_ better. I had problems over the years, with programs and upgrades and whatever, but after dealing with them in a consistent basis, I’ve reached the point were now these quirks are invisible to me. And I mean *INVISIBLE*. I guess that getting familiar with something kinda tricks the mind. And I realized it when I tried to install windows on my pc as well, and the whole procedure just got the hell out of me. NOTE: please bare in mind that what follows is _not_ a rant – please see where I am trying to get to at the end. My soundcard didn’t work at all, sp2 created a problem that made windows unbootable (I had to upgrade bios and stuff and then install a critcal patch using a very non-average-joe-use procedure, ati drivers sucked and I had to resort to the omega drivers) … all these had been non-existent for fedora/redhat with the freshrpms repository and stuff. However I noticed that all my budies were going through similar problems with windows but exactly because they were going through them again and again in a consistent basis, these problems became `invisible’ to them (`windows works great and out of the box’ etc). I guess what is important in the pc world is to what operating system you are accustomed and used to, cause the familiarity you develop with it ends up tricking your mind about it’s actual quality.
Yep. Well done for finding out that Fedora is simply an alpha and beta testing distro for RHEL, where you report bugs to them and test for free. If you whinge about it then they know they need to fix it for their RHEL customers. What do you get in return? Well, certainly not a working distribution.
it is not as bad as you are making it out to be though I agree they could be a little more proactive with community reported bugs etc.
FC5 is very usable and clean distro and i hope FC6 will be better!
it is not as bad as you are making it out to be though I agree they could be a little more proactive with community reported bugs etc.
A project to sort bugs on bugzilla is available on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers. The responsible for this project Rahul who also posts here is back.
“””it is not as bad as you are making it out to be though I agree they could be a little more proactive with community reported bugs etc.
FC5 is very usable and clean distro and i hope FC6 will be better!”””
The ati driver won’t go past 640×480 resolution and there is no work around. I don’t find the 640×480 FC5 desktop to be particularly usable. It’s been 3 months. There has been no interest or progress on the developers’ part. And you are telling me it is not as bad as I make it out to be?
I think what you really mean is that a “works for me” QA policy is satisfactory.
Happily, I have found that the Linux desktop has reached a stage at which one no longer needs to be bleeding edge to have the features they need. CentOS 4.3, which has packages more or less equivalent to FC3, is wonderfully functional and stable.
In all fairness, RedHat does advertise FC as being for hobbyists, etc. I let myself be fooled by RedHat employees’ postings on the mailing lists indicating that they felt that FC was “production quality”.
As someone who has used RH or FC since 4.2 on my own machines, and since 6.0 on my customers’ machines, my perception is that FC *used to be* at least close to production quality, but that condition has deteriorated.
At any rate, for those like me who like RH style distros, CentOS is an excelent alternative. So I guess all’s well that ends well.
I am looking forward to FC6 for the following reasons:
1) The upcoming RedHat Enterprise 5 will be based on FC6, so this is basically an alpha release of RHEL5.
2) XEN will be upgraded to 3.03 with all the good new features will that make XEN rock.
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=685&slide=3…
I just got around to checking out FC5 last week.
My only, and still ongoing complaint is it is too much effort to get a minimal server type install. FC just installs so much crudge..
Pretty much my major complain, too. I tried FC5 last week on my laptop… I just wanted a basic LAMP installation for doing web development while offline, it ends up installing a DNS server, a mail server, Java support and Tomcat! Installing NetworkManager brought lots of cruft, too. Unfortunately, I couldn’t uninstall them since the depedency resolver wanted to remove half of the software on my machine!
I must say the package manager is quite nice while being easy to use. It seems like FC6 is using the same… Let’s hope they relax dependencies, since I don’t want a whole kitchen sink for a simple setup!
My only, and still ongoing complaint is it is too much effort to get a minimal server type install.
You just need to create kickstart configuration file with system-config-kickstart and in %packages section put only:
@core
In default minimal installation you will have @core and @base 😉
Then follow this instructions → http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedora-install-guide-en/fc5/sn-automa…
If you think FC5 installs too much crud then I suggest you take a look at SUSE 10.1. Yesterday I did a “server” install and got literally dollops of crud more than FC5.
It didn’t last long on my system.
I’ve been a Fedora user since FC2. While it arguably provides the best GNU/Linux user experience for many, my major gripe would be the overwhelming updates that are available each week. It has its own intended audience, its there for a specific purpose, and these are the poeple who would appreciate it most.
I wish that they would support their products a little longer. Novell manages to support OpenSuse for two years, why can’t Fedora? For those interested, Blag is a good FC based distro. It is 100% Fedora compatible, but just reduced down to one disk.
Have you forgotten about Fedora Legacy http://fedoralegacy.org ? FC5 now has a integrated legacy repository for longer support.
Legacy sounds nice, but does not offer that much long-term support. For example, FC3 only got a few upgrades once switched to the Legacy project.
I understand why Fedora does what it does; they want free beta testers for their product. You can argue the pros and cons of this, but this is the sole purpose of the Fedora Core Project.
Bottom line, if you want loger support, go with OpenSuse (two years), CentOS (five years), or Ubuntu (five years). The upgrade cycle with Fedora is really the only thing that I can complain about, because the constant upgrades increases the probability that your hardware will be overtaxed by always running the latest and greatest.
“””Bottom line, if you want loger support, go with OpenSuse (two years), CentOS (five years), or Ubuntu (five years).”””
CentOS 4 will receive maintenance updates through at least Feb 29, 2012, which is over seven years from its Feb 2005 release date. And I can attest that the updates have been quite timely, indeed.
http://centos.org/modules/smartfaq/faq.php?faqid=42
Even the ancient CentOS 2 (based on RHEL 2.1, released May 17, 2002) will be supported another 3 years, through May 31, 2009, and thus even that aged RH 7.2 based release will still be supported after the upcoming Fedora Core 6 has long been out of support.
“Legacy sounds nice, but does not offer that much long-term support. For example, FC3 only got a few upgrades once switched to the Legacy project. ”
Fedora Legacy provides updates (note: not “upgrades”) for all the previous releases of Fedora including Core 1-3 so far other than Red Hat Linux 7.3 and 9.
The reason you have been only getting few updates after the transition of Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Legacy is that, the project only provides security fixes under maintenance mode unlike the currently active releases which stays close to upstream.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legacy/FAQ
Fedora Core 1 was released on 5 November 2003 and is still maintained by Fedora Legacy.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Core/HistoricalSchedules
You can extend the legacy provided updates for as long as you want to by contributing towards it. Note that only the last release of Ubuntu is supported for 5 years. If you want to buy such support, RHEL provides it for 7 years.
“””The reason you have been only getting few updates after the transition of Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Legacy is that, the project only provides security fixes under maintenance mode unlike the currently active releases which stays close to upstream.”””
And also, Fedora Legacy isn’t very good about getting security updates out. Anyone who trusts their publicly available server to Fedora Legacy is crazy.
Sorry to put it so bluntly, but it is true.
Also, I wish people would stop spreading the misinformation that if you want security updates for an extended period you have to pay RedHat. RHEL is open source software, so you have a choice of who you want to get that support from , and how much, if anything, you want to pay for it:
http://www.centos.org
Edited 2006-06-24 20:10