Yenya's World

Fri, 20 Nov 2009

Fedora 12

I have been using Fedora 12 on my laptop for a week now, and on my primary workstation for three days. So far I have walked through Bugzilla and checked that most of my bugs are still present in F12. But apart from that, there has not been any unpleasant surprise so far. The new KMS code and X server for Radeon cards work as expected, so I am looking forward to install F12 also to my dual-seat workstation at home. So far it is OK. Well, except ...

... except this bug (covered also in fedora-devel and also at Slashdot). I wonder who could seriously have thought this feature would be an improvement? Probably if the Anaconda can ask whether this is a single-user workstation, and only then enable it, it would be bearable. But having it on by default is simply insane. The fact that to disable it, the 6+ lines file in an undocumented format in four-levels deep directory under /var/lib should be created, just underlines the gross insanity of the whole thing.

I have been a long-term supporter of using Fedora also for other purposes than a single-user workstation, but apparently it seems that some Fedora maintainers either do not care (see my post about GDM), or - what is worse - some are actively trying to undermine the other usages of Fedora.

We have been considering returning Fedora to some of our computer labs (to solve some problems with that African-Debian distro), but with this problem I am not sure whether this is a good thing to do anymore.

UPDATE 2009/11/20: Resolved after all
From fedora-devel:

[...] Executive summary
We'll make an update to the F12 PackageKit, so that the root password is required to install packages.

Glad to see this being resolved relatively fast. This was the most voted-for bug in the Fedora bugzilla (by a factor of almost 10).

Section: /computers (RSS feed) | Permanent link | 5 writebacks

5 replies for this story:

Karel Zak wrote: single-user desktop distro

Is there any opposition against single-user manners in Fedora community? Unfortunately, answers is NO. People who are working on non-desktop stuff are usually busy working on upstream, or on RHEL or they don't use Fedora at all... We have https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Server but the project is almost dead :-(

Milan Zamazal wrote:

BTW: As for the African-Debian distro, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who cares about stability (actually I wouldn't recommend it to anyone at all, but this is another topic). Use Debian instead.

ApoC wrote:

Also FreeBSD can be good choice :)

Yenya wrote: Re: FreeBSD

Well, I am not sure whether I would use a system maintained in three different _centralized_ version control systems ... [That said, I have a FreeBSD installed in a KVM-based virtual machine for testing purposes; they don't have virtio though, so the system is pretty sluggish; I have yet to get time to upgrade it to FreeBSD 8]

ApoC wrote:

There is also distributed git mirror of FreeBSD on http://www.gitorious.org/freebsd About virtio i didn't find any driver :/

Reply to this story:

 
Name:
URL/Email: [http://... or mailto:you@wherever] (optional)
Title: (optional)
Comments:
Key image: key image (valid for an hour only)
Key value: (to verify you are not a bot)

About:

Yenya's World: Linux and beyond - Yenya's blog.

Links:

RSS feed

Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak

The main page of this blog

Categories:

Archive:

Blog roll:

alphabetically :-)