Felipe Contreras

For quite some people it seems if you use Fedora you are committing an open source sin; at best it seems as if there is no good reason to use it, or so has been my experience. Fedora is generally regarded as a test-bed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and even though that is true to some extent, that’s not my perception.

My first serious distribution was Linux From Scratch, so I have thought quite a lot about how a Linux distribution should be. For me, it should have state-of-the-art technology, be developer-friendly, and stable.

The only real contenders so far have been: Ubuntu, Gentoo and Arch Linux.

Arch Linux is a great distribution; simple and useful. Unfortunately, it’s not very popular and that shows in it’s stability. Perhaps that has improved since the last time I tried, but I don’t have enough time nor motivation to try it again.

Gentoo might have been the next logical step away from LFS, but there’s a reason why I stopped doing my own distribution: I didn’t want to compile everything by myself. As far as Gentoo stays away of serious binary packages; it’s not an option.

That leads to Ubuntu. Yeah, it’s a great distribution and everybody loves it… I’m sorry but I don’t. The fact that it’s a desktop oriented distribution makes certain decisions as no-root quite annoying. Also not having any choice of the packages to install or different installation methods; I like to install Fedora with an USB key and download the packages over the network. It’s graphics-only installer also doesn’t play well with QEMU.

Those are quite annoying, but minor details. My biggest rant is the package management system.

I’m quite fond of the following RPM commands:
rpm -q --requires foo
rpm -q --provides foo
rpm -q --whatprovides foo
rpm -q --whatrequires foo

Note that “foo” can be a package, a file, or some identification string, like “perl(Error)”. That solves all the possible dependency querying needs you can have.

In contrast, a query of “dpkg -S /etc/localtime” returns nothing on a debian system, or at least the one I have at hand.

There are other annoying details like “apt-get install” and “apt-cache search”; why do I need to know which one to use in which situations? “yum install” and “yum search” are much friendlier.

Finally, there are some common miss-conceptions regarding Fedora:

• The “dependency-hell” still exists; that’s not true thanks to yum.
• It’s unstable by nature since it’s RHEL’s test-bed; not true, there’s Fedora development, testing and stable.

Despite having bleeding-edge technologies Fedora is always quite stable, and very often they choose new technologies that are aligned to exactly what I would have chosen if I was still doing my own LFS.

It’s not perfect but I don’t see any better option.

Do you have any recommendation?

I just installed Fedora 8 and so far it has been a good experience.

Definitively the best thing so far has been the inclusion of PulseAudio (thanks Lennart!) Since now ESD is emulated, GNOME system sounds can easily work, and also sound files preview in Nautilus. And of course; per-application volume controls.

Another feature that comes bundled is Bluetooth support. Now connecting with other devices and sending files is one click away. Not only that, but there’s also phone support, which right now it seems to be limited to sending SMSs and receiving notifications.

Finally MP3 playback doesn’t require any extra repository installation. Codeina makes it easy to “buy” (for free) a codec from Fluendo. Other formats aren’t free.

I didn’t like the default theme so I changed it to Glossy (GNOME’s default) and Firefox was constantly crashing for a while and then it worked.

I’m not sure if it’s psychological but it does feel more responsive… way more responsive, the UI just feels smoooth.

That’s it for now.

This is basically a copy-paste from a similar post for Fedora 7.

wget ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/Fedora/i386/os/images/diskboot.img
sudo dd if=diskboot.img of=/dev/sdX

WARNING: be really careful to choose the right device or you might screw other partitions.

Also unmount it before doing the operation. If you want to check the contents just unplug and plug your memory stick.

When you reboot you’ll be able to choose the network installation. You’ll want to choose the HTTP method as FTP doesn’t seem to work and since you are required to type the URL of the server it’s better to write it down before rebooting.

For a list of mirrors check here (not working right now). An example URL would be:

http://spreader.yandex.net/fedora/linux/releases/8/Fedora/i386/os/

Here is the bug report. Please provide feedback if you can.

Thanks to this post.

Before I forget how to do it:

Use “lsof -i” to find out the ports you need to open. Look for rpcbind and rpc.mount.

rpcbind 2110 rpc 8u IPv6 7514 TCP *:sunrpc (LISTEN)
rpc.mount 2479 root 7u IPv4 8622 TCP *:59287 (LISTEN)

Now add them to iptables:

iptables -I INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport sunrpc -j ACCEPT
iptables -I INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 59287 -j ACCEPT

I guess you can edit “/etc/sysconfig/nfs” and set MOUNTD_PORT to some value so you don’t have to check it.

That’s all I had to do, but for more information check here.