Top Linux seller Red Hat acknowledged on Friday a misstep in its relations with technology enthusiasts but said the profit motive is helping it to mend its ways.
Red Hat: Fedora will engage customers
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And Red Hat has ample competition. Projects such as Gentoo lure hard-core Linux programmers, while Sun Microsystems is trying to build its own community of programmers around its OpenSolaris project
Yeah, and I bet they’ve been looking at the rise of Ubuntu too.
http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/
Fedora Extra is now official :
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/ (800 packages).
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras
http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-extras-list
Red Hat takes the right way.
First post a ubunto plug, we didn’t see that one coming. (you forgot to put a link)
Anyway, It’s good they publicly aknowledge that perhaps they made a mistake and are looking to correct it. Opening CVS is a good start. but don’t forget to listen when you ask “what do you think”
RedHat. All you have to do is keep inventing more quality software than any other distro. You’ve got a large percentage of the best brains in the business. Let them do the designing and give us code monkeys the plans to build it.
opening CVS. well i wont use fedora or redhat, but i bet some of that code ends up on my gentoo boxes
Co-workers have described Fedora as a scam, in that there’s too much of an idea that you’re benefiting RHEL and not Fedora. The idea that they might not patch bugs in Fedora, but would in RHEL. Sure it’s FUD but I just spent the weekend trying to install Fedora3 on a Dell Dimension 4800 – it didn’t work but Whitebox did.
There needs to be a more obvious distinction between the projects. Getting hosting off redhat.com would be a start, and a developer blog — try and make a community like Ubuntu have.
> but i bet some of that code ends up on my gentoo boxes
Fedora is a “community” project :
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html
3. Do as much of the development work as possible directly in the upstream packages.
> There needs to be a more obvious distinction between the projects.
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/rhel.html
> and a developer blog
Fedora blogs (not Red Hat only) :
http://www.fedoraproject.org/people/
All Red Hat blogs :
http://www.redhat.com/apps/blogs/
http://fedoraproject.org/fudcon/
NEW! We have a live feed available. You can use Totem as a video player, for instance.
For the user track:
* http://128.197.127.23:8800/ in a video player
* http://128.197.127.23/ Using the JAVA client
For the developer track:
* http://128.197.164.36:8800/ in a video player
* http://128.197.164.36/ Using the JAVA client
Arg, does not work here.
Co-workers have described Fedora as a scam, in that there’s too much of an idea that you’re benefiting RHEL and not Fedora. The idea that they might not patch bugs in Fedora, but would in RHEL. <- totaly agree
i still don’t recomend fedora to any one
ubuntu seems much more like a serious open project
> RedHat. All you have to do is keep inventing more quality software than any other distro. You’ve got a large percentage of the best brains in the business.
I don’t think the words “RedHat” and “inventing” can go together. RedHat is not an R&D company, they are more of a packaging company slapping together pieces of software developed elsewhere and getting paid for it. RedHat is a pretty low tech company compared with the likes of Sun and IBM that actually invent things.
> i still don’t recomend fedora to any one
Just stupid.
Sourceforge use Fedora, I use Fedora like many others.
Wikipedia use Fedora :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Servers
RedHat lost me with version 8, but the disillusionment started with 7.0. Fedora, in my experience, has been buggy and slow, compared to Debian Unstable, Slackware, and even the ever-bloated Mandrake.
I do support a coupe of RHES boxes, and while they run okay, they’re clunky to admnister. The mismash of configuration tools makes it difficult to set configurations by hand. If you use the tools, it generally works, but it’s difficult for an administrator to get things working exactly as he wants them to work. The IPTables/Netfilter facility is absolutely horrid.
But who is RedHat competing against? Admittedly, I haven’t used Novelldrake *cough* SuSE, but I have used Solaris, and it’s light years ahead of RedHat. I can use Sun’s bad admin tools, or administer it on the command line exactly the same way I administer the rack full of headless sparcs off to my left.
And for both of them, can we ditch Sendmail already? Give me Exim, give me Postfix, but for the love of pete, retire Sendmail and Sendmail-cf. Ugh.
