Fedora Linux

Ravi writes "Fedora — the Linux that is developed as a community effort, is the sand box of Red Hat. They incorporate all the new features after they have been exhaustively tested into its commercial product, namely Red Hat Enterprise Linux . Fedora has a 6 month release schedule and the most recent release is core 6. In all respects Fedora is the same Red Hat Linux but with cutting edge packages. What I really like about Fedora apart from the vibrant community participating in its development is the mark of quality it has from its association with Red Hat." Read the rest of Ravi's review.

Fedora Linux
author	Chris Tyler
pages	650
publisher	O'Reilly
rating	9
reviewer	Ravi
ISBN	0-596-52682-2
summary	An excellent book on setting up and configuring all aspects of Fedora Linux.

Coinciding with the release of the latest version of Fedora, O'Reilly brought out the new book titled Fedora Linux authored by Chris Tyler. The book is divided into 10 chapters spanning over 600 pages with each chapter catering to a particular topic. Like all books of this genre, this book also starts by explaining how to install Fedora on ones machine. But what is different regarding the Fedora installer is that it provides a lot of flexibility, variety and finer control over the install process. Not surprisingly, the author has dedicated two chapters for explaining the various ways in installing Fedora. The first chapter titled "Quick start: Installing Fedora" covers the basic installation from start to finish. Where as the 10th chapter titled "Advanced Installation" covers the advanced features of the installer such as creating logical volumes and Raid during installation, automating the installation process using the kick start file, installing from locations other than a CD/DVD such as NFS and PXE boot as well as a detailed coverage of the Grub boot loader. This chapter also has a short section explaining how to install and use Xen virtual machines.

At a first glance, one might be tempted to bundle this book with the rest of the books available on this subject. But on close scrutiny, I discovered a certain method to the madness. That is each topic that is covered in the book is divided into 4 broad sections. There is a section titled "How do I do that?" which explains the nuts and bolts of accomplishing the given task. The next section titled "How does it work?" gives a good understanding of the theoretical concepts if any behind the topic, the third section titled "What about...?" introduces potential configuration bottlenecks and any additional tasks related to the topic and provides solutions to them. And lastly, there is a section titled "Where can I learn more...?" which provides a bunch of resources on the web and pointers to the respective documentation which will provide further insights about the topic being discussed. It is really refreshing to see this book take such a unique structured approach to explaining the concepts.

The 2nd chapter titled "Using Fedora on your Desktop" apart from covering details about Gnome and KDE Desktops also provides information about additional topics like configuring the XServer, adding new fonts and configuring sound and printing to work with Fedora. There are topics like partitioning a flash drive which makes this particular chapter quite interesting.

The third chapter titled "Using Fedora on your Notebook" explains how to configure Fedora to handle laptop specific features such as power management, mobile networking and configuring touch pad. This chapter also gives a firm introduction to configuring the networking interfaces be it the ethernet or wireless. One thing which holds Fedora in good stead over its peers is the good set of GUI front-ends available to configure each and every aspect of Linux. And configuring networking is no different. But the author does not limit himself to explaining the GUI way of configuring but also explains how to do it the command line way.

No book on Linux is complete without an in depth coverage of the basic commands used for system maintenance. The fourth chapter titled "Basic System Management" is one of the largest chapters in this book where the author explains all the important commands one might be expected to know to keep Fedora Linux in ship shape. Apart from the ubiquitous commands, I also found detailed pointers in enabling secure remote access to Fedora using SSH.

Package management forms the basis for the fifth chapter. Fedora has a great set of tools which aid the user in a variety of ways in installing, removing and upgrading packages. Fedora uses the software management system called RPM Package Manager. But with popular demand, it has also incorporated an apt-get like tool called Yum which automatically resolve dependency issues. I found this chapter to provide an in-depth coverage of all the tools related to package management in Fedora. For example, the author explains how to roll back the installation of a package to a state 10 minutes ago or for that matter to a previous date using the RPM tool. There is also a section which explains how to create ones own RPM packages.

