Submitted by Fedora 7 is a first class distro that demonstrates solid progress in improving the user experience, easing the move to virtualization and enabling the user to create their own custom spins with open source build tools, says this review. The same site had the opportunity to sit down face-to-face with Max Spevack, chairman of the Fedora project, at the Red Hat Summit in San Diego to talk about all things Fedora – the merger of Fedora Core and Extras, Fedora 7, and the road ahead.
Flying High with Fedora 7; Interview with Fedora’s Chairman
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.p…
I know people consider this an advert, but can’t you negative voters be more consistent?
People did the opposite to his links to Ubuntu screenshots (+4)!
Well, you’ve got to accept that those that voted him up for the Ubuntu screenshots probably aren’t the ones that voted him down on these screenshots.
Besides, EVERYONE knows where to find screenshots
Edited 2007-07-06 19:59
Q: Why is Fedora in a holding pattern at only number 4 at DistroWatch. Why isn’t Fedora number 1?
Max: You know, I don’t like the competition to see who has loudest fanboys. I have wanted to make Fedora cool, to make it work and make it good.
It works, and it does not make much noise. As long as I have the latest (and stable enough) technology at my desktop, I cannot care less about “distro” wars.
Edited 2007-07-06 06:59
Ubuntu is more popular because it’s a newer project founded with the benefit of hindsight. Their philosophy on community infrastructure and release management has resonated with lots of users.
But Fedora is making a very noticeable effort to reform its project structure and community focus. They’re developing tools to encourage participation, such as the new build system. They want to become the Ubuntu of the RPM world, and I think they’re off to a great start.
With Fedora Core, I notice you get the option use either a KDE or GNOME desktop (or both!). Which is best to use with Fedora in terms of the quality of integration (applications, look and feel, configuration…)?
Does one or other feel more ‘peripheral’ to the goals of the distribution or do they both fit quite neatly?
Once again, sorry for the OT!
Edited 2007-07-06 10:47
doesn’t fedora also ship with xfce4?
It does.
There is both a Fedora Gnome live cd and a Fedora KDE live cd, so you can try it out for yourself. Fedora is considered to be more or less on the Gnome side, traditionally, but Fedora doesn’t really tweak the generic Gnome or KDE desktops a lot, if you ask me. So this traditional image makes little sense to most users.
Fedora is all about “under the hood”, anyway.
Apart from that, I have always had both GTK and QT libs on my systems, and I’ve got difficulty understanding the “KDE-only” or “Gnome-only” zealots.
They dropped the core part. It’s Fedora now.
I used RH distros from 5.2 through FC6.
I think the one I liked the -best- was RH 9. FC started adding too many things, and the management tools (up2date, yum, rpm, whatever the flavor of the release was) got way too bulky.
After literally years of managing and developing on RH Linux distros, a guy at work got me to download Ubuntu Edgy Eft a few months back. I quickly upgraded to Fiesty when it was released.
The process of getting a dev box on RH or FC distros took me at least two hours — and that was with a very well-tuned process of downloading what I needed, installing it, etc. I knew exactly what to get, where to put it, and how to build the RPM’s I needed from srpms.
But Edgy… took me 20 minutes.
I had been considering buying a RHEL workstation license. I didn’t take the plunge. Ubuntu proved superior for the uses I need. I’ve never looked back, and I don’t intend to.
For me Fedora Rocks.
Should have tried CentOS coming from RHEL. I knew it wouldnt take long for Ubuntu to come up. Not to discredit it AT ALL,its a great distro and anyone who says otherwise is lying to themselves, but I will agree with the point he made about fanboys. Often time with passionate crowds, fanboys lead the charge. Ubuntu has a much more “vocal” community than most distros which tend to be a little reserved.
Distrowatch can be very misleading as well, i think there was even a group accused of manipulating the numbers at one point. They just count the number of clicks for a distro. So its more of a guage of new users and queries, not so much current users. I doubt very serious CentOS users or say Debian users, have any reason to go to Distrowatch and click on their distro for the latest news, they already know whats going on!!!
Nonetheless, I am very much a distro whore, and I have test machines I rotate with new distros. Fedora 7 is one of the most polished & complete distros available, and definately the best Fedora camp release to date. But the same can be said for OpenSUSE 10.2 / Debian Etch / and Ubuntu 7.04…I urge people to try to find the distro that best fits their needs, and let go of all the zealotry and my distro is better than yours type crap…it’s all old and most doesn’t apply anymore.
I LOVE YOU FEDORA
Once the Fedora articles used to get 100+ post on OSNEWS. Now days same buzz is going on for most of the Ubuntu articals. Today Feodra has hardely 15-20 posts on OSnews! What is the meaning of this? Is Fedora losing its popularity?
