Fedora 8 Released

Cat in the Hat writes "Fedora 8 has been officially released. Ars Technica has a run-down of what's new in Fedora 8, including the PulseAudio sound daemon, Nodoka visual style, and a new authentication system. 'Another major change in Fedora 8 is the new PolicyKit authentication system that makes authority escalation more secure. Instead of providing root access to an entire program when it needs higher privileges, PolicyKit makes it possible to isolate individual operations that require higher privileges and put them into system services that can be accessed through D-Bus. Another advantage of PolicyKit is that it will give administrators more control over which users and programs have access to individual operations that use escalated privileges.'"

Waiting for Fedora 9

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Not enough reasosns to move from Fedora 7, IMHO, but to each their own. Maybe I'll wait for Fedora 9.

Re:Another one?

[hdparm]

RHEL 5.1 (if you mean this as one of two related distros) is a RHEL 5 re-packed to include all bug/security fixes to date, so if you need to do a new install, there's no need to pull hundreds of updates from RHN.

Fedora 8 isn't related too much to RHEL (RHEL 5 was built on Fedora Core 6). I use only Fedora and Red Hat and I'm probably biased. However, F8 includes some neat stuff that warrants checking up by Linux users in general. It works great, too.

Re:All Hail Choice!

[LingNoi]

Just think of how good it could be if you could actually PAY people to put in the effort to make things right?

mmm? A lot of distros do pay developers. I don't know about Fedora but Ubuntu for example has people on payroll to fix bugs and get things working.

I'm having problems with GNOME.

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed it earlier today, but I'm having all sorts of problems with GNOME. Right after I first started using it, a bunch of different programs starting dumping core. I don't think it's my PC, since it was working fine with Ubuntu for the past 8 months. I switched to KDE, and all of the programs there work. None have crashed. So I'm thinking that the version of GNOME bundled with FC8 is just unstable.

Re:So essentially

[Firewing1]

They copied a bunch of stuff Windows has had for years (policy) or just got (advanced audio).

Do you mean the advanced Windows audio that decreases network performance by up to 90%? [slashdot.org] Oh wait, that was supposed to be a feature! [slashdot.org] My bad ;)

Re:All Hail Choice!

[rayvd]

Red Hat pays many of their developers / admins to work full time or part time on the Fedora project. They have a vested interest after all -- much of Fedora eventually makes its way into RHEL.

Fedora 8 release summary and announcements

[spevack]

There are a few "official" links that people might find useful:

Release Summary -- http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/8/ReleaseSummary [fedoraproject.org]

Release Notes -- http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f8/en_US/ [fedoraproject.org]

Fedora Project Leader's release announcement -- http://lwn.net/Articles/257644/ [lwn.net]

And of course the downloads at http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/ [fedoraproject.org]

Re:So essentially

[iccaros]

I know, don't feed the .. well you know..

this is not a copy of any Microsoft or Apple function. This is closer to Trusted Solaris and ppriv command. that allows users to be given access to services and at what level they are usable, IE the OS is at ADMIN LOW because all user will be able to read that security domain but not write to it.. (read down/ write up) and all logs are published to admin high because most users can write to that level but not read it (so you can't find your actions in a log and remove them, but your programs can write to the log)

in this case though its just a gui interface (not a new function) to the SELinux modules to set privileges at a much greater granularity. example we can give your application root privileges to write to the CDR but only user privileges on every other action, or replace with any OS function including limiting which memory locations it can access, this way the escalation can not be used on any other service/thread or action.

This is apart of the Mandatory access Controls, that along with Role based authentication (root is not a user but a role) gives Linux the ability to be certified as a PL3 and higher system, While Windows in any current state or Mac OS or that matter, would never be able to achieve this accreditation.

GNOME, KDE, and other custom spins

[spevack]

For folks who are downloading, http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora [fedoraproject.org] is the best starting point to the GNOME, KDE, and other spins.

Fedora 8 running on USB keys

[spevack]

Red Hat Magazine posted a HOWTO explaining Fedora 8 booting from a USB key [redhatmagazine.com].

It is one of the more interesting features in Fedora -- users can build their own customized spin of the distro, and then run it on a USB key. Totally custom and portable.

Re:Yet ANOTHER sound server?

[Rayban]

PulseAudio emulates all the other systems with LD_PRELOAD libs so that they are all PulseAudio-aware. This means that your 1998 softphone that uses exclusive open() on /dev/dsp will function, with the magical policy of PulseAudio.

Re:Waiting for Fedora 9

[Eric Smith]

Fedora 7 is horribly unstable,

I've been running Fedora 7 on five machines, including one publicly-visible web and mail server, and have seen no stability issues at all, other than minor problems with one update kernel which were fixed in less than 24 hours. Of course, I'm probably using different parts of F7 than those with which you have had trouble. What areas caused problems for you? And weren't they fixed in F7 updates?

