Fedora Project Turns 10 83
darthcamaro writes "It was ten years ago this past Sunday September 22nd, that the Red Hat sponsored Fedora project was born. The first Fedora release didn't come until six weeks later in November of 2003. Over the last 10 years the project has transformed itself from being entirely controlled by Red Hat to being a true community effort. In a video interview, the current Fedora Project Leader, Robyn Bergeron talks about the past and the future of Fedora. 'We need to think about how we're actually making the sausage,' Bergeron said. 'I think we can try and abstract and automate the things we have to do a lot, so our really awesome people's brains can be applied to solving problems that aren't yet automate-able.'"
Not controlled by Red Hat? (Score:4, Insightful)
The summary implies Fedora is not under the control of Red Hat. However, since almost all the key people at the Fedora project are employees of Red Hat, I find it hard to believe Red Hat isn't running the show.
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You wouldn't be wrong (mostly).
While it's true that a lot of the development work targeted to a specific Fedora release (just look at their Feature Lists in the planning part of the wiki) is led by Red Hat employees it's also true that anyone can propose and work on any feature they want.
It's no coincidence that a lot of the features listed in each release in the past 2-4 years can be tied back to general enterprise features, after all Virtualization is one of Red Hat's main public focuses at the moment. Th
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we're not talking about red hat linux, we're talking about fedora. see, that's the problem. red hat gave all of us who introduced linux into the enterprise the finger and said we couldn't use red hat at home or on a trial machine at work. they locked down their update repository to only paid subscribed machines, quite unlike the other leading distros and not in the spirit of open source. After all, money should be made on *support*, not access to code. then, to add insult to injury, red hat made fedora
Re:Not controlled by Red Hat? (Score:5, Insightful)
so people like me, who administer hundreds of servers, dumped red hat. I've actively been phasing out redhat on hundreds of servers in favor of two other distributions at my employer who has over a million users. At my last employer, I lead the same effort, with clients who have billion dollar plus IT budgets.
Seems to me those are the types of companies with the types of budgets that can both pay for RedHat's subscriptions, and benefit from them.
And it should be mutual... as I understand it, Red Hat *Enterprise* Linux is geared toward just that target market. As handsomely paid as I'm sure you are, I'm not sure why I'm picking up a tone of sour grapes in your post. Also, if you want RHEL for free, there is CentOS... which is still based on work done by the evil Red Hat Corporation.
And really, it's not that much different than the business model of other Linux companies. SuSE doesn't give you their enterprise stuff for free, nor does Ubuntu. None of it bothers me. As far as I'm concerned, Linux has always been free for nerds... and someday, when my company has a billion-dollar budget to upgrade our cloud, we'll no doubt be writing checks, happily, to RedHat.
Re:Not controlled by Red Hat? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I felt the same way ten years ago. I've come to accept the state of affairs. Fedora isn't bad at all for a workstation, and in fact, much more useful than RHEL Desktop, due to the newer packages available.
Out of curiosity, what are you switching all of those servers to?
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Rebuttal: RHEL derived Linuxes such as CentOS and Scientific Linux are actually able to maintain binary compatibility with RHEL They have access to the same source as the paying customers, they just don't get the updates quite as fast because of the delay between Read Hat publishing the patch and the third-party package maintainers compiling and uploading said patch to their respective repositories.
Fedora has always billed itself a test-bed for new, potentially unstable technologies. You don't want potentia
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rebuttal, Red Hat obsfuscates the build process so users of Centos and Scientific Linux are at risk. Red hat, just say no.
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That's one of the reasons Linux used to be perceived as business hostile - people who are in no way contributing to Red Hat's top nor bottom line making demands of what Red Hat should do. Red Hat deserves credit for figuring out how to make a profitable business out of Linux, and send the freeloaders elsewhere. I'm not sure what purpose Fedora really serves - Red Hat could just as easily have partnered w/ Debian for its development inputs, and embraced competing technologies, such as apt.
One thing t
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So what if it's controlled by Redhat? That's a good thing! Hell of a lot better than distros ruled by some egomaniac dickhead or circlekjerk committee of autistic freaks.
There was a time when geeks actually liked stuff that worked well but around here with all the hate I see spewing for Apple and Redhat (the two biggest UNIX vendors) it seems like geeks have become so afflicted with oppositional defiance disorder that they put scoring cheap points against some "man" ahead of the most advanced technology. Gr
You mean it gets worse? (Score:2)
So what if it's controlled by Redhat? That's a good thing! Hell of a lot better than distros ruled by some egomaniac dickhead or circlekjerk committee of autistic freaks.
You mean there are distros where the rulers are bigger jerks than the ones running Fedora? God forbid.
Recently I had some spare time to devote to open-source programming (*cough* unemployed *cough*), and part of it involved submitting several packages to Fedora. One guy went ape shit on me and accused me of "spamming the review queue". I've learned to expect apathy from the maintainers of open-source projects, but outright hostility?! Holy crap. Then I had another run-in with another jerk who couldn't
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I haven't seen any behavior like that in Debian or Ubuntu, and suspect that PP is referring to the product rather than the means.
