Fedora Core 6 has been delayed again. “Over the weekend we ran into a few more bugs with Fedora Core 6 that we
decided were important enough to fix. There were some multilib compose issues (wrong packages landing in the wrong dirs), some translation files that would cause tracebacks in things like anaconda (whoops), and a fedora-release package that forgot to enable updates (double whoops). For these reasons and a few others, we decided to respin the release candidate tree and push the release date out another couple of days.”
Honestly, I was a bit surprised at the gravity of some of these bugs. When Test 4 came out, it was pretty obvious that things were behind schedule. Since then, they have stated minor setbacks in the release date, but I have to wonder how this affects their image? If it were up to me, I would give a longer delay for the new release, let the communit have some time to piss and moan about the sad state of Fedora, and then beat the stated release date much to the delight of the former Fedora detractors. I think that the repeated delay of Fedora (even though it is not that long) gives the community several opportunities to complain; I say just get it over with in one fell-swoop. But, then again, what do I know…
I have been using Fedora since I wiped out the RedHat 9.0 from the start of my using since 6.0.
I wonder if the user base is eroding and migrating towards Ubuntu. I like Fedora better over all, just because I have used RedHat since 1999 or so. Plus, I find it really easy to set up and it is very stable.
Some people will come from Ubuntu to Fedora at the same time. At certain point it will reach an equilibrium which is pretty much current situation. The good thing about fedora is that it has so many able hands to do things such as major update of kernel. As the time of writing, kernel 2.6.18.1 has been pushed out for FC5 update.
Some people will come from Ubuntu to Fedora at the same time.
I left Ubuntu Dapper for Fedora Core 5. Isn’t Ubuntu a lot cooler at the moment? But Fedora Just Works (TM
).
Fedora’s package manager and Pup are slow. Its default looks are not very impressive (although the new fonts are perfect). Out of the box its multimedia is crippled. Occasionally, I even have a Gnome app crashing. And actually booting could be faster.
But for some reason, I just love this distro.
It’s never let me down.
Developers, this delay is no problem at all. Thumbs up for admitting to the bugs you found, and fixing them! Other distros often just release, and the fixes come in as Badly Needed Updates. And if people have no patience waiting for a few days more, shame on them.
Long back I was a Redhat 7 then Redhat 9 fan. I “upgraded” to Fedora Core after RH9.. since then I’ve been rather unconvinced. Admitingly the last Fedora core I’ve used was Core 4, but I just find something about it causing me to back off and wait until the next release.
I’m now using Ubuntu and Suse 10 enterprise and am really happy with it.
I think it’s something about the cutting edge aspect of it that doesn’t thrill me with confidence.
I’ve been using Fedora Development basically since it’s inception, it has always been nicely stable and provided me with a well matched system of fresh technology and stability.
I admire the fact that the developers are willing to stand up and say: “we’re sorry but we will be pushing it back 2 days to fix these specific bugs”. There has not be a cut of announced features and the delay is minimal, the 6 month release cycle is as good as kept and the result is stunning. Fedora Core 6 is an amazing system, one that the developers can be proud of and the users will enjoy.
Better one day late than known broken from day one.
I was hoping to start downloading tomorrow and install it on thursday or friday, i’ll guess i’ll have to wait until weekend.
I can accept a 2 day delay if all major bugs a ironed out.
Fedora is one of the greatest distros out there and waiting a bit mor is well worth it.
Take your time team – waiting patiently for what promises to be a very good release.
Another little delay, big deal, long as the final release turns out well. If it doesn’t, then I will complain. Am looking forward to the release and will probably upgrade my core 5 box when all the repos I use are ready
It’s fair enough to wait till the release is good enough.Not that FC5 is not good enough,on the contrary.Although i’m looking forward to FC6 i don’t mind at all waiting till the devs think FC6 is ready.
There’s no way people could complain about the delays in this release compared to Vista’s delays.
Yet another Linux Review that can’t void itself of a Vista/MS comment.
Does anybody know if there is an RALink rt2500 WLAN driver included in the FC6 distro this time? Hope, hope, hope…
If it’s not upstream it’s not in Fedora – that’s the way it works. Having played with the latest driver for this WLAN device and trust me it’s no where near ready – e.g. my USB keyboard magically stopped working after inserting the device.
I remember that the “release when it’s ready” philosophy once was THE philosophy of free software, and everybody was proud about that.
By contrast, the philosophy of proprietary software was to give more importance to “time to market” than to software quality.
Nowadays GNU/Linux distro have to follow exact relase cycle and schedule time, which, althought a good thing for some aspects (planning upgrades, etc…), may have a negative influence on software quality.
“Nowadays GNU/Linux distro have to follow exact relase cycle and schedule time, which, althought a good thing for some aspects (planning upgrades, etc…), may have a negative influence on software quality.”
They don’t “have to”, they just do. I think over the years the development process of free software projects has improved a lot, which is why they’re able to release on schedule. Just because you release on schedule doesn’t mean the release isn’t “ready”.
For example, take a look at GNOME. The 1.4 -> 2.0 transition wasn’t exactly great, and the project learned a lot from the mistakes made there. These days GNOME releases are *ready* on schedule, so they’re released as planned.
