Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules [LWN.net]

Many Fedora users are anxiously waiting for the Fedora Core 5 release, scheduled for Monday, March 20. Be warned that some of you may have to wait a little longer, however: the kernel shipped with FC5 effectively disallows the loading of any non-GPL modules. That behavior was a mistake, and a fix has already been made, but it is too late to get that fix into the initial FC5 release. So binary module users will want to wait until the first errata kernel is released (a few days, at most) before upgrading.

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Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 16, 2006 15:43 UTC (Thu) by fenrus (guest, #31654) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe the binary module makers will see this as the second shot for the bow...

Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 16, 2006 15:52 UTC (Thu) by dvrabel (guest, #9500) [Link]

The expression is "a shot across the bow", with bow referring to the pointy end of a ship. i.e., a warning shot.

It appears a simple oversight to me, rather than a deliberate attempt to make binary modules awkward to use. It does however illustrate nicely one of the drawbacks of binary modules -- they aren't tested for compatibility by some major distributions.

Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 16, 2006 15:47 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (11 responses)

It's pretty much a given that Fedora is constantly broken in one fashion or another, even at release time. That's possibly the single largest reason I switched to Ubuntu. Despite my extreme dislike for Debian based OSes, at least with Ubuntu I didn't feel like I was nothing more than Red Hat's guinea pig.

I really miss the days of Red Hat Linux, when we had a stable and supported OS for hobbyists and home users from Red Hat.

Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 16, 2006 16:41 UTC (Thu) by rhiensch (guest, #15396) [Link] (4 responses)

Come on, you have to choose between stability or the latest greatest.
stability means proven technology (which needs time to prove) and this in contradiction with "to-day"
May be you are the same guy who blame Red Hat that they didn't come up with the latest in the past.
I think http://centos.org/ is yours.

Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 16, 2006 20:16 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (3 responses)

Come on, you have to choose between stability or the latest greatest.

No, you don't; it's not an "all or nothing" proposition.

As a former Red Hat user, I also miss the non-enterprise Red Hat releases. They struck a nice balance between stability and newness. Fedora seems not to, which is why I switched to Ubuntu.

Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 16, 2006 21:35 UTC (Thu) by dvandeun (guest, #24273) [Link] (2 responses)

Indeed a distribution can very well be conservative for its base system (kernel, gcc, glibc, X, ...) but provide up-to-date applications.

My desktop systems run slackware-current (i.e. the development branch): the system as a whole is quite conservative and very stable, but I'm always using the very newest KDE desktop.

Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 17, 2006 5:19 UTC (Fri) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (1 responses)

I use Slackware -current as well, but you paint too rosy a picture. It is
a development branch, and things do break occasionally. It might actually
be okay to run as a server, because the core does stay pretty stable, but
GUI-centric things frequently break. For example, a few weeks ago,
ImageMagick broke completely. That is a critical program for me, and I
had to hunt down libraries that were removed by an X server upgrade to get
it working again.

Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 17, 2006 11:42 UTC (Fri) by dvandeun (guest, #24273) [Link]

The point that I was trying to make was that *even* the development branch never breaks in a big way. But no conservative approach can avoid breaking things at all in a development branch, of course.

Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 16, 2006 20:52 UTC (Thu) by HappyCamp (guest, #29230) [Link] (3 responses)

It's pretty much a given that every distribution is constantly broken, unless you can point me to a distribution that has zero defects/bugs :)

I started out using Red Hat Linux and have been using Fedora Core. I have noticed a few issues here and there but nothing that has made me want to switch distributions.

I guess it is to each their own.

Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 17, 2006 0:36 UTC (Fri) by hawk (guest, #3195) [Link]

I think the whole point was that Fedora is much more experimental than RHL ever was.

I'm not truly into RedHat, but from what I've seen and heard I don't think anyone is saying that Fedora has to be absolutely bug free or that RHL was absolutely bug free.
What seems to be a central part of the complaints, however, is that Fedora implements experimental things that don't necessarily make sense to roll out at that stage if the goal really was to make Fedora as good as possible. (Hence "RHEL's guinea pig".)

Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 17, 2006 6:53 UTC (Fri) by wolfrider (guest, #3105) [Link] (1 responses)

Ever heard of Debian STABLE? :P

Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 17, 2006 7:22 UTC (Fri) by HappyCamp (guest, #29230) [Link]

Which of course does NOT have zero defects/bugs :)

Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 19, 2006 23:56 UTC (Sun) by hescominsoon (guest, #36575) [Link]

you can use one fo the RHEL rebuilds. You get the relative stability of RHEL with the community of a fedora. I personally use Centos.

Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 20, 2006 17:44 UTC (Mon) by bogado (guest, #36601) [Link]

I went to ubuntu after reading so much good reviews about it. And while I found it very good, if your need are those of the bundled set of features it stinks when you want to develop and lack the knowledge on debian systems.

First you have to install a compiler, so far so good the ubuntu site has a FAQ about it and with a single command you're there. But then when you start using the compiler you discover that you have to install every single development library by hand, in fedora you choose "gnome-development" in the installation and voila you have all the devel libraries you need for gnome-development. Ubuntu don't seem to have this choice, or if it have it is not easy to find.

Well, after a few days of happily using ubuntu I discovered that I don't have the man pages for the Xt* functions. I research the ubuntu site and discover a bug for this, it turns out the developer forgot to pack them. Well it is only human to forget and I understand that, but the solution description in the bug makes me very anoyed "fixed in Dapper". So this means that I have to wait until the next release of the distribution to get a simple fix to a "I forgot to package some man pages" bug??? Oh come on, fixing this bug is not going to afect any other part of the system, and it is very anoying to people that need those man pages, as I do (unfortunaly I may add).

So after a few other problems involving installing development packages with the "great apt-get and dpkg" (irony indented) I am going back to fedora, at least they do fix their bugs in a timely fashion. :-P I still like ubuntu, and I am going to install it for a friend that wants to test linux, since he is not a developer, and have more basic needs I think ubuntu will be just the distribution for him. :-)

Why isn't 5 days enough to fix it?

Posted Mar 16, 2006 16:05 UTC (Thu) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (5 responses)

The message is dated March 15. The release date is March 20. Does it take 5 days to push the distro to the mirrors? Or is Fedora busy printing disks? Isn't a community based distribution supposed to have a shorter turnaround time for the bugs? This is one of the bugs that should be fixed quickly - it's in a package that everyone uses, and the fix is simple, straightforward and well understood.

I have no problems with being Fedora's guinea pig as long as the experiment results are not discarded or delayed beyond reasonable time.

Why isn't 5 days enough to fix it?

Posted Mar 16, 2006 16:52 UTC (Thu) by jreiser (subscriber, #11027) [Link] (4 responses)

Yes, it does take 5 days to perform a clean build+check of 4500 packages, then push 27GB to each of the 250 mirrors. Approximately: (x86 + x86_64 + ppc) * (CD + DVD) * (3GB Core binary + 1GB Extras binary) + (2.5GB Core source + 0.5GB Extras source).

Why isn't 5 days enough to fix it?

Posted Mar 16, 2006 22:29 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (3 responses)

Well, I'd say that other distributions do not rebuild the whole archive with itself immediately before releasing, probably because they don't need to -- there are better ways to ensure binary sanity.

If Fedora *wants* to do this exercise of their build system, fine. Their choice. Other distributions might decide that fixing problems which crop up at the last minute (and impact a nontrivial number of users) are slightly more important.

Why isn't 5 days enough to fix it?

Posted Mar 17, 2006 8:00 UTC (Fri) by fenrus (guest, #31654) [Link] (2 responses)

several people claim "huge impact" of this bug.. but that's overstated. The workaround for the nvidia driver for example is 3 lines of C. Yawn.
Hardly critical at all.

Why isn't 5 days enough to fix it?

Posted Mar 17, 2006 8:41 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

That's exactly my point.

Three lines of code. Yawn.

Affecting a whole lot of people. Not-so-yawn.

Rebuilding everything in the distribution because of a three-line fix like this one (if that's in fact what's going on -- I'm using Ubuntu -- their release process definitely does NOT work that way) makes ... slightly less than no sense whatsoever.

Why isn't 5 days enough to fix it?

Posted Mar 17, 2006 15:16 UTC (Fri) by fenrus (guest, #31654) [Link]

three lines of code *IN THE NVIDIA DRIVER*.

which Fedora obviously doesn't ship (for legal and open source reasons)

Network install overdue

Posted Mar 16, 2006 21:50 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (9 responses)

This reminds me of a complaint I've had for some time about the way Fedora does releases. Instead of giving everyone one CD (or a fraction of one CD) that has the base system, installs it, and then uses yum to retreive the latest versions of each package from the net, the Fedora project tells everyone to download four CDs, or a DVD ISO via BitTorrent, 80% of which consists of packages that the user will not install. This is a massive waste of bandwidth, especially when we have packages of signficant size that are already known to be broken before the first ship date. I recently installed Fedora Core 4 on a new machine, and yum needed to download more than a gigabyte of packages to update the system. Almost every large package had been replaced: the kernel, X, almost all of Gnome, OpenOffice, Firefox, and hundreds of other packages. Almost everything I installed from the CD was a waste of time. It also places an unnecessary hurdle in front of people who would like to try out Fedora.

