Softpanorama (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)

Fedora

Fedora is essentially alpha version of RHEL provided for beta-addicts. There is no patches only upgrades. That makes it different from Debian and Ubuntu.

What is the difference between fedora.us and the Fedora Project at fedora.redhat.com?

Fedora Project at fedora.redhat.com is Red Hat's new community distribution development project. What used to be Red Hat Linux is now the Fedora Project, with the long term goal of creating a community volunteer developed Linux distribution somewhat like Debian, however moving at a faster pace of innovation. During September 2003 fedora.us agreed to merge with Red Hat Linux to become the new Fedora Project. This alliance of corporate engineering and enthused community contributors work together to improve the overall quality of the entire distribution.

Currently the merge is still progressing, with the goal of a full project merge before the release of Fedora Core 2 scheduled for April 2004. After the complete merge, fedora.us packages will exist as Fedora Extras as an official part of the combined Fedora Project.

In the mean time fedora.us continues to operate as an independent project. Our package submission & QA testing procedures strives for the highest level of package quality. fedora.us repositories continue to serve add-ons and upgrades for those add-ons for Red Hat Linux 8.0, 9, and Fedora Core 1. Meanwhile FedoraLegacy supplies security updates to the older distributions no longer supported by Red Hat, Inc.

Old News ;-)

[Aug 7, 2007] Expect plays a crucial role in network management  by Cameron Laird

31 Jul 2007 | www.ibm.com/developerworks

If you manage systems and networks, you need Expect.

More precisely, why would you want to be without Expect? It saves hours common tasks otherwise demand. Even if you already depend on Expect, though, you might not be aware of the capabilities described below.

Expect automates command-line interactions

You don't have to understand all of Expect to begin profiting from the tool; let's start with a concrete example of how Expect can simplify your work on AIX® or other operating systems:

Suppose you have logins on several UNIX® or UNIX-like hosts and you need to change the passwords of these accounts, but the accounts are not synchronized by Network Information Service (NIS), Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), or some other mechanism that recognizes you're the same person logging in on each machine. Logging in to a specific host and running the appropriate passwd command doesn't take long—probably only a minute, in most cases. And you must log in "by hand," right, because there's no way to script your password?

Wrong. In fact, the standard Expect distribution (full distribution) includes a command-line tool (and a manual page describing its use!) that precisely takes over this chore. passmass (see Resources) is a short script written in Expect that makes it as easy to change passwords on twenty machines as on one. Rather than retyping the same password over and over, you can launch passmass once and let your desktop computer take care of updating each individual host. You save yourself enough time to get a bit of fresh air, and multiple opportunities for the frustration of mistyping something you've already entered.

The limits of Expect

This passmass application is an excellent model—it illustrates many of Expect's general properties:

• It's a great return on investment: The utility is already written, freely downloadable, easy to install and use, and saves time and effort.
• Its contribution is "superficial," in some sense. If everything were "by the book"—if you had NIS or some other domain authentication or single sign-on system in place—or even if login could be scripted, there'd be no need for passmass. The world isn't polished that way, though, and Expect is very handy for grabbing on to all sorts of sharp edges that remain. Maybe Expect will help you create enough free time to rationalize your configuration so that you no longer need Expect. In the meantime, take advantage of it.
• As distributed, passmass only logs in by way of telnet, rlogin, or slogin. I hope all current developerWorks readers have abandoned these protocols for ssh, which passmasss does not fully support.
• On the other hand, almost everything having to do with Expect is clearly written and freely available. It only takes three simple lines (at most) to enhance passmass to respect ssh and other options.

You probably know enough already to begin to write or modify your own Expect tools. As it turns out, the passmass distribution actually includes code to log in by means of ssh, but omits the command-line parsing to reach that code. Here's one way you might modify the distribution source to put ssh on the same footing as telnet and the other protocols:
Listing 1. Modified passmass fragment that accepts the -ssh argument                   

            ...
         } "-rlogin" {
            set login "rlogin"
            continue
        } "-slogin" {
            set login "slogin"
            continue
        } "-ssh" {
            set login "ssh"
            continue
        } "-telnet" {
            set login "telnet"
            continue
           ...
     

