Some review of Fedora 7. First, eWeek concludes: “We were impressed to see how amenable to customization this popular Linux-based operating system has grown.” Linux.com also reviews Fedora 7. “Fedora 7 was released last week, a little bit behind schedule, with a spate of new features, updates, and live CD installable “spins” of Fedora in KDE and GNOME flavors. I found a lot of good in this release, but a bug in the FireWire stack that attacked my external backup drive made this release just a little shy of perfect.” Update: Two more Fedora articles, a review and a news article.
I thought the review was pretty fair and balanced. The writer discussed some of the new features which allows a group to spin up their own flavor of the Fedora distro. The virtualization GUI tools make it very easy to try out this features. I barely knew what I was doing and I just used the wizard, clicked next several times and at the end I was running Windows XP — very cool. Other features such as the new Wifi stack worked well for me and Fedora picked up my Wifi card on install.
Ah, but I liked the article since it was fair and stated that Fedora is bleeding edge and recent changes can create problems. For example, I have several USB drives connected. I rebooted after installing nvidia’s drivers and my USB drives became read only. Puzzling. So I logged in as root and changed the permissions to read/write for everyone since they are USB drives. Installing all the software for proprietary media formats like MP3 can also be confusing for new users. Fedorafaq describes how to get all your favorite media to play. To get mpeg video to play I added the Livna repo using RPM and then issued the yum command ‘yum install mplayer mplayer-gui mplayer-fonts.’ A lot of the media issues might disappear when Codecbuddy works its way into version 8. http://www.fedorafaq.org/
Sometimes I wonder who the Fedora distro is for. Is it a Red Hat test bed? Not really. Is it a newbie desktop linux. Nope. I like to use it since it is pliable in terms of hacking together different modules. If you want more reliable stability I would stick to centos, if you want an RPM based distro. If you like to tinker a little and want it all you might like Fedora 7.
Edited 2007-06-07 04:05
You could ask that about OpenSuSE or Debian; who its for is up to the individual to decide. Its like “oooh, this is a server operating system” – there are no fixed roles, you can use any operating system for anything you want.
Those who run Fedora are the same as those who would run OpenSuSE; if people really needed to have ultra-stability, they would go out and use/purchase an ‘enterprise’ based distribution – but with that comes the issue of whether you want the latest software or whether you want stability; the most up to date the software, the greater the risk for bugs and compatibility issues.
Those who run Fedora are the same as those who would run OpenSuSE
I don’t know if I agree with that. Fedora is not recommended for production use. Suse has more of a stable reputation. You are right that everyone use whatever they want but it pays to consider what that distro was intended for carefully.
“Those who run Fedora are the same as those who would run OpenSuSE”
I don’t know if I agree with that. Fedora is not recommended for production use. Suse has more of a stable reputation. You are right that everyone use whatever they want but it pays to consider what that distro was intended for carefully.
Just to be clear, one guy is talking about OpenSUSE, and you are talking about SuSE, bearing in mind, I don’t think those are the same thingm or is it a RedHat, CentOS relationship?
Edited 2007-06-07 07:07
Using the last guys logic (whom you replied to), no one should use OpenSuSE or Fedora because they’re buggy riddled POS. Fedora is Red Hats community based distribution for their enterprise release, and OpenSuSE is the basis for Novells Desktop product (SLED SP1 for instance is based on OpenSuSE 10.1 plus patches).
Also, ‘It is not recommended for production use’ – who doesn’t recommend it? some nameless person with a blog located at some place in the middle of no where? how do you define production? someone who needs 24/7 uptime and support, or merely someone who wants a distro for his or her desktop use?
Why do people equate ‘community based distributions’ as nothing more than ‘experimental versions’? sure, these companies make up the majority of contributors. If people choose not to muck in and actually contribute, who sit outside these establishment, then why blame Red Hat or Novell? All these companies offer is a distribution based on the community version with long term support both software, telephone and consultancy. What the heck is wrong with that?
