back to article Fedora's Schrödinger's Cat Linux gives coders claws for thought

The Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, devised by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, pits the theory of quantum superposition against what we observe to be true. In the world of Linux distros, in theory the beta version of Fedora 18 was slated for release in early October 2012 with the aim of producing a final build in November …

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  1. darklordsid
    Pint

    Let's hope

    Package manager were badly flawed in last Fedora releases. Just hope this one is better and can be back my RPM based reference distribution.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Paris Hilton

      Re: Let's hope

      I haven't encountered a problem? Bug# or it didn't happen.

      1. darklordsid
        FAIL

        Re: Let's hope

        Google is your friend, go for missing security signature and you'll find the nasty bug preventing to install virtually anything from outside the off repo. OR it is a grievous bug, OR worse it is a walled garden test. In any case it is why I dropped Fedora and started warning people to stay away from them until the issue is resolved.

        1. AdamWill

          Re: Let's hope

          The bug darklordsid seems to be referring to is this:

          https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=890616

          In F18, PackageKit couldn't install packages without a signature - which is often the case with third party packages. So yeah, it was a genuine bug, and a bit annoying if you were trying to use PK for third-party packages.

          That was fixed with https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2013-0957/PackageKit-0.8.7-1.fc18 , back in January, so it's been sorted for a while now. It *was* just a bug, not a conspiracy.

          There is still an outstanding bug that it can't install a package signed with a key you don't currently trust (it should allow you to do so after warning you and requiring you to authenticate to allow the override) - that's https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=911442 .

    2. DrXym

      Re: Let's hope

      The package manager GUI in Fedora is absolutely atrocious. Few of the packages have icons, they're not grouped very well, they're not sorted by popularity, relevance or dependencies. The search function sucks. The app doesn't explain what it's doing and often goes unresponsive. It's a bad app.

      The software update is just as bad. It says there are 100 updates (for example), hit update and the list bounces the list up and down like like a frog on acid without bothering to explain what it's doing, what the icons mean or anything else.

      Both these apps could do with being rewritten to order the information in a more useful way, to be more informative, and more forgiving.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Thumb Up

        Re: Let's hope

        sudo yum check-update

        sudo yum update

        What's the problem?

        1. Euripides Pants
          Thumb Down

          Re: What's the problem?

          1. You get a notification on your taskbar that updates are available.

          2. you click on the notification icon.

          3. Flawed GUI tool opens.

          The problem is that the graphical tool is the default. Even Ubuntu hasn't fucked that up (yet).

      2. FrankAlphaXII

        Re: Let's hope

        You actually use the GUI for Package Management? I mean I use the GUI for most things but Apper, KDE's package management software, has never worked well for me. I've been using straight up yum and rpm commands in the CLI since I switched to KDE and it just works faster even if Apper decides to work.

        Not to mention sometimes Apper hangs, behaves oddly, and such. Ive never had a problem updating or whatnot through the CLI though.

        1. DrXym

          Re: Let's hope

          "You actually use the GUI for Package Management? "

          Yes sometimes. Nothing to be ashamed of. Often I want a package and I don't know it's name, or just feel the idle urge to browse through the games and see what's there. Or I want to find out what files an RPM installs without remembering all the syntax.

          And I would expect the GUI to be up to scratch, especially in a modern desktop.

      3. AdamWill

        Re: Let's hope

        To be honest you're pretty much right about that (the GUI package manager). It is not great. It doesn't get much development love and quite honestly it doesn't get much use; in my experience most Fedora users just use yum, and those who use a GUI tend to prefer yumex. We pretty much just test each release that it can install a package, remove a package, do a system update (and yeah, the feedback it gives you while it's doing that kinda sucks), and call it good.

        We have a plan to develop an 'app store' type application which would be a much better GUI for 'I want to install an app to do X' kind of tasks, and updates are kinda _supposed_ to be done via the 'offline updates' mechanism now (but GNOME still didn't really get around to obsoleting gpk-update-viewer, so GNOME's story here is something of a mess at present).

  2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Pint

    "Fedora 19 bugs cannot be reported because the server side cannot handle the release name 'Schrödinger's Cat'."

    That's epic and should definitely enter the book of the history of computing trivia.

    1. Michael Strorm Silver badge
      Coat

      Then they should call it "Wave Function" because it's so unreliable it collapses when you just look at it. (*)

      (*) Note; I haven't actually used Fedora 19- but I wanted to make that joke anyway. :-)

    2. AdamWill

      worth noting

      It's worth noting the bug only actually affected libreport, which is used for the automated bug reporting tools - abrt and the SELinux troubleshooter thing. You could report bugs manually through Bugzilla fine, it was just the automated tools that broke briefly.

  3. Anonymous Dutch Coward
    Headmaster

    Developer-focused release?

