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A look at Fedora Core 1
With the first stable release of the Fedora Core scheduled for early next week,
we thought we'd take a look at the final test
release to
see what users could expect from Fedora.
This release ("Severn") looks and feels like recent Red Hat releases, which is not entirely surprising. The default desktop is still GNOME with Metacity as the window manager. For the most part, if you're familiar with the Red Hat 9 release, Fedora will contain few surprises. The installation procedure is mostly the same as Red Hat 9, though users now have a few additional install options. Fedora 0.95 includes the ability to perform a graphical install via FTP, HTTP and the ability to perform an install via VNC. We installed the Severn release on two machines to see how well it fared. On one machine we installed the "Server" package set, and performed a "Custom" install on the second machine. The entire install took less than thirty minutes on an Athlon 2600+ XP machine with 1 GB of RAM, and about forty-five minutes on an Athlon 1GHz machine with 1 GB of RAM. The only real glitch we encountered was that Severn had a little trouble setting up the Matrox G450 dual-head video card. Though it offered the option of performing a dual-head setup that spanned both monitors, it kept producing a cloned display. A quick hand-edit of our XF86Config file solved the problem. The firewall configuration during installation is somewhat simpler than the configuration that was present in Red Hat 9. Red Hat 9 offered "High," "Medium," and "No Firewall." The option with Fedora is to turn the firewall on or off. The user is also able to specify specific ports that should be passed through the firewall. The installer offers the options of passing through SSH, HTTP, FTP, Telnet, SMTP or specifying their own protocol that can be passed through. Though it's a small thing, one also notices a difference in attitude during the installation. Instead of seeing Red Hat promotions during the install, the user is told that Fedora has a new graphical boot feature ("Who understood all that text scrolling by anyway?") and is encouraged to sign up for Fedora user and developer lists ("Hey! It's better than spam!"). There is a full list of packages for Severn test 3 release here. It may change slightly for the final release. Most of the packages have been updated since Red Hat 9, of course, but the package list hasn't changed that much. One new inclusion in Fedora is Yum, an APT-like package installer/updater. Yum is not installed by default, but it is included on the Severn CDs. Yum has a command set similar to apt-get. One striking difference, however, is when using "yum check-update" to retrieve information on changed packages. The apt-get update command simply retrieves an index file for each package repository, which is fairly fast. Yum, on the other hand, retrieves RPM header information for every installed RPM, which can be very time-consuming. Some packages have not made the cut from Red Hat 9 to Fedora. The LPRng print system is no longer supported or included with Fedora. CUPS is now the official, and only, print spooler for Red Hat/Fedora systems. According to the Fedora 0.95 release notes, LPRng will be replaced by CUPS even if the user decides to upgrade an existing Red Hat system with Fedora. Galeon is out, replaced by Epiphany. Users no longer have the option of using the LILO bootloader. Pine has been kicked due to licensing issues and "long-term maintenance concerns." Zebra has been replaced by the Quagga Routing Suite, and Tripwire has been removed as well. Another interesting change is the inclusion of the Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL). The Severn release ships with a 2.4.22 kernel with NPTL replacing the user-space LinuxThreads implementation. This means that some applications, notably Sun's Java Runtime Environment (JRE) prior to 1.4.1 and IBM's JRE will have issues. For applications that need the old implementation, there is a workaround described in the release notes. The Fedora kernel also includes "exec shield," a kernel patch that we covered last May. By default exec shield is turned on for programs that are "marked" for this functionality. For the Fedora release, this pretty much means that the program needs to have been built with the Fedora toolchain. Fedora Core 1 is still very much a Red Hat product, even if the "Red Hat Linux" name has been filed off. There has not, as yet, been time for a true development community to form; traffic on the Fedora mailing lists is tiny relative to those of, say, Debian or Mandrake's Cooker. So it is hard to guess what Fedora will look like in the future. But, if Fedora 0.95 is any indication, the first "stable" release looks to be shaping up well. If all goes as planned, Fedora Core 1.0 will be released on Monday, November 3. (Log in to post comments)
window manager Posted Oct 30, 2003 1:55 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] quote: "GNOME with Metacity as the window manager."what exactly is the point of throwing on the Metacity as the WM bit? It's GNOME, Metacity is the GNOME WM, simple. We don't say KDE with the KWM window manager. ;-)
window manager Posted Oct 30, 2003 2:28 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] Not quite. There is no such thing as "the GNOME window manager". Metacity is just one of many window managers that have good GNOME support. Others are Enlightenment, Sawfish and IceWM.From http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/metacity/: Metacity is a window manager that integrates nicely with GNOME 2. Originally an experiment, it's now turning out to be halfway usable and lots of people are using it, though there are still some caveats - be sure to read the README.It's very different from KDE, where the window manager is an integral part of the project, even though it can be replaced.
