Fedora Core 4 as good as Ubuntu?

[dwcal]

Originally posted by: pcthuglife
It sounds like a lot of the Fedora fans are Sys Admins. If I'm going to run a server then I'm going to use CentOS not Fedora or Ubuntu.

:thumbsup: One of the free RH Enterprise Linux clones is better than Fedora for servers. CentOS and Scientific Linux seem to have the best support. The release cycles and end-of-life dates for Fedora are way too short for servers that might have to run for years without an OS upgrade. Fedora is way too experimental for production servers. It's meant to be the free, community version of Redhat that tests all the features that will eventually go into Redhat Enterprise.

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
That will get you a GTK frontend for yum, it won't get you the amount or quality of the packages available in Debian or Ubuntu and in the longterm that's much more important.

I have no idea where the myth that the packages are "low quality/quantity" came from, either. The guys at rpmforge are doing an awesome job, and I've been pleasantly surprised at how many packages there are. Are they missing some of the crazy, semi-obscure ones? Yes. But, in general, rpmforge and Fedora Extras are remarkably complete and high quality.

Have you been keeping up with FC at all?

-Erwos

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

In FC to get a package installation experience almost identical to that of Synaptice go to terminal as root and type : yum install yumex

That will get you a GTK frontend for yum, it won't get you the amount or quality of the packages available in Debian or Ubuntu and in the longterm that's much more important.

Then install apt & synaptic on FC there shouldn't be any other issues right?

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: erwos

Originally posted by: Nothinman
That will get you a GTK frontend for yum, it won't get you the amount or quality of the packages available in Debian or Ubuntu and in the longterm that's much more important.

I have no idea where the myth that the packages are "low quality/quantity" came from, either. The guys at rpmforge are doing an awesome job, and I've been pleasantly surprised at how many packages there are. Are they missing some of the crazy, semi-obscure ones? Yes. But, in general, rpmforge and Fedora Extras are remarkably complete and high quality.

Have you been keeping up with FC at all?

-Erwos

What he is saying is that it's not because Fedora sucks, it's because Debian is very good at making packages.

Right now, using 'wajig list-all|wc' command I have over 17,000 packages aviable to me at this moment.

All of those packages have to go thru a series of compatability and bug testing in order to get to the point were they are aviable to me. In order to get all the way to Debian 'stable' they go thru a Experimental branch then Unstable then testing then finally into stable.

And by the time they reach testing all the packages are treated as a entire OS. Not just individual packages. Debian tries to be responsable for bug tracking and any security problems that happen to come along for those packages. They are all 'official'.

Plus the licenses and various legal issues with the software are tracked so that if I had to use Debian as the basis for a commercial system or use in a professional manner then I wouldn't have to sweat about the small legal stuff. (which fedora does pretty good job of, too)

What Fedora needs to do is pay more serious attention to third party package developers. To work with them, to endorse them, keep track of bugs for them, and give the end users easy access to them at bit more then do at the moment. They need to make them more 'official'.

It's because of those third party packagers its what makes Fedora usable, for me at least.

Now Ubuntu is a bit better then Fedora in this matter, but it's mostly because they have the benifit from all the work Debian does, which is perfectly fine for the most part.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: The Linuxator

Originally posted by: Nothinman

In FC to get a package installation experience almost identical to that of Synaptice go to terminal as root and type : yum install yumex

That will get you a GTK frontend for yum, it won't get you the amount or quality of the packages available in Debian or Ubuntu and in the longterm that's much more important.

Then install apt & synaptic on FC there shouldn't be any other issues right?

There are some issues with how Apt-get works.

I don't know the details to much, but as a actual packaging format RPM has quite a few little advantages/differences from .deb packages, which is what apt-get was designed for.

Apt-get for rpm was ported a long time ago and is much older (or at least became more widespread usage) then yum, which is why most third party repositories support it. (ironicly the synaptic gui used for ubuntu and such was designed for the rpm version of apt-get, I beleive).

However apt-get itself is not realy a terrific match. So Yum is designed specificly to work with rpm packages and it takes advantages of many of the desirable features that rpms themselves offer.

Plus there is differences between Debian and Fedora developer culture.

One big difference is that when using apt-get in Debian and I want to ugprade between stable to unstable I can just change the sources and do apt-get dist-upgrade.

On Fedora/Redhat using apt-get I can approximate it with apt-get, but the system isn't designed to work like that. The technically correct way to upgrade between redhat versions is to download the install cds and use the anaconda installer to upgrade. This is the only way to get some of the newer features and changes offered between fedora/redhat versions and is less likely to break something.

I use Yum personally with Fedora. If it's just for personal use then apt-get usually works out great, but I'd avoid it if I had to deal with lots of machines.