    ... and the only thing developer-related mentioned in the article is a developer assistant (and the usual upgrade of dev tools).

    What does 3d printing support have to do with developers... unless you stretch the definition of developer that is?

    Am I missing something or is my short-term memory going completely?

  4. thefutureboy

    So...

    ...more importantly: What was Schrödinger's Cat's name?

    1. frank ly

      Re: So...

      It died before it could tell anyone. Or did it?

  5. ifm

    Don't mean to nitpick, but...

    > it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD. And it isn't system d either. Why? Because it's a system daemon, and under Unix/Linux those are in lower case, and get suffixed with a lower case d

    http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/

    I've enjoyed using Fedora a lot more since replacing Gnome with Awesome. Having your window manager do backflips in front of you when trying to get something done is very distracting.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Don't mean to nitpick, but...

      Ain't no systemd crap on a real unix

      1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge
        Unhappy

        Re: Don't mean to nitpick, but...

        Much as it pains me to say it, I think that the days of UNIX being the yard-stick for OpenSystems are long gone.

        With only AIX (and maybe Solaris if Oracle are still interested enough) receiving anything like new features, and every other Genetic UNIX reaching legacy status or worse, we are going to have to accept that Linux now rules the roost of how non-windows systems should look, however badly it does this. I know that there are flavours of BSD still out there, and OSX can still be called UNIX, but I cannot see there being any new UNIX customers.

        What we can now look forward to is a decade of Linux distros that are sufficiently different so that they cannot be treated as a single platform, which will pose a significant barrier to supplanting UNIX in existing environments. And if they don't get their act together with something like LSB, they could lose it completely.

        I'm just hoping that ARM servers get enough traction with a dominant distro to appear in the server space and shake things up a bit. Otherwise we will be looking at Windows on Intel for customers who need vendor support, and a plethora of 'propriety' (I use the term very loosely to mean different distros) Linux boxes for less critical systems.

      2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: Don't mean to nitpick, but...

        I think systemd is a pretty cool guy, eh boots services and doesnt afraid of anything.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Mushroom

        Re: Don't mean to nitpick, but...

        1983 is waiting for you to return and trap yourself in its tentacles for ever...

      4. zooooooom
        Stop

        Re: Don't mean to nitpick, but...

        "Ain't no systemd crap on a real unix"

        modding this down to S99

    2. h3

      Re: Don't mean to nitpick, but...

      It breaks all the standard conventions. i.e it should be in /sbin with a wrapper in /bin if it is needed to be run by a user. (Or maybe most of it /libexec with little wrappers in /bin /sbin).

      There is no rules about lower case or not. Any rules there are are ignored completely by systemd.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    does this release mean...

    That 2013 will be the year of Linux on the desktop?????

    1. darklordsid
      Trollface

      Re: does this release mean...

      Who cares, Ballmerboy said desktop is legacy...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: does this release mean...

        Who cares what that person said - do you want a desktop?

  7. Dom 3

    Bug report

    Stupid bloody distro nicknames cause more hassle than they are worth.

    I get the feeling the nerds love 'em, but I am a straightforward geek and I just want a readily understandable version number. And the Ubuntu system works just great because I can tell just how old it is.

    1. Notas Badoff
      Joke

      Re: Bug report

      Then shouldn't your user name be just "3.0" ?

    2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Headmaster

      Re: Bug report

      Well, if you want to get all 9-to-5 straightlaced, then there is Red Hat Enterprise 5, 6 and soon 7.

    3. AdamWill

      Re: Bug report

      Just call it Fedora 19, then. The release name really only exists for the publicity benefits. Very few Fedora users actually refer to the names, they just use the numbers.

      The fact that the name broke various things (never mind automated bug reports - it actually broke *system boot*, briefly) is kind of a good thing: it made the code better. The best way to find out if your code is safe for extended characters is to throw some at it; if we hadn't used a release name with an umlaut, a space and a single quote in it, we'd never have found some bugs in various bits of code. Now we did, and the code's better.

  8. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
    Coat

    I had a version of this, but it quantum-tunnelled away

    Sorry, couldn't resist.

    Mine is the one with "What is Life?" by Erwin Schrödinger in the pocket (very much worth the read!)

  9. FrankAlphaXII

    You can get cinnamon without getting the DVD,,,

    Before a novice asks, yes you can install cinnamon without getting the DVD.

    First make sure you're a sudoer or can elevate to root in the CLI, for the purposes of this comment, I'm going to assume the user is a sudoer but without the root password. If you have the root password, just elevate with su instead of using sudo before each command.

    #sudo yum update (unless you know you're up to date)

    #sudo yum install cinnamon

    Then log out and log back in with a cinnamon session.

    There you go. Too easy.

