First Look At Fedora 11 Beta Release

Ars Technica has a first look at the latest beta release from the Fedora universe and it has several new shiny-bits including kernel modesetting, ext4, and faster boot times. "Fedora 11, which is codenamed Leonidas, is scheduled for final release at the end of May. It will include several new features and noteworthy improvements, such as RPM 4.7, which will reduce the memory consumption of complex package activity, tighter integration of PackageKit, faster boot time with a target goal of 20 seconds, and reduced power consumption thanks to a major tuning effort. This version of Fedora will ship with the latest version of many popular open source software programs, including GNOME 2.26, KDE 4.2, and Xfce 4.6. This will also be the first Fedora release — and possibly the first mainstream distro release — to use the new Ext4 filesystem by default.

Re:Ext4?

[Anonymous Coward]

a patch was released today.

Re:One question:

[nrgy]

PulseAudio has totally fubared my computer at work and my laptop at home. I disabled it and went back to alsa however I still get soundlockups and other odd things.

These machines ran perfectly fine before Ubuntu made the switch to PulseAudio. Its one thing that drives me insane about Linux distros. They will switch to something new well before its stable and warranted yet packages that are updated and should be the default are left behind "case in point Eclipse".

PulseAudio on Fedora ..

[rs232]

And if you could expand to explain how Pulse Audio [fedoraproject.org] differs and what benefits this will have for end-users? Or even for developers of existing applications too, such as Audacity/Jokosher/Rhythmbox/$general_audio_application.

A lot of things have changed. For example, you can now change the volume of every playback stream seperately. Then, we have better hotplug support: Just plug in your USB speaker and it will appear in your mixer (as long as you use pavucontrol, of course, PA's native mixer tool; the classic gnome-volume-control which we still ship is not hotplug-capable). You can move streams during playback between output devices. With a single click in our "paprefs" tool you can aggregate all local audio devices into a virtual one, which distributes audio to all outputs, and deals with the small frequency deviations in the sound card's quartzes -- and that code even deals with hotplugging/unplugging. If that checkbox is checked, just plugin in your USB headset and you get audio through it. (This is actually pretty cool, and it might be something we enable by default in F9)..

Re:Bad summary.

[TheCycoONE]

It's 2.6.29 of course, but here's the document that says it: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Beats/Kernel [fedoraproject.org]

Ubuntu screwed it up

[SmallFurryCreature]

PulseAudio is the future... but it is also a bit of an X. Not a curse word, X the server. X is fantastic and has features that make other GUI's look very poor indeed. Pity that for most people 99% of it is never needed and indeed gets in the way.

Linux, and for that matter all OS'es have always had trouble with sound. For some reason the powers that be (IBM) never really thought sound was needed beyond an occasional bleep. For a long time your soundcard was made by a taiwanese firm, the type of firm that you would expect to produce dirt cheap clones of western hardware, NOT the only supplier of sound for the IBM-PC (oh okay, leaving out a lot but still).

OSS and even Alsa have problems with apps wanting to lock the soundcard to themselves. PulseAudio is supposed to once and for all end this and make it similar to X in that Pulse Audio can hook up any audio app and any soundcard, even over the network, and mix them together.

Sadly it was released before it was ready and Ubuntu especially implemented it in a really bad way. Hence it got a bad rep because a beta was put badly into a "just works" distro.

But trust me, once you get it working and you are the kind of person who has 2-3 PC's and can never remember which desktop is actually hooked up to a speaker set but just want to play music it is a very nice system.

Re:Finally Fedora?

[armanox]

I stayed away from 9 myself, and then found that 10 after some updates returned most sanity to the Fedora universe.

Re:Ext4?

[Anthony_Cargile]

It only has problems if the system goes down unexpectedly during a series of disk writes, or if the system is rebooted before ext4 has flushed its write cache (30-60 seconds)

I thought since it was journaling, it prevents all of this by writing everything to the journal first and retains said data even if interrupted?

Re:Finally Fedora?

[Binestar]

I'm a long, long time RedHat user. (Since Red Hat Linux 5.1, if you're curious)

You got lucky timing. As an "earlier than that" RedHat user, the 4.2-> 5.0 libc change was a horrible upgrade path. 5 worked great for new systems, but anyone with a good working 4.x system trying to upgrade to 5 had loads of problems. If you were to have gone through that upgrade you might not have stayed with RH as long as you have =)

ubuntu 9.04 beta and fedora 11 beta compared...

[dr_wheel]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_fedora_q209&num=1 [phoronix.com]

Re:Ext4?

[billcopc]

That's the problem, it writes the metadata journal first, and the actual data journal later. So you wind up with metadata pointing to not-yet-written data.

Common sense says it should be the other way around: it's much easier to detect the absense of a file, than to detect that an existing file is full of gibberish.

Re:One question:

[Drew M.]

It was my impression that Fedora was primarily used by people seeking a "stable and low maintenance" RPM-based distro that they don't have to pay for. I've only used it a bit (intranet server at a former employer) so I'm not in on the distro's culture, but that's the impression I've gotten from reading comments by its users and paying (some) attention to its development over the years.

Nope, you would be thinking (or should be thinking) of CentOS http://www.centos.org/ [centos.org]

Re:One question:

[Lendrick]

If someone is used to RedHat and wants a free version of it, they ought to be using Centos [centos.org], which is pretty much an exact duplicate of RedHat Enterprise, except rebranded and free.

Re:Ext4?

[Jurily]

Sounds like a "yes it does have a severe data integrity issue" to me.

It's already been discussed. Basically, if you write a small file, rename it before the data reaches the disk, and power down, you lose.

People have been known to lose GNOME and Firefox config files for instance.

Re:One question:

[Anonymous Coward]

Really because I have hda_intel and have no problems with alsa. Obviously there's more then one person that doesn't have a clue about what they're talking about.

Re:Ubuntu screwed it up

[BertieBaggio]

Honestly, what is this mythical use case in which hearing different sources of digital sound simultaneously is a good thing?

I can't tell from your tone if you're serious or being flippant. It seems like both. However, if you're serious... In addition to sibling posts, I have several other 'mythical' use cases too:

• I sometimes like to listen to music while playing games (when I'm either passing a quick 10-20 minutes, or in a game with crap music).
• I'm normally on a teamspeak [teamspeak.com] server to keep in contact with my buddies.
• Audio notifications. Okay, so you kinda covered that one, but they can be kinda useful. I won't go into this as it's a preference thing.
• Web sites (flash). Sibling has this covered, but I'll mention it too. I hate having to close my media player (and lose my place in the music) to watch a tiny wee clip.

There are undoubtedly others that I can't think of because it's after 3 AM, but you get the idea I think. If you don't want mixing, that's your preference and I have nothing against it, but there are most definitely cases where it is desirable.

I have never understood why this auto-mixing is considered desirable.

Hope this cleared that up for you then.