Submitted by Fedora 12 has been released today. “I’m proud to announce the release of Fedora 12, the latest innovative Linux distribution from the Fedora Project, a global, collaborative partnership of free software community members sponsored by Red Hat.”
The new features include the Linux Kernel version 2.6.31, GNOME 2.28, KDE 4.3, an improved KVM virtualization stack with memory deduplication and libguestfs, and smaller and faster updates thanks to delta updates enabled by default and XZ compression
It also comes with better webcam support, improved mobile broadband support, support for BlueTooth audio devices, uPnP audio MediaServer and surround sound in sound events in Pulseaudio, KMS enabled by default in the Nouveau driver, a Moblin graphical interface for netbooks, an SELinux sandbox, and many other improvements.
Download it here. See a release notes here (a complete list is here). Known issues are documented on the common bugs page.
One extra linky:
Known issues (PLEASE READ!) – http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F12_bugs
Edited 2009-11-17 16:47 UTC
…and a fairly content one at that, there doesn’t seem to be any compelling reason to upgrade.
That’s the first time I’ve felt this way since I started dabbling in Linux 6 years ago. I’m actually content. That’s been a long time coming but, from my own personal perspective, is a good sign that the Linux desktop has come of age.
I think I’ll just hang back and enjoy the view from here!
(I was never close to being content with Windows although I stopped using it years ago)
Fedora does have a short support cycle for older distributions (two releases + 1 month?). Thus you’ll need to upgrade pretty soon.
Unfortunately that’s the status of Linux desktop right now. However if you’re a little bit adventurous there is much to gain.
I call foul on that. The Fedora-style forced upgrade treadmill is certainly *not* the status of the Linux desktop today. It is the status of Fedora. Period.
Other distros typically provide for at least 18 months of support, as opposed to Fedora’s 13 months. And a number of solid and respected Linux distros give you anywhere from 3 years to 7+ years of support.
I don’t believe that any Linux distro provides for a shorter maximum life-cycle than does Fedora.
And as an administrator of Linux business desktops, I am actually finding less and less advantage in upgrading to the latest. The Linux desktop is already pretty much there for me and my users. The main problem today being third party issues like IE only web apps.
Edited 2009-11-17 18:05 UTC
I think he was probably thinking of Ubuntu and their 6 month upgrade for non LTS releases.
Ubuntu’s support policy for non-LTS releases is, and has always been, 18 months.
3 years for the LTS desktop. And 5 years for the LTS server.
Edited 2009-11-17 18:37 UTC
Unfortunately, their LTS releases mean nothing. They are exactly the same as the six monthly releases that they try and make a commitment on ‘supporting’, but it largely depends on the resources and community support available. When you have a Firefox beta in your LTS distribution for five years you know there is a problem. It’s funny. People complained about the confusion of KDE 4.0 as to what distributors wre shipping, and yet when something is explicitly labelled as a beta it goes in anyway.
Ubuntu is exactly like other distributions. If you want the latest ‘supported’ software in your distribution then the only way to get it is to upgrade. Bug fixes? The only way to get them is to upgrade. You end up getting sucked along with the release cycle anyway.
Edited 2009-11-18 13:56 UTC
How many distributions provide anything beyond security/major bugfixes for old releases, such as driver/kernel feature backports and new software versions when merited?
RHEL/CentOS and SLE definitely do, and Ubuntu LTS seems to as well. For example, RHEL 5 uses a (heavily patched) 2.6.18 kernel, yet has new & improved drivers, ext4, KVM, etc. RHEL 4 has a package for Firefox 3, even though it won’t build using the included library versions in RHEL 4.
I’ve been using Fedora since the beginning (and Red Hat Linux before that), and I fully agree, Fedora seems to have the shortest maximum life-cycle of any major Linux distribution. To be fair, that is by design and well-documented. I like running the latest and greatest, so I upgraded to the latest Rawhide this morning. Nothing apparently broken yet, other than the nouveau driver (which is just broken on my hardware and has been since at least Fedora 11). I also have working copies of both Fedora 12 and Fedora 11 on my hard drive, just in case. Not the way I’d run an enterprise, but it works for me.
Yes, that is what diskspace (and rysnc, tgz, whatever) is for. 🙂
I wonder if it’s possible to intercept with a proxy those IE only web apps and change the offending CSS and JS…
I don’t feel under sufficient threat to be forced to upgrade even if the updates stop. Then I’ll just have (what I consider) a stable OS.
Saying that I bet I install something newer just out of interest before the end of 2010 anyway.
The problem with using Fedora, non-LTS Ubuntu, and maybe OpenSUSE is that there is always a compelling reason to upgrade: continued support. You’ve got maybe seven months to go on Fedora 11.
A Fedora version is unsupported approximately 13 months after release. After that, no more updates. How well are Fedora/non-LTS Ubuntu releases supported in the period between the new version being released and the end of support? Do they get anything besides security/major bug fixes? Do they get kernel upgrades / backports? How well do upgrades work when skipping between versions?
Since Linux drivers are often only provided for the latest or recent mainline kernel version(s), one may have to upgrade, rebuild parts of the system, or backport drivers if they change hardware / need improved drivers. And after a few years, new software might not work with old dependencies. (For example, Firefox 3 won’t build out-of-the-box using the libraries included with RHEL 4.)
I personally use CentOS to avoid these problems – Red Hat provide updates for years, and backports drivers and fixes.
I doubt RedHat supports CentOS unless you pay them too.
My guess is they usually only support RHEL.