Nothing. Taking this “community based” equals “experimental” to the extreme you could say that Debian or Slackware are “experimental” and I think not many things are further from the truth.
Fedora 7 is an impressive release, not impressive enough to replace Debian as my main GNU, but I’d still say it is the best out-of-the-box GNU/Linux distribution for the desktop right now.
Using the last guys logic (whom you replied to), no one should use OpenSuSE or Fedora because they’re buggy riddled POS. Fedora is Red Hats community based distribution for their enterprise release, and OpenSuSE is the basis for Novells Desktop product (SLED SP1 for instance is based on OpenSuSE 10.1 plus patches).
Well, I don’t think I’d have read quite such an extream view from his statement. However, yes it could have been cleaner.
I believe he was just saying SuSE was more stable than Fedora (I’m not sure if he was specifically refering to Open Suse, or the pay for distro).
If OpenSuse is to SLED, as CentOS is to RedHat EL, then yes, OpenSuse would be geared more towards a “static production environment”, however if it is the same as Fedora, then I would say neither are applicable for a produciton environment (I’ll clarify lower down what I mean by production).
Also, ‘It is not recommended for production use’ – who doesn’t recommend it? some nameless person with a blog located at some place in the middle of no where? how do you define production? someone who needs 24/7 uptime and support, or merely someone who wants a distro for his or her desktop use?
Well, I suppose the first thing to clarify is the statement “production use” and what that actually means, as it is bandied about a lot, with out a defenition.
I’ve been working as a systems administrator for about 10 years now, in various companies. In that time “production use/ environment” has primarily come to mean long support cycles.
I want to be able to install a server, and know that once it is working, I can forget about it’s upgrade cycle for a significant amount of time, but be confident that security erata is available.
Fedora, does not, has not, and will not provide this, and I don’t want them to.
In addition to this, Fedora has released things that HAVE caused problems, migration to the 2.6 kernel was far from smooth, introduction of SElinux was atrocious (now, it’s just fan dabby dosey), I don’t want to have things like this thrown on to a “production system”.
Kernel upgrades within releases for fedora have broken things quite spectacularly.
I think it boils down to the fact that “production environment” tends not to mean “dynamic”, dynamic bad, static gooood.
However, for me on my desktop, at work and at home, fedora has proved to be excellent, desktop and laptop. So from that perspective it’s absalutely fine.
Why do people equate ‘community based distributions’ as nothing more than ‘experimental versions’? sure, these companies make up the majority of contributors. If people choose not to muck in and actually contribute, who sit outside these establishment, then why blame Red Hat or Novell? All these companies offer is a distribution based on the community version with long term support both software, telephone and consultancy. What the heck is wrong with that?
Erm, I think your going over board here, the discussion was Fedora and OpenSuSE, at no point in time have we mentioned “community based distrobutions”, remember there are many other community based distro’s out that other than fedora/ opensuse. Critasism’s aimed at them has nothing to do with slackware for example.
Incorrect in case of CentOS which is a clone of RHEL. Fedora is actually the basis of RHEL and CentOS.
Not unique to Fedora as it affected early 2.6 kernel based distributions including Mandriva and SLED.
Edited 2007-06-07 10:20
But the thing is, both OpenSuSE and Fedora on a time based schedule; when OpenSuSE was released, it was a buggy riddled distribution, a few months later, it became more palitable. Same can be said for Fedora, a couple of months after its released, with a few updates, you’ll find that its stability will improve.
But the same can be said for CentOS – have you looked at the tonnes upon tonnes of patches available for it – just as it has been released? Even so-called ‘enterprise distributions’ aren’t immune to these issues.
No, OpenSUE is to SLED as Fedora is to RedHat Enterprise Linux. Its a community based distribution which the respective companies (Novell and Red Hat) base their enterprise distributions on. The only difference between the community vs. ‘enterprise’ is the level of support. Apart from that, they’re exactly the same. So when you think about it, ask yourself, do you need the support provided by Red Hat or Novell? if not, you don’t need an enterprise distribution.
