Fedora 7 LiveCD Beta

Hello from the Future

I wrote this post immediately upon returning from a trip, after a weeks of writing reviews. It was late at night, I was tired, this one was long. I was focused on getting this one finished before I took anything new on, so I did not stop to look around. Once it was done, I poked my head up, looked around, and found out both Mint 3.0 and Fedora 7 LiveCD were GA. Nuts.

I am downloading them now, even as I type this, and I'll get another post up as soon as I can to see if anything I say here has totally changed.

Now back to our previous post, already written

I was extremely happy to see that late in Fedora 6's lifetime somewhere (and I missed exactly when it happened) a LiveCD version came out. Fedora still has their more traditional install versions, but now they had LiveCD's as well. I am sure I was hardly the first to think: "Finally".

Fedora in some ways seems to have fallen on hard times lately, if for no other reason than mind share of Ubuntu these days. Fedora just does not seem to have it's former luster. This might be in part why it was decided to merge Core and Extras and just create "Fedora". I think this is a move in the right direction, but to be honest, I think they have a ways to go with this. I do not mean to be critical here: I am "Just saying". I will explain why, after I first talk about what the F7 beta was like in general for me.

(Hi: Future me again. I was at Distrowatch getting the new torrents fort the GA version, and glanced at the "Hits Per Day" tracker. Ubuntu was at 2854, and trending down. Number 2 is PCLinuxOS at 1944 and trending up. Three spot held by OpenSUSE at 1904, trending down. Fourth was Fedora at 1445, trending up. Just a snapshot, but covers the trends of the last six months, so somewhat supports the idea. With F7 now freshly released, and OpenSUSE 10.3 GA out in October, I imagine they'll be switching places on the list soon.)

F7, not FC7

Dropping that 'C' from the abbreviation is really messing with me....

I downloaded the F7 Beta from the torrent, and it flew down Just flew. I don't think I have ever seen a torrent feed that so fast. Really. Something like 10 minutes. If I understand BitTorrent technology correctly, the more people downloading it at the same time, the faster it is for everyone. The closer to you on the 'net to each other, the better as well. Extrapolating from there, taking into account the Hubble constant, and the speed of light, the stock market closing numbers, and how old I am, I calculate that One Bazillion people (that is, a one, followed by a bazillion zeros) were also downloading F7 beta. So maybe the shine is off out there in pundit-space, but not the interest...

Questionable math aside, that speed did seem to indicate interest, and not without reason. F7 is a good distro in many ways, and some of the problems I was having are related to it being a Beta as much as anything.

As usual, I am not going to do the screenshot by screenshot thing. There are always plenty of those. No point is repeating others good work.

I first booted the LiveCD of F7 on my Acer 5610. I have mentioned this computer many times here before: it is very Linux compatible, with two exceptions: The little special buttons between the screen and the keyboard do nothing, and the built in media reader from ENE Tech. is detected correctly (if messages in the 'dmesg' output are to be believed), but no media in the slots is ever detected. Research here has indicated that fixes are coming for this, and in fact were supposed to be in the 2.6.21 kernel which F7 has... but it still is not working. I assume the ENE support code did not make it to the final build. I guess Fedora could have taken the ENE code out of the base kernel as well... not really sure. I just know the card slot doesn't work yet. It does work under MS Vista, so I know the slot is OK.

The wireless card from Intel was detected and configured without issue. The screen size was too. Not all Linuxii do that: the Intel video card has a special support module that has to be loaded. Ubuntu 6.10 didn't, but oddly Mint always has. There is more to Mint than just a Blue / green theme.

Speaking of themes, the FC7 desktop balloon theme is very nice to my blue-loving eyes. I was so encouraged, I decided to take the next step and install it someplace.

I picked the IBM X30 as my target. I am always interested in how well any version of Linux works on my most portable computer. I clicked the X30 into the dock to get a boot CD, and away I went. Without really thinking about it, I just clicked on the Ubuntu-ish install icon on the desk. And that was where F7 stopped being like Ubuntu in any way, and started being more like Fedora.