The chapter titled "Storage management" gives a broad explanation of Logical volume management and setting up Raid. Fedora comes with its own LVM administration tool which makes it a snap to set up and manage logical volumes. The author after explaining how to accomplish creating, resizing and deleting logical volumes using this GUI tool, goes on to describe how to do it the command line way too which makes this chapter really useful. All along the chapter, I found useful tips on tasks such as creating backups of the disk and how to go about doing it, stopping a raid and so on.

But the one chapter which I found really comprehensive was the seventh chapter titled "Network Services". Here the author explains how to setup the gamut of network services including but not limited to DHCP server, BIND, CUPS print server, MySQL server, sendmail and more. This chapter spans around 100 pages. There is also a short section providing tips on analyzing the web and ftp logs.

Lets face it. Even though Fedora is a community supported venture backed by Red Hat, it has all the characteristics which propel it to the enterprise level. One of the notable characteristics is the extensive integration of SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux). SELinux controls what a program is and is not allowed to do, enforcing security policy through the kernel. Fedora has very good support for SELinux and has even developed GUI front-ends to make it much more easier to configure. In the 8th chapter, the author explains in detail the steps needed to configure and fine tune selinux on Fedora. This chapter also contain sections which explain the pluggable authentication module as well as other security related features such as configuring a firewall and using access control lists.

The unique structure in which the chapters are layed out makes it more suitable to be used as a reference more than a cover to cover read. The author is eloquent in his narration of the topics and has done a good job of explaining the concepts. I found this book to be an ideal resource for coming up to date with all the system and network administration tasks that can be accomplished in Fedora Linux.

Ravi Kumar maintains a blog where he shares his thoughts related to GNU/Linux, Open Source and Free Software at linuxhelp.blogspot.com. He has also reviewed in a concise way the history of GNU/Linux.

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You can purchase Fedora Linux from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comment on Fedora in general.

For my CSE432 class, Operating System Internals, we delve into the Linux 2.4 kernel code to show examples of how operating systems are implemented. So I, being a lifelong Windows user, decided to setup a VMware virtual Linux box. Started with Ubuntu, but couldn't get the VMTools installed properly.
Format.
Install Fedora, update the kernel packages, VMTools up and running.
Easy.
I like Fedora and this book look like it could make anyone a more knowledgeable Fedora user.

Fedora's version of KDE lacks polish, attention

The modified version of KDE that ships in Fedora 6 is really buggy and unpolished. There's been talk for two years about placing KDE in Fedora Extras [fedoraproject.org] so that it will be better supported by the dedicated KDE community, but Redhat seems to keep refusing the help and treating KDE apps as second-class citizens.

Some of the Fedora 6 changes (like taking away MP3 playing capability from KDE music players) are justified on a legal basis, but other changes (like using a 4-year old window decoration and widget styles) are at best the result of ineptitude or at worst a deliberate attempt to make KDE look bad and outdated.

Re:Gentoo?

The main trick to installing Gentoo is to religiously follow every line of the installation guide. If you derive from it, you should be able to explain why (i.e. be an advanced enough user to know what you are doing, which typically doesn't require to be a wizard, but not a newbie either). Oh and the installation CDs didn't come with vi. I wasted quite some time figuring out that the editor was a thing called nano (which I had never heard of at the time).

I used it for a few years because it was the only functional fully 64 bit distro out there at the time and found it to be fairly easy to use if you read the documentation (which is quite good). Its drawback is that you actually have to read the doc (even if you've already installed a dozen other distributions) or it won't work very well.

After that, it's all a matter of taste of course. It's neither better nor worse than the others, it has advantages and drawbacks. And of course basically it installs the same stuff as everybody else. If you have some spare time it's interesting to try as a fairly different approach to a common problem though.

More widely used than you'd know

In an informal survey on my IM list, more people are using Fedora than any other distro. Not that that's good or bad, but considering all the hype for Ubuntu recently, I'm happy to see Fedora getting a little love. It's been my workstation of choice since FC2.

