Fedora 12 debuts after Halloween slippage Fedora 12 made its official debut today, after a two-week slippage in its release schedule. Codenamed "Constantine," the new RedHat community Linux distro includes power management features pulled from RHEL 5, improved support for netbooks, and a much-improved NetworkManager. The latter provides a graphical display of the WiFi …
As I'm sure I won't be the only one to mention, this is an overestimate, and surely a large one, of the number of installations. After all, most people at home have DHCP from their ISP.
More useful, even if still not perfect, would be to know the daily number of unique IP addresses downloading updates -- since it's much less likely that the same installation will perform updates in one day using different IP addresses. That could be presented as either an average (not so good, since a few days after updates are out most will have applied them, numbers fluctuate and skew the average) or as a graph of the raw numbers. Or some combination, like the average for the peak day in a month. Something else, because 17.7 million since 2007 means nothing. Could be 100,000, or 1 million, or more, or less. How many times in a year does the average home computer change IP address?
That might give a better idea of the number of Fedora installations out there.
"As I'm sure I won't be the only one to mention, this is an overestimate, and surely a large one, of the number of installations. After all, most people at home have DHCP from their ISP."
On the other hand, a lot of people are behing NATting firewalls so one public IP may correspond to a large number of actual machines. I'm told this is especially common in developing countries, where public IPs are more scarce than in countries that were on the Net earlier. In those places you might have an entire university apparently behind a single public IP. So I'm not so sure it is an overestimate.
Fedora 12 sadly does not support some i686 CPU (Via C3) anymore. So while it might work on the AMD, it might not work on other, which leaves me stranded for my servers
I can accept that Fedora wants to ship a version compiled for more modern hardware, but why drop the support in the build, as I think it has been done?
While unique IP addresses may overstate the installs that metric does not include companies like mine that run Fedora on everything. servers, desktops and laptops and simply install using an ISO image off our servers. 1 download - around 50 computers.
We committed to the Linux route after endless problems with Windows. Even our external directors are now converting to Fedora after recent problems with viruses. To quote one - "what a relief and so quick - why didn't you guys suggest this last year?"
It might work on the eight old AMD PC, but Fedora 12 lost support for Via C3 CPU.
So F12 might or might not work on old hardware.
I can (somewhat) accept that Fedora wants to ship a version that is compiled for newer CPUs but why remove the build option for older version, which I believe has been done.
@J 3 - What a strange comment.
"The Fedora project doesn't track downloads because requiring any kind of registration or putting in any kind of tracking is anathema to the open source community. But Frields says that since Fedora 7 was launched in May 2007, the project has tracked over 17.7 million unique IP addresses that have come to the site and checked for updates for various Fedora releases."
Again - "The Fedora project doesn't track downloads because requiring any kind of registration or putting in any kind of tracking is anathema to the open source community."
So, the interviewer probably pushed for a number and Frields came out with a fairly logical reply based on the number of unique IPs.
But, who really cares how many Fedora users there are? Does it have any relevance to the OS? As a community lead project the more user there are the better the OS will become but in a "my dad is bigger than your dad" way it has no relevance.
A few points.
My External IP address is not fixed but it hasn't changed in over a year.
I have 3 machines running Fedora 11 so their update requests will appear to the Fedora servers as all coming from the same one.
Therefore IMHO as an approximate number 17.7 million seems to be in the right ballpark.
I loaded F12 on to my aged PPC Mac Mini over F9 and everything works fine OOTB including WLAN
Difficult to see how it could be made worse. In F10, it was the second thing I disabled, first being SELinux. Either of these by itself was sufficient to prevent Samba from working, as NetworkManager left the network "down" until I logged in, and smbd/nmbd start much earlier than that. God only knows how a random-idiot user would have coped.
Bah.
The set of hardware that F12 works on is significantly larger than the set of hardware that Windows 7 works on (I was going to add say "installs and works reasonably well on" but I though I'd be setting myself up for comments about the ability of Windows 7 or yum, again).
Does Windows 7 install and run on any Via C3 machine? That was the point wasn't it -- that F12 will run quite well on old hardware that Windows 7 will just give up on. I don't suppose the decision to stop supporting some old hardware so that some other less-powerful hardware runs better was easily made -- have a look through the various Fedora lists. (Speaking for myself I wasn't greatly impressed by the emphasis on supporting the Atom, but that's just me.)
And anyway, the build process is completely open so there's no reason why you shouldn't build your own distro that's compiled slightly differently. It'll take a degree of determination to do that, but you can do it -- there's nothing hidden that's stopping you.
My only complaint was that the install "forgot" about my Windows installation - a necessary evil cuckoo :-(. I had to edit grub.conf to get it back. I guess this may be because it was Alpha and not production. Otherwise, a stepwise increment rather than a revolutionary release. Stable but not that exciting.
"He has plunked Fedora 12 on the eight-year-old Athlon PC at home that the Frields family uses, and it works just fine. Windows 7 would never load on this box." I wonder if that's an opinion from someone who hasn't actually tried it, or is there something about this box that he's not telling?
That's odd, as I happen to have installed Windows 7 Ultimate on a similarly ancient bit of kit - an athlon XP box running on an Asus A7V333 motherboard. Combined with a 8400GS PCI graphics card and a copy of MPC-HC it's serving up 1080p MKV files without any issues and will form the basis of my next HTPC, no tweaking needed (so far).
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