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Red Hat Software Businesses Software Linux

Fedora Core 4 Available 550

Posted by Hemos from the here-comes-the-flood-again dept.
Limburgher writes "As of a few minutes ago, the torrents listed at duke went live. Nothing on the main site yet, however. The more people get on the torrents, the faster they will be. You all know the drill." Update: 06/13 19:07 GMT by T : Also in Red Hat-related news, halfbyte_hosting writes "CentOS 4.1 is now on the mirrors and ready for download."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Fedora Core 4 Available More

Fedora Core 4 Available

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  • Fedora Core 4 is great... (Score:5, Informative)

    by coop0030 ( 263345 ) * on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:12AM (#12803355) Homepage
    I actually just did a new dual-boot install of Fedora Core 4, and Windows XP, and found Fedora Core 4 (the beta is the one I installed this past weekend) about 10 times easier to install than Windows XP. It was incredibly easier to configure after the installation, also.

    Here is that commentary about my process (I am a first-time user of Linux):
    http://www.mygadgetbag.com/MGBCommentary/tabid/183 /ctl/ArticleView/mid/575/articleId/319/Dualbooting WindowsXPandLinux.aspx [mygadgetbag.com]

    Also, for anyone wondering, here is a link to the newest updates that are in Fedora Core 4:
    http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc4/#s n-new-in-fc [redhat.com]

    I am very happy with Fedora Core 4 (beta) after using it for a few days. The only thing I am having trouble with is connecting to the Yum repositories, as described on the Fedora FAQ.

    The main Fedora site is updated now, also!

    • Re:Fedora Core 4 is great... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yes,
      But Windows XP came out (I think) before all of the nForce2 malarky. This gives it a large dis-advantage. Until recently, I would always have a nightmare trying to install debian on to an nForce2 board. I would need to install a separate network card to start it working. I still use the nvidia graphics driver.

      You may correctly claim that this is one advantage that linux distro's have over windows due to the regular(ish) updates. But most hardware ships with windows drivers. The same cannot be said for

    • Re:Fedora Core 4 is great... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:23AM (#12803472) Homepage
      I've been very pleased with Fedora 4t2, which I've been running for a while, with apt4rpm instead of yum as my package acquisition method. My only real complaint is that when they say that you can use reiserfs but they don't support it, they mean that "it doesn't work".

      I figured out some tricks to make it work, though: boot with commandline "linux reiserfs selinux=0". That'll stop the installation of the init package from failing like it would if you left of the selinux=0 line (and no, disabling selinux during the install setup doesn't work). Then, after boot, you'll get a grub error. Boot instead with a boot disk. Copy your kernel image (not move - you need it to be rewritten), delete the original copy, and then copy it back. Your system should be bootable. At least, this all worked for me. :)
    • You have GOT to be kidding me.

      10 times easier than windows XP?

      I think Windows XP installer asks for a grand total for 3 inputs. Computer Name, User Name, and Time Zone.

      You bitch about having to download SP2, yet you're installing the most recent version of an operating system (Fedora core 4) against an old version of XP (XP sans SP2, yes you can buy xp with sp2 included). If you installed Fedora Core 3 and wanted to update it to the newest version, you'd have a butload of updating to do also.

      If you're

      • Re:Fedora Core 4 is great... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:29AM (#12803534)
        >>10 times easier than windows XP?
        >>I think Windows XP installer asks for a grand total for 3 inputs. Computer Name, User Name, and Time Zone.

        No, really. Fedora only asks for three-tenths of a prompt for input.
      • Yeah, I'll admit also, M$ makes some really simple installers, but there is one point to consider:

        The extra minutes you spend setting up before your first login can help ease the amount of mucking around later to change prefs.

      • Re:Fedora Core 4 is great... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:33AM (#12803566)
        You conveniently forget that installing Windows does just that, install Windows.

        No apps, no security updates, a lot of drivers missing, etc.

        Now compare that with the install of a modern Linux distro. See the difference?

