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After our post yesterday on Fedora, we received a comment from Paul W. Frields, who is the Fedora Project Leader and chairman of the Fedora Project Board. He wrote:
I think the idea that we’re “regaining†users implies that we lost them somewhere along the way, which isn’t what our statistics show. Rather, as the total size of the Linux-user pie has become larger, we’ve continued to grow consistently. There will always be distro-hoppers looking for that elusive perfect Linux distribution — and more often than not, failing in that quest — but in general the strength of our development model, rapid release cycle, and putting the freshest software in front of users in a stable, easy to manage platform have retained users’ hearts for a long time. It’s true that we may not have the marketing push of Ubuntu; it’s a fine distribution and community, but given the choice between marketing features and creating them, we definitely choose the latter. We’re very happy that many of the features we create are adopted by other distributions, because that shows, first, the strength of the free software development model; and second, that our policy of working directly with the upstream, as opposed to creating a crazy quilt of technically questionable patches in our own distribution alone, is the winning strategy for long-term sustainability.
And he is right, we were inaccurate with the title. Fedora is improving its share of the overall Linux market, which continues to grow. There has been a lot of growth on the Ubuntu front, because of their aggressive marketing push. We’ve noticed developers seem to be releasing Ubuntu packaging and not is offering up-to-date Fedora packing.
Three pieces of software we’ve referenced on this blog come to mind. Dropbox, Boxee, and XBMC. Dropbox is a file sync application which offers a current Ubuntu package, but only a Fedora 9 rpm(which fortunately works with Fedora 10). XBMC and Boxee are both supported under Ubuntu, and maintained there, but require a series of source code hacks to work under Fedora.
Now, this is hardly a reflection on Fedora. XBMC and Boxee contain multimedia packages that Fedora cannot include for legal reasons…nor can Ubuntu for that matter. It is a reflection on our original point…essentially that Fedora(which we use) is gaining popularity. As Paul reminded us, one of the best parts of Fedora is that they work directly with upstream maintainers…those who write the packages Fedora is assembled from, such as the Gnome Desktop, which is a major part of multiple distributions, so that the alterations are done at a level above the individual distribution. Thus Fedora enhances the overall Linux experiences for all users, by being involved.
Reading a draft of this article on Fedora, it states that “the Fedora project has four basic foundations, the 4 Fs, its corner stones. Freedom, Friends, Features and First are the core values that govern us.”
“Freedom†represents the dedication to free software. It lays emphasis on the creation, usage and promotion of free, open source alternatives to proprietary or closed source solutions. Our aim is to provide software that is reliable as well as a hundred percent legally redistributable to everyone.
“Friends†signifies the strength of the community. The project consists of people from different parts of the world with different ideas and views with belief in Fedora’ s core values as their binding force. Everyone who wants to help is welcome at the community. Our decisions and steps are taken after a consensus is reached, as between friends!
“Features†represents our commitment to excellence. Fedora is responsible for the creation and constant improvement of software that takes the Linux world forward. It is for the benefit of all users of free software regardless of their distribution of choice.
Lastly, “first†represents our commitment to innovation. It signifies that every major step in the project is taken with a view of the future. Fedora is described as a bleeding edge distribution that always provides the latest available for Linux.
Fedora has some great features/goals for Fedora 11. They include, to name a few:
- 20 Second Startup – Part of their continual goal to speed this up
- Automatic Font and Mime Installer – Allowing programs on the desktop to automatically install fonts, codecs, and clipart
- CrashCatcher – to help users with bug reporting
- Ext4 – Replace the default ext3 partitioning scheme with ext4, its successor.
- Updating the following included programs: Firefox to version 3.1, gcc to 4.4, Gnome to 2.26, NetBeans to 6.5, Python to 2.6, Thunderbird to 3, Xfce to 4.6, Xserver to 1.6.
- Improved Fingerprint Reader support
- Multiseat support – making it easy to a single computer to operate with independent keyboard, mouse, and monitor for multiple users
- Improve Power Management
- Presto – Presto supports upgrades using DeltaRPMS. A DeltaRPM is a file that only has the differences between the last version of the software and the new one, allowing it to be much smaller. The DeltaRPM can be used to generate the updated package. This will reduce overall load on servers by not requiring users to download pieces of a file they already have.
- Volume Control improvements – There have been problems with volume control since Fedora added Pulseaudio
- Windows Cross-Compiler – Allows users to compile Windows programs without Windows
And many more…We look forward to enjoying them.
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Wow, I didn’t expect to generate a whole separate story! 🙂 In case you’re interested, you can read more about the “Four Foundations” — which are essentially a statement of Fedora Project’s core values, as well as part of our overall brand message — here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Foundations
The draft article you quote was written by someone very new to Fedora and thus not all the comments in that article are necessarily on point. We encourage all our contributors to learn more about Fedora from our extensive wiki, and to ask questions about any part of the project in which they’re interested. Thanks for the clarification and cheers!
Well, you did inspire us. We’ve bounced around a bit on what to talk about on this blog and hope our choices cause people to follow. Talking about Fedora is certainly something we can do. If you hunt back in our posts, when we talk software, we prefer items that are available for Linux, but have tried to remain distribution neutral. But, we’ve been with one Red Hat distribution or another since we bought Red Hat 7 at the store, back in the days where one did that. We rsynced the Fedora 10 prerelease repository starting a few weeks in advance so we could use Jigdo to get a copy of the DVD when it was released without contributing to the bandwidth issues. We emailed around to ask why a Jigdo release for the specialty Fedora spins, ie the XFCE spin was not offered and who to talk to about that(No response from anyone, as we recall). We run a local repository to maintain updates to four separate machines and eagerly await the addition of Presto to that to save bandwidth. We read the Fedora News every week.
We walk the Open Source Walk and we talk the Open Source Talk. We should write more about it.
Jeroen van Meeuwen from our Spins SIG was kind enough to send me this information on Jigdo:
“The jigdo method of distribution basically works as follows: for every file in a .iso that you tell jigdo is available from somewhere else, it strips the file (or slice, or piece of the .iso jigsaw) from the .iso leaving you with a relatively small .iso.template (only the parts of the .iso that are not available from somewhere else) and a list of files you can get from somewhere else.
“Now, with installation media, this means there’s a small part of the .iso you need to download in the form of a .iso.template, while the rest (install.img, and all RPMs) is available from any mirror (and you are going to use the closest and fastest one).
“With Live media however, the contents of the .iso is just a few files. Some of them are really small (vmlinuz0, initrd0.img), while others are very large and make up 99% of the size of the .iso (osmin.img and squashfs.img). Splitting those slices from the .iso isn’t very useful, because you would end up downloading a small .iso.template, several very small files, and then one single beast of a file (squashfs.img).”
Hopefully this helps clarify our jigdo availability. Thanks for the question!