Fedora 7 Released

fedoraman writes "Fedora 7 has been released. With Xorg 7.3, KDE 3.5.6, GNOME 2.18, and version 2.6.21 of the Linux kernel Fedora 7 comes with all the latest and greatest open source desktop software. Fedora 7 drops the traditional 'Core' nomenclature, since it includes both what used to be termed the Core and Extra components by default. Fedora 7 is also the first release to be constructed with Fedora's revolutionary new build system, which is designed to improve the ease of developing derivatives and Fedora-based software appliances. As usual, extensive documentation and release notes are available. Torrents are also available and ISO images can be downloaded from mirrors around the world."

WOW Xorg 7.3?!

[isa-kuruption (317695)]

Not even x.org has 7.3 yet! Fedora is really on top of things!

Re:

[xenocide2 (231786)]

Allow me to introduce you to two very fun programs, "which" and "find". Which prints out where a program in your path is. This is useful when you install a new version and cant seem to run it, or for Paul to tell his coworker where he installed something. Find will search a specified tree for the properties you want, like perhaps the name of the file and executable permission.

Not quite correct. Still nice.

[c0l0 (826165)]

It's not Xorg 7.3 that's packaged with Fedora, but Xorg 7.2 with the xorg-server 1.3.0 release. It still features very interesting software, like, for example, noveau [freedesktop.org], a free reimplementation of NVIDIA's hardware-accelerated 3D-drivers (still work in progress, of course), as well as a kernel patched with the all-new and highly anticipated mac802.11 [intellinuxwireless.org]-subsystem that whould yield much better compatibility and performance for all things WLAN. I also like this idea of "Revisor [heise.de]", an application easily allowing for building customized bootable (install-)media with specific packages only.

Sorry CD Users

[Kainaw (676073)]

Fedora 7 is released with a DVD iso. If you need the set of CD isos, sorry. You'll have to wait to see if anyone is nice enough to create them in the future. You can try to use the rescue cd and a network install, but again, you'll have to wait until the bandwidth opens up enough for that. So, either upgrade your computer or stick with FC6.

Re:

[pembo13 (770295)]

The LiveCDs aren't CDs?

Re:Sorry CD Users

[Kainaw (676073)]

The LiveCDs aren't CDs?

No. They are not. I want a set of CDs with all the RPMs on them (just as I had with FC2, 3, 4, 5, and 6). The LiveCDs have a minimal Fedora install. If you want to put it on your computer (and toss out the CD), you need to do a network install. I have 17 computers here. I don't want to wait hours and hours for a network install on each one.

Re:

[Waffle Iron (339739)]

1. Download the DVD ISO into one computer on your LAN
2. Mount the ISO filesystem image on a loop device
3. Turn on an FTP daemon to serve up the DVD files
4. Tell the 17 computers to do an FTP-based install over your lan

I've done this. It's faster than a DVD or CD install because you don't have to deal with an optical drive's abysmal seek latency. And no swapping CDs for hours.

Fedora Security

[macemoneta (154740)]

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned one of Fedora's major strengths; security [fedoraproject.org]. This is the primary reason that I use Fedora. The combination of security layers has made Fedora immune to many (all?) of the compromises/exploits in recent history.

While distributions like Ubuntu are more popular with end-users, I'm concerned that an exploit across such a popular (but security weak) distribution will paint all of Linux with an unfavorable brush.

FC5 should have been supported for 2 years!

[Builder (103701)]

I posted a somewhat trollish comment about this earlier today. Nice to see that the fanbois made it out in such good time on this one to defend the indefensible. Good to see we leap to attack people instead of considering the actions of the Fedora project and their associated projects.

What most people are completely missing in their ad hominem attacks on my earlier thread is that when a lot of people installed FC5, there was an expectation that it would be supported for 2 years through the Fedora Legacy project. On February 9 2007, this project ceased to exist, giving people just 4 months to migrate their servers.

If Microsoft suddenly halved the supported lifespan of products currently in production, they would be crucified by the very people attacking me on this site. But when an open source project does this, it's ok.

You can call the people who installed FC5 idiots all you want, but they're not. They trusted this 'community' that they kept being preached at about. "When a company goes under, you're screwed, but with community supported products, you're never forced to upgrade" - That sound familiar to anyone here? You ever told anyone that? You ever heard that line of bullshit from someone ?

A lot of people figured 2 years was an acceptable lifespan for the product because it fits well with hardware refresh cycles on older equipment. Then half way through their 2 year server lifecycle, they had the rug pulled out from under them. On a date when they thought they had about 11 - 13 months support left, they got told that they have 4 months to do a complete migration.

