Fedora Core 5 Available

Jan Slupski writes "New release day today. Fedora Core 5 CD images are now available for download (i386, ppc, x86_64) on the ftp servers or via the torrent page." Linclips also has a short screencast on some of the default functionality.

bug sorted?

[LiquidCoooled]

It appears as though FC5 contains a bug which prevents none GPL modules (read nVidia) from being used.
Has this been fixed in this one yet, or is it worth waiting a few more days for the fix to be rolled out?

(It was identified too late to be pushed to the mirrors)

Info about it is here [lwn.net].

Finally I can say what MS is saying for years

[A beautiful mind]

Bug? Naaah. Feature!

Re:bug sorted?

[osvejda]

Fixed kernel is here. [redhat.com] It's not in official updates yet.

Re:bug sorted?

[skogs]

I believe you will find that the kernel that is autocompiled beforehand will not accept the binary drivers...just like any other non-custom-built kernel that leaves out that option.

Rebuild your kernel per directions found on several sites, install the drivers per nvidia's instructions...

game. xgl. whatever.

Re:bug sorted?

[gr8_phk]

"I believe you will find that the kernel that is autocompiled beforehand will not accept the binary drivers...just like any other non-custom-built kernel that leaves out that option."

You make it sound like it's supposed to be that way. IT'S NOT. FC3 and 4 both worked fine. You make it sound like Fedora decided to change policy on their default kernels. They didn't, that's why they've stated that an update will correct the problem. This is a bug introduced right before they created the images (commence conspiracy theories).

Someone F***ed up, didn't test properly, and isn't owning up to it.

Re:bug sorted?

[skogs]

bug...not really a bug. Just a two keystroke mistake. It isn't a bug in any program or anything. My appologies for not being so up on fedora's policies...its a simple reconfiguration. One that I wish more distros would auto-compile into the kernel, but sadly many don't.

Re:bug sorted?

[MSG]

Those responsible are "owning up" to the mistake. It's been discussed on the testing list, and corrected packages were made available to the testers. It's a sad fact that a bug was introduced in the kernel very late in the testing process. The first kernel update will correct the problem.

Don't blow it out of proportion. Fedora Core is a distro for developers and hobbyists (which is why I use it). For that audience, this bug isn't anything more than a minor annoyance.

Re:bug sorted?

[MSG]

I believe you will find that the kernel that is autocompiled beforehand will not accept the binary drivers

Normally, they do. The Nvidia drivers are broken because the spinlock macros were accidentally made GPL-only. The first kernel update will fix the problem.

install the drivers per nvidia's instructions...

It's probably better if you don't. If you read the Fedora Projects notes on 3rd party drivers [fedoraproject.org], you'll notice that Nvidia and ATI both break X in subtle ways, and may leave GL in an unworkable state, even after uninstalling them.

Poor testing

[gr8_phk]

Never mind that they don't test with proprietary drivers. They applied a patch that affected the functionality of tainted kernels - normal development practice would natrually require *that patch* be tested with a tainted kernel regardless. Throwing a patch over and saying it's OK because the automated testing didn't find a problem is like saying "it compiled - ship it".

So if I wait for 2.6.16 kernel on FC5 is that going to break with nVidia too? I saw a comment in the 2.6.16 story saying that doesn't work either (may have been distro specific).

Damn people, I understood the 4K stacks thing - make a good decision for good reason and let nVidia catch up. This utter disrespect for drivers used by a large number of people is really unacceptable. Actually, when a disto fails to test with drivers used by a large portion of their userbase, it is the user who feels the disrespect. Please don't make excuses - that's disrespectful too. Just get FC6 right.

That said, I'm downloading FC5 now ;-)

Re:bug sorted?

[typical]

Actually, this *is* a bug. It was not intentional on the part of the Fedora folks.

Of course, I don't *like* binary drivers very much, but ATI and NVidia have agreed to stick with 'em if you want 3d support on their modern cards. I have a Radeon 9250 (with the 128-bit datapath), which is about as peppy a card as you can get and still have open source drivers.

If the Open Graphics Project [duskglow.com] ever releases any hardware, unless it's $400 or something like that, I'll buy it -- it'll be fully open source.

If one vendor would release even a half-decent card and support it fully with open-source drivers, I'd buy it in a moment (binary microcode is okay, but I want everything running host-side to be OSS).

I know that few people feel this way, and most gamers are happy just using binary drivers and the current NVidia or ATI cards, but there are a group of people who feel the same way I do.