I doubt RedHat supports CentOS unless you pay them too. My guess is they usually only support RHEL.
Well, it seems in this discussion ‘support’ is shorthand for ‘patch and security support’. I don’t think anyone was implying RH is supporting CentOS in the trouble-ticket sense. In any case, CentOS 5 will be ‘security supported’ until March 2014, which is a longest available right now (I think).
Until April 2014 (said the nitpicker). March 31, 2014 is the official date.
I thought they had extended this due to the planned 12 month delay in releasing RHEL6. (Rahul?) But it would not surprise me if Red Hat ended up postponing that flag day for a while. Red Hat is top notch in consideration for their customers. As is the CentOS team. Though I am a bit annoyed at their (Red Hat’s) breaking their 18-24 month promise. Predictability was one of the nice things about the RHEL/CentOS release schedule. Some of us “enterprise” admins *do* care about having the option to upgrade at reasonable intervals.
Edited 2009-11-17 19:47 UTC
While I do agree that RHEL 6 is long over-due. (Especially if you use it as a workstation), in RedHat’s defense, a lot of resources were invested in making 5.3 and 5.4 more competitive with recent distributions – anything from new(er) Firefox, evolution to backported network stack changes, updated drivers and KVM support.
Hopefully RHEL is right around the corner. (And with it, more blood into the EPEL project)
– Gilboa
Firstly, as someone who has administered business desktops using both Fedora and non-LTS Ubuntu, I would not lump them into the same category. Both do get security and bug fixes. Fedora takes a rather cavalier attitude regarding kernel upgrades. Over the (short) lifetime of a Fedora release, one might see 3 major kernel upgrades. For example, Fedora 8 was released with 2.6.23. 2.6.24, 2.6.25, and 2.6.26 crashed our XDMCP server about once a week, bringing down about 70 users. (Yes, I gave each version a try. All Fedora kernels killed it right up to the point at which we switched to another distro.)
Ubuntu (non-LTS) takes a more conservative approach. If the distro releases with, say, 2.6.31, then 2.6.31 is what it will be for the 18 months that the version is supported. As an admin I find this to be a blessing. I’m uncertain whether drivers are added over the life of the kernel. I suspect they are. But I don’t care that much about that in this use case.
The Fedora update pipeline is a firehose. Ubuntu’s updates are much more controlled. I get the impression that you might feel that continued, aggressive updates are always a good thing. The admin in me shudders at that thought. But it also shudders a bit at the idea of being stuck with old tools for extended periods, which is why I use CentOS judiciously, and not for everything.
Non-LTS releases don’t get new drivers AFAIK and I am not sure that even LTS releases do get a lot of backports. Red Hat and Novell certainly do a lot more in that regard.
Any Ubuntu kernels devs around that can correct me?
No reason to upgrade? Why miss the fun of borking your wireless and destroying your xorg.conf settings? Even better Flash will work *worse* once you upgrade.
Which only goes to show that every cloud has a silver lining. Would it be too much to hope that in the next release it won’t work at all? Yes, I suppose it would be…
“That’s the first time I’ve felt this way since I started dabbling in Linux 6 years ago. I’m actually content. That’s been a long time coming but, from my own personal perspective, is a good sign that the Linux desktop has come of age.”
You took the words right out of my mouth!
In my experience the latest Fedora releases (10, 11) have been very buggy. But Fedora devs|users have always been eager to help, when I asked for troubleshooting tips.
I just hope 12 is going to be different.
Cheers,
Stathis
Edited 2009-11-17 16:57 UTC
“Faster” depends on your RAM/CPU/Network.
On a very slow line with a fast CPU and a lot of RAM it might be faster. On an old computer with a fat line it will be slower because regenerating the RPM from the delta-RPM is an intensive task.
Everybody with more than 2mbit should disable the presto-plugin for yum IMO.
kragil: you’re basically right, but rather exaggerating. We use xz at a low compression level for the deltas, and the CPU intensity isn’t as high as you imply. It’s actually faster than downloading even on my very weedy Vaio P.
Well, on every machine I ran Fedora (which I don’t anymore) the heavy usage of the disk when applying updates really got on my nerves.
TBH I think Suses Delta-RPM (which Fedora now after a few years adopted) is a second-rate solution. Googles Courier patches are much nicer. I hope .deb based distros will skip this regenerating of packages idea and go right to a good solution. ( .. maybe ChromeOS will .. nobody (outside Google) knows .. )
when were you testing? for quite a while during the f12 rawhide cycle, deltas were using high xz compression, which was rather CPU-intensive. it was changed to use a lower compression level rather later in the cycle. you may have already given up by then.
edit: I see by your later reply you were basing your experience on f11. yes, things are different in f12, please do not judge based on f11 experience.
Edited 2009-11-17 18:23 UTC
OK, so the delta can now be applied right away? I thought you needed to generate the original RPM for security checks? Or is that now done completely in RAM? Convince me that it is now a sane solution and I might try it again.
Debian updates work very well as they are now, there is no reason to mess with aptitude at all.
Debian’s superb package management is one of the reasons that I moved to it years ago, as at the time, Fedora’s was a mess. They’ve been trying to fix it forever,a nd this is just another attempt.
“They’ve been trying to fix it forever,a nd this is just another attempt.”
What do you mean by ‘this’?