Calling people who trusted you an idiot for believing you does not convert people to Linux!

I made one mistake in my earlier post - I said that support for FC5 ends today. It turns out that it still has a month to go, so I'll apologise for that. But the Fedora community has let a lot of people down today and given Microsoft a load more useful FUD fuel.

Every time something like this happens, MS have some more examples of how this community will turn on you in a heartbeat. When the Tuttle Centos issue happened, MS were taking the response of the 'community' into sales meetings where Linux was a threat. When a Squirrelmail developer called for an end-user to be fired and belittled her in public for daring to use contact details posted on the Squirrelmail site when she didn't know where else to turn, MS smiled with glee (and a small white cat). And you can bet your bottom dollar that someone at MS will be pointing out this latest gaff to someone in the PR department and they'll be using this behind closed doors in the near future too.

You probably don't care - you probably know better. But somewhere, some PHB who could have been converted to Linux will become an even firmer closed source supporter because of the actions of the Fedora and Fedora legacy projects that come into effect today. And when you're fighting a monopolist, every sale or install that you give up through rudeness, through arrogance and most especially through broken promises and lies is one install too many!

I'll say it again - If Microsoft suddenly halved the supported lifespan of products currently in production, they would be crucified by the very people attacking me on this site. But when an open source project does this, it's ok. Why?

Can you say Xen?

[jmorris42 (1458)]

> Is there a good reason they seem to think they know better than Linus and all the other devs working hard on the standard kernel
> or is it just an ego trip for the developers at these distros?

Yes, there are lots of good reasons. We can start with Xen. All of the big distros support it but it isn't in the mainline kernel tree. So right there you blow away the ability to run the mainline kernel without breaking things. The list goes on from there. The latest device drivers that haven't yet made it upstream, bug fixes that are working their way upstream, etc. There are lots of other good reasons why a distro kernel gets patches.

SUSE, like RHEL is longterm stable. That means bug fixes and security issues get patched into the same base kernel that originally shipped with that version of the distro because revving the whole kernel would be a nightmare.

That said, Fedora does have a policy of trying to stay close to the upstream kernel, pushing their patches upline wherever possible and not being afraid to revv the whole kernel in the lifetime of a 'stable' release. But when it comes down to big patchsets like Xen that they really want to ship but that neither Xen nor Linus appear interested in seeing merged they don't really have much of a choice. Longterm, just as an interested bystander, I'd suspect Xen to disappear from Fedora once KVM gets stable enough to totally replace it for the non-enterprise workloads Fedora is aimed at.

Fedora use a hacked kernel?

[jd (1658)]

Ummm.... The short answer is yes. The long answer is that there are a gigantic number of patches, but they seem to miss out on a lot of the key patches out there and I'm not impressed with some of the stuff they've included. In order to do a lot of useful things, I've got to roll my own kernel, but because the patchset provided with FC is so convoluted, I can't use any of their patches. Which means I lose all the functionality that actually is provided and actually is useful.

What I'd like is for Red Hat to build better diffs, develop some alternative scheme for merging in new code, or get as many of their patches rolled into the -mm tree as possible, then use the -mm tree exclusively. It may not be a true vanilla kernel, but at least -mm is openly maintained, heavily used, popular and actively folded into the mainstream.

Re:

[Vellmont (569020)]

Is there a good reason they seem to think they know better than Linus and all the other devs working hard on the standard kernel


Linus and the other kernel devs have different, but partially overlapping goals. Distributions value stable, well tested kernels with new features as a secondary goal. Kernel devs want new features, increased performance, etc, with stability perhaps a bit less of a priority.

So it's not that Redhat/SuSe/Ubuntu "know better", it's that the distributions work on kernel stability a l

Un-hacked kernels (Slackware)

[spaceyhackerlady (462530)]

So it's not that Redhat/SuSe/Ubuntu "know better", it's that the distributions work on kernel stability a lot more than the kernel devs. This is NOT anything new. The days of thinking you should go get "the latest kernel from Linus" and just expect everything to work properly went away years ago. Did I used to go re-compile my kernel from the vanilla source? Sure. Do I do it anymore? Hell no, and without a good reason to I never will. If you want that sort of thing, pick a distribution that values the vanilla kernel. Otherwise stop griping.

Slackware (my favourite distro) uses utterly vanilla kernels. Want a new one? Download it from kernel.org, untar it, build it. No sweat.

