"hard core" linux

Rahul Sundaram sundaram at redhat.com
Tue Aug 16 15:36:11 UTC 2005


Paul A Houle wrote:

>    I think a lot of the people who have problems with Fedora would be 
> happy to have an alternative ("fork" distribution) to work on.

It depends on your problems. If you want to say fix bugs, a fork wouldnt 
be necessary. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers

>
>    It would be trivial to develop a distribution that consists of a 
> subset of Fedora Core packages plus packages from Fedora Extras:  the 
> advantage here is that users can plug into the existing system for 
> yum,  so there's no need to work on security updates,  plus users get 
> 100% compatibility with Fedora.  It would be easy to address common 
> complaints about Fedora such as "bloat" (Two desktop environments,  
> who knows how many GB of internationalization files),  packages that 
> make it difficult to install your own software (OpenOffice).  It might 
> be a bit silly,  but I'm still missing 'fortune' and the games package 
> that came with Slackware.

One of the FC5 goals is to trim down Fedora to reasonable default. When 
Anaconda gets a yum backend would make it easy enough to mix and match 
what packages you want. Its also a goal of the Live CD project to make 
it easy to create derivatives which are compatible with Fedora

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LiveCD


>
>    In the age of BitTorrent,  the task of distributing the new 
> distribution would be easy as well:  set up a tracker and a few seeds 
> with good connectivity,  and the problem is solved.
>
>    (Actually,  that scares me a little -- what if somebody spins a 
> 'black hat linux' with a bad ssh that misrepresents itself as FC and 
> spreads the .torrent file around the net?)

Pretty good question. The legal protection against people 
misrepresenting Fedora is through trade marks

http://fedora.redhat.com/about/trademarks/


>    This kind of project would make Extras more relevant:  people who 
> want to put packages in alternative distributions would have a 
> motivation to get packages into Extras so they can benefit from the 
> update network.

I believe with the current work in Anaconda helps a lot in blurring out 
the differences between core and extras. If someone takes up the project 
of spinning off  Fedora Extras repository into ISO images it pretty much 
makes it irrelevant whether its in core or extras for a lot of people.

>    Many of us can imagine our own personal perfect Fedora-derived 
> distribution,  but really the challenge is to think of a coherent 
> mission for an alternative distribution (or series of alternative 
> distributions) that would be compelling to enough people that it could 
> get some momentum.  Any ideas?

Lets see

* KDE or XFCE based Fedora derivative.
* Fedora for low end systems
* Hardened version of Fedora with strict or MLS policy by default

Things like that. It would be interesting if you can work within the 
frame work of Fedora, get a cvs space  and keep it compatible rather 
than fork it right away but you are free to do that neverthless

regards
Rahul




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