First Look At Fedora 11 Beta Release 205
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.
One question: (Score:5, Insightful)
Has PulseAudio been either removed or fixed?
I'm off Linux until that crap gets sorted out. It infected Ubuntu too, for some reason.
Re:One question: (Score:4, Insightful)
That will never happen.
It really sucked when most of the users could never have more than one application using audio simultaneously. Also controlling the devices could not be offered via unified user interface.
If you have a problem with pulseaudio, please consider filing bug reports.
Re:Ext4? (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Sounds like a "yes it does have a severe data integrity issue" to me.
Re:One question: (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I remember those days--a couple years ago, if not more. Audio was finally working great out of the box, and even not-that-bad to configure manually in Gentoo.
Now, it's all screwed up again in the distros that switched to PulseAudio. We got alpha-quality software pushed on us.
I assure you, there are plenty already.
Re:One question: (Score:5, Insightful)
Criticizing Ubuntu is fair enough since they intend to be a user friendly distro, but criticizing Fedora for switching to PA early is way off base. It says right in Fedora's objectives they aim to "Be on the leading edge of free and open source technology". If you want a stable and low maintenance system I think Fedora is not the distro for you.
Re:Ubuntu screwed it up (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure it's the future. The features sound great. Doesn't goddamn work right yet, though.
That's why I said, "removed or fixed" rather than just "removed". I'll accept "fixed". Awesome. I'll also accept "change reverted until PulseAudio is beyond alpha (generously, beta) stages".
Personally, I stopped having trouble with audio in Linux at least a couple years ago, so suddenly breaking it with a half-finished implementation of a new audio server is very, very annoying, especially from the "Just Works" distros. It would have been one thing if PulseAudio actually added some kind of functionality that I wanted, but there were zero new features I needed from my existing system, so it didn't. Also would have been fine if they switched it but everything I used kept working fine, but that didn't happen.
Re:One question: (Score:2, Insightful)
Really? Most people I hear of using it do so because they're used to Red Hat and want a free version of it, not to be on the "leading edge". I mean, most distros make claims like that; it's a marketing sort of statement. Doesn't mean they intend to release unstable/untested/unfinished software.
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.
Re:Biggest problems (Score:1, Insightful)
You don't have to "reinstall" to upgrade. All you have to do is boot from the install media and chose "upgrade".
I can't believe how everyone is repeating this misconception.
Re:One question: (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? Most people I hear of using it do so because they're used to Red Hat and want a free version of it, not to be on the "leading edge".
Obviously, I can't speak for why most other people use Fedora. I suspect anyone using it for the reasons you state are misinformed.
Fedora's goal is to be bleeding edge. They are pulling the latest versions of almost everything with the philosophy that the only way to stabilize these things is to get them into a real system used by people.
This will mean occasional brokenness as seen with KDE4, pulseaudio, networkmanager, etc. Obviously, Fedora does not want to put out a broken distribution and so they work hard to get things usable. But if you are looking for the stability of RedHat distributions, Fedora is the wrong place to look.
Re:Wrong focus (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't care if it boots in 20 or 30 seconds
Apparently quite a few people do.
kernel based mode setting (so it flickers a bit, XP also does this)
Well, I mean "we" are tring to be better than that though, right?
ext4 (more testing plz)
That's been in Fedora testing for quite some time. So I would leave that decision up to them and not assume they weren't testing it.
management tools for virtual machines
Better than virt-manager i take it?
to finally be able so sync my phone without jumping through hoops. Same with using a webcam. And I would love to run Office 2007 SP1 on it, since I could try converting some machines at work to Linux. This would make my live a LOT easier
That's a bit beyond the scope of a distribution though, no?
Re:Ubuntu screwed it up (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I have never understood why this auto-mixing is considered desirable. I like that an application locks the soundcard. I listen to high-quality music while I work - why on Earth would I want another application mixing something else into that? The effect of two different tracks of music sequences superimposed is virtually always hideous cacophony - no thanks. I don't need a perky jingle to inform me that a download has finished. I am actively grateful to X for preventing the browser from interfering with my enjoyment. If I wanted your web site to make noise, I'd rub my thumb against the monitor! Honestly, what is this mythical use case in which hearing different sources of digital sound simultaneously is a good thing?
Re:Ext4? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't even search my disks hardly ever, since I keep everything logically organized myself, so metadata is one of those features (next to indexing) that I don't even appreciate, although I'm sure there are users that do.
Keep in mind that "metadata" here is referring to much more than things like extended attributes, and in fact is probably NOT referring to those. "metadata" here means stuff like the inode and indirect blocks, which you definitely DO care about because it's what lets you access your data.
Metadata journaling saves this information so that you don't have things like blocks that are doubly-allocated or just lost because they aren't part of any file but aren't on the free list, which is what fsck saves.
Re:Ubuntu screwed it up (Score:2, Insightful)
I listen to high-quality music while I work - why on Earth would I want another application mixing something else into that?
Because you want to pause your music player and watch a youtube video someone linked you to?
(Granted, this is sort of Flash's problem for keeping the card locked longer than necessary, but it's still a problem. Sound is set up crappily on the system I'm on now, and it appears that only one program can access it at once unless I manually start esd or something like that. If I want to have sound in Flash (and thus youtube), which I want fairly often, I might need to have nothing else holding the sound card when I start firefox. It's definitely the case that if I go to a page with flash, the sound card remains locked by FF until I close it. Which means if I want to start listening to other music, I have to close firefox, which at best is annoying and at worst loses state.)
Re:In Defense of Pulseaudio (Score:3, Insightful)
Having read "The Perfect Setup" - all those config files in your home directory? That is waaaaaaaaaay too complicated.
We, the people, just want a plug and play solution to detect the hardware, set some reasonable defaults and provide intuitive gnome wizards (or kde 4.x if you prefer) to configure the rest.
I hear it'll be the year of the Linux Desktop soon. :( I could list other non plug and play bugbears... It's 2009; the days of hand-editing umpteen configuration files for I/O devices should be over.
Re:One question: (Score:4, Insightful)
Right on.
I was just talking with a group of *nix heads two days and the outpouring of disgust around so many distros switching to PA was incredible.
Apparently it didn't work well, or at all, for anyone in the group!
The other commonality was everyone agreed that audio was finally starting to work _well_ before the switch!