ESR has always been a lot of hot air. He's an attention whore.
He is some thing of a gas bag, isn't he. :D
Maybe :), but he has a couple things I agree with, RH/Fedora is losing ground on desktop share, because people want things to just work, like as simple as playing a bloody mp3, which they can do with every other distro out there. like it or not, its here and here to stay.
I'm not certain that there's much Fedora can do about that. AFAIK, legal MP3 playback requires a license. For a community supported distro, I'm not sure if this is feasible and even if it were, it may disagree with some of the fundamental tenets of Free software. To his point about compromising ideals for end-user convenience, I'm in disagreement.
Try converting winblows users to Fedora, but saying, oh but you cant play mp3's out of the box...you can, but youll have to go toa unofficial RH/Fedora repo and try install it, or do like I do and erase the players RH bastardises, and grab the source and install it, now say that to a newbie and you've lost em! First impression are ever lasting in this game.
Here too... MP3s are nice, but it's not something that is a show-stopper for me or anyone that I've helped with Linux. I.e., if MP3 playback is important enough then it's a relatively simple matter to install the software. A rough equivalent would be WinZIP. It doesn't ship with Windows, but is a quick install. Same for SSH clients, editors, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Flash/Shockwave, Quicktime, and a host of other proprietary codecs.
Secondly, the version upgrade is messy, I've never ever yet upgraded from one version of RH or Fedora without conflicts, FC4 was a comple explosion, I gave up and reinstalled previous and ignored FC4.
Yet I can do this with even slackware and have been able to for years, with slapt-get I was able to upgrade without a drama a slackware 7 box to a slackware 11.0!!, reboot and viola! all working.
True, I'll agree here. I haven't upgraded FC or RH in a long time as I generally do scratch installs. My boxes, once the distro is loaded, usually get heavily modified with all sorts of packages so it may be unrealistic in my case to have an upgrade work smoothly. My /home is separate so it's not too big a deal.
I'll possibly for time being stick with Fedora for desktops,as I've used them since early RH, but no way in bloody hell will it ever run on any server in my data center, I'll stick with slackware there, last RH server I decommisioned about 2 years ago was RH9, it was unbreakable, Fedora is by design "bleeding edge" or is that "bleeding edge of blunders", and if we dont fix it soon, the likes of debian and suse will overtake us by a long mile.
I'd agree that FC on a server is not the best choice, though I run my own web/dns/file/ldap on FC5 or FC6 currently. Being a lazy admin though, FC fits me pretty well.
You raise some good points and if you'd written the same thing that the gasbag had mailbombed the world with, I'd probably have read more attentively :P
On Wed, 2007-02-21 at 20:09 -0500, Kwan Lowe wrote:
Try converting winblows users to Fedora, but saying, oh but you cant
play
mp3's out of the box...you can, but youll have to go toa unofficial RH/Fedora repo and try install it, or do like I do and erase the
players
RH bastardises, and grab the source and install it, now say that to
a
newbie and you've lost em! First impression are ever lasting in
this
game.
Here too... MP3s are nice, but it's not something that is a show-stopper for me or anyone that I've helped with Linux. I.e., if MP3 playback is important enough then it's a relatively simple matter to install the software. A rough equivalent would be WinZIP. It doesn't ship with Windows, but is a quick install. Same for SSH clients, editors, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Flash/Shockwave, Quicktime, and a host of other proprietary codecs.
Maybe if a simple script was written to dnload every proprietary library and util were put right in front of a newbie's nose, just before or after the install was complete... AND it all worked, that would answer the problem.
Call it "Media Whore" and by clicking on it you agree to install "legal-iffy" software from a remote site in France. Everything pours in to your machine, and the remote site in France does their best to have everything work at once, so they save the day.
Toss in some fun homebrewed avi, mpeg, wmv, midi, mod, wave, flv, mp3 files for testing purposes, everyone gets a hoot and grins, the experience is fun, everybody happy. Make it EASY, and REWARDING so that you can show off your machine with your friends green with envy.
My own experience was to get LAUGHED by a fervent Windows user, because xine fell apart while trying trying to show off what had worked just fine. Guys and Gals, THAT sucked. Ole Eric got jerked because what worked, became not-working. He might be a complete knee-biter, I don't know him to judge him, but he's been a fervent and vocal supporter for RH for like forever, and now he is not. That's bottom line kiddies. I get irritated when I have to spend hours unraveling how something that worked, and now doesn't.
There are tool-builders, who squeal with delight at the chance to spend a weekend fixing shit, and tool-users who merely want to actually use applications to do things. Tool builders contribute to Linux making and fixing tool stuff that we all need. Tool-Users contribute to Linux using those tools to produce output from the tools, whether they be music/video files, webpages, text, financial statements, etc.
Both groups need each other in a symbiotic trusted relationship. Evidently, Eric felt betrayed and lost trust. Maybe he's a half right or completely right or completely wrong, I dunno. I'd give him half right, out of the gate, with nary a quibble. Smart works pretty good, and that is a step in the right direction. I'd like to see a better menu system to it, but it's workable as it is. If he had it in his install, maybe he wouldn't have had as many problems. Ric
Ric Moore wrote:
Maybe if a simple script was written to dnload every proprietary library and util were put right in front of a newbie's nose, just before or after the install was complete... AND it all worked, that would answer the problem.
Call it "Media Whore" and by clicking on it you agree to install "legal-iffy" software from a remote site in France. Everything pours in to your machine, and the remote site in France does their best to have everything work at once, so they save the day.
Ummm... I think you just described the livna repository:
http://rpm.livna.org/rlowiki/UsingLivna
Except for the script that says something like
yum install xmms.mp3 vlc xine mplayer mplayer-skins w32codec (etc.)
On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 22:23:24 -0500, Ric Moore wayward4now@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe if a simple script was written to dnload every proprietary library and util were put right in front of a newbie's nose, just before or after the install was complete... AND it all worked, that would answer the problem.
You would need to be careful about contributary infringement. Expect some lawsuits if this route is tried.
Ric Moore wayward4now@gmail.com writes:
Maybe if a simple script was written to dnload every proprietary library and util were put right in front of a newbie's nose, just before or after the install was complete... AND it all worked, that would answer the problem.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureCodecBuddy?highlight=%28Catego...
Regards Ingemar
On Thu, 2007-03-01 at 10:51 +0100, Ingemar Nilsson wrote:
Ric Moore wayward4now@gmail.com writes:
Maybe if a simple script was written to dnload every proprietary library and util were put right in front of a newbie's nose, just before or after the install was complete... AND it all worked, that would answer the problem.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureCodecBuddy?highlight=%28Catego...
Thank you Ingemar! That is the ticket especially if the repos would pull together to keep the versioning in step or one be put in charge of all things audio and another all things video and another all things nVidia... something like that.
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Bruno Wolff III -
Ingemar Nilsson -
Kwan Lowe -
Les Mikesell -
Ric Moore