eWEEK Labs drills down into the Linux core and finds improved scalability and performance while also gives a spin to Fedora Core 2.
eWEEK on Linux 2.6 for Enterprise and Fedora 2
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Linux 2.6 also ships with support for
is this an odd statement? shipping with support sounds like feature of a product from a company that comes by default. while there are probably a subset of things that are default in most kernels built by major linux vendors (something that would ship), those things aren’t necesarily compiled into all kernels (i know i don’t have bluetooth support or irda).
i guess i don’t like the phrasing. it makes it sound like linux is a product that was meant to compete in a marketplace, when i think it would be better to say redhat server, or suse enterprise are products meant to compete in a marketplace, linux just happens to be the common denominator.
i suppose i wasn’t the target audience though
Better IDE drive performance. Under 2.4.22, hdparm was consistently reporting buffered disk reads of ~27 MB/sec for my fastest drive. The same drive, using the same parameters,
now gets about 34-38 MB/sec.
Well, as is kind of common in the OSS world, the word support has been redefined. Yes, support has two meanings (similar to free), and the more common usage when referring to a technology is that there is a manufacturer guaranteeing that it will work on said platform. But the OSS community defines support more like “it should work.” Not the kind of support you get when you get a SLA from a webhost or something. Yes it is confusing, and I suspect intentionally so. But I’ll leave the paranoid ramblings to the OSS community. Down with Microsoft!
“However, Fedora’s speedy development pace also poses a significant challenge for the distribution, because frequent software changes often introduce application incompatibilities.”
I was initially skeptic about Fedora. Would the approach work? Would it result in lots of bugs? Would strange things start growing out of it? Would development be slow?
No – it’s still Redhat. I’m keeping my installation up2date regularly and have had no unpleasant surprises in any respect. Well, there was problem with up2date at one point. But a manual download of Python fixed that.
“Sometimes our packages would begin downloading, slowly, from the default Red Hat server, in which case we’d restart the process to pick up a faster connection.”
The download site “dulug” is slow while “mirrors” and “hiwaay” are much faster. The up2dates are daily and large. Maybe tomorrow’s has KDE-3.2.1.
I wonder if the public part of the “community” is more than testing and bug reporting. And why Novell-SuSE are not involving the “community”.
Does anyone know why openmotif-2.2.3-1.9 was pulled and replaced by openmotif-2.2.2-17? I have some Motif apps that only work with the former.
Fedora will not have KDE 3.2.1, or at least, not in the updates. They do not bump maor version numbers on installed stuff, unless it is very critical. KDE 3.1.5 to 3.2 is not permissible, unless they had a change of policy.
I kinds like the way eweek review distribution, because there are balnaced in their view, don’t bore you into details and ultimately just clearly states what’s nice, what’s alright and what needs improvements.
However they never show proper screenshots, what about gimp 2.0 or OO 1.1 for instance.
Regarding Fedora Core 2 itself I ll wait and stick with Core 1 for the time being.
If it ani’t broke don’t fix it.
As a rule, hardware manufacturers don’t guarantee anything [certainly not for home users, anyway]. The only protection is your statutory rights as a consumer should their product fail to live up to their explicit promises. Essentially, if it’s broken, you’re entitled to a refund.
(Note: it’s rarely that simple, since they’re naturally going to be loathe to give you your money back.)
Anyway, AFAIK this is the same for software, too. Obviously you have no statutory rights if you download Linux freely off the internet, since you haven’t actually purchased anything. Should you go out and *buy* RHEL workstation or similar, however, you will be covered in that you will be entitled to a refund from the vendor.
I kind of wish they would lengthen the release cycles too. I love cutting edge but Fedora is finally to the point where all my favorite apps are over (in RPM form I mean). Now they want us to upgrade? It’s a tough decision since I really want the new Gnome, KDE. I have the 2.6 kernel and am unable to connect to the internet since I switched to DSL. Looks like I may have found the culprit.
I’m excited about the ACL stuff too. Overall this should be a nice update. There are just so many major change to include.
the article was about the 2.6 kernel. what screenshots do you want?
Why hasn’t somebody integrated the two? I’d gladly send out a couple of gigs of data a day if someone gave me the opportunity. I hear that the distributed computing guys are coming together on the SETI and Folding@Home projects to create a common infrastructure. That might be a good starting point. If there was one standard background app that allowed even unsophisticated users to share either bandwidth or CPU cycles, we’d all be better off.
“Fedora will not have KDE 3.2.1, or at least, not in the updates.”
up2date is currently downloading kdebase-3.2.1-1.i386.rpm onto my office box.
From the article: The final release of Fedora Core 2 is expected to come out next month. Chances are good that that date could slip, however, considering that the second Fedora test release date has already been pushed back about two weeks to provide more time for SELinux implementation.
I find this ironic since the Fedora website states that it will ship in MAY!
http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/schedule/