Re:bug sorted?

[typical]

Good question. No, the 9250 uses the RV280, not the R300. I've had some interest in the R300 project, but last time I looked at it, it was nowhere near as far along as the R200 code. The R200 drivers have been part of DRI for quite some time.

And even the R200 drivers have problems. I can't use the accelerated framebuffer driver at the same time as xorg (I have to use the standard VESA one). I don't have texture compression support, despite the fact that my card supports it (this may be because S3 has the texture compression format used in graphics cards patented -- not sure). While the drivers are usable, I *have* managed to hang the system before while playing 3d games as a non-root user -- that could be an xorg bug or a R200 bug.

I haven't used the official ATI drivers after one attempt long ago where I couldn't get them working.

Re:bug sorted?

[typical]

In terms of performance, I can tell you that I can play Darwinia and NWN, though both have slowdown at places (and NWN unnecessarily limits any card that doesn't support texture compression to minimum-resolution textures). It's not a card that would be acceptable for someone seriously interested in playing modern games, however.

Flash is Evil! Evil, I say!

[AKAImBatman]

Linclips also has a short screencast on some of the default functionality.

That screencast is in Flash, and we all know that Flash is evil.

Thus, Fedora must be evil by extension.

Fedora is the development branch for RedHat. If Fedora is evil, RedHat must also be evil.

Microsoft is well known for being evil.

We all know that RedHat is a competitor to Microsoft.

Ergo, RedHat is the next Microsoft.

QED

(Yes, this is a joke. Laugh.)

Re:Flash is Evil! Evil, I say!

[Philosinfinity]

If I had mod points, I woulda modded it up. I got a good chuckle out of it.

Screenshots?

[Orestesx]

I don't believe there is any power way to evaluate a linux distro than screenshots, except for maybe it's logo.

Re:Screenshots?

[rubycodez]

the name has to sound cool, uncool names are out. Like Gentoo and Slackware: pfft, gay! Ubuntu and SuSE, those just radiate coolness. Though I also agree with logos, if the packaged set includes stickers.

Re:Screenshots?

[tehshen]

OSDir to the rescue [osdir.com]

I don't like how it looks, but I'll probably get used to it. Having used FC3 and 4, the new 'f' logo looks pretty... weird. The theme is also a lot shinier than Bluecurve. Why are all desktop environments slowly tending to shiny?

Re:Screenshots?

[Morrigu]

Version numbers. Don't forget the version numbers.

If it's not high enough, then it's not even worth booting.

Re:Screenshots? Logos?

[markhb]

Somehow, I think that new logo [osdir.com] looks suspiciously like the one found here [macromedia.com], or even here [macromedia.com].

Yowza

[MAXOMENOS]

We're up to *five* CD-ROMs now?

Re: Inspector gadget

[matt me]

>We're up to *five* CD-ROMs now?
That's only half a DVD.

Still too small, IMHO.

[jd]

It would be possible to triple the size of Fedora Core without even breaking into a sweat. And that's without even supporting multiple configurations of the same application (which they really should do) or rarer applications. If you want those, I reckon a 20 DVD pack would be necessary to be truly diverse.

I would re-work the layout of the CD-ROMS, though - you need too many for a minimal install - and I'd also re-work how to pick what is installed. At present, it is unnecessarily tedious to pick out what you want and I'm not convinced the default settings are useful or desirable.

However, since a lot of people download CD and DVD ISOs, probably the most useful utility would be to allow people to pick from a web form what they want, then have the server roll the appropriate images for you. Then, you only download what you actually need, not what Red Hat thinks you might need.

Good to know

[MAXOMENOS]

Of course, I want my KDE.

To the tune of a Dire Straits song...

[jd]

I want my.... I want my KDE....

I want my.... I want my KDE....

I want my.... I want my KDE....

Now look at them desktops, that's the way to do it

You get your DCOP from your KDE

That ain't working, that's the way to code it

Widgets for nothing and your glyphs for free.

Bow that ain't working, that's the way to code it

Lemme tell ya, them guys ain't dumb

Maybe get a glitch in your brand-new icon

Maybe get a glitchy core-dump.

We gotta install ISO 9000

Custom language packs

We gotta move those partition boundries

We gotta move that Berlin GUI

Upgrading

[Rik Sweeney]

I new to Linux and am still running Fedora Core 3. Am I right in thinking that to upgrade to FC5 I have to basically backup anything I want to keep and reinstall everything? Is there no easier way of upgrading?

