[Nottingham] My fedora 9 experience (vent/rant included)

[Graeme Fowler]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2008, "Michael Simms" <michael at tuxgames.com> wrote:
<a long and stressed-out rant>

I'm writing this on my F9 box at work. I've been using Fedora since,  
well, Redhat 5 :) and stick with it because it's the devil I know.

It strikes me that a huge number of the rant points you made are down  
to the use of SELinux. You have to understand that SELinux is designed  
around a relatively inflexible template driven set of policies. If you  
want to stick with it, changes to the system - such as, ooh, adding a  
user - will be difficult (at best) or impossible (at best, depending  
on your point of view!). It really, really isn't designed for  
fast-moving systems like desktop boxes where the users want to fiddle  
all the time, as James already pointed out.

Some of the other points come down to inexperience. Yes, yum could be  
described as a poor man's apt, but if you don't understand how it  
works then how can you work with it? I've been frustrated in equal  
measure by Debian and the many clones of it in the past *because I  
don't understand them fully*. I don't post about how crap they are (I  
don't think that), I just go back to what I know and like.

Yum should absolutely not open up services you have deleted. If it is  
doing, then there's a bug or you're doing things in a non-RH way (ie.  
trying to do Debian/Ubuntu-isms on a RH derivative). Again, I've been  
caught by this on alternative distributions in the past but I have  
tried to learn what the "right way" is for that distro. What services  
has it opened up, and how have you disabled them?

Interface aliases were deprecated - yes, they were - a long time ago  
in favour of the arcane but powerful iproute2 toolkit. That's probably  
why you can no longer bind to an alias. I guess you now probably have  
to state the IP address in dhcpd.conf instead of the device alias.

Printing via Samba has worked here from day 1. Although I still hate CUPS ;-)

SMB access via \\netbios-name\share\directory works for me.

The Apache config is following a recommended best practice from the  
developers to split out functions into different files - it makes  
managing the config easier, a bit like Debian do with Exim for example.

NetworkManager can be removed, although it's the "new way" I still  
don't like it. But then I have to manage servers too.

I could go on, but I won't. However the first time I try a newer  
Ubuntu release, I'll post my findings shall I? Could be an interesting  
comparison.

If I were you I'd go for a run, shower, go to the pub and go back to  
it tomorrow. And turn off SELinux. It's a PITA and probably more  
trouble than it's worth in your situation.

Graeme