LWN: Comments on "Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10"

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

gvy — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 20:24:18 +0000

> And my default rule for swap anyway is (given that disk is cheap)
> is "twice max ram" which on my mobo is 32Gb.
So I should do 48G swap on an 1U server by that rule, and have done only 2G given 4G RAM. Ouch.

Did you consider multiple swap partitions, or emergency swap files (which aren't as nice as swap partitions/spindles but hey, if you need that much virtual memory actively you should go after more RAM)?

> People have been saying "the twice ram rule is obsolete" since before
> linux was born ...
I'm not to cry "prooflink!!11" but for 4, 8, 16, 32M RAM it was perfectly the rule. Somewhere near 64M RAM things became less apparent for desktop as working set more or less got into that plus 1x swap.

> then 2.4 proved they were wrong!
There were quite a few VM managers for 2.4.x, and at some time a bug has caused the "need" in 2x swap which is probably what you heard and recall when it was long fixed.

My main reasons for large swap these days are tmpfs for hasher package builds (with swap on 15kRPM SAS drives, and not heavily used -- rather "just to free up memory before having to clean up") and hiberation (where again, I have a hard time filling up RAM to get all of the RAM+VRAM+tinybit swap used by hibernation alone).

My, and probably yours either, main reason *not* to do uselessly large swaps is the time needed to write or read it all. If you're not going to wait for minutes, that is -- hdparm -t/-T will help to estimate both hard disk's and RAM read speed, and bc -l to turn that into full swap read time.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

nix — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 12:55:06 +0000

Well, it all depends on what you're using it for. On my desktop (a 12Gb Nehalem), I'm using twice RAM simply because I'm suspending to swap when not in use, and I'd rather like to find I can suspend even if I happen to have launched a monster 20Gb compilation, thank you very much. On the server holding my home directory, though, I don't bother: the machine runs good few VMs, so it has 24Gb RAM, and the max RAM on that motherboard is 128Gb. I'm not configuring 256Gb swap, thanks! I configured 24Gb swap and I think that was probably too much: I've never seen more than 6Gb in use.

The rule for swap is really 'configure as much as you need'. Swap partitions aren't much faster than swapfiles these days, so adding swap as needed isn't penalized anymore.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

robbe — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 10:26:03 +0000

> Unity (which is somewhat ironic, since Ubuntu is going it alone)

Well, that's basically the definition of it... oh, you didn't infer the mathematical meaning of unity? But still, it's easiest to attain unity if you are just one entity.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

AdamW — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 22:40:04 +0000

Fedora doesn't have any such thing. A Fedora release is just a Fedora release. There's no planned 'adventurous' and 'polishing' releases.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

Wol — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 10:07:50 +0000

I hope you haven't repeated the mistake in the SuSE partitioner ...

On a 2Gb ram machine it gave me a default 2Gb swap. This machine dual-boots gentoo, and I *need* 10Gb usable memory (to compile OOo). Would SuSE let me increase the size of the swap partition? No it wouldn't! Even shrinking another partition to make room it refused to give me more swap :-( It seems all are capped at whatever SuSE thinks is the best default, and all you can do is free up space, not reuse it elsewhere :-(

And my default rule for swap anyway is (given that disk is cheap) is "twice max ram" which on my mobo is 32Gb. People have been saying "the twice ram rule is obsolete" since before linux was born ... then 2.4 proved they were wrong! I haven't seen anything (yes I know there's been some major rewrite since then) that says the actual underlying algorithm has changed, so I still stick to the rule. If it still holds it means there's some (minor) performance hit if you have less ram.

Cheers,
Wol

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

elanthis — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 09:06:17 +0000

Or even better, what if you want the best UI you can get, instead of blindly avoiding everything Mac or Windows or whoever has done just because it's "boring."

Many ideas can use improvements, sure, but there's old adage about wheels and inventions...

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

mdz@debian.org — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 10:15:47 +0000

It gave me a chuckle (thanks, Zonker)

Ubuntu Font Family PPA

jspaleta — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 21:07:09 +0000

Define publication. I'm encourage to render screenshots but discouraged from sending a document to a printer?