> I don’t think the words “RedHat” and “inventing” can go together.
Red Hat bring ntpl, Red Hat works on gtk+/cairo/Xorg ( http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog//xrendering, Red Hat maintain glib/pango/gtk+/nautilus/gamin/… ), Red Hat maintain/create cluster solutions ( http://sources.redhat.com/cluster/ ), Red Hat creates freedesktop (via havoc), recently sabayon ( http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/sabayon ), Red Hat maintain libxml2 ( http://xmlsoft.org/ ), etc.
Just check sources in Linux/glibc/gcc and many other projects. Red Hat do *a _lot_ of* work !
Compare to Debian or Gentoo or any other distro, Red Hat is the more inovating distro. Period.
You don’t know all the work done by Red Hat because it is mostly done upstream. Red Hat works with the “community”.
Forget this : Red Hat host many projects :
– all gnome/gtk
– http://sources.redhat.com/sourcecode.html
> And for both of them, can we ditch Sendmail already? Give me Exim, give me Postfix,
Seems you don’t use Fedora/Red Hat:
RHEL :
exim :
http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/4/en/os/i386/SRPM…
Postfix :
http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/4/en/os/i386/SRPM…
Fedora :
exim :
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/3/SRPMS/exi…
postfix :
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/3/SRPMS/pos…
I think the previous poster mean the “DEFAULT” intsall of sendmail in all RedHat installs. Notice that even if you deselect “sendmail” it still gets installed for some ungodly reason. Sendmail needs be to read it’s rights and buried.
Yes, I know they exist, but it still uses Sendmail by default.
I thought the headline said enrage customers. Which, based on these comments can be checked off as mission accomplished.
> Red Hat bring ntpl, Red Hat works on gtk+/cairo/Xorg ( http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog//xrendering, Red Hat maintain glib/pango/gtk+/nautilus/gamin/… ), Red Hat maintain/create cluster solutions ( http://sources.redhat.com/cluster/ ), Red Hat creates freedesktop (via havoc), recently sabayon ( http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/sabayon ), Red Hat maintain libxml2 ( http://xmlsoft.org/ ),
Red Hat was one of the contributors to the above listed project and wan’t the major contributor many of those projects (Xorg, etc.). RedHat is quick to put its name under a project even if there contribution was purely superficial. In reality there is little tangible stuff coming out of Red Hat compared with Sun or IBM, which are by far the biggest contributors. I think RedHat overall is too overhyped undeservingly by the community
> Notice that even if you deselect “sendmail” it still gets installed for some ungodly reason.
a mailer agent is needed by cron, at, watchlog, mdadm, …
> there is little tangible stuff coming out of Red Hat
Stop the FUD.
http://www.fr.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.10
grep -i suse | wc -l => 386
grep -i redhat | wc -l => 254
grep -i debian | wc -l => 25
grep -i gentoo | wc -l => 6
grep -i mandrake | wc -l => 1
gtk 2.6.2 (grep -i (…) | wc -l)
redhat => 3320
suse => 42
gentoo => 0
debian => 58
mandrake => 52
There are many many other examples.
As a programmer the most important
tools for me are gcc and gdb.
RedHat pays a lot of the
GCC guys (watch for all
the exciting new stuff
in GCC-4.0) and the vast
majority of the GDB work
is done by Redhat Guys.
Not mention the huge ammount
of Gnome/Gtk/X11 done by
other RedHat guys.
And don’t forget how many of the
main Linux kernel guys are RedHat employess, and
how much new technology have brought to the table.
So RedHat is doing the Free Software
community a huge service.
