Red Hat Promises A More Vibrant Fedora

loki99 points out a CNET story about the direction Red Hat's development has taken (and changes in the wind), writing "Michael Tiemann, vice president of Red Hat, admits that after exclusively concentrating on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in recent years, they left those 'early adopters' behind. 'It insulted some of our best supporters. But worse, we lost our opportunity to do customer-driven innovation.' Tiemann said." The recent Boston FUDcon (mentioned in the linked article) is one example of how the company wants to revitalize non-corporate interest.

No supported upgrade path...

[OgGreeb]

I used RHL9 exclusively for my production servers along with a subscription to Red Hat Network for each machine, for the security patches. I've never needed RedHat's other support services and couldn't justify the cost of purchasing them to my clients. When RH discontinued RHL9 and provided no upgrade path from RHL9 to RHEL3 (re-install from scratch only), I had no choice but to put all the old servers on Fedora Legacy support and plan to use other distributions. I begged for an upgrade installer path from Red Hat salesmen with no effect -- I even had approval from most of my clients to purchase RHEL3 for their machines, but the danger of installing from scratch was too high.

Even now I don't understand why they did that. That kind of move fails Marketing 101.

Re:FUD?

[tempest303]

The name is supposed to be funny/ironic.

Re:Questions for Red Hat customers...

[laughingcoyote]

Went to Gentoo, and I've been happier then hell with it. I'm just fine where I am and wouldn't have any reason to come back.

Re:While we're fantasizing ...

[Kyouryuu]

I'm not sure it's a matter of it being bloated - more at just disorganized such that bloat is the end result. For example, Mepis and Ubuntu Linux each chime in at just one CD and it contains all of the essentials. An office suite, web browser, e-mail, and a GUI of some kind. With Fedora, you download four CDs worth of stuff, the majority of which the average user just plain doesn't need. But, Fedora is not organized such that the basic essentials are grouped on the first CD, making the other three extraneous. Instead, it's sprawled out evenly across four of them. The progress bar even shows that OpenOffice spans two CDs.

Re:Questions for Red Hat customers...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll stay a coward on this one. When RH support ran out, I put my 12 or so customers servers on fedora legacy updates (RH7.3) I dabble around with Debian but it really doesn't work for the particular customer set I have. I have also dabble around with FreeBSD 4.9 10 and 11 and a bit of 5.3 mostly for mail servers, BUT for my paying customers (I roll about 2 to 4 SAMBA and rsync Backup servers a month), I am using White Box/CentOS. I am not going to use Fedora,with it's bleeding edge, and six month update schedule and I am not going to pay Red Hats over priced support fees for security patches (all I need from them).

Re:Too little, too late

[Brandybuck]

Article summary: Redhat tells core users to sod' off, then wonders why it doesn't have any core users.

Welcome to CentOS and RHEL alternatives.

[Zeio]

Fedora and RedHat to me is annoying - I can't bring myself to use it professionally. It changes too frequently and is poorly supported in my opinion, never fix the problems, always upgrade the packages to move the problem somewhere else. Right now I still have machines running RedHat 7.3 running updates on the fedora legacy project. (There are legacy projects to keep the older RedHat's and various Fedora Cores alive because people hate upgrading a working system every 5 minutes.)

RedHat died the day up2date stopped working for free. Welcome to CentOS 3 and now CentOS, with up2date replaced by yum (which is arguably better). I've found CentOS to be every bit as good as the real RHEL. Please do what you can to support CentOS, as this is what RedHat was for all of us since what, Version 3.x?

My fondest memories of Linux distributions include: RedHat 6.2, the longest supported Linux, which I used past its deprecation, and Cobalt Linux. What could be better than a Linux that feels like it gets the same support level of Solaris.

Microsoft has messed up in a similar way with Windows 2000. Why no SP5? Why no SP7 for Windows NT 4.0? Why not have an SP every 3-4 months? This is very difficult to deal with general, particularly with software one has to pay for.

Ideally, everyone would do what Sun does with Solaris, and what CentOS (RHEL) does. Release a new update every 3-4 months, and have ongoing patching in between. Sun knocks it up a notch and separates the nice to have patches from the critical ones in the Recommended cluster.

Back to Fedora. RedHat jumped that shark at RedHat 8. I was done with RedHat at version 8. Luckily, CentOS 3 and now 4 (which us running great, SELinux and all) provides us with a way to get a Linux with a 5 year lifetime without changing our applications so that they compile on glibc-threads-of-doom-version-99.09099999-alpha-b6 -beta-theta-gamma-ppr6_pre1_rc5.