I really don’t get the big hoohaa over package management. Took me about two days to switch from urpmi to yum. Figured out what the equivalent commands were and it was fine. I don’t sit there with a stopwatch figuring out which is faster, they both get the job done. *shrug*
Fedora updates not only consume far more bandwidth and time, but break the system far more often due to their extreme volume. The Fedora folks are trying to address the time and bandwidth issue with Presto, with results which remain to be evaluated, but have pretty much ignored the real problem of cavalierly issuing massive volumes of updates from a large number of third parties, who implement widely varying degrees of QA quality. They simply trust the third parties on their users’ behalf, and call it “staying close to upstream”. Breakage that trades processor for banwidth is still breakgage.
Please don’t presume to answer for the person I was actually talking to. He was talking about package management, not update policies.
If Jake objects he’ll tell me so. In the mean time, have you any objections to addressing my concerns?
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Critical_Path_Packages_Proposal
was implemented during the last cycle. That’s the first stage of a plan to impose more stringent standards on updates for important packages. The AutoQA project – https://fedorahosted.org/autoqa/ – which Will Woods, Kamil Paral and others are working on will also help to provide more stringent testing of all updates once it’s fully running.
It has nothing to do with speed of updates, so much as the entire rpm system. At the time I switched, Apt had much better dependency tracking, and the Debian repositories kick ass, the system just worked better.
What exactly do you mean by ‘better dependency tracking’?
I mean exactly what I said, apt tracks dependencies better.
Without any more details or examples of HOW it handles it better, I can’t agree with you.
Sigh.
Let me spell it out for you:
Actual -F- -A- -C- -T- -S-?
(As opposed to “Apt is better” “Why” “Because Apt is better” “Why” …)
– Gilboa
I didn’t just say apt is better, I said it is better at keeping track of dependencies. I gave a concrete reason why I think it is better. Take off the fanboy glasses and try reading.
Excuse me? At the time of my post, all you said was:
“It has nothing to do with speed of updates, so much as the entire rpm system. At the time I switched, Apt had much better dependency tracking…”
“What exactly do you mean by ‘better dependency tracking’?”
“I mean exactly what I said, apt tracks dependencies better.”
If you call this facts, I must be living in a different galaxy.
– Gilboa
P.S. Unless I’m mistaken, we had this argument before (F11?). In the end, it came down to Apt’s ability to download multiple streams coupled with the lack of good Fedora mirrors close to you.
How you jumped to “better dependency checking”, I have no idea…
Edited 2009-11-18 14:10 UTC
I don’t remember having that discussion, but those are also good reasons. Not having good mirrors in close proximity to me is one of the problems I had with Fedora, so I guess we must have.
Doesn’t change the fact I have far less dependency issues with Debian then I did with Fedora, and I try it out once in a while.
I may have had this argument with someone else. Who knows.
Which has nothing to do with dependency tracking.
These days (since the introduction of the unified Fedora build system in F7), dependency issues are usually the result of stale mirror (of the official repositories) or as a result of the use of problematic 3’rd party repositories.
My last encounter with missing dependency was in mid F10, when I got bitten by a stable mirror.
Either way, non of this has anything to do with yum or RPM by themselves.
– Gilboa
You’re still being frustratingly vague. I’m trying to see if there’s an actual problem here that maybe should be addressed, but you’re not providing anywhere near enough information. Just saying ‘dependency tracking’ doesn’t cut it, there’s no way we can tell from that exactly what the actual problem you experienced with yum was. Could you please just tell us instead of making it into a vague value judgement?
Ok. here we go, if I have to spell it out…I find that Debian, which is a GNU\Linux Distribution, has a better system of managing application dependencies (which are libraries or helper programs that a given program needs to run properly) than Fedora, which is another GNU\Linux Distribution.
Debian uses APT, which is the “Advanced Package Tool” This tool, when used to install applications, does a better job of tracking down, and installing all the the various programs, libraries and such than the equivalent program on Fedora, yum.
I had problems installing some programs on Fedora, as there would be dependencies that yum could not resolve, at this time I cannot remember what they were, as it was a year ago.
I have tried Fedora multiple times, and in fact started my linux journey on Fedora Core 2 (which didn’t actually use yum at the time, I’m pretty sure Yum is actually another one of those attempts to fix the problems with the Package management system in Fedora). The problems I had with updating my system eventually led me to try Hoary Hedgehog, a release of GNU Linux called Ubuntu created by Canonical. it worked well, and I did not have nearly as many problems installing applications or updating the system as I did with Fedora. I liked Hoary so much, that after the next version, Breezy Badger, I decided to try out the distribution that Ubuntu was based on, Debian. At this time i tried out sarge, and quickly moved to testing.
I often return to Fedora, to try it out, see if it has improves, and I am always disapointed.
Vague indeed.
Oh, but it’s improved incredibly since the last time you used it! Or at least that’s what they always tell me. With a straight face, even.
Specifics would be listing exactly what package you had a problem with, and what release it was on. You know, so someone else could actually confirm the problem, and see if it’s fixed or not.
You’re basically saying that back in F10 you had a couple issues installing some unknown package, and because of that you blame the entire RPM system and don’t think Fedora can ever fix it.
What do you want to bet the issue was actually due to a bad 3rd party repository, and didn’t even have anything to do with RPM?
Edited 2009-11-18 18:54 UTC
Not just F10. ALL OF THE FEDORA INSTALLS I HAVE TRIED. Please just give it up, I prefer Debian, I believe (through experience) that Debian’s package management infrastructure is better, and every time I try Fedora, it still sucks compared to Debian.
As far as what packages, I don’t remember now, I said in an earlier post that my last attempt was a year or so ago. I’m not going to waste my time, if F12 is so much better, why the hell did it take them 12 versions to get there?