Re: window manager Posted Oct 30, 2003 15:10 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] So lets see
What exactly is the difference?
Re: window manager Posted Oct 30, 2003 16:59 UTC (Thu) by sideshow (guest, #2791) [Link] The difference is that the "default" window manager for GNOME has changed in the past (from sawmill/sawfish) and may be different in different distributions (I think someone still ships sawfish as the default). It's worth noting with GNOME rather than KDE because AFAIK noone ships anything other than kwm as the window manager for KDE.
Re: window manager Posted Oct 31, 2003 5:06 UTC (Fri) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] Gnome, as distributed from ftp.gnome.org ships with metacity. A third party is free to make modifications to what they distribute, in accordance with the licenses on the various packages. I am simply stating that an unmodified Gnome ships with Metacity, the same way KDE ships with kwm. Both Gnome and KDE have rewritten and replaced components of their respective desktops over the years. However, the switch to Metacity as the default is not something new for Gnome (it happened in 2.2), or Red Hat/Fedora (they were using Metacity in RH8).
A few minor nits Posted Oct 30, 2003 3:08 UTC (Thu) by LinuxLobbyist (guest, #6541) [Link] ...and the ability to perform an install via VNC.This capability was also available in Red Hat Linux 9. There is, I believe, at least one new option to this feature. You can now specify 'linux vnc -connect 192.168.0.1' at the 'boot:' prompt and the installer will connect to host 192.168.0.1 if you are running 'vncviewer -listen' on it. ...Yum is not installed by default, but it is included on the Severn CDs....Yum, on the other hand, retrieves RPM header information for every installed RPM, which can be very time-consuming.Yes, it is true that yum has a definite performance disadvantage compared to apt-get (for rpm). And it's not installed by default. However, it should be noted that you don't actually need the yum client. Red Hat's up2date client now has native support for yum repositories. Zebra has been replaced by the Quagga Routing Suite...Quagga is actually a branch of Zebra that was started, I believe, due to the lack of activity of Zebra development. Same basic code, new name. Another interesting change is the inclusion of the Native POSIX Thread Library (NPTL).Uh, where did this come from? NPTL is not a change in Fedora at all; it's been part of Red Hat Linux 9 since it's initial release. The only other thing I'd note would be to run up2date after the initial install as there have been a huge number of updates since Fedora Core 1 Test 3 came out. But, on the other hand, why bother: release is coming in only a few short days. ...traffic on the Fedora mailing lists is tiny relative to those of, say, Debian or Mandrake's Cooker.Not a nit, but...Yowza, is that really true?! How does anyone on those lists keep up? Are you refering to just the fedora-list? If so, I'd say that the explaination is that that list is for discussion about released versions of Fedora for which none yet exist. I'm on all four lists (fedora-test-list, fedora-list, fedora-doc-list, and fedora-devel-list) and the total messages I've received since July 22 is over 13,000 which is averages nearly 150 messages per day.