Re:More widely used than you'd know

I hate to say "me, too", but "me, too". I started losing faith when RH9 came out so fast after 8, especially considering how happy I was was the whole 7.x line. (and even 6.1) I still have FC1 on a couple of boxes, and unfortunately FC4 on a couple as well. What has kept RH on those boxes is the fact that I simply know RH's quirks/methods better than anything else.

What is ironic is that everyone is bitching about how it took 6 years to go from xp to Vista (which I won't migrate to) but I felt the opposite. I am tired of learning new operating systems just for the sake of learning new operating systems. I don't buy computers to run operating systems, I use operating systems to run PROGRAMS.

Eventually I will have to make the switch to Debian (which seems to be the best for NOT changing the version every freaking 6 to 12 months), but have just been too busy running the actual programs to learn a different Linux version.

package manager need tons of work

Fedora is a nice distro. The biggest problem I have faced in using it, though, has been yum. But to be fair, it is improving with every version of FC. However, it's very feature deficient when compared to apt -- which is a big big plus for Debian based distros. Also, the various repositories of FC also add to the confusion: which mirrors to use and which mirrors to avoid is not straightfordward (dependency hell) and the combinations of various 'acceptable' repositories can be a confusing issue. The other problem with yum has been its speed: the last time I checked (that was in FC5), it still took ages to do every operation.

Having said all this, I hope yum has imoproved in FC6, yet to try that though.

Re:package manager need tons of work

One problem yum has had is that it wants to check the network for updates before every operation. This has improved recently ... It still needs to re-read the data, which takes longer than it should, but only has to call out to the network if something is likely to be different, which makes a *huge* difference when you're installing individual packages or querying it with search or info.

Reading and re-reading the data should be quicker now, too.

The repository data is stored in a giant XML file which is incredibly slow to parse. Back in the day, it would read this file in every time you ran yum. Last year [1] they added a SQLite cache, so this step could be skipped if the data hadn't changed.

Relatively recently, they added a separate yum-metadata-parser written in C that dramatically reduces the time the parse step takes. Take these changes together and what used to take 45.5 seconds every time you ran yum now takes 7.5 seconds only if the data have changed. [2]

It sounds like they've done as much as they can without changing the transferred data to be an indexed binary format (with the associated forward/backward compatibility complexity).

(I'm not running Fedora Core 6, so I'm not sure if this change made it in.)

[1] - Looks like [duke.edu] yum 2.3.1 introduced the cache, around March 2005.

[2] - See this message [duke.edu] introducing it around May 2006 sometime after yum 2.6.1.

Better than the alternative

"Fedora -- the Linux that is developed as a community effort, is the sand box of Red Hat.

I guess that's better than being the litter box of Red Hat.

Misleading Summary

They incorporate all the new features after they have been exhaustively tested into its commercial product, namely Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Really? I thought it was the other way around? It was when I last tested it.

In all respects Fedora is the same Red Hat Linux but with cutting edge packages.
No, it's not!
1. No support. (This matters to some. Not me though)
2. Buggier. Look at the distros created with the Enterprise source code. That's a production ready OS. FC is not.
3. (b)leading edge everything where applicable. Comparable to Debian unstable IMHO.
4. Red Hat's Management/Sales probably don't like "free as good as paid version" statement either.

There are a few great distro's out there and FC is probably one of them, but not for production equipment. Every version I have recently tested I've ended up with randomly broken systems after applying patches. I never knew when or what to watch out for.

Debian stable and copycat Red Hat Enterprise distro's make it into production just fine. The path from Debian Testing versions to Stable is quite good as always.

Re:Misleading Summary

They incorporate all the new features after they have been exhaustively tested into its commercial product, namely Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Really? I thought it was the other way around? It was when I last tested it.

The sentence is poorly structured, hard to parse, and has a few grammatical errors (they/its), but is not backwards. It could use a couple of commas:

"They incorporate all the new features, after they have been exhaustively tested, into their commercial product..."

