Fedora Core May Be Reborn 92
darthcamaro writes "At the first ever Fedora Flock conference this past weekend, a proposal was put forward by developer Mat Miller to re-architect Fedora with a core distribution, surrounded by layers of additional functionality for desktop, server and cloud. It's a proposal that Fedora Project Leader Robyn Bergeron is interested in too. 'How can we make Fedora be something that is modular enough to fit into all those different environments (device, desktop, server & cloud) , while still acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all approach isn't something that draws people into the project?' Bergeron said. 'People want something that is specifically for them.'"
Arch Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
Hasn't Arch Linux already solved this problem (for at least x86)?
Hasn't Gentoo already solved this problem for [almost] all architectures?
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Why wouldn't/couldn't you?
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Over the years that I've used these systems, that hasn't been my experience. So, readers: YMMV.
In fact, mileage often depends on whose in the driver's seat.
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In fact, mileage often depends on whose ass is in the driver's seat.
FTFY
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Come on, Grammar Nazis, if you're going to do it, do it properly.
It doesn't matter worth a damn if my ass is in the seat if you're driving. And it doesn't, from the same example, even matter who is occupying the driver's seat.
However, your mileage may vary based on who's driving - and that person's ass is likely (but necessarily) in the driver's seat!
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But you wouldn't use those in an office/cloud environment, which is what I think the developers are thinking about.
i wouldnt? whoops...my bad. guess i should redo all the servers I have been running for the past 6 years
Gentoo and Arch don't have recognised large-scale support vendors, which is something many companies require. I would guess any work will be back-ported into a RedHat if something fruitful comes from this.
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You mean like having this :
http://developerblog.redhat.com/2013/01/28/software-collections-on-red-hat-enterprise-linux/ [redhat.com]
( also, something that Fedora refused to have, so the whole idea of "fedora is a redhat product" is proved a bit wrong )
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Arch generally resolves problems by working directly with upstream projects themselves. So yes, sooner or latter bits of Arch end up in everyone's distribution. This is true of any good distribution. Good distributions work in upstreams to the greatest extent possible rather than hording large wads of patches to themselves. Being more recent and more vanilla than most distributions helps a lot to that end. You give up some stability (although surprisingly not as much as one would think) but bugs often
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Seriously, the AC is talking of running servers on office environment for 6 years now - unless it's fiction he obviously must have a job as maintaining servers and/or as system administrator for them.
And you AC talk about "nub" (wtf is that anyway, must you turn l33t sp33k even dumber?). 6 years (and who knows how long experience of Linux out-of-field), and you AC talk about mistake in the beginning.
Really? :) *sparkle*
I use CentOS for those unless I have no choice (Score:5, Insightful)
That's where you want stability, well proven packages and long term maintenance.
Fedora is the cutting edge, better suited to an enthusiast desktop or maybe a development environment.
In the past I used Fedora for office and servers. That was an error. Switching to CentOS (which is Fedora stabilized) was a much better decision.
The exception was one case in which I needed a brand new subsystem - kernel plus userspace. For that, Fedora made sense because the brand new version I needed was not on RedHat / CentOS yet.
Re:I use CentOS for those unless I have no choice (Score:4, Insightful)
I think a lot of the traditional thinking about servers are changing: VM's, OS-containers, cloud computing means, that the traditional big iron, unchanging OS with hand crafted config files, is receding. Instead all the interesting stuff will happen in mass deployed auto configured VM's, or OS-containers (OpenVZ, LXC etc). There will be VPS's (Virtual Private Servers, served from the cloud), etc. etc.
With services doing live migrations across data centers, and services being configured and executed on a demand only basis, and everything interesting in fleeting VM's and containers, they need for long term feature stable servers may recede;
So while Fedora may not be everyone's choice for a bare metal VM and container server, it may very well be exactly what you want to put inside those VM's and containers. This is why it is important to rethink the Fedora distro. As it is now, its base install very much reflect old style UNIX thinking (nothing wrong with UNIX style, but such servers are not the whole story), that means the base install pulls in stuff like "ed", "tar", "file" etc. While they may nice little standard programs, they may not make sense in a custom VPS.