Re:Upgrading

[/ASCII]

No, all you need to do is get the CDs or DVD and boot from them - you will be presented with the alternatives of overwriting the current install or upgrading it to FC5. It is a very good idea to backup your data just to be sure, but I've never had any problems going from one RedHat/Fedora version to a newer one.

Re:Upgrading

[MAXOMENOS]

It depends. I feel a little better about upgrading my system because I keep all my important data -- photos, tax records, etc -- in its own separate ext3 partition that mounts to /home.

If you've done that very basic and important step, then you can upgrade -- or even install a new system from scratch -- without fear. (There may, however, be a few hours of tweaking involved, to install printers and the like.)

The same works for Windows, too, btw -- and can save you from losing all your data when XP destroys itself and you need to recover your system.

Re:Upgrading

[LizardKing]

Err, I haven't used RedHat since FC3, but upgrading is normally accomplished by selecting the upgrade option when the installer finds an existing installation. That said, backups before major upgrades are *always* a good idea.

Re:Upgrading

[ElleyKitten]

You should backup everything you want to keep everytime you do something major to your computer (such as upgrading your OS). Actually, you should backup your stuff on a regular basis anyways.

I'm not 100% sure about Fedora, but I know other distros support upgrading while keeping all your programs and settings, so I'm pretty sure Fedora does too. The backup is just a recommendation in case something goes wrong.

Re:Upgrading

[typical]

There are three things you can do:

First, Fedora has an "upgrade" (as opposed to "install") option in the installer that lets you upgrade from the previous version. Download the CD images for FC4, burn 'em, boot off the CD, choose "upgrade", and then do the same for FC5. That's the "supported" path.

Second, it may be possible to just stuff the FC5 CDs in and upgrade directly from FC3 to FC5. Dunno.

Third (and this is probably not the best choice if you're new to Fedora), you can usually upgrade via yum. Download the fedora-release RPM package from FC5, and then run "yum update" and with some tweaking (apt is really better than yum at this kind of whole-system update, since it will actually uninstall things), you can generally update a system on-line. This is really best for people who are hobbyists, like me, and aren't worried about a server going down and can handle fixing any breakage. Red Hat doesn't support this approach, and while I've done this for a long time, there have been some nasty interactions -- on one version I remember, RH didn't include a dependency on fsck, and the new kernel required a new modutils that was incompatible both with the old kernel and the old modutils. Doing this meant that you'd get a new kernel with a new modutils, but one that couldn't boot without the new fsck. You do tend to learn a lot about your system doing this. :-)

Re:Upgrading

[smoker2]

I make a point of not upgrading to the last update until the next new version is out. I just upgraded from FC3 to FC4 about 2 weeks ago. I'm not completely unhappy with FC4 but among other things, certain icons have gone missing in Gnome, virtually all the panel apps went missing, Gdesklets broke, the weather panel applet doesn't have forecasts for my area anymore and the pop email applets went missing. That last one was a bugger, as I have about 5 different addys I need to keep an eye on. I ended up with Mail Notification 2.0 which is not the same thing at all. For one thing it can't perform seperate actions according to which mailbox has mail :(

On the plus side, my 400GB LVM volume didn't get lost in the upgrade, so I should be grateful ;-)

Oh, I upgraded using yum BTW and it all went fine. IIRC, you have to install the later version kernel first, then reboot, then run yum, so that it gets the correct distribution. Here's the how-to I followed. [brandonhutchinson.com]

When FC6 comes out, I'll take a look at upgrading to FC5.

Re:Upgrading

[Jarlsberg]

Backup, install, and spend the next fortnight tweaking your system back into shape. There is no other way. ;/
(I've got FC4, and I'm *not* upgrading)

Of course, if you've got all your documents etc. on a separate partition, you shouldn't run into really bad problems when installing FC5. Be sure to backup config files etc. that you may have put on the system partition.

Re:Upgrading

[curmudgeous]

I've built many linux machines over the years (with several different distros) and I've learned through experience that best practice is to keep system files and user data on separate volumes. Either create a dedicated partition for /home or use another physical drive entirely. I've had too many upgrades go bad and didn't have the time or patience to poke around to find the cause, so the quickest and best solution was to format and start over. Just my 2 cents.

Re:Upgrading

[Vellmont]

Some people report no problems with upgrading, others report many problems.