In my own code, I actually factor out more of this "boilerplate." For now, though, this cascade of tests, in the vicinity of line #100 of passmass, gives a good idea of Expect's readability. There's no deep programming here—no need for object-orientation, monadic application, co-routines, or other subtleties. You just ask the computer to take over typing you usually do for yourself. As it happens, this small step represents many minutes or hours of human effort saved.  

[Jun 15, 2005] Red Hat virtually supports Xen with Fedora Core 4 - Computer Business Review

The community-led project provides an early view of technologies likely to be included in future releases of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux distribution, and is the first concrete evidence that the Raleigh, North Carolina-based company will introduce support for Xen into RHEL.

Created and distributed by XenSource, Xen is an open source virtualization hypervisor that has already received the backing of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices, among others.

Red Hat began talking positively about Xen in October 2004 but until now no concrete plans have been announced. Red Hat's Linux rival, Novell, introduced support for Xen in its SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 consumer product released in April.

Alongside Xen, Fedora Core 4 also provides an early look at OpenOffice.org 2.0, the new version of the open source office productivity applications suite, which is not yet generally available, as well as Evince, a new document viewer for PDF and Postscript files from the Gnome project.

Fedora Core 4 also includes version 2.10 of the Gnome interface, version 3.4 of the KDE interface, version 3.1 of the Eclipse development environment, as well as Red Hat's Global File System integrated clustering technology.

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux has long been available for Power processor-based servers, as well as including 32-bit X86, AMD64 and Intel EM64T, Intel Itanium 2, and IBM S/390 processor systems, Fedora Core 4 is the first Fedora release to also be available on PowerPC. According to the release notes, Fedora Core 4 should boot on Apple Computer's Macintosh PowerPC-based machines.

Earlier this month, Red Hat announced plans to hand over control of its Fedora community-led Linux development project to the new Fedora Foundation, moving Fedora project development work and copyright of contributed code outside of its core business.

An open letter to the current Fedora community from Karen Bennet, Red Hat vice president of applications and tools, indicates that not too much is expected to change. "There are no current plans to change the Fedora Core distribution project, processes, and management," she wrote. "As many have asked, Red Hat will also maintain ultimate overall control of the project to ensure that we continue to have timely, high quality releases."

However, according to Bennet, the Foundation could encourage new projects to develop under the Fedora umbrella without specific Red Hat involvement. "Fedora can only expand by enabling individuals and groups to contribute rather than consume. The Foundation exists to do this, not just for Red Hat originated Fedora projects but for those that come from the community," she said.

 [Mar 16,2005] Red Hat Fedora Core 4 Test 1 Now Available krunchyfrog writes "The first test release of Fedora Core 4 is now available from Red Hat and at distinguished mirror sites near you, and is also available in the torrent. New features in Fedora Core 4 test 1 include previews of GCC 4.0, GNOME 2.10, and KDE 3.4, as well as support for the PowerPC architecture. Please file bugs via Bugzilla, Product Fedora Core, Version fc4test1, so that they are noticed and appropriately classified. Discuss this release on fedora-test-list. -- The BitTorrent link is already there."

Quick RPM Version Check (Score:5, Informative) by rimu guy (665008) * on Wednesday March 16, @05:21AM (#11951720) (http://rimuhosting.com/)

Just been poring over the new RPM versions [redhat.com]... I see FC4 includes MySQL 4.1.10 a nice wee jump [mysql.com] up from 3.23. Apparently RedHat are now happy with the MySQL licensing terms [redhat.com]. It has Eclipse 3.1 [eclipse.org], dovecot, bash 3 (with debugger), Tomcat 5 [apache.org] (but only 5.0, not the declared stable 5.5.7), Xen 2 [cam.ac.uk]. And that is about all that caught my eye. Having just been recompiling the RHEL4 sources [redhat.com] I'm struck by how similar the versions all are. I'm presuming that rhel4 split off fc4 or vice versa a month or two back. I'd be curious how/if they co-ordinate all the patches and source code between the two different brands.