    1. AdamWill

      Re: You can get cinnamon without getting the DVD,,,

      Note that'll only work if you're starting from GNOME - cinnamon is just an alternative shell for GNOME and I don't think the package has all its dependencies properly in place yet, so just 'yum install cinnamon' from, say, a KDE install will give you something that probably won't work. But yeah, if you start from a GNOME install, 'yum install cinnamon' will get you a fine working cinnamon.

  10. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. AdamWill

      Re: LVM on RAID?

      Yeah, that was added back for F19. I don't think it was broken 'for a few revisions', though - only in F18. F17 was still on the old UI and LVM-on-RAID still worked with that. It was one of the things that missed F18 because we just didn't have time to get it in (though you could still do it with a kickstart), but it's back in F19. How it works is that in custom partitioning you can edit properties of the VG itself, and RAID level is one of these.

  11. Alistair
    Boffin

    If I install it in a VirtualBox VM will it run or not?

    (sadly I use KVM not virtualbox, but the pun is there)

  12. h3

    Be interesting if Oracle provide their version of RHEL7 in a more admin friendly manner.

    Nearly all of the stuff by the systemd guy (Whose name I have to look up the spelling of all the time) has provided no benefit whatsoever for me and significant extra work. (Avahi - pita with linux bridging / xen openvswitch / pulseaudio cannot even simply just play glitch free on hardware that has individual crystals for each sample rate. alsa takes some blame for this they never manage to keep it working / systemd broke xen completely the release they switched to it.)

    It is like what Microsoft did when they making sure the Lotus stuff didn't work on Windows.

    Oracle use Xen I think exclusively and Citrix I suppose will do what is worth it for them.

    Somewhat interested to see what the RHEL7 beta's work out like.

    (Most of the stuff that is proprietary that I need to use can be run on Solaris 10 (Sometimes 11) / SLES / RHEL / AIX). It all depends on the vendors and whether they use systemd properly and whether Redhat gets it working well. If something is going to be using systemd in compatibility mode I won't be using it on RHEL7.

  13. h3

    I don't care at all whether stuff is released to a timescale. Much rather have it released when it is working pretty good. There is nothing these days that is good enough to be worth messing around for with Linux. (When it first got NPTL then it was worth having it and accepting the extra hassle).

    I generally find when it comes to UNIX the least complicated and easiest to understand ways work the best. If there is something complicated that is worth it for a certain task then I would prefer not to make everything else that doesn't need the complexity complicated just for the sake of it.

    (Solaris SMF has never caused me any problems). Don't mind learning stuff if it is important I don't want to be in the situation where systemd is starting and stopping stuff and it is breaking some expensive thing in /opt in a subtle way that is started by a legacy init script. (At least if it is using systemd properly then the designers have taken it into account at some level).

    Doesn't matter how much faster systemd is to boot when it still has to be done at stupid o clock. (And I have to be physically present.)

  14. Richard Lloyd
    Meh

    Boots quickly in VirtualBox...

    Just tried it in VirtualBox with the vdi image on an SSD (and two virtual cores on my i7 plus 8GB RAM in the VM) and really does boot extremely quickly (3 seconds from Grub to graphical login).

    Anaconda is still pointlessly shouty (lots of headings entirely in capitals for no good reason) and the custom disk partitioning is painful - no obvious option to use all remaining space on device for a partition. I ended up putting in a big size value and let it truncate it down, but that's not great. They're still annoyingly mixing size units (K, MB and GB all on the same screen) too :-(

    Still no package size or description is displayed when the packages are being installed and the placement of the ever-changing banner during the package installs (at the bottom of the screen, leaving a lot of space above it) made it look like a rotating banner ad, which most people automatically tune out now. The banner should have been slap bang in the middle of the install screen (i.e. above the progress bar).

    Am I the only one who actively dislikes those white/blue coloured multiple progress bars at the bottom of an otherwise black screen when Fedora boots (yes, the ones that tell you zero about what's going on)? You can press ESCAPE to get a textual boot, but if you're doing a (barely) "graphical" boot, I'm sure it couldn't take too much effort to produce a better booting screen.

    When I first logged in, I got about a dozen file explorer windows open (this is a known bug that will be fixed, but it just looks sloppy, even for a beta). I also got an immediate SELinux balloon warning which is bad for a vanilla install, so I did the classic disabling of SELinux (though is there any GUI to do this?).

    I do like the MATE Desktop in general though (it's good with Linux Mint 15 too) - refugees from Fedora 14/CentOS 6's GNOME 2 desktop will feel at home with MATE. I hope CentOS 7 comes with MATE, because without it, the GNOME 3 desktop experience is painful.

    1. AdamWill

      Re: Boots quickly in VirtualBox...

