Fedora

[Ben Scott]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 12:23 PM, Bruce Labitt <bruce.labitt at verizon.net> wrote:
> Is there a Fedora 10? or is that in alpha?

  The current "general release" is Fedora 9.

  From my point of view, the Fedora project is *always* in
development/testing mode for the next release.  The stated goal of the
Fedora Project is to provide a platform for the latest and greatest
ideas in Open Source.  They target a general release every six months,
but work for "the next release" is always happening.  That can be a
good thing or an irritation, depending on what you want.

> Can one "relatively painlessly" upgrade from Fedora 9 to 10?

  The official upgrade path for Fedora is to download disc images for
the latest release, burn and boot from disc, and follow the prompts to
upgrade.

  I've read several reports about upgrading the running system
in-place, using yum, but they always come with big warnings about how
they're unofficial, not supported, here there be dragons, etc.

  The actual upgrade mechanism itself tends to work pretty well -- Red
Hat's been doing this for 15 or so years, and they've gotten the
techniques down.

  The problems arise from the packages being upgraded.  They don't
always work so well.  Fedora is not afraid to scrap old ideas and try
new ones.  Sometimes the new ideas don't actually work so well.
Sometimes they try something for one release and then abandon it for
the next.  Again, that's stated up-front: They're willing to sacrifice
some backwards compatibility to advance the state of the art.

  I currently run Fedora at home.  It's kind of neat to be able to
check out the latest neat features and cool software.  Having to
upgrade every 12 months to maintain security updates is annoying.

  It's not really a "good" or "bad" by itself, but know what you're
subscribing to.

-- Ben