On Thu, 2008-09-18 at 13:03 -0400, Darrell Michaud wrote: > Fedora is very much a bleeding edge distribution. It usually has the most > late-breaking versions of packages.
The development tree definitely does. Stable releases, it varies a bit from package to package. One of the interesting things about Fedora folks might not be aware of is that a huge portion of the packages are maintained by *community* members, not Red Hat employees. For the packages I maintain, I tend to put the latest and greatest into the development tree as soon as possible. The latest release will likely get those same packages built, and pushed into the updates-testing repo. For the prior release, I'll often stick to only bugfix updates. Depends on the exposure from updating the package... > It is not unheard of to find > pre-release or beta versions, sometimes against the original upstream > source's wishes. We try to work as closely as possible with upstream to make sure that doesn't happen, but it does still happen sometimes. Occasionally, pre-release versions get pushed into the devel tree, hoping there will be a stable release by the time of the upcoming Fedora release, but it doesn't always happen that way. > It also tends to be a showcase of ideas > never-been-packaged-in-a-distribution-before coming out of RedHat's > research and development. For all that instability, it also tends to be on > the leading edge of some interesting security and privacy technologies. It > has a very good SELinux configuration out of the box, and easy > install-time support for full encrypted disk volumes. It's a great > distribution for experimenting with the latest and greatest, and is > generally quite usable. Indeed. Even the development tree is generally quite useable. My laptop: $ uname -r 2.6.27-0.329.rc6.git2.fc10.x86_64 $ rpm -q gnome-desktop gnome-desktop-2.23.92-1.fc10.x86_64 > One major downside is the upgrade treadmill- Fedora's support for previous > versions does not last long and new versions are released about every six > months, forcing a cycle of frequent whole-system upgrades. ...which I actually like myself. :) > Another difficulty for end users is Fedora's scrupulous avoidance of any > software that might have legal issues being distributed in the US, such as > most popular audio and video codecs. Fedora does not have built-in support > proprietary kernel modules or drivers, such as the ATI and NVidia > accelerated drivers. If you want all those things, you have to get it from > third-party repositories. Luckily, there are many to choose from that > specifically target fedora users. I like freshrpms and occasionally livna. And Real Soon Now, rpmfusion will go live. For those that don't know, rpmfusion is the merger of livna, freshrpms, dribble and a few other 3rd-party repos. > Fedora 10 is not scheduled for final release until Nov. If you are going > to try it I would stick with Fedora 9 and not get pre-release versions of > 10 unless you are incurably curious. In general the final release tends to > see a massive wave of fixed packages 1-2 weeks after its initial release. Sometimes, yeah. Have to freeze the tree at some point, and internal/community testing of the development tree doesn't hit nearly as much hardware or use cases as the initial release. > It is an unlikely linux distribution choice for a business use case, or > for a non-technical user's situation, but for a technical user's personal > system or experimentation system it is fun and interesting. Yeah, I'd generally agree with that. RHEL/CentOS is generally better for business use case, IMO (unless you need support for newer $foo). I think Fedora is generally pretty good for non-technical users these days, but not quite as much so as Ubuntu. It definitely kicks ass for leading-edge tech though. -- Jarod Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
