Fedora - The Next Generation

Gerald Thompson geraldt at telus.net
Sat Jun 26 00:07:40 UTC 2004


Roland Venter wrote:

>Hi Folks,
>
>I would like to hear your feelings on a couple of issues:
>
>To start off I've been using FC1 on serveral servers since it's initial
>release and have had little or no problems, only rebooting for kernel
>upgrades, etc.  Before a flame war starts, I agree that for critical
>production servers you should be running RHEL.  My problem is this:
>
>Several customers are SOHO with less than 15 users and simply cannot justify
>the cost of RHEL or they might as well be running MS SBS, (Some of them
>actually believe the MS propaganda!)
>
>I've been playing round with a couple of ideas:
>Create a single CD Fedora installation with only core apps required for
>business use, eg. postfix, squid, samba etc
>Better inital setup, like a wizard after the install to add domain entries
>to automatically configure postfix, samba and the likes, so after the
>initial reboot you'll have a fully functional server.
>Aditional testing of updates, maybe a separate yum mirror, so nightly
>updates install only critical updates.
>
>*important*
>What I don't want is to reinvent the wheel, the Fedora community is doing
>great work and we don't need to fork into yet another distro.  This should
>be something between the latest and greatest, FC2, and a stable production
>environment - RHEL.  (maybe if this all works, we can plough some of it back
>into FC3?)
>
>I'm not very fond of fixed release schedules, if it's broken, fix it and
>release a new ISO, this will save us answering the same questions on the
>list time after time.
>
>By stripping down the initial install we can fokus on making Fedora better
>and we can actually implement some of the suggestions on this list.  Being
>based on Fedora it should be easy to add additional components as required,
>something like a minimal install and add what you need.
>
>Your thoughts...
>Roland
>  
>
Well since Fedora is released under the GPL you are perfectly allowed to 
repackage the distribution and send it out under a different name.  The 
only requirement I believe is to remove all reference to the Fedora name 
from the system.  I am pretty sure when I read the Fedora license 
agreement and it mentioned that everything was under the GPL except the 
name Fedora and some of the jpeg's used for branding in the distro.  So 
as long as you strip out the Fedora name and any reference to Fedora you 
should be able to customize your own version of the distro.

Heck you can even get around the name thing and just use an 
abbreviation.  Call it BCF - Linux (Business Class based on Fedora).  
The only thing is that you are going to have to set up a mirror for all 
the patches.  Since you have to support your own distro without using 
the Fedora name you will have to download the source for the patches and 
recompile them and make sure references to Fedora are removed.

I guess this comes back to the whole forking issue.

You can customize your own distro install by using Anaconda and 
customizing the install and the available packages.  In this scenario 
the update process is the same as Fedora because you aren't changing the 
name of the OS or the update mirrors.  The only issue with doing it this 
way is that any knowledgeable user can just log in as root and use yum 
to grab the extra packages you left off the distro.

Since the whole distro is open source you can pretty much do whatever 
you want, the only restriction is on the Fedora name, and the amount of 
work that you are willing to do.

Sincerely,
Gerald Thompson





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