Fedora Core 6 (Zod) makes a bid for world domination [LWN.net]

Fedora Core 6, also called Zod, is out and ready to take over the world. Of course General Zod tried to take over the world in the movie Superman II, and more recently made another bid for world domination in the TV series Smallville, but in both appearances he was defeated by Superman (or young Clark Kent). If Zod is out can Superman be far behind? Where do they come up with these names? Jesse Keating talks about Fedora naming in this Red Hat Magazine article. For those put off by the Fedora announcement, the Red Hat press release is less fun and contains more market-speak.

Fedora Core 6 is available for x86, x86_64 and PPC and it has a new theme from the Fedora Artwork Project. The DejaVu font is now the default font and Compiz is managing the windows, for the best effects using the AIGLX framework. The system-config-printer tool has been rewritten with several new features. For the desktop, both GNOME 2.16 and KDE 3.5.4 are provided. Dogtail, a GUI test tool and automation framework written in Python, is included with features that aid in the automation and testing of desktop applications. Totem has replaced Helix Player as the default media player. All applications have been rebuilt using DT_GNU_HASH for improved performance. For more performance enhancements see this page, which also lists those packages which were dropped due to license issues. Anaconda, the Fedora installer, now allows the user to specify third-party repositories, and if the install is network-aware, Fedora can reach out to those repositories and pull in additional packages. There's a new graphical Virtual Machine Manager for managing virtual machines and a graphical SELinux Trouble Shooting Tool. For more information, tours, screenshots and other useful links see Fedora Core 6 Release Summary.

Some of the main Fedora sites seem to be a bit busy right now, but there are other torrent sites and mirrors available. Also the rpm.livna.org team has announced the rpm.livna.org repository with complete support for the 6th release of Fedora Core and Fedora Extras. The Fedora Unity Project has announced the initial release of several Fedora Core 6 Live-Spin CD and DVD ISO images. These Live-Spins are based on the October 24 release of Fedora Core 6. They are available for the i386 and x86_64 architectures via BitTorrent immediately. ATrpms has also officially launched Fedora Core 6 support for i386, x86_64 and PPC. If that's not enough, freshrpms.net is ready to go with support for Fedora Core and Fedora Extras on all architectures.

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Fedora Core 6 (Zod) makes a bid for world domination

Posted Oct 26, 2006 3:37 UTC (Thu) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link]

Yesterday, I downloaded the FC6-i386-iso-dvd, burnt a DVD, and went to make an upgrade installation from FC5. It crapped-out during package installation, leaving my system hosed.

Rebooted from the DVD, and received at disk-error message after it began booting ISOLINUX. Tried again, and again. Same deal.

Took out the FC5 installation CDs, from which I made the previous installation. Another crap-out during the installation process.

Grabbed my Debian Etch (Beta) installation CD, rebooted from it, chose "installgui", and ev-ry-thing worked like a charm. My 7-year-old Toshiba Tecra 8100 laptop was already running Etch (Beta); now my Big Box does, too.

After ten years of RedHat, it's time for a change... and for me to grow in a new direction. "World Domination"? I'm thinking "Not". Not in my home.

Fedora Core 6 (Zod) makes a bid for world domination

Posted Oct 26, 2006 7:58 UTC (Thu) by nicku (subscriber, #777) [Link]

Rebooted from the DVD, and received at disk-error message after it began booting ISOLINUX. Tried again, and again. Same deal.

I am not very clear on the error you are describing, although perhaps I am lucky not to have encountered it.

I have installed FC6 using the installer via NFS on two machines, and am currently going through the time-consuming, problem-solving process of doing yum -y upgrade on this machine, since it is my mail and web server.

Here is a couple of observations:

It seems that in extras, the lesstiff packages do not obsolete the openmotif packages. This broke the yum -y update after the installation on one machine.
I think that Red Hat could focus on making yum -y upgrade work properly with enormous benefit to its customers.
The lack of cooperation between the various packagers hurts the situation seriously. Red Hat could benefit their users enormously by spending money on communicating with the people behind atrpms, rpmforge, freshrpms and so on. It is the lack of consistency between these various packagers that hurts the yum -y upgrade process, making it far more painful than apt-get upgrade. For people without buckets of money for redundant servers, yum -y upgrade is the only way to go. It is not feasable to take a server down for the huge number of hours it can take to do an upgrade from the installation media.
Defaulting to do a re-install than an upgrade seems very odd to someone who still has the remnants of Red Hat installations from 1997 on their machine. Is this a partial admission from Red Hat that upgrading is fraught with nuisances?