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Fedora Linux
Posted by
samzenpus
on Mon Nov 27, 2006 03:51 PM
from the read-all-about-it dept.
from the read-all-about-it dept.
Ravi writes "Fedora — the Linux that is developed as a community effort, is the sand box of Red Hat. They incorporate all the new features after they have been exhaustively tested into its commercial product, namely Red Hat Enterprise Linux . Fedora has a 6 month release schedule and the most recent release is core 6. In all respects Fedora is the same Red Hat Linux but with cutting edge packages. What I really like about Fedora apart from the vibrant community participating in its development is the mark of quality it has from its association with Red Hat." Read the rest of Ravi's review.
Coinciding with the release of the latest version of Fedora, O'Reilly brought out the new book titled Fedora Linux authored by Chris Tyler. The book is divided into 10 chapters spanning over 600 pages with each chapter catering to a particular topic. Like all books of this genre, this book also starts by explaining how to install Fedora on ones machine. But what is different regarding the Fedora installer is that it provides a lot of flexibility, variety and finer control over the install process. Not surprisingly, the author has dedicated two chapters for explaining the various ways in installing Fedora. The first chapter titled "Quick start: Installing Fedora" covers the basic installation from start to finish. Where as the 10th chapter titled "Advanced Installation" covers the advanced features of the installer such as creating logical volumes and Raid during installation, automating the installation process using the kick start file, installing from locations other than a CD/DVD such as NFS and PXE boot as well as a detailed coverage of the Grub boot loader. This chapter also has a short section explaining how to install and use Xen virtual machines.
At a first glance, one might be tempted to bundle this book with the rest of the books available on this subject. But on close scrutiny, I discovered a certain method to the madness. That is each topic that is covered in the book is divided into 4 broad sections. There is a section titled "How do I do that?" which explains the nuts and bolts of accomplishing the given task. The next section titled "How does it work?" gives a good understanding of the theoretical concepts if any behind the topic, the third section titled "What about...?" introduces potential configuration bottlenecks and any additional tasks related to the topic and provides solutions to them. And lastly, there is a section titled "Where can I learn more...?" which provides a bunch of resources on the web and pointers to the respective documentation which will provide further insights about the topic being discussed. It is really refreshing to see this book take such a unique structured approach to explaining the concepts.
The 2nd chapter titled "Using Fedora on your Desktop" apart from covering details about Gnome and KDE Desktops also provides information about additional topics like configuring the XServer, adding new fonts and configuring sound and printing to work with Fedora. There are topics like partitioning a flash drive which makes this particular chapter quite interesting.
The third chapter titled "Using Fedora on your Notebook" explains how to configure Fedora to handle laptop specific features such as power management, mobile networking and configuring touch pad. This chapter also gives a firm introduction to configuring the networking interfaces be it the ethernet or wireless. One thing which holds Fedora in good stead over its peers is the good set of GUI front-ends available to configure each and every aspect of Linux. And configuring networking is no different. But the author does not limit himself to explaining the GUI way of configuring but also explains how to do it the command line way.
No book on Linux is complete without an in depth coverage of the basic commands used for system maintenance. The fourth chapter titled "Basic System Management" is one of the largest chapters in this book where the author explains all the important commands one might be expected to know to keep Fedora Linux in ship shape. Apart from the ubiquitous commands, I also found detailed pointers in enabling secure remote access to Fedora using SSH.
Package management forms the basis for the fifth chapter. Fedora has a great set of tools which aid the user in a variety of ways in installing, removing and upgrading packages. Fedora uses the software management system called RPM Package Manager. But with popular demand, it has also incorporated an apt-get like tool called Yum which automatically resolve dependency issues. I found this chapter to provide an in-depth coverage of all the tools related to package management in Fedora. For example, the author explains how to roll back the installation of a package to a state 10 minutes ago or for that matter to a previous date using the RPM tool. There is also a section which explains how to create ones own RPM packages.
