[Ambassadors] Sitting with Ubuntu for a Workshop

Rahul Sundaram sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Sat Apr 19 15:38:44 UTC 2008


Danishka Navin wrote:
> Hi Guys,
> 
> Sri Lanka Linux community will be orgnizing workshop for Maldivian 
> students association as per their request.
> I'm planning to show up the Fedora 9 New features and l10n as well.
> As most of our members prefer Ubuntu, I don't want to criticizes other 
> bistros, but want to show the true advantages over F9.
> 
> Date is yet to be fixd, so planning to introduce Fedora Live USB Self 
> Service PC. ;-)
> 
> Appreciate your points, suggestions and previous experience.

A generic intro:
----------------
You can reuse and modify as necessary the intro presentation from

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CommunityArchitecture/Presentations

Fedora is fully committed to Free and open source software and staying 
close to upstream as much as possible.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WhyUpstream

Fedora drives a lot of the upstream work shared by other distributions.

Refer http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions

Security is a key focus area

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Security/Features

Virtualization is another. Refer to virt-manager, libvirt etc.

A open build system, koji, a unified repository along with 
livecd-creator, pungi and revisors supports custom variants of Fedora 
that are called Fedora spins very easily. Rebranding is supported via 
the generic-logos package. We have a easy way to support persistence and 
creating a bootable USB key is trivial. There are a large number of such 
spins - desktop (gnome), KDE, Xfce live images, Electronics Lab, games 
and several upcoming ones.

https://fedorahosted.org/transifex is a web service (completely Free 
software) that understands different source code management systems and 
presents a unified easy to use web interface and works towards 
committing changes upstream and then inheriting those changes in Fedora.

Fedora is well known for presenting a great look and feel including a 
fresh new default theme every release.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork

Fedora in a continuation of Red Hat Linux released first in November 3 
1994. It is also the upstream for more than a hundred derivatives 
including significant ones such as OLPC and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DerivedDistributions

A common misconception
----------------------

This is a common misconception that you might want to clarify upfront:

RPM format ~= DEB format
RPM tool ~= dpkg
Yum, apt-rpm, smart ~= apt

RPM is not comparable to apt-get. It is comparable to dpkg. In fact, 
both RPM and Apt-RPM upstreams are maintained by the same Fedora/Red Hat 
developer. We have yum, apt-rpm(synaptic) and smart available in the 
Fedora repository and they all support the same repomd metadata format.

RPM supports many additional things including multi-lib (the ability to 
install both 32-bit and 64-bit libs in parallel), file based 
dependencies (though we don't use it much), triggers (which recently has 
been in the dpkg fork in Ubuntu but not in Debian) and others.

We choose yum over apt-rpm as the default because it was a good 
replacement for up2date using the same language (python), ease of 
development and also because apt-rpm upstream was dead as the time we 
had to chose and didn't support features like multi-lib that was crucial 
to us. For performance improvements, demonstrate the speed in Fedora 9.

----

Fedora 9 specific
-----------------

http://jonrob.wordpress.com/2008/04/19/5-reasons-why-youll-love-fedora-9/ 
is a pretty good intro. I would also definitely highlight FreeIPA better.

Closing
-------

Fedora and Ubuntu share a lot of the same software due to Fedora's free 
software and upstream friendly policy. In particular, Ubuntu has 
inherited system-config-printer, virt-manager, PulseAudio etc from us 
and we have recently inherited Upstart from Ubuntu. We have constantly 
learn from each other and while many of the contributors understand this 
very well, users still need to.
----

Hope that helps.

Rahul




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