Everything old is new again
Remember a while back when I said I wasn’t using Fedora anymore? That was a lie. Ubuntu is the only other distro I’ve found to meet my current wants of being desktop-oriented, active and not completely ridiculous, and it and Fedora do about 80% of what I’d like them to do. And since those 80 per-cents don’t completely overlap, I’ve ended up using both. Fun!
Anyway, one of the little bothersome things in Fedora is that the speed of development, uncoupled from a slow-lumbering leviathan like Ubuntu’s Debian, makes some things difficult. It creates a moving-target mess, sometimes ignored out of convenience, for third-party software, and if, for example, your favorite music player shits the bed and changes everything in the latest version, then too bad: the old one’s gone. I’ve been keeping a handful of rpms around that allow some old libraries and packages to be installed in the new environment, and I’ve finally made a yum repository out of them. It has two goals in mind: make it easy to install the Amazon MP3 downloader, and bring back Amarok 1.4.
http://reallylongword.org/longcompat/11/i386/longcompat-release-1-1.fc11.noarch.rpm
There’s also a release package for Rawhide, but it’s just the same thing; either one will work. Installing the repository will make available the dependencies for amazonmp3.rpm, and it includes a package for Amarok as amarok14. You’ll have to hit the yes I’m serious button a few times and input the root password a whole bunch as is usual for these things, but otherwise it’s all signed and everything and should just do its thing.
While putting this together I created a sort of build system, and while it’s sort of sloppy—it calls mock about a billion times for every little thing and I don’t think it uses timestamps quite right—but still, it’s the culmination of several heaping tablespoons of annoying google searches, trial and error and Makefile targets borrowed from previous projects, and I thought it might be helpful to put it all in one place for anyone who might be trying to do something similar. It’s on github at http://github.com/reallylongword/longcompat. Let me know if something goes horribly wrong or if you have any suggestions.
December 10th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Hi. I found your blog via google.
The timing was perfect as I’ve been struggling over staying with Fedora (which I’ve used for years) or jumping ship to Ubuntu. Fedora seems to have gotten clunkier over the years while things in Ubuntu seem to “just work.”
So I’m curious what you feel Fedora does better vs what Ubuntu does better.
December 11th, 2009 at 1:19 am
At a high level, Ubuntu is better for a desktop user, and Fedora is better for developers and sysadmins. The problem is that I am all of those things at different times.
The fedora debuginfo package system is delightful. The only things I can think of to improve it are if gdb included a command to just make it so instead of only giving you the exact thing to run to get the symbols you want, and if there were an easier to manage upgrading the debuginfo packages without explicitly enabling the repos.
Ubuntu handles laptop things better most of the time. External monitor support has come and gone for me in the past few Fedora releases, and when it does work it still tends to shut off the external monitor when I close the lid unless I mess around with some things in gconf. CD burning support is dreadful in both, especially since my drive is USB. Ubuntu makes some bad decisions sometimes (the new notification system, for one). The stracciatella session package undoes the worst of it, but still, it feels like a fight. Ubuntu also tends to leave a lot of things unfixed, which is one advantage Fedora and their lack of a release concept improves. Ubuntu had an entire release (Hardy, I think?) where plugging in an external keyboard undid the keyboard layout options. Right now pidgin in Ubuntu doesn’t work right with MSN, and the fix—which is just an upgrade to the new version—probably won’t be added until the next release. Since I dual boot between Fedora and Ubuntu, I had to edit ubuntu’s init settings for a reboot to actually reboot the computer instead of doing a kexec back into Ubuntu.
Fedora handles weird sysadmin tasks a lot better. I used to hate on system-config-* programs years ago, since they seemed like an unnecessary extra layer, but desktop-oriented distros have evolved to where there’s no such things as a normal Linux way to set configurations anymore, I no longer feel like remembering which man pages or example files I need to get things done, and the system-config- programs are more complete than what Ubuntu has, which is generally just whatever comes with GNOME or KDE. IPv6 is handled much better in Fedora, there’s an actual thing to edit startup services without going to the command line, system-config-network can still be used for all the things that NetworkManager hasn’t implemented or won’t implement.
For creating your own packages, there are a lot of things I don’t care for with regards to spec files, but rpmbuild and spec files are a good deal less painful and insane than the mess of debuild + debhelper + dh_make.
For me the choice comes down to whether I want to develop something or just want to browse the web and write email.