> Red Hat was one of the contributors to the above listed project and wan’t the major contributor many of those projects (Xorg, etc.). RedHat is quick to put its name under a project even if there contribution was purely superficial. In reality there is little tangible stuff coming out of Red Hat compared with Sun or IBM, which are by far the biggest contributors. I think RedHat overall is too overhyped undeservingly by the community
Red Hat employs many of the major kernel developers (Ingo Molnar was a major force in getting the scalability up in the 2.6 kernels with his work on threading). Red Hat employs many of the gcc maintainers. Red Hat employs the glibc maintainer. Same for gtk+ and associated packages (glib, pango, etc). They have people working full time on Gnome and Gnome related projects. They effectively started freedesktop.org. They are putting major resources into the Classpath project. Given all that, how are they overhyped? Little tangible stuff? Seems to me that they easily dwarf all of the other distros when it comes to their contributions. They also maintain packages which are critical to all of the Linux distros/users (gcc, glibc, etc). Perhaps Sun and IBM have contributed more, but to say that their is little tangible stuff coming from Red Hat is either extreme ignorance on your part or a blatent attempt to unfairly discredit them.
Of course people are talking about Ubuntu in a Fedora thread — Ubuntu was created at least in part to fill the gap when the Fedora project never materialized properly. There can be little doubt that the success of Ubuntu was a primary cause (not *the* primary cause) of Red Hat’s revived efforts to make the fedora project live up to its initial expectations.
As an Ubuntu user who formerly used Fedora, I think it’s great, personally. Hopefully the developers from each project will challenge the other and in the process make each of their projects better so neither gets complacent. The users of both projects benefit by having talented red hat and debian hackers all working on making the linux gnome desktop better and better — I wish red hat the best of luck, though I don’t expect to see myself use fedora myself.
I had some fond memories of FC2 wrecking my hard drives… I haven’t touched any distros since. In fact, I started using Windows for the first time in 3 years. With all the BSODs lately, I’m thinking of trying another linux distro. Unfortunately, many of the tools my job requires are Windows only.
> Notice that even if you deselect “sendmail” it still gets installed for some ungodly reason.
>>a mailer agent is needed by cron, at, watchlog, mdadm, …
Sendmail is installed even with Postfix selected and Sendmail de-selected. They just love sendmail.
I used to be an active member of the Red Hat user community, years ago. The
mailing lists were a fun place to be but it became increasingly cleare that Red
Hat didn’t care about them, or the users, at all. First the list archives
broke and nothing was done to fix them. Then the lists themselves became
unreliable. Next, they appointed a list moderator who spent most of his time
flaming newbies. Finally, the lists broke altogether; it was a couple of
months befor Red Hat even acknowledged the problem and longer before they fixed
it. Around this time I moved to Debian and never looked back.
An extension of this attitude was that the users were ignored by the Red Hat
design/development team. Much of the configuration system (/etc/sysconfig and
so on) was (and still is) deeply mediocre and in some places just terrible.
Suggested improvements from the user community were ignored and usually not
even responded to.
At my work, we have to use RHEL for some kit that is only supported with that
distribution. I can tell you that the config hasn’t improved much. Add that
to the way that the focus of the design seems to be to make it easy for them to
support it with little thought to how easy or flexible it is to use, and I’m as
unimpressed with RH as I ever was.
my wish would be that fedora would give some love to kde. I currently use fedora + “kde for redhat”
on 2005-02-19 08:35:25
my wish would be that fedora would give some love to kde. I currently use fedora + “kde for redhat”
That is on to-do list from Fedora developers.
It’s total BS that RedHat hassles CentOS for providing a service (RHEL for free download) that RedHat should be offering.
Fedora is cute, but you can’t run DB2 or Oracle on it, can you? That’s really the only reason to pick RHEL or SLES, because they’re supported by the Big Boy ISV’s.
Now I’m a Card Carrying Free Software Hippy, but I find it ironic that Sun provides it’s “enterprise” OS for download when RedHat doesn’t.