A modified Anaconda installer appeared. I didn't count how many screens I went through, but it didn't seem like too many. I was encouraged. Then came the reboot, and the standard second set of Anaconda installer questions appeared. This is where you begin to know that Fedora has no intention of being anything like Ubuntu, despite the similarities up to that point. You have to know a great deal more about how you want the system to be configured; Do you want the firewall up? Do you want to run SELinux? How about running through all these packages and letting us know which ones you'd like installed.

Here is where Ubuntu differs: They have defaults for all this, and you have to dig around after the install to change them. Post OS install addition of software is dead easy with Synaptic already installed and configured by default. For a beginner to Linux, Ubuntu's way is better. For the experienced Linux hand, Fedora's is. This is part of why when we recently built a new NAS server for R&D, we used Fedora for it, not Ubuntu. In fairness, I have not looked at Ubuntu server yet to see if that logic quite applies anymore.

It was stable, fast, and pretty. All the packages appeared to be current.

Then the wheels came off, and with it, Fedora. The wireless card, an Atheros chipped, PCMCIA card from D-Link (DWL-G630) that I have used in the X30 for a long time without issue, would not configure. Fedora did not know it was there. Dim Fedora memories returned.

Oh.

Yes. I need MADWifi (Multiband Atheros Drivers for Wifi). And Fedora did not ship it. It was not in their repositories. Oh. Yes. I am spoiled. I have to enable additional, non-Fedora repositories to get MADWifi. FreshRPMS, ATrpms, or in the old days, DAG. Or just build it myself from source. Been there, done that too. Good thing I am not a beginner at this.

I looked around, and googled, and what became quickly clear is that the repositories like ATrpms and FreshRPMS wait to have a GA version to sync their base off. Their pre-built kernel modules were for kernels many point releases behind where the Beta was. Sigh.

I did not have any more time for this. I was in the middle of doing reviews for 14 people. I put Ubuntu 7.04 on the X30 and was done with it for now. I'll try again after the GA of F7. Ubuntu 7.04 dropped in, everything worked, including the Wifi card. And I am using it to write this.

Professional Grade Linux versus personal Linux

I am not really sure it is exactly fair to compare Fedora to Ubuntu. They are not meant to be the same thing. But here is where so much confusion about Linux comes from. How the heck does someone who does not know anything about Linux know which one is right for them? One he one hand, they hear "Linux is Linux"... because it is. Linux isn't the same thing as a Distro. Linux is a kernel. To make a Distro, you have to wrap that kernel up in all sorts of useful things. Word processors, installation programs, desktop managers, X servers, on and on. Debian has over 21,000 additional things.

As professionals in Linux, we like using Fedora to build servers. We like the granularity of control, and the fact that Fedora is meant to be used for checking out things that are to come in Enterprise grade Linux. In fact, in an upcoming post about a new NAS appliance we just built, we tried to use Advanced Server 4 and 5, and found that, for us, Fedora was working *better*. Had to do with NFS ACL's in NFS V4....

One the other hand, I just rebuilt a computer for my brother. It is a real odd computer. It is built out of parts I had laying around the house, supplemented with bits bought on close-out from our local purveyor of geek gear, Fry's Electronics. It had been running Fedora when I was using it. I had been babying along a failing hard drive that FC6 used as it's boot.

It was going to be my brothers so flaky hard drives were not an option, I tore it apart, reconfigured it, took another newer hard drive that used to just have data on it and promoted it to boot duty, and installed Ubuntu.

There was never a question in my mind that Ubuntu was a better starter Linux for him.

There were lots of little reasons for a decision like that:

1. He lives in Austin. Austin is where Dell is. Dell just released a Linux computer. It's Ubuntu based. If he needs any help on the computer and I'm not around, he lives in a city full of technology, and has a good chance he can find out things about Ubuntu locally.

2. Ubuntu's software installation and updating is brain dead easy. An icon lights up, he clicks it, the updates are listed. He clicks install, enters his password, and they are quickly downloaded and installed. If it needs a reboot (like for a new kernel) it says so by the icon. Click that Icon, and you can reboot from there. Easy easy easy.

3. This computer, as noted, has no pedigree. The mother board can't run as fast as the processor which in essence under-clocks it. There is an old CD writer that I bought in the late 1990's. It used to be in a USB enclosure. When that failed, I installed it directly. Now that only works part-time. There is a new generic CD writer in a USB case, bought on sale. The graphics card was on sale, and the cheapest one I could find. For all that, it had 1 GB or RAM, and even the under-clocked Athelon still ran surprisingly fast... and very cool. Ubuntu identified all the odd gear, and was running without issue. Fast too.

