Fedora Core 6 Released

Shadowman writes "Fedora Core 6 has been released. Recommended download method is via BitTorrent. For more information, see the release notes or the Fedora homepage. Slashdot interviewed the Fedora Project Leader back in August."

Multimedia support

[Nighttime]

As someone always comments on Fedora's (and by proxy, Red Hat's) multimedia support, here it is from the horse's mouth:

15.3. MP3, DVD, and Other Excluded Multimedia Formats
Fedora Core and Fedora Extras software repositories cannot include support for MP3 or DVD video playback or recording. The MP3 formats are patented, and the patent holders have not provided the necessary patent licenses. DVD video formats are patented and equipped with an encryption scheme. The patent holders have not provided the necessary patent licenses, and the code needed to decrypt CSS-encrypted discs may violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a copyright law of the United States. Fedora also excludes other multimedia software due to patent, copyright or license restrictions, including Adobe's Flash Player and and Real Media's Real Player. For more on this subject, please refer to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems [fedoraproject.org].

While other MP3 options may be available for Fedora, Fluendo now offers a free MP3 plugin for GStreamer that has the necessary patent license for end users. This plugin enables MP3 support in applications that use the GStreamer framework as a backend. Fedora does not include this plugin since we prefer to support and encourage the use of patent unrestricted open formats instead. For more information about the MP3 plugin, visit Fluendo's website at http://www.fluendo.com/ [fluendo.com].

Yes, they're sure.

[Kelson]

Torrents are up. The Fedora websites seem to be down (fedora.redhat.com) and overloaded (fedoraproject.org), but if you can get the latter to load, it does announce "Download Fedora Core 6"

Through the magic of Bittorrent I'm downloading the official release faster than their server can manage right now.

Bah - that's what Livna is for :)

[Penguinisto]

No, seriously: Livna works just fine for me (And I think DAG should cover it as well; can;t remember the URL offhand, though). Both Livna and DAG have yum repos that will grant all the necessary tidbits needed to complete the install (including NTFS support for weirdoes like me who have to plug in HDD's formatted in that recover others' data on occasion...).

/P

Release Notes Mirror & Thoughts

[SlashdotOgre]

Here's a mirror of the release notes: ftp://limestone.uoregon.edu/fedora/6/i386/os/RELEA SE-NOTES-en_US.html [uoregon.edu]

Things I'm finding interesting are:

Section 9 (Desktop Effects) Looks like its just AIGLX, not Xgl (in fact there's no mention of Xgl).

Section 17 (Virtualization) FC6 uses Xen 3.0.2, I know Xen was in FC5 but I haven't had a chance to play with it. The release notes mention something about it being connected with the installer, so perhaps I'll get a chance.

Section 22 (Package Changes) Interesting removals IMHO are: mozilla, xscreensaver, gkrellm. I'm sure all can be found in the Fedora Extra's Repo or some place similar. I'm not a big fan of where some of the desktop apps are going (eg. I hate gnome-screensaver), but the beauty of Linux is it's quite simple to solve this problem.

URL's for alternate repos:

[Penguinisto]

Livna [livna.org]

Dag [wieers.com]

Cheers! /P

Re:Bah - that's what Livna is for :)

[the COW OF DOOM (tm)]

Not only that, but in FC6 you can enable Livna right in the installer. So your system will have MP3/DVD/etc. support right at first boot.

Just point it at http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/6/[arch] and those packages will magically appear as install options. Yay!

(link: http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/6/ [livna.org])

Who cares?

[slashdotmsiriv]

Ever since I installed Kubuntu i threw a black stone to the dark days of Fedora Core Installations ... Since then i can completely install linux systems on any laptop and PC without writing a single script and without having to compile my own kernel modules.

Re:Release Notes Mirror & Thoughts

[TheOrquithVagrant]

> Section 9 (Desktop Effects) Looks like its just AIGLX, not Xgl (in fact there's no mention of Xgl).

Fully-implemented AIGLX pretty much makes Xgl obsolete. Compiz runs on top of AIGLX now, and compiz is shipping with Fedora. That means all the "bling" normally associated with "Xgl" is available.

> Section 17 (Virtualization) FC6 uses Xen 3.0.2

Xen 3.0.3 was released on the 17th, in time to get included. The release-schedule slippage had a silver lining.