I think RedHat knows this already, they’ve said as much to the media already. But can they get off their asses and do something about it? I hope so
“Sendmail is installed even with Postfix selected and Sendmail de-selected. They just love sendmail.”
wrong. just use the alternatives system. if you dont how to use it just ask in the fedora list. stop spreading FUD
“It’s total BS that RedHat hassles CentOS for providing a service (RHEL for free download) that RedHat should be offering. ”
lets see the real deal. shall we?
http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=66
I quote
“We understand that you are distributing, on your web site located at http://www.centos.org, CentOS Enterprise class Linux software that was developed using Red Hat’s open source software. While Red Hat permits others to redistribute the software that constitutes Red Hat Linux, Red Hat does not authorize any person to use the RED HAT marks in association with such redistribution in any fashion, except by express agreement”
”
A couple of points I need to make. Please DO NOT hassle the upstream vendor or their attorney over this matter. http://www.centos.org user contributed content in the form of forum posts, news and article comments, wiki content etc. do not fall directly under the control of http://www.centos.org. So in the normal course of user to user communication, the use of the upstream vendor’s marks (to identify their brand) is not prohibited. Obviously if a CentOS team member merely copies existing front page content into a forum post that’s going to be a problem.”
you can understand English right?
RedHat has every LEGAL right to do what their doing. It just doesn’t make any sense. You can understand common sense, right?
I would never use Fedora instead of Gentoo, I find this latter an excellent distribution, but I acknowledge the work Red Hat does to improve Free Software. I see no reason to bash them, and as with any other company who supports Free Software I wish them good luck
People do NOT like being taken advantage of. That’s a BIG reason why people like Free Software and Open Source. They may never look at a single line of code, but the whole principle gives them that Warm Fuzzy Feeling.
Now here’s RedHat. On one hand, they want you to contribute to Fedora because they can roll all your feedback into RHEL. But you can’t use RHEL unless you pay out the ass. That’s almost as bad as Sun’s CDDL.
RedHat HEAL THYSELF!
All they need to do is offer RHEL for free download, without any support. Most people will play with it, then go back to Fedora. People who NEED to run RHEL (to run DB2 or Oracle or such) can run it completely unsupported for silly purposes like training and development. When you put a big application or database into production, Mr CIO will be more than happy to write RedHat a big check for official support. It’s easy really. I have no idea why I refuse to get into management…
A poster above wants RedHat to “stop being stupid” and wants them to give away RHEL for free. Er, hang on, RHEL is *entirely* composed of GPL software with the trademarked names/logos/artwork of Red Hat thrown in (this is the only thing stopping people redistributing RHEL exactly as it is).
CentOS, Whitebox and others simply replace all those Red Hat references with their own and create what’s effectively an *exact* RHEL clone and let you download it for free. Yes, no support from Red Hat, but the cloners do provide updates to their clones of RHEL, which is good enough surely?
Also, RHEL is based on the last released Fedora Core (e.g. RHEL4 is based on Fedora Core 3), so you can download Fedora Core 3 if you want something pretty close to RHEL4 anyway.
I really can’t see people’s problem here and, yes, it *is* possible to run Oracle 10g with Fedora Core (we’re doing it on a test server quite happily), despite what people might think. Don’t bother with anything prior to 10g on Fedora Core 2 or 3 though – couldn’t get 9i to work on FC2 (but I think this was Oracle 9i’s lack of 2.6 distro support more than FC2 issues).
Yes, Red Hat should have opened CVS up a lot earlier in the Fedora Core cycles – that was a mistake that they’ve finally corrected – and, yes, it would be nice to have a “cheap” RHEL ES with no support option (except maybe for RPM updates which you really have to have on production servers), but there’s always the RHEL clones if you have a tight budget as I said (or Fedora Core if you like to be a bit more bleeding edge).
“RedHat has every LEGAL right to do what their doing. It just doesn’t make any sense. You can understand common sense, right?
:”
lets see. if you dont protect your trademarks and enforce them you dilute and eventually lose the rights. do you understand how that can affect redhat. btw trademarks rules are there in non commercial distros like debian and gentoo too. simply put it makes total sense. you are pretty ignorant about the issues involved here
“But you can’t use RHEL unless you pay out the ass. ”
RHEL is software subscription with SUPPORT and you pay for SUPPORT. if you want just the software you can go ahead and use centos available from centos.org for FREE which is just a rebuild of RHEL SRPMS with the redhat trademarks removed.
”
All they need to do is offer RHEL for free download, without any support.”
which is exactly what centos does. what are you whining about again?
