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First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica)
Ars technica has a
quick look at the Fedora and Ubuntu beta releases. "These betas,
which offer users an opportunity to get an early look at the functionality
that will be included in the next major versions, are already highly
polished and showcase the growing maturity of the desktop Linux software
ecosystem."
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First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 6, 2008 15:32 UTC (Mon) by danielpf (subscriber, #4723) [Link]
"Ubuntu 8.10 has also gained Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS),..."
Gee,a nice feature included in Mandriva since years!
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 6, 2008 16:47 UTC (Mon) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]
Quote from french Asterix comics:
The whole of Europe is under Roman rule, all except one tiny village.
(Replace "Europe" with "the world", "Roman" with "Ubuntu" and "tiny village" with "Mandriva" ;)
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 6, 2008 17:58 UTC (Mon) by danielpf (subscriber, #4723) [Link]
Is this supposed to be funny? I would expect such arguments perhaps among pre-teenagers, but not on the LWN list. Do you realize how silly it is to insinuate that a distro is ridiculous or superior just because of its popularity?
What amazes me instead is that Ubuntu is only now able to integrate DKMS, taking years to learn how to do it while everything is open for inspection from Mandriva distros.
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 6, 2008 22:56 UTC (Mon) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]
You don't know the Asterix comics, don't you?
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 7, 2008 10:00 UTC (Tue) by danielpf (subscriber, #4723) [Link]
I have probably read these comics of the 60's well before you, in the original French, and find them moderately subtle. I know perfectly what you were alluding to, and found it inappropriate in this forum. Please keep the discussion level higher.
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 6, 2008 17:33 UTC (Mon) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]
And in Fedora for years, for that matter. But to be fair, those are both RPM-based systems, and the package has always been at least a little bit RPM-oriented (e.g. --mkrpm).
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 6, 2008 20:15 UTC (Mon) by buchanmilne (guest, #42315) [Link] And in Fedora for years, for that matter.About 2.5 years fewer in Fedora (seems to have shipped first in FC7 in May 2007, while it was in the main section of Mandriva in 10.1, released in Oct 2004) though. All of Mandriva's out-of-kernel drivers are managed by dkms, including all the binary driver packages ("kmod"-package equivalents). But to be fair, those are both RPM-based systems, and the package has always been at least a little bit RPM-oriented (e.g. --mkrpm).And that feature was added to dkms by a Mandriva contributor during the integration into Mandriva in June 2004 ... But, I am glad to see more distributions supporting DKMS, and congrats to Matt at managing a good contribution to open source from Dell that should hopefully make everyone's lives easier. The adoption by (hopefully) the majority of distributions should provide more OEMs motivation to provide drivers using dkms (but, even if they don't I usually just install a Mandriva dkms-package on Fedora/RHEL boxes ...). $ urpmq -y dkms-|sort -u|wc -l 75 (So, actually, 74 drivers shipped using DKMS in Mandriva 2008.1) But, I do agree with danielpf, why leave out the other distros releasing this quarter (some which may beat Ubuntu and Fedora to GNOME 2.24 releases ... or KDE 4.1 releases for that matter), such as Mandriva and "Open"SUSE? Back to the Ars article though:
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 6, 2008 20:53 UTC (Mon) by zdzichu (guest, #17118) [Link]
guest account -- looks like Fedora's xguest ripoff
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 6, 2008 23:00 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Since when is implementing a useful feature that others have implemented before considered a "ripoff"?
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 6, 2008 22:43 UTC (Mon) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]
Addressing some of your points:
3G: this comes with NetworkManager-0.7, so Fedora has it too. Ars could have stated this, even within the confines of only comparing Ubuntu to Fedora
PulseAudio: yes, it now works remarkably well. Much better than in F-9 which is in turn much better than in F-8. Suspend/resuming when audio is playing does not seem to cause any problem too. Flash and other applications that abuse the ALSA API still could cause problems, naturally.
Plymouth: the idea is to initialize the videocard's graphics mode exactly once. splash is framebuffer-based, I believe; plymouth is about using the kernel's new modesetting support (only works with open-source ATi drivers at the moment; the Intel drivers were released first but is being reworked upstream, and thus modesetting for them is not turned on yet)
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 7, 2008 4:25 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
Hmm, so Ubuntu and Fedora are both shipping SVN snapshots of NetworkManager? I don't see any 0.7 release:
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 7, 2008 4:31 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Yes. Fedora is essentially upstream for NetworkManager so, much of these features are shipping early in it via snapshots, however 0.7 is expected to be released before the Fedora 10 general release.
http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/2008/07/20/the-road-to-networ...
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 7, 2008 4:42 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
So, Fedora considers NM 0.7 good enough for their own users, but not the rest of the world? Not sure what to make of that.
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 7, 2008 5:41 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
This is in the middle of the development cycle for many distributions. Not only Fedora but also other distributions like Ubuntu and OpenSUSE ship the development snapshots for early feedback and testing. Standard free software iterative development. Nothing new about it.