Re:I tried the live cd

[Eric Smith]

actually nvidia is at fault here, they should either release specs or source for their drivers, so that they can be supported properly by Xorg

As ATI has started doing with the R500 and R600 series. So far the technical docs they've released basically only cover the frame buffer, but they've stated that the 3D docs will be forthcoming. (2D acceleration is done using the 3D engine.)

For now, it looks like the 3D graphics hardware with the best open source support is the Intel GMA-X3000 integrated graphics in the G965 and GM965 chipsets. The performance is lower than the bleeding-edge ATI and Nvidia parts, but it's adequate for most purposes.

Re:Yet ANOTHER sound server?

[Burz]

No, the problem is that ALSA also exhibits audio blocking by default, too. Many applications use ALSA directly, and some of those block audio even when nothing at all is trying to use OSS.

Adding another userspace soundserver will just compound the confusion that already exists, while leaving the largest architectural flaw in place.

Re:Yet ANOTHER sound server?

[Anonymous Coward]

Polypaudio might be your eventual savior. Polypaudio was made to be a drop in replacement for the very very old enlightenment sound daemon. esd was used so that multiple sound sources could be played at the same time on OSS. You might want to research alsa dmix in your local distributions forums. Good luck.

Original poster obviously didn't look at all into what PulseAudio actually does, because the one thing PulseAudio does really well compared to everything that came before it is unify all these various sound interfaces under one very modern system.

Incidentally, PulseAudio is PolypAudio. :) (Renamed, of course.) I've been using it on my Debian box for a while instead of ESD (for which it is a very nice replacement). One of my favorite things is that if I hold down a key to make my terminal beep (like the back arrow), the sound mixing is low latency--it plays immediately, and creates this awful sound. But it's what it should do--which makes it so cool. :)

"Magic" of LD_PRELOAD?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

What about statically-linked apps?

What if someone calls _open() instead of open()?

What if someone decides to call their sound device something other than /dev/dsp?

What about programs that need to be setuid and/or setgid?

What about 64-bit machines that can run both 32- and 64-bit apps?

Relying on LD_PRELOAD is a hack and a kludge.

Re:Another one? (yum upgrade...)

[DusterBar]

I have use the yum upgrade method for quite some time. You may wish to check out the Fedora yum upgrade faq [fedoraproject.org] at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq [fedoraproject.org] - there is also a non-official guide to using yum to upgrade a number of RedHat distributions [brandonhutchinson.com] at http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Upgrading_Red_Hat_Linux_with_yum.html [brandonhutchinson.com]

You may want to make sure you read some of the gotchas as if you have packages that are not from the Fedora Project and they are not upgraded or compatible with the newer version you are upgrading to you may need to delete them.

Note also that there are some difficulties in the x84_64 CPU architecture as more things become native 64-bit and thus some conflicts with older releases may happen...

Re:I'm having problems with GNOME.

[kripkenstein]

I installed it earlier today, but I'm having all sorts of problems with GNOME. Right after I first started using it, a bunch of different programs starting dumping core. I don't think it's my PC, since it was working fine with Ubuntu for the past 8 months. I switched to KDE, and all of the programs there work. None have crashed. So I'm thinking that the version of GNOME bundled with FC8 is just unstable.

GNOME is the default on Fedora, so that would be a catastrophe for them. Before we jump to conclusions, we should check one thing: did you verify the checksums on your CD after you burned it? Perhaps there were errors; this can mess up an installation.

Re:Waiting for Fedora 9

[RupW]

I don't think it has GCC 4.2 yet. this [vt.edu] shows gcc 4.1.

Remember that's Red Hat's GCC 4.1 branch, not stock FSF 4.1, and it has a lot of 4.2 features backported to it, e.g. OpenMP and I think recent Intel + AMD processor tuning too.

Actually Fedora are hoping to skip 4.2 altogether and use 4.3 for Fedora 9 - see this thread [gnu.org] from the GCC mailing list.

Re:Finegrained security

[Nibbler999]

The new system is replacing userhelper, so there will be the same number of (or likely fewer) password popup prompts - not more. See the wiki [66.102.9.104] (google cache) for details.

Fedora ISOs via FTP

[Culture20]

If you want a fast FTP connection w/o having to look for a mirror, try ftp://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/fedora/linux/releases/8/ [iu.edu] Torrents are nice and all, but they're not for everyone...

Re:Another one?

[petermgreen]

Using apt-get dist-upgrade blindly is indeed nuts but if you read the release notes and pay attention to what apt plans to do you are pretty safe and unlike with fedora upgrading with the package manager is the supported and reccomended way to upgrade.