“Several months ago, the Fedora Board (in consultation with Red Hat Engineering) decided to increase the length of time that Fedora releases are supported, in terms of updates. This decision was retroactively applied to Fedora Core 5, allowing it to remain a fully maintained release for several months longer than it would have under the old policy. Fedora Core 5 will reach its end of life for updates on Friday June 29th, 2007.”
The original announcement has a little more details
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2007-May/msg000…
I wish OSNews refers to official sources of information when available and waits till the projects does release announcements instead of linking to some random website or mirror.
Usually, I do, indeed. But I just got back from 12hrs of work at university, so now I are confused.
Hmm, Fedora 5 was released on March 20, 2006. It will be EOF’ed after 14 months of existence. That’s NOT ok.
Personnaly, I don’t care: I always install the newest release when it comes out. However, I know alot of people who HATE reinstalling/upgrading because they have no time to do it and they simply cannot take the chance to break their system.
I know someone who still use a pre-Sarge version of Debian because moving to a newer version of Linux/GCC/etc would break half of his setup. Hopefully, he’s using Debian.
I clearly understand that maintening old versions is hard and boring but in the ‘nix world, there’s no hurry to upgrade. After all, most software we use were written 20 years ago so why do we need to upgrade? New version of Gnome/KDE? Not really useful when all you need is xterm/emacs/vim/whatever 😉
On the one hand, I agree. I’m writing this on a Fedora Core 5.
On the other hand, I’ll bet the vast majority of people using Fedora Core 5, like myself, didn’t pay one red cent for it. In that case, if we want a maintained version, we ought to contribute something, like perhaps maintaining it ourselves.
If no one’s willing to work on it, then it won’t get maintained.
Which is how marketplace dynamics work in the real world and why Fedora Legacy is no longer around. There were not enough people willing to volunteer their time and energy to providing longer term support to FC releases.
Frankly, I thought that FL was a bad idea from the start and took both human and financial resources away from FC itself.
It drives me crazy when people use Fedora, knowing the rapid pace of development philosophy behind it and then complain about the fact that it is not supported for years.
There are literally hundreds of Linux distros out there and as we all note, choice is a good thing. Make an informed decision.
If you want a (b)leading edge distro, then understand the pros and cons of that choice. If you are willing to accept them, then Fedora is a great distro and for you. I am on FC6 (soon F7), having used RH distros since RH 8.0.
If you want a distro that will be ‘stable’ and supported for years, then Fedora isn’t for you or your company. Use RH or CentOS.
Edited 2007-05-03 19:15
In fairness, it’s a case of using the right tool for the right job. Fedora never claimed to be a platform optimized for long term, stable deployments; I remember back when I jumped back into linux with FC3, it wasn’t even recommended for any sort of production use, it’s bleeding edge nature was what attracted me to it as a re-entry point.
If all you need is xterm/emacs/vim/whatever and value stability, then really, Fedora isn’t the ideal distro. Debian stable is ideally suited to that sort of situation, or even CentOS if you want to stay in the RH fold.
It’s also a question of perceived need; the Fedora legacy project (I believe that was the name) was intended to provide longer term support for older releases, but simply failed to generate enough interest. I just don’t think that’s Fedora’s target market.
I found Fedora Core 5 perfect fit for my ageing computers
and Fedora 6 added new features that I didn’t really want
so I’ll stick with “Five” even if it was officially “dead”.
The latest is not always the greatest ( at least on old hardware) and most likely successor on my machines will be Vector 5.8 SOHO which I’m running right now on 5oo MHz Pentium III Dell Optiplex and not FC 6 neither FC 7.
uname -a
Linux vector 2.6.20.7 #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Apr 20 00:27:21 MDT 2007 i686 peni386 GNU/Linux
I maintain Linux systems for a few people. Most of them just want things to work, and don’t want things to change to much when part of the system is upgraded. (Because too many changes means too much relearning.) Obviously you cannot get that with Fedora, so I won’t bother giving them that. So they lose them as users.
On the other hand I, as their maintainer, don’t want to use something radically different from what they are using (again, more time spent learning differences). They don’t want to use something different from me either, because they know that will mean that I’m less effective at providing them support. So they lose me as a user as well.
Now me and my friends may not count for much to the Fedora developers. I’m fine with that. But I would like to point out that if you turn away enough users there will be noone left to use it and no future generation developers to maintain it. (This, in my opinion, is what happened to the BSDs and is happening to Debian. If you aren’t responsive, you lose favour.)
A distro can’t be everything to everyone.
You have to pick a target market and stick to it.
I am a firm believer in Pareto’s 80/20 Rule. Develop your product or service to address the needs of 80% of your target. If you try to meet the needs of the other 20%, you will go bankrupt.