        • Re:Fedora Core 4 is great... (Score:5, Informative)

          by EvilStein ( 414640 ) <spam@BALDWINpbp.net minus author> on Monday June 13, 2005 @12:06PM (#12803845)
          Yeah, I installed Windows and I got support for my RAID card.

          Tried installing Fedora Core 3 and got absolutely nothing, because apparantly the drivers for the very common MegaRAID Enterprise 1500 card were yanked.
          I'm lucky that I wasn't one of the many people that did a kernel upgrade from RHN/RPM repositories to find out that the box would't boot after a reboot.. :(

          Point is, hardware issues affect any operating system. Fedora isn't a magical OS that just works on everything. :)
        • No kidding. It is so annoying to install Windows fresh and then have to hunt around for all those little apps and drivers that you take for granted on a standard Linux (or even OS X) installation. It is kind of ironic.

          -matthew

      • Re:Fedora Core 4 is great... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:36AM (#12803591)
        Well unless you consider SATA to be specialized hardware, Fedora handles it with no problem...with XP you need a driver disk for the SATA controller to even start the install. This was even using a disc slipstreamed with SP2.
        • More to the point, the Windows installer can't cope with the idea that you may want to install more than Windows. It took me a while to figure out that even if you were installing Windows to a totally different hard disk, the setup program would give an ambiguous error and refuse to proceed if it saw Linux on a different hard disk.

          The solution? Unplug the hard disks power supply, and Windows setup is now happy. I'll take a non-broken installer with a few more clicks (none of which are hard) over that any

      • You have to be kidding ME!

        How many people do you know that have access to a new version of Windows XP that have to do a re-install of their software? I am talking about people that have owned their computers for a while.

        If I want to reinstall Windows I can NOT just go download the latest distro of Windows XP like I can Linux (for free to boot)!

        I was using DHCP, I have a very basic setup, with a standard motherboard (nforce, how more common can that get?) and a direct connection from a cable modem?

        Now c

      • Re:Fedora Core 4 is great... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        10 times easier than windows XP? I think Windows XP installer asks for a grand total for 3 inputs. Computer Name, User Name, and Time Zone.

        Sure it does. After two reboots and, as usual with windows, it spreads the questioning half way through the install, meaning that unattended installing is a nightmare. Oh, and if you need to change keyboard/language it's a few more questions than that

        It might not actually be ten times as difficult to install, MS only manged to make it feel ten times as bloody tedi

      • You are forgetting that after installing WinXP you will still have to install a lot of drivers, of which many are difficult to find (many computer producers put drivers in the computer when they are selling it, but after that it is difficult to find them in the internet). And let's not forget that installing WinXP is a mess if you hae a Serial ATA or SCSI hard-disk...

      • Re:Fedora Core 4 is great... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by naelurec ( 552384 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:50AM (#12803717) Homepage
        You have GOT to be kidding me.
        10 times easier than windows XP?

        Sure.. why not? After you install Windows you get umm.. Windows. After a Windows install (even from an SP2 disk) I generally have to go search around for device drivers and install them, do the Windows update, install software (Office suite, good instant messenger, graphics program, good CD burner app, etc..) and during hte process, hunt down a handful of real long alphanumeric strings that I get to enter to apparently show that I am worthy.

        Now Fedora lets see .. install Fedora. Generally hardware detection is much better and my hardware is detected and configured properly (granted this could be due to the fact it is newer, but alias, Microsoft doesn't offer updated ISOs of WinXP for me to download.. so I think its fair .. latest release to latest release). Oh yah, it comes with the apps I need to use ... so perhaps the quick step of updating *ALL* the software on my system to make sure its the latest versions (versus just Windows via Windows update and manually downloading for the rest..) I am pretty much done after installing Fedora.

        I think the distros for quite a while have beat Windows for going from 0 to productive. I can do a full Linux install in well under an hour -- I'm lucky to get Windows installed in an hour before thinking about installing the apps that Linux comes with.

