The Wife likes XP I like Fedora Core

[Looney]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Seriously the idea about using an old computer for Fedora Core is a good one. I talked to my nephew at the hospital this afternoon (no everything is OK it's a new family member) he is studying to be a programer, he said i might like Ubundi better than Fedora Core, easier to use??

Ubuntu's (sp) high level package manger (apt) and repositories are better than what's provided from FC IMO. But there are people that actually prefer Fedora for some unknown reason.

More support. I work at an ISP, and all of our systems are Fedora, even the customer services agents use Fedora. But most of us run Ubuntu on our personal computers, including the owners of the company.

 

[pkme2]

Noticed on Ubuntu forums that they have the same issues as Fedora, so how is Ubuntu better?

 

[Nothinman]

they release them as rpm packages which are made for Fedora Core and Redhat, an example would be all Linux Intel drivers, Mplayer, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Real Player...and much more)

The intel ipw drivers are integrated with the kernel now and all of the other things you mentioned are packed up by Chris Marillat for Debian and the packages work fine in Ubuntu AFAIK. I can't speak about the 'much more' because the only other thing that I use that's not in Debian sid is VMWare.

I know that most developers put RPMs on their site, but frankly I don't trust them and I usually inspect the packages myself before I use them. The Debian and Ubuntu developers put a lot more time into their packages making sure they work and integrate well with the system, even the RH and Fedora official packages don't feel as high quality to me.

Red Hat's reputation( I know it's no official support, but they still contribute here and there),

RH's reputation for software isn't very good IMO. I like what they do with the company and how they GPL all of their software, but the software itself is mediocre IMO. I mean, up2date? Come on.

Ease of use and installation (Many in here think that Ubuntu's DOS like installer is acceptable at this time and age but oh well),

The Debian installer (and thus the Ubuntu one) is awesome. The fact that it's ncurses is irrelevant since you only have to see it once per computer, less if you really want to avoid it. It was made in ncurses because it has to support all of the architecures that Debian supports and installation over a serial port, which can't be done if X is required. Also, the installer is extensible and there is a GTK2 front-end being worked on which will probably be ready for etch.

PM Hell sure froze over lately and repos are becoming better and bigger, and If you enable livna,freshrpms, greysector & DAG repos in addition to fedora base & extra repos you will pretty much end up with the same # of apps as in apt's multiverse and universe.

RPM hell isn't exactly frozen over, it's not as hot as it used to be but yum sucks hard IMO. And don't you think it's odd that you have to use 5 extra repos to get the same number of packages that are included in the Debian official ones? Even Ubuntu is better off IMO with universe and multiverse because they're just recompiled versions of the Debian packages so they've already gone through the Debian QA process.

More support. I work at an ISP, and all of our systems are Fedora, even the customer services agents use Fedora. But most of us run Ubuntu on our personal computers, including the owners of the company.

If you mean more support as in people on the Internet, I can see that. But you don't get any official support from anyone and at the rate that Ubuntu is being adopted I can see Fedora becoming a second-class citizen in the near future. If I worked at an ISP and I wanted something supported for our servers I would actually pay RH for support, not run Fedora.

Noticed on Ubuntu forums that they have the same issues as Fedora, so how is Ubuntu better?

That's a rather vague statement, care to expand on it? That's like saying, I've seen that Ford has had a number of recalls in their past just like Chevy so how is Ford better?

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

they release them as rpm packages which are made for Fedora Core and Redhat, an example would be all Linux Intel drivers, Mplayer, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Real Player...and much more)

The intel ipw drivers are integrated with the kernel now and all of the other things you mentioned are packed up by Chris Marillat for Debian and the packages work fine in Ubuntu AFAIK. I can't speak about the 'much more' because the only other thing that I use that's not in Debian sid is VMWare.

I know that most developers put RPMs on their site, but frankly I don't trust them and I usually inspect the packages myself before I use them. The Debian and Ubuntu developers put a lot more time into their packages making sure they work and integrate well with the system, even the RH and Fedora official packages don't feel as high quality to me.

Red Hat's reputation( I know it's no official support, but they still contribute here and there),

RH's reputation for software isn't very good IMO. I like what they do with the company and how they GPL all of their software, but the software itself is mediocre IMO. I mean, up2date? Come on.

