Hi
I came across your review [1] of the second test release of Fedora Core
4 . I have a few suggestions and remarks.This is the first review of a
test release of Fedora Core 4 that I have come across and as such it
was certainly a interesting one to read.
"I am one of many who felt that Red Hat's abandonment of their desktop
user community was treacherous at best. I see the logic in this from a
customer support perspective--after all, answering questions from
randoms who've coughed up the money for a Linux distribution at CompUSA
can be time-consuming, but that's how you build market share."
Stopping retail distribution of Red Hat Linux and moving towards a more
frequently updated Fedora project isnt equivalent to abandonment of the
desktop users. Red Hat has never produced a distribution that directly
targetted the desktop segment. While its true that Red Hat wouldnt isnt
directly involved in retail distribution of Fedora, independant vendors
continue to do that extensively. Fedora release cycle combined with the
Fedora legacy project would provide something thats pretty close yet
better to previous releases of Red Hat Linux. While your point about
building market share is pretty true the reality is that support costs
would be higher for the desktop market compared to servers (limited and
restricted usage scenarios).
Red Hat continues to work on things that are meant to improve the user
experience for Fedora. For example extensive work on GTK, dbus, hal and
things like Network manager are some of the pieces of desktop
infrastructure that springs up to mind. Efforts to improve bootup speed
using bootchart [2] and things like GDM early login [3] are primarly for
desktop users. servers arent going to rebooted that often for boot up
speed to be a significant factor . right?
Work on GCJ ( GNU compiler for Java) would enable the significant amount
of Java code in Openoffice 2.0 to e run under a natively compiled free
Java stack which I believe you would agree is a important thing for the
desktop market.
"On my screen, the subtitles read "To sponsor a project and people who
will develop stuff that we can suck directly into future RHEL releases.""
While Fedora project definitely is the basis of Red Hat Enteprise Linux,
inviting the community to work on things is meant to enable more
innovative growth and take Linux into directions which Red Hat cannot or
does not want to work on currently. Fedora Extras is just one such
direct benefit of the work done by the community. Instead of a scattered
set of third party repositories we will now have Fedora Extras
repository which follows Fedora Core release cycle and is enabled by
default in Fedora Core 4 which will enable users to access a whole lot
of software more easily
You have provided a table that shows the changes in version numbers of
the things that you find important. It would have been better to link to
the release notes [4] for the test release for users who want to dig
for further information after reading you review
The following things are what I would consider important features that
are planned to included in Fedora Core 4 that you have not mentioned in
your review
Xen [5] - A para virtualisation software that would enable users to run
multiple operating systems or versions of it.
Red Hat GFS [6] - Cluster filesystem
SELinux update - Significant number of additional deamons will protected
by SELinux in Fedora Core 4
Free Java stack which includes Eclipse and Apache Jakarta
Fedora Extras yum repository enabled by default
GDM early login and removal of rhgb would be a significant change in
user experience for desktop users
Evince document viewer [7]
Yum will use sqllite database and perform much faster that previous releases
regards
Rahul
[1] http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/5830/1/
[2] bootchart.sf.net
[3]
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2005-April/msg00416.html
[4] GDM early login -
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraDocs_2fReleaseNotes_2fCore4Test2
[5] Xen - http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/
[6] Red Hat GFS - http://www.redhat.com/software/rha/gfs/
[7] Evince - http://www.gnome.org/projects/evince/