        I think Windows XP installer asks for a grand total for 3 inputs. Computer Name, User Name, and Time Zone.

        Try installing again and let me know how many prompts it takes until you get a useful system where you can get work done.

      • Yes, the installer is easier than Windows XP. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Nailer ( 69468 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:58AM (#12803781)
        That's insightful? Moderators, and the poster above: have you ever done a full install of Windows XP and Fedora?

        Could you explain to me how Windows XP could possibly be easier?

        1. The Windows installer starts as a 32 bit command line application for partitioning, EULA, loading driver disks, with a reboot into a GUI once a base install happens. It uses F8 and F5 to do things. Fedora uses 'next'. Windows is getting a full GUI installer in Longhorn when WinPE comes out. It doesn't have one now.

        2. The Windows XP installer asks for many more than 3 inputs. You forgot partitioning, EULA agreement, that disk thing I mentioned above, and a bunch of other stuff. The things you did mention are weird - eg, I select my time zone by scrolling through a drop down list box of time zones sorted by GMT offset. Not even geography. Not even FC4 'click where you are on this map'.

        3. The defaults are a lot less secure too - non non admin user, Run As doesn't work for all programs, the firewall lets in ports where known worms live by default (see the Register analysis of SP2 for a complete list). Obviously, there's no MAC implementation enabled by default either (SELinux). And most network services still run as SYSTEM. So post-install you're either gonna have to lock it down, or fix up the mess.

    • Just a note, a glance shows you have a dual boot for WoW. WoW runs flawlessly under Point2Play http://www.transgaming.com/ [transgaming.com]

      Be sure to read the forums. The game will run fine using DirectX emulation, but OpenGL mode is much faster. Using OpenGL mode I get faster framerates than I do on a XP pro system using the same settings and hardware. YMMV.

  • I beat the Slashdot effect (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nighttime ( 231023 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:13AM (#12803368) Homepage Journal
    Managed to snarf a copy over the weekend from an unsecured official mirror. Four CDs, each about 630MB.

    Installed it onto my ThinkPad T23, 733MHz/1.13GHz with 512MB RAM. Familiar graphical installation procedure, auto-detected everything in my laptop. Didn't expect it not to, as previous Fedora Core releases did so. When setting up the soundcard though, couldn't hear the test sounds but booting into KDE produced the familiar jingle. SELinux option during installation is Enabled or Disabled, no halfway house as in FC3. Compiling with GCC4.0 has made a noticeable speed difference, especially in KDE 3.4. Start-up time seemed quicker as well.

    As always, read the release notes. They have taken the decision to move some stuff off into the Fedora Extras project. XMMS was the main one I noticed. And yes, this being Red Hat-influenced, there is no support for MP3 or DVD playback straight off the installation discs.

    If you have a Matrox-based card that requires you to use the Matrox-sourced mga_hal module, you're not going to have much luck configuring X until they release a new version for X.org 6.8.2. I get lovely vertical bars every 1cm on my TFTs using a G550 DVI.

    • SELinux option during installation is Enabled or Disabled, no halfway house as in FC3.

      You have the choice of running SELinux under either the targeted policy of the strict policy. I think targeted is what you are referring to as the "halfway house".

      Targeted only confines certain daemons like Apache and BIND in SELinux domains, the rest of the system runs in an unconfined domain.
    • SELinux option during installation is Enabled or Disabled, no halfway house as in FC3.

      I believe that they've stopped offering the strict policy, so "on" would be the targeted policy that was offered in FC3.

    • auto-detected everything in my laptop. Didn't expect it not to, as previous Fedora Core releases did so.

      I was a very happy RedHat and then Fedora user until I tried to install FC3. I hope that FC4 does better then its predecessor. When I did the install for FC3 it clobbered my system. It appeared that it did not correctly configure itself for my scsi controller.

      All I can say is thank you St. Anthony [americancatholic.org] because my backups saved my derrier that day. I am now a very happy gentoo user who synced and upd

    • With BitTorrent the slashdot effect actually helps.
      Since there are likely to be more users downloading and they are more likely to be close to you.