Re:When will RPM-based distros change to .deb? (Score:5, Interesting) by Coryoth (254751) on Wednesday March 16, @12:39PM (#11954986) (http://jedidiah.stuff.gen.nz/ | Last Journal: Friday November 26, @05:40PM)

So you love Apt or yum. Great. Apt does not mean .deb. Apt can still do its normal great things using rpm formatted packages, so clearly the greatness comes from the tool, not the package specification. The future of package managers, like Smart [smartpm.org], make this even clearer. Smart is like apt (but has better dep resolution algorithms) except it supports pluggable backends - that means currently Smart supports .deb, .rpm, and even slackware .tgz. It can manage those from apt repositories, yum repositories, urpmi repositories, re-carpet channels, whatever. You can even do a mix and match between formats and repository types if you want (though that, of course, can get messy). The point is that package management and dependency solving are largely independent of package formats (as long as the format contains some dependency information). We can have a global package manager that works everywhere and doesn't care which package format it happens to be working with. Jedidiah.

Warning Warning! And some tips (Score:2) by DragoonAK (17095) on Wednesday March 16, @07:02PM (#11959885)

Anyone who downloads this expecting stability is fooling themselves - this is basically the development tree or rawhide packaged up. That said, here's some installation notes. 1) Mediacheck doesn't seem to work. At least I haven't seen anyone who can get a PASS for the DVD or CD isos. I've booted directly from a checked iso and still FAILed. 2) Despite what you tell it, the installer will install grub on your MBR, not on a partition. 3) Firstboot doesn't work on first boot. This is fixed in rawhide by installing gnome-python2-gnomevfs, which also fixes the system-config-* utils. 4) The packaged GDM eats CPU. "yum update gdm" before logging in through GDM or regret it. Gnome 2.10 has some nice improvements, but nothing amazing. Unless you're willing to do a lot of testing, don't bother. That said, the only thing really stopping me from using this instead of FC3 is a lack of other repos - FreshRPMS, Extras for FC4 - and a sata_sil regression for my SATA drive always hanging.

Linux Today - PR Fedora Extras Available for Download

Thanks to the efforts of all the Extras contributors, you can now get Fedora Extras packages from the main Fedora download site at http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/

Fedora Extras are sets of packages that augment Fedora Core but do not replace Fedora Core component packages. These packages, like all packages that are part of The Fedora Project, must conform to the legal requirements of the project and conform to the Fedora Extras policies.

Examples of packages currently available in Fedora Extras include:

bittorrent cfengine gqview jikes libsigc++ openslp rxvt sqlite starfighter zope

with a total of over 500 packages available!

The fedora-extras-list (https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-extras-list/) is the best place to discuss Extras.

If you'd like to start becoming involved with Extras development, a good step beyond joining fedora-extras-list might be http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/extras.shtml

<mschwendt> Sopwith: bug reports via bugzilla.redhat.com, not bugzilla.fedora.us

Please remember to report bugs at < ahref="http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/">http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/ Use a Product of "Fedora Extras".

Seth Vidal deserves special recognition for continuing to be the engine behind getting builds done and organized through the fedoraproject.org site.

And thanks to you all for being part of Fedora!
-- Elliot

Related Story:
Red Hat Magazine: Fedora Status Report(Dec 16, 2004

FedoraNEWS.ORG

Suppose you want to install a development package "mysql-server 4.1.7" from Fedora Development Repo.
First, you need to enable it by changing the option "enabled" from 0 to 1 in fedora-devel.repo file:

[tchung@tchung-fc3 ~]$ sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-devel.repo

[development]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - Development Tree
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/$basearch/
mirrorlist=http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/fedora-core-rawhide
enabled=1

But soon you will notice that it did not install the development package you wanted.
Even if you have imported GPG Public Key for Fedora Base/Updates and Fedora Development/Test packages from Fedora Project.

For installing GPG Public Key for Fedora Base/Updates, see How to install GPG Key for yum in FC3.
For installing GPG Public Key for Fedora Development/Test packages, see Fedora Project GPG Keys page.
("Automated Package Signing" section for Development packages)

Adding and Removing programs in Fedora TUX

So you have your new installation of Fedora up and running and so far you're quite happy with the results. Then you decide that it's time to start installing some new programs. So how do you add in new packages, or remove packages you don't need?