Edited 2009-11-18 20:48 UTC
My problems with yum over the many years, have not been so much related to dependencies. It seems to get that much right. It’s more a matter of slowness, and clunkiness. Even with the fastest-mirror plugin, it seems that it’s always stubbornly picking and timing out on dead mirrors. And the memory consumption is obscene. And even when it doesn’t pick a dead mirror, it’s slow. And something else always has the database locked. Or there are left over temporary __* files in the /var/lib/rpm or wherever, which have to be deleted before it will work again. And certainly, it doesn’t have the finesse that apt has in pulling things from multiple mirrors simultaneously. Apt is almost always able to saturate my fast connection. Yum just clunks along at whatever mediocre speed the single mirror its talking to can deliiver.
Yum “works” in the same sort of way that a 1973 Vega hatchback “worked”. Apt works like a refined sports car.
For years, I used to make fun of Debian folk who seemed always to be lauding over Apt. But then I tried an Apt/Deb based distro. And the difference in refinement is irrefutable. Although that does not dissuade an army of Fedora fans from trying to, anyway.
For someone who claims to have given up on Fedora, you post more about Fedora (in news not even related to Fedora such as PulseAudio problems in Ubuntu!) and seem to be investing a lot of time and energy in that compared to any other “Fedora fans” I have seen.
I must say I am impressed by this although the logic gymnastics you indulged in the PulseAudio discussion was quite amusing and entertaining. Keep it up.
Are you sure you have the right person? I just did a google search of osnews looking for me and pulseaudio, and I don’t see anything where I was complaining about pulseaudio. If you can show me the posts you are refering to I would me interested
His personal attack was directed at me, and not you. Though I think he may be confusing OSNews.com with LWN.net. 😉
Edited 2009-11-18 22:19 UTC
I did not reply to you
It looks like you did, I guess it’s an error or something.
Were you intending to be posted in this thread. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with yum.
At any rate, I probably have more hands on experience with using Fedora professionally than most people here, including many of the Fedora cheerleaders. And quite honestly a few years more experience than I would have wanted, since one cannot really “turn on a dime” regarding migrations. I comment based upon my experiences, hopefully adding value to these forums. And if my opinions of Fedora are not always glowing… well, that’s just the way it is. And if it bothers you that I express them here, that’s just too bad for you.
While yum has improved substantially since the Yarrow days, it’s still quite clunky in comparison to Apt. Hey, I do give it credit for getting the dependencies right, which many seem to disagree with me on. And I give it credit for “working”, albeit clunkily. I used to be a yum fan, in fact. And I’m still a fan of Python based utilities. But I started using Apt a few years ago and it quickly won me over with its polish.
Improve yum to the point that it impresses me and I’ll start praising it. I’m sure that Presto has potential. And it is something that Apt doesn’t currently do. I’m not married to Apt or to Debs. I just call it like I see it.
You don’t call it like you see it. Otherwise, you would have easily admitted that the responsibility of what other distros ship is not Fedora’s problem. As far as I am concerned, you have lost all personal credibility in that stupid argument. Now I am unwilling to take any claims you make at face value including your experience if any with Fedora.
Now that you are claiming to have completely moved off Fedora, I don’t see why you continue to be bothered about what Fedora does. Just be happy with the distribution you are using instead of inventing contrived arguments to trash talk what you don’t like. It doesn’t lead to any interesting conversations.
Color me devastated.
You’re perfectly free to stick your fingers in your ears and sing “La La La” all day long, if you like. It won’t help Fedora much. But you are perfectly free to do it.
And that is that is as much time as I care to waste on this subthread.
You should be devastated for making a ridiculous argument and blaming Fedora for Ubuntu shipping PulseAudio by default with broken patches. You also tried to blame Fedora for bugs in CentOS before. I am just calling you out now on a repeated pattern of unhealthy behaviour and asking you to stop it. If you have useful and constructive criticism, it would be much more worth paying attention to. Currently, you are not.
You said it was a year ago, so I just assumed F10. Obviously it couldn’t have been F11 or F12 you were talking about.
And as far as what you prefer to use, I say go for whatever floats your boat. You have every right to use whatever you want, and I don’t even use Fedora myself.
I’m just saying you shouldn’t come in here and make blanket statements about how something sucks when you haven’t even tried it yet.
And that the problems you’re having with dependencies are almost certainly related to the packages and mirrors themselves, and not the technology grabbing them. Fedora could move to an apt based system and it would still have the exact same issues.
Edited 2009-11-19 04:39 UTC
All of my experience with Fedora says that the package management is inferior to Debian. No I have not tried F12, because all of the other times I have tried Fedora, I was disappointed.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me 12 times, shame on me. And if the problems I had with Fedora were because of the repositories and the mirrors, THEY ARE STILL PART OF THE FEDORA PACKAGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM. I don’t care why the problems occurred, they occurred.
so, basically, there’s no useful information we can gain from you to improve Fedora. thanks for clearing that up.
He’s provided plenty of useful information. You refuse to acknowledge it. Your interest in the matter seems limited to the PR aspects.
I think you’re wrong about that. He’s provided an anecdote, which has no verifiable test or way to directly improve anything. At best, he can hope that some Fedora dev stops by and decides to work more on general package management issues. More likely, nothing will happen.
Think if this was a bug report. What would happen? It would get closed for not having enough information.
