Rock-solid Fedora 10 brings salvation to Ubuntu weary

Fedora might not be getting a complete makeover or flashy new features in version 10, out today, but some welcome enhancements under-the-hood make this a worthwhile upgrade. If you've never given Fedora a try, now is a great time. The tenth revision slick and stable and it has a rock solid feel to it that, for our money, …

[Saucerhead Tharpe]

Why mention Ubuntu?

Seriously.

Your header suggests that Fedora 10 will provide welcome relief to those who have used Ubuntu and found it lacking, but as your only comparisions are "Ubuntu has this" then I have to suspect you are trying to court controversy where none exists/

Interesting news about pulse Audio mind, but for feck sake aim higher with your attempts to attract attention. Treat us like adults.

[Jason Harvey]

yes, but does it play mp3s?

or will we be forced to spend some hours/days/... ripping our cd collection into OGG or FLAC to be able to listen in Fedora. This is one of the major reasons I even have Ubuntu on my laptop. I don't have to find work-a-rounds or remove the standard RPM and install a program manually to get mp3 to work. I stopped using Fedora on anything other than my server quite a while back for this one reason, Fedora was a big pain to get media to play.

[Steve Taylor]

RPMS - Oo good.

"As a bonus you also get the always excellent RPM package system"

and

"simply head to the RPMs and install what you'd like"

would be lovely - if you can guarantee that the dreadful dependency hell that RPM's always seems to provoke has been finally solved.

After using Ubuntu for a couple of years, I'd forgotten what a nightmare RPM dependencies are until I tried (and failed) to install wine on a Centos 5.2 systems a fews days ago.

Has this really REALLY been fixed?

[Tom Cook]

Can we lose the gushing enthusiasm a bit?

Not to mention the inferiority complex. This so-called 'review' amounts to, "I like it, and it has Empathy... which is crap, but other than that, I like it. Now can we all stop hanging around Ubuntu like a pack of teenage boys around a girl and come try Fedora... please??? <grumble grumble smug Ubuntu bastards grumble>"

[Toastan Buttar]

Hardware support ?

How does hardware support compare to Ubuntu ?

[Andy]

Errrrm ok then

Well my personal experience of fedora is such that I now use Debian and am much happier.

RPM's and yum are a poor, poor reflection of apt/aptitude in my humble opinion.

[Neil Greatorex]

Nice review

I will definitely be giving it another try on the strength of this. I've avoided Red Hat in the recent past, due to a nasty experience I had. I knocked a mug of coffee onto my keyboard during an install :-(

Keep up the good work Mr. Gilbertson :-)

PS Mr. Bidmead, please take note: It's not necessary to have 14gazillion pages with 4 lines of text & a screenshot on each page.

[Anonymous Coward]

Biased much?

"the always excellent RPM package system", what? RPM is the number one reason I left Red Hat and all derivatives. Ever heard of "RPM hell"? Sure the addition of yum and apt-get somewhat fixed the issues, but I wouldn't refer to RPM as "always excellent".

As for Pulse Audio there are a number of apps that don't play nice with it. The two off the top of my head are Ekiga and Wine.

[Dominik Mierzejewski]

nVidia proprietary drivers

(...) Fedora 10 includes the latest stable version of X.Org, which means no more support for proprietary nVidia drivers.

That's not true. nVidia drivers repackaged by RPMFusion project are reported to work just fine. See http://rpmfusion.org/ for more details.

[Greg]

no support for proprietary nVidia drivers???

Up until that point this was sounding like something that might tempt me away from Ubuntu after all these years, but that's a show stopper for me. I've managed to find a partial explanation for why this is the case, but maybe someone with more in depth knowledge could explain more - and more importantly, is there likely to be a fix/workaround, and is this going to affect me as an Ubuntu user any time soon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Deal breaker

Was thinking of trying it until I read that I'll have to use the default "nv" driver with my NVIDIA card. Unfortunately, this driver is utter crap---it won't run the Gnome desktop smoothly in my experience, much less a 3D screensaver or God forbid, video playback or a game! Tis' a shame because the NVIDIA proprietary driver works great and is fairly easy to install. Lacking the expertise myself, I wish someone would write a non-proprietary driver that does decent 3D on NVIDIA if we're forced to use a native driver.

[Duncan Hothersall]

"the always excellent RPM package system"

This is a new use of the phrase "always excellent" that I haven't come across before. RPM was the reason I moved away from RH-derivatives. It may well have got better recently, indeed I'm prepared to believe it might now be "excellent", but it definitely hasn't "always" been... I'm afraid that means I don't believe anything else said here, which is a shame, cos it might be true.

[Michael Miller]

Does anyone even read this before slapping it up on the site?

Perhaps try proof reading before going to the pub?

"Even Linux newcomers should have any trouble getting Fedora 10 installed and running."

[Adam Williamson]

Quit whining about RPM.

Nice to see a positive review of something - anything - other than Ubuntu. Good going, Reg.

Commentards, please stop whining about 'RPM hell', which has not been anything other than a misunderstanding or PEBKAC for at least five years.

RPM is a package format and a very basic, non-dependency-resolving package manager - in the same mode as dpkg, not apt-get or aptitude. So if you try and use the 'rpm' command as you would use the apt tools, congratulations, you just failed.

