Fedora Core and Fedora Extras To Merge

Kelson writes to tell us about a Fedora Weekly News article reporting that, beginning with Fedora 7, the distinction between Core and Extras will cease to exist. This development comes out of the Fedora summit held in November. From the article: "Starting with Fedora 7, there is no more Core, and no more Extras; there is only Fedora. One single repository, built in the community on open source tools, assembled into whatever spins the Fedora community desires." Kelson adds: "The post goes on to list three 'spins' they plan to introduce at Fedora 7's April release: server, desktop and KDE. Presumably these would be 1-disc installation sets, with further packages downloaded over the network, rather than the 5-CD collection needed to install Fedora 6."

Re:It would be nice

[Kalriath]

The "From the one-hat-to-bind-them dept" probably wont help with that cause.

As long as I can still upgrade with yum....

[DigitalReverend]

I won't have a problem with this. In fact, I think it's about time as a lot of things that were called Extras were actually needed items so this will be a good thing. The once CD idea rocks too.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[radarsat1]

I've been following the development, and while the server install MAY be one cd, I haven't seen anything to suggest that such an artificial restriction would be set. If anything it may be a specific minimal spin.

Why is it that distros are still so predominantly media-based anyways?
Every single time I've installed Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, or Gentoo in the past.. oh.. 4 years or so, I've done it using a network-based method.
It seems to me like it's much more efficient to just download the packages you need instead of downloading GB's worth of apps only to actually install and use a portion of them.

When I _have_ installed from CD, I tend to go and do an update to the latest packages immediately, and end up re-downloading new copies of most of the packages anyways, making it even more of a waste of bandwidth.

Why do distros still concentrate so much on CD and DVD releases, instead of just promoting the network-based install methods?

And when will we see a distro that incorporates bittorrent into its packaging download system? ;-)
(Slightly joking on that last one.. I've no idea if it would be appropriate, not to mention trust-worthy. But it is an interesting idea for distros that can't afford nice servers and don't have tons of mirrors.)

Re:It would be nice

[syousef]

So if a distro doesn't support for example hardware properly, that's the now the end user's fault?

If it's worked for you and not for someone else who thought they had the proper hardware after the appropriate amount of research that's good luck NOT good management. ...and you wonder why people won't jump ship to Linux.

Re:Who said anything about one CD?

[Burdell]

I recently downloaded a DVD image of SuSE and mailed to a friend stationed in Iraq. Another friend is only able to get dialup at his home (he could probably get satellite, but they have download caps).

High speed Internet is NOT widespread enough to require everything be done over the network. Even when it is, it is often more convenient to have media in-hand; I have more bandwidth at work (OC3+DS3s) than at home (DSL), so it sometimes still makes sense to burn things at work (or at least download to a notebook) and carry them home.

Networks are still slow: 3Mbps DSL is about the same speed as a 2x CD-ROM drive.

Re:It would be nice

[NerveGas]

I'd believe your comment if I hadn't thrown Fedora on every type of hardware from single-CPU/IDE machines to 4x/8x machines with high-end SCSI arrays and fiber networking, Intel and AMD architectures. Apart from sound and video, there's not a lot of hardware I haven't run it on. Other than one particular issue with a RAID card, it's done a good job of setting up hardware. It's not like it's hard for a distro to add a line to modprobe.conf telling it which driver to load....

If anything, the problems you encounter are, in my experience, more likely to be problems with the Linux drivers themselves than with Fedora, although there may be a handful of cases to the contrary.

steve

One disc installation sets

[vga_init]

You mean like Ubuntu? It looks like Fedora is taking some tips from the "other" distro.

Personally, that was one of the things I liked about Fedora--I could download the incredibly large DVD that contained everything and the kitchen sink. Download packages over the network? Pff... I used to sit there and remove/insert CD after CD of the latest linux systems. I remember I had SuSE professional that came with 7 discs. When I finally got a DVD burner, it turns out I didn't need it anymore... distros magically fit on a single CD all of the sudden. >:o

Re:How about a USEFUL spin?

[essdodson]

There's a difference between what's right and what's easy. People need to be aware of the implications of software patents and this is one way of driving that message home.

Limited patch support for Red Hat series

[johnwbyrd]

If an operating system release is not supported with security patches in the long term, it may not be a good long-term choice for production machines. The folks maintaining http://www.fedoralegacy.org/ [fedoralegacy.org] recently announced that they were punting on maintaining everything before Core 4. Ask yourself: in 1.5 years, do I really want to be forced to install a new OS because I can't get security patches on this one? Compare against Ubuntu LTS, which will be around for at least 3-5 more years.