  • Release Notes (Score:5, Informative)

    by WombatControl ( 74685 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:14AM (#12803384)

    The release notes are here [redhat.com]. Major changes include:

    • GNOME 2.10
    • KDE 3.4
    • OpenOffice 2
    • Xen Virtualization
    • PowerPC Support

    • Re:Release Notes (Score:5, Informative)

      by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman@gmaiBLUEl.com minus berry> on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:18AM (#12803418) Homepage Journal
      To anyone thinking of downloading this, be warned that these are bleeding edge features! Fedora is the first place they often get tested, and they don't always fit together smoothly. Not to mention that many individual features are not out of Beta testing! So only use this distro if you don't mind getting burned a little bit!

      Otherwise it can be a great way to understand what is coming down the pipe. :-)

      P.S. Parent poster forgot about GCC 4.0. That's a MAJOR feature itself, but also one of easiest to get burned by.

      • Re:Release Notes (Score:4, Interesting)

        by LnxAddct ( 679316 ) <sgk25@drexel.edu> on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:32AM (#12803554)
        Considering the intensive amount of quality assurance that goes into each fedora release, I wouldnt worry too much about it. I've been using it since Core 1 and have yet to be burned. Its nice having all the latest and greatest stuff, while also having it all integrate together, but also having an OS that I feel comfortable running on my laptop or servers.
        Regards,
        Steve

      • Re:Release Notes (Score:5, Informative)

        by Nailer ( 69468 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:47AM (#12803691)
        Fedora is the first place they often get tested

        Er, no.

        Rawhide is where things first get tested.

        After that, Fedora Core 4 beta 1

        After that, Fedora Core 4 beta 2

        After that, Fedora Core 4 beta 3

        After that, Fedora Core 4 beta 4

        After that, Fedora Core 4

        After that, Red hat Enterprise Linux.

        Fedora works. It has a lot of texting. Report a bug, and someone will fix it. That someone probably works for Red Hat.

        RHEL works too. And it's a lot more conservative - which yes, probably means it's a little more reliable, but doesn't mean FC is unreliable or a beta test. See bullet points above. Stability is a yes no thing, it's a more or less thing.

        People don't buy RHEl cause FC is unstable. They buy RHEL so they can install a box this year and get 24/7 support, and training, and not have to upgrade, till 2011.

    • Re:Release Notes (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There is no OpenOffice 2, it must be a beta 1.99 or something.

    • FC4 rocks (Score:5, Informative)

      by Nailer ( 69468 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:40AM (#12803626)
      I've been running FC4 (actually Rawhide, the equivalent of Debian unstable) on a Mac mini / Hitachi PJXT100 (yes, my computer is 16cm, my screen is 4m) for a few months here. Bluetooth Apple mouse and keyboard too. A pretty weird hardware setup. Everything works reliably.

      In particular, OpenOffice 2 rocks. In FC it comes as individual packages for each app - ie, I get by with openoffice-core, openoffice-writer, and the English language package. In Ubuntu, I have to install and, worse, update a few massive packages.

      Gnome does cool stuff. Like never stealing focus. An app wants focus, it pulses in the task bar. As it should be.

      Extras now works well, it's easy to get a package into Fedora and there's a lot of useful stuff available. The days of having to go to freshrpms and dag wieers to find your app are numbered - FC4, FC Extras, and Livna for the patented stuff will satisfy most people. Other distros never had this problem, but other distros still don't have decent config tools, and other distros don't install menu items when they install GUI apps. Yes, this means you Debian.

      There's a non-poo directory server that has proper ACL support (unlike OpenLDAP, where they were kept outside the directory), multimaster replication. etc as part of the distro. Combine it with JXplorer and you've got a decent Open Source LDAP server.