There are several dependency resolving package managers for RPM packages, all of which do the basic job perfectly well. The oldest is urpmi, which is part of Mandriva (for those who don't know, I work for Mandriva). Fedora uses one called yum. SUSE has its own too. There's a popular third party one named smart. It doesn't really matter which you use, for most purposes: they're all perfectly capable of properly tracking, managing and resolving dependency issues.

Back when some distros didn't have a dependency-resolving package manager at all and made you handle everything with 'rpm', you could legitimately talk about RPM hell. But now, you can't. All major RPM-based distros now have a perfectly competent dependency-resolving packager manager. If you have problems then 99.9% of the time it's because:

a) you hit a bug in the *package*, not the package manager (which can and does also happen in apt-style packages)

b) you're trying to install a package you shouldn't be installing: it's from another distribution, or the wrong version of the right distribution, or - please, no - you found it on some random "RPM search engine".

JUST BECAUSE IT SAYS .RPM IN THE FILE NAME, DOESN'T MEAN YOU CAN EXPECT IT TO WORK ON ANY RPM-BASED DISTRIBUTION.

This, again, is in no way specific to RPM packages. If you try and install a package built for one apt-based distribution on another, it certainly could cause dependency or functional problems. Fr'instance, I don't think the Debian folks would advise you to install Ubuntu 5.04 packages on Debian sid. But people seem to think it's perfectly fine to try this with RPM packages, and whine when it doesn't work. Sorry, no. It's not.

There is no 'RPM hell' any more. Every RPM-based distro is perfectly capable of dependency management within the range of packages actually meant to be installed as part of that distribution, which is exactly the same thing APT-based distros are capable of. If you have trouble with RPMs, either the packager made a boo boo, or you're doing it wrong.

Oh, on the NVIDIA thing - I think there's patches for the NVIDIA drivers to work with the new version of X floating around. IMBW, though.

[David Viner]

RPM Hell

But have they fixed RPM hell yet?

I tried Fedora a couple of years ago. Installed most things I wanted to try and then ran the update to get the latest versions. Then I tried installing a couple of extra things from the CD (Apache and PHP if memory serves). These refused to install, requiring specific library versions that had been updated out of existence in the previously mentioned update. I gave up and decided to avoid all RPM-based distros ever since as their* more trouble than there* worth (also had a similar problem with Mandriva around the same time).

Debian-based systems have been able to handle this sort of thing properly for years - can anyone tell me if RedHat have fixed it yet? If so, I may give it another try.

David

* Yes, I know both of these should be "they're" - it just seems to be standard practise to always use the wrong one around here ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

.deb/dpkg/apt vs .rpm/rpm/yum

http://kitenet.net/~joey/pkg-comp/

Provides an interesting feature comparison of all packaging systems, it would seem that Debian remains the more feature rich environment, however I suspect most of the whingers above have never tried yum (nor dpkg), it covers all the basics. (http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/packaging.html)

I too remember the horror of the old rpm installs, these days though it's a more pleasant experience, (unless your client has rolled their own build of RPM with an outdated db environment and installs it via kickstart throughout their org, you know who you are, but can't be sure who I am)

[Ben Schofield]

nVidia Drivers

For nVidia drivers, use akmod or kmod from the RPM Fusion repository. Very simple to do. I have full 3D support. Around 1500 frames per second on a 300x300 window of glxgears on an XPS M1330 with an nVidia GeForce 8400M. A near point and click install. That sort of full 3D support.

Ben

[REMF]

nice review

i would like to see a reg review of opensuse 11.1 on its release on the 18th of December. :)

[Anonymous Coward]

RPM will never be an excellent package system

No, they can't fix RPM Hell because it is designed that way. Several times I've tried Red Hat to see what's new, felt THE PAIN once again, and every time come back to Debian. At least I know I'm not missing out on anything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Luckily . . .

Luckily Fedora Core is a different distro to Ubuntu. Isn't that nice!

[HFoster]

Interesting

Having been a loyal Fedora user for the past two years, my favourite version thus far has been Fedora 7 (admittedly, the only versions I've used have been 4, 7 and 9), which I found to be nothing if not stable and user friendly.

Fedora 9 was a bit bolshie to begin with: SELinux waited for me like I'd brought its daughter home 20 minutes past curfew until I killed it dead. However, I eventually learned to stop worrying and love FC9, hiccups and all.

I wasn't planning on upgrading again until FC11, but if things get a bit rough with FC9, I won't mind going over to FC10.

Also, FYI, the Fedora forum and Unofficial Fedora FAQ are veritable goldmines when it comes to information on installing and using non-standard and proprietary packages.

[David Hicks]

Sounds good

Especially as Fedora feeds into RHEL, the distro of choice (well, one of the main ones) for enterprise. Given I have to interact a lot with RHEL, this is encouraging for the future.

OTOH I'll always be a debian user at heart, ever since I first tried it way back in 1995...

It even works better than Ubuntu on my laptop.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Adam Williamson

I have no complaints about Fedora's use of RPMs, but would like to add since you work for Mandriva, that I used Mandriva up till a few months ago and was quite happy with it. I found it to be more polished than Ubuntu, and most everything worked well. Until... I decided to let Mandriva update itself, which I'd been putting off with a portentous feeling of dread. Many hours of frustration later and with no solution in sight I put the hard drive in a drawer and decided to return to it perhaps in the future when I was feeling a little stronger. So I've been kind of leaning towards Ubuntu. There are quirks when I update it too (like having to reinstall the NVIDIA proprietary drivers when I update the kernel), but so far it hasn't utterly cornholed itself like Mandriva did.

