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DistributionsFast distributions and slow serversIt's unsurprising - and commendable - that community members want to eat their own dog food when promoting their favorite Linux distribution — but sometimes the dog food expires far too quickly. This was brought to the fore, again, by a question posed to the Fedora Board about Fedora-it.org, which is running on a hosted server running Ubuntu. On January 9, Gianluca Sforna queried the Fedora Board about the Italian community site for Fedora, which is hosted by Italian Linux Distro Network (ILDN). Sforna wanted to know whether the project has, or wants to have, a position on the topic of hosting a Fedora site on a non-Fedora server — not an idle question, since the site is in a development stage and will soon be seeking approval from the Fedora Board to use the Fedora trademark. Former Fedora Board member Matt Domsch quickly, and many would say reasonably, replied that "there is no requirement that a Fedora-trademark-approved web site be run on Fedora - merely that the content be related to Fedora." The issue might have been considered closed there, but Bill Nottingham pointed out that "large chunks" of the Fedora infrastructure run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as well — not Fedora. That inspired Jóhann B. Guðmundsson to ask why Fedora isn't eating its own dog food. It certainly seems a reasonable question on the surface; why wouldn't a Linux distribution project wish to showcase the distribution by hosting its infrastructure using its own system? Guðmundsson goes a bit farther and asks if it "discredits Fedora as a viable server platform" if the infrastructure runs on RHEL. But is Fedora really a viable server platform to begin with? The consensus, unsurprisingly, seems to be "no." Fedora's lifecycle is far too short. Having to upgrade a server, even if a distribution upgrade works flawlessly, every 13 months is simply more work and disruption than most organizations care to face. A 13-month-old desktop may seem ancient to most in the Linux community, but a once a server is configured and doing its job there is often little reason to perform a significant update after only 13 months. And the reality, as Mike McGrath illustrates is that it's impossible to even get the 13 months and not really worth the effort: So sure, we could run Fedora for everything, especially if we slimmed our offering considerably. But what do we gain? Many of the systems above hardly change as far as their primary purpose goes. Look at our dns servers. They run bind. But they also have several underlying systems that make them part of our infrastructure. Monitoring, configuration management, account systems, etc. So by upgrading dns every 6 or 12 months, literally gain NOTHING. But the time lost in creating the staging tests, upgrading them, running the tests, then scheduling the downtime in production and doing the actual upgrades is actually quite large. Then there's the matter of Fedora's actual focus as a distribution. Several Fedora contributors have taken the position that it's too focused on desktop usage, and not enough on servers. Adam Williamson says that they're missing the point of Fedora: To expand on this: remember, a lot of the 'point' of Fedora is to offer a space for experimentation and development. Mike and I are suggesting Fedora is not a good distribution to run boring, stable, important server tasks which just don't change a lot over time on - like DNS. However, if you were prototyping the next generation of DNS server, would Fedora be a great place to do it? Why yes, it would. Would that be partly thanks to the efforts of the server SIG? Definitely. Ditto if you're developing a web server or a web app or a new cloud infrastructure. Maybe Fedora isn't the distro you'll choose to deploy it to paying customers on, two years down the road, but it's certainly a good choice of distro to do your development work on. To put it another way, one size does not fit all. Some of the qualities that make Fedora interesting for developers and some users make it unsuitable for those seeking a distribution that's usable on "boring, stable" servers. Sometimes boring is a feature. Fedora does have a Server Special Interest Group (SIG), but it has few active participants and seems to be moving a bit slowly. There's no spin from the SIG, though you can find a recently generated Kickstart file. Can't we have an LTS?Fedora isn't the only distribution that has this conversation on a regular basis, of course. It has come up repeatedly in the openSUSE community, particularly since openSUSE reduced its support period to 18 months from 24. At the time this decision was made, I was working with Novell as the openSUSE community manager and agreed with the decision to cut support — despite knowing that it would be unpopular. While not a popular decision, it makes little sense for Red Hat or Novell to fund the support of their respective community releases as long as some community members would like. A few extra months of support are not likely to make a distribution like openSUSE or Fedora competitive with RHEL or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) — but they will cost the company a pretty penny over time. One thing that volunteer contributors have not typically been eager or effective at is backporting packages to older releases. The Fedora Legacy project tried, and failed, when it came to supporting Fedora releases past their lifecycle. In the openSUSE community, discussions of an "openSUSE LTS" or openSLES have surfaced frequently, but often to little effect. Many users are supportive of the idea, but finding the number of hands skilled enough and devoted enough to make it happen is not easy. Sending an email or opening a request is easy. Actually making it happen is difficult — but not impossible. Wolfgang Rosenauer has been pushing this idea forward with the Evergreen project, an effort to provide long term support for openSUSE releases. There does seem to be some momentum behind the effort and an actual repository for 11.1 updates in the openSUSE Build Service (OBS). openSUSE 11.1 technically went end of life December 31st, 2010 but Rosenauer noted that the updates hadn't closed yet as of January 7, 2011. It's unclear where the final repositories will land and when Evergreen will be able to offer updates by default. Unfortunately, the archives for the evergreen mailing list are open to subscribers only — but subscription is open and apparently unmoderated. At the moment it looks to be a handful of participants with Rosenauer doing much of the work. He has called for assistance, and noted: "I've seen basically people offering to test stuff... While that's important it's not enough to get this project flying. If it would be that easy the openSUSE Community (or even Novell) would do it already." While one wishes success to Rosenauer and the Evergreen contributors, and to those trying to run the Fedora Server SIG, at best they will create something that's largely redundant. Organizations that truly need long term server-suitable distributions can turn to RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu LTS, Debian, and CentOS, to name a few. There's little real practical need for repurposing Fedora or openSUSE as infrastructure distributions.