When closing bug reports any way possible is the goal, the methods and procedures become refined to achieve that end. I have no doubt that this bug report would quickly be closed on Fedora’s Bugzilla. And for reasons well grounded in Fedora convention. It’s one of the reasons that I migrated my clients away from that distro.
Edited 2009-11-20 00:35 UTC
How would you solve this bug report if one of your users came to you and repeated it? It’s way, way too general to have an actual “solution”.
That’s the point I’m trying to make here, if you can come up with a hard set of steps to follow that break something, it can easily get fixed. But something like this is only useful in the most general terms, and most likely won’t get anything actually accomplished. Because it’s not repeatable, we really only have his word to go on that it even happened. (Although i do trust him, that’s not where I’m going with this)
If he could say that he was only using the official repositories, then that would at least be something. The bug could be about ensuring that all packages are tested in all possible scenarios and they always work. But I’m under the definite impression that things were broken for him after he setup a 3rd party repository that Fedora has no control over, and they ended up breaking his installation by giving him unsupported packages.
Edited 2009-11-20 00:51 UTC
Yum is slow, clunky, and unreliable, compared to its competiton. It has a habit of repeatedly hitting, and timing out, on dead mirrors, over and over and over again. It leaves temporary __db* files in its temporary directory, which is in a very hard to locate nonstandard location which is not even a valid place to put temp files according to the FHS, which have to be deleted before yum will work again. Often, a process holding a lock has to be killed before yum or its current Fedora GUI will work. It’s a Rube Goldberg contraption that more or less works, as long as one is not easily embarrassed or does not have anyone looking over one’s shoulder while using it.
It handles dependencies adequately. It is not dependency hell. It’s just a clunky piece of software that is slow, inefficienct, and has excessive locking complications.
That’s my personal observation.
And I’m sure that you will ignore all that. Instead, insisting upon hearing something more along the lines of “Line 1567 of file YumIsDaBest.py needs to be updated to reflect a subtle syntactical change between Python 2.6.3 and 2.6.4. Patch attached.” before you would consider it to be a proper bug report.
Deny it all you want. It’s just too bad that we don’t see real competition in this area. There is room for improvement. Apt/Deb could stand to see some competition. Where is it?
Slow = benchmarkable, that’s a good report. although more details about exactly what is slow would be better. “everything” would be acceptable.
clunky = a personal opinion? not sure what you mean by that, the syntax seems to be similar to other package managers to me. maybe you meant buggy/slow, in which case you’re duplicating one of your other complaints.
unreliable = this is one where it would be great to have a set of repeatable steps to follow which cause the problem. Is it specific packages? Random but easily verifiable (once every 10 downloads on average, so just keep trying to see the error?) Related to specific mirrors? etc.
See, these are good details. Exactly the kind of stuff the previous poster left out.
Not at all. I just wanted something more than, “it broke for me when i tried it a couple years ago.”
Well, I don’t blame him. One thing that I’ve noticed is that you can scream till you’re blue in the face (or the nose) about the failings of yum… and no one wants to listen.
Look. Apt has been pretty stagnant. It’s a stationary target. It’s good. Very good. But pretty stationary. We ask the Yum community to do one thing: Hit it.
And what we get back is a sort of whiny: “Your bug report isn’t good enough.”
In the words of Joan Jett: Hit me with your best shot! Fire Away!
I’m not sure what you want from me, but I said I couldn’t remember, and this isn’t Fedora’s Bug Tracker. This is OSNews. I’m not here to get help with Fedora, or any other OS, I’m here to read articles and post comments, snide or otherwise.
And if you wanted to have a real discussion, why not send me an email. Initiate something. Bitching to me that you don’t find my comments useful IS NOT USEFUL. You’ve been being snide since you got involved in the discussion. I wasn’t being vague because it was my mission in life, If I was being vague, it was because I had enough problems that I bailed after a couple of weeks, didn’t keep any notes, and like i said it was a year ago.
Instead of being condescending, you could have tried the old “Well, at least he found a distro he likes, good for him” or even “he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about, maybe I’ll explain to him about the improvements we made” No, you complain about my vagueness, and pretend to not be able to figure out what I meant by “Dependency Tracking” (which doesn’t fill me with confidence, it may not be the RIGHT term, but it seems easily understandable.)
I’m not a Mac user deriding Windows for no good reason, at the time I switched to Ubuntu there was things that I couldn’t get working, and I put a lot of effort into it. They worked in Ubuntu, and it worked better. Then when I moved to Debian I knew I had found the right mix.
But if Fedora continues to improve, good for them. I’m glad it’s moving along. It’s suppose to be all Open Source, isn’t it?
Then how about you say that, rather than stating that F12 sucks like it’s a fact and not just your educated guess.
Of course. But that isn’t what you said initially. It’s like the people who blame X for the issues with their video card drivers. The end user doesn’t care, but trolling about how terrible X is when the real issue is in the driver and would occur even if X was replaced is misleading at best. I think you’re smart enough to see what’s going on here, even if a general user might not be. (They wouldn’t even know what DEB or RPM meant, since they’d just use the “installer program”)
I had to even register to this site,
to give U the offical “rpm-expert”-prize.
I.e. every time there is a story about RH/Fedora,
in OSnews, there is some “expert” to talk about rpm and dependency management.
…when rpm has nothing to do with it.
-> yum yum.. Debian this and apt that…
Since the last time I used Debian was with floppies maybe in 1998??, I don’t now write any expert comments about Debian, better leave it to somebody who manages 50+ Debian servers…
In my experience, there is nothing wrong with dependency tracking in rpm. If you use malformed packages or repos with incompatible dependencies things go wrong but that would happen in the deb world as well. To most people this is a no issue if you stick with well known reposositories, and that is the case regardless if you use yum or apt.