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The last thing that comes to mind when I think of fedora is "old UNIX thinking".
Re: I use CentOS for those unless I have no choice (Score:3)
I'll second that, It saddens me to say Fedora isn't stable enough for anything other then the desktop. The fundamental problem is it's Red Hat's play ground for RHEL, and when compared directly with products like Ubuntu LTS and RHEL, it feel like alpha software. I haven't managed to get a release to run to my satisfation that would make me want to use it on my systems... and I try every release, as my day job revolves around RHEL.
What they need is a distribution between the cutting edge Fedora and the prove
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If Fedora "isn't stable enough for anything other then the desktop" then it's not stable enough for the desktop, either. I don't want free reboots on my desktop box while I'm trying to use it.
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Yah, and the truth is that its easier to stabilize most servers than a desktops. The server is going to be running a fairly limited set of programs which don't tend to change.
The average desktop probably has 4 or 5x the applications installed and used on a regular basis leveraging more kernel subsystems.
Most server applications only really stress the network/memory and disk subsystems.
Desktop apps do that, plus they stress the graphical, hotplug (for USB devices), sound, wireless (ethernet and bluetooth) an
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Fedora? Reboot? Naaah, it's very stable and thoroughly bug proof. The year of the Fedora Linux Desktop is at....^H^H
All kidding aside, I've been running Fedora since F12 and it's been stable and not crash prone....there ARE issues. Took till F17 before on-the-fly Pulseaudio output switching worked properly.
I wouldn't worry about "some" of the bleeding edge stuff, like systemd, that is pretty transparent to end users and you can still use "service" rather than systemctl if you want.
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If Fedora "isn't stable enough for anything other then the desktop" then it's not stable enough for the desktop, either. I don't want free reboots on my desktop box while I'm trying to use it.
From my experience Fedora is about as stable as most Ubuntu releases with the distinct difference that Fedora actually gets updated throughout it life time.
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From my experience Fedora is about as stable as most Ubuntu releases with the distinct difference that Fedora actually gets updated throughout it life time.
Ubuntu also gets updated throughout its lifetime, I get updates every week. So what you're saying is that the only real difference is that it uses rpm which still sucks?
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2.6.32 is more of a symbolic number at this point, it was likely the basis for where Red Hat started their work on a version of Fedora and subsequently RHEL. So many fixes and features are backported into that version that calling it "2.6.32" is somewhat misleading.
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Wait... Fedora is actually stable enough for the desktop? Since when? Last I checked it was pretty unstable, bleeding edge, quick to add untested shiny new stuff at random, and this is why I dismissed it after my trial and never actually ran it on my machines...
And this was long before GNOME 3, more around the time it (prematurely) adopted KDE 4...
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Gentoo has precompiled packages support for quite some time now, so it is pretty good for office use. And in any case, if you have power users you know they will love Gentoo even if they use other distros. Having a proper and complete development toolset out of the box is the major feature of Gentoo imho, aside from the fine-tuning that is.
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A working and complete development toolset is something I've come to take for granted over the years as a Gentoo user. Every time I try to use something else, inevitably I run into something stupidly minor that ends up being a gigantic hassle due to lack of one. The fact that you can easily compile your programs against what you actually have instead of what some developer somewhere had makes things both smooth and surprisingly pain-free compared to the all-binary distros I've encountered.
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People sure as hell aren't using Fedora in office/cloud environments either.
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Hey, wakeup. This is about Fedora restructuring itself, not about other distros.
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I exclusively run Gentoo on my servers!
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Same here. I tried running others on them and found them to be more hassle than benefit.
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No, these distros have solved nothing other than the problem of things being too straightforward and consistently manageable.
That's where Arch and Gentoo fall flat. If you want to be able to consistently manage things from one machine to another? You've got a headache in front of you. This stems from the fact that they use packaging techniques which are only marginally less cumbersome than flat ZIP files with README.txts.