I consider building a custom kernel to be an integral part of an installation: all the distro kernel does is bootstrap building the production one. All my systems run kernels that are a precise match to the hardware and my needs, with no superfluous junk. No superfluous security holes, either.

...laura

Re:

[businessnerd (1009815)]

Sweeet! Using Fedora 7 is going to be more fun than I expected. Except I probably won't remember much of the experience the next morning.

One nice thing about Fedora7 is the buildtools

[crush (19364)]

The complete build process is FL/OSS!

The tool for taking all the RPM packages and composing them into an installation tree is pungi [fedoraproject.org]. It's FL/OSS.

The tool for taking source from CVS and turning it into packages is Koji [fedoraproject.org] and it's completely FL/OSS too

The tool for producing updated packages is bodhi [fedoraproject.org] and is FL/OSS

Be happy. The Fedora Project yet again has made major contributions to FL/OSS which can be enjoyed and improved by everyone. It means that Fedora is completely independent of Red Hat (apart from Red Hat's very generous donation of hardware and developers) and that anyone that wants to can easily produce a specialised "spin" of Fedora suited exactly to their own needs. That's one of the main innovations that Fedora is pursuing with the above: instead of being stuck dependent on the choices of a distributor you can benefit from the patched sources, even their packaging, yet diverge when needed. This should be the goal that every distribution follows, and the only thing that is similar in terms of flexibility is Gentoo, but that IMHO fails to provide an easy path for those that are happy with a distributor making the decisions for them.

I'll freely admit to being a Fedora and Red Hat fan, but I hope that the significance of the release of these build tools is not overlooked by people using other distributions.

Re:

[crush (19364)]

Even if you're not interested in using Koji locally for your own purposes and just want to find out what the status of your favorite package is you can look at it on Fedora's Koji server. Click a package name on the left and you can see what patches have been applied according to the cnangelog and whether the package is being rebuilt, or waiting on review or whatever. It's superb.

Re:

[crush (19364)]

That would be here [fedoraproject.org]

Re:

[xenocide2 (231786)]

Debian and Ubuntu use buildd [debian.org]. It's not as pretty as the 5 seconds I spent looking at Fedora's tool, but it gets the job done. Ubuntu uses a tool written and run by Canonical, the largest and most integrated sponsor of Ubuntu. It's also closed source, with strange promises that it will be open eventually. That said, launchpad does a hell of a lot more than monitor buildd servers. It's also a far better distro bugtracker than bugzilla is, a project planning tool etc.

Re:Nice but is it bloatware?

[dosius (230542)]

The last version of Debian worked on a 486/133 with 32 MB RAM, I'm sure the current ought to too...

-uso.

Re:Nice but is it bloatware?

[murph (16036)]

When the last version of Debian was new, wasn't that current hardware?

Re:

[gfxguy (98788)]

I noticed when I upgraded from FC4 to FC6 a lot of hardware that was recognized in 4 suddenly wasn't in 6. Shouldn't it be the other way around?

I've tried the latest Ubuntu, and it's installing on my laptop (have had it on my desktop for a week now, and am very happy) as I come across this article... I'm going to stick with Ubuntu.

I've used FC for a couple of years now, though, and I have to give it props, they've been excellent, overall. If I hadn't just done all the installing I've done, I'd be willing

Re:What's the story with Extras?

[spevack (210449)]

Core and Extras have been merged into a single repository, so those names no longer exist. But what you are looking for DOES exist. It's all there in the "Everything" version of Fedora. That's an install tree that we provide at (for example):

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux /releases/7/Everything/ [redhat.com]

Re:

[gdek (202709)]

Check out Red Hat Magazine:

http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/05/31/remixing- fedora-7/ [redhatmagazine.com]

Re:

[L-s-L69 (700599)]

With respect you're an idiot. Fedora is NOT designed or distributed as a stable plateform with long term support, if you want that from a Redhat type install use Enterprise or CentOs. Fedora *is* however the cutting edge of Redhat development and I use it across all my (personal) servers and PCs/Laptops ungrading when nessesary.

Re:

[norminator (784674)]

Distrowatch [distrowatch.com], maybe?

I started out with RedHat 6.x, and kept with it until about Fedora Core 2, at which point I started looking around at some other distros. I settled on Ubuntu, and while I think Fedora is great for certain people, I think Ubuntu is a better general-purpose distro.

There's one install disc, which contains everything most users need to get started, then users can use the "Add/Remove Programs" app or Synaptic to get whatever else they need from the repos. Fedora on the other hand, has