Ease of use and installation (Many in here think that Ubuntu's DOS like installer is acceptable at this time and age but oh well),

The Debian installer (and thus the Ubuntu one) is awesome. The fact that it's ncurses is irrelevant since you only have to see it once per computer, less if you really want to avoid it. It was made in ncurses because it has to support all of the architecures that Debian supports and installation over a serial port, which can't be done if X is required. Also, the installer is extensible and there is a GTK2 front-end being worked on which will probably be ready for etch.

PM Hell sure froze over lately and repos are becoming better and bigger, and If you enable livna,freshrpms, greysector & DAG repos in addition to fedora base & extra repos you will pretty much end up with the same # of apps as in apt's multiverse and universe.

RPM hell isn't exactly frozen over, it's not as hot as it used to be but yum sucks hard IMO. And don't you think it's odd that you have to use 5 extra repos to get the same number of packages that are included in the Debian official ones? Even Ubuntu is better off IMO with universe and multiverse because they're just recompiled versions of the Debian packages so they've already gone through the Debian QA process.

More support. I work at an ISP, and all of our systems are Fedora, even the customer services agents use Fedora. But most of us run Ubuntu on our personal computers, including the owners of the company.

If you mean more support as in people on the Internet, I can see that. But you don't get any official support from anyone and at the rate that Ubuntu is being adopted I can see Fedora becoming a second-class citizen in the near future. If I worked at an ISP and I wanted something supported for our servers I would actually pay RH for support, not run Fedora.

Noticed on Ubuntu forums that they have the same issues as Fedora, so how is Ubuntu better?

That's a rather vague statement, care to expand on it? That's like saying, I've seen that Ford has had a number of recalls in their past just like Chevy so how is Ford better?

Well sorry Nothinman everytime you give the same answer, look :

- Ubuntu is the only distro that never installed sucessfully on a couple of my desktops one is an old IBM legacy hardware and the other is my AMD 64 rig ( starting from the first Ubunut till the current one ).

- You keep talking about rpm packages of being low quality and the debian / Ubuntu of being top notch, well give detail how are they better ? do they have a made in Japan on the bottom while the Fedora Core ones are made in China ? Or maybe you are talking about the app mnagaers, yum vs apt ? In case you are talking about apt vs yum , well apt is avilable for Fedora Core so that one is solved.

- You keep saying that the installer is no big deal because you see it once, well you are wrong there IMO, if the user had a problem with the installer then that's it the OS is not going to be installed and the user might opt to try some other distro, and the installer in Ubuntu doesn't allow me to pick what I need to install and what I don't need to install, and the whole setup process in Fedora Core takes less time and is more easy to use and it get's you a nice installation at the end with everything hand picked to perfection.

-And if rpms are so low quality then why does Intel make the rpms for the Fedora users while it requires everyone else to compile the packages from source code ?
It's not a matter of saying well the drivers are already in here or there, I am saying that why do you think big companies provide rpms ?
It's because Fedora is a trusted OS, does offer bleeding edge technology, has to be the most common distro out there and it's easy to use. Now does Ubuntu / Debian suck ?? I don't think so I like Ubuntu it's not as bad as I make it sound, but I stick with Fedora because the ppl responsible for the Feodra project have the right vision of what a desktop linux OS should be like, simple yet very advanced in what it provides it's users with 😉

 

[pkme2]

I had sound issues with my FC3 when I first installed it. Couldn't get the sound on my CD player to work. After tweaking my O/S, I finally got it working. Now I have FC4 and I'm trying to get MP3 working. I checked out the Ubuntu forum site, and they have the same problems I had. If Ubuntu better or easier to use than FC, why all the similar problems?

 

[pukemon]

Although someone has mentioned vmware, there is also VitualPC for Windows - yes it is a Microsoft product now, but it can and will load OS's other than Windows.

 

[M00T]

Originally posted by: pkme2
I had sound issues with my FC3 when I first installed it. Couldn't get the sound on my CD player to work. After tweaking my O/S, I finally got it working. Now I have FC4 and I'm trying to get MP3 working. I checked out the Ubuntu forum site, and they have the same problems I had. If Ubuntu better or easier to use than FC, why all the similar problems?

This is addressed weekly here. Mp3 is copyrighted, and for distros to ship it by default would be venturing into some very grey areas.

Until the RIAA/MPAA BS started being thrown around, I don't ever remember having a problem playing mp3s on a default install w/ xmms.

Further explanation.

