Fedora 7 Test 2 issues I've found

Carlo Wise bcwise at speakeasy.net
Sun Mar 4 18:49:33 UTC 2007


I recently installed Fedora 7 in order to test 2 of the features that I
feel are most important, secure filesystems and rock-solid wireless. I
am in the process of testing Fedora 7 and here are some issues I have found:

1. I seem to remember a few weeks ago seeing a feature of encrypted
filesystems. It is not present nor is it present in the feature list
anymore. This is a HUGE mistake. Encrypted filesystems are, in my
opinion, one of the most important features that Fedora is missing and
without that it limits the benefit of Fedora. Other distros such as
OpenSuSE have had support for encrypted filesystems since at least
version 10.1 (2 versions ago).

2. Test 2 does not detect the Intel 2100, 2200, 2915 series of wireless
cards. This is also a huge hole and it is one of the supposed features
of Fedora 7. Core 6 at least detected the hardware and it would work
provided the wireless network did not have WEP enabled but Fedora 7 does
not even detect the hardware so far. This is a big step backwards. In my
opinion, robust and reliable wireless support is one of the most
important items for any Linux distro and is present in other distros I
have tested.

3. Upgrading to Fedora 7 from Core 6 does not fully upgrade. It appears
many Core 6 packages are not upgraded and though the upgrade process
completes successfully, once you log in and try to update the system it
fails and cannot do so. I had to download all the update packages and
attempt to upgrade them manually. A clean install works much more
reliably though, I had no problems updating on a clean install.

4. Test 2 disables support for creating ext2 filesystems during install.
Not necessarily a problem since ext3 is more robust; however, without
support for encrypted filesystems a user has no way to keep deleted data
from being recovered. Ext3 filesystems are journaled so securely
deleting files/folders using a program such as "wipe" is fruitless since
that info can be recovered from the journal file. At least with
encrypted filesystems that data would be encrypted making recovery
impossible (in addition to securing current data on an encrypted
filesystem). This is a HUGE hole in the distro as far as I am concerned.
With Redhat's long-time focus on security as evidenced by its inclusion
of SE policies I am baffled as to why support for encrypted filesystems
is STILL missing.

Carlo Wise




More information about the fedora-test-list mailing list