My brother is a whiz in wood, being a professional carpenter. But computers are just how he runs email and surfs the net. He could really care less about any of the geeky aspects of them. He just wants them to work. When I delivered the computer to him, he had no issues with any of it. It was going to clearly 'just work'.

He has a Apple iBook, so I left Gnome as the default desktop manager, since it has top side of the screen menus. About an hour of showing him various things, and he was good to go. I know Linux has arrived when I do a fly-by computer install of a Linux based PC, and have it be "No Problems: Looks easy"

One funny thing: his wife told a co-worker they were getting a Linux computer, and the co-worker called her a geek. They were pretty happy about getting geek points. But it is kind of funny: It really is not all the geeky to run a Linux computer anymore.

I guess there are geek points is running such a Franken-Computer though.

Fedora again...

I have not lost my mind... I think. I called this a Fedora post, and then spent all that time talking about Ubuntu. Time to pull that together.

As I said, I don't really think Ubuntu and Fedora are all that comparable, except for one problem.

People will compare them.

Outside the data center, Fedora will suffer for that comparison. Whatever project purity that keeps them from (for example) enabling the Atheros Wifi card by default may be 100% in keeping with something. I have not dug into the differences, technical and historical, in the way the the Intel Wifi and Atheros Wifi cards are supported in Linux.

Atheros cards work really well, but I am guessing probably not because of any help received from Atheros. More than likely, like Broadcom and TI Wifi chips , the support is all from Linux community heavy lifting, and probably has nasty stuff where card firmware has to be cut out of MS Windows or some other OS's drivers. This means that only binary versions of that down-loadable firmware are all that is available to Linux, even if the rest of the driver is Open Source.

This has seemed to always be the sticking point for Wifi cards: The manufacturers think that having open source firmware inside their cards would give away things about the way the hardware in the card is designed and thus hurt them in the marketplace.

Intel has provided help to the Open Source community on their cards, but I have not researched to what level: I know Ubuntu for example calls the Intel cards "Restricted Source", and makes sure you know they are not 100% pure Open Source either. Be that as it may, working with the Open Source community clearly benefited Intel on the recent Dell Linux PC, where Dell decided to configure the Intel card on the laptop, rather than the in-house Dell Wifi card. I am not sure why: I have booted Ubuntu on Dells with Dell cards, and it worked fine. I assume that whomever provides Dell with their Wifi chip is more staunchly anti-Open Source than Intel, so support was going to be easier with Intel. I am just guessing here though.

I have no market data to back this next assertion, but I wanted to toss out something on that idea about helping the Open Source communityto write a driver for your Wifi card in some way hurts you by giving your competitors a leg up. My observation is that very few people who are just buying a computer as a tool really care what the chip on the Wifi card is at all. I think then that it break down this way:

• People that care what the chip is are people who are computer literate in some way outside using it as a tool to just write a document or send email. There are many levels of this: the one that know the chips themselves. The ones that know the brand names, and the marketing names. And the reason they know all this is that they care about it for some reason. A Linux person will care because they will want to know if the computer they are buying will work with their OS or not.
  
• People that do not care, just want the thing to work.

Here I have a case where Ubuntu installs Atheros cards with no warnings at all, and Intel cards with a warning about their source. In both cases the card worked.

Fedora installed the Intel card with no warning at all: it just works. But the Atheros card is no where to be seen. By default. I know how to make it work. My brother would not. By extension, most non-Linux literati would not.

Makes my brain hurt.

Fedora has some lovely things in it. I have not given up on using it. I like its display card management better than any ones, for example. Ubuntu's display card management verges on non-existent. Really: Check out with Google trying to set up two display heads on one computer with Ubuntu. Text editing as root the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and entering several stanza's of data about the video card or cards, the monitors, their refresh rates, etc, will be the key. Hardly beginner level Linux. Fedora makes this easy.

I do not flinch from enabling other repositories like ATrpms or FreshRPMS to get to things like MADWifi either. But beginners installing Fedora on their Atheros chipped computer will just know the Fedora didn't work on their hardware and decide it must be broken, and move on.

