The next version of Fedora, Fedora 12, will integrate a Moblin Desktop Environment. It can be easily “groupinstalled” via the yum package manager. The environment has already been added to the Constantine alpha release of Fedora 12 and to Fedora’s “Rawhide” development branch. They’re seeking testers to “make it great” for the final release of Fedora 12, which will be released in early November.
Is that a brand name or someone trying to be O’Reilly plaguing the world it silly names/
http://moblin.org/
Moblin is an open source project focused on building a Linux-based platform optimized for the next generation of mobile devices including Netbooks, Mobile Internet Devices, and In-vehicle infotainment systems.
It’s for Nettops/Smart Phones
Fedora used to look _good_, but it’s terribly unstable. I installed it on a corporate desktop once and I was hugely disappointed. It was also working really slow constantly mangling its guts. That was a nightmare. I don’t see it on the mobile devices, even if it’s trimmed down already.
Edited 2009-08-31 23:04 UTC
runs fine on my Vaio P, which is hardly high spec (1.33GHz Atom). Of course, I would say that…
The one thing Fedora does better than any of the other main distros is power management. Fedora had the lowest out-of-box power usage of any – 8-9W on my Asus 1000HE. I had other problems (my Atheros wireless) that wound up making Fedora untenable,but I hope all distros will examine what they are doing power-wise.
Fedora is not built to be used on the ‘corporate desktop’ AFAIK, that is what Red Hat EL is for.
I run fedora 11 on my laptop and it is by far the best performing OS that I have installed on that machine (out of around 7 different OSen, I can’t recall all of them). Not sure where this slowness you were experiencing was coming from. Also I have not noticed Fedora to be ‘terribly unstable’ as you say but maybe I have just had better experiences with it.
I am tired of hearing that. It is not stable, it is broken.
For example I can’t install F11 on an nforce motherboard PC or even eeepc1000hd. This is because of a broken anaconda, on release!!!!
Quoting from the following page.
The result to all the dot points….
Lies all lies. I use to love Fedora.
I will try version 12 lets hope it works.
Oh, thats why it doesn’t work my nforce computer. I just moved on without thinking twice about why.
I have an nforce4 board, but that isn’t the reason it won’t install. It is the anaconda installer causing my install issues.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/AnacondaStorageRewrite
The target release for that should have been delayed.
For example I can’t install F11 on an nforce motherboard PC
Same here, Fedora has been broken for like 2 years or more. It is just an amateur project, learn from Ubuntu.
I hear you. After 12 years in the RH camp, my clients and I have given up and moved on. Because it’s getting worse and worse, and yet the devs feel they’re doing great. And if you complain about the breakage you just get chastised by for not helping them enough. It’s as though they don’t realize they have competition. When a distro is broken, and the devs just want to blame the users… the users, reasonably enough, prefer to move to a distro that isn’t broken rather than wasting their time on a lost cause. IMO, Fedora’s attitude has helped fuel the popularity of a certain other distro.
My advice? Stop worrying about Fedora. Find a distro that isn’t so broken all the time and enjoy life. By staying with Fedora you are only enabling the project’s continued maladaptive behavior.
I did too. And RH Linux before it. Go ahead and waste your time on another release if you want. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. 😉
Edited 2009-09-01 00:16 UTC
I have been a long-time Debian stable and Slackware user (10 years or so) and I definitely value stability over bleeding edge. I remember trying Fedora Core in its early days and having a terrible time with stability.
However, in the past year, I decided to devote one of my laptops (Thinkpad x61s) to Fedora, starting with F10. I have been very pleasantly surprised at both F10 and F11. The installs have been flawless, the repos have met all my needs, and the stability has been there. Yum with yum-fastestmirror and yum-presto easily matches apt in transaction time, and yum’s clean and informative output exceeds the garbage apt spews out.
Overall, Fedora has definitely improved its overall experience, and I find myself quite enjoying my time with my Fedora laptop. I still love and use Debian and Slackware (and probably always will) but Fedora has really impressed me.
Bump for freaking truth.
I used to distro hop every few weeks, but since F11 came out, I’ve been absolutely impressed with the quality of product that Fedora puts out. This is hands down, the best OS I’ve used on my T61…and that includes the XP that it came with. I’ve changed desktop environments and software from LXDE to KDE to Gnome and back to Xfce in that time without breaking anything. The package management system is the best I’ve seen…DeltaRPMs make updating a breeze by only downloading the difference between what has changed and thus reducing download size. The only thing I have to worry about is manually recompiling the VirtualBox kernel module whenever it or the kernel is updated. I don’t know what to say, maybe it’s a Thinkpad thing, but this system is rock solid. Sorry that I had to go offtopic, but I just wanted to add my case to the “Fedora is not broken” camp.