[Mike]

@Adam Williamson

I manage about 10 Fedora machines. I NEVER use the rpm command, except when querying the contents of packages. Yum can do everything related to installing rpm's. Are there sometimes some strange dependency chains? Sure. Does yum do an excellent job of resolving them? Absolutely.

There are really no use cases where you need to use the rpm command to install software. If you find yourself doing that, you're probably doing something wrong. Use 'yum localinstall' instead.

Fedora is excellent. Haven't used F10 (waiting until it gets out to the mirror I rsync from), but I did notice that there are Nvidia kmod's in rpm-fusion. If they are kmod's of the proprietary drivers, then all you need to do is install the rpm-fusion repository, and 'yum install kmod-nvidia' to get the nvidia proprietary drivers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: yes, but does it play mp3s?

Presumably it will once the Livna RPM repository is updated for Fedora 10 - install xmms-mp3 (or whatever your audio player of choice is) and you're done (the Fedora 9 rpms might work, but don't count on it) - once this was done, I had no problems playing mp3 files, watching video using vlc etc.etc.

Although I'm unlikely to update the work machines to Fedora 10 any time soon, it's nice to know that they've finally got pulseaudio sorted out - it was a major pain in the arse in both Fedora 8 and Fedora 9.

As for RPM hell, I've only encountered that when upgrading from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9, and then only because I'd forgotten a step in the upgrade process. Then again, I still prefer the emerge/apt-get style method of package management since RPM tries to be all things to all men and ends up being merely adequate.

[mario]

@Adam

ok fine. But there's no denying that dependency hell was a nightmare for RH based distros. I started with RH5.2, moved to mandrake but decided to go with a debian based distro because rpms were a bitch to use. I had to slap myself after I installed knoppix on my hdd, edited the apt config files and saw how easy it was to install enlightenment. Doing the same on a rpm machine was like placing your balls on a railway track before the train passed by.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice but.......

Think I'll wait for OpenSuse 11.1 to land and give KDE 4.2 a whiz, hopefully KDE 4 won't be such a work in progress by then.

[Michael Fremlins]

Shouldn't "rock solid feel" be taken for granted these days?

I don't see how a "rock solid feel" can be considered a selling point, not for about the last ten years.

"no bugs, glitches or crashes". Crikey, that should be par for the course.

Solaris and FreeBSD, which I've used for years, have always had a "rock solid feel". RedHat in the pre RHEL versions often used to have that feel - I'm referring to 5.2, 6.2 and so on. Even Win2K was rock solid. NT was crap, of course.

Having just started to use Linux again regularly after a few years minimal use, I'm rather surprised to see just how bloated some distros have become. Centos is heavy man, like 60s heavy. A huge download. It's almost as though Linux distro authors (if that is the right term) are intent on using up a machine's resources come what may.

Fedora may be good, I don't know, but I'm not going to make a huge download just to get a "rock solid" system when I already have one.

[Anonymous Coward]

More KDE, less Gnome

Fedora is one of the very few distributions that really get the KDE desktop. Only too bad they have not spent much time on it for this release.

It is a shame that such a good desktop environment has to be provided on a separate disk, as an option to the regular thing. I feel that many Windows users would feel more at home in KDE than in Gnome. Thus making an easier transition.

Overall, a good release. Much more stable than the last Debian release, and actually on time too.

[Anonymous Coward]

RPMs

"As a bonus you also get the always excellent RPM package system"

Lots of people don't like RPMs. I am one of them. I have experienced RPM Hell. It drove me to APT based systems (like Debian and Ubuntu of course).

That is not to say RH is bad or RPM are bad, they are just not for me.

YUM seems to be a nice alternative to direct RPM stuff, but its still not a patch on APT... in my opinion, you are welcome to yours.

I still might give this distro a try, worth a look at least on a spare partition.

[Adam Williamson]

Replies

AC 17:13 GMT - that chart is out-of-date in one respect - current RPM supports suggested (soft) dependencies, and at least urpmi and Mandriva packages implement this (I don't know if Fedora or SUSE use this capability yet). In other ways I'd say it's a bit biased towards apt, some of the criteria seem to have been chosen purely to make apt look good. What does it really matter whether 'standard tools' can be used to access the packages or the metadata?

AC 18:39 GMT - sorry about that. It would be important to know when you tried the upgrade: it's a brand new feature for 2009, and honestly, when it was first rolled out, it wasn't as robust as it needed to be against possible failure cases. It worked fine in internal tests, but these didn't sufficiently reproduce real-world cases like heavily overloaded mirrors and very slow connections. We pulled the feature for a couple of weeks, made a lot of improvements to make it much more resistant to problems, and re-enabled it again. Since then, there've been a lot fewer reports of problems with it. Anyway, this is a bit off-topic, so if you'd like to follow up further, do please post to the forums, or mail me directly.

Mike: I'm not sure if you misread my post, but I certainly didn't intend to suggest you have to use rpm on Fedora. I was defending Fedora (and other RPM-based distros) against the silly 'RPM hell' crap. I specifically mentioned yum in my post.

mario: well, yeah, I did specifically say that back when there were distros around where you had to use the rpm command directly, it was a pain. But no distro makes you do that any more. Things change, believe it or not. I don't see the relevance in bringing up problems from years and years ago.

