Submitted by “The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new DVD ISO Re-Spins of Fedora Core 5 (as well as the live CD). These Re-Spin ISOs are based upon Fedora Core 5 and all updates released as of August 18th, 2006. The ISO images are available for i386 and x86_64 architectures via BitTorrent starting Monday, August 28th, 2006.”
Anyone know if this updated version includes drivers for the ATI Mobility Radeo X1400??? I can’t run fedora on my laptop because, the drivers for this seemed to be missing.
Live CDs for FC6t2 is an excellent idea. A Live CD makes it possible to try it out without the risk of losing their data or need to reinstall if it doesn’t work.
This way more people might try it before the final releases are shipped. This means that more bug reports and other user input can go into the final release, hopefully resulting in higher quality software.
Due to the number of wasteful updates required for Fedora, this Fedora Unity project has been formed to release monthly snapshots (entire DVDs) so people can keep new installations up to date without having to download hundreds of megs of updates per machine.
In addition, The Fedora Legacy Project, after officially becoming part of Fedora, just a month ago announced that support for a lot of the older versions of Fedora and RedHat will be discontinued.
Finally, in a recent interview with Brians Steven, the CTO of RedHat, he had to say this about RHEL 5.
“We’re convinced that there is a better way to develop software, so what we did is we blew up the notion of an Alpha and we use Fedora as an alpha…
FC 5 and FC6 constituted the role of an alpha and now we’re going right to Beta 1 in a few weeks.”
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3628476
Take from this whatever you will.
Agreed, the number of updates for Fedora Core 5 was impressive, and the package updater is not fast.
Is that a reason to leave Fedora for what it is?
Personally, I used Suse for two years, then I wanted to upgrade but was disappointed in 10.1. I never even thought of using Fedora, maybe it was the logo? So I tried Ubuntu because I like the idea of having an apt-get and .deb system. But I faced a few bugs in Ubuntu, crucial to me (printing, multilingual input methods) and finally when I met my first full system crash since using Linux I decided to try Fedora.
All of the things I need work absolutely flawlessly in Fedora, and there is very good support (via the forum) for all multimedia, even if Fedora is an American distribution. Took me one hour to set it all up. Plus there is excellent security (SELinux), although I don’t know if I need it.
And Fedora has very few annoying bugs, and a very good Gnome desktop.
Some people may dislike the idea of RedHat just using Fedora Core as a playground. But to have a multi million dollar enterprise behind a free Linux distro is not a bad idea at all. If Fedora would ever end up so buggy that Red Hat Enterprise Linux started to suffer too, they’ll do something about it.
And what people call alphas, betas, etc., that’s rather relative. I’m running an alpha release of NeoOffice on a Mac and I haven’t found a single bug.
I think it’s pretty poor of Brian Stevens to label the final releases of Fedora Core 5 and 6 as “alpha release Linux distributions”. After all, the Fedora Project releases 3 test releases 1-2 months apart to iron out any serious issues before the final release and the final version is usually a very solid release indeed and definitely beyond both the alpha and beta stages of other free Linux distros (and arguably as equally solid as pretty well any of the free final releases of other Linux distros out there).
Yes, can argue that it hasn’t had a full “Enterprise test suite bake-in” period like RHEL gets (e.g. the major OEMs and software vendors probably want to vet their hardware and commercial software against it to “certify it”), but didn’t I read somewhere that the currently closed-source testing tools used on RHEL are going to be opened up and can be used on Fedora (which again makes Fedora even closer to RHEL and will also save some bug-fixing time for RHEL, since many of the problems found by the test suite will be fixed in the Fedora final release before the RHEL team need to deal with them).
Fedora is a fine distro and has the added advantage of being the basis for a *future* RHEL (so learn the Fedora setup now and you’re ready for the next RHEL release already!). Of course, if you really want to play with the current RHEL itself for free, just wander off and grab CentOS, so between those two, you’ve got potential OS’es you’d run at work covered nicely for free at home…
“We’re convinced that there is a better way to develop software, so what we did is we blew up the notion of an Alpha and we use Fedora as an alpha…
FC 5 and FC6 constituted the role of an alpha and now we’re going right to Beta 1 in a few weeks.”
I’ve been using FC5 on several workstations and servers now since it came out and have been meticulously updating them all daily. The above quote doesn’t say anything to me about Fedora Core’s quality as I know it to be quite excellent (I use FC5 both for developing as well as for rendering network services). If anything, that statement tells me how good the next version of RHEL is going to be if the consider FC5 an Alpha.
Edited 2006-08-30 22:28
You skipped, from the interview, *exactly* two phrases, that was between the two you reported:
<cite>
“The engineers are goaled on not just producing enterprise quality software, but driving it through upstream in terms of the community.
In the early days it was about providing a version of Linux that is differentiated somehow; instead it’s now about how do we participate in the upstream projects through Fedora.”
</cite>
I think that the meaning is completely different from what it seems from your post.
Redhat marketing line is that you want to spend money on an enterprise quality linux, and that Fedora is not that. I run Fedora servers and workstations in the enterprise without a problem. Yes there are a hell of a lot of patches but the distro is leading edge, and bug fixes are released often, not sure why this is bad.
Put Fedora-Legacy in this picture and the support time for any particular fedora release is pretty much the same as Ubuntu, every OS has an end-of-life.
Edited 2006-08-31 01:35
I am already using FC 6 Test 2 and I like it a lot. I installed XFCE 4.4 beta and the latest Nvidia drivers. The graphics performance with Xorg’s 7 server is excellent. I tried out some transparency effects but ended up disabling it since it caused X to crash too much. Networking, DVD burning, HP printing worked right out of the box.