New Fedora User Questions

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2004-08-25 at 12:44, Matthew Miller wrote:

> > 1.  Rumor has it that Red Hat and Fedora are going to merge back into 
> > one distro in the near future. Is this true, and if so, should I wait?
> 
> Which rumor has this? Fedora Core is the basis for the enterprise products
> from Red Hat....

Since the new stuff is all currently in Fedora only, any subsequent
merger would have to be based on that - but it sounds unlikely to me.

> > 2. Is there a way to do an ftp install of sorts with fedora, rather 
> > than downloading all of the iso's and burning disks?
> 
> Yes. Download a boot image, make a CD with just that, and choose FTP
> install. I do this all of the time.

Another way is to download iso images to a directory exported by
NFS.  Burn only the first one, boot with that and at the boot
prompt enter "linux askmethod".  Then you will see NFS image as
an install option and be able to enter the location of the
holding the iso images.  FC1 still has a floppy boot image that
you can use instead of the CD - FC2 is too big but it has an
image you can copy to a USB flash drive for machines that can
boot from USB.

> > 3. What are the advantages of using Fedora over SuSE or Mandrake (in 
> > the opinion of someone that has used all three recently, please).
> 
> It's a nice, cutting edge distro that has a strong commitment to pure open
> source, and there's a solid community of users and developers. And, if
> you're used to Red Hat Linux, it's nice and familiar.

The biggest advantage is that you can find a large number of 3rd party
programs that are prebuilt as RPMs for easy installations.  That may be
enough to compensate for the 2 choices of development models (fedora:
too fast, RHEL: too slow...).  Sorry - just being nostalgic for the days
when everyone knew that version X.2 was the right RH release to use and
there is now no equivalent.

---
  Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com