 

[Nothinman]

- You keep talking about rpm packages of being low quality and the debian / Ubuntu of being top notch, well give detail how are they better ? do they have a made in Japan on the bottom while the Fedora Core ones are made in China ? Or maybe you are talking about the app mnagaers, yum vs apt ? In case you are talking about apt vs yum , well apt is avilable for Fedora Core so that one is solved.

Apt is definitely better than yum, but installing apt on FC doesn't help because there's virtually no apt repos for FC available. And when I talk about package integration and quality I mean things like packages using debconf to do some initial setup and continuing to use those settings automatically on upgrade. Being able to use apt-listbugs to be informed of any open bugs on a package before I install it without having to search the BTS manually. The use of alternatives and sensible-* apps to have the appropriate tool run if I have multiple packages installed that do the same thing. Having man pages for _everything_, the documentation supplied by RH is craptacular at best.

- You keep saying that the installer is no big deal because you see it once, well you are wrong there IMO, if the user had a problem with the installer then that's it the OS is not going to be installed and the user might opt to try some other distro, and the installer in Ubuntu doesn't allow me to pick what I need to install and what I don't need to install, and the whole setup process in Fedora Core takes less time and is more easy to use and it get's you a nice installation at the end with everything hand picked to perfection.

If you run the Ubuntu installer in expert mode you get to see all of the questions, not just the slimmed down default set. The package selection tool in FC's Anaconda is terrible, it doesn't even do any dependency resolution until after you've selected everything so you end up going back and forth a dozen times unless you already know what needs what.

-And if rpms are so low quality then why does Intel make the rpms for the Fedora users while it requires everyone else to compile the packages from source code ?

The same reason they release .msi files for Windows, it's got a name people know. That and RH used to be synonymous with Linux. And now that RH doesn't do their own non-business distro it makes sense that Fedora would inherit some of the things that RH used to get. And it's not about RPMs vs debs, they're very close feature-wise, it's about the extra steps that Debian developers seem to go through to make the system feel like a tight, integrated system compared to "a bunch of packages thrown together" that RH/FC feels like.

Here's the link m00t meant to post: https://www.ubuntulinux.org/support/doc...aq/helpcenterfaq.2004-09-16.3469703387

 

[The Linuxator]

OK I agree with some of your points here, but they aren't enough to support your idea that FC is sucky!! Similarly Ubuntu & Debi an do have their disadvantages, and that doesn't make them suck, they are just not as much user friendly.

Furthermore Anaconda is superior to the Debian installer, when compared to usability from an end user's point of view.
And I don't know what you are talking about when you said " The package selection tool in FC's Anaconda is terrible, it doesn't even do any dependency resolution until after you've selected everything so you end up going back and forth a dozen times unless you already know what needs what. " Why does it need to do a dependency checkup , the packages are all designed to be complete on the media they have been copied to, the packages are all there. Anaconda never failed to install an app that I needed, and once I had a lot of hdd space to waste so I selected every single app in there and all went through fine, no dependency issues at all.

And for those who say that you can't do an install over the Internet to get the up to date packages, well you can, and I have done it before. Just get the first and perhaps the 2nd CD install the base system, then boot the system you will get a terminal and then from there you will get everything else, in that way you don't have to download the 5 CDs and you will get the new packages installed instead of updated. It doesn't involve too much work to get it done that way.

 

[Nothinman]

Furthermore Anaconda is superior to the Debian installer, when compared to usability from an end user's point of view.

But the fact that it only supports 1/3 of the architectures is a major disadvantage, Debian is adding architectures while RedHat is dropping them. Portability is another huge issue that helps Debian software be better overall.

Why does it need to do a dependency checkup , the packages are all designed to be complete on the media they have been copied to, the packages are all there. Anaconda never failed to install an app that I needed, and once I had a lot of hdd space to waste so I selected every single app in there and all went through fine, no dependency issues at all.

It's not that it fails to install a package, it's that it takes like 2 minutes to check deps after you hit Next and then it prompts you with it's resolution to any problems which means you have to accept it's resolution or go back and fix things manually if you don't want all of the new packages.

And for those who say that you can't do an install over the Internet to get the up to date packages, well you can, and I have done it before. Just get the first and perhaps the 2nd CD install the base system, then boot the system you will get a terminal and then from there you will get everything else, in that way you don't have to download the 5 CDs and you will get the new packages installed instead of updated. It doesn't involve too much work to get it done that way.

Compared to the Debian method which is grab 1 100M CD and install the newest packages directly from the Internet the first time.

 

[M00T]

RPM is hell, and it always will be. Nuff' said.