Gentoo — Far better community and much easier to use and contribute to than Fedora. Fedora is nothing but RH’s attemt at a free ride.
“Gentoo — Far better community and much easier to use and contribute to than Fedora. Fedora is nothing but RH’s attemt at a free ride.”
as if redhat didnt contribute anything to open source. stop smoking crack
Co-workers have described Fedora as a scam, in that there’s too much of an idea that you’re benefiting RHEL and not Fedora. The idea that they might not patch bugs in Fedora, but would in RHEL. Sure it’s FUD but I just spent the weekend trying to install Fedora3 on a Dell Dimension 4800 – it didn’t work but Whitebox did.
Whitebox uses kernel 2.4? FC3 uses kernel 2.6? You should try FC1 in that case
I think we could all see it coming. Once they figured out that they couldn’t conqueror the terrible USB malloc() bug, they decided to drop development in the laps of the “users”.
Viva la RedHat! Linux users want webcams, too!
Whoa!
Jeez – there’s a bunch of 1337 hax0rz in this place. Debian users ~*and*~ gentoo users??? I *shudder* and *genuflect* in your magnanimous presence. It takes some serious mojo to type “emerge” or “apt-get” — those poor fools using RH products can only spell out three letter words like “yum” — right? Redhat sucks because its GUI tools are too hard to use? WTF kind of admin relies on GUI tools? Seriously. Learn the fscking command line.
With this much in-fighting between Sun and Linux, and this much rampant fanboi-ism between various linux distros, it is no wonder Microsoft is still kicking the ass of all Linuxes, Sun and Apple combined.
Some of you asshats really need to grow up.
I wish we could give out Rep-points on this site, everytime someone comes out with FUD you knock them back into reality. Good stuff.
Yep, one Gentoo user said ‘I used gentoo and don’t like RedHat but I can see they do some good’. If people had this attitude we’d all get much further along. But no, so many people want to treat RedHat as some anti-christ.. I just don’t understand it.
And to the guy who told me RH isn’t a R&D company why did they pledge to put 1/5th of their money into R&D?
Stop telling me my distro killed Jesus, thank you.
Red Hat Fedora will be remembered forever for coining the FUDcon.
If not for any other reason, I thank Fedora and Red Hat marketing for that.
All this talk about giving out copies of the enterprise software is stupid…
Even though it is for a limited time, Red Hat offers trial subscriptions of their enterprise software. They even allow you to continue using the software when the trial runs out.
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/eval/
I don’t actually have a “my distro.” I have run several of them, but nothing close to most of them. I have debian sarge, FC2, ubuntu, and CentOS installed on boxes at my home. All of them have their plusses and minuses. I do think redhat is doing some very good work though, and people who bash them because they are not 1337 enough, or because they actually *gasp* make money need to examine their motivations.
LOL… Kind of amuses me reading some of these posts. Your all as bad as each other.
For the other Distro folks:
You love your distro?… great so keep using it but appreciate the work the RedHat folk do/have done for the linux community.
For RedHat folks:
I hope you now realise that even RedHat themselves acknowledge they made a mistake by splitting the distro into two communities. Obviously they lost many hearts and long time supporters which wasn’t good for business.
As for me I am a Gentoo user now and probably won’t be going back to RedHat or Fedora again unless something very compelling comes out of the RedHat camp in the future. Don’t get me wrong, RedHat is a great company and as I said have supported the linux community in many ways. I don’t think Linux would be where it is today if it wasn’t for RedHat.
I hope you now realise that even RedHat themselves acknowledge they made a mistake by splitting the distro into two communities. Obviously they lost many hearts and long time supporters which wasn’t good for business.
That is not the problem as any company can do mistake but they learned for that like Red Hat just did. The problem is some other distros users (especially Debian/Ubuntu) keep whining and spreading fuds listed on previous. Why don’t they simply post on this topic if they like their own distros?
“With this much in-fighting between Sun and Linux, and this much rampant fanboi-ism between various linux distros, it is no wonder Microsoft is still kicking the ass of all Linuxes, Sun and Apple combined.
