LWN: Comments on "The Amazing Fedora Core 4!"

The Amazing Fedora Core 4!

jstAusr — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:28:23 +0000

Thanks anyway, but Debian already has everything you need and alot more. You just need to learn how to use it. Its very easy if you are willing to put in a little effort.

The Amazing Fedora Core 4!

vonbrand — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 15:48:53 +0000

Playing MP3s requires paying for a licence for patented CODECs. Can't be done on a free (as in beer) distribution. Besides, Red Hat (and Fedora) pledge distributing only open source, so...

The Amazing Fedora Core 4!

sbergman27 — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 02:22:24 +0000

Fedora is actually pretty stable.

My question is whether Debian will ever be comparable to Fedora, providing bleeding edge packages with security updates, too. (What other distro could ever get away with not providing security updates to its most popular releases?)

By the way, if you want a slower (but predictable) release cycle (unlike the total unpredictability of Debian) and you want it in a free, community supported form, check out Centos 4.1.

The Amazing Fedora Core 4!

jwboyer — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 01:52:56 +0000

Oh, and XMMS is no longer in Fedora Core. It's in Fedora Extras though.

The Amazing Fedora Core 4!

jwboyer — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 01:51:44 +0000

Nope. And the project hasn't transitioned to a Fedora Foundation as of yet.

The Amazing Fedora Core 4!

beoba — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 15:31:08 +0000

Now that the project is more independant of Redhat, does XMMS play MP3's?

The Amazing Fedora Core 4!

jamesh — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 07:34:45 +0000

Both distros come with a working desktop. However, both distros lack out of the box support for patent encumbered media codecs (which is pretty much a given if you want to put out a free of charge distro).

As far as staying up to date, both distros come out at roughly 6 month intervals, so one is likely to be more up to date than the other at any one time but never by more than 6 months. You won't generally see new versions of packages being added to an existing version of the distro -- only security updates and critical bug fixes. If you really need bleeding edge packages, both distros have corresponding development distros, so you can track the development of the next stable release.

If you need stuff outside of the main distribution, Fedora provides a "Fedora Extras" repository and Ubuntu has a "universe" repository. Universe is larger than Extras, which could be a deciding factor.

The other differences are in details like package management system (apt vs. yum), system config tools (gnome-system-tools vs. system-config-*) and some distro specific customisations.

The Amazing Fedora Core 4!

dkite — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 05:40:10 +0000

Honest opinion needed.

How does Fedora compare to Ubuntu? Do I need to build or install
unsupported packages to get a working desktop box?

I see that KDE is supported. Does Fedora keep up to date with new
releases?

I'm having the rather uncomfortable experience of binary distributions
after a borked gentoo install needed to be replaced in a few hours. Are
they all this bad?

Derek (the gentoo install was three years old and like all three year
olds needed a bit of cleaning up)

PPC, oh yeah

rqosa — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 03:44:48 +0000

> never at what looked to me like an competitive price compared to x86. Are you saying that's changing?

Terra Soft offers a "blade" server made by IBM which appears to cost less than the Apple Xserve. I'm not sure how this compares to x86 blade servers.

Also, in Terra Soft's announcement, they claimed that "Things are already in motion to enable a world of greater Power Architecture diversity." (If I remember correctly, around winter of 2002/2003, they had announced that they would sell the MAI Teron CX mainboard, also known as AmigaOne SE, but they didn't follow through on that.)

PPC, oh yeah

rankincj — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 22:04:56 +0000

Good thing, too. All those PPC MACs can now become fully-fledged Linux machines ;-).

The Amazing Fedora Core 4!

dmarti — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 19:45:33 +0000

Sweet. OO.o 2.0 and Eclipse in an all-Free-Software distribution. Happy, happy, joy joy!

PPC, oh yeah

gnb — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 19:42:07 +0000

There have been third party PPC motherboards around for ages (pegasos
etc.) but never at what looked to me like an competitive price compared
to x86. Are you saying that's changing? Interesting if so.

The Amazing Fedora Core 4!

peace — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 19:15:59 +0000

Many thanks and congradulations to the Fedora team! Between Ubuntu and Fedora it has become much easier to spread Linux to interested newbies.

Also, Fedora has absolutely the best release announcements, they make me smile :-)

PPC, oh yeah

alan — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 18:58:05 +0000

um er, if you look around, you might notice that there are some third party ppc hardware vendors out there that are testing the market. Since the first wave is of a limited supply, I'm keeping mum until I purchase mine :o)

The Amazing Fedora Core 4!

sbergman27 — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 18:17:01 +0000

I'm on the Fedora-Devel list and there is talk of extending future release cycles to 9 months or so. Sounds like a good idea to me.

I don't see this as a particularly radical release. Not like FC2 and the switch to the 2.6 kernel.

And this is a very late spring release for Fedora/Redhat. Over seven months.

I'm expecting pretty good stability. And with the creation of the Fedora Foundation, I suspect that the timing of the dropping of support for "old" releases might be more user oriented, and less RedHat oriented. (As in "Don't drop support for FC(n-2) a month or two before the release of FC(n)".)

BTW, that last is not really a dig at RH. Just a constructive criticism. :-)

The Amazing Fedora Core 4!

jstAusr — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 18:10:25 +0000

Will Fedora ever become comparable to Debian, with bleeding-edge options and stable options as well? Perhaps Fedora could support a few more packages as well.

PPC, oh yeah

dberkholz — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 17:34:38 +0000

Sweet! They got PowerPC support just in time for Apple to drop it!

The Amazing Fedora Core 4!

b7j0c — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 16:50:16 +0000

Congrats, hope it is stable, lots of changes to key packages. Glad to see Fedora become a true community project, there's room for a bleeding-edge distro managed by the community. Will be interested to see how Extras shapes up.