Just wait until your next upgrade. You’ll see. A couple months using one release on one machine is hardly grounds for claiming your experience to be “truth”. F11 worked for you on your T61. That’s exactly all that means.
And you can only put off the day of reckoning for 13 months from the day of release (10 months from now) because they drop your support like a hot potato 13 months from release. Talk about an upgrade treadmill! That’s another thing we got fed up with regarding Fedora. Once we *did* finally get the breakage worked around on our machines after an upgrade… we couldn’t stick with that installation very long. And so the whole nightmare would begin again.
Edit: Of course, the above assumes that one or more of the torrent of updates flooding out of the Fedora update fire hose doesn’t get you first.
Edited 2009-09-01 01:42 UTC
“Just wait until your next upgrade. You’ll see. A couple months using one release on one machine is hardly grounds for claiming your experience to be “truth”. F11 worked for you on your T61. That’s exactly all that means.”
So…your subjective experience on your hardware is truth, someone else’s subjective experience on their hardware isn’t?
My “subjective” experience covers 6 years of Fedora use on about 80 machines in 4 cities in 3 states in a business environment where things have to work, and stay working. As the sole admin, changing distros is not something I do lightly in that environment. But in retrospect, dumping Fedora was a very good decision. And my trouble log confirms it.
So yes, I would weight my experience more heavily than that that of someone for whom F11 happens to have worked with his T61 for a couple of months.
That’s fair enough, but then I don’t see why you’d deploy Fedora in such an environment. It’s really not designed for it. I’d hope anyone you asked would recommend RHEL or CentOS for such a situation. I certainly would (and all our Red Hat offices deploy RHEL on their corporate desktops by default, not Fedora). You’re quite right that the pace of releases and the aggressiveness of the development process make Fedora mostly unsuited to that kind of deployment, but that’s not a _criticism_, exactly – criticising Fedora for that is like criticising a spade for not being a hoe. It’s just…not what it is.
Unfortunately, that is very much not the case. Plenty of… errr… overenthusiastic Fedora advocates will argue and argue until you either give up or “admit” that Fedora is great for this situation. I know very well and first hand about that.
Believe it or not, I don’t post about this issue just to rag on Fedora. I post it to get the truth that you just stated out in the open from time to time.
Edit: I should probably also mention that I would never have even considered Fedora for this use, despite all the “advice”, had it not been for that Great Deception called Fedora Legacy. And what a fiasco *that* turned out to be!
Edited 2009-09-01 15:07 UTC
I haven’t seen anyone giving that advice since I’ve been around. There’s usually several threads along those lines in Fedora Forum at any particular time and the advice given is pretty consistently not to use Fedora. Do you find there are still people / places where Fedora would be advocated for large-scale enterprise use?
Hmmmmmm, and you think you’ve solved that ‘upgrade treadmill’ by moving to another distribution? They *all* have that problem sunshine except if you use a source based distribution like Gentoo where you can largely get around binary compatibility problems and upgrading or reinstalling ‘as a whole’, but that brings problems in itself. Most people just install their new distribution, and they can largely get around the pain of doing so by having a separate /home partition.
The notion that you can do in-place upgrades with impunity with any distribution apart from Fedora is just plain stupid.
Specific known examples? For any one that you come up with anyone will almost certainly be able to point you to breakages in any distribution.
Without examples and a rational comparison between different distributions then this is meaningless I’m afraid.
Edited 2009-09-01 11:00 UTC
“The notion that you can do in-place upgrades with impunity with any distribution apart from Fedora is just plain stupid. ”
You can do it in Fedora as well.
Fedora does it from a known previous release point though, which is the only way you can support that well to any degree.
“The only thing I have to worry about is manually recompiling the VirtualBox kernel module whenever it or the kernel is updated.”
You don’t need to do that, unless you need the non-open source edition of VirtualBox for some of its features. If the features of the open source edition are OK for you, you can get it packaged from RPM Fusion, where the kmod/akmod system will take care of the kernel modules.
Hmmmm. Specific examples of breakage that you can at least Google for, as I did ‘for a certain other distro’ at one point? I’m willing to bet we’ll find comparable breakages and problems in all distributions.