Long delays are not something to be proud of, the quality of what you put out is.
“Nowadays GNU/Linux distro have to follow exact relase cycle and schedule time
They don’t “have to”, they just do.
well, they HAVE to. At least those of them who are interested in market share (thinking about SLED, Redhat, Ubuntu, Mandriva).
Beside how good the developement process of a GNU/Linux distro can become, with free software quality depends on too many factor out of your developement process. For example, if you have to deploy the latest version of XYZ software in your distro (and surely, you want to if you care market share), you have no control on the quality of it. You have to trust XYZ team, and you can find bugs at the very last moment, which is a problem.
I’m not saying that “release when it’s ready” is always better than “release on schedule”. Just saying that obtaining the latter could lead to buggier software.
PS: Gnome is not a GNU/Linux distribution, but yes, I do agree with you: they are always able to release on time and their releases are great.
Actually, -both- philosophies, in their purist forms are wrong.
Release an application that’s too buggy, and you’ll lose your user base.
Release once every two years, and you’ll end up using a very old software with less features that’s well behind the curve.
The question is, at what level of bugs is a certain piece of software considered good enough for a [1..N].0 release.
Fedora’s problems (ext3 corruption, anaconda problems), were indeed show-stopper bugs. I wouldn’t have stopped a Fedora release due to a bug in Evolution and/or firefox – these kind of bugs can be easily fixed by an
update.
– Gilboa
Around the time Dapper came out, I wiped my main linux partition and installed it…and really liked it, except for speed…it just felt a lot slower. I waded through the forums, trying tweaks/tips to speed things up, but nothing gave me back that snappiness I was used to.
I recently installed Test3 of FC6 and it was much faster than even my ‘tweaked’ ubuntu out of the box…anyone else notice this? I’m not flaming Ubuntu here, just an observation of my own on my hardware (laptop, amd64 3800, 1GB ram). That said, can’t wait for the official FC6 release…
I haven’t used FC6, but my clean install of Ubuntu wasn’t blazing. I have a Duo Core with 1GB Ram, 100GB Sata drive laptop, and 128MB Vid and it was sluggish. So chances are FC6 could be faster. I suspect Ubuntu was built that way to work on a number of different systems. I do know that FC and SuSE can be picky at times when it comes to hardware. But if you have the right stuff, performance is outstanding…
Hi I also “just” switched to Fedora 5 I was using Debian sid before and I can’t say I am totally satisfied with Fedora, but it has a certain “professional” feel to it whereas Debian felt really “amateur” and like it was developed by highschool nerds in their free time between homeworks. Anyways I have tried pretty much all the distros out there and SuSE seemed optimal, but now that they switch to ext3 from reiserfs, GNOME from KDE, exclude not-totally-free software like mp3 players as RedHat does, etc…, well, SuSE is not really SuSE any longer just a second-grade RedHat clone. Which is very sad, for now I stay with Fedora but I would really like to see the old SuSE back.
How many time has this to be repeated: they switch the default file system to ext3. About time too. Reiser lacks lots of features ext3 has, and the performance gap (which could be felt 3-4 years ago) is pretty much closed. But Reiser will be supported for a long time, it just won’t be the default.
They also fully support KDE. There was talk about focusing on GNOME, but they backed off, due to customer demand (especially in Europe). So KDE is as much supported as GNOME.
Not that I care, I use freebsd. But SuSE is one of the better rpm based linux distroes out there (if not the best). I don’t like .deb, I don’t know why. Perhaps because I had bad experience with .deb based distroes. When I tried debian 5 years ago, it was badly outdated, and an update to the then current unstable branch crippled the whole system. Recently I tried Kubuntu, tried to stay with it for a couple of weeks, but quality sucked so much that I ran back to BSD (my reason for experimenting with linux was crappy flash support for free~). On-screen artifacts using nvidia-driver, while I had no similar problems with same driver on FreeBSD… after manual update to the latest, X was crippled, hours hunting for a repo that had monkey audio codec and all the multimedia stuff I needed, only to run into dependency hell when one of the packages from a repo conflicted with the ones in the official repo. LVM. HP-printer daemons running by default, even though I have no printer whatsoever. KDE broken up into miriad packages, so you have to start up the package manager just for a freaking calculator (kcalc). I know, this is not the fault of the package format (DEB), but still…
Actually, distoes based on the good old .tgz format from slackware seems to be the most trouble free, with archlinux being one of the best.
>>SuSE seemed optimal, but now that they switch to ext3 from reiserfs, GNOME from KDE, exclude not-totally-free software like mp3 players as RedHat does, etc…, well, SuSE is not really SuSE any longer just a second-grade RedHat clone. Which is very sad, for now I stay with Fedora but I would really like to see the old SuSE back.
Fedora uses ext3, Gnome as most polished DE, excludes non-open source software by default, including mp3-players, what would you like to find in Fedora that you now miss in Suse?
