Re: last night's meeting

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

On Fri, Nov 07, 2003 at 03:05:27PM -0600, Gary wrote:
> Can anyone give me a synopsis of the meeting last night, regarding what
> was said about Fedora, and anything about security updates, etc.

I don't remember what was actually said, but the points that I
intended to make were something like this:

  * Nothing fundamental is really changing but the name.  When you see
    "Fedora Core 1", think "Red Hat Linux 10".

  * Red Hat (in the form of Fedora) will *finally* be taking
    contributions from the army of volunteers that have been dying to
    work on the distribution for years.

  * Red Hat people will continue to do the bulk of the work on Fedora
    Core, plus they'll be driving new releases.

  * Red Hat is dropping official support of old versions of the free
    distribution ("Red Hat Linux"), but support will be picked up by
    Fedora Legacy.

  * Red Hat is dropping official support of the free distribution, but
    they never really supported it officially unless you paid for it
    anyway.

  * People who care about "real" support can pay for RHEL
    (http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/)

  * Because new releases aren't "officially" supported, good features
    that don't work for 100% of the systems out there can be included.
    (As an example, ACPI was removed from RH 9 because it didn't work
    on many systems.  It is included in Fedora Core 1 with a note that
    some systems may require "acpi=off" in the kernel command line.)

  * Fedora Core includes yum, a somewhat apt-like program originally
    developed for Yellow Dog, a PPC Red Hat derivative.  Future
    versions will likely include apt as well.  (If it isn't in Core,
    it will be in Extras.)

  * Speaking of that, Fedora will not only include "Core", which is
    what everyone thinks of as "Red Hat Linux", but also "Updates"
    (obvious), "Extras" (a lot of the random stuff Debian people are
    used to), and "Alternatives" (apparently alternative versions of
    packages included in Core or Extras).  There's also a repository
    of stuff that can't be included in Fedora due to random legal
    issues (xmms-mp3, libdvdcss, etc.) at http://rpm.livna.org/.  And
    then there's always http://freshrpms.net/, which probably won't be
    going away.

I'm sure there's more that I'm forgetting...

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux Users Group
(618)398-7360             | See web site for meeting details.
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/

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