Fedora and Redhat have never been intended to be forever upgraded like Debian or Ubuntu have, so it's always a little risky. If you're talking about a production level machine that's doing critical work you rely on every day, I wouldn't trust an upgrade at all. If it's just your desktop where you store some MP3s or whatever, it's not a big deal to try the upgrade.

   

Re:Upgrading

[moranar]

Yes, you made a few typos. The command is actually:

yum update

Don't worry, it happens to the best of us :P

Good for Older laptop?

[SaidiaDude]

Would this distro work for an old laptop - UMAX 233MHz 256MB 3GB? I have one lying around and was thinking about creating a wireless terminal to check email and possibly display pictures. A basic Core 4 installed fine but the UI wasnt very responsive sometimes. Thx for your help.

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[LizardKing]

NetBSD may be a better choice for older hardware, as it consumes less resources than recent versions of Linux. Note that this is not an anit-Linux troll, much of that extra resource hungriness seems to come from the added functionality rather than superfluous bloat - and despite my personal preference for NetBSD, I'm considering putting FC5 onto my PowerBook, as there appears to be support for Java on PowerPC Linux.

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[/ASCII]

You can probably compile GCC4 and Classpath yourself to get the same Java support FC5 has for NetBSD. On the other hand, you can use DSL or some other lightweight Linux distribution that runs like a champ on a Pentium 233 MHz.

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[LizardKing]

I'd read that IBM have a port of the Sun JDK for PowerPC Linux. While GCJ and Classpath are progressing fast, I don't think they're quite ready for all the Swing and Tomcat/JSP based stuff that I'd like to do. The Swing classes at the very least are still a bit patchy. However, both projects have come on in leaps and bounds in the last couple of years, and along with the new Fortran 95 compiler I'm looking forward to the next few releases of GCC4.

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[SClitheroe]

I'd be interested in the answer to this as well. I tried Ubuntu on an older Dell Latitude running at 233mhz, and although it was well supported, it was pretty slow (although everything on it seems slow, I guess)

-Scott

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[dylan_-]

A good one for older hardware is VectorLinux [vectorlinux.com]. The standard edition uses icewm and Rox filer, which is nice and fast.

Mod parent post up

[skogs]

Mod parent post up

Re:Good for Older laptop?

[JonLatane]

I'd recommend not using GNOME for it if you want to do everything easily. Probably the easiest thing to do is get Ubuntu and do a Xubuntu installation (this will give you an XFCE desktop; it's good looking and still not a resource hog). Basically, just pop in an install disc and choose to do a server installation, which after rebooting will give you a terminal. Login and then do:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install gdm

This will give you a desktop and a login manager. The Ubuntu support page [ubuntu.com] will explain everything you need to know about installing new software with the Synaptic Package Manager. And once you've enabled the Universe and Multiverse repositories, setting up MP3 playback will be one hell of a lot easier than with any Fedora system I've used.

selinux

[typical]

Someone on the target webpage asked how to disable SELinux. I don't really feel like making an account on that website, but you should edit /etc/sysconfig/selinux.

Re:selinux

[Azarael]

I'm not sure if this is still the case, but SELinux and the nVidia graphics drivers do not seem to get along either. I had this problem in FC4.

Re:selinux

[LnxAddct]

Or disable it in the installer by clicking "Disable SELinux" when prompted, you can't miss it. If you happen to miss it, just go to Desktop->System Settings->Security Level from gui and disable under the SELinux tab. New users don't like editing config files, Fedora will let you disable SELinux through the gui.
Regards,
Steve

Re:selinux

[typical]

Fair enough.

I've been using RHL and Fedora for a long time, though, and never bothered to learn the GUI. The GUIs always change and shift around -- first there was the Tk control-panel back in the day, then system-config, then a sequence of other utilities. If you learn some of the GUI, you wind up having to relearn the thing down the road. The config files stay in the same place over the years.

Re:selinux

[typical]

Surely that only disables selinux for the kernel being used to execute the installer, and does not actually affect the installed copy?

Re:selinux

[typical]

Although that does disable selinux earlier in the boot process, which, I guess, could be useful if somehow selinux was preventing you from booting.

You'd add "selinux=0" to the kernel arguments by (E)diting the boot option and then (E)diting the line starting with "kernel". That'd disable it for the current boot. To permanently disable it, you can edit /boot/grub/grub.conf and add "selinux=0" to the list of arguments after "kernel".

I ran into this mostly because I wanted to try out reiserfs v3 (and reiserfs does not support selinux).

