Submitted by “Paul Frields is new to Red Hat, but he’s not new to the Fedora Linux community. Frields became the Fedora project leader and a Red Hat employee at the beginning of February. Previously Frields was a US government employee and a contributor to the Fedora community for more than four years. Frields takes over at a pivotal time for Fedora as it gears up for its next major release, Fedora 9. A feature freeze is currently set for March 4, and Frields is already ready to chat about where Fedora is heading.”
I hope fedora gets it. I am using ubuntu and NEVER had a single problem with my hardware (asus a7n266vm)
Every feodra release I had lockups right in the boot itself. Feodra 8 lockup up in starting udev/usb(?something i dont recall).
Also I dont like their default themes (bluecurve?).
Couldnt change the mac address of LAN card due to some security issues in feodra.
Although I had setup a mail server for a company on fedora 4 long time back and it was great.
Its a good option for people, but they need to get on the cooler side and win the techie crowd if they want to regain the old glory of redhat.
Have you ever filed bug reports? These problems aren’t going to get fixed unless reported and tracked by developers
Default theme has been changed from BlueCurve long back. You might want to try a recent release of Fedora.
Edited 2008-02-29 15:19 UTC
Alot of people seem to have had the exact opposite experience. Many had severe issues with ubuntu’s last release (packman hard drive, my network card (intel 3945abg) on my toshiba not recognized). Please try to be informative and list specific issues or links to bug reports so people take you seriously and not just scoff it off as another fan boy trying to put down the other distro. I’m not the only one cautious of these posts.
Fedora isn’t bug free by any stretch but I’d just like to know the bugs you supposedly came across are valid or fixed.
Fedora is by far the most innovative distro out there so you’d expect bugs but its surprisingly stable for the most part. The issues i had tend to be with yum cause ALOT of rapid dev has been going on here so things are in a constant state of flux. but it appears the foundation is set now and the changes will be mostly incremental from here on out cutting the bugs down hopefully. (whats up with yum updatesd!)everythings locked all the time we all disable it.
I think the main problem with Yum updates is the fact that its not multithreaded. I could be wrong as I am not a big coder but it acts like it is a single thread (including the Gui) getting hung up waiting for stuff to download. The cli version works like a charm.
I think you are basically right about the lack of threading. Once I fire up yum I can’t interrupt it. Sometimes I will have to kill yum and then remove the locked file to get it running again. On the bright side, Fedora 9 supports delta RPMs so only changed files are downloaded, reducing download times. Overall I am pretty happy with Fedora 8 right now. Pulseaudio sometimes bugs me. I can’t figure out why the audio makes a popping sound when the volume goes down to zero. It offers nice features but also creates new hassles and has increased overhead. It should be interesting to see how the Ubuntu folks react to it when it is pushed mainstream.
Edited 2008-02-29 23:09 UTC
You hope Fedora “gets it”?
You do realize that any such bug that you are describing would relate to either the kernel itself, or a patch for the kernel that Fedora has added?
There is also bugs in the Ubuntu kernel that is non-existant on the Fedora kernel. Does that mean Ubuntu also needs to “get it”?
The Fedora kernels are bleeding edge and uses the latest vanilla kernels coupled with tons of bugfixes by Redhat and others. If the bug that solves your problem is upstream it will be in the latest Fedora kernel. If not, you should report this bug so that someone can make it upstream. Or it will never get fixed.
In any case, you can’t possibly judge the whole Fedora distrubution by this one issue that doesn’t work for you.
I realize not all users are very tech savvie, but for heaven’s sake, at least try the distribution on some different hardware and get it booted up before you make your verdict… Sheesh…
Edited 2008-03-01 14:21 UTC
Gets… what?
While I am happy the you seem to have found a suitable distribution that works on your hardware without any issues, I should point out that unless you take the time to report this problem, it will not get fixed.
Far worse, Fedora might be using some new(er) patch/fix/update/etc that doesn’t agree with your hardware and this patch/etc might just find its way to next version/update of Ubuntu, making it just as unstable as Fedora is. (on your hardware)
In short, I’d suggest you file a bug report.