If the fonts came with a EULA about what I was actually allowed to do and spelled what I was allowed and not allowed to do..fine. But there is no EULA on those fonts which is a lapse. It doesn't really matter what the license will be in the future or the intention to openly license it at some point. Right now I have no license under the terms of which I can _use_ the fonts even though I can obtain them and install them. Even proprietary licensed fonts come with EULAs which tell me what I can and cannot do with the software. This software doesn't provide any licensing terms at all which describe what is and is not allowed usage. That's a problem.

-jef

Ubuntu Font Family PPA

jmm82 — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 20:50:57 +0000

It really isn't that interesting and I think I have read the same debate here about 100 times. Yet, it is a good excuse to argue about trademarks/copyrights and that is enough for some people. Maybe I'm just being grumpy!

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

pjones — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:24:18 +0000

Fedora 14 is also road testing features for Multipath install, which is to say Storage Area Network (SAN) devices. Again, not something that will really appeal to the consumer desktop market, but important to larger organizations.

I think you've misunderstood the Fedora feature process here - which is all too easy to do, unfortunately. This "feature" has been removed from the Fedora 14 feature list. It's actually very functional in Fedora _13_ as shipped, and mostly unchanged in Fedora 14 as it will ship, but there are some lingering polish issues that are still on the TODO list: mostly kickstart work. This has kept me from declaring the feature to be finished.

Ubuntu Font Family PPA

DOT — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 13:56:38 +0000

While this is certainly an interesting theoretical debate, Canonical has said that the font will be released with a free license when they package it with Ubuntu. So feel free to beta-test it and make screenshots, and wait for the actual release before using it for publication.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

philipstorry — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 08:38:36 +0000

Whilst I'm not planning on selling anything through the App Store myself, I agree that we need to be able to buy and sell software more easily for Linux.

There is this nasty perception that Linux users don't - or worse, won't - buy software. And I think that's complete crap.

It's no doubt caused by a very vocal minority of people that genuinely won't buy software. But most users will happily pay a reasonable price for well-written software if they need or want it.

It's not helped by the fact that some of the attempts to sell software on Linux have been a bit naive - going after the FPS gaming market, for example. That just seemed premature.

Myself, I've bought software for Linux when I couldn't find an acceptable open source solution. So far, off the top of my head, that means I've bought VMware Professional (at the time VirtualBox's USB support was ropey), Bibble Pro (versions 4 and 5), LightZone, and others.

Some software projects just aren't really feasible for free software without significant support (i.e. Sun supporting VirtualBox) or a commercial revenue stream (i.e. Bibble Labs sometimes needs to buy new cameras to properly profile them). Hopefully, the community can recognise this and make it easier to be successful on the Linux platform.

In an ideal world, maybe we could also get a "Donate" button so that some GPL'd projects can do better too. I really like the idea of being able to install something and then donate to the project via the same software centre... Maybe a "recently installed" view which shows a Donate/Give Thanks button for projects that choose to participate?

Hmmm. Time to hit the Launchpad for the Software Centre and throw in a suggestion or two! :-)

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

cjwatson — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 22:21:55 +0000

Whichever you prefer.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

jspaleta — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:58:51 +0000

Credited to Ubuntu? Or Credited to Canonical?

-jef

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

mgedmin — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:35:58 +0000

What if I want a Mac, but with the freedom added back?

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

cjwatson — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:12:23 +0000

I'm afraid that isn't accurate.

The Ubuntu installer has always been based on the Debian installer ("d-i"), and given our heritage as a distribution it makes a lot of sense to take that route. While the version you see on Ubuntu desktop CDs has a customised frontend, much of the backend code is shared with d-i, and this is particularly so for the partitioner - partitioning code is sufficiently delicate that we have no desire to maintain two entirely separate versions of it!

d-i's partitioner is called partman, and it's been used in all versions of Debian since 2004 or so, and in all versions of Ubuntu. We have contributed extensively to d-i over the years, and I'm one of the primary developers of partman among other things. (I guess it isn't fashionable to regard Debian as an upstream or something, but in this case it certainly is.) Like many partitioners, partman uses libparted, one of whose maintainers indeed works for Red Hat.