      Off topic: once installed, OOo 2 is the first version I'd say would be on par with MS Office. The toolbars are decent - they no longer take up an entire row, and can be edited and docked together at will, like you damn well expect. Spell check can count selections. Floating docks becomes sidebars. And, surprisingly, it can work with MS Offices proprietary XML files. All the usual OOo features are still there

      Other nice things about recent Fedoras:

      FC3 and newer: Partitioning uses LVM by default. Online resizing is supported. Ext3 has signficant speed improvements, bechmarks favorably against Reiser, and unlike Reiser, works properly with SELinux.

      FC3 but expanded in FC4: SELinux is enabled by default. For example, Apache is prevented from reading files who don't have the 'web content' context, and cgi scripts can't access particular device files without the right context either. If someone breaks into apachge, the chances of them going further than breasking into your web site are limited.

      One note: while yum is getting better, I don't use it. Instead, I use Smart Package Manager. A command line and GUI tool from the author of apt-rpm and Synaptic, that replaes both those tools, and works with Yum metadata repositories. It's faster (downloads in parallel from each source), has a better GUI, and simpler error messages than yum and apt (no 'but version foo will be installed'-without-any-explanation type stuff).

  • Upgrade path (Score:5, Interesting)

    by learn fast ( 824724 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:15AM (#12803392)
    Is it easy to upgrade from FC1 to FC4? I have a semi-production server that's running on FC1, and I don't want a clean install.

    This is not an off-topic question. The response to this question will make a legitimate point about the FC model.
    • The response to this question will make a legitimate point about the FC model.

      That is some trust you're putting into the average slashdot response;-)

    • Re:Upgrade path (Score:5, Informative)

      by bflong ( 107195 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:21AM (#12803461)
      In short, no.
      There is not even a supported way to upgrade from FC3 to FC4, or even from a FC4 test release. The reason being explained to me was that testing all that upgrading would greatly slow down the release process. Personaly, I'd rather have to wait another month or two for a release then have to fresh install. It's not as big a deal as it is with windows though, since all the user settings are in /home and easy to back up and restore. But for those running servers on FC, ouch.
      • Really, running a server on Fedora Core is probably a mistake to begin with. Not just because of stability (which is usually ok), but because of update end of life and lack of an upgrade path.

        Fedora won't get official security updates for long after the next version comes out and you're reliant on the Fedora Legacy project to do that for you.

        IMO, this is why distros such as Debian shine on the server. With a long release cycle (no jokes, please) and official updates and upgrade paths, it allows you to run

      • Re:Upgrade path (Score:3, Informative)

        by miffo.swe ( 547642 )
        If your cheap go for Centos or Debian and if you like paid support RHEL isnt expensive compared to a Windows box with supplemental support. Basically if you want to setup a server and forget it make sure to choose a distribution with a long life expectancy.

        That said most configs is easily migrated unless you have been compiling your own brew and have messed around with loads of configs.

      • Re:Upgrade path (Score:3, Informative)

        by Tim C ( 15259 )
        Well, under a modern Windows OS all the user-specific settings *should* be in C:\Documents and Settings\, which is just as easy to back up and restore. You can also change that to put it on a different partition (or even a network share, etc) if your Windows-fu is up to it.

        That said though, none of the system-wide settings are in there (but then none of the system-wide stuff is in /home on Linux, of course) and a lot of apps (especially older ones) use the registry for all sorts of things that they shouldn

      • Re:Upgrade path (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13, 2005 @12:15PM (#12803932)
        Sorry, but no. Upgrades from any FC release to any newer FC release are supported. Upgrades from any RHL release (well, since RHL 3.0.3) to any newer FC release are supported

        What's not supported is upgrades from tests (like FC4 test3) to stable releases (like FC4). That's it. Tests are not meant for use on production machines, or non-production machines by those who don't want to deal with the pain of actually, you know, testing stuff

      • Re:Upgrade path (Score:5, Informative)

        by mattdm ( 1931 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @12:34PM (#12804143) Homepage
        There is not even a supported way to upgrade from FC3 to FC4, or even from a FC4 test release.