      "Anaconda is still pointlessly shouty (lots of headings entirely in capitals for no good reason) and the custom disk partitioning is painful - no obvious option to use all remaining space on device for a partition. I ended up putting in a big size value and let it truncate it down, but that's not great. They're still annoyingly mixing size units (K, MB and GB all on the same screen) too :-("

      Again, you can just enter no size at all and it will use all remaining free space. And again, I don't see why you think it's wrong to mix size units. It would make no sense to list a 1MB partition as '1000KB' or '0.001GB', would it?

      "Still no package size or description is displayed when the packages are being installed"

      And I still don't see why you think there's any particularly good reason to do this, other than making the installer look busier.

      "Am I the only one who actively dislikes those white/blue coloured multiple progress bars at the bottom of an otherwise black screen when Fedora boots (yes, the ones that tell you zero about what's going on)?"

      Probably. You seem like someone who REALLY CARES A LOT about things that seem really pretty trivial (like, er, all of the above). For the record, though, you only see that screen if kernel modesetting is not working - so basically, usually only in VMs. On actual machines, you get a fully graphical boot splash which is just a big blue screen with the Fedora logo in the middle.

      "When I first logged in, I got about a dozen file explorer windows open (this is a known bug that will be fixed, but it just looks sloppy, even for a beta)."

      It's also only in MATE, which is not a top-tier supported desktop (in Fedora, GNOME and KDE are supported the most strongly - they're the only desktops in which bugs can block the release - followed by Xfce, LXDE, Sugar, MATE and Cinnamon in about that order). We run a six month release cycle, we have a test team of about a dozen people inc. paid and volunteers, and Fedora includes at least a dozen desktops; there's a pretty hard limit to how strongly we can test them all for a beta release. And it wouldn't have really served any purpose for anyone to delay the Beta release just to fix a superficial bug in MATE.

      "I also got an immediate SELinux balloon warning which is bad for a vanilla install"

      Again, that doesn't happen in KDE or GNOME; it's actually tied to the lightdm login manager. We were tracking this bug prior to release and the lightdm that shipped in Beta was actually meant to fix it, but the packager made a mistake and inadvertently left the fix out of the build we shipped. The bug is https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=922958 . Xfce, MATE and Sugar use lightdm in 19. The AVC is actually basically harmless, it doesn't affect functionality of the system at all; you don't have to turn off SELinux just because you saw an AVC, in fact that's almost always the wrong response. It's much better to report it and follow the report. They are usually resolved very quickly.

  15. keithpeter Silver badge
    Boffin

    Default install

    Just installed from Beta-1 iso onto a spare hard drive (my old HP workstation makes swapping hds very easy). I used the default settings all through and ended up with a large root partition (53Gb), and a small swap (3.5Gb, smaller than installed memory so no hibernate). I had to delete an existing partition on the spare hard drive using a live session *before* running the installer to get the system to install using default settings.

    Most things seem to be working OK from a basic Desktop end user perspective. I used the Unofficial Fedora FAQ to enable rpmfusion (just by clicking on the rpmfusion rpm) and to install the codecs needed to play an mp3 and added GIMP/Audacity and a few other bits and pieces all using the 'Software' tool. I used terminal commands to get Flash installed but could have clicked on the installer rpm to use Software I suppose.

    The only really technical bit was having to search for gstreamer-ugly codec pack in the Software app, it only seems to match the full package name as another poster has mentioned.

    Only issue so far is installing proprietary nvidia drivers on the i686-PAE kernel. There is a mismatch between the kernel version installed and the version for which kmod-nvidia is expecting. This has happened in other Fedora beta cycles and clears when the packages catch up with each other. The Nouveau driver is actually doing very well at present with Gnome Shell and the software composition.

    I'm probably in a minority here as I actually quite like Gnome Shell.

    1. keithpeter Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: Default install

      Should have mentioned that I used the Live CD i386 iso. LibreOffice won't spell check unless you install some other bits (aspell or the thesaurus). When you get spell checking going, it does pick up the language setting (en-uk for me) correctly.

      I can never understand why packagers leave out files you need for spell checking (400k) but include a dozen wallpapers (half a meg each). This isn't just Fedora either...

  16. MACWINLINO
    Unhappy

    Love Red Hat/Cent OS but HATE Fedora

    Does anyone else think that Fedora is a steaming pile of crap. Each time I have used Fedora from 15 to 18 I have always managed to break yum.

    Then fixing it always seems to be more trouble than it is worth. Pitty in many aspects I prefer Fedora to Ubuntu but as my hatred for RPM's is strong I'll stick with apt distro's

  17. grantmasterflash

    "On the desktop, the primary Fedora installer is saddled with Gnome 3, which remains an exercise in questionable decisions and poor usability."

    As said by someone who secretly misses Windows 95 and never took the time to learn Gnome 3.

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