I expect that when PP refers to "egomaniac" he has Shuttleworth's comments about Canonical-developed software vs. other software (mostly RedHat, by chance) in mind.
As far as getting along with the maintainers goes, Ubuntu's certainly not bad.
But he doesn't agree with the decisions they make, so he thinks they suck.
[flamebait]
Frankly, I think that unity and gnome-shell are both mis
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One guy went ape shit on me and accused me of "spamming the review queue". I've learned to expect apathy from the maintainers of open-source projects, but outright hostility?!
It's not the first time I hear this story. The hostility of OSS people seems to be a recurring thing. I think it might already be time to find out why this phenomenon happens and whether the situation could be improved somehow.
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The summary implies Fedora is not under the control of Red Hat. However, since almost all the key people at the Fedora project are employees of Red Hat, I find it hard to believe Red Hat isn't running the show.
Fedora is not controlled by Red Hat, but Red Hat is a large contributor to Fedora and thus has a large de facto control over Fedora.
Fedora community effort (Score:5, Funny)
I commend the Fedora project for sustaining and growing the popularity... of Arch Linux, Linux Mint, and Debian. Good community spirit, people!
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I've been running Fedora 19 for a few weeks now and it just doesn't feel as smooth as PClinux OS did on this machine. It has been stable but then it's been years since I've had a linux distro that wasn't stable. It's not that it's bad, it just isn't as good as some other distros I've tried. I know one thing, the recent trend in linux desktops I do not like. I think Ubuntu right before they dived into unity had about the best desktop of ANY operating system. Then they proceeded to fuck it up. The fedor
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Yea- I agree. I can't imagine touching Fedora, CentOS, or RHEL. I congratulate Redhat on there contributions and will stop there. When Debian came into being they fixed the RPM problem. When Linspire came into being they fixed the ease of use problem, when Ubuntu became popular they fixed the integration and support issues, and now we are left with a fairly stable although tad buggy set of distribution derived from Ubuntu with bad to acceptable set of desktops. If I could combine what we have today KDE 3.x
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Konq can use webkit, or it can continue to use KHTML. Its a config option. I'm not sure what the default is.
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I know one thing, the recent trend in linux desktops I do not like. I think Ubuntu right before they dived into unity had about the best desktop of ANY operating system. Then they proceeded to fuck it up. The fedora desktop makes unity look.....slightly less shitty.
I agree with all of that.
[lawn mode] I remember using fvwm and Nextstep back in the early oughts... Those were the days, when there was so much promise, so much potential in desktop environments. It was all in front of us, still to do. And the people seemed so talented...
It all went wrong in 2010, it seemed. Probably earlier, in reality.
[lawn mode off]
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I started out with Gnome when i first discovered Linux in 1997. In my first job in 2000, my time was split between KDE, which i used at work, and Gnome, which i used at home. Soon after i switched to Fluxbox and never looked at anything else.
It's a shame what's happened to the Linux desktop. All that potential slowly going to waste, what with the "let's clone the windoze UI" and big egos and community squabbles and no sense of direction.
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I commend the Fedora project for sustaining and growing the popularity... of Arch Linux, Linux Mint, and Debian. Good community spirit, people!
I second that. I started using linux on PPC (Suse on a PowerMac G4) back in 2000. Then used RedHat at work, started using Fedora at home. Dependency hell was a nightmare, especially the upgrades from Fedora 1 to 2 then 3 !!!! Everything including X and drivers had to be reconfigured all over again. Switched to Debian just after Fedora 3, then to Ubuntu around 2007. Still use Ubuntu server every day.
I had to use RedHat at work in recent years and every time it is dependency hell all over again. Even with pai
Ah, Fedora (Score:3)
But, once again, I had an installation that failed to boot after an update last week. It's just too bleeding-edge for my tastes, and it has a tendency to have rough edges. Back on Mint (KDE), which lets me leech off of Ubuntu's repos without feeling dirty.
Still, glad it's around, and I'll inevitably try it again in the future.
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Ah, actually I just remembered I DID have a failed boot, last week too. That
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I was also disto-hopping quite a bit to find out which KDE's installation worked best out-of-the-box (Gnome 3 devs finally pissed me off enough to give up despite my positive feelings toward the overall environment, and Cinnamon just doesn't do it for me quite yet). Fedora's KDE environment was actually quite nice -- it handles docking/undocking my laptop with a second monitor best, and it provided
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That, right there, is my biggest beef with Fedora -- they push out kernel updates in the repos without waiting for nvidia modules to match. Of course, akmod solves that problem, but it's definitely one bugaboo of having to get drivers from rpmfusion instead of them being a part of the main repo. They were doing better for a while, but recently, the problem is back. What was it, over a week, the nvidia module was behind? All it would take is a little communication and coordination, I should think.
