fedora 7: it’s the community, stupid
by Christopher Blizzard
Bryan pointed me at this very excited review about the upcoming Fedora 7. The neat thing is that he really gets why Fedora 7 is such an important release for us and also for the rest of the free and open source software community. The main feature of Fedora 7, aside from lots of new stuff that the community has been working on (wireless drivers, new GNOME, etc) this release is mostly about enabling the community to do cool stuff with Fedora and let the community get in the driver’s seat for the distribution. From building Fedora-based security USB keys to OLPC, we’re already living the flexibility that open tools and open community can provide.
Today in particular is a very important day to make this happen: it’s merge day. Today is the day when the former Fedora Core and Fedora Extras become a single community-driven and community-owned distribution: Fedora. Red Hat still plays a special role here as a contributor but anyone who cares about a piece of the technology stack and has the ability to participate can finally do so. Want to hack on the kernel? Join the list and do some hacking. Want to own a piece of the stack that you think that is under-managed by a member of the Red Hat team? Man up and join the team. Want to hack on the actual infrastructure that makes the fedora project go? (Sysadmin boxes, hack on cool tools for the whole community, etc?) Sign up.
We’re still focused on making sure that we do really good releases every six months with support for roughly a year and a half afterwards (the idea that we’re unsupported is a total lie, for the record) to make sure that the best and newest technology gets into people’s hands as soon as possible. And within the limits of our values and tools, the law and spirit of free software, making things that Just Work.
We’ve already done a good job of attracting awesome people to the project. Red Hat folks inside of the project are already outnumbered 3:1. Compared to old Red Hat-driven Fedora releases, the sheer number of packages that are lovingly maintained has grown from about a thousand source packages to over four thousand in a very short period of time. The project is undergoing tremendous growth.
On a personal note I have to say that I’m very excited about our future in the Fedora project. This is just the first step on the long path to build a free software distribution that’s community-driven and let everyone who is interested in showing up and making a difference the tools and place to do so.
Chris, how much of the OLPC development (kernel hacks for example) went back into the main Fedora tree?
The kernel code for OLPC is in its own repo on laptop.org. It includes a lot of the driver and power management changes we’ve needed. It’s not the fedora kernel.
One thing that keep amazing me is the “success” of Ubuntu: i mean, its “marketing” success. If you try to see the technical ‘merits’ or ‘achievements’, or even, the contributions that Canonical or Ubuntu give back to the community (and in special, to the kinux kernel) .. those are ZERO.
1) There’s no mention on canonical or ubuntu’s homepages about Debian (Ubuntu is a simple copy or debian, prettier yes, but a simple copy, no mention on the homepages). One should remember that Canonical “bought” some debian developers in order to “prettify” Debian and launch a new “distro” (sic).
2) Compare http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions, http://www.redhat.com/truthhappens/leadership/ and http://sources.redhat.com/projects.html to Canonical (and Ubuntu) ones. What do they have to offer to the community? … a closed source bug tracking system (Launchpad).
3) All of us know about binary (and propietary) drivers that Ubuntu includes. This point was, is and will be a completely shame.
4) Mark talks about a recent “radical freedom” flavour of Ubuntu. Well, at least Fedora is sincere, honest and doesn’t need this kind of “radical freedom flavour”, it’s already a 100% linux distro. Mark sells the principles of open source like a poor marketing student. Another shame for Canonical and Ubuntu.
…
And i could keep talking about this new “hype”, this new “phenomenon” on Linux: Ubuntu. Or how to be famous spending hundreds of dollars shiping copies of Debian around the world (sic).
man up!
what about people who want to use fedora and update, install new software and have no internet connexion, did you have anything like opensuse build service, where software are just organized in a logical manner,
and just another complain, it is very sad that you drop kde from the dvd edition.
anyway i still remember with passion, the days when i installed redhat 5.1, even i still have the cd just for fun
One of our targets with F7 was to have a complete build of the OS available on two DVDs. This would let you install new software from a system without an internet connection. Also, the Fedora Unity guys do respins every once in a while of the OS that includes updates. It’s a great service for people who are bandwidth impared. Thanks!
Also there is presto which makes a huge difference for folks especially on low bandwidth systems. The plugin is already available in Fedora Extras.
Canonical has universe and multiverse
@ Rahul
actually we have highbandwith connexion relatively mainstream, but ehh in cybercafe( not in home where my pc ), i know this not a probleme specific to fedora, but installing new software under linux is just a real nightmare. in windows or mac os it is just a matter of downloading a file, move it to flash disk and install in on any computer, but in linux you have to get rpm package and you must get all dependencies with it,
just a question is it hard to make a directory for a example gnome 2.18.1 whitch has all the rpm needed.
as i am a linux fanboy it is not a real problem, but how can you explain that to a friend who used only windows.
i asked this question in a forum, and guess what, someone tell me, linux was not designed with’ sorry i have no internet connexion’
thanks
Djouallah, it’s interesting that you bring this up. One of the thing we’ve been doing with OLPC is to define “activity bundles.” One of the main aspects of these is that they are completely self-contained applications. You don’t have to find dependencies as part of the installation and you can take an app that you have and just give it to someone else. The interface is designed to make it easy. One of our target interactions is that if you have an app on your toolbar and you want to give it to someone else you just drag it from the toolbar onto that person and they have a copy over the wireless.
djouallah,
Apart from what Blizzard has told you this is precisely the problem we are tackling in a different way in http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SummerOfCode/2007/DebarshiRay. This is not at the same level as activity bundles in OLPC. It just wraps a package and all its dependencies into a archive which makes offline redistribution much more practical.
Of course if a package depends on something like a newer ABI incompatible glibc this won’t help in many cases it would.
I wouldn’t trust on forum posts to understand how distributions are approaching the problem unless developers are involved. Atleast in Fedora, the forums are purely end user focused. If you need to suggest anything to developers, you will have to post to fedora-devel mailing list instead. Just FYI.
thanks realy for your feadback, still dreaming of something like dmg for linux, i got a lot of expectation about klick but unfortunately it need to be online to access them. and happy to see that you are aware of this problem
anyway from the redhat 5.1 to fedora 7, a lot of things has changed, so i am confident it is a matter of time that linux will rock for all.
friendly from algeria
Will Fedora 7 have build in support for the dell wireless 1500 draft 802.11n wlan mini-card?
I still cannot get this to work w/ FC6.