Fwd: Re: Review: 3 top Linux distros go for different users

Mel Chua mel at redhat.com
Mon Jan 4 05:41:56 UTC 2010


Forwarded with Michael Tiemann's permission. The short version: should 
we look into (1) figuring out an optional (opt-in, I'd suggest) tweak to 
get Fedora-specific search results when looking for Linux howtos, and/or 
(2) SEO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization) at 
some point?

--Mel

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Review: 3 top Linux distros go for different users
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:13:05 -0500
From: Michael Tiemann <tiemann at redhat.com>

Kara Schiltz wrote:
> Computerworld
> 12.16.09
>
> Review: 3 top Linux distros go for different users
> By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
>
> [clip]
>
> Paul Frields, Red Hat's Fedora Project Leader, described Fedora to me
> as being "first and foremost for users interested in and capable of
> contributing to open source." So if you're a Linux power user, you're
> going to love Fedora. If you're not, this probably isn't the distro
> for you.

I just installed Fedora 12 (DVD iso x86_64) this past weekend on a very
hostile piece of hardware: an old MacBookPro version 2,1.  By hostile I
mean that it's now old enough to reject the installation of modern
versions of Mac OSX.  The installation process went perfectly smoothly
until it was time to reboot, and that failed because the MBR and/or the
GPT has a "bootable" flag that needed to be reset.  I reset the flag,
and then grub failed.  Some googling led me to question whether my ext4
boot partition was really a proper choice, and when I backed up /boot to 
some temp space in my rescued filesystem image, reformatted /boot as
ext2, and restored the contents, everything worked perfectly
thereafter.  WIN!

What does this have to do with Ubuntu, the implied distro for non-power 
users, you might ask?

I have yet to find a way to search via Google for answers to my Fedora
problems without Ubuntu being a prominent, if not nearly exclusive
search result.  Well, that's not quite true...by adding +fedora -ubuntu
I start to get the kinds of results I'm looking for, but by golly for
all that Google is supposed to be my Big Brother, it keeps trying to
lead me away from Fedora and over to Ubuntu.

If there were some way to make technical support help focus on the OS
installed on one's machine, I think we'd find at least a level playing
field.  Any way we could set up Mozilla preferences (and other browsers) 
to treat "Linux" like Fedora?

M

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effort of the whole world. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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the things you accomplish by practice and effort.
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Dream so big you can share -- me




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