The chapter titled "Storage management" gives a broad explanation of Logical volume management and setting up Raid. Fedora comes with its own LVM administration tool which makes it a snap to set up and manage logical volumes. The author after explaining how to accomplish creating, resizing and deleting logical volumes using this GUI tool, goes on to describe how to do it the command line way too which makes this chapter really useful. All along the chapter, I found useful tips on tasks such as creating backups of the disk and how to go about doing it, stopping a raid and so on.
But the one chapter which I found really comprehensive was the seventh chapter titled "Network Services". Here the author explains how to setup the gamut of network services including but not limited to DHCP server, BIND, CUPS print server, MySQL server, sendmail and more. This chapter spans around 100 pages. There is also a short section providing tips on analyzing the web and ftp logs.
Lets face it. Even though Fedora is a community supported venture backed by Red Hat, it has all the characteristics which propel it to the enterprise level. One of the notable characteristics is the extensive integration of SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux). SELinux controls what a program is and is not allowed to do, enforcing security policy through the kernel. Fedora has very good support for SELinux and has even developed GUI front-ends to make it much more easier to configure. In the 8th chapter, the author explains in detail the steps needed to configure and fine tune selinux on Fedora. This chapter also contain sections which explain the pluggable authentication module as well as other security related features such as configuring a firewall and using access control lists.
The unique structure in which the chapters are layed out makes it more suitable to be used as a reference more than a cover to cover read. The author is eloquent in his narration of the topics and has done a good job of explaining the concepts. I found this book to be an ideal resource for coming up to date with all the system and network administration tasks that can be accomplished in Fedora Linux.
Ravi Kumar maintains a blog where he shares his thoughts related to GNU/Linux, Open Source and Free Software at linuxhelp.blogspot.com. He has also reviewed in a concise way the history of GNU/Linux.
You can purchase Fedora Linux from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Comment on Fedora in general. (Score:2, Informative)
Format.
Install Fedora, update the kernel packages, VMTools up and running.
Easy.
I like Fedora and this book look like it could make anyone a more knowledgeable Fedora user.
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Fedora's version of KDE lacks polish, attention (Score:4, Interesting)
Some of the Fedora 6 changes (like taking away MP3 playing capability from KDE music players) are justified on a legal basis, but other changes (like using a 4-year old window decoration and widget styles) are at best the result of ineptitude or at worst a deliberate attempt to make KDE look bad and outdated.
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Re:Gentoo? (Score:4, Interesting)
I used it for a few years because it was the only functional fully 64 bit distro out there at the time and found it to be fairly easy to use if you read the documentation (which is quite good). Its drawback is that you actually have to read the doc (even if you've already installed a dozen other distributions) or it won't work very well.
After that, it's all a matter of taste of course. It's neither better nor worse than the others, it has advantages and drawbacks. And of course basically it installs the same stuff as everybody else. If you have some spare time it's interesting to try as a fairly different approach to a common problem though.
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Perhaps it was a typo (missed the spacebar). Nevertheless, the omission of a space hardly warrants a grammer flame. My rule of thumb is this: If the mistake makes the message difficult to understand, then you might want to bring it to the other person's attention (if you are feeling like an anal jerk on a given day). If the only reason the mistake is bothering you is because you have a 2x4 pi
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More of a spelling flame I'd think. And on that subject, it's "grammar".
More widely used than you'd know (Score:2, Interesting)
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What a coincidence -- FC2 was the distro that drove me away from Red Hat and all of its relations.
Re:More widely used than you'd know (Score:5, Insightful)
What is ironic is that everyone is bitching about how it took 6 years to go from xp to Vista (which I won't migrate to) but I felt the opposite. I am tired of learning new operating systems just for the sake of learning new operating systems. I don't buy computers to run operating systems, I use operating systems to run PROGRAMS.
Eventually I will have to make the switch to Debian (which seems to be the best for NOT changing the version every freaking 6 to 12 months), but have just been too busy running the actual programs to learn a different Linux version.
