Fedora Core, anyone ?

[Keith Morse]

On Sun, 14 Dec 2003, Chong Yu Meng wrote:

> Anybody using Fedora Core out there ? I installed it on Tuesday after a 
> new keyboard corrupted my Red Hat 9 partition (It was a Zippy Win XP 
> certified keyboard. No harm, right ? Well, in this case, it was a 
> disaster! RH9 couldn't even recognize my regular keyboard after that.)

Bad Karma, no doubt.

> 
> Some first impressions :
> 
> 1. Pretty cool. Still looks like Red Hat, but the Custom package 
> installation is different from how I remember RH9 -- didn't have the 
> option to select indicidual packages.

Hmmm, don't remember that. But I've only done one install so far.

> 2. Still has the tendency to dump everything and the kitchen sink into 
> your PC. This turned out to be a good thing for me, though, because I'm 
> picking up DocBook, and the tools (all 100+ MB of them) for parsing and 
> generating HTML docs are very good.


> 3. gdm has now become a real pain in the neck. Trying to add an XFCE 
> session inside with no luck so far -- even after googling for answers. 
> Something seems to be broken or missing ...
> 
> I'm actually glad that Red Hat decided not to support their "Linux for 
> the masses". One of the main gripes I had about Red Hat years ago, was 
> that I thought  they'd hijack Linux and turn it proprietary. Hopefully 
> Fedora will become an independent project ... and successful.

I've seen this comment semi consistently on the RedHat list's.  Key 
phrases like "Microsoft like", proprietary, and closed source get bandied 
about but nothing I've seen or heard about the company gives me that 
impression.  Everything they produce code wise is available to anybody 
including their enterprise distribution. Gotta compile it on your own and 
there are at least two different projects whose purpose is to create a 
distribution based on RHEL.  

One thing I wonder about is that if people realize that RHL could 
have entirely abandoned RHL and not created a follow on that is now Fedora 
Core.  Admittedly the firestorm from such an action would be a magnitude 
or more greater than the current row.  To be sure there is a public 
relations element to it, but I think at it's core, they see it as a 
two way street of giving and getting to/from the open source community.

Ultimately acts speak louder than words, least ways they should, and 
RedHat will prove themselves to be villans or good guys.  I'm betting on 
the later.