Bluecurve was replaced -looooong- ago.
Never the less, look-and-feel is customizable. Dismissing a distribution simply because you don’t like it’s default theme is, well, weird. (at least in my view)
For the record, I’m using a (heavily) customized KDE desktop on all my Fedora (and some RHEL/CentOS) machines.
[quote]Couldnt change the mac address of LAN card due to some security issues in feodra.[/quote]
Again, how, when, where, but report?
For the record, I’m using “customized” MAC addresses on a fairly large number of machines.
[quote]Although I had setup a mail server for a company on fedora 4 long time back and it was great.[/quote]
I’d think twice before setting up a production server using Fedora. Fedora is bleeding edge and has a fairly short (13 month) support cycle.
I’d use RHEL (or CentOS if I don’t have a budget) instead.
Cooler side?
I was under the impression that most people consider Fedora far-too-technical and nerd-oriented.
Other then that, your comment is -far- too general. What exactly do -you- consider cool? Are you certain that these “techies” (what-ever that means) share the same need for “coolness” as you?
– Gilboa
Fedora actually does a pretty reasonable job of maintaining stability, considering the *absolutely huge* patch volume they push through the updates channel. (About 1000 update packages per month!) I run production servers on both Fedora and CentOS, depending upon which makes more sense for the situation. Sometimes, one actually ends up sufferring with a bug for much *longer* with RHEL/CentOS than with Fedora. On a RHEL 4.x system, fuser -n is broken, and has been for years:
[root@farpoint ~]# fuser -n tcp 22
here: 22
22/tcp: 3606
[root@farpoint ~]# fuser -n tcp 222
here: 222
I reported it a long time ago. The decided not to fix it. I don’t mean that they just ignored my report. They actually decided deliberately *not* to fix it. I guess they felt that fixing it would be too destabilizing.
Presumably, it’s fixed in 5.0/5.1. But I’m not sure.
It has worked for a long time in Fedora.
On the other hand, I have had more Fedora bugs which get reported and then ignored than with RHEL.
All in all, I’m moving more toward Fedora for production. It’s a mixed bag, either way. And at least with Fedora software, and the bugs, are shiny and new. 😉
The FreeIPA stuff sounds really interesting. The lack of this kinds of tools have hold Linux back for a long time.
Yes, it is true that there have been openldap, and that sudo, dhcp, key storage for ssh have been able to use LDAP for a very long time. The problem is that there haven’t been any way of setting it all up that looked remotely attractive to a windows admin that wanted to move from AD to Linux.
It is first with, the introduction of fedora-ds that we have got an easy to use LDAP server, and that have not even been part most Linux distros. But even with a good GUI fedora-ds is still a directory server that requires a lot of knowledge to integrate with other parts of the system. Hopefully, FreeIPA will do the trick in that respect, even though I think there are more things should be managable centrally. One such thing would be central management of gconf-keys in Gnome
Speaking of Gnome, this feels just as big as when Ubuntu? did their first distro that didn’t have their program menu filled with 10 different programs of each kind, but instead selected a few good ones that worked well together, and by doing so created a professional looking Linux desktop that we now see on most distros, including Fedora.
Another thing that makes me long for Fedora 9 is the new Gnomve GVFS. Finally Gnome will have something that can compete with the elegance of KDE kioslaves. Using KDE have been like sitting in front of Internet while using Gnome have been like sitting in front of the computer. Now, with Gnome 2.22, users will hopfully both sit in front of the Internet, and enjoy the clean usable interface of Gnome.
“I hope fedora gets it.”
i don’t even know what that means.
“Also I dont like their default themes (bluecurve?).”
i think bluecurve disappeared in what, fedora core 2? and an ubuntu user saying they don’t like fedora’s theme is pretty rich – or do you like that brown mess?
“Couldnt change the mac address of LAN card due to some security issues in feodra.”
disable selinux?
“they need to get on the cooler side and win the techie crowd if they want to regain the old glory of redhat.”
the real techies do still use fedora – because its the most bleeding edge distro and will eventually end up rolled back into redhat. ubuntu is for beginners.
