[lug] Fedora 7 is out, but don't yum upgrade

Sean Reifschneider jafo at tummy.com
Tue Jun 5 04:56:52 MDT 2007


On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 10:37:37AM -0600, David Howland wrote:
>It seems to me that with the merging of core and extras Fedora is shooting
>for more of an "everybody's Linux" as Ubuntu has. Most traditional OS users

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "everybody's Linux".  The merging of
core and extras is, in my mind, primarily about including the community
more in the Fedora development process.  Core existed because it was the
part that was "owned" by Red Hat, and Extras was the part which had heavy
community involvement.

Fedora 7 is notable to me because it marks largely the completion of the
transition of Red Hat Linux from being a Red Hat internal project to being
much more responsive to the community.

This was a lot of work from people on both the Red Hat side, and also
community people like Kevin who have put in a whole pile of work to make
this happen.

And the results are great.  The biggest strength of Debian, IMHO, is the
huge repository of packages available for it.  Because of the tight control
Red Hat had over Red Hat Linux and early Fedora, you had a tight core of
fairly high quality packages, but for other software you often had to go
out to another repository to get it.  Even fairly important (IMHO)
software, such as OpenVPN, you had to go hunt down.

This lead to a lot of problems, where users would pick up packages that
weren't built for their exact distro, force their installation, and then
have all sorts of problems with that installation breaking other software.

This was really apparent when I did the F7 install on my laptop.  Almost
all of the software I needed except for tightvnc were available in the
standard repository.  So far, tightvnc has been the only thing I had to get
elsewhere.  My understanding is that RealVNC is meant to be the replacement
for tightvnc, but I'm still having problems with RealVNC in my use.  Not
sure what the right solution is, I think my current issue with RealVNC is a
bug.

>experience serious Linux users go with Debian, SuSE or Gentoo anyway. I

Depends on what you mean by "serious" I guess.  When I think serious, I
think people who are betting their businesses on Linux, making their living
off it and care deeply about it when there is breakage.  These kind of
people:

   Need to deploy something and then have at least 3 to 5 years of security
   and errata updates available.

   Not be forced to adapt to large changes in the software they rely on
   in production.  Normally, a major software change would involve weeks or
   months of time spent with testing against a major or even minor number
   upgrade.

   Almost never do in-place major updates.  Need to upgrade from
   WhateverLinux version 3 to 4?  These people will almost always set up a
   "shadow" environment running the new OS, set up and test their
   applications, and then migrate over to these new machines.  This
   provides a clear back-out procedure: switch back to the old machines
   with the old software.  It also allows testing before things are in
   production.

In my experience, which is largely based on our clients, CentOS and Red Hat
Enterprise Linux are by far the most used Linux distributions.  Ubuntu
maybe comes a distant second.  SuSE was making a lot of progress in the
last year, but then Novell pissed people off with the Microsoft deal so
I've seen some slowdown in SuSE.  However, we are currently in the process
of deploying the first SuSE cluster at our facility right now.  Up until
now, SuSE has only been used by our clients at their own facilities, not
those who are getting hosting through us.

Fedora is towards the bottom of the list of distros we support, largely
because of it's short support cycles for errata and security updates.  I'd
guess that we support around the same number of Fedora and SuSE boxes.

Sean
-- 
 The price of freedom is responsibility, but it's a bargain because freedom
 is priceless.  -- Hugh Downs
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability




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