Fedora 8 Test 2 (7.91)
has been released with isos and trees for i386, x86_64, and ppc(64) and 3 live CDs (KDE, developer and Electronic Lab). Update: Preview of Fedora 8 here.
Fedora 8 Test 2 (7.91) Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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* Fedora Developer Live (i686) – A Live image designed for software developers.
That’s what Im looking for, thank you.
not to nitpick, but there’s four live cds including the Gnome version
Is that a problem? Its not so different from the many variations of the official Ubuntu distro.
the blurb says 3 live cds, there are 4, hence why it was identified as nitpicking
Ok, I get it.
Itś been years since I touched a RedHat/Fedora system. I would greatly appreciate if one informed me on how RPM/YUM measures up as compared to Debian's apt. The last time I used Fedora, it had what was then known as rpm hell. Thank you.
What do you mean ‘measure up’ it is the same principle and who says apt-get is superior.
I have been using Red Hat since 6.0 release, and currently running FC7. I have not had any problems with rpm problems or any other issues. If you are trying to compare let me guess ‘Ubuntu’ since it is Debian based to Red Hat Enterprise releases (Fedora is the test bed) you got to be kidding me…
Installing software is still the same, and the argument/option is different. No different than someone running SuSE or Mandrake…
One other note Red Hat is the leader in the Enterprise and they are releasing the Global Desktop this month…
One more side note, I make a living off Red Hat (Admin) and I have my RHCT working on my RHCE…
Edited 2007-09-14 02:21
I’d say RPM is superior to APT. The only people who get caught in “RPM hell” are those who think that ‘rpm’ is equivalent to ‘apt-get’. Once you learn that ‘yum’ is equivalent to ‘apt-get’ (and more powerful), and that ‘rpm’ is more like ‘dpkg’ (but more powerful), and that you can deal with circular dependencies by, gasp, installing the packages all on the same command line (which I figured out in about 15 seconds on my own), you find that yum/rpm is much more fun than apt-get/dpkg. Having worked extensively with yum and rpm at work, including making my own RPMs, and then trying out Ubuntu a couple of times, I was severely disappointed with apt-get. The only good thing is the number of packages in the repositories. RPM is technically superior in almost every way.
…and that you can deal with circular dependencies by, gasp, installing the packages all on the same command line (which I figured out in about 15 seconds on my own), you find that yum/rpm is much more fun than apt-get/dpkg…
You can always install any number of packages on one line using either apt-get or dpkg as well.
What about the graphical add/remove applications(or equivalent) on Fedora, last time I used it, I couldn’t remove any program because of dependency problems.
Works just fine here. If you find any issues with it, file bug reports in http://bugzilla.redhat.com.
Well, occasionally you do run into problems with having yum/pup removing critical packages that you need for a functional desktop, such as when I attempted to uninstall Evolution. I did not pay attention to all the other software that it wanted to remove and at the end I was left with a system that booted into console mode. The solution was simply typing ‘yum groupinstall “GNOME Desktop Environment”‘ at the command line to recover the lost packages.
I had much less trouble with DPKG and APT (on Ubuntu) than I did with RPM and APT-RPM (on AltLinux). RPM seemed more picky than DPKG about dependencies when it actually didn’t need to, and APT-RPM worked noticeably slower than regular APT, at least on updating package lists.
“RPM seemed more picky than DPKG about dependencies when it actually didn’t need to”
this has absolutely nothing to do with the package managers.
rpm and dpkg handle dependencies very simply. There’s really nothing else they *could* do. The dependencies are specified in the packages themselves. If all dependencies are satisfied, rpm and dpkg install the package. If they’re not, they stop and complain. That simple. No room for any differences.
In other words – what you’re talking about has absolutely nothing to do with dpkg and rpm, and absolutely everything to do with Alt and Ubuntu. It’s up to the *packagers* to specify the dependencies correctly. It has nothing to do with the apt or rpm formats themselves.
Thing is, it takes a lot more to dismiss bad memories.
For the end-user there’s no noticeable difference between a system that uses deb and one that uses rpm.
Pirut, the fedora package manager, is not a patch on Synaptic though. Pirut/Pup is quite awful in so many ways and is easily my biggest gripe about Fedora right now.
That and that it doesnt support my Ralink card well.
Edited 2007-09-14 03:35
I haven’t used yum in a while but last time I did yum was far slower than apt-get by a huge margin and it wasn’t as good as apt-get at resolving dependencies. They must have worked on that. I will still stick with apt-get and deb packages because I have yet to have any issues with dependencies using any debian based distro, I can’t really say the same for Fedora when I was using it, it used to be a huge hassle all the time and it was mostly because of yum and how it handled the same version of a library across different repos. Apt-get seems to resolve things better, imo, even with unsupported repos. I don’t think I’ll ever move from ubuntu but I am going to install Fedora on one my old Feisty harddrives (using gutsy) and get familiar with fedora again.
Very well, I would think. In later years, I think I have had much more .deb hell in Ubuntu and Debian, than I have had rpm hell in Fedora or CentOS.
The main problem with yum is, or rather have been, lack of speed. However, if that is what it takes to avoid .deb/rpm hell I’ll gladly accept it. Lately, the speed of yum have improved a lot.
RPM hell? You’ve been listening to too much uninformed Debian propaganda. It comes from the ancient times when Debian was the only distro that handled dependency resolution.
That said, apt is still faster. And the package availability is pretty amazing.