FWIW, while I've seen the benchmarks that should mean that resiser is somewhat faster than ext3, I was kinda disappointed -- I didn't notice any speed benefit on my machine.

Re:selinux

[typical]

I think the idea is that SELinux is fine on a server that's doing more-or-less standard things. I know that it can interfere with hobbyist stuff, where you're significantly changing the system around. I also don't think that the end user is supposed to directly write SELinux policy rules, but to use high-level tools that control it (though I'm unaware of what tools exist to do this). SELinux is more of a toolkit for letting you build systems that provide secure environments than actually such a secure environment.

Also, I'm unaware of any ties between TCPA and SELinux. I would be surprised if such exist -- SELinux was done by the NSA, which obviously has little stake in DRM.

Some initial installation notes

[clear_thought_05]

There are some pages: installation guide [mjmwired.net], installation notes [stanton-finley.net] which should be valuable starting points.

Re:Some initial installation notes

[Metaphorically]

I used that same installation guide to find the setup for my NVidia card and a few other good tweaks.

Fedora Mirrors

[Brian The Dog]

Am I the only one that thinks it is awesome that playboy.com mirrors the distro? They should have 'customized' it. (Special backgrounds, prepopulated bookmarks, etc.)

Re:Fedora Mirrors

[Secrity]

Playboy.com also mirrors Firefox, Thunderbird, Apache, FreeBSD, and CPAN. Playboy uses FOSS in it's operation and wants to give back to the community by providing mirrors.

Re:Fedora Mirrors

[LnxAddct]

Most major sites that run Fedora to host their website, also mirror it. Kernel.org and Playboy.com are two of the largest sites that I can think of off the top of my head that run Fedora in the back and mirror it, but there are plenty of other huge sites running it as well. It really is a good distro, zealots tend to spread sensless FUD about it though.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Fedora Mirrors

[JollyFinn]

Yeah. You can always say that you downloaded 3.3GB off stuff from playboy.com today, and didn't have to pay a dime.

what's included

[b17bmbr]

silly question, but I'd like to know what kernel version, hardware support, etc. is included. perhaps a link would have been nice. but, i dumped fedora a while ago for ubuntu.

Kernel version

[jd]

Fedora 5 comes with Kernel 2.6.15 with Red Hat patches. The latest official kernel is 2.6.16, which includes some important bugfixes. At the time of writing this, Fedora Core does NOT have 2.6.16 in the development tree, so it may be a few days before this upgrade is available.

Just as a personal note, I compile my own kernels, using the vanilla kernel patched with Andrew Morton's patches first, then with whatever of Red Hat's will still apply cleanly. Andrew Morton's -mm patches adds a lot of extremely useful functionality, for me, so that's my patchset of choice. (There are some nice real-time patches out there, too, but they're generally not compatible with other patchsets, making them a pain.)

Zen

[skogs]

This comes with the virtual machine support now I believe. I look forward to wiping my current win2k install and installing virtual machine.

I like the idea of being able to do some extensive testing on virtual machine setup, run win2k, run FC5, run gentoo, and probably ubuntu too. All at the same time.

Very slick.

I look forward to it.

Re:Zen

[/ASCII]

If my memory serves me correctly, Xen needs either special virtualization support from the guest OS (meaning you can pretty much only run Linux as the guest OS) or special virtualization support from the CPU (On the way from both Intel and AMD, I belive), so you'll probably have to wait a bit before you can use Xen and Windows.

Re:Zen

[ColourlessGreenIdeas]

I don't think Xen can currently run Windows.

Well, it can, but you need to re-compile the windows kernel with a special patch that Xen can't give you. Since you probably don't have the source to the Windows kernel, this is totally theoretical. This may change when CPUs have proper support for virtualisation (assuming you have a new CPU)

Xen can...

[LuckyStarr]

Well, I did actually run Windows Server 2003 using Xen 3.0.1. This was only 2 weeks ago. The only prerequisite is a Intel processor with the Vanderpool virtualization technology. Access to the screen is done via VNC.

I stand corrected

[ColourlessGreenIdeas]

I'd failed to notice that Vanderpool CPUs were available.

Re:Zen

[AKAImBatman]

Xen [wikipedia.org] has been included since Fedora Core 4. So it's not that new of a feature. :-)

Re:Zen

[Shawn is an Asshole]

You currently can't run Windows under Xen as Xen requires the OS to be modified to run under it. Until the new CPUs with virtualization are out you can't use Xen to run Windows.