        That's not true at all. Upgrading from release to release is completely supported -- not in the "call Red Hat and they'll help you" sense, but in the "designed to work and if doesn't it will get fixed" sense.

        Upgrading from test releases to final releases isn't supported (sometimes last-minute back-outs of dead end ideas makes that hard) but generally works.

        And live update of a running FC3 system to FC4 via yum isn't officially supported, but also generally works just fine [fedoraproject.org].

    • Re:Upgrade path (Score:3, Informative)

      by presarioD ( 771260 )
      I am not sure what you mean by easy. I upgraded last year or so from RH9 to FC2 using 'yum upgrade' and it went smoothly. I still had to do some cleanup by myself since the upgrade is not aggressive and does not change all of the gazillions of .conf files but that was smooth as well.

      My humble suggestion is *not* to upgrade though unless you have too. In a few months FC4 will be obsolete and FC5 will be out and so on and so forth. A recent kernel upgrade that I did (2.6.10-1-771_FC2) broke the ACPI interf

    • Re:Upgrade path (Score:2, Insightful)

      by pz ( 113803 )
      I have a semi-production server that's running on FC1, and I don't want a clean install.

      Let's concentrate on the first part of the quote before going on to the second: A semi-production server running FC1. You're running experimental, development code on a sever? Huh? The primary concern with a server is stability and reliability. Secondary to that is performance (if you have a whiz-bang fast server that goes down once a day, you are doing something wrong). Plenty of web sites are still using RedHat 6

    • Re:Upgrade path (Score:3, Informative)

      by erroneus ( 253617 )
      I almost always just do a fresh install. If there's data I want to save, I back it up. With very few exceptions, this has always been the best approach for me. I haven't always found that upgrading packages worked flawlessly every time and in many cases, there is a new way of doing things that you may be missing out on if you run an upgrade. For example, the upgrade will not upgrade you to LVM2 if you aren't already using it. So if you want those features, that's about the only way to get it if you're

  • the mirrors are populated long time ago... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:16AM (#12803397)
    http://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/fedor a.redhat.com/linux/core/4/i386/iso/>
    http://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/fedor a.redhat.com/linux/core/4/i386/iso/ [fht-esslingen.de]
    http://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/fedor a.redhat.com/linux/core/4/i386/iso/ [fht-esslingen.de]

    http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/lin ux /core/4/>
    http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux /core/4/ [redhat.com]
    http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux /core/4/ [redhat.com]

    ftp://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/fedora-core/4/ [tu-chemnitz.de]
    ftp://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/fedora-core/4 />
    ftp://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/fedora-core/4/ [tu-chemnitz.de]

    and many more....

    dont wait for shitty slashdot to report on old news.

    cuz nothin is older than the news of yesterday/yesterhour/yesterminute...

    • The mirrors were populated quite a while ago because the original release for FC4 was supposed to be a week ago.

      They were NOT open until today 14:00 UTC however, because there were some stupid legal issues, something to do with legal team needing to check the release name "Stentz".

  • Now that Debian's back in the game.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:16AM (#12803405)
    ... what's the incentive of moving to moving to Fedora. I don't mean this as a troll - I like Fedora filling the gaps for people who didn't feel comfortable with Debian Unstable - but it feels to me like Debian's a bigger organization with more resources to handle more packages than Fedora. Especially since red hat left it. Is there reason to believe Fedora can continue competing without it's corportate ties?

    • Re:Now that Debian's back in the game.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by LnxAddct ( 679316 ) <sgk25@drexel.edu> on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:48AM (#12803697)
      Nice troll, RedHat didn't leave it. Infact every core engineer is paid for by RedHat. RedHat simply let the decision making process become a little more open. Fedora is not unstable, where as Debian unstable used to break on me monthly. Fedora is highly integrated and easy to use. The same devs working on Fedora are usually the same devs doing the majority of kernel development, Gnome development, Apache, OpenOffice, etc... so things tend to work real nice together. This latest release only goes to show moreso how great it is working out. RedHat however did not just let them go, Fedora is a huge part of their enterprise offering, RedHat still fully backs Fedora.
      Regards,
      Steve
    • See here [slashdot.org] and here [slashdot.org].