A much bigger problem that we have two dominant non compatible packaging systems. This means that developer effort to package a certain package doubles. This means that the developer is likely to have less time available to test that his package works well on the target system.
It also means that the developer needs time to learn both systems. In the end this means that many programs only gets packaged for one of the packaging systems, resulting in less available software for the end user, and a lesser customer base for the software manufacturer.
Lesser customer base often means less profit. Less profit means that it is less likely that the package gets ported to Linux in the first place, and again the loser is the Linux end user.
Today you need to be able to install rpm to support Linux Standards Base. Debian complies with this by using Alien. However Alien is far too difficult to use to most end users, so if you are software house you still need to create both debian and rpms to support both Red Hat and Debian. In my opinion Debian does the Linux world a disservice in not adopting the standard packaging format.
If Debian switched to rpm as packagin format, their repositories would still kick ass, as they are done by very brilliant people, and they could still use apt-get and other tools that their users know and like, but the job for developers that would like to support both Debian and Red Hat would be much easier.
In the end that would result in a better business proposition for people considering porting their apps to Linux, and in the end this would be a good thing for the Linux user in general, regardless if he use Debian or some Red Hat based distro.
I don’t find alien hard to use. I’m not sure how it could be that hard to use.
No, I’m sure you don’t, and in fact neither do I. But this is not about you and me. To a newbie, not using the standard way of install things is too hard or at least unecessary hard.
To gain more marketshare Linux needs to get rid of small glitches like this. People won’t change until Linux is significantly easier to use compared to e.g. Windows.
From a strategic point of view Linux as a whole would benefit from using one standard packaging format, and one installer program. The latter is already starting to happen as PackageKit gets more and more common.
A newbie is going to install everything from the repositories, it is rarely necessary to use Alien. I’ve maybe used it twice in the last couple of years.
A firehose is a firehose. Oh… you can compress the stream however you want. Or you can separate out only the new breakage, and send that compressed, to be combined with the original good stuff and old, unfixed, breakage on the client side. But the end result has the same problems, plus any new problems introduced by the shiny new delivery system. The churn problem is preserved by the process, and made worse by something akin to the second law of thermodynamics.
I’m sure that your Debian’s updates are better than Fedoras. But pretty much any distro’s updates are. We’ve all simply escaped in different directions.
Edited 2009-11-17 23:09 UTC
Oh, I’m not arguing that at all, just puttin’ in my 2 cents worth.
I will agree to your every word. yum is hell and so is RPM. I also moved from Fedora/Redhat to debian due to the same reason. People who wants to know the difference between yum and apt-get or synaptic please read the link below:
http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7382/1.html
Don’t spread FUD. When was the last time you tried Fedora? The benchmarks you link to doesn’t even measure the same things. If you want to benchmark yum, refer to
http://skvidal.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/yum-benchmarks/
Edited 2009-11-18 09:25 UTC
I give you one thing that bothers me about apt. “Reading database…” takes forever.
Having fun trolling?
– Gilboa
This is not a troll, this is what my experience with Fedora has been. If that is what defines trolling nowadays, so be it.
Lets do an English 101:
Unless you spent the last couple of weeks using Fedora 12 (How exactly? It was released… Yesterday?), you have no way of defining Fedora 12 as “just another attempt”…
– Gilboa
Edited 2009-11-18 14:11 UTC
No, but I did try Fedora 11, and Fedora 9, and I saw no real improvement over what Debian gives me, or what I had to deal with when I did use Fedora.
Me too. I tried Fedora 10 and that made me remember those old days with RPM dependency hell. I used a Live KDE spin and then wanted to install GNOME with yum. Not only it was so much slower than apt, but something in the way got broke and the installation never finished, leaving hundreds of untrackable orphaned files over the disk, just like RH used to do.
You tried to install all of GNOME on a system running from a LiveCD? That would probably a bit brave, given all of the “installed” stuff will have to sit in memory? It’s disappointing if rpm failed to handle the out-of-space situation elegantly, though I do wonder what apt would have done in the same situation – I don’t imagine that doing this on a LiveCD boot, as opposed to running off an installed disk, is a well-tested case for any distro.
rpm isn’t fundamentally awful (as a packaging format it’s pretty similar to deb, in terms of its featureset). yum was a dog last time I used it but that was a *long* time ago and I imagine it has improved since then. It’s really unfortunate that rpm itself was relatively unmaintained for such a long time, it really should have had better treatment.
No. Install Ubuntu… then do sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop… you will retrieve something like 250MB from the Ubuntu server, but considering your connection won’t let you down, you will GET KDE installed. The same goes for Kubuntu sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop. Oh I forgot, in Fedora I’d have to become root first… and all that work.
When everybody was saying that YUM was faster and faster, better and better, I tried it… and it was no way near APT. Too bad. Modern distros are more inclined to use DEB than RPM. I think that APT/DEB is the shiniest conceived thing from Debian folks (nothing else though). RPM based distros are more kinda legacy distros, because in long ago, RedHat was the “base” distro for others to build custumized distros. But soon apt was introduced, new distros started to adopt it.
APT doesn’t even leave orphaned files in my system, and that is so cool…
Edited 2009-11-19 01:38 UTC
Sorry, because you mentioned the LiveCD I had the impression that you’d tried to add Gnome to an install running from a LiveCD. It’d probably have a go at it but I wouldn’t be surprised if it failed!