Really: Most folks don't even know or care that there are all these different companies making all these different chips that the manufacturers are buying and installing. Lots of folks just look to see of it has a Wifi card built in or not. Or a media reader slot.

I tried to keep this simple by focusing on a few items, and recent experience, but I think this issue is the final frontier for Linux usage. To get past the "geek" label, people are not going to want to know which Linux Distro is the right one for what they have in mind. For many, a computer is something that ranges from a “Necessary evil”, to a tool they use to achieve an end. The computer itself is not at all interesting.

No really. Some people do not find computers interesting. I'm not kidding.

OS.X and Ubuntu are going to be the OS's that win the hearts and minds and dollars of those kinds of computer users. Fedora can't win here unless it changes it's mind about what it wants to be, from 'test playground for data center Linux, and corporate desktops' to 'everyones OS'. Funny thing is, it is not all that far away. The LiveCD install, while not quite as spiffy as Ubuntu's, is light years ahead of the one Knoppix had back in the early days.

Oh great. I just brought another OS into this. Suffice it to say that Knoppix was first to the plate with an installer that let you install Linux on you computer from the LiveCD. It was command line, kind of Debian'ish in terms of what you had to know to use it, and at the end of it you did not really end up with a Knoppix computer so much as a Debian one. That was good: better than a base Debian install to be sure. But when I ran it, I wished it had left the resulting computer looking and acting a lot more like Knoppix than it did. I have not tried this with a recent Knoppix. But I digress.

Splitting up the Market

So, one possible trajectory for this: Ubuntu, and other easy to use but Debian based Distos end up owning the desktop market. Mint. Xandros. Linspire / Freesprire. All Debian at their core. All dpkg based for package management. They do this because they are a bit less persnickity about the purity of the Open Source-ed-ness of some critical things, and cover them with their "Restricted Source" manager. Their stuff by and laqrge "Just Works" (tm)

The data center is where RPM is king. Redhat and SUSE are both RPM based distros, and between them have the majority of the glass house installs. Fedora is designed to be a test playground for the things that will end up in RedHat later, so its focus stays on the hot buttons of the glass house, not the end user. Same thing is true about OpenSUSE and it's relationship to SUSE. I can find all the same issues for new users with OpenSUSE as I have here for Fedora.

RPM at current course and speed seems set to loose the casual Linux user desktop to dpkg.

I am not talking about the Linux literati here. Most of us are able to work in either packaging world (even if we perhaps prefer one of the other), and to make computers that do what we need no matter what. Linux really is Linux, and if you know what you are doing, most any starting place will work. What I am concerned about is the idea that if RPM based Linux don't do a better job capturing the mind share of the causal end user that they will cede that to dpkg. And we'll end up with a split in Enterprise Linux so that what someone uses at the office in the data center or on their office desktop will be different than what they have at the house. And that will be frustrating, and slow Linux adoption down.

Hey! I just thought of a new anti-Linux conspiracy theory...

I supposed the other option might be that Ubuntu Server will start making real inroads in the glass house, and dpkg ends up the winner at the end of it all. As much as I like Ubuntu these days (and it's plucky offspring, Mint) that would make me sad too.

Fedora is still cool to me, and has a lot to offer the end user community, should they just decide to take their LiveCD Fedora as a starting point, rationalize their hardware support a bit, and make it every bit as easy to install as Ubuntu.

I watched my brothers reaction to Ubuntu. He got the ease of use. He went from 'geeky' to 'easy' in no time flat. I could have done the same thing with Fedora 7 once it was GA. Gnome is Gnome. A few pointed installs of things like 'yumex' to ease self maintenance, with me-configured extra repositories, and Fedora 7 would have worked for most things, at least as long as he didn't change anything.

Lest you think I am predicting the doom of Fedora, I am not. Linux distros rarely die. That is also the nature of Open Source in general. What I am pondering is the idea that it will be marginalized.

In the meantime, I look forward to being able to put the GA release on the X30 and getting the Atheros Wifi card going and really getting a chance to spend some time with it.

I'd put Fedora 7 on the Acer 5610 (that would be easier...), but that is where the GA release of Mint 3.0 is going... :)

(Future me again: Looks like I'll get that opportunity sooner rather than later)