      Debian and Fedora are different distros w/different purposes. Fedora releases twice a year w/the latest and greatest, while Debian releases far less frequently w/a selection of old moldy stable tested proven software. Whereas Fedora brings the bleeding edge to just a handful of the most popular platforms w/o providing a convenient upgrade path, Debian makes itself available to both more platforms than any other distro and a systematic manageable way to upgrade to future releases. I may as well say this more clearly:

      Fedora
      • released every 6 months
      • latest software
      • supports few mainstream platforms
      • no feasible upgrade path


      Debian
      • years b/w release
      • old stable software
      • supports several platforms
      • well-designed upgrade system


      If you're looking for a desktop distro, Fedora would be an excellent choice. If you're running a server on the other hand, Debian would be the obvious choice.
      • See here and here.

        And read the replies - the info in both of those links is false. And was proven to be with +5 moderated replies when you linked to them.

        Fedora...no feasable upgrade path from beta releases. Use stable versions and it's fine.

        Debian vs Fedora as a server:
        • No LVM (just MS DOS partitions) or automation in in the installer (may have changed in 3 - I use Ubuntu - but I doubt it, and hey, at least I have a disclaimer).
        • No SELinux. It's hard to go back to a non DAC system once you understa
    • Although Fedora is officially independent, RedHat still contributes heavily to its developement.

      Anyway I don't understand your Debian vs. Fedora view. What about Ubuntu, for example?

  • Two major Core 4 fixes (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:16AM (#12803406)
    The load times are definitely faster and it's nowhere near as dark all the time.

  • Best slashdot ever (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:17AM (#12803409)
    Torrent download rate before slashdot posted the story: 10 KB/s

    After slashdotting: 145 KB/s (flirting with my max bandwidth)

    • /me pours some liquid nitrogen on the torrent tracker server.

      It's a good thing we're housed in Physics. :)
  • The installer couldn't cope with installing into an existing LVM VG which is a shame.

    Switching from init 1 to init 5 requested the root password which was novel. I'll have to track down what that's all about.

  • If you don't like FC4 (Score:3, Funny)

    by Goody ( 23843 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:18AM (#12803425) Journal
    ...wait five minutes and Fedora Core 5 will be out.

  • Tracker busted. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bogado ( 25959 ) <bogado.bogado@net> on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:18AM (#12803427) Homepage Journal
    The tracker did not handle the masses of people going after him, it is upto now not accepting any conections. This shows that a trackless BitTorrent is really needed.

  • mirrors.kernel.org (Score:3, Informative)

    by hpa ( 7948 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:20AM (#12803447) Homepage
    C'mon guys... mirrors.kernel.org is only pumping 1100 Mbit/s so far... plenty of bandwidth to spare :)

    http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/core/4/ [kernel.org]
    ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/core/4/ [kernel.org]
    rsync://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/core/4/

  • pre-emptive apt vs rpm rebuttal (Score:4, Informative)

    by pyros ( 61399 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:36AM (#12803592) Journal
    You can't compare apt and rpm (command line tools). These are the only comparisons which are valid
    • command line dependency trackers - apt vs up2date/apt/yum
    • binary package formats - RPM vs DEB
    • command line single package management tools - rpm vs dpkg

    If you make any comparisons which cross the above boundaries, you are either trolling or have a fundamental misunderstanding of what you are discussing and should reald up before posting.

  • WM Strife. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ionicplasma ( 820891 )
    XFCE has been moved to extras.

    It's funny to see how a lightweight yet potentially pretty WM wouldn't be the first choice for producing a desktop OS. Why not include it with the distro?

  • Here's a good question (Score:4, Interesting)

    by portwojc ( 201398 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:48AM (#12803695) Homepage
    I want to know what hardware Fedora supports. Like which RAID controllers, Ehternet cards, video cards, and Etc are supported. Where do I find this information at?