A few minor nits Posted Oct 30, 2003 9:49 UTC (Thu) by dvrabel (guest, #9500) [Link] "Quagga is actually a branch of Zebra..." It's an interesting choice of name. The quagga is an extinct subspecies of the plains zebra (much like how the Zebra router suite is kind of extinct) but research is underway to recreate the quagga via selective breeding.
Networking and Zoology Posted Oct 31, 2003 1:44 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] I'm impressed. How many networking engineers are up on their extinct species of African wildlife?
A look at Fedora Core 1 Posted Oct 30, 2003 4:36 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] FWIW, Red Hat (public) betas have always had funny stuff where the promotional messages go in the final release.
A look at Fedora Core 1 Posted Oct 30, 2003 9:08 UTC (Thu) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] One striking difference, however, is when using "yum check-update" to retrieve information on changed packages. The apt-get update command simply retrieves an index file for each package repository, which is fairly fast. Yum, on the other hand, retrieves RPM header information for every installed RPM, which can be very time-consuming. Yum retrieves headers for every non-installed rpm (the headers for the installed rpms are already availible). This is time-consuming the first time the command is run but fairly fast from the second use on.
Shame about Pine Posted Oct 30, 2003 10:46 UTC (Thu) by alspnost (guest, #2763) [Link] Most of the package changes seem reasonable, but it's a shame Pine has gone. I know it's easy to install it yourself from elsewhere, but Pine strikes me as quite an important package for gurus, as it's a popular non-GUI mailer. Oh well, not the end of the world, but sometimes, Red Hat's licensing paranoia does actually hamper the functionality of the product.
Shame about Pine Posted Oct 30, 2003 13:22 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] Red Hat's licensing paranoiaAs far as I know, Debian doesn't include pine in the distro either (at least in binary form) - so it's probably not a paranoia (or not Red Hat is not the only one who got infected :-).
Shame about Pine Posted Oct 30, 2003 14:11 UTC (Thu) by leonid (guest, #4891) [Link] but Pine strikes me as quite an important package for gurusWell, AFAIR, according to statistics of Linux Kernel Mailing List, most of those gurus run Mutt. Actually, it's been a long time since I've seen a guru running Pine, but that maybe is just me. :)
Shame about Pine Posted Oct 30, 2003 14:37 UTC (Thu) by jamesm (guest, #2273) [Link] Well, some guy called Linus is still using pine :-)
Shame about Pine Posted Oct 30, 2003 16:48 UTC (Thu) by LinuxLobbyist (guest, #6541) [Link] Actually, there is a GPLed replacement for pine called cone written by the author of courier-mta. It'll probably show up in a future release of Fedora Core. It is supposedly a workalike (but is still a work-in-progress, AFAIK).
Re: Shame about Pine Posted Oct 31, 2003 3:15 UTC (Fri) by X-Nc (guest, #1661) [Link] Yeah, I must say that pine will be misses. I've tried to switch to mutt but it's just to funky. The beauty of pine is that it can do all the zillion things that any other MUA can but the interface is clean and very easy to use.
Re: Shame about Pine Posted Oct 31, 2003 7:28 UTC (Fri) by set (guest, #4788) [Link] The first time I tried mutt, I didnt care for it. Whatever thedefault settings were, I found ugly, and I was used to pine. Then pine proved to be too slow at opening mailboxes with a thousand or so messages in. I re-examined mutt, and found that it is massively configurable. Starting with a config that mimiced pines interface, I organicly started to grow and modify my own interface, eg. adding vi style navigation. Mutt powers through mailboxes with 30k+ emails no problem, has powerful regex support at all levels, and I wouldnt go back for the world. Of course, my interface is so personalized that I cant claim any knowlege of a "mutt user interface", except how to alter it to suit my needs. A friend of mine was also a long time pine user, and after sharing my .muttrc, he quickly and easily moved over... (this looks too much like a mua war troll, but I really only started it to indicate that transitioning to mutt can be easier than it may initially appear.;)
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