Clearly Fedora weathered the storm and has not only survived but thrived.
I had occasion to try Fedora again yesterday when debugging a GCP/JAXP issue. The problem turned out to be the version of libjaxp1.3-java included in the distribution was incompatible with the version of GCJ included in that same distribution. That’s the second distribution packaging bug I encountered relating to GCJ on Ubuntu.
Apparently, RedHat based distributions put more attention on Java than Debian based distributions do.
Anyway, I was curious to see what had changed since I had last looked into a RPM based distribution over five years ago, and the answer in retrospect was totally obvious. The difference between two 2009 vintage Linux distributions is much smaller than the difference between a 2009 vintage distribution and a 2003 vintage distribution, even of those distributions came from the same place.
Oh, there are differences. On Ubuntu, the Terminal application is an Accessory, on Fedora it is a System Tool. Yum totally closed the gap with apt-get, but package names are different, for example ruby1.8-dev on Ubuntu maps to ruby-devel on Fedora. Shutting down wasn’t obvious on Fedora, at least not until I logged off. Sudo is preconfigured on Ubuntu, not so on Fedora. Yum default to “No”, aptitude to “Yes” on “Is this OK?” types of questions.
But those differences are cosmetic. The true differences are in the version of the packages. Fedora 11 gives you Rails 2.3.2 and Ruby 1.8.6 whereas Ubuntu 9.04 provides Rails 2.1.0 and Ruby 1.8.7. Ubuntu provides Firefox 3.0, Fedora provides Firefox 3.5beta4.
Given that I’m likely to continue playing with GCJ for a few more weeks at least, I might even consider switching. The only two showstoppers I’ve seen are both temporary. VirtualBox doesn’t seem to know how to install Guest additions on Fedora 11, and Firebug won’t install on Firefox 3.5beta4. I’d also miss the new notification system that debuted in Jaunty.
Hi Sam,
I have the same problem. Firebug install on Firefox 3.5b4 shipped in Fedora 11. Please go to : [link] and download Firebug 1.4.0b2
How do Fedora releases work? I heard the other day that F11 is shipping Thunderbird 3.0b2, and although I’m the very worst and least involved of the Tb release drivers, I know I certainly didn’t realize that we were making decisions about what needed to block b2 based on it being a shipping product rather than the second of probably five or six betas. Do regular Fedora users all know that you just shouldn’t use a new version for six months or so unless you want to wind up with random buggy packages, and treat it like the .0 versions of Windows releases used to be?
Ubuntu’s universe packages suffer from being automatically imported from Debian unstable - no effort is made to check for RC bugs or that the packages actually work together. The freshness of packages also suffers from the vagaries of Debian’s relese cycle - when testing is frozen, quite often new packages don’t get uploaded to unstable (and hence into Ubuntu) until after the next relase. Debian’s last few releases have all been 22 months apart which surprised me as to how regular that is. My general upgrade path is stay on stable until the pressure of features I want from newer packages, at which point I follow testing until the next stable release.
Phil: yeah, Fedora relesaes get significant amounts of post-release updates, so waiting a while is probably not a bad idea. But you can’t wait too long - Fedora was aiming for a release every 6 months and only support two releases at a time. I’d argue Debian testing is about as good Fedora (not that I’ve used recent Fedora) given the post-release updates of the latter. Ubuntu is absolutely shocking at post-release fixes, which is just bearable when it’s fixed in the next release less than 6 months away. At which point you get a whole new set of bugs to live with.
I’ve been thoroughly unimpressed with the packaging of Java libraries on Ubuntu. It really doesn’t seem like much care goes into them. I’ve found it’s almost always more straightforward to use the Maven repositories when they’re available, especially given the fact that much of the benefit of using a systemwide package manager is lost due to the fact that you have to add libraries to your classpath manually anyway.