Sales Push?

Without(seriously) trying to be a Tr*ll, this really felt like a sales pitch.

I am not talking about Fanboy Fawning either, but more like "out of a brouchure".

Really, its not a review, but a list of talking points....no critical review, no Pro/Con.....strictly Pro/Pro.

Why is this a book review?

dimes

Red Hat != the world

Fedora -- the Linux that is developed as a community effort

That rather overstates the case, don't you think?

/vertisement... Stop it.

Ravi Kumar maintains a blog where he shares his thoughts related to GNU/Linux, Open Source and Free Software at linuxhelp.blogspot.com. He has also reviewed in a concise way the history of GNU/Linux.

Dear editors,
We don't want any more slashvertisements. If there is stupid crap like this in a summary or book review, or whatever, especially if it has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the submission, remove it! You are editors. You edit. That is your job. Do it. Or face the wrath...

With love,
The Undersigned

Re:/vertisement... Stop it.

Ravi was kind enough to provide a book review for slashdot. It is only common curtesy to give him a little attention.

Also, without that little explanation on who Ravi is, I would have no idea. The fact that he writes about linux (even though it's a blog), and has written other reviews makes the entire review a little more credible.

Take your blinkers off...

> Fedora -- the Linux that is developed as a community effort

s/the/a/

I prefer Debian and here's why...

As Bruce Perens said it a while ago:

Fedora project is obviously intended to look like Debian. But unlike Debian, Fedora is an extremely unequal partnership. "Fedora" is where the community developers are supposed to build Red Hat's product, while the certifications and vendor endorsements are held back for the high-priced "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" brand. This is especially obvious in recent certification announcements: the Common Criteria certification will go to "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", not "Fedora". And of course the entire steering board of the Fedora project are Red Hat employees. Red Hat recently announced a second draft of the leadership structure for Fedora, in which they have eliminated voting, expressing the need to keep control in the hands of Red Hat's management.

But the most ludicrous aspect of the Fedora project is that with Fedora, Red Hat seeks to achieve what Debian did long ago. Because they can't (and shouldn't) control Debian, they decided to re-invent the wheel. It would take them years to achieve a fraction of what Debian already has.

If you need a stable, easy-to-administer, well-established, production OS, I would suggest Debian.

Review

I have to agree that the review is very poor and misleading. I like the book, I like Fedora and I think that it is underrated. But, this review leads the reader to think Fedora is something which it is clearly not. Could someone re-write a decent review?

Fedora for Enterprise?

What a joke. FC6 on day of release had already 20MB of software updates. Day later - 100MB. So called great updater has to download whole RPM package for a minor update.

I can't imagine anybody in large corporations wants to spend all their time and bandwidth propagating bleeding-edge software updates.

my observations with core 6

Okay, I recently installed Fedora Core 6 on a new computer for my class, here are my observations as an infrequent Linux user:

-Frequently crashes on I/O errors (I assume a bad driver, not working well with dual core?).
-Inconsistency between control panels (too many tools do the same thing, scattered around the system).
-File sharing is a _little_ easier to setup, but I still had issues with it. Why can't a right click a folder, set permissions, and share?
-Fonts are still INCREDIBLY UGLY and illegible even after almost 10 years of Redhat.
-Still can't play .MOV files (i.e. movie trailers)
-Can't play divx out of the box
-Flash wasn't installed with Firefox.

Yeah, there are probably ways I could fix the last three, but come on, these should be standard. Are any other flavors of Linux ready for the consumer desktop? I mostly just use it for research, because it's a good platform for that. I can't stand it though for just a desktop OS. I've done slackware before, even scarier to me. Any other distro suggestions?

Buy a new book every 6 months

That's great! Now not only do I get to upgrade my OS every 6 months but I can also buy another book too! After all, the FC4 book is now obsolete (and in seriousness, in some ways this is true). O'Reilly's got quite a thing going here!

Seriously, their Fedora books are pretty good.