I don't criticize Fedora for updating their packages frequently; this is a good thing. But Fedora could take a lesson from Debian: provide a small install image; install what you need (and only what you need) from the net. And since the consumers of ISOs, under this regime, will be those with limited access, it's not OK if the ISOs get to the point where half the packages need upgrades. It is then time to do a stable point release, as Debian does, and produce new ISOs that have the bug fixes included.

Network install overdue

Posted Mar 16, 2006 21:52 UTC (Thu) by fenrus (guest, #31654) [Link]

that is in progress; Fedora Core 5 is a big step in that direction actually (the installer is now YUM based).

The next step is in FC6 to use network sources (you can already do FTP and HTTP installs of course, but that's not the same) and "application CDs" for lack of a better word (think "openoffice.org CD" "KDE CD" "GNOME CD" )

Network install overdue

Posted Mar 16, 2006 22:16 UTC (Thu) by kornak (guest, #17589) [Link] (2 responses)

There is a contradiction in your complaint. If Fedora provided a smaller
initial installation, how would that decrease the network update? It would
increase as you would be downloading more packages. There is a certain
balance now as most of what people are looking for is included on the
CD/DVD. If they remove these packages everyone would have to do a massive
update on each installation.

Network install overdue

Posted Mar 17, 2006 3:08 UTC (Fri) by proski (guest, #104) [Link]

It depends. If the distro is downloaded for just one installation, any unused package on CD is wasted bandwidth, and every downloaded package is downloaded just once. If the CD is going to be shared, then indeed, every package on CD is downloaded once, but the extra packages will be downloaded more than once.

Network install overdue

Posted Mar 18, 2006 1:44 UTC (Sat) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

The bandwidth saved is that the ISOs are not downloaded in the first place; the current version of each package needed is downloaded only once (except for those packages that are in the base install).

After a working system is configured, then of course the bandwidth needed to keep it current is just the same.

Network install overdue

Posted Mar 17, 2006 11:20 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

Network install has existed for every release of Fedora and many years before that for Red Hat Linux. Refer to the installation guide before complaining that the feature doesnt exist

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedora-install-guide-en/

Moreever a minimal installation only requires 1 CD and a desktop installation only requires 2 CD's

Network install overdue

Posted Mar 17, 2006 13:26 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] (3 responses)

Please check Fedora's download instructions, under the header "Download the files you need" there are four ISOs.

Yes, it has been possible to install systems over a network for years, but as far as I know you will still have to download the images first, so you can set up a repository. ;-)

Network install overdue

Posted Mar 17, 2006 13:30 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

Incorrect. For example, FC4 has boot and rescue images in this folder

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/4...

The boot image is just 6 MB.

Network install overdue

Posted Mar 18, 2006 1:42 UTC (Sat) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (1 responses)

Sorry, the download instructions do not tell users how to do a minimal install; they tell everyone, clearly, to download 4 CD ISOs. Yes, I know that it is possible. But the bandwidth waste is because people follow directions.

Network install overdue

Posted Mar 18, 2006 10:34 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

The directions are specified in the installation guide. So if you follow directions, you already know of many Anaconda capabalities.

Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 17, 2006 5:29 UTC (Fri) by charris (guest, #13263) [Link] (2 responses)

Thanks for the warning,

I have now removed kernel version 2054 before it can drive me nuts -- I can just imagine the hours of frustration if I had rebooted yesterday. A few more days of waiting isn't going to hurt. I have had generally few frustrations with Fedora outside of multimedia, persistent sound problems in FC3, and SELinux messing up the file systems for use with some other distros. Does anybody know if there is a way to turn off SELinux *and* clean up the filesystems?

Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 17, 2006 21:56 UTC (Fri) by kornak (guest, #17589) [Link] (1 responses)

In the boot menu, append at the end of the kernel line like so...

title Fedora Core 3 disk0...
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-... rhgb quiet selinux=0

This will turn off selinux.

If you want to re-label the filesystem contexts manually so selinux will
not burp the next time, you can use the command "fixfiles". Check the
man page for options.

Fedora core 5 will (temporarily) break non-GPL modules

Posted Mar 20, 2006 18:06 UTC (Mon) by Lobais (guest, #36605) [Link]

Or just run system-config-securitylevel, press "disable selinux" and reboot.