Looking forward to Fedora 7

[Posted January 10, 2007 by corbet]

LWN readers will, by now, be well familiar with the fact that the Fedora universe is changing. There will be no more Fedora Core releases, and the repository known as Fedora Extras is going away. In their place will be a combined distribution known simply as Fedora, with the next release being called Fedora 7. The Fedora community is busily trying to figure out just what that release is going to look like.

Bill Nottingham posted a discussion document on January 4. It keeps the previously-discussed schedule, with the first test release happening on January 30 and general availability of Fedora 7 on April 26. There's a long list of objectives for this release, some of which are:

Improving the speed of the boot and shutdown processes. "While Xerxes appreciates that he can grab a cup of coffee while waiting for his Fedora system to boot, it becomes annoying when he is not actually thirsty." There are a number of ideas on how this speedup can be effected, none of which appear to involve switching to Upstart. There is talk of replacing init, but nobody appears to own that task currently; it seems unlikely to happen for Fedora 7.
CodecBuddy - a recognition that not all content can currently be found in free formats. The idea is that the software would detect an attempt to play a file in an unsupported format and respond with an educational session on why free formats are better. Should the user not respond by immediately deleting all MP3 files, CodecBuddy will offer a pointer to available codecs whenever Red Hat Legal allows.
Encrypted filesystem support, though which encryption technology will be used has not been decided yet.
Fast user switching - being able to move between different accounts while retaining the current desktop status of each. Making this feature work in a secure and robust way is not trivial.
The creation of a desktop "spin" of the distribution. That leads to a few related issues - see below.
Firewire support that actually works. "Requires rewriting the kernel firewire stack. No biggie."
Support for the KVM virtualization API. KVM appears to be the future of Linux virtualization, so distributions will need to pick it up. What will happen to Xen support is unclear; Xen is unpopular with some of the Fedora folks, but is high on the Red Hat list.
Support for the new parallel ATA drivers, moving away from the old IDE subsystem. The PATA drivers are an improvement, but they will cause drives to be renamed, leading to potential system chaos. Fedora systems have used the mount-by-label feature for some time, so most installed systems should handle the change without trouble.
The addition of Nouveau, the reverse-engineered NVidia driver. Whether this driver will be ready by the time Fedora 7 needs it remains to be seen, however.
Speeding up Yum and RPM. That, alone, should justify the cost of an upgrade to Fedora 7.

There's much more on the list, but the above should be enough to give a sense for what is going on. The Fedora developers would like to improve their distribution in a number of significant ways, and in a very short period of time.

Most of the desired changes are uncontroversial. The creation of a desktop version of the distribution, however, has been the subject of a fair amount of discussion. The Fedora distribution has traditionally been fairly strongly tied to the GNOME desktop. As Fedora tries to expand its community, though, there is a stronger set of voices calling for support of a KDE version of Fedora as well. Nobody seems to oppose that idea, but there is still a shortage of consensus on how it should be done.

As often seems to happen in community discussions, the Fedora developers have gotten hung up on a relatively unimportant issue: naming. Current plans call for the GNOME-based version of the distribution to be named "Fedora Desktop," while the KDE-based version would be "Fedora KDE." The KDE users, who were under the impression that they had a desktop too, think that this naming goes against the idea of KDE being an equal citizen. Others claim that "Fedora Desktop" is meant to be a combination of the "best of breed" desktop software, most of which just happens to come from the GNOME project. They hold out the possibility of a separate "Fedora GNOME" version for GNOME purists; it would feature tools like AbiWord, Gnumeric, and Epiphany, which currently have failed to qualify for the "best of breed" designation. This idea doesn't seem to make the KDE community feel much better.

Jeff Spaleta has posted a call for peace on this issue, saying:

But more importantly in the near term. the fact that there is going to be a KDE spin is a fundamentally important step in terms of opening the process for community involvement. How about we, as engaged and proactive community members, focus on making the technical side of that happen. Whether the Desktop spin is called the Desktop spin or the 'Office Professional Workforce of Doom' spin its trivially unimportant compared to helping Rex get the KDE spin out the door.

On the technical side, the biggest disagreement would appear to be over whether Firefox should be included. There has also been some discussion of OpenOffice.org and Evolution. In each case, there seems to be some tension between a "pure" KDE system and a desire to include applications that some users are likely to want. Since the unwanted presence (or absence) of any of these tools is relatively easy to correct after installation, one assumes that a solution will be found that everybody is able to live with.

This kind of discussion is not new in the free software community, but it is relatively new to Fedora. As this distribution opens up and accepts more input from outside of Red Hat, there is no doubt that it will get more opinions as well. How these newcomers are accommodated will have a big effect on how successful a more community-oriented Fedora will be. We should see some concrete signs of how well the community is working sometime around late April.

to post comments

Encrypted filesystem support

Posted Jan 11, 2007 7:28 UTC (Thu) by fyodor (guest, #3481) [Link] (1 responses)

Encrypted filesystem support, though which encryption technology will be used has not been decided yet.