Right now, though, there is a good free (beer) alternative: VMWare Player [vmware.com]. I've been using it with a Win2k guest and it works great. A bit sluggish on Athlon XP's (2500+) and lower, but it feels almost native on an Athlon 64 (3200+).

To create a disk, install qemu and use the following command to create the disk:

qemu-img create -f vmdk disk.vmdk 15G

To create your *.vmx file use VM Builder [dcgrendel.be] (it's a webapp).

Open the VMX file in VMWare Player and install Windows normally.

To install VMware Tools, just download an old version (tar.gz, not the rpm) of the Workstation or the betas of the Server. There is a "windows.iso" file in the archive that has everything you need.

Oh, great, I've just upgraded to FC4

[Russ Nelson]

Oh, great, I've just upgraded from FC2 to FC4 ... and now there's an FC5?? Technology marches on....

Fedora is on a fast development cycle

[winkydink]

If you prefer something that looks like RH but evolves at a more stately pace, may I suggest CentOS [centos.org]. This is RHEL built from the the Open Sources.

Re:Oh, great, I've just upgraded to FC4

[drooling-dog]

Me too, but unless there's something you really need in FC5, why bother? FC4 isn't going to stop working on you.

Beagle (Dashboard) in Gnome

[SlashdotOgre]

One of the main features I'm looking forward to in FC5 is the inclusion of Beagle (a personal information search tool written in Mono). I currently use Beagle in Gentoo, and I have been quite impressed. It doesn't seem to suck up my processor like most document indexers (unless I pass the variable BEAGLE_EXERCISE_THE_DOG=1), and it handles a lot of formats. I've tried getting Beagle to work in FC4, but always ran into issues (mainly had to do with mono). What I'm really hoping is now that Beagle is so easy to install (yum install beagle -- ought to work out of the box in FC5, no need to add repo's), it will expose it to more people and motivate development.

Re:Beagle (Dashboard) in Gnome

[justsomebody]

One of the main features I'm looking forward to in FC5 is the inclusion of Beagle

In that case you should upgrade beagle to 0.2.3, and here is why http://planet.gnome.org/ [gnome.org] search for "joe: yes I also want to know about the leak". His site doesn't seem to work now

Re:Beagle (Dashboard) in Gnome

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

That's been working in Suse and Ubuntu for some time. I'm surprised Fedora's so behind the times.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Probably the worst beginner's distribution

[AKAImBatman]

FWIW, Red Hat has always liked to be on the Bleeding Edge of Linux, but in their own way. (e.g. If GNOME 2.x isn't ready to ship, make quick patches around the problems and ship it.) This tended to get them into a lot of trouble, because their OS would have all kinds of idiosynchrasies and inconsistencies that other distributions didn't exhibit.

RedHat decided to address the matter with the Fedora branch. Fedora is a perpetual beta of RedHat's enterprise product. By releasing this beta, RedHat is able to get real-world testing of their latest tech before they foist it upon paying customers.

As a result, Fedora tends to look very nice and has a lot of nice features that are hard to find elsewhere. (e.g. Its beautiful BlueCurve theme.) Unfortunately, it also means that you're testing beta software. Unless you are completely comfortable with that, you shouldn't use Fedora.

So you're right. Your professor was being a little kooky on this one. He was probably blinded by the "latest and greatest" mentality that tends to permeate the software industry.

Fedora is a hobbiest OS

[skogs]

This is a hobby OS. It is the developement tree for RHEL. What is so hard to figure out here? It is not a beginner distro, it is a testing ground for new ideas and functions. The entire point is to test things, and separated by name so that people like your professor cannot sue RedHat when something doesn't work as it should.

Point release version numbers don't really apply to something that is perpetually beta. There are dozens of Fedora based distros...ever notice that they all make changes/mods for better security/hardwaredetection/userinterface/etc..

I know this is a flame, and some fedora fanboys will mod be down for this and flame me, but please...do look around> this is a perpetual beta. If you want the 'good stuff' pay for it, or download something that has another couple of steps of tweaking built in.

Re:Fedora is a hobbiest OS

[Nermal]

While it's true that Fedora is a proving ground for new technologies, it's a mistake to say that it is in "perpetual beta". Rawhide, the development branch of Fedora, is in perpetual beta. Fedora Core is the stable branch of Rawhide. If it's not stable then something is wrong. So while on the one hand Fedora is not intended to be enterprise-grade and I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the GP, on the other it does have its own test process and its own devel/stable release cycle.

