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Red Hat Software GNOME GUI KDE Operating Systems Upgrades Linux

Fedora 20 Released 147

Posted by timothy from the is-it-a-true-fedora? dept.
sfcrazy writes "The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora 20, code named Heisenbug (release notes). Fedora 20 is dedicated to Seth Vidal, the lead developer of Yum and the Fedora update repository, who recently died in a road accident. Gnome is the default DE of Fedora, and so it is for Fedora 20. However unlike Ubuntu (where they had to create different distros for each DE) Fedora comes with KDE, XFCE, LXDE and MATE. You can install the DE of your choice on top of base Fedora."
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Fedora 20 Released More

Fedora 20 Released

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  • It's a meta joke (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @11:52AM (#45715463)

    Heisenbug - nice. A fitting name for a bleeding edge distro.

  • Was it even or odd.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ..releases of Redhat you had to watch like a hawk again?

    I've a spare motherboard and some HDs kicking around, maybe I'll have a go at installing a Redhat descendant for the first time in well over a decade (Has it really been that long a time?..ye gods..'one day you'll find' and all that.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by M1FCJ ( 586251 )

      What is wrong with a nice VM?
      Who dedicates real hardware to test these days?

      • People with spare motherboards and some HDs kicking around.

        I got married, my wife doesn't let me collect old computer parts. But if I weren't it would be a nice way to test stuff out. Vs. having a big block of storage gone on your favorite PC.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by icebike ( 68054 )

          Disk is cheap. You won't miss it.

          And that huge block of storage can be recovered any time you want. Entry level desktop machines these days come with more than enough storage to accommodate running a couple concurrent VMs.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mea2214 ( 935585 )
      I've always had best luck with even Fedora releases. I'm still on Fedora 14 and have been patiently waiting for 20 to hit the shelves.

    • Just go for it. Fedora 20 is worth investing some time in, since it is systemd based and therefore shows the direction that most Linux distribution are heading. All the knowledge you gain about systemd and its tools like "journalctl" can be directly used in future Linux distro's like RHEL, CentOS, SUSE, etc.

      So instead of wasting time getting to know a particular distros home made tools for eg. managing daemons, you can learn a set of standard tools that can be deployed exactly the same way across many diffe

  • You can install the DE of your choice on top of base Fedora

    That's the case with pretty much every distro out there. Ubuntu is the exception in that regard.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by XanC ( 644172 )

      Can't you do that on Ubuntu too? I thought the different distros really were just installation defaults.

      • The summary makes a (pretty much meaningless) distinction between Ubuntu requiring different base installations for different desktops, instead of a single base installation. So yeah, Ubuntu is different from most distros in that regard I guess. But no one really gives a fuck. But I guess distros will do anything these days to try to distinguish themselves from every other distro out there that's pretty much the same.

        • Re:Whoopty do (Score:4, Informative)

          by Desler ( 1608317 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @12:12PM (#45715761)

          There has been a minimal Ubuntu install that you can then install your DE of choice on top of since at least 8.04.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Fwipp ( 1473271 )

            And even if you install Unity-flavored Ubuntu and want to switch to, say, Cinnamon, just add the PPA and go.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Knuckles ( 8964 )

              The problem with installing flavor A and then apt-getting DE B is always that you end up with a gazillion different utilities which clutter up your menus and are confusing even to the seasoned linux user. You can do it, and it may be reasonable if you are evaluating DEs prior to a decision, but it's not pretty. Given Ubuntu's targets they are doing it right IMHO.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by msobkow ( 48369 )

                More to the point, you'll still need to periodically log in to the original default DE to use the system configuration utilities, because the alternate DEs you add on from the repository later usually aren't complete installs of all the tools that can be used to configure the system.

