Fedora Looks Fresh and Functions Well

[Rahul Sundaram]

On Thu, 2006-03-30 at 04:28 -0500, Benjy Grogan wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm really enjoying using FC5.  Tomboy is a great tool for jotting
> down ideas.  I actually put together this email using a few tomboy
> notes.  I have a few suggestions -- that you can take or leave -- that
> I wanted to share to help out with 'Fedora's way forward'. :)  Here
> they are:
> 
> 
> 1) A welcome to Fedora (or RHEL) tutorial for new accounts and even
> maybe a tips section everytime you log in.  DAC would be a really good
> topic for new users.

Do you want to help with that? . Docs project has a number of people who
introduce themselves but then dont contribute. So the actual
contributors are extremely low now.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject


> 
> 2) Have a place in Preferences set up for the two or three available
> Javas (Sun's and the OSS ones).  Then when you have installed Sun's
> Java you have a place to switch back to the old one, and vice versa. 
> (Question: Is a compiled Azureus the same if it's based on Sun or
> GCJ?)
> 

Fedora wouldnt ship Sun Java. Azureus is GCJ compiled.

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc5/#sn-Java

The alternatives mechanism already allows you to switch between any
implementation of Java as long as it is appropriately packaged. Check
out the third question in  

http://www.redhat.com/magazine/001nov04/departments/tips_tricks/



> 3) I have a question on codecs.  Is it possible to get all OSS codecs
> these days based on the GStreamer plugin system?  I think the whole
> audio/video codec problem would go away if there was a GStreamer Codec
> management system where OSS codecs would be there by default and then
> the user would go out and get all the proprietary GStreamer codecs
> he/she is missing.  It should be simple to look at a Fedora system,
> and say "alright, got those ones, but missing these ones (like
> mp3/avi).  And I can figure out where to get them."  And this
> presupposes a future where there are only Gstreamer codecs.

Thats exactly how it is supposed to be working. We are almost there at
this point. 

> 
> 4) Since Firefox is one of the most important pieces of the Linux OS
> these days, it would be great to have all of the alphas, betas and RCs
> available in update-testing.  That would allow some users to test
> Firefox for bugs over an extended period of time before 2.0 or 3.0
> comes out.  Obviously, under some guidance from Fedora with all the
> patches they put into it.

fedora updates-testing repository is just for testing updates that would
almost always be later pushed out as actual updates. Having a
experimental repository might be a good idea but the current usage of
updates-testing repository is low enough to not deviate into that.


> 
> 5) An updating system (maybe using deltarpms or smartrpms) that could
> compete with the updating system available on Windows XP and OS/X. 
> Smaller updates are really needed.


This has been discussed many times. Check the archives. Deltarpms add
complexity to the updates infrastructure and we dont want to force
mirrors to store anything more than the actual packages.

Rahul