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What's Fedora Up To? Ask the Project Leader
Posted by
Roblimo
on Mon Aug 07, 2006 11:34 AM
from the not-all-hats-are-red dept.
from the not-all-hats-are-red dept.
Fedora Project Leader Max Spevack offered himself up for this interview because, he said, "I look at stories like [your] posting Ubuntu to Bring About Red Hat's Demise and many of the comments about Red Hat and Fedora seem very rooted in the world of several years ago, when the RHEL/Fedora split took place." This is a chance to clear the air, and get an up-to-date look at what Fedora is up to these days. So ask away; we'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Max and (hopefully) publish his answers later this week.
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Fedora Project Leader Max Spevack Responds 135 comments
Max Spevack writes: "Hi everyone. I'm looking forward to answering all of the questions, but
before I start diving into that, I guess it would be useful to give a
little bit of perspective about me and my role within Fedora and Red Hat,
because it will offer some context around the things I have to say."
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Link? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Link? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Why such a divide? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, package management seems to be the great divide. What are you doing to bring One Package Manager to all Linux?
Drivers Vs Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd consider this a Real Problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
On that basis, I'll ask my question: Users are forever complaining about a lack of drivers, but the drivers they are often presented with are a very small subset of the Open Source drivers that exist. Is this a problem Fedora will be addressing, or will it be largely left to such drivers being absorbed into the mainstream kernel?
Parent
What's changed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Daniel
Worst Aspect of Fedora? (Score:5, Interesting)
This evening (Score:4, Funny)
Vista a Problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm hoping that Linux distros are not pressured into adding unneeded bells and whistles in a desperate attempt to compete with Vista. Are you invulnerable from this mentality?
Linux presence (Score:5, Interesting)
What is Fedora's Comparative Advantage? (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you tried Ubuntu? (Score:4, Interesting)
NTFS support in Fedora/RedHat. (Score:5, Interesting)
Users do need this option (unlike RedHat's customers, which are organizations as far as I know), and for evidence, Linux-NTFS is one of the projects with the most downloads on sourceforge.
I would like to add that NTFS is part of the mainline kernel. Compiling it as a module will cause it to not take any memory resources other than the few kilobytes on disk that any un-used hardware module is taking, unless of course the user has a mounted NTFS partition.
RedHat's reason for disabling NTFS support was that RedHat is a US-based organization and that they fear patenting problems from MS. No law action was ever taken, and no actual patent was referenced. As far as I know, NTFS is not even patented or patentable. Fedora is not RedHat as you say, so this old reasoning is not exactly valid for Fedora. The IBM/SCO saga also cleared the issue about patents in the mainline kernel.
Unless Fedora will change this simple flag in the kernel config file, I assume it is still controlled (and not only sponsered as some would say) by RedHat.
Fedora (Score:5, Interesting)
Directory Server (Score:5, Interesting)
.rpms and the LSB (Score:5, Interesting)
Dependency hell (Score:5, Interesting)
That's clearly wrong. I only want to install a PostScript previewer. Doing so should not require a filemanager (which I don't need or want), and certainly not a CD burner. But these are added as dependencies due to the clumsy packaging that seems to be increasingly prevalent in Fedora. Perhaps (and I remain unconvinced) there's some aspect of evince that can make use of nautilus being present. But if so, I haven't seen it. I could well believe that nautilus could make use of evince, but not really the other way around. But assume for the sake of argument that it can use nautilus. That still isn't a reason to have it depend on it. Dependencies should be packages that are required in order for another to run, not packages that will merely enable additional functionality. In this case -- the prime function of evince is to view documents, which isn't significantly enhanced by having a file browser present.
Fedora is still my distribution of choice, but it's becoming increasingly hard to use for those of us that prefer to run with a minimal system due to the way that the dependencies have been getting out of hand. Are there any plans to fix this, or is any work already underway to do so? I understand that some consideration has been given to providing "soft dependencies" within RPM (like dpkg's suggested dependencies), which would help. Is there a timeframe for this? Is anything else being done?
I quite understand the focus on getting the system to be usable for the average unskilled user. But the impression I'm getting is that it's being done at the expense of letting those of us that know what we're doing do what we want. Does Fedora have a position on the type of users it's aiming for, or is it still trying to be a general purpose OS?
What's the diffference? (Score:5, Interesting)
mass end user appeal (Score:4, Interesting)
1) A pre-built image file on C:\ that will be the linux hard drive.
2) A
3) When run, this kernel boots off the image on NTFS.
I know this can be done with existing technology (or at least the hard parts are already working). The NTFS driver can write to an existing file if the size does not change. Linux kernel can init on an already powered up machine and reset the hardware. I know Red Hat does a lot of kernel work and other developement, so I know you guys capable of doing this very quickly.
This gives the vast majority of users a way to download linux like any other program, run it without rebooting into some scary 'repartition' software, and still get the full benefit and experience of linux. In fact, immediately after downloading they just click the program and say "Yes" to "Shutdown Windows and start Linux?" and 20 seconds later they are in a Fedora core system. If they like it, they can install a normal Fedora directly onto the system. If they don't like it, just delete the image file.
My question is, will you at least consider doing this? Something like this would be huge for linux adoption and therefore Red Hat mindshare.
Goals (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there an objective in the Fedora Project? One that is clear and may motivate developers to join? Or is it here really just to reduce costs for the Red Hat team?
Support for Free Drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
RHEL vs RH9 vs FC3-5 (Score:4, Interesting)
Vendor Support (Score:4, Interesting)
Ultimately, who has the pull to get it done?
Re:MP3 Licensing (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Well, if you really want to (Score:4, Funny)
Parent