If we lose people because of the design approach behind Fedora, that’s fine. They are probably folks that should not have used Fedora in the first place. And…importantly, they probably wouldn’t be Ubuntu users either.
As I noted above with respect to FL, you can’t have it both ways. There are not enough resources.
Debian is in trouble because they were at the other end of the spectrum. Their philosophy was “it will be ready when it is ready and not before”. They were way behind the development curve relative to today’s marketplace. In that respect, they were not addressing the needs of the majority of their potential user base.
In response to that vacuum we have Fedora and Ubuntu.
Ever hear about Ubuntu LTS (Long term support) that is supported 3 years on the desktop and 5 for server.
Yes indeed. So what’s your point?
Ubuntu LTS is to Ubuntu as RHEL/CentOS is to Fedora.
The premise underlying my points is still valid.
“(This, in my opinion, is what happened to the BSDs and is happening to Debian. If you aren’t responsive, you lose favour.)”
Who’s losing what..?
Nonsense, you just didn’t seem to have had yourself informed of what the purpose of Fedora is. Shouldn’t you have done that when you decided to install it for other people?
I think an upgrade once a year is not that shocking. Plus, there is CentOS now. Should feel very familiar to a Fedora user.
Millions are using Fedora and most of them think the new installation is a tiny sacrifice for a brand new system with lots of new stuff every (half) year.
Don’t worry about the BSDs. Quality will always find its way on people’s pcs. And Debian, isn’t that that system that the supposedly most popular desktop Linux distribution is based on?
If you want a better Fedora, do take it for what it is, and contribute if you like. Criticism of Fedora (which it *does* need, if only to stay sharp) should be addressed to the things that Fedora is about, such as innovation, making a lighter and faster booting system, security, increased (GUI) consistency, removing annoying bugs, stable virtualisation, better bug reporting system, improved performance of Yum, quality packaging, etc. etc.
I got into then out of Fedora at FC4 and FC5, and yes there was a lot to like about it. The GUI was great and I liked how it packaged up software (I’m of the opinion that Debian based distributions are too fine grained). But let’s get a couple of things straight here: goals like faster booting and improved performance of yum are a direct consequence of sluggishness of yum and the rather long boots of earlier times. And I will have a very hard time supporting the notion that Fedora is about security or fixing bugs when the support cycle is under 2 years. That means fewer bug fixes and fewer security patches for products that are on the market.
As for upgrading every year not being shocking, well, I’m sure that the over 80% of the market who use Windows and Mac OS X would disagree with that. The computer obsessive, like you and I, may like frequent upgrades because it gives us new toys. To those for whom the computer is a tool, it is far more of an annoyance.
Choice 1 is to pay money to get very long term support. This is Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Choice 2 is to have a decent leading edge distro, but be expected to upgrade once a year (generally you can skip one release, so you can do FC4->FC6->… or FC5->F7…).
Choice 3 is to take someone else’s version of RHEL, namely Centos. You get roughly the RHEL bits (minus some artwork and branding) without the Red Hat support, but you’ll get the security upgrades for basically the lifetime of the RHEL release.
Some people are complaining because there isn’t a choice 4: keep any old Fedora release and get support, security coverage, etc. Sorry, but there aren’t resources to do that, either from Red Hat or from volunteers. If you want to pick a distro and leave it untouched for years (other than security fixes), and you don’t have money to pay for RHEL, and you otherwise like Fedora, then you want Centos.
I have been using Fedora 7 since Test 2 and it is smooth. I am running Test 4 right now to write this. Gnome, XFCE4 are running smoothly. HAL is correctly mounting and unmounting flash drives which show up on the desktop as expected. If I was using Fedora 5 I would probably upgrade to Fedora 7 when the stable build is released. It is really pretty sweet. I even tried the Xen virtualization. It was easy. I just inserted the XP disc and followed the GUI instructions. It took a load of RAM though and appeared too taxing for my older system so I went back to a dual boot Fedora/XP.
Edited 2007-05-04 00:34
The whole point of Fedora is that it’s bleeding edge stuff, that will get into RHEL in about two years!
Why use a distro that’s know for its fast turnaround if you don’t want to upgrade at least annually?
Use CentOS if you want RedHat-like but free and longlife, otherwise push off and use Ubuntu like the other fanboys. You could always go back to Windows and its six year lifecycle where the whole thing goes stagnant, and people complain about that.
I like to stick to the odd versions of Fedora, so my FC5 boxes will all be getting upgraded to F7, as I didn’t think much of FC6. I’m not complaining, it’s about time for an upgrade.
I didn’t think much of FC6. I’m not complaining, it’s about time for an upgrade.
It is nice to see less complaining and just a simple reason for what you like to do. If there was less complaining in general on the web it would be a nicer place to visit.