And to Suse’s defense, it is most certainly not “a second-grade RedHat clone”, yes it uses rpm, but so do dozens others, that has nothing to do with being a clone. Originally, Suse was a German Slackware-based distro (a translation really), nothing to do with Red Hat, and Suse Linux is actually a little older than Red Hat Linux.
I recommend you try Mandriva, which approaches your preferences rather well.
An AppArmor like GUI to SELinux.A policy made just a few clicks away.
Anyways I have tried pretty much all the distros out there and SuSE seemed optimal,
Likewise.Once they screwed 10.1 i thought it was time to shift and found FC5 to be must suitable.Personally i think there isn’t such thing as an ideal OS.They all have pros and cons.Only FC5 happens to have more pros than cons.The mileage may vary ofcourse.
Would be nice if fedora had apt-get instead of yum and a GUI for SELinux equall to Novell AppArmor.Once installed i have yet to see a distro as stable and secure by default as fedora.
RedHat really is abusing Fedora and pushing people away to far more stable distributions. One just needs to look at their release cycle to realize that they have no desire to make sure they release something stable. While many distributins go through a freeze cycle and release multiple beta’s, and release candidate’s, with Fedora we just have 4 Test releases and no clue as to what they mean. They need to stop worrying about Fedora eating the RHEL market and allow Fedora to develop properly. They are not in the same market, so RedHat needs to stop crippling Fedora.
RedHat really is abusing Fedora and pushing people away to far more stable distributions.
Name one that has a MAC equall to SELinux,Exec-Shield,fortify-source,to name a few.
One just needs to look at their release cycle to realize that they have no desire to make sure they release something stable.
As SUSE,it looks normal on the outside yet they bluntly ship a release with known bugs and add them to the release notes.
They need to stop worrying about Fedora eating the RHEL market and allow Fedora to develop properly.
Both are free.If you want “stable” install CentOS or whitebox.It’s the service contracts that costs money.Yet can you can official Fedora support equall to RHEL?
“They need to stop worrying about Fedora eating the RHEL market and allow Fedora to develop properly.”
Fedora doesn’t target the same user base as RHEL.
If anything, CentOS and Whitebox are -really- eating into RHEL.
“so RedHat needs to stop crippling Fedora.”
How exactly does RedHat cripple Fedora?
– Gilboa
Edited 2006-10-17 14:51
“How exactly does RedHat cripple Fedora?”
Well, for one thing, you do not find all these critical bugs one day before the release while trying to compile everything. Whatever happenned to release candidates? I shudder to think what bugs will not be caught with the release.
Well, for one thing, you do not find all these critical bugs one day before the release while trying to compile everything. Whatever happenned to release candidates? I shudder to think what bugs will not be caught with the release.
This page provides more details:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/FC6TreeTesting
As you see, the test is done before releasing the final version.
At least some of the bugs were only detected when test4 was released.
Never the less, I second the RCn sentiment.
I’d suggest you raise this (minus the anti-RedHat bashing) in the -devel list.
– Gilboa
Is there any chance that final release versions of several packages will be included past the freeze dates? I know OO.o just released ver. 2.0.4. I’ve seen Fedora Core switch minor versions like that in the course of its lifetime so doing so in a feature-freeze wouldn’t be a big deal, right? Also, Firefox 2 is just around the corner. Wonder if that will make it in.
Most of the time apps like that get upgraded.
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development…
OO.o for example is at 2.0.4
Firefox 2.0, probably would be updated.
If you tracked FC5, for example Gnome 2.14.0 was used. However in updates, it moved to 2.14.[1-3]
FC5 release:
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/x86_64/os…
FC5 updates:
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/5/x…
Unless FF2.0 causes a big problem with rebuilding everything against it, then someday you will see it in FC6
I used Fedora for quite some time and it is definitely one of the better distros. But one thing slowly, but steadily frustrated me: the short lifetime of its products compared to some other distros and some severe bugs in FC5 that really angered me (killing e.g. my whole printing network with a system update and not being able to use X after installing a “kernel-fix”). I use Debian now, which is also nice, but different. I miss some things that I had in Fedora but I love the longlivety of Debians releases.
If Fedora would get better and longer support and if it would get rid of its habit of breaking things occasionally with updates, I would be tempted to go back to Fedora. But I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.
well, easy answer there: if you like redhat’s stuff such as their system-config-* tools, the way they organize /etc/ (such as sysconfig), or the cool things you can do with rpms, but dislike the bleeding edge short lifespan nature of fedora, use redhat enterprise, or, if you don’t want to pay, use centos. particularly, I’d look to see if the centos folk do a rebuild of rhel5 after it’s release.
Two days is nothing for the best distro out there, I am not a linux pro and the fact that I have been able to use fedora since RH9 shows that it’s the best one.. you don’t have to push it that much to get things working: using it server side is simply fantastic, everything runs smoothly, as for the desktop version most of the times (even if some more GNOMEing could be better).
At the moment I am still pretty sad for having lost my laptop with a full FC5 install that was HD suspended… just hope this will show somebody out there that linux (and Fedora most of all) CAN run on laptops in a very good way!
…btw, I managed to restore my backup on an old celeron desktop and I was up and running again in half an hour
Thank you Fedora!