In general, statements like "Then again, I still prefer the emerge/apt-get style method of package management since RPM tries to be all things to all men and ends up being merely adequate." and "No, they can't fix RPM Hell because it is designed that way." just confuse me. I have no idea what they're talking about. Both binary .deb packages and binary .rpm packages contain a bunch of files, and some metainformation (the package name, version, changelog, file list, list of dependencies, and a description). That's it. There's nothing massively complex about a binary package format that you can get 'wrong'. I don't know what you think it is that RPM gets wrong.

David Viner: either you did something wrong with your repositories, or that was simply an error on Fedora's part in not rebuilding the packages with the updated libraries. Given the packages in question are very important, I would suspect the former, because if an official update actually prevented the official Apache package from installing, there'd be a giant shitstorm, and I don't remember ever reading about anything like that.

Either way, it's not 'RPM hell'. It's either a user error or a packager error.

[Fluffykins]

@Jason Harvey - MP3 - No chance

And it's not down to Fedora. Blame the licensors:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/desktop-user-guide/en/sn-excluded-multimedia.html

[Duncan Hothersall]

@ Adam

I appreciate a good rant as much as anyone, but just occasionally you might want to listen to the issues people are having rather than simply defend your entrenched position.

Many people, me included, having tried them both, find apt a superior dependency manager to urpmi, and make their deployment decisions accordingly. Free software is about choice, after all.

Many people, me included, have experienced more problems with urpmi/yum and rpm than we have with apt and dpkg. The rpm ecosystem was late to the dependency management game, and the effect lingers, both as a memory of troubles and an occasional contemporary reminder of underlying issues.

I suspect that, while I personally find apt more reliable, urpmi and yum are probably very good tools now. The real reason there was a flurry of "commentards" on the RPM-hell case on this particular article was that the author made the ludicrous claim that the rpm system was "always excellent", and we *know*, from personal experience, that it *wasn't*. It used to be crap.

I'm glad to hear it has got better.

[Anonymous Coward]

1980s Desktops

If I wanted a computer that's indistinguishable from Windows, I'd install Windows; Gnome and KDE are a waste of hard drive space, to say nothing of the dependancy nightmare they both create. You can end up downloading 230MB just because the twat who wrote your calculator app decided to bump the "requires" list to the last version of the libraries he installed at home.

[cor]

I have used RH4 up to FC8..

.. and finally got seduced by Ubuntu, cos FC7 registered itself as 6.9 and refused to update anymore (with ANY package manager). Even though this was a trivial issue to fix, I was just so annoyed at the idiocy of it, and left it all behind.

I do miss FC/Red Hat. I will be trying FC10, but if I can't get my nVidias running and my laptop's non-intel wifi without jiggery-pokery, then I will need the 10-foot pole to push it away.

x)

[Anonymous Coward]

@Nice review By Neil Greatorex

"PS Mr. Bidmead, please take note: It's not necessary to have 14gazillion pages with 4 lines of text & a screenshot on each page."

unless you want to pump out loads more adverts and boost your page hits

now why would you want to do that?

yours freetardly,

etc etc

[No]

You're kidding, right?

"As a bonus you also get the always excellent RPM package system"

Umm, on what planet is RPM an "excellent package system"?

[Anonymous Coward]

640x480 screenshots?

Are those screen shots taken from a system running at 640x480, or are those desktop icons special "child friendly" versions?

How are you supposed to get any work done with so much wasted space in the menus?

[Adam Williamson]

Duncan

"I appreciate a good rant as much as anyone, but just occasionally you might want to listen to the issues people are having rather than simply defend your entrenched position."

If you ask anyone who knows me they'll tell you I'm very responsive to genuine issues. (I've closed three bugs today). The thing is, no-one in these comments reported any actual issue. They just ranted on about 'RPM hell' without giving any specifics. You, also, don't give any specifics - you say you "find apt a superior dependency manager to urpmi" but you don't say *why*. You say you "experienced more problems with urpmi/yum and rpm than we have with apt and dpkg", but you don't say *what problems*. You mention an "occasional contemporary reminder of underlying issues.", but you don't say *what issues*.

How am I meant to listen to your issues, then?

[Daniel B.]

I want my nVidias!

Why oh why no propietary nVidia support? This annoys me as much as the "no mp3 support" with Fedora, which might also be a good reason why some Linux distros aren't just getting enough mainstream use. (j00 have to H4><><0|2 j00r leenuks deestro to get mp3z d00d!)

But I wonder why the nVidia propietary drivers aren't working in the newest xorg version. I hope it isn't some kind of "open source or nothing" crusade; I want my nVidia to work dammit, I don't care if the driver's open or closed!

Meanwhile, I'll keep FC6 for now ...

[Richard]

RPM not hell

Please can people who last tried Red Hat Linux in 1996 stop commenting on "RPM hell" now.

RPM is a fine packaging system, and YUM is a dependency manager, like dpkg compared to apt. Do we talk about "dpkg hell"? No because Debian and Ubuntu use APT, and Fedora uses YUM.

I, for a living, have built both dpkg packages and RPMs, and I can tell you that RPM is my preferred system from a technical point of view. The single spec file, proper parser and automatic dependency resolution makes it a much more sane choice than the "big collection of random shell scripts" that is dpkg.