Fedora
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You have a lot of moving parts to keep in sync to keep binary blob video drivers working in fedora, kernel updates, xorg updates and the drivers themselves. I don't see why a distro should reward a binary driver company for their bad behavior and punish firms like intel ( and amd which occasionally does some work on the open source driver) that publish source. As a user of the source drivers, I'd rather not have them coordinate anything. If nvidia wants to keep up, they should all fedora development is in t
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Building nVidia drivers for Fedora Core (Score:2)
I DID have a failed boot, last week too. That was when fedora upgraded to 3.11... basically, the nvidia driver is incompatible at the moment.
Yeah, the nVidia drivers don't always make a timely appearance in RPMFusion, do they.
Not to worry. Boot into the version of the kernel without an nVidia driver, download the source to buildsys-build-rpmfusion (i.e. "yumdownloader --source buildsys-build-rpmfusion"), install it, edit SOURCES/buildsys-build-rpmfusion-kerneldevpkgs-current so that they match the version of the kernel you're building for, then build and install/upgrade buildsys-build-rpmfusion and buildsys-build-rpmfusion-kerneldevpkgs-curren
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Yikes! If it were that complex, I'd have dropped Fedora already. It's a bit simpler than that, luckily...
yum install akmod-nvidia
As long as you have kernel-devel, akmod will build your driver when you boot your new kernel.
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Sigh...I long for a geekier time, when those instructions wouldn't have been considered complex.
Still...thanks for the heads-up on akmod-nvidia (or, for me, akmod-nvidia-304xx). Worked like a charm!
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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I remember Red Hat Linux (v5-v7; bad v8!) before Fedora! I think I ran them on original Pentium 1s and AMD XP Athons.
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8 Comments (Score:3)
Great job slashdot! 10 years for a significant linux distro and even if it isn't your choice, it is historically significant in that regard. These comment threads are riveting!
May be we should have inserted some bit about the government or liberals or guns into this article to get some clicks.
I for one, congradulate them and wish them the best.
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Anonymous congratulations, the best kind. Almost as good as anonymous insults.
Already congratulated them. Good esprit de corps, pity about the project guidance, software, and documentation.
Tried Fedora back when it was still Red Hat, community edition or some such. The installer was good. That was the high point, though. Persevered about two months, and then went back to FreeBSD for a while. I read reviews from time to time, and comments here, check out the web site... and see no reason to try Fedora again.
Fedora's out-of-fashion problem (Score:1)
Fedora. Installed it once -- not for myself. Supposed to be rock solid.
Maybe so, but the corrollary was -- a bit of stifness, old hat (pun
intended), -- in short: not very HIP, COOL, SIZZLING.
If Fedora could get that, a bit of grease and pizzazz, I would try it
(albeit on a VM first).
Anyways -- as it is: sincere congratulations!
Re:Fedora's out-of-fashion problem (Score:4, Informative)
Doesn't sound like you know what you're talking about, bro. Fedora has the most bleeding edge shit of any distro but of course at the expense of stability and compatibility...maybe you installed Debian by accident or something.
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Or, if you are coming form arch, I could see it being a bit old.
Fedora + PlanetCCRMA = audio production OS (Score:5, Interesting)
This has been one area where Fedora has consistently stood out among its peers. For a short time, Ubuntu Studio was almost the perfect fit for this niche, but the complete incorporation of an early, incomplete, and buggy PulseAudio killed that chance.
I think that dates to around Fedora 7 or 8. Since then, I have yet to come across a cleaner & more efficient combination for Linux based multitrack audio production.
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Lots of trolling here in this thread (Score:3)
User since '97 (Score:5, Insightful)
My first Linux distro was Slackware, and it was damn educational. I had to do a lot of stuff on my own. A little less than a year later, I tried Red Hat Linux (4.2) and never turned back.
I tried Debian a few times early on, and the system would always break when I applied updates. Break, as in, it would either no longer boot or I could no longer log in.
Debian was what I wanted in a distribution: committed to Free Software. Red Hat angered a lot of users when it split off Fedora, but I never understood that. Fedora was the distribution that I wanted Red Hat to be. Free Software and community driven. Since apt and yum came into the picture, Red Hat's distribution has been the best of the bunch. The company maintains their commitment to Free Software, releasing the code to acquisition after acquisition, and leads all others in developing GNU/Linux.
Thank you Red Hat. There are too many negative comments here. I love Fedora.
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Fedora overheats my laptops and gets other hardware issues wrong besides. I wish Qubes weren't based on it, but the project leaders would rather have jobs/contracts with RedHat than Canonical.
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Your recollection is off. PAM was in the distribution at least as early as version 4, and has never checked complexity at login. The old cracklib module that was used to check complexity doesn't even offer that service.
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OK, so there were two things I wanted Red Hat to have that Debian did, back then: more community involvement and apt.
Apt came along eventually, and then was replaced by yum.
At the same time, there were a lot of things that I liked better about RPM. RPM packages were PGP signed long before debs. As far as I could tell from the documentation, debs were either all or mostly built by hand where RPM packages were built using a script included in the src.rpm. Last, Debian used to have mirrors for everything ex
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Yes. Fedora has the policy that the firmware it includes does not have to be free software, it only has to be freely redistributed without restrictions.
Fedora rulzz (Score:1)
Love it (Score:2)
redhat are commies! (Score:1)