Maybe it is best to refrain from using such open ended statements such as ‘production ready’.
Then one could argue that what you should be saying is that you need *more* than just software, you need a complete package which includes support.
So therefore, the issue isn’t with Fedora, but the fact that you need more than what Fedora provides. All Fedora provides is the software and support is left to the community. You need more than just community support.
So the issue isn’t ‘ready for production environment’ it is “my needs and what the Fedora community can provide don’t match up” – thats what should be said, not ‘its not production ready’ gives the message that Fedora is completely useless.
Edited 2007-06-07 11:31
But the thing is, both OpenSuSE and Fedora on a time based schedule; when OpenSuSE was released, it was a buggy riddled distribution, a few months later, it became more palitable. Same can be said for Fedora, a couple of months after its released, with a few updates, you’ll find that its stability will improve.
But the same can be said for CentOS – have you looked at the tonnes upon tonnes of patches available for it – just as it has been released? Even so-called ‘enterprise distributions’ aren’t immune to these issues.
Fedora has a release cycle of 6 to 8 months, I believe the official errata support time for a release is some thing along the lines of (R-2)+ 2 months. I.E. a release will be support for up to 2 months after it’s second successor is released, this has only just been extended.
This gives you a errata support for at absalute most 14 months.
You state that after a few months, the product stabalises, so take that down to 12 months.
That’s a year, that you have a stable system with erata support, you show me an admin that has the time to upgrade all of their servers on a yearly bassis (maintaining one or two servers for one or two users does not count).
Where as RedHat state they will support a product for either 5 or 7 years.
Your trying to equate those to product life cycles?
But the thing is, both OpenSuSE and Fedora on a time based schedule; when OpenSuSE was released, it was a buggy riddled distribution, a few months later, it became more palitable. Same can be said for Fedora, a couple of months after its released, with a few updates, you’ll find that its stability will improve.
But the same can be said for CentOS – have you looked at the tonnes upon tonnes of patches available for it – just as it has been released? Even so-called ‘enterprise distributions’ aren’t immune to these issues.
Okay, lets put this straight.
Drop the “you’s”, I’m 100% happy with the fedora/redhat relationship. I KNOW where I will use one or the other (or CentOS).
The thing that I find anoying is, Person a comes along and says “fedora is shit and buggy and not enterprise ready”. A) “shit” is subjective. B) “Buggy” For what I use fedora for, I don’t find it buggy, and don’t have a problem with the QA implemented, and feel it should not be crtasised for what it is doing. C) It is NOT targeting the enterprise, so why critasize it for this.
Some one may wish to come back and state “Yes it is enterprise ready, at least for my enterprise”, then so be it. Enterprise is obviously subjective, and we are coming from entirely different environments.
I’m happy with fedora.
Bad form I know, but it’s getting quite anoying the miss-understanding regarding Fedora’s purpose and aims.
As much damage is done to fedora’s reputation by the group saying “It’s not production ready” as by the group shouting “You idiot’s it IS production ready, you just don’t know what production is (or any number of other random insults)”.
Fedora is a bleading edge distro, and one may blead when using it.
http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/79957.html
That would not happen with RHEL, but things like this are not infrequent within fedora.
But, before some one flames me, this I am happy with, it pushes forward the Linux movement (not just redhat!).
Agreed.
Fedora is generally a stable and well-worked out OS, and if certain major bugs turn up, it shouldn’t be taken for granted and co-define Fedora’s identity as “not for production use”. Instead, the bugs should be fixed.
It may not have as few bugs as CentOS or Debian Stable, but that doesn’t mean that there is not a minimal level of stability that must be reached before Fedora can be released in the first place. and as far as I know, Fedora cares about that level.