In other words, Arch/Gentoo solve the problem only slightly more thoroughly than manual
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Debian has been pulling this shit as long as I can remember and everyone thinks Debian is cool so...
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Maybe things have changed but when I used Debian they had one stable release in like 5 years...if anyone farts around the fire it's that cluster fuck of Debian dudes.
I don't know what you are talking about. If you look at the release timeline [wikipedia.org] offered by Wikipedia (which is always right) you can see that the longest gap between two releases was between woody and sarge. This was slightly less than three years, which is not unheard of with less rapid release distributions. All new releases since then has taken roughly two years each.
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Debian 4.0 to 5.0: 4/8/2007, 2/15/2009. About two years.
Debian 5.0 to 6.0: 2/15/2009, 2/6/2011. About two years.
Debian 6.0 to 7.0: 2/6/2011, 5/4/2013. About two years.
In other words, your complaint is either outdated or just completely false.
Even going back a bit further, pre-4.0, I see:
Debian 3.0 to 3.1: 7/19/2002, 6/6/2005. About three years.
Debian 3.1 to 4.0: 6/6/2005, 4/8/2007. About two years.
Going back even further, releases were even more frequent, done once or even more than once a year with a few e
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Clarification on how my thinking is wrong? You could argue that there was one "major version" in five years, but not one "release" in five years. Unless for some bizarre reason, probably to stretch the facts and warp reality, you don't consider 3.0 before it a "release."
"The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 3.1 codenamed ``sarge'' after nearly three years of constant development."
Source? Right here: http://www.debian.org/News/2005/20050606 [debian.org]
I don't know, b
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Yeah, and I only had one birthday in a span of over 700 days while others get them roughly every 365 days!
Moron.
What Fedora Needs... (Score:1)
Is a stable release, so I can actually use it. The sandbox style of Fedora and over stable style of Red Hat just doesn't cut it. It seems as though Fedora changes too rapidly and breaks stuff often and Red Hat is so "stable" that binaries lag far behind.
Re:What Fedora Needs... (Score:4, Informative)
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Did you even read the parent post? He said that RHEL/Cent OS lags too far behind. There needs to be a happy medium between the too unstable Fedora and the Jurassic RHEL/Cent OS. Good luck getting the stable version of chrome to run on Cent OS. The current release is so far behind that Google dropped support for it.
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Which is something Red Hat has a solution coming out for - I don't remember what it's called (not awake yet), but they're including optional repo for newer packages with RHEL 7.
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The sandbox style of Fedora and over stable style of Red Hat just doesn't cut it. It seems as though Fedora changes too rapidly and breaks stuff often and Red Hat is so "stable" that binaries lag far behind.
I agree. This is exactly why I generally stay away from the Fedora/Red Hat family. I have to say though that I respect Red Hat's stability and would use it over Fedora any day, but really, I think I'll just stick with Slackware and Debian and their derivatives for stability and decently-spaced releases. For a desktop/laptop machine though even they can become quite stale, and while openSUSE is a bit bloated, I do like their 8-month release schedule... because let's face it, the standard 6 months of Ubunt
GGP said future. NSA and outlawing soft drinks. (Score:2)
Now that they have the capability to prevent
"hackers" from doing things like installing scary unauthorized operating systems, and multi billion dollar companies stand to profit billions from new regulations it's not impossible. I understand did you take the rejection Microsoft has had to layoff two of their congressmen,
Re:Fedora is very important (Score:4, Informative)
With integrated secure boot and remote attestation Fedora is likely to be the *only* Linux distribution which can lawfully be used on the Internet in the coming years. It is important that they continue their good work if we are to have any Linux at all.
ah I believe ubuntu has its bootloader signed and did not the linux foundation have shim loader signed monthes ago?
Matt not Mat (Score:2)
my kittens (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm still using Fedora 16 with no problems. I don't understand all these people claiming Fedora is "bleeding edge." I guess there are already a lot of different ways to use it. For me it is a fairly stodgy distro with a focus on business and dev tools.