Also, Fedora doesn't have point releases because point releases are old-fashioned. There's no need to wait for bug fixes to accumulate before making them available anymore because tools like Yum can be used to make them available immediately. New features are added every six months or so in a new major version, but it serves the same purpose as what used to be called a point release. The only difference is in the numbers.

Re:Probably the worst beginner's distribution

[xtracto]

So, that one was your one issue, my one issue was that when I tried to install it to my laptop external USB FC4 did not recognized it, nothing, zero, nada. For the installation my USB HD just did not existed.

I read in some forums that I needed to boot with some flags or something but I really did not wanted to bother so I installed Mandriva 2006 which recognized my external disk and installed without major problems.

I wonder if that bug/problem was fixed in this version...

FC5 mirror

[Yenya]

The Fedora Download page, which is according to the announcement message supposed to redirect you to one of the mirrors, does not work - it redirects to ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com [redhat.com] which is (of course) busy. So let me allow to advertise my mirror - if you are in Europe, I have still about half a gigabit of bandwidth free at

ftp://ftp.linux.cz/pub/linux/fedora-core/5/ [linux.cz]

-Yenya

Upgrade via yum is easier

[Cosine0]

Just download and install fedora-release.xx.rpm
Next, "yum upgrade"
And you don't even have to reboot...

Re:Upgrade via yum is easier

[NoExec]

That sounds quite appealing! Here is a page with more detailed instructions. [brandonhutchinson.com]

BitTorrent seeds

[bernywork]

Is anyone seeing any data coming from the BitTorrent seeds yet? (17:39 GMT)

At the moment, I can't see any peers who have data, and the seeds don't appear to be sending data yet. The amount of seeds is slowly rising though...

Cent OS - Free RedHat

[gatzke]

Remember, you can get the free version of RedHat from CentOS

http://www.centos.org/ [centos.org]

No silly annual payments just to get support.

I personally use knoppix / debian since RedHat started charging for support.

People need to know CentOS is out there.

Bought on DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

If like me you don't have broadband, you can get it from budgetlinuxcds.com on DVD for only $5

Re:MP3's?

[r_cerq]

It won't be "fixed", it's like that by design. Check http://fedora.redhat.com/About/ [redhat.com] (Why can't Fedora play mp3 files?)

Re:MP3's?

[Nighttime]

Short answer is no.

From http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems [fedoraproject.org]

MP3 encoding/decoding support is not included in any Fedora application because MP3 is heavily patented in several regions including the United States. The patent holder is unwilling to give an unrestricted patent grant, as required by the GPL. Other platforms might have paid the royalty and/or included proprietary software. Other Linux distributions not based in a region affected by the patent might ship MP3 decoders/encoders or they might have included proprietary software. However, Fedora Core cannot and does not ship MP3 decoders/encoders in order to serve the goal of shipping only free and open source software that is not restricted by software patents.

Fedora Suggests: If possible, use patent unrestricted formats such as Ogg Vorbis (a lossy audio codec that has better quality than MP3), or FLAC (a lossless audio codec).

Re:MP3's?

[typical]

You know, I didn't even realize that this was the case -- I only have .ogg and .flac files.

Re:MP3's?

[jb.hl.com]

I asked this question in another thread, and didn't get an answer. Has anyone ever been sued for building RPMs or DEBs of MP3 codecs, MP3 encoders, Mplayer etc? Ever?

Re:MP3's?

[pyros]

The problem isn't distributing a codec, the problem is you can't legally have a GPL implementation in a jurisdiction where the patents on those formats applies (like the US). In the example of MP3, the patent holders grant free license for ditributing a decoding implementation, I believe. But that's not liberal enough to be compatible with the GPL, because the license could be revoked.

Re:MP3's?

[just_forget_it]

From the Fedora website: "The ATI graphics drivers are proprietary and many kernel developers consider this driver to violate the GPL license of the kernel. Fedora Core does not include proprietary software. Fedora Suggests: Consider using a graphics adapter from Intel or any other manufacturer that supports open source with full specifications and/or source code. Note that ATI adapters will usually work well using the drivers included with Fedora, but accelerated functions (OpenGL) will not be available. " This is exactly what is keeping a lot of people from using Linux. Fedora's hard-nosed stance against non-GPL software is laughable. This advice sheet is fine for someone building a new machine, but I'm not going to go out and buy some shitty Intel chipset just so I can use Linux. The whole tone of the forbidden items page is "We purposely broke that feature because it conflicts with our idealogy, but that's ok, you don't really need things like hardware 3D acceleration and the ability to play your mountainous library of MP3's anyway." It's not the fact that the NVidia drivers aren't included that bothers me, no OS bundles that driver, it's the fact that Fedora people and a lot of Linux zealots seem to have the "change your hardware to things we like" attitude as opposed to "we don't include support for that because of , but here's how you can add it yourself."