As someone more or less biased in favour of Fedora, I wouldn’t like people to say, ‘let’s forgive Fedora for this (say) major filesystem bug, after all it’s not meant for production use.’ That would make little sense.
Edited 2007-06-07 09:20 UTC
“””
Fedora is generally a stable and well-worked out OS, and if certain major bugs turn up, it shouldn’t be taken for granted and co-define Fedora’s identity as “not for production use”.
“””
Typically, these discussions of whether Fedora is fit for production use or not go on and on, getting nowhere.
Rather than trying to apply broad labels, perhaps it is best to say that Fedora differs from other distros in that it:
1. Is intended to be a devlopers’ playground and a showcase for cutting edge OSS technologies.
2. Comes with an absolutely huge update load.
Fedora issues an average of 130 updates per month.(!) And while I have used it extensively in production environments, one really does need to weigh the pros of Fedora against the relatively freewheeling attitude that its maintainers take regarding updates.
With, say, Centos/RHEL, the updates are *far* fewer, and only security updates are issued between quarterly update points. Typically, with CentOS/RHEL packages are patched with the security fix, whereas with Fedora, they just push out the latest point release of the package.
Often, in discussions about Fedora’s suitability for production use, someone whips out Disney’s, or some other large companies’ use of Fedora in a production environment. It looks impressive at first. But then one has to consider that these organizations are large enough, and have resources enough, that they could outright fork Fedora and maintain their own branch if they wanted to. Not that they do. But they have those kinds of resources.
The real test, im my opinion, is how well it works for small time consultants like me.
If I wake up in the morning and find that a nightly update has broken something, I might have 5 calls on my answering machine from clients having problems, and I can’t just call my IT department and have them whip up a quick patch. It’s five broken servers, and just me and me alone trying to figure out what happened.
I should say that this does not happen often, but it does happen. Considering that volume of updates that Fedora pushes out, they do remarkably well. But I’ve slept better since I migrated a number of machines from Fedora to CentOS.
The moral? If you really need the features provided by Fedora in your production environment, it is usable. But if you don’t you are likely better off with a more conservative distro.
Edited 2007-06-07 16:55
Fedora 7 is incredibly unstable, but then Fedora always has been for me… Just playing chess (with compiz turned on) and then quiting chess crashed X… Yes it didn’t crash the OS and it recovered, but that is _far_ from acceptable, and I’m using the Free software Intel graphics drivers, nothing proprietary.
So you used a known unstable piece of software (Compiz) and got mad when it crashed? I think the problem is your attitude and expectations, not Fedora. If you don’t want it to crash X, then don’t use Compiz. Turn compositing off and I can pretty much guarantee you that X will not crash.
I don’t think Compiz is meant to be considered “unstable”, if it was I doubt fedora would be shipped with it installed and ready to be enabled by default (as opposed to having to be installed seporately).
Though, saying that, I don’t think it’s a reason to cold the entire distro incredibly unstable. It’s a bug, file a bug report :/
(not that, this always results in a resolution mind…)
It is NOT enabled by default, which is what is important. When you try to turn it on, it even warns you that Compiz is unstable. It also pops up a dialog after you turn it on asking you if you want to keep settings in case something didn’t work. If you can’t handle that, then just go back to Windows. Linux requires some degree of non-idiocy.
I never said it was, however I should have included another comma.
It is shipped, and ready to be enabled, by default.
I.E. You install the machine, and it is ready to be enabled, you don’t have to go through the config files, or pull in additional binaries. Fedora folken felt it was stable enough to be put in that position.
I don’t remember seeing this message at all when I’ve gone to enable compiz. Which of course does not mean there is no message, but may suggest it’s not the most obvious.
Yes, it does, however this guy said nothing about like “Fedora sucks monkey nuts, I went to enable compiz and my screen went all funny, man it is so shit, they even knew it was shit, that is why the offered the option to revert to previous setting, that is how shit they are”.
No he said, when playing chess with compiz enabled on exiting, X crashed.