Fedora Books and Linux Books

I am curious. Does a "newbie" actually buy a book on a linux distribution? I would assume that plenty of online guides are much easier, cheaper and are (arguably) a better choice.

For example:
http://gagme.com/greg/linux/fc6-tips.php [gagme.com]
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc6.h tml [mjmwired.net]
http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_5_installati on_notes.html [stanton-finley.net]

If I'm pessimistic about the "free" part about Linux, would I spend $30 on a book? Additionally, so much changes in a given 6 month period for something like Fedora. Is is really beneficial to recommend a book to someone when any given chapter could be totally outdated for the next release?

Confusion

Fedora the Linux that is developed as a community effort

Well what the hell do you call the other five billion Linuxes (Linuces?) out there? Aren't they community-developed as well? Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, DSL, FeatherLinux, etc. I mean, Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat, so if Fedora is a "community effort," then surely Knoppix, Mandriva, and other corporate-associated Linuces are "community-developed" as well!

With much better distro options out there..

why bother with Fedora? I mean really! Ubuntu, debian, gentoo, archlinux are all so much better... heck, I'd even take mandriva over fedora.

Save $5.60 by buying the book at Amazon.com!

Barnes and Noble is selling this book for $31.99, but Amazon.com is only selling it for $26.39!
 
Save yourself $5.60 by buying the book here: Fedora Linux [amazon.com]. That's a total savings of 17.51%!

Re:Missing a Chapter

Yeah, it sucked when RedHat decided they needed to concentrate on making money or they were going to go out of business.

Fedora's pace is just right for me

The pace of Fedora is just right for me. For servers I can still use EL or Centos, but I like to keep up with what's happening out there on my notebook. Fedora provides that environment. Not too slow (Debian) and not too fast (gentoo or Rawhide). If you look at RedHat linux releases previous to Fedora, the pace was about the same. It seems to me that RedHat decided they needed to slow down the cycle without loosing momentum. The way they did this is Fedora.

Re:Who writes this sh1t?

Yes I know I misspelled 1/2 of the words in that post...

Re:Who writes this sh1t?

Not only you can he not spell, he is very wrong...:)

Re:sex wIth a gnaa

Oi, noob, you forgot the Goatse link. It's trolls like you that give the GNAA a bad name.

Re:Missing a Chapter

Wake me up when the book has a chapter entitled "How Red Hat Software broke its covenant with the linux community" talking about how the supported stable free version of the software disappeared, to be replaced by a beta test program for RHEL.

There never was such a convenant, and RedHat releases all the source packages as required by the GPL. This means you can download a RHEL-based stable, free distribution recompiled by a third party in the form of CentOS [centos.org]. My company tends to buy RHEL where we want paid support or where we have to buy an operating system with hardware (Dell offers Windows or RHEL at the same price). We use CentOS elsewhere. It's the same software, and it's free and legal.

Many of us, myself included, were formerly RedHat users but we learned that they don't give a fuck about us when they shifted from free RedHat to Fedora, and haven't looked back since.

For a company that doesn't give a fuck about open source, they sure hire a lot of people to develop it. I can't find it now, but somewhere there's a webpage with a list of all the open source projects RedHat has developed, maintains, and contributes to. It's amazing how much they've given back to the community, and how many idiots like you there are who are deliberately blind to it.

Can someone please mod the parent down as a troll? And someone else please post a link to the page I can't find?

Re:Missing a Chapter

I'm curious what "covenant" you imagine Red Hat broke.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Pick a random, popular package.

And open up the AUTHORS or CHANGES file. Grep for "@redhat.com".

I think they still care.

Re:Who writes this sh1t?

You clearly have no idea how much RedHat has contributed to linux over the years.

Re:Missing a Chapter

Yes, truly it was awful when the free-as-in-freeloader demographic was cut off. Now there are fewer choices for the freeloaders than ever. Instead of nice free Red Hat .isos, you have Fedora, CentOS, White Box Linux, Pie box Linux, Lineox..... poor dears, how will you survive.