As you follow along, it is possible that the screenshots may look slightly different than on your system. The default desktop for Fedora is GNOME, but a recent online poll here at TuxMagazine.com indicated that a fairly sizeable majority of desktops were using KDE. Therefore, in writing this article, I decided to do my testing and screenshot captures using the KDE desktop.

Basic package installation and removal isn't all that complex. Your first stop is the Fedora Package manager. To access this tool, look under System Settings on the main menu. You should see an entry for Package Management (Add/Remove Applications). Click on this to pull up the package manager (see figure below -- click for a larger size view).

Yumex Reins in Fedora Core 3

I recently came across a program, called YUM (Yellow dog Updater, Modified) Extender, which has significantly simplified software management on the Fedora Core 3 machines I maintain.

Yumex, as it's also known, adds a handy graphical interface to YUM, which itself works with the RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) application that handles software management chores on Fedora and several other Linux distributions.

YUM automates package dependency resolution and is a very capable application. However, as a command-line program, YUM takes some time to master.

Yumex is currently at its 0.23 release. It sports a fairly basic interface , but, even so, it offers the best method I've seen yet for juggling numerous YUM software repositories.

Along with the official package sources for Fedora Core 3—currently the only distribution that Yumex supports—there are various third-party repositories for obtaining the packages that Fedora does not ship with by default. I could create profiles in Yumex to separate, for instance, fetching important core project updates from seeking out third-party packages.

Yumex is written by Tim Lauridsen and is available for free download at linux.rasmil.dk/mambo. If you run Fedora Core 3, it's definitely worth a look.

Linux Times An Online Linux Magazine - A great desktop OS Fedora Core 3

Re: A great desktop OS: Fedora Core 3 (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Tuesday, January 25 @ 19:46:36 PST

Probably the best place for first time users to get answers to the most popular questions... http://www.fedorafaq.org/

Re: A great desktop OS: Fedora Core 3 (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Wednesday, January 26 @ 10:03:22 PST

Fedora Core 3 makes installation of many extra packages easier with the availability of Fedora (pre-)Extras. Watch http://fedoraproject.org/pre-extras/ [fedoraproject.org] For trivial installation and update of the nvidia and ntfs drivers and other goodies, there is the free counterpart to fedora extras: http://rpm.livna.org/ [rpm.livna.org]

Linux Today - Linux Magazine Keeping Fedora Ship Shape

I've started to have a sort of love-hate relationship with Fedora. On the one hand, I like the fact that the Fedora Project keeps their distribution constantly up-to-date, making all of the latest and greatest advancements in KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice.org, and so on available to me. On the other hand, Fedora can sometimes be as stable as Anne Heche strung out on peyote.

"I know, I know: that's what I get for using a 'work in progress' as my desktop operating system instead of a commercial Linux distribution. But let's face it: Fedora is darned popular, a lot of good stuff is being packaged for it first, and some of us like to live on the bleeding edge. We want our cake and want to eat it, too...

... ... ...

If you run Fedora, the first thing you should do is configure yum to use a faster mirror. I like the mirror at kernel.org, because they've got high-speed connections coming out the wazoo and it's one of the first sites to get updated -- not to mention that it's one of the few mirrors that hosts a complete x86_64 mirror of Fedora and I'm a Opteron/Athlon 64 weenie. (If kernel.org is too slow for you, a complete list of mirrors is listed at http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html.)

You can change your mirror easily. First, copy the original yum. conf over to yum.old, remove the original repository section from yum.conf, and add Listing One with your favorite text editor.

James Cornell - Subject: Distributions... ( Jan 10, 2005, 01:01:10 )

Gentoo is more bleeding edge. A stock install of Fedora is a big uncomfortable bloat. I recommend using one of the still up to date but less intensive distributions instead. I recommend Slackware, Debian, Gentoo, and if you want a solid commercially backed distro, use whitebox. WhiteBox isn't commercially backed, but most of the development is. Have a good day LinuxToday!