Re:package for "forbidden items"

[eelcoh]

You could try http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm [livna.org]. That will add livna's rpm repositories to your yum configuration. After that it should be straightforward to install stuff like mplayer or xine (yum install mplayer xine).

Re:Mandatory Zod quote

[spevack]

It's traditional for us to have some sort of "whimsical" or "funny" release announcement that accompanies all of the serious stuff. The full link to it is here:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-li st/2006-October/msg00008.html [redhat.com]

Re:Not flamebait

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't flamebait, just paranoia. FC uses the same default theme style for both GNOME and KDE (called "Bluecurve" in FC5, at least). Don't like the default? Pick another.

The missing default support for formats (such as MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3) that rest on shaky FOSS distribution grounds has nothing to do with Fedora's KDE. Of course it's exluded from the GNOME apps too, and it's as easily fixed with KDE as it is with GNOME. Add your favourite 3rd party RPM repositories and use yum.

There is no anti-KDE conspiracy.

Re:CentOS?

[Limecron]

> Is there any reason to care about Fedora now that we have CentOS?

Huh? Most desktop Linux users like running the latest and greatest which is clearly not what CentOS is intended to do. That's why Fedora and the Ubuntus exist, for desktop users to have all the latest versions before they're completely tested.

Not to mention that Fedora is essentially the test bed for RedHat, which is what CentOS carbon copys itself from. So essentially, if you use CentOS, you need people to use Fedora to ensure your copy of CentOS is tested properly.

> Also, I spent the day mapping configurations between Debian and RHEL. It was not fun.
> Could someone please, pretty please, come up with some kind of XML file to abstract everything commonly found in a linux /etc, then write conversion tools for each OS to move from XML to /etc files?
> Then we could have one configuration tool for the XML file, instead of having to use hundreds of tools (system-config-foobar, dselect reconfigure foobar) or learn hundreds of config file parsing languages.
> 99% of configurations done in /etc/ are simple concepts that should not require looking up some random guy's BNF.

Good idea. I nominate you.

Re:Honestly

[nath_de]

Use Fedora Unity [fedoraunity.org] for respins including all updates.

Re:Not to troll, but...

[Nixoloco]

http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/07/1 1/1431207&tid=138&tid=2/ [newsforge.com]

Will Woods, the new test lead for the Fedora Project, has only been in his position a few weeks, but already he has a clear goal in mind. Whenever Fedora is mentioned on Slashdot, he notes, "There's always someone who will comment that Fedora is just Red Hat's beta test for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It's not true, and I want no one to have cause to say that ever again."

Re:Multimedia support

[pyros]

That depends on how they include the functionality. If they include unlicensed software, then U.S. ditribution of Mandriva (hosting ISO images on servers in the U.S., retail outlets selling boxed CD sets, etc) could be halted.

Re:FC's Package Manager

[MrRobahtsu]

That's like saying "does anybody actually prefer ruled paper to soy sauce?" Apt and rpm are differnt things. Apt and yum are roughly comparable, apt and apt4rpm (availalble for fedora and RH) are quite comparable, but rpm is more like dpkg, not apt.

Re:Not to troll, but...

[spevack]

I tried to address that myth -- the "Fedora is just a trial ground for RHEL" statement -- in the interview that I did *on this very site* a couple of months ago.

Rather than repeat a lot of that stuff here, I'll just post the link.

http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/0 8/17/177220 [slashdot.org]

There are lots of folks out there who use Fedora as a production server. There are many other who choose to use RHEL, or CentOS. But just because there are multiple choices doesn't mean that each distribution has to be pigeon-holed into things that it "is for" or "is not for".

Yes. It worked in FC5 and it still works now.

[the COW OF DOOM (tm)]

The ipw2100/ipw2200 driver is in the kernel package.
The firmware is freely available from http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] or the livna repo.

HTH HAND kthxbye.

Re:Yes, but...

[J.Y.Kelly]

Actually the developers have said that Firefox 2.x will be a FC7 target and won't be released for FC6. Their reasoning was that there are too many other packages which depend on firefox to release a major update within a release.

There are however a couple of people working on Firefox 2 rpms for FC6 (and 5) which will install into /usr/local and will work alongside v1.5 so everyone's happy.