It seems everywere overall people are preferring slick and simple stuff then the bolted, over crowded and over featured and over engeered products!
Ex: Old Yahoo search page used to have 100+ stuff while google has simple search box… now Yahoo has http://search.yahoo.com
Same goes with Ubuntu… its slick has bare essential apps unlike Fedora which is loaded with 100+ unwanted apps…
I think we need both type of distros to satisfy every persons need but on large scale Ubuntu is beating Fedora because of the same reason….
Nope, most people using it are too busy to be posting here. Or they have lives, the other option.
/me ducks
Which has.. what to do with Fedora? Over engineered? What in heaven’s name are you blathering about?
Oh, I see. Plain crap, especially since Fedora has a one cd install/live image just like Ubuntu has. You don’t have to address any repository if you don’t want to. Please be aware that we are at Fedora 7 at the moment, by the way, I am under the impression you haven’t read any Fedora news for a couple years.
It sure does. :
Now, how about I install Ubuntu on my Fedora box, and you then compile SELinux and a nice firewall on it? While you’re at it, make sure I can do the same that I can do on Fedora with the livecdtools, and don’t forget to finally get SCIM right on the new Ubuntu system, which I want to be working out of the box. I also demand having the same packaging quality, including an equivalent of the yum priorities plugin for apt-get.
In exchange, I’ll pay your shrink bill to get rid of your “I want to compare Fedora to Ubuntu wherever it may or may not apply” complex.
Everybody that claims Fedora is somehow more “bloated” than Ubuntu is smoking something I’d be very interested in trying.
You compare things, fine, but stick to some facts.
Hey bud, right on/
Fedora configured X-windows
correctly right-off-the-bat for
my LCD 22″ monitor. Ubuntu coudn’t.
In addition to a fairly nice scim , Fedora
is the ONLY distro(apart from localized asian ones that
are server oriented) that gets Korean fonts
to work well. Visit http://www.yahoo.co.kr in Ubuntu
and what you get is font spaghetti. Quite embarrassing
and just goes to show Ubuntu is a Western world thing.
Fedora does asian fonts as well as windows XP.
« Visit http://www.yahoo.co.kr in Ubuntu
and what you get is font spaghetti. Quite embarrassing
and just goes to show Ubuntu is a Western world thing. »
It’s not out-of-the-box with ubuntu, but I’m sure that with ubuntu, you can do everything you do with Fedora (maybe with more or less work). All of this is free software, after all.
did you try Mandriva ?
If we face the reality : Fedora, Suse, Mandriva, ,Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives are technically more or less equal.
The differences are cosmetics. If you are used with Fedora, you won’t be lost when trying Suse/Mandriva/Debian/Ubuntu. In a couple of hours, you’ll be able to do almost everything you did with Fedora.
Someone said «Please be aware that we are at Fedora 7 at the moment, by the way, I am under the impression you haven’t read any Fedora news for a couple years.»
At the same time all distro progressed as well, almost at the same pace with the same results.
regards,
glyj
Mandriva user
No I havent tried Mandriva yet but was an Ubuntu
user for a while .(I have also tried Slackware, arch
and knoppix)
A couple of hours? how about countless searches
and tinkering..Ubuntu is cool and flashy but all the
difficult boring problems, like
internationalization , don’t seem to get any answers.
Maybe that has changed since 4 months ago when i last tried it.
The solid BASE of Fedora is what attracted me to it.
However maybe others might have had more luck finding
suitable fonts and configuring them.
While I have heard that Mandriva is a very good distro , I’m really not sure how u can say all distros
(there are dozens) progress at the same pace.
Some concentrate on one or two things, like security,
while others simply don’t develop quickly.
You guys are funny. A distros popularity is not measured by clickety-clikcing at distrowatch or the number of posts at OSNews. The distros with high post numbers are simply the most controversial, if you ask me.
I use Fedora and rarely post here anymore as I don’t see any reason to participate in those endless distro-wars that some people enjoy. I simply use my computer for work. And when I don’t use it at work, then I take care of my family. Way more important than a simple distro.
Message to all: Use what works for you, but please stop spreading nonsense and wasting time in useless discussions.
JMHO
I’m somewhat of a Linux newbie that is quite familiar with PC hardware. I really enjoy using Fedora 7, and while the posted review is informative, I wish it included some of the cons instead of merely the pros and changes in the release. My biggest concern at the moment is how long updates seem to take. Maybe it’s user error.
Oh well, I still love Fedora!
Can I run CDE on Fedora 7?
Honest question.
It should be possible.
Looks like I have to pay for it or something.
http://www.opengroup.org/cde/
http://www.xig.com/