Aside from that, I’d take a RHEL/CentOS/Fedora system over a Debian-based system any day of the week.
Come on in. The water’s fine.
> Aside from that, I’d take a RHEL/CentOS/Fedora system
> over a Debian-based system any day of the week.
Could you please explain why?
In what situation would a RHEL/CentOS/Fedora system make your life easier than a Debian-based system? (For servers, I mean.)
For server:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Security/Features
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/columnItem/0,294698,sid…
http://interactive.linuxjournal.com/article/9176
Less attractive if no KDE 4 included in this release
kde 4 won’t be out by the time fedora 8 is out.
KDE 4 will be out between FC7 and FC8, but if other distributions include KDE 4 once KDE 4 is out, then they will be more attractive. I’ve no excuce to use FC7 if I am a KDE user, since redhat don’t take KDE 3 series seriously in several previous release.
>KDE 4 will be out between FC7 and FC8
KDE4 will be out between FC8 and FC9 that’s why it can’t be in FC8 and will be in FC9.
Please check the timetable of both projects!
RPMs and Debs are for all purposes that most people care about equally good. Yum and apt-get perform the same tasks with pretty much the same features. Although yum at least used to be quite a bit slower than apt-get. A problem which has mostly been fixed.
Both systems can end up with “RPM/Deb-hell” if not handled carefully, particularly with multiple repositories.
The only difference worth caring about has little to do with the technical differences of the system, and more to do with how good of a job the packagers do. Debian/Ubuntu has a massive advantage here, given the amount of good packages available to you.
Personally I think it is a mistake to care deeply which package system your Linux distribution uses. The overall gain by having every distribution use the same system is massively larger than the minor gains you may get by chosing a particular packaging system.
RPM/DEB? I simply don’t care as long as the packages themselves are nicely and sanely done.
rpm/deb .. imho doesn’t matter. What does matter though is the repos. Are there many mirrors? Are those repos on high available servers? Is the control within reach of the distros policies? etc..
As long as a user can simply issue “<fill in> install <package>” and all dependancies are met automagically it's ok.
The overall gain by having every distribution use the same system is massively larger than the minor gains you may get by choosing a particular packaging system.
I second that. There are too many package systems out there.
Amen to that – I don’t get RPM hell a lot, but when I do I have the sense to know it’s because I’m mixing repos. I tried using Ubuntu (I really did), but being a RH user since 5.x, I’ve been spoiled by _logical_ stuff like numbered runlevels (runlevel S, wtf?), Apache’s user being “apache” and not www-data, and also cool frontends for basic stuff. Besides, I couldn’t get the HAL daemon to start up on Ubuntu, or make changes to gnome-session contents (both known bugs, not yet fixed). Roll on Fedora 8!
I am using Fedora 8 Test 1 to write this and I find that Yum is much improved. It updates much faster now and you can also install a plugin for yum which allows you to only download changed files (deltas) which greatly decreases download time. The only major problem I had with the test was getting my Audigy SE sound card to work. I had to install the latest test packages of Alsa before sound would work. The new Pulse Audio sound server works well but I had to download a developer’s build of Flash to get it to work with PA. The final test of Fedora 8 is also going to come with Compiz-Fusion. I don’t think it is in test 2 yet.
Edited 2007-09-14 11:51
pulseaudio sounds interesting, wonder when suse will get it?
The page it links too is 1/5 review and the rest being Flash pop ups and ads, ads, ads.
If you’re a firefox user AdblockPlus does the job nicely. With almost no configuration I got 2 small images and some ad text on that site
http://www.linuxcompatible.org/Fedora_8_Test_2_7.91_p96170.html
http://www.reviewlinux.com/index.php?m=show&opt=printable&id=7017
How is it looking now ?
Edited 2007-09-14 21:32
Let’s not get back to the package format discussions we had 10 years ago. I feel at home both on DEB-based and RPM-based Linux distributions. Everyone working on multiple flavors of Linux should already have found out that the packages itself are not creating “dependency hells” – it is the maintainers who do and differing packaging guidelines among Linux distributions or even among different repositories for one distribution. We you run into dependency hells on Fedora then it is probably because of mixing mutual exclusive repositories, i.e. livna and freshrpms.
And this review here is not even worth the click.
Speaking about livna and freshrpms repository,
the conflict between these two is officially over. They have recently merged into rpmfusion repository.
http://www.rpmfusion.org
Let me known when Fedora gets to distro 99999999999999 and I will consider looking at it!!!!!!!
..or better yet just go ahead and tell everybody they are beta testers, not somebody that is going to benefit from a good solid OS design.
Edited 2007-09-15 17:59
Let me known when Fedora gets to distro 99999999999999 and I will consider looking at it!!!!!!!
Pah-leeze… Fedora negativity is so cliched. I have been using version 8 since the first test to do all my grad school work on. I use Exaile to listen to MP3 radio streams while I’m typing up reports on Open Office. The installer correctly picked up my Nvidia 640 board, HP 6540 printer, all my flash and external USB drives and mounted my NTFS partition. Yum is faster than it has ever been. Damn, what more do you want for free?! Oh-yeah, and the latest icon sets and themes from Gnome look great on Fedora.
Edited 2007-09-17 22:13
oh yes I tested it and it was massive fun.
http://linuxtruthiness.blogspot.com/2007/09/beta-testing-fedora-8-t…
(i know its old news for all of you but i couldn’t resist telling it
)