Fedora is basically a feed into RHEL and little more really. However, if people think things are going to be better with Ubuntu or any other distribution then they are likely to be disappointed. Every distribution throws something together with brand new software version bumps that they all share every six months and releases like LTS have problems in themselves. The notion that you’ll get stability elsewhere from ‘a certain other distro’, and that has boosted its popularity, is laughable.
Certainly, corner case hardware issues happen on any distribution, and I had one with installing OpenSuse 11.1 (but not 11.0 bizarrely) not so long ago. By and large I’ve found Fedora to be no worse and no better than any other distribution.
Edited 2009-09-01 10:24 UTC
My clients and I certainly have not been disappointed by the migrations. Fedora’s penchant for including stuff that’s not quite ready yet combined with the “Fedora Update Firehose” and the forced upgrades every 12 months[1]… well, let’s just say that those “features” set Fedora apart from other distros.
It’s true that distros with long release cycles have their own problems. But we’re finding that we can upgrade the distro we’ve moved to as frequently as desired (6 months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months), and do it with relative confidence.
[1] Every six months, really. Sure, you can skip a release… but then you *have* to upgrade within 4 weeks of the release of the next version… which is always a bad idea with Fedora. In my professional experience, it’s best to wait until close to time for version x+1 to come out before upgrading to version x, and pray that they’ve fixed enough breakage by that time to get you by. Or move to another distro, of course.
Edited 2009-09-01 11:04 UTC
If you can do that then I’m happy for you because you’re virtually the only person who can do anything like that with ‘relative confidence’. It’s easier just to install a new version because there’s always something that doesn’t surface until a few months later.
I’m talking about it from the point of view that every six months packages are basically version bumped so there is very little time to test and account for any issues that might occur when you do an in-place upgrade. Whether you upgrade after six, twelve or eighteen months doesn’t change that fact.
Edited 2009-09-01 11:08 UTC
Yes. It’s nice to be able to give a release a year of shake down time before upgrading to it if we choose. And how does that work out with Fedora’s 13 month support period? Hmmm. Not very well.
This kind of flexibility is supposed to be one of the nicer things about OSS. If Microsoft or Apple forced upgrades every 12 months like Fedora does you (yes, you, Segedunum) would be screaming about it from the hilltops. But somehow it’s perfectly OK with you that Fedora does it.
What can I say? It’s amusing to watch you jump through hoops, perform logical contortions, and act generally hypocritical to justify it. Especially while I’m enjoying the flexibility I now have. We’ve been on that 12 month treadmill and we’re not going back.
Edited 2009-09-01 11:23 UTC
This kind of flexibility is one of the nicer things about OSS. Need more than 13 month support, chose one of the distros that offer that. Want a distro that will keep you on the cutting edge of the latest software, chose a distro that offers that. That is the flexibility of OSS, lots of distros targeting different niche needs.
Fedora isn’t all things to some people. If fedora doesn’t work for you, pick a distro that does. That’s what I did.
True. But some people like to assert that it is all things to all people. Cutting edge, yet stable enough for production use. And it just isn’t so. (Well, perhaps as a LAMP server it might be. XDMCP servers are a lot harder to get right.)
Absolutely. Though I would note that it’s much easier for an individual to “turn on a dime” than for an organization. It took a lot of abuse before I decided to just be done with it and move on. I wouldn’t be nearly as annoyed with Fedora if it had just been my personal desktop I had to migrate.
Edited 2009-09-01 12:02 UTC
Your first mistake was using a distro that is known for cutting edge software and that has a life span of 13months as a production/corporate OS. If you want to use a Redhat flavour in a corporate environment you should use RHEL or CentOS.
My first mistake was in putting any credence into the reports from people swearing that Fedora was production ready. That led to my second mistake, which was deploying Fedora.
Which I no longer care to do.
No. RHEL/CentOS are not very good for this use. Been there, done that. Remember, we’re talking XDMCP servers. And RHEL/CentOS take you in the opposite extreme. We deal with *lots* of documents from outside the company. And RHEL5/CentOS5 do not deal with that nearly as well as what we use now. And even with the dag repo, the package availability for RHEL/CentOS is absolutely anemic. Last I looked, EPEL was looking pretty disappointing, too.