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I was pretty pleased with Fedora Core 2-4, felt like they were modern, without being bloated and slow like 8 & 9. FC5 was a real dog, though, so I don't know what to say about that. In all, I tend to use Fedora more than any other distro. It's got its issues, but when you use it enough, you just sort of
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Have you tried CentOS? It's based off of RHEL4 and the versions are fairly stable. It will be supported for a while. The program versions are quite old, though. I can't stand the version of Gnome it ships with (2.14 was the first version I found usable). With KDE-Redhat, tho
package manager need tons of work (Score:4, Interesting)
Having said all this, I hope yum has imoproved in FC6, yet to try that though.
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It still needs to re-read the data, which takes longer than it should, but only has to call out to the network if something is likely to be
Re:package manager need tons of work (Score:5, Informative)
Reading and re-reading the data should be quicker now, too.
The repository data is stored in a giant XML file which is incredibly slow to parse. Back in the day, it would read this file in every time you ran yum. Last year [1] they added a SQLite cache, so this step could be skipped if the data hadn't changed.
Relatively recently, they added a separate yum-metadata-parser written in C that dramatically reduces the time the parse step takes. Take these changes together and what used to take 45.5 seconds every time you ran yum now takes 7.5 seconds only if the data have changed. [2]
It sounds like they've done as much as they can without changing the transferred data to be an indexed binary format (with the associated forward/backward compatibility complexity).
(I'm not running Fedora Core 6, so I'm not sure if this change made it in.)
[1] - Looks like [duke.edu] yum 2.3.1 introduced the cache, around March 2005.
[2] - See this message [duke.edu] introducing it around May 2006 sometime after yum 2.6.1.
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Ive use debian for years, and wonderd why (Score:2)
IMO: debian still has the best package management in the business. Also, you don't have to download and install a ton of cruft that you don't want. And you only install debian once - then just incrementally upgrade.
To each, his own, I guess.
Misleading Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? I thought it was the other way around? It was when I last tested it.
In all respects Fedora is the same Red Hat Linux but with cutting edge packages.
No, it's not!
1. No support. (This matters to some. Not me though)
2. Buggier. Look at the distros created with the Enterprise source code. That's a production ready OS. FC is not.
3. (b)leading edge everything where applicable. Comparable to Debian unstable IMHO.
4. Red Hat's Management/Sales probably don't like "free as good as paid version" statement either.
There are a few great distro's out there and FC is probably one of them, but not for production equipment. Every version I have recently tested I've ended up with randomly broken systems after applying patches. I never knew when or what to watch out for.
Debian stable and copycat Red Hat Enterprise distro's make it into production just fine. The path from Debian Testing versions to Stable is quite good as always.
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Re:Misleading Summary (Score:5, Informative)
The sentence is poorly structured, hard to parse, and has a few grammatical errors (they/its), but is not backwards. It could use a couple of commas:
"They incorporate all the new features, after they have been exhaustively tested, into their commercial product..."
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Heh. I think it's one of those unwritten rules of the internet that posts about spelling must contain speling mistakes, and posts about grammar must grammar mistakes.
Solid but takes some tweaking. (Score:2)
My biggest complaint is that they often compile software with to many dependicies, that aren't needed, required. This gets to be a pain when you have to compile half of your
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Right now, however, I'm trying to work out how to replace the hard disk in my PC and transfer files from the old disk to the new one. It used to be you could just 'mount' but Fedora uses LVM by default, which has about forty different commands and manual pages. There's no handy tool to say 'ju
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Indeed. Better support at ubuntu forums. But, I think the support is better at ubuntu forums than at any RHEL forums.
2. Buggier. Look at the distros created with the Enterprise source code. That's a production ready OS. FC is not.
Indeed, FC is buggier than RHEL. But RHEL is buggier than most other distros too. Not a reference in my mind.. Especially in package management. I don't even count the problems in RPM database I have had.
3. (b)leading edge everyth
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Different OSes for different needs. For Desktop use Fedora, for servers use RHEL/CentOS .
Sales Push? (Score:2, Insightful)
I am not talking about Fanboy Fawning either, but more like "out of a brouchure".
Really, its not a review, but a list of talking points....no critical review, no Pro/Con.....strictly Pro/Pro.