That is very much different. Your vitriol is targetless.
I wish there was some way to filter agressive/ bitter people from the keyboard, before their crap even makes it to the net.
I am a strong proponent of Fedora, and open source in general.
Edited 2007-06-08 06:55
I don’t know who modded you down but I think it is unfair. If that is the norm when someone simply tells the truth then the person who modded you must not be very receptive of other views or just a fanboy.
I tried all Red Hat 7.* versions on the the desktop and deemed them unusable because of the ugliness of the desktop and probably my lack of experience. I used Mandrake 8.1 and 8.2 then but I don’t know what has become of Mandriva.
When Red Hat 8.0 came out that was the very first time I found a desktop that was not ugly with fonts that were worth looking at (because of Xft). I switched both my sisters’ and parents’ computers to this OS.
Red Hat 9.0 was a continuation of this and performed even better as a desktop but I was the only one running it. So when Red Hat 9.0 was EOL’ed I naturally looked towards Fedora Core 1.
Again I switched all computers to this new version and actually believed their promises that it would be just as good and stable as Red Hat before. This didn’t turn out to be true as I would find out shortly.
I had specifically bought Ati Radeon 9200 graphics adapters because of their open source drivers (and I still use them). The included driver in Fedora didn’t work well and the fglrx kept crashing the computer.
I didn’t know what to do and kept explaining to my sister that to use the fglrx drivers was the least aggravating of the two options (no visible graphics or some kind of graphics). Upgrade woes added to the frustration.
In the end I decided enough is enough and switched to Slackware. That’s what I’ve been running ever since. I have even ported it to MIPS lately. I probably won’t ever have a need for another operating system anymore unless it’s even better (Solaris?).
This experience has taught me that only Slackware, Debian, Gentoo (in the hands of professionals), Solaris and the BSDs are worthy and the others are just also-rans from a technical perspective.
Not to say that those (such as Ubuntu/Kubuntu) aren’t easy to use, but just not as stable and well-engineered when looking at it from a system perspective.
I am repeatedly asked to remove OpenSUSE 10.1/10.2 and install Slackware because people don’t want to deal with bugs, instability and slow performance particularly in a business setting.
The fact that all my relatives, friends and customers with Slackware desktops only ever call me when their hardware breaks down testifies to its stability compared to Windows and other Linux distributions.
I have been running FC6 since it was released and I havent had a single problem with it. No crashes, no hiccups. Nothing. You cant blame fedora for the total crap that is ATI graphics cards/drivers. And you should have known better than to buy an unsupported card. I have run nvidia cards without any problems since I started out with my GF2 MX. Also, the open source drivers for that card now support 3d and are very stable.
People here are talking about the “bugs” that pop up from time to time on Fedora. What kind of bugs are they? The one about the chess game crashing X is certainly annoying. Has anybody had a serious bug, one that would affect your day to day productivity (whatever it may be)? Once, on FC6, the kernel would not boot. I don’t know why, but a simple restart and selection of the previous kernel solved the problem. Updating the system with Pup allowed me to use the latest kernel. I think a non-booting kernel is a big deal, though the work around was simple enough. Can anybody else claim to have experienced similar show stopping bugs?
As for bleeding edge software, another problem is security holes. Newer software does not have the security reputation of some more proven software (hence Debian stable is “outdated”). But doesn’t SELinux reduce or perhaps negate the security holes in new software? If you are worried about security, it would seem that Fedora and OpenSuse has a distinct advantage over other distribuions. I don’t think enough credit is given to these two distributions for providing the latest software and protecting (to some extent) their users.
I’ve been using Fedora since 1 (redhat linux from before), and I’ve only had mild irritation with bugs that I work around.
I’ve never had a bug that has lost me data (unless I’ve been a dufus), or resulted in a unusable host.
For me, Fedora is a perfectly valid environment to do my day to day work.
Am i the only one who tested FC7 on a subnetted network and experienced slow network performance?