If you select "Specify partitions manually (advanced)" in the current Ubuntu graphical partitioner, you'll get something that's essentially a graphical rendering of partman's dialogs (though there are a couple of features missing). I wrote that graphical frontend for Ubuntu, and it has not been changed much in 10.10. The big changes are in the automatic partitioner, whose job it is to supply a small number of clear common-case options; Michael Forrest gave us a new design for that, and Evan Dandrea implemented it. Those changes, the ones mentioned in the main article, can and should be credited to Ubuntu.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

rahulsundaram — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:30:51 +0000

Spice is a much more efficient replacement for RDP and VNC. Although it can be used as part of a thin client solution, it was designed for VDI. It was a proprietary protocol developed by Qumranet, original developers of KVM. Their business plan was to build a management layer on top of KVM and use spice to remotely manage Windows machines. Red Hat acquired Qumranet and recently open sourced Spice under GPL and now it will become part of the Fedora 14 release.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

drag — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:27:15 +0000

> Spice sounds like a re-implementation of the thin-client concept, except it's a remote thick client...

Yes.

> Seems to me like there are other technologies like LTSP or Citrix that accomplish similar things.

Not really.

It depends on your goals. Do you want to provide a bunch of people some GUI applications so they can get some work done? Then, sure, you can use LTSP.

Do you want to give your users access to a OS were they can have a set of applications and be able to set things up for themselves without your intervention? Do you want to allow them to use Windows in a thin client setup? Do you want them to have access to multiple operating systems?

Then you'll want to use KVM/Linux + Spice.

As KVM matures your gaining access to a lot of features like 'deduping' memory (so you can do something like run multiple copies of Windows from the same section of physical RAM). That way you can over commit resources to your virtual machine and economically provide multiple copies of the OS to a large number of end users on a large server machine. It's not as lightweight as doing containers or just going multiuser on a box and doing X networking, but it's not nearly as expensive as it once was.

Spice depends on paravirtualized drivers and KVM to create a GUI were you have some actually really good compresson over a network. Performance of it is much better then Microsoft's Rdesktop (RDP) or Citrix's ICA remote desktop protocols and will usually perform better then X11 networking.

It's very neat and is needed as corporations are now leaning much more towards virtualization + full desktop + remote GUI versus the old thin client scemes.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

rahulsundaram — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:25:31 +0000

You will probably find such major changes pretty much in every Fedora cycle. This is actually one of the quieter ones except for systemd.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

rgoates — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:21:38 +0000

Interesting that a reference to Iron Chef causes no comment. Must be quite a few Linux enthusiasts who are also foodies. Or wannabe foodies, like myself.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

Lukehasnoname — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:13:52 +0000

Quasi-off-topic:

Spice sounds like a re-implementation of the thin-client concept, except it's a remote thick client...

Seems to me like there are other technologies like LTSP or Citrix that accomplish similar things.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

amit — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:44:31 +0000

Fixed now, it shouldn't need enabling javascript anymore.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

Trelane — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:40:30 +0000

"Fedora is starting to find its niche with the early adopters of new linux technology, and Ubuntu's niche is more in making things user friendly (which is not to say that Fedora isn't user friendly, or that Ubuntu doesn't have cutting-edge tech, just that their focus is different)."

Not really. Basically, what you have is two distros that have a more ground-breaking release (I think Ubuntu's was in April), and then you have a few polishing releases where mostly they keep the underpinnings stable and polish things. Fedora is in the groundbreaking phase of their cycle; Ubuntu is in the polish phase. Intel calls it "tick" and "tock."