                Of course, if you're a long-time Unix/Linux hack, you don't use those fancy GUI tools in the first place, so it won't matter to you. And from what I've seen, people who are experienced enough to apt-get an alternate DE (or a

        • Jesus Christ, how did that make it into a Slashdot summary?

          apt-get install gnome-desktop

        • Re:Whoopty do (Score:5, Informative)

          by AdamWill ( 604569 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @12:59PM (#45716375) Homepage

          We (Fedora) didn't write anything comparing the way we provide desktops to how Ubuntu does it. That's something the person who submitted the story wrote. It's not a comparison we'd find particularly interesting, I don't think.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by icebike ( 68054 )

            Yeah, it seemed to me to simply be a way to throw some gratuitous denigration and farts in the general of Ubuntu.

            People can't seem to just report the news these days, they have to color it and use it as a springboard for their own
            pet peeves and preferences. Something learned from the mainstream media I guess.
               

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Burz ( 138833 )

            I thought is was "interesting" when F16 overheated two different models of Macbooks, where the "uninteresting" distros somehow weren't able to foil the operation of the fans.

            Its also "interesting" that the F18 system I'm on now reported that I have only 15 minutes of operation left because battery #1 is at 10% (nevermind that battery #2 is at 100%).

            Even more hilarious (and "interesting") is the way Fedora handles dual monitors on a laptop (not an Apple this time... at least the 'F' people can devote some ne

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Arker ( 91948 )

        You *can* (submitter appears to be a bit confused) but there is certainly no guarantee it will work well. When you go against the Ubuntu way and start making your own decisions it's easy to get well outside of what is tested and supported.

        Even KDE is IIRC only maintained by external volunteers, Ubuntu is built around the idea that they decide and you use what they decided on. If you want to make choices there are plenty of better distributions to use.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Burz ( 138833 )

          You *can* (submitter appears to be a bit confused) but there is certainly no guarantee it will work well. When you go against the Ubuntu way and start making your own decisions it's easy to get well outside of what is tested and supported.

          From my experience, vanishingly little in the way of desktop-user vertical integrations (Ubuntu's strength) meets with rigorous testing on Fedora. In fact, much of that "ucky" obsessing over details and connecting code in the between layers is precisely the kind of thing they frown upon.

          Even KDE is IIRC only maintained by external volunteers, Ubuntu is built around the idea that they decide and you use what they decided on. If you want to make choices there are plenty of better distributions to use.

          More power to them, then. The kinds of choices you're implying concern only a thin sliver of the techie demographic. Once users feel they have a stable interface to their system, they start feeling more confident about makin

    • Wait, what? You can't install DEs of your choice on Ubuntu? o_O

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by no_go ( 96797 )

      I'm running KDE on Ubuntu 13.04 (installed from the standard dvd download).
      All i had to do is apt-get the relevant (meta?)package .
      No need to download the Kubuntu dvd.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by RDW ( 41497 )

      I think a lot of people don't realise how easy it is to switch desktops in Ubuntu - just install the appropriate packages from the standard repositories and choose whichever you want to use at login. Occasionally you run into minor conflicts, but the major DEs generally co-exist quite happily. You don't have to go with, say, Xubuntu just because you want Xfce. The spinoff distributions aren't just standard Ubuntu with alternative desktops, they also have very different collections of default packages, so th

    • Ubuntu isn't even really an exception. You can still install the barebones "server" flavor, then drop whatever DE you want on top of that. Or start with one DE, then install another DE alongside it. As far as I'm concerned it is just a nit-picky detail of what they happen to promote as the default distribution image.
  • so many updates.

    • They were asking for that joke ( fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedUp ). Well, you have to name it something I guess.

    • Not if you use software RAID, you're not - there has been no supported way to upgrade since Fedora 16 if you do something bizarre, like mirror your drives.

      Unless this got fixed in 20 and the bz was never updated.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rjforster ( 2130 )

        Not in my experience. Over the last 4 years my PC has run every version of Fedora and has /home on a pair of mirrored drives which I set up using anaconda on what I'm guessing was F11. I don't always upgrade as new versions are released but it is running F19 right now.
        I grant that "not supported" is different from "it ain't gonna work" but for me at least; it worked.