    Is there a list out there somewhere that is easy to look this up on or do I have to dig around for every little piece?

    I checked the Fedora FAQ and nothing popped out as a definitive list. Just base hardware requirements.

    Thanks

  • Extras (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mr_Icon ( 124425 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:48AM (#12803700) Homepage
    Something that's not mentioned -- this is the first release of Fedora Core with the "Extras" repository enabled by default. Fedora Extras [fedoraproject.org] is a volunteer packaging project of various software not in Core, and is currently providing additional 1,000 packages [fedoraproject.org] ready to install just by running "yum install foo."

    If you don't see your favorite package in Extras, you can always become a contributor [fedoraproject.org] yourself.

  • What about multimedia? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ratta ( 760424 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @11:52AM (#12803737)
    The last time i have tries Fedora it was really poor about multimedia... I know about patent problems, but i could barely play an mp3 with the crappy helix player from Real let's not even talk about playing an (undencrypted!) DVD!!!!! I think that been able to play most widespread audio and video formats (with Xine or Mplayer) should be a key point for a moder linux distro.

    • Re:What about multimedia? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bogie ( 31020 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @12:32PM (#12804119) Journal
      I don't doubt you tried Fedora but did you even do any searchs on google regarding this? At all?

      All of that and more is explained at several easily findable and popular FAQ and howto sites specific to Fedora and this issue. I'm not even going to list them but just typing Fedora and mp3 or DVD in google is enough to answer all of your questions.

      This isn't a case of me being "shut the f*** up noob! Read the man!" either. Fedora's multimedia policy is easily found and fixed with the most basic of efforts. The fact that you knew about the patent problems and why certain codecs aren't included with Fedora shows your clearly smart enough to figure out the first thing you should have done when you had a question.

      "I think that been able to play most widespread audio and video formats (with Xine or Mplayer) should be a key point for a modern linux distro."

      Right and Fedora and every other distro out there can do that. You already know why that can't be done with a truly OSS distro so why the fuss? Can XP rip to mp3 and play DVD's right out of the box?

  • Fedora Core 4 Review (Score:5, Informative)

    by SilentBob4 ( 805119 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @12:01PM (#12803808)
    Mad Penguin published a "progress" review [madpenguin.org] of FC4 not too long ago and it was a pretty good read.
  • The more people get on the torrents, the faster they will be.
    This is not true.

    The average download rate of a torrent is pretty much independant of the number of downloaders -- that's what's so neat about it. (Compare to downloading via ftp or http -- double the number of downloaders, and you half the average download rate, assuming that you're out of bandwidth in the first place.)

    If you've got a torrent being seeded by some fast sites, then adding new downloaders on cable modems (fast download, slow upload) will generally slow the average download down rather than speed it up. But it won't slow down to almost nothing, which is what happens if thousands of people are hitting a ftp or http server ...

    Now, if people who are downloading leave their BT clients running after they're done downloading, then the average download rates (of those still downloading, that is) will go up, as there will be more sites seeding at that point.

    But in general, merely having more people using BT to download something will not make the average download rates go up. BT is way cool -- don't get me wrong -- I love it. But it's not magic ...

  • Will it run on WindowsXP Professional or Longhorn? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13, 2005 @12:36PM (#12804157)
    I am new to the whole "computers" scene, and I am wondering if this "Redhat Fedora Core Linux 4" will run on my windows. I am running windows 98. Will I have to upgrade to windows XP if I want to use "Redhat Fedora Core Linux 4"? Or will I have to wait for microsoft longhorn before I can run it on my computer. Also, does it work with my flat screen monitor?

  • SATA support? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BRSQUIRRL ( 69271 ) on Monday June 13, 2005 @12:50PM (#12804315)
    I wonder if this release has better support for installing to SATA drives. FC3 choked on my nForce3 SATA controller, and I didn't feel like mucking around with a newer kernel at the time.

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