I think they mostly mean encrypted root filesystem support here, or maybe they want to add better admin tools. But I've been encrypting non-root filesystems with Fedora for ages, and it is pretty easy. Simply dedicate a hard drive partition (or use a file with loopback) for this, then run 'cryptsetup' to create an encrypted mapping of that partition in /dev/mapper. Then format it with your preferred filesystem (e.g. use mke2fs) and then you are ready to 'mount' it. Here are more detailed instructions.

-Fyodor
Insecure.Org

Encrypted filesystem support

Posted Jan 11, 2007 21:32 UTC (Thu) by Shin (guest, #5731) [Link]

EncFS (http://arg0.net/wiki/encfs/intro2) is also nice, and while not "better", has some advantages for me:
- very easy to setup
- no need to pre-allocate space
- easy to backup
- integration with PAM if you want (ie - log in and your 'vault' is automatically open)

I think a 'vault' folder that is easy for users to use and setup and is automatically opened upon login can be very useful (especially on laptops).

Preparing for a libre java world in Fedora 7

Posted Jan 11, 2007 10:15 UTC (Thu) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]

There are also some interesting plans to make Fedora a top-notch libre-java platform, even before the whole openjdk roll-out (which would be to late for Fedora 7) with full 1.5 language, tools and library support through eclipse, gcj and gnu classpath: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.java/19...

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 11, 2007 10:28 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link] (8 responses)

The naming discussion seems a bit silly. I'm personally running Kubuntu and I honestly don't think the name is that great, but I don't really care - it works pretty well for me and gets better all the time.

Instead of complaining about the name, they should just name the Fedora KDE version something silly like "Fedora Ultimate Edition" or "Fedora for Life, the Universe and Everything" :)

Furthermore, if I was working on a KDE distro, I would probably work on a distro that is actually interested in KDE like Kubuntu or OpenSuse. Redhat/Fedora have always seemed very focused on GNOME.

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 11, 2007 10:52 UTC (Thu) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link] (7 responses)

But not everyone wants to support Novell by contributing to OpenSUSE, and
there's growing concern about the gap between what the Ubuntu developers
say and what they do on matters like Freedom. A distribution with the
principles of Fedora backed by the development resources of RedHat is a
very attractive proposition; if only they can fix the second class status
of KDE.

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 11, 2007 11:24 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link] (3 responses)

That is of course true.

I'm not personally that concerned about Ubuntu in regards to freedom. They seem to have a practical approach to things, similar to Linus Torvalds and I really like that. I'm not saying that I like binary drivers - not at all, my own laptop was bought with Intel graphics specifically because I try to avoid closed source drivers as much as possible.

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 11, 2007 13:39 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (2 responses)

well, yes, Ubuntu has a more practical, linus-like approach to Free
Software, as opposed to Red Hat/Fedora which is much more strict. i think
it's good there is a choice, as some ppl respect and prefer the Red-Hat
way of dealing with the problems - as opposed to hiding them from the user
by workarounds like automatic non-free codec download or even including
proprietary software.

and as KDE user, i'd love to see Fedora have a decent KDE, as it is really
quite terrible now...

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 11, 2007 14:04 UTC (Thu) by jprenaud (guest, #24040) [Link]

Honestly, it is not that bad if you use the kde-redhat repository maintained by Rex Dieter. I came from Kubuntu on a laptop to FC6 on a desktop system with KDE chosen as the desktop at install and although Kubuntu offer all the system tools with QT widgets, the KDE desktop on Fedora works well for me.

Please voice your issues about the current state of the KDE desktop in FC6 + kde-redhat repo so that they have a chance to be considered for Fedora 7.

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 11, 2007 14:15 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link]

Certainly - choice is great, it's one of the great things about open source software :)

"...as opposed to hiding them from the user by workarounds like automatic non-free codec download or even including proprietary software."

I don't think Ubuntu does that and from what I've read, they don't intend to do it that way either.

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 12, 2007 1:22 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (2 responses)

You know, making KDE a "first class citizen" in Fedora-land is in your hands: Get in touch with the people working towards "Fedora KDE", and chip in.

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 12, 2007 8:35 UTC (Fri) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link]

I don't use Fedora, so I don't see why I should start working on making KDE better there?

Yes, I'm fully aware that the people doing this is doing it for free and if I want something, I should just make it happen myself, but I'm a bit tired of that comment because that is just not an option in many cases.
I do regularly donate to various projects to support the developers, but that's not my point. The problem is that when people get that comment thrown in their face everytime they comment on a piece of open source software, they get tired of it too and the result is that they get a bad experience with open source software.

