Author needs clue! [LWN.net]

Author needs clue!

Posted Apr 9, 2008 20:17 UTC (Wed) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203)
Parent article: 10 things to consider when choosing a Linux distribution (TechRepublic)

Lets take em in his order:

1.  Fedora is 100% Free Software.  The brief flirtation with Fluendo and Codec Buddy is out
for F9.

2.  No comment on the eternal flamewars over rpm vs deb except to note that both DO work and
have real strengths and weaknesses vs each other.

3.  I dunno, I have /etc/init.d on RHEL/Fedora.  And /etc/rc.d/init.d so you can't fumble and
throw a file not found error.

4.  This guy claims to be using Ubuntu and doesn't know it's default DE is GNOME?  Phlease.
Not that both Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, etc. doesn't also maintain pretty up to date KDE packages
as well.

5.  SELinux anyone?  I hate the thing because after years of effort it still tends to fill
/var/log/messages with crap and stuff randomly doesn't work.  But it does enhance security,
especially on servers where it tends to work out somewhat better.

6-8. No comment.

9.  Why waste so many words saying that installation problems ain't much of a problem and
hasn't been for years?  Agree that preload is a good thing, just wish more vendors offered it.

10.  Is this guy really right that the Ubuntu community has outpaced Debian and Fedora's?  If
so I'll have to go have another look.

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Author needs clue!

Posted Apr 9, 2008 20:37 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Brief note: Fedora Board decided to not change Codeina behavior drastically for Fedora 9 since
it is the development freeze already and there isn't much left for the release. There has been
some tweaks in the meantime however. I am not sure the presence of Codeina changes the Free
software nature of Fedora since Codeina itself is Free software that has some links to
non-free software much like Firefox links to non-free plugins. 

If the free software distributions list comes from FSF it likely doesn't have Fedora in it due
to the firmware exception.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing

Author needs clue!

Posted Apr 9, 2008 20:42 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

Fedora is free indeed. And even some of its version would recommend use of non-free software, Fedora has never included any proprietary drivers, as the article implies. In fact, I'm not aware of any distribution doing it currently, although many of us surely remember Kororaa LiveCD with proprietary video drivers. Kororaa doesn't exist anymore.

Some of the references distributions go beyond what Fedora does and remove non-free blobs, i.e. compiled code without sources that is loaded into devices, but not run on the host CPU. That's an entirely different issue, but the author is confusing it with non-free drivers that do run on the host CPU, often with the kernel permissions.

I didn't bother reading the rest.

Author needs clue!

Posted Apr 9, 2008 23:34 UTC (Wed) by lurk546 (subscriber, #17438) [Link]

5. Security - "the short list of distributions would include ... Bastille Linux"

Try Again! ("If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.")

A hardening script, not a distro

Posted Apr 10, 2008 6:17 UTC (Thu) by AnswerGuy (subscriber, #1256) [Link]

Last I checked (and again, just now as I started typing this) Bastille is not a distro, nor is
it only for Linux.  It's a system hardening script which has been ported to HP-UX and MacOS X
as well as various distributions of Linux.