Chris - Subject: Bad rap? ( Jan 10, 2005, 11:49:33 )

I'm not sure why Fedora Core gets such a bad rap. I use it on several production machines in the workplace, and on my laptop. Yes, you do have to configure a secondary yum repository like FreshRPMs or DAG in order to get multimedia and some wireless hardware working properly. Once that's done, however, it provides a stable and easy to use environment.

I've tried pretty much every major distribution out there. Gentoo, Debian, Slackware (my first distro like ten years ago - has it really been that long?? anyone else remember making a shoebox full of floppies?) and more.
As a disclaimer, we do have to use Red Hat AS for some of our servers due to Oracle support requirements. That may be why I decided to use Fedora for the other server - simplifies administration, as Fedora is more similar to RedHat than Gentoo or Debian would be.

I've been using yum to keep my Fedora Core 2 OS updated. (I found the instructions online somewhere and they seem to work.) But I'm wondering if there's a way to update my system from Core 2 to Core 3 to Core 4 in place? Or do you have to re-install?

Recommended Links

Installing Fedora 3

In This Chapter

• Before You Begin the Installation
• Choosing How to Install Fedora
• Step-by-Step Installation
• Login and Shutdown
• Reference

In this chapter, you learn how to do a basic installation of Fedora Core. You'll see how to boot and then install Fedora using the CD-ROMs included with this book. The chapter first shows how to prepare and research your install, choose a strategy on how Fedora will use your computer's hard drive, decide how to boot Fedora, and then how to complete the Fedora Core installation. You'll get a step-by-step walkthrough of a sample installation, and then you learn how to log in to Fedora and shut down or reboot the system.

Before You Begin the Installation

Part of the process of installing Fedora Core (or any operating system for that matter) is to first research how well the new operating system will fit into an existing hardware environment, or if new hardware will be required to host the operating system. The following sections provide some basic points to consider when installing Fedora and augment the checklists and ideas presented in Chapter 2, "Preparing to Install Fedora."

You start by researching and documenting your hardware. This information can prove helpful later on during the installation.

Fedora HOWTO

RPM Repositories

• rpm.livna.org/fedora/1/i386
• dag.wieers.com/packages/gstreamer-plugins
• download.fedora.us
• newrpms.sunsite.dk
• ftp.freshrpms.net

Research Your Hardware Specifications

FAQs

Fedora Users FAQ

I have Red Hat Linux 9 (Shrike) installed now. How can I update to Fedora Core 2?

That is an excellent question. Of course you want to avoid the need to burn CDs, and would like to do a simple and reliable online install. And obviously you want to know how to make it work from behind your authenticating proxy that requires a userid and a password. You might be wondering whether it is as simple as pasting the right lines into your /etc/yum.conf file, and running yum -y update. It could be you are on the right track, or maybe not. Hopefully someone in the know will update this page soon to answer your excellent and insightful question.

Hint 1: There are online resources on doing an unsupported and untested upgrade with Yum:

• http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Upgrading_Red_Hat_Linux_with_yum.html
• http://linux.duke.edu/%7Eskvidal/misc/fc1-fc2-yum-hints.txt

It will be necessary to clean up some parts of the system configuration, because normally the Fedora Core Installer Anaconda would do that during a regular upgrade.

What is fedora.us?

Fedora.us is the authoritative community project for the development of high quality Extras add-on packages for Red Hat Linux and Fedora Core. This community volunteer development of package development is much like the spirit of the Debian community.

What is the difference between fedora.us and the Fedora Project at fedora.redhat.com?

Fedora Project at fedora.redhat.com is Red Hat's new community distribution development project. What used to be Red Hat Linux is now the Fedora Project, with the long term goal of creating a community volunteer developed Linux distribution somewhat like Debian, however moving at a faster pace of innovation. During September 2003 fedora.us agreed to merge with Red Hat Linux to become the new Fedora Project. This alliance of corporate engineering and enthused community contributors work together to improve the overall quality of the entire distribution.

Currently the merge is still progressing, with the goal of a full project merge before the release of Fedora Core 2 scheduled for April 2004. After the complete merge, fedora.us packages will exist as Fedora Extras as an official part of the combined Fedora Project.