      • I don't know if anyone's tested it recently. It may work with fedup. 'use software RAID' is a misleadingly vague statement of the problem, though; IIRC it was only ever broken if you *have /boot on RAID*, which is rather different from just 'using RAID'.

        • 'use software RAID' is a misleadingly vague statement of the problem

          It's disingenuous of you to accuse me of being misleadingly vague when the very sentence [that you fail to quote] says " if you do something bizarre, like mirror your drives". It's clearly qualified - blame shifting is not becoming. The ironic 'bizarre' is there to indicate just how common this configuration is.

          Yes, /boot is mirrored on mirrored drives, just like /, /home, /var, etc.. Every server I've ever seen with mirrored drives has

      • My nas machine has been running fedora since f12, five drives with /boot mirrored on all of them, not a problem upgrading.
  • Not sure why Ubuntu is even mentioned in the summary. I'm sure the summary containing a story about someone dying could've been written a little more tastefully.
  • Is using bcache really this hard? [fedoraproject.org] I didn't see any mention of setting up bcache during an initial system install. Essentially like: install everything to /dev/sda and use /dev/sdb as cache? Couldn't this be done if /dev/sda1 was a LVM w/ / on it, maybe with /dev/sda2 as /boot?

    • I don't think the 'nice' support in anaconda actually got done (or if it did, I missed the memo) so yeah, it probably is still that hard. Sorry.

  • Yes! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Peter H.S. ( 38077 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @01:01PM (#45716405) Homepage

    KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11 and systemd, yes!

    I really like Fedora. Been using it since Fedora Core 1 (and Red Hat before that). It has been rock solid for me all these years, and it just keeps on improving.

    The new "systemd" internal plumbing system is a joy to use. "journalctl" is the finest new system tool I have seen for many years; it is really fast, and its superb autocompletion reduces typing to a minimum.

    "$ journalctl -F _SYSTEMD_UNIT" instantly show all systemd services that has ever written to the log file.

    "$ journalctl -b -1 -p err" filters the log file, so that only errors are shown (-p err) from the previous boot (-b -1, current boot is just "-b" etc.).

    A tremendous help for newbies who now doesn't need to learn 'cat', 'grep', 'less' and piping in order to do basic log file inspection.

    Besides improving my systemd skills, the next spare time project I will try on Fedora 20 is lightweight containers. They seems like a useful addition to full blown virtual guests.

    • Re:Yes! No! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I noticed huge system slowdown with the introduction of journald. I noticed huge performance loss in reading and writing files on my hard drive. After some investigation I figured out that journald is the cause of all the slowness. After killing the process (multiple times) I figured out that the performance in writing and reading comes back to normal (used to know) speed. After investigating I figured out that after using the system that journald has created around 100-150mb of metafiles in /var/log/system

      • I think there was a systemd bug that caused syslog to freak out. But besides that, systemd-journald is lightening fast and lightweight on a proper systemd distro like Fedora. It on takes 300 K memory (+3 Megabyte shared mem) on my desktop system. I haven't seen it even suck up 1% CPU time ever.

        systemd often keeps logfiles around for longer than many syslog implementations that uses a simple cron/time based logrotate. Since the journal is indexed size isn't really a issue.
        You can tweak the maximum size etc.,

    • Re:Yes! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @02:00PM (#45717179)

      Oh yes!
      I've struggled for months trying to use things like grep and less, you've no idea how many weeks I've been stumped trying to use cat!

      I've been playing with journalctl, and I've managed to learn it all within about 3 days! It's a miracle! Now I can finally drop the endless nights spent scrolling through logs with less!!

      If only we could have a tool to change plain text files to systemd log format, and I could use the wonder that is journalctl to parse and find things in them, instead of awful grep. There should be a text edit built in to systemd that does this and allows me to edit files and configurations, imagine how much better it would all be with this wonder of journalctl!