 

[Nothinman]

I have no idea where the myth that the packages are "low quality/quantity" came from, either. The guys at rpmforge are doing an awesome job, and I've been pleasantly surprised at how many packages there are. Are they missing some of the crazy, semi-obscure ones? Yes. But, in general, rpmforge and Fedora Extras are remarkably complete and high quality.

Have you been keeping up with FC at all?

Have you used Debian at all? The complete lack of documentation in the form of man pages and commented config files in RH/FC always frustrates me. Half of the commands on a RH/FC system don't have man page, wtf is that? And there's a lot of little things missing like an empty rc.local saying what it is for would be nice, same thing for rc.modules but I think they may have depricated that one. And then there's the other things that Debian does like the alternatives and menu systems that make integration between packages much more cohesive and simpler.

IMO RH/Fedora feels like a bundle of packages thrown together and Debian feels like a complete system.

 

[drag]

hehe, ya the alternatives system is pretty nice in Debian, as well has a hundred other little features that are handy to have.

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: drag
On Fedora/Redhat using apt-get I can approximate it with apt-get, but the system isn't designed to work like that. The technically correct way to upgrade between redhat versions is to download the install cds and use the anaconda installer to upgrade. This is the only way to get some of the newer features and changes offered between fedora/redhat versions and is less likely to break something.

I believe they offered an rpm that allowed you to upgrade from fc3 to fc4 without cds. I didn't try it though, because I didn't find it until after I had done the cd upgrade.

That leads me to agree with Nothinman. Fedora's documentation blows. I guess the reason is that they are concentrating too hard on putting together all the latest of everything; it's a trade off you have to make if you like the distro. I personally get along fine, but it is painful sometimes, and keeps you from learning the sort of things that you wouldn't have even known about unless you read about them in documentation.

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Have you used Debian at all? The complete lack of documentation in the form of man pages and commented config files in RH/FC always frustrates me. Half of the commands on a RH/FC system don't have man page, wtf is that? And there's a lot of little things missing like an empty rc.local saying what it is for would be nice, same thing for rc.modules but I think they may have depricated that one. And then there's the other things that Debian does like the alternatives and menu systems that make integration between packages much more cohesive and simpler.

IMO RH/Fedora feels like a bundle of packages thrown together and Debian feels like a complete system.

Thanks, but I grew up on Debian. I'm willing to bet I know it better than you, in fact.

Point by point:
1. RH/FC system-* commands don't have man pages. Then again, they have no invocation options, either. For everything else, you can blame program writers for the lack of man pages - it is not the packager's responsibility to put them in separately.
2. Alternatives is present in FC - see the chkconfig rpm.
3. rc.local comes by default with a little message in it explaining how to use it. rc.modules is indeed deprecated, although the _functionality_ is nothing you can't replicate in rc.local with half a brain.
4. I have no idea what you mean by "menu systems" helping package integration. Do you mean synaptic, or some kind of standard place to drop .desktop files?

Again, no one's saying Debian Stable is bad - but Debian Unstable is a mess, and always has been. Comparing Debian to FC by using Debian Stable when talking about stability, and Debian Unstable when talking about number/versions of packages is intellectually dishonest.

-Erwos

 

[Nothinman]

1. RH/FC system-* commands don't have man pages. Then again, they have no invocation options, either. For everything else, you can blame program writers for the lack of man pages - it is not the packager's responsibility to put them in separately.

But Debian has a policy that each program must have a man page so the DDs do create them when necessary. The lack of even a simple man page with a list of the available options and what they do is extremely frustrating.

2. Alternatives is present in FC - see the chkconfig rpm.

I thought chkconfig was for SysV symlink management.

3. rc.local comes by default with a little message in it explaining how to use it. rc.modules is indeed deprecated, although the _functionality_ is nothing you can't replicate in rc.local with half a brain.

The empty rc.local addition must have been fairly recent and I know it's easy to just add modprobe/insmod commands to rc.local, but I find /etc/modules in Debian more convenient because it happens earlier in the boot process.

4. I have no idea what you mean by "menu systems" helping package integration. Do you mean synaptic, or some kind of standard place to drop .desktop files?

Debian has shipped with a system that manages all of the system menus for years. If you install E16 and WindowMaker, both will have a Debian menu with entries for each installed package and as you add/remove packages the menu gets updated by the update-menus command. f.d.o is working on a similar thing with the .desktop files but each WM will have to add support for that as it becomes more popular.

Again, no one's saying Debian Stable is bad - but Debian Unstable is a mess, and always has been. Comparing Debian to FC by using Debian Stable when talking about stability, and Debian Unstable when talking about number/versions of packages is intellectually dishonest.

I've been using Debian unstable on my desktop and my laptop for like 6 years, it's nowhere near a mess. Once in a while a major migration causes breakage for a few days, but if you just wait to upgrade the DDs work out the bugs and everything calms down after a little bit. I don't think I've seen major breakage last more than 3-5 days.