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 7, 2008 12:58 UTC (Tue) by dcbw (guest, #50562) [Link]
NetworkManager is it's own project, there are significant contributions from other people as well. It just happens that I'm employed to work full-time on NetworkManager by Red Hat. Tambet works for Novell and contributes most of his time to NetworkManager as well. There have been significant contributions from community volunteers.
The fact that 0.7 hasn't been released quite yet has nothing to do with it not being good enough for anyone else. We've been shipping 0.7 snapshots for quite a long time, and while there have been issues with them, they have generally worked out well for Fedora users in combination with the latest kernel updates that fix wireless driver bugs.
The reason Ars probably didn't mention Fedora's mobile broadband support is that Fedora has had good 3G support for the past 6 months becuase we've been actively backporting NetworkManager improvements to both Fedora 8 and Fedora 9, even though Fedora 8 didn't ship with mobile broadband support.
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 7, 2008 6:37 UTC (Tue) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]
Plymouth: adding vga=0x318 on boot line will make Nvidia version work using probably Nouveau driver. Only plugins-label, pulser, and fade are not supported.
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 7, 2008 14:31 UTC (Tue) by buchanmilne (guest, #42315) [Link]
Thanks. Neither the Ars article nor the blog entry pointed to provided any of this detail (besides "RHGB has problems, plymouth will address them"). AFAIK, the goals listed on the plymouth blog pointed to by Ars are also achieved by splashy. Thus my question.
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 7, 2008 15:20 UTC (Tue) by dcbw (guest, #50562) [Link]
None of the other prettyboot solutions will ever get upstream because the kernel patches necessary for them were never acceptable, and they couldn't be made accpetable to upstream because the real issue was lack of kernel modesetting. Now that kernel modesetting is about to land upstream (and has shipped in various forms in Fedora) boot splash screens can be done _right_ in a way that's acceptable to everyone. But reworking splashy/bootsplash would be a waste of effort becuase they are built on completely different foundations.
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 7, 2008 15:26 UTC (Tue) by dcbw (guest, #50562) [Link]
Correction: I lie about slashy, it doesn't need kernel patches.
Apparently they strongly recommend vesafb, which means you can never ever get flicker-free non-modeswitching boot (the goal of plymouth) because after vesafb gets loaded, you'll have to reload the actual driver for your card, leading to a modeswitch. You need to have kernel modesetting to get fast, completely clean, flicker-free bootup. It's possible that splashy could be modified to work on modesetting kernels, but I have no idea what the effort required to do that would be.
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 7, 2008 10:53 UTC (Tue) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
Re "Ubuntu not-upstreaming" - are you saying that every distro must upstream any change it makes, before it can ship it in the distro? This seems like a rather inflexible and slow way of doing things, and surely it's sometimes better to test out new ideas within a distro's community without upstreaming them first.
Upstreaming changes is a good thing, and in the distro's own interest longer term to minimise the deltas it must maintain, but lambasting Ubuntu for creating its own quite minor usability features like this one is a bit harsh - I don't recall anyone criticising MEPIS, PCLinuxOS, Puppy Linux or the many other distro that write their own distro specific features or admin tools.
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 6, 2008 22:47 UTC (Mon) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]
And when will Mandriva add support for module-assistant (happily used in Debian-land for >5 years)?
Okay, probably never, because DKMS does the job for them (and IIUC has a somewhat different focus), but whatever, it still proves Mandriva sucks! Or something.
DKMS seems perfectly nice. But my guess is that their main motivation to add it wasn't its super-awesome features, but to make Ubuntu more convenient for Dell to pre-install. (Dell has an existing DKMS-based setup for shipping drivers.)
First look: latest Fedora and Ubuntu betas really shine (ars technica) Posted Oct 8, 2008 19:03 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Okay, probably never, because DKMS does the job for them (and IIUC has a somewhat different focus), but whatever, it still proves Mandriva sucks! Or something.
Ya. DKMS is a effort to improve time-to-market for Linux drivers.
Linux has a terrible lag in supporting newest devices.. This is because:
* 'Proper' Linux support says that it's better to target the current next-release for driver development rather then trying to use a current or older kernel and trying to forward-port your driver to the newest version.
* Linux distributions use older kernels and only offer a newer kernel with newer releases and that only happens anywere from six months to a year.
So therefore for the end user to gain access to the new 'in-kernel properly designed' driver (without using custom kernels) means that they have to wait anywere from a few months or to a year after the hardware has hit market. For a OEM this is obviously unacceptable. There is no way that they can let new hardware be sold without driver support for a few days, much less a few months.
So DKMS is ment to help accelerate the speed at which Linux hardware support is able to hit new users by making it easier to back port newer in-kernel drivers to older Distro-built kernels that end users will actually be using.
Module-assistent, on the other hand, is ment to make it easy for end users to build and install out-of-tree kernel drivers and have it handled in a automated fasion. These are modules that are designed 'wrong' by being ment to be outside of the normal kernel source tree for whatever reason. (of course 'wrong and right' when dealing with kernel drivers is always going to be a case-by-case basis.)
So depending on how you look at it it actually makes sense to have both since they can be used in a complimentary way.
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