Fedora

[Jarod Wilson]

On Thu, 2008-09-18 at 15:46 -0400, Bruce Labitt wrote:
> Jarod Wilson wrote:
> > 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.
> >>     
> > <snip>
> > </snip>
> >> 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. :)
> >>
> >>     
> Is there some way to make this upgrade more automated?  It always seems 
> so painful trying to remember what little doodads to backup - stuff that 
> is not in /home

I've got backuppc running, routinely doing backups of all my critical
machines, so I just go right ahead with yum upgrades whenever I'm in the
mood (and don't need my cpu/disk for other things).

A release or two ago, there was a 'pre-upgrade' package added to the
Fedora repos, which was supposed to do some sort of depsolving, package
downloading, and insert bits into your bootloader, such that when it was
done, you could reboot into the anaconda installer running off your hard
disk, with all the packages also already available locally and do an
upgrade. Never tried it myself, but its supposed to be spiff. I *think*
there are some future plans to tie this into PackageKit in the (near?)
future, so that PK will actually tell you when a new release is
available, suck down the pre-upgrade bits, set everything up and let you
know when its ready. I could be smoking something too though... Like I
said, I just do yum upgrades from one release to the next.

> > 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.
> >
> >   
> RSN, when would that be?  It looks like a good idea...  However their 
> website wasn't too revealing IIRC.

Well, the original plan was to have it ready by F9's release... That
obviously didn't happen. The new plan is to be ready *before* the F10
release. Lots has been going on behind the scenes getting the repo
populated, and its actually usable right now, it just isn't publicized
anywhere. (Nb: I maintain packages in rpmfusion too, and am already
using its repos).

> > 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.
> >   
> Well, for work, I'm really not quite sure if I'm what the linux 
> community would consider a developer.  It feels like I'm a developer, I 
> write code in C and soon in python, to do some scientific application.  
> I don't develop OS stuff, nor do I want to develop 3D apps, I just need 
> to solve a problem.  I wouldn't think I would need "really" new $foo, 
> but I guess I do, if I want my 2 year old video card supported (open 
> source only). 
> 
> So what would "you" do?

Well, RHEL is probably the right answer most of the time here.
Unfortunately, sometimes new-ish hardware support is lacking,
particularly for devices where there was no freely available
documentation until very recently. AMD only handed out the docs for the
Radeon HD and x1000 line very very recently, not soon enough that
RHEL5.2 could incorporate proper drivers for 'em. They ought to be
supported nicely in RHEL5.3, so far as I know (disclaimer: I don't know
for sure, this isn't an official promise from RH, etc., etc.).

Me, I'd run Fedora. RHEL5 as a whole was outdated an uninteresting to me
before 5.0 was even released. :)

However, if I had a business to run, and actually working on the distro
itself wasn't my day job, I'd probably stick to RHEL5, and in your case,
just use the binary fglrx driver until such time as a viable free driver
was available.

Or get a different video card. I've actually got a rather nice 512MB
Radeon X1900XTX sitting in a drawer in favor of an nVidia card around
here somewhere, because Radeon X1000 support was so crappy last I tried
it (maybe a year ago now). However, things are actually looking quite
good these days w/another box of mine that has an X1300 in it, so I may
have to dig the X1900XTX back out...



-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com