 

[erwos]

I thought chkconfig was for SysV symlink management.

You thought wrong.

[root@myhost ~]# rpm -qf `which alternatives`
chkconfig-1.3.20-1
[root@myhost ~]#

but I find /etc/modules in Debian more convenient because it happens earlier in the boot process.

This is a reasonable criticism, but I've personally never seen an instance where loading something before rc.local was absolutely necessary. Even the infamous RHGB could load nvidia at the appropriate time if you just adjusted modprobe.conf correctly.

Debian has shipped with a system that manages all of the system menus for years.

Fedora is using the fd.o system. Not saying one is better than the other, but real standards are your friend, you know?

I don't think I've seen major breakage last more than 3-5 days.

If you think this is acceptable, then obviously your standards are a bit lower than mine.

-Erwos

 

[nweaver]

Gentoo rules, and it's not as bad as nothin makes it out to be. I run about 5 gentoo boxes, one Ubuntu, and one RH9. I will admit, synaptic/apt-get is MUCH faster then emerge.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: erwos

Debian has shipped with a system that manages all of the system menus for years.

Fedora is using the fd.o system. Not saying one is better than the other, but real standards are your friend, you know?

Debian used what they had because nobody else did it or provided standards, now they are using Freedesktop.org standards.

I don't think I've seen major breakage last more than 3-5 days.

If you think this is acceptable, then obviously your standards are a bit lower than mine.

-Erwos

Depends for what your using it for.

Keep in mind that 'breakage' _does_not_actually_break_ your computer. There are hiccups in moving the C++ ABI over to GCC 4.x version, and there was one for moving over to X.org... and the C++ one was a lot more strenious and lasted for a few weeks.

These are simply problems when you decide to run a apt-get dist-upgrade and the system wants to uninstall some packages you need. In that case you just run regular old upgrade and it works fine. But I am sure that you know this.

Plus, as your surely aware, Fedora Core does not have a wonderfull record of not-breaking-stuff. I personally would be very weary of installing a new version Fedora core less then 2 months after it's latest release...

For a production enviroment I would never considure Fedora Core personally, except maybe as a workstation for a knowledgable Linux user. I would not considure Debian unstable for the same thing either, although maybe Debian testing after a few months of developement and only then in a limited fasion.

My preferences would be Debian stable, Redhat WS/ES, a Redhat clone, or Suse and that's about it.

Debian unstable and Fedora Core are developement platforms for their developers primarly and desktop systems secondarly, IMO.

 

[Nothinman]

You thought wrong.

[root@myhost ~]# rpm -qf `which alternatives`
chkconfig-1.3.20-1
[root@myhost ~]#

I booted up FC4 in VMWare here and it would seem I am wrong, although there's virtually nothing there in a default FC4 install. The only things that seem to use it are java, mta stuff and print stuff.

This is a reasonable criticism, but I've personally never seen an instance where loading something before rc.local was absolutely necessary. Even the infamous RHGB could load nvidia at the appropriate time if you just adjusted modprobe.conf correctly.

Some of my boxes have modules loaded in a specific order so that interface, ALSA, etc names stay consistent. If I didn't use /etc/modules hotplug would load them in whatever order it wanted and that would be bad. I could probably fix them in other ways, but that was the simplest method.

Fedora is using the fd.o system. Not saying one is better than the other, but real standards are your friend, you know?

Considering that Debian is using the fd.o system too I don't see what you're getting at with the standards quip. But my point was the even those WMs that will never support the fd.o menus (like E16 and probably WindowMaker and who knows which others) have their menus updated in a centralized manner.

If you think this is acceptable, then obviously your standards are a bit lower than mine.

For the tree that the developers use as the entry point for new packages? Sure I consider it acceptable that a package be broken for a day or two, it happens and is usually fixable by installing the last good package until a fixed one is uploaded to the mirrors, yay for /var/cache/apt/archives.

And the only things I've seen take more than a day or two to resolve are the really large ones like recent X.org and C++ ABI transitions. Sid is the equivalent to constantly running a CVS snapshot of the next Debian release and it's virtually never broken, I would imagine that not many projects can say that. Hell from what I hear Ubuntu Breezy had tons of X and Gnome packages broken for like 2 months straight while they worked through bugs after Hoary was released. I have no idea how bad running Fedora Rawhide can be since I don't pay attention to their mailing lists, but I can't imagine it would be fun considering how many huge changes they try to push out with each release.

Gentoo rules, and it's not as bad as nothin makes it out to be. I run about 5 gentoo boxes, one Ubuntu, and one RH9. I will admit, synaptic/apt-get is MUCH faster then emerge.

All I have to say is : http://www.funroll-loops.org/