YUM vs APT is a worthwhile argument. APT is faster and uses much less memory. YUM has made great improvements and has a much saner repository scheme (createrepo rocks).

The gravestone should read "RPM hell".

[Andy]

Mandriva is still superior

I tried (K)ubuntu, I tried Fedora, but none comes close to the stability, whilst still being up-to-date, of Mandriva.

I'm currently still using Mandriva 2008.1, not yet 2009, as I never like bleeding edge stuff (I actually use my PC, I don't just experiment with it!) but I have already paid for the 2009 Powerpack download version (with Ubuntu having the unfair advantage of a rich backer who doesn't mind making a loss, Mandriva can use all the financial support it gets, and so far my 59 Euros have always been worth it).

@Ben Schofield: you must be doing something wrong: I get already 1200fps with a 300x300 pixel window of glxgears on my old P4 2.5Ghz with an ancient Nvidia FX5200 driving 2 monitors at 1280x1024!

[wview]

I've been using fedora 10 a few weeks.

No problems. I am using the proprietary Nvidia driver from rpmfusion, no problem. Not one single crash, freeze, error of any kind. I have been using RPM based distros almost solid for 2 years (Mandriva, Fedora, PCLOS mainly, some Debian ones like Sidux and Mepis for brief periods, Ubuntu, but I found it to be much glitchy, every release on my machine), no problems with dependency Hell, I've had no problems installing packages. I've installed many packages, and I upgraded to stable 10 today, no problems. I'm running the 64bit version. I'd go so far to say it is one of the smoother running distros out of many I've tried, almost close to Sidux.

As to those commenting on MP3 playback and other things, I suggest looking at "autoten" (google it). I used it and it worked nicely, plays every media file I've tried, and no I'm not affiliated with it, I just found it to be a useful Fedora tool. Installs many things automatically (like flash, Nvidia (but I installed it manually prior to finding the tool, so I don't know if that works), Google products, codecs, etc.

[Neoc]

Writer hasn't done research?

"Of course PackageKit really only works for files that have a Linux-compatible app available - download a .flv movie and PackageKit will ignore it."

No Linux-compatible apps for FLVs? That's weird - I play FLV files on a standard Ubuntu-EEE installation without any problems. System quite happily recognises them out of the box and launches Mplayer.

[MarkMac]

@ Jason Harvey

Huh? Fedora can play MP3s fine - just install vlc or xmms.

The nvidia issue is a dealbreaker tho - presumably that means no support for Compiz.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs proof-reading?

Second paragraph

"The tenth revision slick and stable and it has a rock solid feel to it"

[Jach]

I'm among the no-Fedora crowd.

7 wouldn't even go, I played with 9 a few weeks ago and the liveCD struggled for the longest time on fairly decent hardware that handles Ubuntu's just fine. I played with yum, really felt like apt was a way superior system, and RPMs have made me mad too many times. (Source-based with Portage for the win!)

[Adam Williamson]

Daniel B.

"Why oh why no propietary nVidia support?"

Just because the NVIDIA drivers themselves don't work with the (very recent) X server Fedora ships. But, as has been noted by several commenters, a popular Fedora third party repo has patched packages, so you really shouldn't have any trouble getting it up and running.

[Steven Knox]

F-spot?

Shurely a Gnome app should be called G-sp...Never mind.

[V.Srikrishnan]

Off topic but Slackware rocks

gdb on Fedora gives a peculiar error. apparently it needs about 20 more libraries before it can do something meaningful; this after 4GB of installation. i think i chose one of the default profiles and then again manually selected packages, emacs is apparently an optional software.

that itself says all.

however, between ubuntu and fedora, i would certainly prefer fedora. disabling root login and substituting another user as superuser is stupid and it is a waste of time to undo such moronic antics.

[mario]

@adam

so what you're saying is that if i install a modern RPM based distro, i can then install enlightenment in a manner as easy as debian provides? the real problem was that an rpm of a dependency just didn't exist. a problem i never faced with debian. if a package was listed in apt it would install. and the most important thing was apt had everything you could ever want and then some more.

[Steven Davison]

EEE?

Neoc - I have a feeling the author means that if the file does not have an assoiciated reader/player installed on the system - PackageKit can find the correct one in it's list of known types and install an applicable app.

He doesn't say you can't find and install one yourself :)

[Robin Szemeti]

you sold it to me ..

so ....

"The absence of a flicker between when the boot screen exists and X loads is the result of Fedora's decision to move X from virtual terminal seven to virtual terminal one. It sounds like a small, unimportant change, but the results are worth it our opinion."

Well, that's sold it to me .. been keeping me awake at night that has. I reboot the laptop once every month or so (when I manage to let the battery go so flat it won't wake again) and that little jump in the display as it boots, ooh, so annoying, Certainly one of he key features Ive been looking for ...

I thought this was going to be a serious article until you got to the bit about the wonders of RPMs ... that kinda gave it away.

I'll stick with Debian, thanks.

[Sam]

Please remove the NVidia FUD from the article

"Speaking of proprietary things like Flash files, Fedora 10 includes the latest stable version of X.Org, which means no more support for proprietary nVidia drivers. The free driver will work for those systems, but you'll lose 3-D support, which is a shame."