In Fedora, yes, you’d have to type something like:
su – -c “yum install -whatever-”
which doesn’t seem that much worse? If you install the appropriate thingy that provides KDE, then you’ll get KDE?
Apparently with F12 you don’t have to be root to install stuff using PackageKit, so long as you’re logged in at the local terminal. I don’t entirely approve of that decision but that *is* slightly easier than Ubuntu, even.
I’m sure it’s faster and better than it was – if it had got any worse you’d have had too many servers destroyed by the returning glaciers whilst waiting for a yum install operation.
Apt is just fast already, though. There do seem to be a confusing variety of package interface for Fedora, so maybe one of the other ones is better than yum…
Hrmmm. I’m really not too sure about that. I’d expect that OpenSuSE, Mandriva, CentOS/RHEL and Fedora make up a big chunk of the marketshare, even measured against Debian and Ubuntu. Other modern distros such as Arch and Gentoo have their own systems.
It’s fair to say that the single most popular distro (Ubuntu) uses apt, though.
apt itself has never given me many issues, whereas I’ve had corrupted RPM databases on a few occasions and they were incredibly annoying. That can be addressed by fixing bugs in the RPM tool, it doesn’t mean RPM needs to be abandoned. Although it would be nice if there was a standard package format and manager on the mainstream distros.
$ su -c ‘yum install @kde-desktop’
Is that any harder? really? You might have a point but this argument is just lame
The term RPM dependency hell appears to be a bias without understanding how a package manager works. It will not be surprising that people stating it never ever use the base command dpkg alone or make/make install. It looks like a mirror issue rather than package itself. yum does a lot of task before making a transaction (cache is disabled by default) unlike apt.
At that case, have you installed yum-utils then apply yum-complete-transaction command? As someone who is familiar with a package manager, why did you not research other functionalities of yum? The tools are available and you only want to complain.
Edited 2009-11-18 20:38 UTC
Yum went through some many changes in each subsequent release that comparing F9 to F12 is irrelevant.
As for F11, coupled with delta-RPMs (once activated) and fastestmirrors, updating my large number of F11 machines is not longer a visible issue.
While the local debian mirrors are faster (Fedora does not have local mirrors in Israel), given the speed in which Fedora releases updates, I can’t say the I really feel any difference between Debian Sid and F11. (Actually, I last encountered a broken dependency in… Sid)
In short, do not mock F11 or F12’s yum until you used for a long while.
– Gilboa
Not true. Even on a fairly high bandwidth connection, yum-presto is definitely faster for me at work.
Then you probably have fast machines. On Netbooks or old computers presto sucks big fat donkey dong and I am _not_ exaggerating. Downloading with a fast line is basically effortless. Regenerating the RPMs isn’t and it basically just froze my netbook (EeePC 901)
Nope. Using Fedora 12 on a regular laptop as well as a netbook. EEEPC, in fact.
OK, maybe your Netbook as a fast SSD or F12 presto improved over F11 tenfold. Trust me F11 presto sucked on my netbook and somehow I think it didn’t change all that much or did it?
I would rather wait a few minutes for updates being applied than have to download over 100MB of patches for something like Open office.
It would also be cool if this type of update works for upgrading between major versions of the distributions. For example if you have installed all the current updates for Fedora 11 you could delta upgrade to Fedora 12 (And non delta packages used when delta is not possible).
It all really depends on the speed of your machine, but as far as I’m concerned presto had been a big help. I no longer cringe at 300-400Mb of updates.
What’s up with that? Otherwise it seems like an incremental update… which it is. DOH! But nice to see Fedora still pounding them out.
the ‘miscellaneous problems’ entries on the common bugs page are catch-alls copy/pasted straight over from the f11 page; basically they’re just standard bits of advice for configuration tweaking for people who do run into X issues. there are _always_ some X issues in any distro release, just too much hardware to support it all perfectly. In general F12 should have rather better graphics experiences for most users than F11.
Ah. O.K. Thanks.
http://www.seoexpertconsultants.com/index.php?linux&release=Fedora~…
Yet again, Fedora developers has done awesome work. It’s pleasant to see how Fedora drives Linux forward. There’s no Fedora related/branded technologies but technologies for every single Linux distro (+ other open source OS as well).
Really impressive work, thanks.
I’ve always liked Fedora’s artwork more that Ubuntu’s.
Let’s see, I have to make a 10GB download this time? This is one of the things that made me withdraw from Fedora – every release a huge download. RPM is slower than DEB, and generally the root account cannot be sudoed out of the box. No thanks… I’d rather go with a 700MB Ubuntu image… and .DEBs keep it up much better. As far as bugginess goes, I belive both Ubuntu and Fedora are quite buggy anyways.
Edited 2009-11-17 20:21 UTC
No. Not at all. It’s just a 4.3GB DVD image. Even if you are on a modem connection, that’s only about 11 to 13 days. By then there will only be about a half a gig of updates out. With the new delta-rpms you can go through those less than a day and a half.
Of course, if you pay by the MB, you want to be careful. Fedora’s price tag on my netbook with mobile broadband comes in at about $300 with the initial updates.
FUD. a Live CD is only around 700 megs.
Even if you do install the DVD and decide to install everything, with DeltaRPM, even 500 megs of updates will probably go down to maybe 50 megs – so the feature is invaluable to users on such connections, unlike how you were suggesting earlier.
and due to Delta RPM and ALSO due to the existence of installable live cd’s that are around 700 megs, I am begining to wonder wether you are really trolling?
um…no. You can download a 650MB live CD, if you like.
