Roland Venter wrote:
Well since Fedora is released under the GPL you are perfectly allowed to repackage the distribution and send it out under a different name. The only requirement I believe is to remove all reference to the Fedora name from the system. I am pretty sure when I read the Fedora license agreement and it mentioned that everything was under the GPL except the name Fedora and some of the jpeg's used for branding in the distro. So as long as you strip out the Fedora name and any reference to Fedora you should be able to customize your own version of the distro.Hi Folks,
I would like to hear your feelings on a couple of issues:
To start off I've been using FC1 on serveral servers since it's initial release and have had little or no problems, only rebooting for kernel upgrades, etc. Before a flame war starts, I agree that for critical production servers you should be running RHEL. My problem is this:
Several customers are SOHO with less than 15 users and simply cannot justify the cost of RHEL or they might as well be running MS SBS, (Some of them actually believe the MS propaganda!)
I've been playing round with a couple of ideas: Create a single CD Fedora installation with only core apps required for business use, eg. postfix, squid, samba etc Better inital setup, like a wizard after the install to add domain entries to automatically configure postfix, samba and the likes, so after the initial reboot you'll have a fully functional server. Aditional testing of updates, maybe a separate yum mirror, so nightly updates install only critical updates.
*important* What I don't want is to reinvent the wheel, the Fedora community is doing great work and we don't need to fork into yet another distro. This should be something between the latest and greatest, FC2, and a stable production environment - RHEL. (maybe if this all works, we can plough some of it back into FC3?)
I'm not very fond of fixed release schedules, if it's broken, fix it and release a new ISO, this will save us answering the same questions on the list time after time.
By stripping down the initial install we can fokus on making Fedora better and we can actually implement some of the suggestions on this list. Being based on Fedora it should be easy to add additional components as required, something like a minimal install and add what you need.
Your thoughts...
Roland
Heck you can even get around the name thing and just use an abbreviation. Call it BCF - Linux (Business Class based on Fedora). The only thing is that you are going to have to set up a mirror for all the patches. Since you have to support your own distro without using the Fedora name you will have to download the source for the patches and recompile them and make sure references to Fedora are removed.
I guess this comes back to the whole forking issue.
You can customize your own distro install by using Anaconda and customizing the install and the available packages. In this scenario the update process is the same as Fedora because you aren't changing the name of the OS or the update mirrors. The only issue with doing it this way is that any knowledgeable user can just log in as root and use yum to grab the extra packages you left off the distro.
Since the whole distro is open source you can pretty much do whatever you want, the only restriction is on the Fedora name, and the amount of work that you are willing to do.
Sincerely, Gerald Thompson