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

Trelane — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:37:56 +0000

So don't use it? parted and fdisk and whatever else you want are still there. There's just now a shinier partition editor too.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

sitaram — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:15:54 +0000

I clicked on that "Spice" link, and got sent to http://www.spice-space.org/noscript.html.

I've never seen an open source project do that. Enabling JS didn't show me anything that would *need* JS so it's doubly puzzling why they do this.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

RCL — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:07:49 +0000

Wow! That for purchase section is a great idea! I hope that by the time they introduce that I'll finish my "probing" app and see how it sells.

Let's build market around Linux, so "Linux developer" will no longer be understood among professional developers as "young amateur programmer with naive communist-like ideas" :/

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

xnox — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 07:43:17 +0000

No mention of MultiTouch for Ubuntu 10.10?

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Multitouch

Ubuntu Font Family PPA

jspaleta — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 04:49:43 +0000

Citing a ruling pertaining to a court case about physical typesetting equipment that predates the decision which extended copyright to software generally..seems a bit of a reach...and doesn't actually address the issue of what permitted use is in regard to the _software_ Canonical is providing "all rights reserved".

Even granting you that court case... the copyrightability of digital typography is even more complex than you realize. That court ruling basically makes typefaces uncopyrightable as artistic works in the US. But, because the US is a signatory of the Berne convention... US courts must uphold typography copyrights from other jurisdictions that allow then to be registered as artistic works... effectively mooting that ruling as other countries allow fonts to be copyrighted.

But regardless of that little nuance... none of that actually speaks to fonts as copyrightable pieces of software. Here's some more up-to-date reading that puts that ruling in context of software:
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/20050425novalis

If I had clear license to _use_ the font software and took a screenshot of that usage or printed a document from a computer program _using_ the font software...things would be fine. But there is no EULA that tells me what I am allowed to actually do with the font software such that I can take a screenshot or print a document rendered with the font software in use. Certainly installing and accessing font software with other software programs is not automatically fair use.

-jef

Ubuntu Font Family PPA

SEMW — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 03:30:24 +0000

> You are confusing trademark and copyright which is unfortunate.

I don't believe I am. A logo, being a creative work, is surely (disclaimer: IANAL) subject to copyright as well as being a trademark; and whilst it's arguable whether the Ubuntu & Fedora logos are complicated enough (being simple, solid colour, & geometrical) for copyright to apply, the Firefox logo certainly is. In the case of just the word "Fedora", where only trademark law applies, I did specifically say 'trademark' -- the example not being irrelevant because trademark law is also subject to fair use. In any case, the point -- that being that paranoid over IP leads nowhere, fast -- was framed in terms of Intellectual Property, which covers both.

And yes, certainly fonts are subject to copyright; I never implied otherwise. Perhaps I should have -- whilst they certainly are where I live (the UK), where they actually are or not in the US is up for debate: see, for example, Eltra Corp. v. Ringer. But even in jurisdictions where they definitely are subject to copyright, if you can point to a single case where a software screenshot or equivalent -- i.e. something where the font is used indirectly, not directly (so a photo with an open book in it, rather than a logo or the book itself) has been found to not be fair use -- I'll be very surprised.

Ubuntu Font Family PPA

jspaleta — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 02:53:20 +0000

You are confusing trademark and copyright which is unfortunate.

Fonts _do_ have copyright licenses associated with them. The permission to use a font typeface to render a static image can not be taken for granted as fair use in all cases. Fair use is at best situational and decided on a case-by-case basis.

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/tips/archives/2008/0...

-jef

Ubuntu wouldn't be where it is without Fedora

drag — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 01:54:18 +0000

If Fedora did not want Ubuntu to benefit from their work then they would of not released everything under a open source license. :)

Ubuntu Font Family PPA

SEMW — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 01:15:51 +0000

>Have I just violated Canonical's copyrights on the fonts?