That strikes me as a cut-and-paste from a Fedora 9 review, where it was briefly true, because Fedora shipped what was technically an "pre-release" version of X.org - The API in this was not supported by the NVidia driver.

But the good old folks at rpmfusion.org quickly packaged an NVidia beta driver, and continued through to a stable driver for Fedora 10, which definitely works because I am using it.

There is no issue with installing the NVidia driver on Fedora 10

[Lars]

@Adam Williamson

Some things are very sticky, like RPM hell.

I belive the "hell" stuff started with something Windows even if I cannot remember what.

An other thing that become very sticky is this thing about Mandriva beeing good for "beginners".

I think that was very unfair towards Mandrake and Mandriva.

I am a programmer since 1968 but I want my installation to work out of the box.

Screen, connection, printers, sound etc.

Does that make me a beginner.

I find it good that I can tweek and fuck around with things if I like so.

I am a very old Mandriva user, and I like the product.

And like many others, I like the Control Center and the formatting tool.

I got the payed for Powerpack 2008 about a year ago.

I newer got the sound working with a USB headset (needed only for Skype).

Also updating from 9.something to 10.0 on a laptop I lost the sound.

Then I tried Sabayon and the sound came out of the box, although I cannot change from speakers to the headset without rebooting.

I wonder Adam cound I approach you through some e-mail address to try to work out this

sound problem on P2008.

You seem to be dedicated to your job, and It is always fine when compleatly wrong statements are rebuffed bye people who know better.

Regards

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Windows

There, I said it. I like Windows XP. You know what?? It worked when I installed it, it has drivers for everything and software installs as if by magick. And I have 3-D support and I play MP3 on it...

I always say that you get waht you pay for. You're paying naff-all and you're getting a work in progress. At least I know how broken my Windows are.

[Anonymous Coward]

nVidia + Wine

How well does the nVidia from RPMFusion work with Wine? I've had a #D app (game) that I recently tried with rpmfusion under Wine that'd moan about lack of a display. The native nVidia driver worked a treat. Hopefully they've fixed this in the past week or two. I look forward to giving F10 a run around the park sometime this weekend.

[Sam]

@ Adam Williamson

"So if you try and use the 'rpm' command as you would use the apt tools, congratulations, you just failed."

And that attitude is partly why Joe Public will continue to use mainstream stuff like XP and Macs, for the simple reason they work straight out of the box, and you don't have people who still live with mummy talking down to you if you have a problem.

Linux still isn't there yet, which is a shame.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm...

I've said it before, and no doubt, I'll say it again: Linux needs a single package management tool across all distributions.

Most of the comments above are along the lines of "RPM sux", "No, you suck, you don't understand RMP", "You should try apt", "APT sux, you should use yum"... etc. This tedious in fighting doesn't really help anyone adopt Linux.

[Neil Hoskins]

Scott Gilbertson Ate My Hamster

The live CD gave me a bar at the bottom of the screen for ten minutes, then garbage on the screen, then a black screen with a mouse pointer (which did actually move around as I moved my mouse). This procedure took half an hour, after which I pulled the power. Now Windows is borked. I'm currently on a borrowed workstation. Oh, joy.

[zenkaon]

RPM sucks

RPM is the MAIN reason that I stopped using red-hat systems. I have wasted far to many days of my life with the dependency nightmare that comes along with it.

When I moved to ubuntu and found apt-get I knew that I was converted...never had a problem installing anything on an ubuntu system.

I have heard that yum is very good in fedora, I tried fedora 9 and yum and ran into a dependency nightmare almost straight away. I think i'll miss fedora 10.

All the gui and stuff is great, and lets face it, comes from communities outside both fedora and ubuntu - so you can get this with any distro - if you can install it!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dribblers club

This is 2008 and our OSs are still lurking around ~1967. Look at us arguing over our favorite brand of brain damage.

By now I would have expected a transparent versioned filesystem (TOPS-20, ~1976) with clearcase like dynamic views on top, based on MVC so I could view and sort and arrange meta/data how I liked (all versioned) with full rollback, history, split, join, unlimited do/undo. intelligent indexing (not scan my whole disk inna the background, Duhh) - choose cmd line, text or graphics GUI or not, and apps that you can break into and hack at runtime (lisp, ~1974) modify and rollback if things go horribly wrong (as per data), distribute and configure per user or whatever. Lots of other things as well, soon as I daydream them up.

We are still stuck with stone knives and bearskins, and when we try, we end up with stuff that is complicated because its a reflection of whoever did it and went the easy way out. Read "design of everyday things" you cop-out lazy %*#&-tards. Tools to make tools, written by tools.

</rant> In case you weren't paying attention.

'Dribblers club' in memory of Pete the Bastard, who might be alive, or not.

[Stephen F. Hess]

@ Neil Hoskins

Sorry to hear that, check the FedoraForum.org to see if anyone else has experienced that with the livecd, you may have an easy answer there.

This review is not too bad as reviews go, but remember, it is just that -- a review, an opinion.

There is some misinformation about nvidia drivers. After which commenced some whining and bashing even after some comments posted with the correct information. So the whiners and bashers kept posting without reading through all the comments.

After reading the flames about rpm vs apt. I was a little surprised not to see more distro vs distro crap, or the inevitable Gnome vs KDE...