Why is this a book review?
dimes
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Red Hat != the world (Score:2)
That rather overstates the case, don't you think?
Take your blinkers off... (Score:2, Informative)
s/the/a/
I prefer Debian and here's why... (Score:3, Informative)
If you need a stable, easy-to-administer, well-established, production OS, I would suggest Debian.
Review (Score:2, Insightful)
Fedora for Enterprise? (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't imagine anybody in large corporations wants to spend all their time and bandwidth propagating bleeding-edge software updates.
my observations with core 6 (Score:2, Interesting)
-Frequently crashes on I/O errors (I assume a bad driver, not working well with dual core?).
-Inconsistency between control panels (too many tools do the same thing, scattered around the system).
-File sharing is a _little_ easier to setup, but I still had issues with it. Why can't a right click a folder, set permissions, and share?
-Fonts are still INCREDIBLY UGLY and illegible even af
Confusion (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Missing a Chapter (Score:5, Funny)
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I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but to claim Red Hat are getting a free ride is just plain ridiculous. I'd like to be pointed to a single organisation, commercial or otherwise, that has done more for the free software community than Red Hat. And yes, I'd probably say they even eclipse the FSF in that respect now.
Fedora's pace is just right for me (Score:2)
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Yeah, they used to release 5.0, then 6-9 months later 5.1, then 6-9 months later 5.2, then 6-9 months later 6.0. Now it's 3, then 6-9 months later 4, then 6-9 months later 5, then 6-9 months later 6.
The biggest change in the release schedule is the numbering scheme. They're just incrementing a full number each time instead of doing point releases.
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Ummm. Not that I know of.
Calling Debian's release cycle slow down right stupid. You know very well that's because everyone who doesn't use Debian, never looks past stable. And you know what, stable is stable.
What is the point of having a stable release if no one uses it? Cutting stable release a bit more often is very useful. It appears that is what more than a few people want. It seems to be the main thing that is fueling the success of Ubuntu at the cost of creating incompatible
Re:Missing a Chapter (Score:5, Insightful)
There never was such a convenant, and RedHat releases all the source packages as required by the GPL. This means you can download a RHEL-based stable, free distribution recompiled by a third party in the form of CentOS [centos.org]. My company tends to buy RHEL where we want paid support or where we have to buy an operating system with hardware (Dell offers Windows or RHEL at the same price). We use CentOS elsewhere. It's the same software, and it's free and legal.
For a company that doesn't give a fuck about open source, they sure hire a lot of people to develop it. I can't find it now, but somewhere there's a webpage with a list of all the open source projects RedHat has developed, maintains, and contributes to. It's amazing how much they've given back to the community, and how many idiots like you there are who are deliberately blind to it.
Can someone please mod the parent down as a troll? And someone else please post a link to the page I can't find?
Parent
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In the interest of full disclosure, you should mention that you have Foe'd me when you ask someone to mod me down. I have a couple of serial downvoters modding various comments incorrectly already and now you ask people to do more of it? This is not a troll. This is my genuine opinion.
Actually, if you don't even know what a troll is, perhaps you shouldn't ask people to mod things with that
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"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
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And Red Hat has violated this how? Considering how many millions of dollars they have spent on developers, Q&A, and computer resources for Gcc, Gnome, the Linux kernel, NetworkManager, etc etc etc - and of course Fedora Core.
I apologize for not being familiar with your contributions to Gnu/Linux/Free Software. I'm assuming they're noteworthy; otherwise you wouldn't have written what you wrote.
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I don't get choked up when someone supports Free Software in the pursuit of making money. Sorry.
When I said they didn't care about "us" I meant the users of RedHat, but I guess everyone assumed I was speaking for the entire Open Source and Free Software community. I should have expected that out of the idiots on this thing.
Am I n
Re:sex wIth a gnaa (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:/vertisement... Stop it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, without that little explanation on who Ravi is, I would have no idea. The fact that he writes about linux (even though it's a blog), and has written other reviews makes the entire review a little more credible.
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