Your first mistake was in using XDMCP for any kind of remote working, unless it’s for legacy reasons. Even then, there are far better methods of using remote desktops and getting remote access to data these days that are seriously worth migrating to. Unless you’re going to allow that I see little point at all to XDMCP these days with all the powerful, cheap fat clients and alternatives we have such as NX or even NFS mounting.
As far as I know there are a number of people using XDMCP with Red Hat and lots of distros, but again, there are better ways of accomplishing the same thing and more which is why I don’t use it. Ever. You have to use it on a reliable and secured LAN, so if anyone starts asking for outside access via the internet you’re stuck.
Well, I hope you don’t use XDMCP for outside access so I’m assuming that means that you need certain documents to open and they only open with later versions of Open Office. It’s a very hefty application to be running for multiple users on central remote machines though.
I’m not too sure why you’d want a large package repository for this kind of thing. Open Office 3, if that’s your problem, can be installed fairly easily on CentOS/RHEL 5. You were best served getting a static and reliable distribution and set up you would leave in place for years before you planned a major upgrade. It’s easier to work from there and get a reliable installation method for your applications rather than constantly getting into a muddle about what distribution you’d use and when to ‘upgrade’. It shouldn’t be hard.
If you were really clever you could simply forward applications from an ‘applications’ machine, that you could upgrade and drop in on a more regular basis, to a desktop. With NX you can even do this with Windows and Terminal Services applications.
Congratulations. It sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, or a nightmare at least.
Your credentials? I’ve never noted you posting any, other than “hobbyist”, of course. I suggest you actually get out in the field and implement these things before criticizing those who have successfully done so for many years. 🙂
XDMCP works great on a LAN. For the remote offices, nothing beats NX. NFS mounts? Don’t think so.
Edited 2009-09-02 12:20 UTC
I was referring to the fact that upgrading too often to a new version tends to have unknown side-effects versus just installing the new release cleanly, but no matter. I thought we would have all known that by now.
You never get that shakedown time though because the focus of development and testing and the software in it always inevitably shifts to the next six month cycle. If you think any fixes are going to be updated and backported well to a previous release, think again. The train has left the station. It’s extremely time consuming and pretty impossible to support that well in any rational sense. If it was then Mark Shuttleworth wouldn’t be trying to hijack Debian and get everyone on a six month release cycle.
It doesn’t force anything on you. You can use a release for as long as you like, you keep your user data intact, you upgrade in a staggered manner from a known master install and perform updates that are supported rationally within the context and timeframe of the distribution version you are using where current focus and effort is going into them. With things like virtualisation these days that process has got easier. If you want a longer update support cycle then use CentOS or something but don’t pretend you can just upgrade to a much later release with umpunity.
Support one release (or service pack point or whatever) and support it well rather than pretending you can spread yourself thinly.
It’s not amusing to see you paint that kind of ‘upgrade’ process as somehow trouble-free when it isn’t. You’re either covering up the disasters or you’ve been lucky, the former being the far more likely judging from past history.
I wouldn’t call it broken. Fedora has a large install base and that simply would not be the case if it was broken.
I can. It works just fine on my nForce 430.
I don’t want to stir the crap pot but I actually have experienced more installabilty with Ubuntu than I have with Fedora (especially pertaining to nForce motherboards; hello, hard lock up). That is only my experience but it’s the truth. I still wouldn’t call Fedora rock solid but it is stable enough for me.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview#Who_uses_Fedora.3F
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics
Edited 2009-09-01 00:24 UTC
Most of the people and organizations there get paid to use Fedora.
Every time I have tried Fedora I have been disappointed. It is unstable, many times(as in different non-consecutive versions) I can’t even get it to install because the installer crashes, and that’s with the stable versions I cannot imagine what a beta would do to my computer(Oh yes, I can, it would burn my ethernet card). And by the way, its package management is still horrible.
The people in Fedora seem to think that having to compile an older version of a module and integrating it with a modern kernel is a normal operating procedure. It surely is for their users, because they don’t bother to test a new kernel before commiting it.
Ubuntu is not perfect, many times it breaks with new releases and package updates, but it is in a completely different league. The league of trying to get an operating system out of the mess upstream delivers.
And who would that be? Any examples at all? Does NASA get paid to use fedora?
I found that to be an odd statement because it would be nice for me to get paid to use Fedora.
No-one’s ever released any version of any operating system which worked with all hardware.
Having said that, yes, there were regressions in F11 anaconda, we did explain that at the time of release. It was necessary pain to get a substantial rewrite of anaconda’s storage code done. There wasn’t any other way to do it which wouldn’t have caused more pain to someone.