But let's get to the point. If you read and base your decision on only 1 review, I'm sorry, your a complete moron... and actually, i don't think that anyone only reads only 1 review, even the above commenters.

If you blindly click "update", does not matter if it is Linux or Windows, and it breaks your "lifeline to self and humanity", you may be excused as inexperienced the first time only, otherwise, you are an idiot.

So, what are we left with? A bunch of flames targeting RPM ( indirectly targeting Fedora? ) and an author who may only redeem himself from the label "complete jackass" by posting a correction to the nvidia driver nonsense.

Here is the nvidia driver solution that took me less than a minute to find.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=204752&highlight=f10+nvidia

[Adam Williamson]

Mario, Lars, Sam, Fraser

Mario: Again, you're confusing things. Whether the distro you choose happens to have a package for something you want to install has nothing to do with the package management system it chooses to use. To answer your initial question - on Mandriva, 'urpmi task-e17' installs e17, and 'urpmi enlightenment' installs e16.

Lars: Sure - awilliamson AT mandriva DOT com. Send the details there and I'll try and help.

Sam: Actually, a brand new Linux user who didn't listen to the crap spewed by old Debian users would never have to worry about this, because they'd read the instructions - like http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tasks/Installing_and_removing_software - and never know that the terrible, inferior RPM-based system they were using was causing them so much trouble. Because it, um, wouldn't be. Heck, they'd probably never touch the 'rpm' command at all. It's only people who last tried an RPM-based distro in 2002 and are apparently under the impression that nothing ever changes who perpetuate this stupid 'apt is better than rpm' crap. And I write this way on the Reg because it's traditional. If I was actually nice to people they'd make me give up my subscription. ;)

And no, I don't live with Mummy. Thanks for caring, though.

Fraser: "I've said it before, and no doubt, I'll say it again: Linux needs a single package management tool across all distributions."

Why? What would that achieve?

You still can't install packages from one distribution on another, or at least not safely. That has nothing to do with the package manager they use, it's simply because everyone has different versions of various libraries available, and everyone has different conventions about package splitting and naming policies and so on. That's why you can't install a Debian package on Fedora, it's not because one uses .deb and one uses .rpm.

Having different package management systems on different distros doesn't cause any major practical problems, and using one single package management system on all distros wouldn't really solve any.

[Anonymous Coward]

apt vs rpm

At least one person is trying to compare apt to rpm. That doesn't make sense -- you can compare apt and yum or dpkg and rpm, but you can't compare apt and rpm as they do different jobs.

"rpm hell" has been consigned to the dustbin of history for ages. I first remember up2date which did half the job waaay back at the beginning of the century (if not before) and then we had yum and now we have PackageKit ...

[Boris the Cockroach]

Rpm hell?

That only seems to happen on my washing machine's spin cycle and NASA urine dispensing machines

I'm a happy Fedora user, in fact I'm so happy with Fedora 6 I have'nt bothered upgrading since installing it on the uber box(this pc) and ye olde semi retired box(the 2001 pc sitting next to me)

I've installed things with yum, used the package manager GUI thingy (heracy! command line only the linux geeks yell) to swap packages and programs in and out like there's no tomorrow( and if those CLI geeks catch me, there may not be) and I've yet to hit 'RPM hell', I did have one program that protested that its dependencies where missing, but that was due to me un installing something without thinking about it.

The only real downside I can find is that Java does'nt like beryl so I have to switch off the desktop effects while using the latest netbeans

As for mp3 support... I tried a Fedora 9 live cd 2 months ago..... and it installed it when I asked it to.

Bill G..... because .dll hell is a real place thats far worse than rpm hell

[Not That Andrew]

Strange

I've never had RPM hell but I've frequently had DEB hell. The worst/most stupid case was on X/K/ubuntu 7.something. I uninstalled a minor package using synaptic (some IM crap - not Gaim), and it removed all of GNOME as well. No, it wasn't part of the default install and yes it was an official X/K/Ubuntu package.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Adam

Ok, to clarify: Linux needs common packages and common package management across all distributions.

This will achieve:

The same commands to do the same things on different flavours of linux, it may not be a biggie for you, or most experienced linux users, but it puts off new users. Above anything though, what is the point of having an OS that has different commands to a slightly different version of the same OS, surely that isn't the same OS?

The other major achievement this will cause is halting the 'my package is better than your package' arguments, see above comments. This appears childish and unprofessional, why would someone choose to use linux when the most vocal advocates of it behave in this manner?

[Stuart]

Where are the OpenSuse users?

Fascinating thread, especially Adam Williamson's valiant (if not entirely successful) efforts at breaking centuries of Linux tradition by trying to initiate civil and reasoned discussion. I'm still not going to try Fedora though. Or Ubuntu, the distro that treats KDE like some sort of inbred cousin-child, to be neglected and shunned. I'm guessing all the Ubuntu worshippers have seldom if ever suffered the misery that is Kubuntu. Only 3 weeks until OpenSuse 11.1 goes gold, and hopefully a stable KDE4.x at last.

[Adam Williamson]

Neil

A live CD can't break an existing OS. Sounds like that machine was screwed to start with.

[Adam Williamson]

Fraser

"Ok, to clarify: Linux needs common packages and common package management across all distributions."

...but then you wouldn't have distributions any more. 99% of the difference between distros is, well, the packages. And I don't think it's a very good idea, anyway. There's different distros for different purposes. What suits a Fedora user doesn't necessarily suit a Debian user. You can't force a one-size-fits-all set of packages on all Linux users. They don't want it.

