Fedora 12 Beta Released

AdamWill writes "The Fedora project has announced the release of Fedora 12 Beta, which is available here. This will be the final pre-release before the final release in November. New features of Fedora 12 highlighted in the announcement include substantial improvements and fixes to the major graphics drivers, including experimental 3D acceleration support for AMD Radeon r600+-based adapters; improved mobile broadband support and new Bluetooth PAN tethering support in NetworkManager; improved performance in the 32-bit releases; significant fixes and improvements to audio support, including easy Bluetooth audio support; initial implementation of completely open source Broadcom wireless networking via the openfwwf project; significant improvements to the Fedora virtualization stack; and easy access to the Moblin desktop environment and a preview of the new GNOME Shell interface for GNOME. Further details on the major new features of Fedora 12 can be found in the release announcement and feature list. Known issues are documented in the common bugs page."

Fedora

[sopssa]

In my opinion Fedora is the best distro out there, a lot nicer to use than Debian (and especially Ubuntu) too. Also their repositories contain lots of software and they're actually put there correctly - hundreds of times I've run into missing or non-working features with other distros repositories.

Seems they're actually also improving exactly what needs to be improved - graphics driver support, sound support, bluetooth support and wireless networking support. Other distros usually seem to go select just some more obscure improvements, but these should affect lots of users.

I like it.

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

You should definitely solely base your opinion of Fedora on 1) an incident years ago and 2) a beta version. I mean, why would anyone download and use an actual release?!? That's just crazy talk.

Re:Many launches

[Vancorps]

Windows 7 is the best OS I've used in years!

Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Picass0]

I've used Fedora since it was split off from RH, and I used RedHat going back to 5.2. For most of that time it was one of the best supported distros from the user community point of view. More recently the pendulum appears to have swung to Ubuntu. Aside from package management what are the differences I would notice by giving Ubuntu a try this time?

Not a particularly exciting release

[Improv]

For those of us who are happy with our hardware support and don't use virtualisation, there's nothing I see in this release for us. Maybe Fedora 13 will be more interesting.

Re:Great!

[nschubach]

Yeah! The kicker is that none of them lock you out of features because you bought "the cheap one."

Re:Fedora

[discogravy]

There's a menu item for installing software, but honestly, if you don't know what yum is and how it's used to install software in redhat-based distros -- especially if you couldn't be bothered to google it and instead thought installing windows would be easier -- windows is where you need to be. that's not meant as an insult either; linux is not for you.

Re:Fedora

[sopssa]

Is apt-get/apt-cache then?

When you're moving to a new OS you should atleast get to know some basic things about it, and how to install software is probably the most basic one.

But even if thats too much to figure out, you have the GUI installer (not that I've ever used it)

Re:Great!

[sbeckstead]

Yeah that may be true but if you have to choose from 400 what features do they all have and how long will it take to find the ONE that has the features that I need. If none of them do, how many have ALL the features so I don't have to choose. I've been told that the beauty of Linux is that if the feature doesn't exist I can just write it myself.
What if I don't have the time, skills or money for that I'll just go with the least confusing solution I can find that has the closest feature set.

I'll trade a bit of money and lock in for the simplicity of buying it off the shelf and knowing it's a multinational company with a huge customer service department.
Just playing Devil's advocate. I've been a Linux fan since kernel version 0.29. But I just can't find a distro that works out of the box. I'm playing with Mint but even that has holes and I just can't download a .exe or a .msi that installs a feature that is missing that I need. Oh what is the command that is like yum for Mint? All the distros seem to have a different way to get missing software but I can never remember what it is and do they all actually get all the dependencies and versions correctly. I seem to never be able to guess which dependent version goes with what it is that I'm trying to install.

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[gr8_phk]

I agree. My Fedora sequence has been: 3,4,5,7,9,10, and now 12. The pace of improvement has slowed down to where it's not that exciting, but that's actually a good thing IMHO it means things are "good" and "stable". I'm still unhappy that 12 doesn't seem to have the driver for e1000 wireless in the install (you can yum it from the other repo but not until final I guess). I believe that is in 2.6.32 kernel, so it should make it for Fedora 13.

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[jjohnson]

Really? You fail to do something that millions of other people do without issue, and the problem is Fedora?

Most "Features" Have Nothing To Do With Fedora

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the features announced have nothing to do with Fedora and everything to do with the Linux Kernel, the X Window System and the respective desktops. This means that any distro with these components will have these features.

What makes Fedora unique among distros? How has that changed or been improved? What has been done to integrate all that FOSS into Fedora? What patches have been applied to the Kernel? What are the admin tools? Anything new in the install process?

Just listing features of software others have independently developed tells me nothing about Fedora as a distro.

Re:Fedora

[h4rr4r]

So are you a troll or an idiot?

Because with the story you are laying out here it is one or the other.

Re:Fedora

[ebuck]

Well, if you can't manage "yum install httpd", you are better off staying with Win98.

Pretty sad statement but yeah if you think win98 is better than Redhat linux I guess you're right.

That's not exactly what the grandparent poster said. The grandparent poster said something more like, "Since you haven't learned anything since Windows 98, you should stick to the operating system you're proficient in."

Re:Fedora

[AdamWill]

well. um. it does. yum takes care of the dependencies for you. all you have to do is tell it what you want to install.

try as I might, I _really_ can't see any qualitative difference between the two. You seem to be assuming that it's blindingly obvious that you should use this 'wampserver' thing to install the stack on Windows, but I've no idea why. I'd never heard of it until I came across this thread. How did you magically know that the right tool to use to install the stack on Windows was 'wampserver'? I'm betting you didn't; you either did research yourself and found this tool, or you were given the benefit of this knowledge by someone else who had. How is that any different from doing a couple of minutes of research yourself to learn about yum, or being told about it by other people in this thread?

also, you didn't answer the question about updates, which is rather important. Does this 'wampserver' thing take care of keeping the whole stack up to date with security updates for you?

Re:Fedora

[koxkoxkox]

So, you feel more comfortable in a system you know and for which you researched online beforehand than on an unknown system without Internet ? How is that surprising ? How is that the fault of Redhat ?

Re:Most "Features" Have Nothing To Do With Fedora

[Daengbo]

I respect Red Hat and Fedora for being such pure FOSS organizations. Kudos. You guys prove that you can have your cake (be FOSS) and eat it, too (make a good profit).