I'd love a minimized version because right now it has gotten too big to run as a router on very old hardware. I hate having to choose debian in those situations.
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Re:Really? Give it a break. (Score:4, Informative)
I run Fedora 19 with KDE on my home machines. Basically I set aside about 5 to 6 hours every six months to upgrade and when I say upgrade I mean a complete re-installation of the latest Fedora from DVD. Even though I actually backup my data (over 1TB) progressively I have never had to recover my data since I use LVM to manage my disks and all I have to do is make sure the system volumes including swap and of course the /boot partition are sized properly. Actually the only time I did have to recover my data when I converted the file-system from ext3 to ext4 and IMHO the performance improvement was worth it.
I strongly recommend that you try upgrading with 'fedup' next time around. It's far-and-away better than our historical upgrade processes and works in-place. I've personally gone from F17->F18->F19 using it with no ill effects.
I have actually found Fedora from 10 onward have been remarkably stable although I will admit when KDE 4.0 came out (I think that was with Fedora 15) I actually switched to Gnome util they fixed the stability issues, however that was not a Fedora issue.
Would I recommend Fedora for the Enterprise? Hell no! since you want any enterprise solution to be supported and in large corporations this usually means a Microsoft OS (this is changing but slowly) for the desktop and a mix of Linux (in my experience Redhat), Microsoft and Unix for the server room.
That's going to depend on your definition of Enterprise. Would I recommend Fedora today as your long-term FreeIPA or other core infrastructure server? No, probably not. On the other hand, would I recommend it for DevOps and rapidly deployed-used-and-killed VM instances for newer technologies such as Ruby on Rails or Node.js? Absolutely. Fedora's rapid development cycle is much more in line with those DevOps behaviors. It's actually a myth that "Fedora isn't for production". I know a great many DevOps deployments using Fedora successfully.
That all said, the major piece that was missing from this incredibly (and clearly intentionally) misleading summary is that the purpose of splitting off Fedora into three targets is to provide better support for those who want to use Fedora in production (the cloud image), those who want to develop their layered software so that it will run on the next version of RHEL/CentOS (the server) and people who want a comprehensive desktop for getting stuff done (the workstation/client).
Stephen Gallagher (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee)
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I strongly recommend that you try upgrading with 'fedup' next time around. It's far-and-away better than our historical upgrade processes and works in-place. I've personally gone from F17->F18->F19 using it with no ill effects.
I had a lot of problems with fedup from 17 to 18. They were fixable after you figured out the issues, but, it caused problems on two systems anyway. Apart from that, the update problem has been pretty tame. Things have been sufficiently stable that I no longer update with a full new install in its own partition while retaining the original so that I can backtrack. I probably should, but I don't.
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exactly! I waited years for systemd, it is newer than SysV but it is sure not bleeding edge.
NetworkManager, yeah, that is the very first thing I turn off in fedora. I doubt I'll adopt "firewall" either. <3 iptables :) These choices have never been difficult in Fedora. That's what I love about it... I have the new stuff, and the old stuff all still works. Many distros want to force you to change, and then things you opt out of you have to maintain your own WTFs in /usr/local
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When it was 'just' an upstream snapshot look to what RedHat Enterprise was going to be in the future,
It was never that. It's the alpha test release for RHEL. It's not beta-quality, because there's a RHEL limited beta program. Fedora is Alpha-test-quality software. Why would you run that on your desktops? At least run CentOS.
Making a 'one-size-fits-all' OS is, pain and simple: a horrible idea. I don't want a damn highly integrated OS that I can use for everything.
You are confusing OS and distribution. That's normal because it's kind of a fuzzy and wavy line, but it's somewhere between the kernel, basic userland, and basic libraries, and the full-fledged system. Debian is useful for installs ranging from very small to full desktop because the min
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Why would you run that on your desktops? At least run CentOS.
Fedora is too bleeding edge and releases too quickly.
CentOS isn't new enough.
I want something in-between.