Looking forward to Fedora 7

Posted Jan 13, 2007 13:28 UTC (Sat) by tlw (guest, #31237) [Link]

> You know, making KDE a "first class citizen" in
> Fedora-land is in your hands

Agreed, and very well said.

As it turns out my window environment of choice happens to be fvwm2, which RedHat/Fedora stopped providing RPMs for many releases ago. Did that make me stop using RedHat/Fedora and seek out another distro that provided it for me? Or did it make me whine in public? No. Getting fvwm2 is a simple matter of downloading, configuring, compiling, and installing the program from source. What's that?... 4 steps instead of 1?

Honestly I can't believe how some people have become so helpless. If someone doesn't provide an icon to click on, it doesn't get done. When I hear people complaining about this it almost makes me think there are no free compilers available anymore.

Maybe in the 1990's or early 2000's compiling source code was a bit of an art and almost required someone to be a developer to get it to work... but nowadays? And especially something like fvwm2 (or KDE for that matter).

Ahh... the good ol' days... when compiling from source was considered fun and almost a requirement... :-)

Xen, KVM management tools in Fedora

Posted Jan 11, 2007 13:19 UTC (Thu) by danpb (subscriber, #4831) [Link]

> Support for the KVM virtualization API. KVM appears to be the
> future of Linux virtualization, so distributions will need to
> pick it up. What will happen to Xen support is unclear; Xen is
> unpopular with some of the Fedora folks, but is high on the Red
> Hat list.

With the pace of development in the area of virtualization, it is looking
increasingly like Linux is going to be (blessed?) with many different
virt solutions (some in tree, some out of tree) for the long term.

Since each project has its own approach to management, this could have a
negative impact for system administrators / software developers. To avoid
this problem, in Fedora the goal is for all primary management tools to
use the libvirt API (http://libvirt.org). This library provides a simple
management API which is agnostic to the different virtualization
technologies. In Fedora Core 6, this supported management of Xen virtual
machines. In Fedora 7, the goal is to additionally support QEMU & KVM
virtual machines. This will allow a single set of management tools (eg
Virtual Machine Manager http://virt-manager.et.redhat.com) to be used
with Xen, QEMU & KVM.

So in the short term, Xen & KVM ought to be able to happily co-exist in
Fedora 7, letting people can pick & choose whichever works best for their
needs.

Firewire

Posted Jan 11, 2007 14:15 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link] (3 responses)

LWN coverage of the Firewire issues would be interesting ...

Firewire

Posted Jan 11, 2007 15:30 UTC (Thu) by wingo (guest, #26929) [Link]

I second this motion :) The @redhat.com fellow implementing a different stack, the proposals for a sane permissions/security infrastructure, the status of firewire audio interfaces -- these are all interesting to me.

Firewire - not a biggy

Posted Jan 19, 2007 10:23 UTC (Fri) by alext (guest, #7589) [Link] (1 responses)

What struck me is if rewriting the stack is no biggy why wasn't it got right in the first place?

Firewire - not a biggy

Posted Jan 28, 2007 21:24 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

That was meant to be humorous. In reality, it is a lot of work that a Red Hat developer had to do.

Why not use Upstart?

Posted Jan 11, 2007 16:07 UTC (Thu) by DancingProg (guest, #4816) [Link] (4 responses)

Upstart looks really great to me. What am I missing?

Why not use Upstart?

Posted Jan 11, 2007 16:45 UTC (Thu) by eklitzke (subscriber, #36426) [Link] (3 responses)

I second this! I am primarily a Fedora user, but I had Ubuntu installed as well, and I have been really impressed by upstart. Not only is the booting speed incredible, but I think the idea of an event based init system is a really great one, and if Fedora were to adopt upstart it would go a long way toward making upstart a standard.

Why not use Upstart?

Posted Jan 11, 2007 16:56 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

If you have Edgy installed, the boot speed, which is quite good, is not due to Upstart at all. Upstart currently uses regular old sysvinit scripts.

What you are observing is the simple steps that Ubuntu has taken to trim the cruft from the sysvinit scripts. The Upstart goodness comes later... perhaps in the next release. Perhaps in the one after that.

Why not use Upstart?

Posted Jan 11, 2007 17:30 UTC (Thu) by jonabbey (guest, #2736) [Link] (1 responses)

Boy, it sure would be sweet to see an LWN.net article comparing upstart, launchd, and etc.. ;-)

Why not use Upstart?

Posted Jan 15, 2007 9:10 UTC (Mon) by JohnNilsson (guest, #41242) [Link]

Don't miss runit. This is the system I'm most intrigued by, I really like the the djb way of doing things.