No more, surely, than you would have done so anyway, due to that Ubuntu logo visible in the screenshot (or in your case, the Fedora logo -- copyright Red Hat). And, of course, Mozilla's -- that darned Firefox icon in the panel. And, probably, several dozen anonymous icon designers who haven't explicitly released their work under a Free license. And, oh dear, I seem to have violated Red Hat's trademark myself, by publishing (in this comment) the word "Fedora" without the ® symbol or the words "Fedora and the Infinity design logo are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc.", as I am required to do by their trademark guidelines. Not to mention....

Etc, etc, etc. Being that paranoid over IP leads nowhere, fast. And whilst IANAL, I was under the impression that these sort of uses are more than covered by Fair Use in the USA, and its equivalent in other jurisdictions.

Ubuntu wouldn't be where it is without Fedora

sladen — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:42:50 +0000

It is wonderful when everyone works (cooperatively) together, be it Fedora users finding bugs in Upstart, or Ubuntu users finding bugs in ext4 and g-p-m; and the same for Gentoo, Debian, Suse, Mandriva, ....

"Ubuntu wouldn't be where it is without Fedora"

This is precisely the concept of Ubuntu (philosophy); no man is an island: we are each where we are because of each other, and would not be there without them.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

ewan — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 23:57:28 +0000

Sometimes I think Ubuntu should use Fedora as its upstream.

In large part they do, just not directly. As well as Ubuntu benefiting from the extensive testing that new software gets in Fedora considerably before it makes it into Ubuntu, Fedora's 'upstream first' approach means that a lot of Fedora and Red Hat work is done directly in upstream projects, from whence it flows into Ubuntu, either directly or via Debian.

It's safe to say that Ubuntu wouldn't be where it is without Fedora's contributions.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

Lennie — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 23:16:36 +0000

I guess they are trying to take elements from existing systems that seems useful to them (as in: user friendly, etc.).

When you want to see what the result is when people start to just blindly copy what Apple is doing, you should have a look at this project:

http://www.elementary-project.com/
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/tag/elementary/
http://elementary-project.com/news/

Maybe it just seems that way from a far.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

mitchskin — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 23:12:44 +0000

...Ubuntu's focus largely on refining improvements from 10.04 and Fedora introducing major changes to the infrastructure

Sometimes I think Ubuntu should use Fedora as its upstream. Fedora is starting to find its niche with the early adopters of new linux technology, and Ubuntu's niche is more in making things user friendly (which is not to say that Fedora isn't user friendly, or that Ubuntu doesn't have cutting-edge tech, just that their focus is different).

Right now, those two goals of user friendliness and new technology are pretty closely aligned, because the linux desktop world is undergoing a lot of development; the best thing to do for users is to get the latest, best technology to them quickly. As things mature, though, those two goals will diverge more and more. It'll be less important for Ubuntu to rev every six months, and the goal of making things easy for users will lead them toward more conservative choices for infrastructure.

Shuttleworth has talked about wanting to coordinate release cycles, but of course it's possible to go further and share very large chunk of the stack, if he wants to.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

jengelh — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 22:34:40 +0000

>The partitioner has also been simplified, and has a positively Mac-like feel.

If I /wanted/ Mac, I'd gotten Mac already. Doing it like someone else does is boring.

(You may also try: s{Mac}{Apple products}, s{Mac}{MacOS and its interfaces} and s{Mac}{Mac-ish hardware}.)

Correction?

lool — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 22:33:44 +0000

Yes, you're correct; Ubuntu didn't ship a Netbook version based on Moblin; there were versions based on Moblin 1 and Moblin 2, but Moblin was used in neither Ubuntu Netbook Remix nor in Ubuntu Netbook Edition releases.

Looking at Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10

busterb — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 22:27:11 +0000

Looks like it's part of ubiquity:

https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-installer

Here's the code for it:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-installer/ubiquity/tr...

Ubuntu 10.10

mrjk — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 22:26:50 +0000

Anecdote wise Ubuntu 10.10 solved a lot of nagging problems that I had to make workarounds for in 10.4 and before. Things like basic gestures working from the get go on my Sony laptop, and sound working without putting in a little program at startup. This release feels a lot more solid for my use (but still jello-like in places! what positive value does gwibber provide again?).