Stuart: you accuse me of "civil and reasoned discussion"? On the REGISTER?! How dare you, sir! *glove slap*

[JDS]

NVIDIA

My understanding of the NVIDIA + XOrg issue is that *newer* NVIDIA cards are supported but older ones are not. This is coming from the comment on Ubuntu's 8.10 release notes.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810

"Users with the nVidia TNT, TNT2, TNT Ultra, GeForce, GeForce2, GeForce3, and GeForce4 chipsets are affected and will be transitioned on upgrade to the free nv driver instead."

I imagine that this is similar for Fedora 10.

[mario]

Adam

i get your point on apt v/s rpm. i also admit it's been a while since i've worked with a linux box. corporate policy means i'm forced to use crap-xp.

i guess it boils down to which distro has a better selection of packages. apt has all the packages known about and then some more. i've played with refhat and mandrake. and back in those days, debian and derivatives simply mopped the floor with these 2 based on the above. to the enduser, that made apt a lot more easier to use.

another feature that i liked about debian was that the repositories were central. so it made no difference if my base install was debian vanilla or knoppix. and i suspect the same holds true for ubuntu. i'm not really sure that mandrake and hedhat both rpm based systems allowed this. ya sure sometimes it did work. but it still was not the same. for example an rpm of icarus verilog initially worked with mandrake, but later on i had to get me a tarball and compile it as later rpms would complain.

FWIW, i appreciate your replies on this forum. it's comforting to know that a linux developer walks among us.

[LinuxCanuck]

Who are you kidding?

Who are you kidding? RPM is a great package management format? Have you actually used both RPM and DEB?

I started with Mandrake and used it for two years. I have lived in RPM hell. I switched to Debian based systems and I will never go back to RPM. I still occasionally install an RPM distro to see if it has improved and it hasn't. I can break OpenSUSE within an hour without trying. Mandriva will at least work for awhile but it is just a question of how long it works before the package manager is useless. Fedora lies between the two from my experience.

Here is why I say this. I install lots. I install every possible desktop and bit of eye candy. I install all possible multimedia. I do this intentionally. I count how long it takes to run into a dependency problem.

With Debian based systems Synaptic usually does not run into problems. However if it does encounter a problem, it prevents me from installing in the first place or the broken dependency filter in Synaptic usually works. If not it works from the commandline. In short it is easy to fix. In Ubuntu I can even install from outside the repositories. I can install across versions and even use many packages from the Debian repositories. Try using a Mandrake RPM in Fedora or even a Fedora 9 package in Fedora 10 and you will see why DEB is superior.

In RPM based distros if you try this it breaks the system and in many cases it makes the package manager unusable and destabilizes the system. SUSE is absolutely the worst and it presents you with all kinds of troubleshooting scenarios which only make things worse in most cases. When an RPM based package manager breaks it is very hard to resolve the issues. You are stuck in dependency hell and it is often easier to re-install than to troubleshoot the problem.

If you have used both there is no comparison. Deb packages are just better built and they are more flexible as you can use them across many Debian based distros. On top of this there are far more packages for Debian based systems.

RPM works if you are prepared to stick with limited repositories and if you don't install lots. If you want to use lots of applications and want to go outside of the repositories, then RPM is useless, in my experience.

Other than this outrageous statement, I had no problem with the review. In fact I have downloaded Fedora 10 and will put it through its paces. I don't expect good things, but I am willing to be surprised. I hated the last couple of releases and wonder why a Fedora user would put up with such a weak effort when there are better alternatives. They just keep making excuses in the vague hope that things will improve. One good release (Fedora 6) does not make a good platform, IMO. Fedora needs a winner and I hope for their sake and the users that Fedora 10 is it.

[Adam Williamson]

Mario

Ubuntu uses its own repos, not Debian's. You can install Debian packages on Ubuntu, and often it'll work, but it's not supported, not guaranteed to work, and sometimes doesn't.

[A J Stiles]

MP3 patents (expired 2007)

The "patents" which -- until they expired last year -- governed MP3 encoding and decoding are null and void in any jurisdiction where you can't patent a mathematical operation. Furthermore, thanks to the beauty of fair use exemptions, even in such places an MP3 encoder or decoder compiled from source would have been non-infringing unless any reward was sought for the act of compiling.

Since every Linux includes the GNU toolchain, it ought to be easy enough to create a package which has the Source Code for a media player with MP3 support, and compiles it during the post-install script. Most people probably would not even notice that happening.

[Hel]

You're mistaken on the X.org Nvidia comment

First off, if you had been correct, then you should have also stated that you'd just be losing support for the nvidia LEGACY driver that powers kit over 4 years old (roughly).

Second, as of 10/29, Nvidia released a 32 and 64 bit version of the legacy driver that's compatible with X.org -> http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=1826678

[Anonymous Coward]

Great imporvent over version 9

Fedora 10 is a big improvement to the buggy Fedora 9, but that seems to be the case with all of there releases, every other one fixes the bugs. Package Kit is very nice and its easy to install thing like mp3 support on just when you are trying to use the file, saves a good deal of time. And the rpm system seems to have very little bugs now. As a user off both Red Hat based and Debian based Linux, I can defiantly recommend this version over ubuntu.