I wish someone told me so that I would waste my precious bandwidth.
How about when issues like this get fixed then Fedora community could do a “respin” so I can download something that works.
Edited 2009-09-01 05:49 UTC
http://fedoraunity.org/
IRC: Channel: #Fedora-Unity  irc.freenode.net
Thanks.
But where are the fedora11 respins?
http://spins.fedoraunity.org/spins
Also check this out.
http://www.kanarip.com/2009/07/new-fedora-11-respin-in-testing-plus…
Look at the dates in the comments section. F12 will be out before the respin. Fedora=useless (for some).
Edited 2009-09-01 13:19 UTC
IRC: Channel: #Fedora-Unity  irc.freenode.net
Your hardware configuration? *
Have you reported these issues to bugzilla.redhat.com?
Just for the record,
I’m running F10 and F11 on 12 different machines, ranging from an nVidia based T61 laptop to a 24 core HP DL585G6 and Intel S7000 machines.
Never the less, as always YMMV.
– Gilboa
* Intel on-board?
P.S. at least two of the machines used nVidia chipsets.
– Gilboa
I tried Moblin on my Fedora (rawhide) installation and it worked great. I like it’s simplicity. It’s propably the UI I’m going to install my wife’s EEE PC once Fedora 12 is released.
Fedora is the distro that drives Linux desktop forward.
Edited 2009-09-01 05:17 UTC
It is also the distro that pushes often questionable solutions to the throats of other distros.
The *Kit-foo are the latest example.
I am a happy Fedora user, but I remain critical for many reasons. One example of my critique focuses on too rapid release cycles and bleeding-edge solutions, which I consider doing more harm than good to Linux generally, leading to often badly planned, post haste solutions. This is of course evident in other Linux distributions as well, but Fedora may be the prime example.
Isn’t it a GNOME community that decide to use *Kit technologies? Does some distros have problems with *Kit stuff? Have the distros raised their voices on GNOME devel mailing list about the issues?
Fedora is a bit different than other 98% of other distros because Fedora developes new techinologies. Of course there are rough edges but without providing the latest technologies they are not going anywhere.
fedora pushes the bleeding edge for a reason, and other distributions are free to wait until the technology matures. it does FAR more good than harm.
Am I wrong or did F11 only include “cc1” without the GCC compiler proper? Very strange.
I also find it very disheartening when most Linux distros ignore one of the main components: GCC. (“Users aren’t developers”, “not enough room”, blah blah blah. They don’t even try including TCC. Argh!)
red hat is one of the biggest contributers to GCC, there is no way fedora doesn’t have it.
Huh?
A. GCC is fully included in Fedora. (Including a number of cross compilers. *)
You sure you didn’t forget to install gcc-c++?
B. Nothing stops you from packaging TCC and including it in Fedora.
– Gilboa
* $ yum search gcc | grep gcc.x86_64 | sort
arm-gp2x-linux-gcc.x86_64 : Cross Compiling GNU GCC targeted at arm-gp2x-linux
avr-gcc.x86_64 : Cross Compiling GNU GCC targeted at avr
gcc.x86_64 : Various compilers (C, C++, Objective-C, Java, …)
libgcc.x86_64 : GCC version 4.4 shared support library
mingw32-gcc.x86_64 : MinGW Windows cross-compiler (GCC) for C
msp430-gcc.x86_64 : Cross Compiling GNU GCC targeted at msp430
Edited 2009-09-01 11:09 UTC
I mean on the liveCD, for some reason it includes cc1 but nothing else.
livecds are incredibly short on space, there’s no good reason to cut out other stuff to put a compiler on there.
… Why do you need a full compiler on a LiveCD?!?!?
– Gilboa
I knew eventually fedora would get on the netbook variant bandwagon, just wondered if they would choose moblin or ubuntu’s netbook-launcher. Now we know.
Fedora, Moblin… that looks a lot like Linux distributions. And Linux… wasn’t that at some time an operating system kernel? So this looks like an article about operating systems, right?
Then why is an article about Facebook (not an OS) on PAGE 1, and this article isn’t? Is this not osnews anymore, is osnews.com becoming random-geeky-news-for-geeks.com? If I wanted that, I wouldn’t be here, I’d be hitting slashdot!
Page 1 often has stuff written by osnews writer/editor, in other words they put that little extra effort. Which helps.
Page 2 just has interesting links that may even be submitted by us the readers.