Feedback on Fedora Core 4 test 2 review

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi

I came across your review [1] of the second test release of Fedora Core 
4 . I have a few suggestions and remarks.This is the first review of a 
test release of  Fedora Core 4 that I have come across and as such it 
was certainly a interesting one to read. 

"I am one of many who felt that Red Hat's abandonment of their desktop 
user community was treacherous at best. I see the logic in this from a 
customer support perspective--after all, answering questions from 
randoms who've coughed up the money for a Linux distribution at CompUSA 
can be time-consuming, but that's how you build market share."

Stopping retail distribution of  Red Hat Linux and moving towards a more 
frequently updated Fedora project isnt equivalent to abandonment of the 
desktop users.  Red Hat has never produced a distribution that directly 
targetted the desktop segment. While its true that Red Hat wouldnt isnt 
directly involved in retail distribution of Fedora, independant vendors 
continue to do that extensively. Fedora  release cycle combined with the 
Fedora legacy project would provide something thats pretty close yet 
better  to previous releases of Red Hat Linux.   While your point about 
building market share is pretty true the reality is that support costs 
would be higher for the desktop market compared to servers (limited and 
restricted usage scenarios).

Red Hat continues to work on things that are meant to improve the user 
experience for Fedora. For example extensive work on GTK, dbus, hal and  
things like Network manager  are some of the pieces of desktop  
infrastructure that springs up to mind. Efforts to improve bootup speed 
using bootchart [2] and things like GDM early login [3] are primarly for 
desktop users. servers arent going to rebooted that often for boot up 
speed to be a significant factor . right?

Work on GCJ ( GNU compiler for Java) would enable the significant amount 
of Java code  in Openoffice 2.0 to e run under a natively compiled free 
Java stack which I believe you would agree is a important thing for the 
desktop market.

"On my screen, the subtitles read "To sponsor a project and people who 
will develop stuff that we can suck directly into future RHEL releases.""

While Fedora project definitely is the basis of Red Hat Enteprise Linux, 
inviting the community to work on things is meant to enable more 
innovative growth and take Linux into directions which Red Hat cannot or 
does not want to work on currently. Fedora Extras is just one such 
direct benefit of the work done by the community. Instead of a scattered 
set of third party repositories we will  now have Fedora Extras 
repository which follows Fedora Core release cycle and is  enabled by 
default in Fedora Core 4 which will enable users to access a whole lot 
of software more easily

You have provided a table  that shows the changes in version numbers of  
the things that you find important. It would have been better to link to 
the release notes [4]  for the test release for users who want to dig 
for further information after reading you review

The following things are what I would consider important features that 
are planned to included in Fedora Core 4 that you have not mentioned in 
your review

Xen [5]  - A para virtualisation software that would enable users to run 
multiple operating systems or versions of it.
Red Hat GFS [6]  - Cluster filesystem
SELinux update - Significant number of additional deamons will protected 
by SELinux in Fedora Core 4
Free Java stack which includes Eclipse and  Apache Jakarta
Fedora Extras yum repository enabled by default
GDM early login and removal of rhgb would be a significant change in 
user experience for  desktop users
Evince document viewer [7]
Yum will use sqllite database and perform much faster that previous releases

regards
Rahul




[1] http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/5830/1/
[2] bootchart.sf.net
[3] 
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2005-April/msg00416.html
[4] GDM early login -  
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraDocs_2fReleaseNotes_2fCore4Test2
[5] Xen - http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/
[6] Red Hat GFS - http://www.redhat.com/software/rha/gfs/
[7] Evince - http://www.gnome.org/projects/evince/