Edited 2008-03-01 21:43 UTC
And face the scorn of a community which will condemn your action as being inexcusable, and assert that you are just stupid and lazy, while advising that you should spend your days fighting the fires with setroubleshoot rather than getting real work done.
For servers facing the Internet, SELinux can be a useful tool. But for most machines the best use of time is, indeed, to turn it off as you suggest.
A. Scorn of the community? Which community? Where? Care to elaborate? (As opposed to spewing random allegations?)
B. Fedora is, among other things, about security-out-of-the-box and SELinux is a big part of that. SELinux is -vastly- more important to desktop users them what most people seem to believe. Vulnerabilities will be found and exploited by virus/work/root-kit writers – there nothing to be done about it; But when such vulnerability is found, the only thing standing between the exploit and your precious data/root account/etc is SELinux – nothing else.
C. Fedora is a -community- project. Assuming that all the bugs (SELinux or others) will somehow be magically fixed if you (as a member of community) don’t take the time to report them is absurd (and I’m being -very- polite).
D. If you’re still not convinced and you do not feel inclined to do anything to improve the situation (by, say, helping to improve SELinux) – I’d suggest you stay clear of Fedora. Really, nobody is forcing you.
For the record, I’ve got a (large) number of Fedora/CentOS/RHEL machines (I’m a software developer) – all of them with SELinux enabled in enforcing mode. While I have encountered a number of SELinux-related bugs/policy-issues, most of them were fixed within days (if not hours) of the bug report.
Granted, YMMV, but by the tone of your post (and I may be incorrect in reading it) I’d venture and guess that never really tried to help -the developers- help you.
P.S. I’d suggest you read RedHat’s 3 years with RHEL 4 report. [1]
– Gilboa
[1] http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/02/26/risk-report-three-years-of…
See? An SELinux fan has just gone into attack mode as a result of my suggestion to turn it off. Didn’t take long, either. Are you seriously going to argue that when the topic of disabling SELinux comes up, people (like you, apparently) come out of the woodwork to scream that doing so it wrong? Simply peruse most any thread in which turning off SELinux is suggested.
Untrue. nx, exec-shield, and other less intrusive measures have been around for a long time. SELinux is just one of many measures. And it happens to be more intrusive, problematic, and (overly) complex than the others, including AppArmor. (Not that I’m necessarily advocating AppArmor, either.)
Really? I suggest that turning off SELinux is often appropriate, and you accuse me of being too lazy to help out with the community project. I’d hardly call that being polite. But thanks for making my original point for me… by showing your *scorn*.
More scorn.
Oh, I like Fedora, alright. And RHL before that, back to about 4.1. But I simply do the reasonable thing, and turn off SELinux where appropriate, and go on. It’s just too bad that people get so bent out of shape over the idea of *other people* doing so.
Hmmm. It occurs to me that my post, above, probably comes across as more confrontational than I had actually intended.
Starting from Fedora 6, disabling SELinux is no longer an excuse because tools to diagnose the problem and report them are available, that method is the last resort.
I could safely rest my case now. But I will point out that utilities like lpadmin fail silently, claiming to have created a printer without actually doing it, as late as RHEL5. The “created” printer even works… until the next reboot, at which point no evidence remains that it ever existed. Turning off SELinux fixes the problem. It’s that sort of inexplicable time-waster that leaves me skeptical.
And why should anyone be required to provide you, or anyone else, an explanation for administering their own machines the way they see fit?
Edited 2008-03-02 02:45 UTC
Have you submitted a bug report about that problem? As an administrator of RHEL5 for this example, maybe you should contact the technical support Even the best administration will need help and the biggest mistake IMHO is to keep the problem for oneself.
I knew you were going to ask that. No. I did not waste my own and others’ time filing a bug against an ill-conceived package. I’d rather they be working on useful things. And that is where I prefer to spend my own time, as well. Which is to say that I have wasted as much time on this thread as makes any sense.
I wonder why you conveniently forgot to quote your original text.
Let me assist you:
As I’m not in the habit of feeding trolls, forgive me if I ignore the rest of your comment.
– Gilboa
Edited 2008-03-02 07:35 UTC