Fedora

I use the SystemRescueCD a lot at work. My work study scoffed at me for actually running it from CD rather than a USB stick... because the USB stick is much faster. I bought a three pack of SanDisk Cruzer Micro 2GB USB thumb drives from CostCo for about $50. I followed the SystemRescueCD instructions and bingo it worked. Ok, it boots up a lot faster now.

So, now to apply it to Fedora and CentOS. Luckily Fedora has instructions. Following those instructions, I could boot Fedora 8 from USB.

I applied the Fedora method to the recently released CentOS 5.1 LiveCD and that worked too. I guess the same principle would apply to any LiveCD .iso you'd want to throw at it... including regular distro install media. They even have a program for Windows users.

KDE Live CD InstallIf you've read any Linux news sites today, you know that Fedora 7 was released this morning and is codenamed Moonshine. You may have noticed by now that I only seem to cover the releases of Red Hat related distros. That is because that is what I prefer. I'd certainly welcome other members covering their favorite distros. Can you hear me Ubuntu users?

If you didn't know already, the Fedora Project has dropped the word Core from the name and with this release you no longer have to download multiple CDs. Fedora 7 is a lot like Ubuntu in that it has a single Live / Install CD that is based on Gnome. For KDE (K Desktop Environment) users, there is another, single Live / Install CD that is KDE based. For those who want to download as much as possible and have a lot of software to pick from, there is also a single DVD that has both Gnome and KDE and much, much more. Me? I decided to download them all... but since the KDE .iso completed first, and hey, I'm a big KDE person, I took the KDE Live / Install CD for a spin.

Virtual Machine ManagerI got a bit farther with Xen this time. I did another CentOS 5 Beta install and made sure to add the Virtualization package set. It's not like I needed to do another install but I've been doing a few installs just to test out differences with the various package sets.

I originally tried out Xen about a year and a half ago on a Fedora Core 4 host on rather underpowered hardware and a lot has changed since then.

No, this isn't a repeat blog posting... as I continually download and install various distros. Since I'm very Red Hat centric, I'm all excited about the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 release... that is coming out... maybe in March?!?
[Update: Looks like next week... March 14th.]

Fedora 7 Beta 2

Fedora 7 betaDownloaded and installed Fedora 7 Test 2. Notice that Core is no longer part of the name because Core and Extras are in the process of being merged. I downloaded the LiveCD and it worked great. I was very impressed by the artwork. I did an install from the LiveCD and it worked well... and seemed faster than the boot-install method. The only things broken that I noticed were some warning messages during shutdown after doing the install... about not being able to unmount something... but it was of no consequence... and a few of the desktop apps didn't work... like Abiword for example. Other than that, it recognized the onboard Intel video chipset of my wife's Gateway branded box and worked with accelerated video... rotating cube and all.

For the rest of the story, click on the read more link below...

Max Spevack sent out an announcement on the fedora-announce-list today regarding the future of RPM. I'm on the mailing list and I include the email here because I think it should be of interest to a wide variety of Linux users.

Sent by: Max Spevack
On: Thu 14 Dec 2006 10:42:03 AM MST
To: fedora-announce-list@redhat.com

There has been a lot of discussion in the past few months about RPM -- its present state, its future plans, and its leadership team. In particular, the Fedora Project has received numerous requests asking us, "what are you guys doing about RPM?"

Here is our answer, in a few words. Then if you want more, you can read the rest of this note:

The Fedora Project is leading the creation of a new community around RPM. One in which the leaders can come from Fedora, from Red Hat, from Novell, from Mandriva, or from anywhere. Job #1 is to take the current RPM codebase and clean it up, and in doing so work with all the other people and groups who rely on RPM to build a first-rate upstream project.

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