In the mean time fedora.us continues to operate as an independent project. Our package & QA testing procedures strives for the highest level of package quality. fedora.us repositories continue to serve add-ons and upgrades for those add-ons for Red Hat Linux 8.0, 9, and Fedora Core 1. Meanwhile FedoraLegacy supplies security updates to the older distributions no longer supported by Red Hat, Inc.

Why use fedora.us?

• Fedora saves time by making additional software installation very easy. In many cases new users would be able to read through Fedora's catalog and simply choose packages that sound good. In other cases they may ask experienced users for suggestions. In these cases the answer would be "Install foo from Fedora." rather than three hours of explaining tarball building and installation. This saves times and energy for everyone.
• Furthermore fedora.us is the authoritative development project that will lead into Fedora Extras. fedora.us stands for the highest quality add-on packages for RHL and FC, and this package set will continue well into the future.

How do I use fedora.us?

Read the Fedora HOWTO.

How does fedora.us differ from FreshRPMS or other repositories?

Many other repositories like FreshRPMS are made by a single person. Fedora can have a lot more packages, and of higher quality, because we have many package developers working together on a common authoritative repository. It is our belief that collaboratively developed package repositories tend to produce higher quality and reduce the chance of clashes. Other examples of high quality collaborative developed repositories that do not conflict with fedora.us are rpm.livna.org and jpackage.org.

Who started all this Fedora stuff and when?

Founded December 2002 by University of Hawaii Computer Science student Warren Togami, the previous Fedora Linux Project is an international team of volunteer software developers united for the development of high quality 3rd party RPM packages for the Red Hat Linux platform.

The new combined project will bring these benefits of open collaborative development to a larger mainstream audience, with much greater community involvement in the development process.

How do I switch mail programs?

• See SwitchingToPostfix for a short how-to.

The Unofficial Fedora FAQ

1. Q: How do I read my NTFS (Windows NT/2000/XP/2003) drive in Fedora?

   A: Well, now, that's an easy one! The wonderful linux-ntfs project has a whole section dedicated to Red Hat and Fedora. If you get lost, just look at the links on the left.
    

2. Q: I can't access my Windows network shares anymore! People tell me to use the smbmount command, but it doesn't work! A: Fedora Core 3 uses a cool new type of Windows file sharing called "The Common Internet File System" (CIFS). Instead of using "smbmount", try:

       mount -t cifs //computername/share /mnt/somedirectory

   For more information about this, in a terminal you can do:

   man mount.cifs

3. Q: How do I get Wine to work? A: There are RPMs that work out-of-the-box at NewRPMs. Go to the NewRPMs Fedora Repository and get whichever wine RPM has been posted most recently (check the date next to the file), and try installing it. (Thanks to che for the tip.)
4. Q: Where is the floppy disk install image for Fedora Core 3? A: The new 2.6 kernel in Fedora Core 2 can't fit on a floppy disk. So, you can't boot or install from a floppy. However, you can install from a CD, hard drive, or even USB disk (if your computer supports booting from a USB disk).

   If you can only use a floppy, you have a few choices:

   • If you are upgrading from another Red Hat/Fedora installation, you can see HOWTO: Upgrade to Fedora on a Laptop with no Floppy or CD Drive. (Thanks to Alan Cox for that link.)
   • If you have a CD-ROM, but you can't boot from it, you can install Smart Boot Manager on a floppy, and then use that to boot from your CD-ROM drive. (Thanks to Paul Rouleau for that tip!)

   (Thanks to Noa Resare for suggesting this question and giving me some good sample text.)

Yum

How do I install software for Fedora? (How to use yum or an RPM)

A: The easiest way to install software in Fedora is to use yum.
1. Download this yum.conf.
2. Replace your "/etc/yum.conf" with the one you downloaded. You will need to be root to do that. In fact, you need to be root to do any of the following.

NOTE: Not all software is available for Fedora Core 3, yet. Some of the repos are still catching up with the recent release of Fedora Core 3.

Note that the yum.conf provided here is updated from time to time, for various reasons.

Now, you can see a list of the available software:

yum list available

• To install some software, you type:

Last modified: June 05, 2008