Right now there seems to be one thing missing from LinuxLand, and that's a more complete IPCop. I want IPCop based on 2.6 and a fully working IPSec/L2TP --and-- PPTPd that works with Windows 2000 and Windows XP/2003 clients without any modifications whatsoever. RedHat should craft up someone to heavily OpenWall/SmoothWall/Astaro/IPCop/OpenBSD/Checkpoin t-Nokia/PIX/etc. Beating a PIX should be real easy.

Back to RedHat miffing things up and leaving itself vulnerable to Novell taking over the leadership role of Linux leader. I've found that using Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and non-RedHat Linux like CentOS is pretty much the preferred MO these days. One thing that RedHat needs besides a firewall killer application, is a total drop in Exchange killer like Scalix.

One thing I have to pay homage to Solaris - I really like providing NFS with Solaris. I always set and forget Solaris, its a pain in the arcane butt with a fairly austere userland, but once its configured it runs like a champion. Im curious to see if RHEL 4 / CentOS 4 can provide NFS v4 services but I'm skeptical about it and will probably just use them as clients and leave the job of shoveling out NFS to client to the guys who invented it.

Re:Fedora

[LnxAddct]

What are you talking about? Up2date is completely free, and Fedora is an excellent distro with all the same engineers behind it that built the world reknowned previous versions of the Red Hat desktop. Don't let the fud on slashdot let you think otherwise, its the only distro out of about 7 that I've tried that works on my laptop. Everything is super easy to use, set up, and configure. Its one of those distros that retains the power of linux, but everything just works. I'm very impressed with it, so much so that it has been phasing out my debian servers. I actually currently only have one debian server left, more so for its uptime then anything else :)
Regards,
Steve

Re:Sexist!

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, but Fedoras typically aren't worn by women.

Really?

[eno2001]

I hadn't noticed anything other than BETTER quality from the Fedora project compared to previous RedHat offerings. I am using a mix of RedHat 9 and Fedora Core 3 at home and at work and from where I stand FC3 is a HUGE jump past RH9. The hardware support is better, the apps are even better integrated than before and the functionality overall is extermely impressive. Examples:

1. The changes to Nautilus have made file management and access much easier with many conveniences like thumbnails, media previews, photo gallery views, etc... 2. The integration of remote mounts (SMB [ie. Windows file shares], FTP, SSH) is spectacular
3. USB device support is nearly flawless. I plugged in my brand new Epson Stylus R300 and just started printing. I plugged in a USB flash drive and it mounted and placed an icon on the desktop. I plugged in my Sony Mavica CD digital camera and it asked me about importing images into a gallery. The gallery also displayed all the inluded EXIF information. Just beautiful.
4. GIMP 2.0 takes some getting used to, but it looks promising (Just for the record I love GIMP 1.x)
5. LVM2 with kernel support at boot so that you no longer have to deal with the archaic notion of partitions
6. And of course... much improved performance on the same hardware. I have been using the same P4 at work for the past three years. RH9 was OK on it but admittedly a little slow with the default packages. I recompiled nearly everything and got performance more in line with Windows XP on the same box. But... with FC3, the same box didn't need any of the custom compiles and tweaks the RH9 did to get even better performance

Overall, I'd say Fedora has been a rousing success. I RedHat says they plan to put more effort into it, this can only mean greater things.

Re:Questions for Red Hat customers...

[jarich]

I started using Knoppix and realized how many of the little Linux annoyances were just RH. I've been a fan of RH since the beginning (they are local and I know many of them).

With Knoppix, my wireless cards were supported a year before RH. Everything the laptop (including power functions) worked out of the box with Knoppix. RH required a kernel recompile and extra utils and hours of putzing with config files.

And burning CDs and DVDs. Again, out of the box with Knoppix but RH never liked one of my burners. Same with digital cameras. All the home "consumer items" that RH (the business OS) doesn't care about run great under Knoppix.

Also, I don't ~care~ why RH doesn't think MP3s are "free enough". I really REALLY don't care. I have a lot of MP3s and I want to be able to play them out of the box. With Knoppix, I can. With RH (like Windows), I have extra steps.

Now, at work, when people ask what Linux to try, I point them to Knoppix instead of RH.

Re: No supported upgrade path...

[LnxAddct]

You might want to check this [brandonhutchinson.com] out. It's not half as complicated as it seems and has always worked for me.
Regards,
steve

Redhat lost community goodwill

[oob]

Don't forget that Redhat's CEO Matthew Szulik Also recommended that desktop users use Windows instead of Linux [silicon.com] around the time that they dropped their desktop distributions in order to focus on enterprise Linux.

