Fri, 20 Nov 2009
Fedora 12
I have been using Fedora 12 on my laptop for a week now, and on my primary workstation for three days. So far I have walked through Bugzilla and checked that most of my bugs are still present in F12. But apart from that, there has not been any unpleasant surprise so far. The new KMS code and X server for Radeon cards work as expected, so I am looking forward to install F12 also to my dual-seat workstation at home. So far it is OK. Well, except ...
... except this
bug (covered also in
fedora-devel
and also at Slashdot).
I wonder who could seriously have thought this feature would be an improvement?
Probably if the Anaconda can ask whether this is a single-user workstation,
and only then enable it, it would be bearable. But having it on by
default is simply insane. The fact that to disable it, the 6+ lines file
in an undocumented format in four-levels deep directory under
/var/lib should be created, just underlines the gross insanity
of the whole thing.
I have been a long-term supporter of using Fedora also for other purposes than a single-user workstation, but apparently it seems that some Fedora maintainers either do not care (see my post about GDM), or - what is worse - some are actively trying to undermine the other usages of Fedora.
We have been considering returning Fedora to some of our computer labs (to solve some problems with that African-Debian distro), but with this problem I am not sure whether this is a good thing to do anymore.
Update - Fri, 20 Nov 2009: Resolved after all
From fedora-devel:
[...] Executive summary
We'll make an update to the F12 PackageKit, so that the root password is required to install packages.
Glad to see this being resolved relatively fast. This was the most voted-for bug in the Fedora bugzilla (by a factor of almost 10).