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Peter H.S. ( 38077 )

        You are trying to be sarcastic but that doesn't help one bit. Some people don't seem to like systemd, and that is ok with me, but what I find hilarious about the systemd haters are that they can't seem to argue their case in any coherent technical way, they always seem to use ad hominem attacks combined with a considerable dose of paranoid conspiracy speculation. I think your problem is that you actually doesn't have any real knowledge or experience with systemd, that way you are bound to loose any technica

      • There's probably an emacs mode which does what you're looking for.

  • The biggest differences between them are admin tools and init/rc stuff as well as the language the tools are written in. The packaging systems (RPM vs .DEB) are really not as great a difference since they accomplish essentially the same thing overall. The biggest packaging difference is how they name things and where they put them; this is also the most frustrating difference.

    You'll notice that most general/new-release distro reviews are superficial, noting things like application/kernel version numbers and what DE is chosen and what default apps are installed -- all meaningless since any DE and most any app and most any kernel can be installed on any distro. These are reviews written by newbies for newbies. Apparently the people who know the significant underlying differences don't write reviews or don't know enough about other distros to draw a meaningful comparison.

    Here's a review I wrote comparing Mageia with Fedora, which I hope is not the typical kind of review.
    http://maximumhoyt.blogspot.com/2013/01/mageia3-beta-vs-fedora18.html [blogspot.com]

    Why not compare these to Ubuntu? Behind the scenes where it matters, it's too different from Fedora/Mageia for me to get a handle on it without obtaining a more intimate knowledge of Ubuntu, something I have no real need or desire to do. My only gripe about Ubuntu is that too much software is developed for it that is reliant on Ubuntu-specific scripts and such things that it cannot easily be used on other Linux distros; HOWTOs written for Ubuntu are so Ubuntu-specific that they are rendered almost useless for any other distro (they seem to be written by the same folks that write the superficial reviews).

    sfcrazy and others do Fedora and Ubuntu a disservice by making these uninformed and superficial comparisons.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      > The biggest packaging difference is how they name things and where they put them; this is also the most frustrating difference.

      I find the Ubuntu/Debian packaging system is much weaker than the Fedora/RPM system. Firstly the Fedora packages are sensibly and predictably named (lib prefix for libs, -devel for the development packages, -static for static libs) while the Ubuntu packages are insane with odd version numbers rolled into the package names e.g. zlib1g, zlib32z1, zlib64z1, Fedora nicely has jus

  • Fedora 20 vs. Ubuntu 13 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Well Fedora must be better, of course. It's at 20 but Ubuntu is only at 13.

  • Are where you will find syslogd and init scripts. Get away from your wibbly-wobbly daemony-waemony way of doing things, and let the admin adjust startup stuff and view logs via simple text edit commands.

    Anyone know when RHEL7 is out?

    Amusingly, the ./ motd below reads "Heisenberg may have slept here"

  • Hint: apt-get install XXX-desktop converts your Ubuntu into a XXX desktop variant.

    Ubuntu does create different distributions to make it easier for the user. and so that they don't need to install software initially that they won't be using.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lennie ( 16154 )

      That is exactly correct.

      The summary is wrong.

      Fedora has the same thing as the Ubuntu distributions, it's called a spin.

  • Now that Fedora comes with systemd as default, I see more and more comments like "systemd is installed and default in more and more distributions" and I would like to use the opportunity to say that not only this is not true, but it will absolutely not happen for quite a few distros.

    While I love the ideas behind systemd, and it undeniably works very well (it wouldn't have been adopted otherwise), it does have it's disadvantages. One of the most important ones is it is Linux-exclusive, which means that any d

    • "While I love the ideas behind systemd, and it undeniably works very well (it wouldn't have been adopted otherwise), it does have it's disadvantages. One of the most important ones is it is Linux-exclusive, which means that any distribution and any software that wants to be available for other platforms, simply cannot use it. That is the case, for example, for Debian."

      That doesn't appear to be correct. Debian is currently actively considering a switch to systemd, which I don't think it'd be wasting time on

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