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."

Many launches

[Goffee71]

First Snow Leopard, tomorrow Windows 7, new Ubuntu, now this... its like their cycles are all coming together.
Play the Windows 7 launch drinking game - here [blogspot.com]

ATI Driver Issues

[KJACK98]

I've been a loyal fedora user since Fedora 8 when I made the switch to it for my primary OS. I upgraded to Fedora 11 from Fedora 8, and now my system has been constantly becoming unresponsive, even the xconfig changes mentioned on their errata page reduced the freezing but still get it randomly. As for the commercial ATI drivers, they suck and all I get is a black screen with a blinking cursor so I for one am praying they have finally resolved this issue in the next release.

Re:Fedora

[Ephemeriis]

Actually I meant the entire lamp stack and I had never heard of yum it's not documented very well and the application yum is not exactly named "install-missing-software" is it. I went with windows XP and the wampserver installation. Works like a charm it installs itself and was trouble free.

You obviously didn't try too hard.

I'm by no means a *nix guru... I spend most of my time working on Windows machines... And the first thing I do when I sit down at a new computer is look for the mouse.

But it only takes about 60 seconds with a web browser [tinyurl.com] to give you a very complete, concise answer. Seriously. It is literally the first result that comes up in Google. Complete, step-by-step instructions. You don't even need to know what yum is.

Why don't they try fixing Fedora 11 first?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many times have you been able to do a 'yum update' or 'preupgrade' without having to worry about whether the system will be able to boot correctly?

How many times has anaconda crashed mid-install, or failed to detect your RAID and decided instead to wipe individual drives without really telling you, or any number of other nagging problems?

'Bleeding-edge' isn't an excuse by any measure; I never run into any problems when upgrading FreeBSD regularly and its ports tree stays far more current than Fedora's yum packages ever will manage.

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[dHagger]

..."brown, and shit"... was that intentional?

Seriously, I have to agree about Ubuntu. I've been using Ubuntu since 6.10, and for the last few releases things have deteriorated. They are pushing things into the distribution before they are ready and/or doing a poor job integrating them. Pulseaudio has never worked OK for me. Notification OSD does not work at all for me, placing notifications outside of the visible area, and replacing a system that works fine. Multi-monitor support (except for fixed configuration in xorg.conf) has been partially broken on all the 6-8 computers I've tried it on. The beta of Kubuntu 9.10 did not have working multi-monitor support at all!

So I'm currently running Windows 7, which beats the *brown* out of Ubuntu. At least on my new shiny hardware. I'm thinking about trying another distribution, just have not decided which one yet. Fedora sounds nice (especially the thing about improved sound and video), you recommend OpenSUSE, and I've also heard a lot of good things about Mandriva. Decisions, decisions...

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

[armanox]

Most of these features that are listed are from the Red Hat and Fedora teams, and some make it upstream. DRI2 is pushed by RH/Fedora, Network Manager was created by Red Hat, and Fedora adds features to GNOME that have made it into upstream. Fedora stands out because they have many features before other distributions because Red Hat contributes much code to these projects.

Fedora is fine

[kokoko1]

Before switching to Fedora I was using Slackware for almost two years and now I am using Fedora from last 3 and half years. I thinks Fedora is the best Distro out their, I am using it as my primary OS on my work and home laptops (F10, F11) without any issue. At work I use wireless Internet, Fedora support Intel base wireless cards out of the box, at home i use wired network. At my previous job as sysadmin (telecommute) our all servers were running xen/UML virtualization and host/guest OSs were Fedora. I remember we have to upgrade the host/guest OSs using yum and the whole process of upgrading online was easy. someitme we get into issue which get resolved in no time. So IMHO Fedora is the best Linux distro and with my past experience i do not find any issue using Fedora as Server OS.

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Daengbo]

Agreed. Ubuntu doesn't seem to have enough core developers for what they try to do. My feeling is that they have grown out of control. The original "one CD with limited options and only the best software" mantra that made Ubuntu 4.10 interesting has been cast off, universe and multiverse are huge and unmanageable, and core technologies are broken every release.

When your default applications have blocker bugs (F-Spot photo manager sidebar is invisible, F-Spot doesn't work on a supported platform, included plug-ins don't work on Totem movie player or Rhythmbox music manager, or Brasero burning application can't burn a DVD, for starters) and well- and long-supported chipsets with open drivers fail to work with new versions (RaLink wireless and i945 graphics), there really is no reason to release.

Canonical needs to step back, Ubuntu needs to consolidate, and both need to focus on "just works in default install" issues.