Installable?
Of course. All you had to do was visit the download page to see all this, it’s not exactly rocket science.
http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora
The first DVD is all you need, especially if you upgrading from F11. The DVD is actually smaller now.
I look forward to installing it this weekend, I hope to upgrade my Fedora 11 install to F12
cheers
niall
I’m a bit more pragmatic, I suppose. I would hesistate to congratulate a distro for “another great release” until I had installed it and experienced its wonders and/or horrors for myself.
hey, it’s my distro of choice and has been since the first release of Fedora came about in November 2003,
I’ve used every release since the betas of Yarrow and to me they’ve all been Great releases, I see no reason for that distinguished reputation to be tarnished now, and once again I congratulate the team on a great job of keeping Fedora alive and kicking and producing another great release. I’m sure of it.
cheers
niall
Edited 2009-11-17 22:27 UTC
Well, I rode that train from Red Hat 4.2 (Biltmore) in Spring 1997 through Fedora 8 (Werewolf), released November 2007. It started to jump the track with FC1, Yarrow, but I refused to admit it. By Fedora 7, aptly named “Moonshine”. things became completely untenable.
When I hear of another Fedora release, I tend not to think “Another Great Release!” but “Better thee than me!”.
Edited 2009-11-17 22:36 UTC
I use Fedora on my work laptop (a Lenovo T61p) and my four workstations for FMRI and DTI heavy lifting at work and four test machines for server applications I write for DICOM streaming, which production servers run mostly on CENTOS (fasing out RHE 5). The Fedora machines all have 2 partitions for the OS, the old for fallback and the new one. I upgrade by installing a standard DVD (mostly an half hour installing) and I have written a couple scripts that generate a list of additional installed rpms on a well working previous install (Fedora 11) and then automatic upgrade the new OS with the listed rpms. . I do this for one 64bit and one 32bit install, clone the partitions and install the rest of the machines with them.
Upgrading cost me 4 hours for 10 computers top.
Edited 2009-11-17 21:21 UTC
I was running Fedora 10 and upgraded to 11. But i wanted to try ext4 and installed Fedora 12 from scratch this afternoon.
Well, time to install is reduced to about 15 mins on an Athlon X2 5200+, 2GB DDR2 and 160GB SATA2 HDD, which is about 10 to 15 mins less than previous versions, very nice!
Also, startup times has been decreased to about 30s to desktop, and shutup to about 5 secs, very nice also.
Hardware detection is rather good, with the exception of not being able to activate desktop effects on a nvidia integrated graphics. I will try to add rpmfusion repository and install drivers tomorrow.
Last thing to polish the installation is adding some multimedia codecs, which i hope i can install from rpmfusion, too.
Last thing will be flash player, a subject on which i must investigate because last time i tried i had to try a 64 beta of version 10 on my x86_64 kernel of Fedora.
I have noticed that updating Fedora is rather faster than it used to :yum in older versions of Fedora were painful compared to delta rpms and yum included in last version.
Adding up, i’d give it a 9 out of 10, very good/excellent.
I’m afraid desktop effects may have to wait awhile with this release. Due to something that NVidia did with the drivers where it kills usability with KDE users the Fedora 12 team decided to leave them out.
At least, that’s what it says on their common F12 bugs page.
If you’re okay with the open source driver, then by all means have a blast. It’s a really great release otherwise.
edit: spelling
Edited 2009-11-18 09:48 UTC
Common bugs page talks about an issue with the proprietary Nvidia driver. Details at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F12_bugs#Problems_when_using_t…
Fedora will not ever ship any proprietary kernel drivers. However it is available in the updates-testing repository in RPM Fusion repository if you want to use it. Details at
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-November/m…
There’s always GNOME. On the other hand, GNOME isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I’m using compiz with the nvidia driver, and desktop effects seem to be working just fine.
right, because wobbly windows and spinning cubes are so helpful in getting shit done.
So you don’t like special effects? So what?
Go back to your green-screen VT100 terminal.
A 6 month release cycle is hard to keep up with. This is what it what it should be: a yearly new release and a safe application backport and bugfix six months after that. At least the backport bugfix release would be far more stable, in theory, than the releases.
I used to like RedHat desktop, which ceased in version 9. They did set standards. But Ubuntu came with great ideas and an ugly theme and stormed every Linux distro out there. Fedora now runs behind Ubuntu’s trail.
I actually like the deltarpm concept… I am tired of upgrading whole packages… but after so many dellusions… don’t know… Fedora packag management is inferior to Debian’s.
I remember Eric S Raymond writing a very bold and harsh letter against this issue – it was the whole package management thing. “Fedora, you had every chance, and you BLEW it…” he wrote.
Edited 2009-11-19 16:31 UTC
At least until you are sure all your working tools are running well.
I had used RH7,RH9, FC2,FC3,FC4,FC5,FC6,FC8,FC11 and now just migrated an istallation from FC11 to FC12.
Still using FC5, FC6, FC8 in some machines. All that I needed there are running. So, apart of a bug fix or security hole, there is no reason to upgrade the OS.
The version upgrade from FC11 to FC12 was surpringly smooth. I normally do clean installs to avoid time wasting to solve problems that cost more than reinstalling whole system.
Also tried Suse/Debian/Ubuntu/Mandriva/Slackware/Knoppix/Vector/Centos, but Fedora was the one that fit my “modus operandi” better. It’s not a case of being better than others, it’s only a tool that is for me.