Some of you asshats really need to grow up.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. I don’t agree that MS is kicking linux’s ass but its still ahead and maybe it wouldn’t be if everyone was on the same page or at least had the same damn book open.
I’m using Fedora right now and it has many nice features, but I really think Redhat should consider using APT4RPM as the default package manner (as opposed to YUM). I’m finding YUM to be slow, cumbersome and often broken. APT4RPM was created by the user community and offered to Redhat for free, but the company just isn’t taking advantage of it. That’s a pity.
> I really think Redhat should consider using APT4RPM
apt does not support bi-arch (x86/x86_64) and does not support group (comps.xml).
> APT4RPM was created by the user community and offered to Redhat for free
Like yum.
You can get an apt-get binary from freshrpms.net that works well with fedora. I’d also recommend (if you haven’t already) moving away from the redhat repositories – they make yum, which is already slow, much slower. If you want to play it safe, freshrpms is fast, and only adds a few tweaks to the redhat repo (mp3, etc). If you want more of the latest/greatest, look at dag’s repository (http://dag.wieers.com/). Both can use either yum or apt.
http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/
> the redhat repositories – they make yum
No, Red Hat does not make yum :
http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/
At the beginning, yum was make for yellow dog.
“the redhat repositories – they make yum
No, Red Hat does not make yum :
http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/
At the beginning, yum was make for yellow dog.”
The actual sentence was “[Move] away from the redhat repositories – they make yum, which is already slow, much slower.” This means that yum is slow, the redhat repositories are slow, and combined they are very slow. Nothing I said implied that redhat created yum.
> Nothing I said implied that redhat created yum.
Sorry.
Did you try Yum 2.1.x ?
By Dog’s_Breakfast (IP: —.dynamic.hinet.net) – Posted on 2005-02-20 00:35:55
I’m using Fedora right now and it has many nice features, but I really think Redhat should consider using APT4RPM as the default package manner (as opposed to YUM).
Well, I am using Fedora Core 3 right now and I only have 3 major problems or things for a wishlist.
That does NOT mean those are the only 3 things I would ever want Fedora to add.
It just means there are only 3 things that really drive me frickin’ nuts enough to look at using Ubuntu or Gentoo for my home desktop.
1) A Gparted interface in Acanacando for re-sizing partitions. Most community distros do not have this but this is the preview for what RH releases will eventually become folks!
2) Menu editing. Freedesktop standards or uniform menus across desktops? I don’t care anymore I just want to be able to edit my menus period. The sad part is too many people think this is a Gnome issue and not a Fedora one.
Here it comes Dog …..
3) Better package management. yum is cool. apt is nice but I found the bomb end all package program for Fedora just the other day.
SMART Package Manager. The easy answer is to write off the time developing the Install/Remove Apps interface and the up2date stuff and just doll up the smart-ui and be done with it. Man, it is sooo much quicker than yum or apt and resolves multiple connected repos like Freshrpms, Dag and Dries without screaming.
OMG, you have to try it out and Dag has the rpms for it.
The harder but probably better approach is to tie at least the up2date tool to smart-update and the doubleclick install rpm druid to the smart backend.
How would that work for single downloaded rpms? You doubleclick the rpm and the druid (“wizard”) appears for you to install the rpm but if there are conflicts it uses smart to find and prompt the user to install the dependencies.
Even, in yum, for months I would enble-repo on dag and other repos and only update or keep active a precious few core repos for fear of borking my system. I considered it my golden rule to use the fedorafaq yum.conf but NOT by default enable anything else and use enable-repo to install extras.
SMART Package Manager freed me from this limitation.
http://smartpm.org
Dag’s rpms for it are available.
http://dag.wieers.com/packages/smart/
Red Hat might not created yum, but they certianly help in its development:
http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/credits.ptml
See any names that look familiar??
As already mentioned. apt isn’t bidirectional and it is in “extras” too.
also on smart
http://linux-br.conectiva.com.br/~niemeyer/smart/doc/README.html