I'm not sure that documentation is correct - there were some changes in the installer for F17 that lowered that memory requirement and we explicitly tested installs with 512 MiB (the hard coded minimum for install with Fedora 17). I've seen reports of successful installs with 384 MiB and enough swap (using the nomemcheck boot parameter) but AFAIK, that isn't supported and YMMV.
As far as why the installer needs that much memory, there are several things but yum, rpm and selinux are big memory users.
While it is a little old, one of the Anaconda (the name of the installer used in Fedora) developers did an analysis on where all the memory is used during installation [1] which I found to be rather interesting.
"Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 2,155,876 tested so far."
Huh, that's awesome ... in a bad way. According to that page , both my system fonts and browser plugin details are unique among the browsers they've tested thus far.
Unfortunately, gnome-shell doesn't work well in VMs due to the fact that it requires 3D acceleration. AFAIK, virtualbox is the only platform that supports 3D emulation but I can't speak to how well it works because I haven't tried it myself.
However, software rendering support has been recently added to rawhide (which will become Fedora 17 in about 6 months). If you're interested in seeing gnome-shell in a VM, you may want to give Fedora 17 a try when it is released.
Yes, you can upgrade that way but it's not recommended (see the warning @ the top of that page). That upgrade method isn't really tested and may or may not work depending on your system.
You'd be much better off using PreUpgrade (making sure you update your system first) [1] or the install media. If you don't want to burn a DVD or CD, you can make a bootable USB stick with the iso [2].
Wow, it works for me with FF 7.0.1 and nouveau on Linux. A little laggy when I go fullscreen, sure but the last time I tried viewing WebGL FF told me that my 3D setup wasn't supported.
Anyhow, cool presentation. It's impressive to see how WebGL is progressing.
"Testing is a tool for helping you, not for using to engage in a 'more pious than thou' dick-swinging my Cucumber is bigger than yours idiocy. Testing is about giving you the developer useful and quick feedback about if you're on the right path, and if you've broken something, and for warning people who come after you if they've broken something. It's not an arcane methodology that somehow has some magical 'making your code better' side-effect..."
I liked this part; it made me laugh. I also get red flags whenever I hear "X is the one true way to do Y" statements. Personally, I don't think that there is much in life that is so black and white that there could be "one true way" to do anything.
My understanding of the original agile methodologies was that each team/company needed to do what worked for them. Sure, you could follow some book to the letter and hire some certified SCRUM master but odds are, some deviations from the written plan are needed for the best results.
Either way, I'm generally a fan of TDD, test automation and metrics ... where they make sense and where they aren't going to be abused. Use tools and methodologies that make sense for the current situation, not just because some book/person tells you that you'll fail unless you use them.
I've never applied for a job at Amazon but I have done the same thing with other companies. When I was last looking for a job, I found a couple of interesting positions whose HR systems would only take resumes in MS Word. I closed the tab and kept searching.
For me, it's a practical and ideological thing. My resume is written in LaTeX (with a plain text version) and unless I'm missing something, there is no good or easy way to convert from LaTeX to MS Word. I also have doubts about a company that insists on word documents - it smells like inflexibility and a heavy-handed top down management approach.
Word should be perfectly happy reading that. And a lot of places that say they only accept Word won't notice the difference. (I don't know about Amazon.)
Actually, a lot of the places that require Word format use a tool which extracts relevant information from the resume to automatically populate their database. For some reason those custom tools don't work with text documents (go figure).
I think the source of this is that they use third party tools that automatically store/index/rip apart your resume for keywords. Theres obviously no reason why the third party tools don't support plaintext files, but it seems that they don't.
Considering Amazon didn't develop the system, I don't think the choice of software by the HR department is really something that is safe to make generalizations from.
<quote>
All the effort we put into technology might not matter that much if we kept technology off to the side in some sort of R&D department, but we don’t take that approach. Technology infuses all of our teams, all of our processes, our decision-making, and our approach to innovation in each of our businesses. It is deeply integrated into everything we do.
</quote>
According to Bezos you're wrong. If technology infuses all of their processes that also includes hiring.
I honestly think its a bit of a stretch to think that Bezos was talking about the HR department when he said that. Do you think he was talking about the people that vacuum the floors and sell sandwiches in the cafeteria too?
The CentOS kernel is just a rebuild, so there is no problem there. In the case of the centosplus kernel, because it may add patches, some extra steps might be needed. But again, that is not a major issue.
Disclosure: I do work for Red Hat, but not on RHEL. Just posting info I saw earlier.
One of the proposed long term goals (still going through the approval process) for the Fedora project is to lower the barrier of entry for new members (Not a great link but one of the better ones that I could find: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meeting:Board_meeting_2010-12...)
DISCLOSURE: I do work for Red Hat on the Fedora project but my interest in open source is also personal. I suggested this because it seemed appropriate and I'm familiar with it.
Thanks -- I'm going to apply! I have always had a Linux flavor on dual-boot on my PC for learning and tinkering. I'm more about end-user and customization documentation rather than admin/install, but hopefully they can use me!
[1] http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=274611