Redhat lost a fair amount of goodwill from the community with that decision and that announcement, as long term paying (and non-paying) customers were left high and dry without an upgrade path and with the clock ticking on support.

From the commercial perspective it was also a miscalcuation on Redhat's part. Leaving the desktop Linux space left the field open for their competitors, Novell's Suse notably benefitted, as did other commercial distributions that ex-Redhat users migrated to.

Redhat's realisation of their mistake is the reason the Fedora project exists. That they were quite willing to drop their long term customer and community base when they thought we were no longer an asset should be noted by those chosing to use their products.

Re:Redhat Fedora Rant

[Anonymous Coward]

if installing over RHEL 3 is problematic It is because of SElinux. Relabling a filesystem needs to be done. doing a 'fixfiles -relable' is easy when the filesystem is aware of selinux, if it doesn't know about it than bad things could happen. This complaining should be short lived concidering the reason why you're inconvienced. SElinux aware system is worth it if you think about it. It could prevent downtime to a compromise.

Re:Questions for Red Hat customers...

[SunFan]

I looks to me like every Fedora release is a dot-zero release. That didn't appeal to me. Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but Fedora seems more like Red Hat's test bed than a production platform.

Is the basic problem with Fedora is that Red Hat is trying the classic free/value-add approach but missing the reasons why that approach often works? In their case, it seems the free version is inferior in ways beyond just features or support--it is less stable and mature, too.

In other free/value-add approaches, the free and value-added versions are basically identical but differ in added features, like OpenOffice.org/StarOffice, or differ in paid support options with no software differences. This can be subtle, but where Red Hat is failing is trying to make stability a value-added aspect. That just doesn't work in the OSS world.

Re:What is vibrant about it?

[snickell]

I agree the name change was a fuckup. I can tell you what we were thinking though, if its any consolation:

1) We wanted to highlight in big flashing lights what we saw as a very positive improvement to the distro: it was becoming more open to the community. Its been terribly slow going, and we're not like Debian yet, but we're definitely moving in that direction with Fedora.

2) The name "Red Hat" was in the name "Red Hat Linux". You have to defend trademarks to keep them, but clearly a project like Fedora needs to be mungeable, changeable, etc without needing to change the name (or us having to chase after people using the trademark w/o permission).

3) RHEL was very similar in name and the marketing people won (partly because of 2, it seemed reasonable anyway) in which name got changed. Sadly the same group are doing the website, and we in engineering aren't so agressive about marketing our stuff. We should have been saying "Fedora IS RHL" and "We spend lots and lots of time working on Fedora" loudly and frequently until people got the message, but we wrote code instead. *grin* It just didn't seem like a big deal at the time. Live and learn, eh?

In any case, as I've posted over and over on this thread ad nauseum, most RH engineers do most of their daily work in the Fedora context.

-Seth

Re:VIbrant Fedora?

[Clownfush]

Millinery. Hat making.

Re:What is vibrant about it?

[Donny Smith]

>How do I know if I upgraded to a new Redhat version, their management won't turn around and say oh you wasted your time with that install!?

It's easy - use CentOS; if you don't like it, restore your backup.

0. Backup your OS and data
1. Uninstall redhat-release RPM
2. Install CentOS 3.4 (latest) yum and centos-release RPM
3. Import CentOS GPG key (see URL below)
4. Run "yum -y upgrade; reboot"

For a detailed explanation of RH9 to CentOS 3.1 upgrade and a more methodical approach suitable for production OS see:
http://www.owlriver.com/tips/centos-31-ex-rh l-9/
If you get in any kind of trouble, post your errors to CentOS.org discussion forums.

Re:What is vibrant about it?

[siplus]

"For all they're worth, at least Microsoft wrote almost all of windows." HAH... microsoft wrote their software! i haven't seen a joke that good on /. in awhile.... There is nothing wrong with Redhat. Do you think Mandrake is selling software they didn't write? of course they are! do you think novell is selling software they didn't write? ya... what about linspire? there are tons of comerical linux distros. I see nothing wrong with that. obviously you do. If you don't like it, don't use it. RHEL and Fedora are still good linux distros. I have been 'distro hopping' for quite awhile now, and I was content with fedora (although i like the way ubuntu is heading)

Re:Non-starter

[ubernostrum]

With SuSE I can download or buy a set of CD's and install as many times as I want.

And you can do the same with Red Hat's enterprise offerings, since they're distributing a bunch of GPL applications and it's illegal to restrict that. What you pay for on RH is support.