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Why are you assuming any given OS comes in only one size? Gentoo is a good example of the contrary. It comes in any size you want. I tend to think the mistake is more one of trying to make the OS fit the roles without any input from the user. There are a lot of assumptions made that really aren't necessary when that happens.
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I agree with you but Fedora is still less fucked (crazy, non-standard) than Ubuntu, where hostname -f doesn't even work and god-only-knows what they did to standard, core configuration files, like /etc/resolv.conf -- all in the name of making things (superficially) easier.
I'm sure there's some muti-media app that works better on Ubuntu, but I'll take Fedora on the desktop. For the server, Centos or RHEL.
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Man, I am so sick of this 're-birth' crap from Fedora. I liked Fedora 'core' back 7+ years ago before we had to be this uber bleeding edge -slash- agile uber aggressive build cycle that fucks everything up and obsoletes distribution usage to about 6 months.
When it was 'just' an upstream snapshot look to what RedHat Enterprise was going to be in the future, I was totally cool with that, and it melded nicely in a lot of environments. But that spin-off has become such a damn mess now with developer heavy ideas that, in some case, go against every foundation of a traditional UNIX-like operating system design, I could really give who shits what the do now.
Making a 'one-size-fits-all' OS is, pain and simple: a horrible idea. I don't want a damn highly integrated OS that I can use for everything. You'll never get that right, and some 'next-in-line' guy they give 5 minutes of talk time at the next conference will say the same thing.
When you take shit, and try and re-invent it with only shit, I'm sure everyone knows the result you get.
It's not surprising that you are confused here, since the original poster went out of his/her way to omit all of the substance of the proposal and instead focus on screaming "Fedora Core!". Of the three targets that were proposed, one of them (Fedora Server) is intended to be *exactly* what you just asked for. A clearly-defined server OS that is essentially snap-shots on the road to Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS stability. Then, there are two other targets: cloud images suitable for use in an IaaS or PaaS
They should start by not breaking things (Score:3, Interesting)
Well i like GNOME 3 but the subsequent changes are way too much:
1. no dock, preferrably configurable one (left or right)
2. removing F3 from Nautilus
3. changing gvfs paths every 2nd relaease
4. moving menu options into the main title bar (like preferences in GNOME)
I've been using Fedora since the beginning but after F19 I am no longer recommending it to anyone.
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Start with a LTS distro (Score:5, Insightful)
Since 18 months updates is simply not enough.
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Then clip the server aspirations.
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They can't do an LTS. Why would need RHEL if you can get Fedora LTS for free?
For the same reason that people buy RHEL even though CentOS exists? RHEL exists and is successful because of the support it offers. For users who don't want full support, CentOS fills that gap. So in effect, CentOS *is* the LTS version of Fedora. It just happens to be an LTS version that has a ten-year life-cycle and benefits from whatever fixes are driven by Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers.
That said, if we focus our efforts on the Fedora Server as a primary target (instead of an afterthought), I can ver
The packaging system could be finally replaced... (Score:1)
I wish they could take the opportunity and do some work on the packaging system.
Now that systemd has pretty much overhauled most of the user land, and Wayland will be forcing them to write the whole dependencies trees anyhow, and they already have their new installer, I'd like to see something like a cross between GNU Guix and Gentoo Portage be made for Red Hat\Fedora.
It wouldn't have made much sense a year or two ago to redo everything. But now since they obviously need to clean house, they might as well g
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I wish they could take the opportunity and do some work on the packaging system.
If you mean rpm's why would you want to install an rpm package using the rpm command unless that package is basically stand-alone? It is much easier using yum which determines all dependences and installs them.
Now that systemd has pretty much overhauled most of the user land, and Wayland will be forcing them to write the whole dependencies trees anyhow, and they already have their new installer, I'd like to see something like a cross between GNU Guix and Gentoo Portage be made for Red Hat\Fedora.
You do know that systemd is a system management daemon designed exclusively for the Linux kernel and Fedora became the first major Linux distribution to deploy systemd in May 2011.
The purpose of Fedora Core (Score:2)