Re:MP3's?

[quintesse]

And it is people like us who will make sure that ATI and nVidia will never change their ways, why should they? People still keep buying their stuff even if they have to jump through hoops to install the drivers.

Now, truth be told, I said "us" because I use the proprietary drivers as well and I am happy they exist but I also agree that ATI and nVidia must be pushed as hard as possible to open up more and Fedora/Redhat/Debian (and probably others) can't do that if they tell people "you shouldn't use those drivers, but this is how you install them".

You make a decision and you stick by it.

I have decided I _need_ my daily FPS-fix ;-)

Re:Fallacy

[Crispy Critters]

"For a start both Ogg and FLAC are encumbered by patents just like every other compression technology out there."

Then why does the Ogg Vorbis FAQ [vorbis.com] say, "it is completely free, open, and unpatented"?

Why does the Flac FAQ [sourceforge.net] describe it as an "open patent free codec"?

Please explain in what sense they are encumbered.

Re:Fallacy

[crush]

Mp3 was excluded for one reason. Dogma. It has nothing to do with Fraunhofer being beligerent, because if it did, don't you think Ubuntu or others would have excluded mp3 support by now. No. It has to do with Red Hat, and now the Fedora Project, trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, i.e. trying to get the world to move away from mp3, and towards FOSS alternatives.

I think if there's any "dogma" on display it's yours. Red Hat is a company incorporated in the USA and is legally liable for any infringement of Frauenhofer's patents. Ubuntu does not face that situation. Red Hat also owns significant assets unlike Ubuntu and is vulnerable on that score.

Re:MP3's?

[Azarael]

It's not that hard if you just want a player. Just recompile the latest xmms source or install the rpm. I guess if you want mp3 support in other apps, then that would be a big pain.

Re:MP3's?

[Alioth]

No - they can't, or they would be liable to pay royalties to Fraunhofer for the MP3 patent, which isn't tenable for a Free free distro.

The long answer is if you want to use FC5 and play MP3 files, then it takes approximately 10 seconds to add the Livna yum repository and type 'yum install xine' (or the media player of your choice).

Re:MP3's?

[Almost-Retired]

No, and it won't ever be fixed until the patents on mp3 expire. So you might as well get used to it, its not gonna change in the near future.

--
Cheers, Gene

Re:MP3's?

[Kjella]

This answer is valid to April 2010: No, and it won't. I think we can safely say at this point that ogg isn't taking over mainstream and that once it is freed, ogg will go back to a very very little niche. It'll simply take another four years.

Re:MP3's?

[justsomebody]

but have they fixed the runaround that they put you through just to play MP3's?

Out of the box?

In short, no.

But here is how you do it
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/download/fedora5. html [freedesktop.org]

Re:MP3's?

[Listen Up]

For years I have used The Unofficial Fedora Faq located at http://www.fedorafaq.org/ [fedorafaq.org] to install all of the software missing from the Fedora Core downloads.

I agree with everything on that page, except for Java support. I develop Java and suggest that anybody who wants to develop serious Java applications use the official Java JDK from Sun. Otherwise, everything else is spot-on to help make Fedora a serious Linux desktop distribution.

Re:[off topic] GPL v3 and Linux distribs

[/ASCII]

Distributions don't change the license of the programs they contain. So if the kernel remains GPL2, then the kernel shipped with Fedora will also be GPL2. Basically all Linux distributions ship with programs using a whole bunch of different licenses. The parts of a distribution that are mostly distribution specific can use any license. I seem to remember that Yast, the Suse setup tool used to be closed source.

Re:Redhat Naming

[AKAImBatman]

I never understood why Redhat chose Fedora.

Fedora is a hat. You see the "Red Hat" logo? The type of hat the guy is wearing in the logo is called a Fedora [wikipedia.org]. Given that the hat is named after a Frech play, I don't think that anyone is really worried about what it means in Portugese.

Re:Redhat Naming

[DarkSarin]

I'll look it up later, if I remember, and post what I find--I've got a couple of good dictionaries. I don't recall the word, personally. Of course, you probably have access to a better dictionary than I do.