Saturday, March 5, 2011

Some differences between Fedora and Ubuntu

I have already noted a few technical differences between Fedora and Ubuntu which I am going to comment.

/tmp cleanup
Fedora does not automatically remove /tmp contents on reboot, I prefer Ubuntu's behavior, applications do not rely on tmp contents across reboots and regular users should not be working on /tmp. If there is no other automated cleanup mechanism -did not check yet-, on the long run the user will get a full root file system.

Repository information cache
I don’t have a YUM technical background, so please excuse me if I will write something terribly wrong here.
From an user perspective I have noted that yum does not have an explicit cache mechanism, you don’t need to explicitly update the cache. The good side it automatically gets the required information when a new repository is added and frees the user from a repetitive action. The bad side is that it may introduce some network/time overhead during package management opertions.

Software update policy
I did not read Fedora’s update policy yet but I have noted that they provide regular release upgrades for some software, piding was updated to 2.7.10 from the regular updates repository.

2 comments:

  1. tmpwatch runs on a daily basis and cleans any files older than 30 days and hence won't fill up the filesystem. check /etc/cron.daily/tmpwatch

    yum cache timing can be controlled via metadata_expiry value in /etc/yum.conf

    Fedora's update policy is

    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Updates_Policy

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  2. Hi Rahul,
    thanks for the information.

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