Brief items Distribution quotes of the week
Fedora, you know I love you, but I've been waiting for years for the
All-Star game to come to Raleigh. It'll be the first FUDCon on this
continent I will have missed, which feels pretty weird, I must admit - but
I'm sure you'll have a lovely time without me. And when you speak of me
over your beverages, please speak kindly. :)
-- Greg
DeKoenigsberg prioritizes.
Have you seen what I've seen lately? Wow! Pure confusion (and near hatred
on Unity), the "Ubuntu is a kernel" crowd not liking the "new direction",
the regulars who open with "I use Ubuntu" and then say "don't get me
wrong", and then spew forth about a dozen incorrect statements. And, the
guy who refuses to write about the session switcher. There's even one guy
that launches into how interfaces are controversial (referring to Unity),
then does the old "sleight of hand" trick substituting a quote from Linus
about kernel interfaces being tricky. Some malnews is nearly magic.
-- Randall Ross
Preferably by glaring at whoever created a source file with spaces in
the name until they fix it. Meanwhile, by using ? or *. I doubt this
will be a serious problem.
-- Lars Wirzenius
DEFT Linux 6 releasedDEFT Linux 6 is available. DEFT is "a very easy to use system that includes an excellent hardware detection and the best free and open source applications dedicated to incident response and computer forensics." It includes a long list of tools aimed at tracking down problems on Linux and Windows systems.
MeeGo 1.1 update 2 and MeeGo 1.0 update 6The MeeGo project has released updates for MeeGo v1.1 Core, Netbook and In-Vehicle, and for MeeGo v1.0 Core and Netbook. These updates fix security issues and other bugs.
Sci-ZyX-v0.6.0.3 and viros-0.7.2k110111The first beta release of Sci-ZyX is available. "Sci-ZyX is a VirOS produced, rebootlessly installable, descendent of Scientific Linux's 6rolling alpha(4)."
Distribution News Fedora Fedora board Recap 2011-01-10Click below for the minutes of the January 10 meeting of the Fedora board. Topics include board goals as well as FESCo and FAmSCo goals, status on CWG, and other board business.
SUSE Linux and openSUSE Reviewing the openSUSE Trademark GuidelinesThe openSUSE board has invited the community to review and comment on the openSUSE trademark guidelines. "As with anything in life, time gives perspective. There has been sufficient time since the implementation of the first guidelines to observe real use cases where the guidelines were either effective or ineffective. And for the Board, this includes identifying a more responsive workflow to addressing requests for authorization of usage, as we, and others, recognize the current process as being perfectible."
The openSUSE Board election 2010The openSUSE Board Election process started in December 2010, and voting is now open. There are seven candidates for two open seats. All openSUSE members whose membership is in good standing are eligible and encouraged to vote.
Newsletters and articles of interest Distribution newsletters
Oracle Q&A: A Refresher on Unbreakable Linux Kernel (Linux.com)Over at Linux.com, Jennifer Cloer talks with Oracle's Monica Kumar about its "Unbreakable Linux Kernel". Oracle provides the 2.6.32-based kernel as an alternative to run atop its RHEL 5 clone. "Kumar: Over the years, a number of Oracle developers have made significant contributions to Linux in the areas of clustering, data integrity, file systems, virtualization, asynchronous I/O, testing and more. Oracle's Linux development team is an integral part of the Linux community. Our team, working with the Linux community, understands how to make Linux even better in performance, scalability and reliability. Even the "optimized for Oracle" contributions can benefit all Linux distributions and any application that wants to take advantage of them."
Remnant: Leaving CanonicalWorth a read: Scott James Remnant's goodbye note to Canonical. "Ok, Mark wasn't really a Nigerian 419 scammer, but some people did discard his e-mail as spam! The job sounded interesting, and I was largely waiting for him to stop talking on the phone so I could say yes. Even better, he was going to pay me up front for the first couple of months because the company hadn't been formed yet let alone contracts signed and such. No, I didn't have to send him any money first to make the transaction happen."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol |
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