Fedora 12 Released 236
AdamWill writes "The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 12 today. With all the latest open source software and major improvements to graphics support, networking, virtualization and more, Fedora 12 is one of the most exciting releases so far. You can download it here. There's a one-page guide to the new release for those in a hurry. The full release announcement has details on the major features, and the release notes contain comprehensive information on changes in this new release. Known issues are documented on the common bugs page."
Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver... (Score:4, Interesting)
I notice in the release notes [fedoraproject.org] they're using the Nouveau [freedesktop.org] driver for NVidia cards. I've been meaning to check the status of that driver for a while now -- but is this common in distros yet? (I'm a sysadmin mostly working on servers, so I'm a little out of touch. :-)
Re:Fedora? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Great work! (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, what alternative do you suggest for introducing desired new features into older kernel versions? It's not really the case that upstream 'didn't want to' backport things from 2.6.32 to 2.6.31, it's just not what upstream does. Upstream kernel maintainers do not maintain kernel version X once it's released, they go on to work on kernel version Y, pretty much. That doesn't mean it's somehow wrong for a distribution to do it, often it's the right thing to do, and Fedora is not the only distribution that does this (Ubuntu does it too, in some cases).
Again, for RHEL, what's the alternative? The whole point of RHEL is to provide long-term stable releases, but customers also want support for newer hardware. When RH has several thousand large customers all screaming for support for their shiny new SAN hardware that they just spent several zillion dollars on, saying 'well, we're not going to backport that driver to kernel 2.6.18' isn't really an option, and updating them all wholesale to a new kernel release probably wouldn't be the best idea in the world either. What would you suggest RH does instead?
Re:Fedora? (Score:3, Interesting)
Because it fails to install on most generic boxes,
That may be true for some values of "Generic", but this is less so than in the past.
Historically Fedora installs insecure, requiring that you run around closing ports and shutting down daemons that were set up by default.
Ubuntu and opensuse default to the opposite, which is all the home user really needs.
I can not say that 12 still carries on this absurd Red Hat tradition, because I have not yet given 12 a try.
Re:Great work! (Score:3, Interesting)
The primary example of this is yum, which is a third rate program by comparision to apt. In fact, my personal opinion is that the success of Ubuntu has been down to properly maintained and comprehensive apt-repositories. When I left Fedora, yum had nothing in the same league as these, and dependency hell was very much still with the platform.
It's funny you say that, because that was also my problem - but with apt and debian. Also their repositories contain apps that are stupidly build and are missing features (and if you want those features, you have to compile it yourself which defeats the purpose of using a package manager to begin with).
Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials (Score:3, Interesting)
``Wait, did Fedora even have marketing materials before Ubuntu?''
They didn't need to, because they are the free version of Red Hat and Red Hat _was_ Linux in a lot of people's minds.
But when Ubuntu came around, it quickly got so popular that it scared the big distros into getting their act together. Ubuntu's killer combo was the combination of working package management with ease of use.
The only amazing thing about that was it took RedHat so long to get their act together. rpm needed some way of searching package repositories for years. Mandrake had urpmi and Debian had apt-get years before RedHat had anything comparable.
Re:Fedora? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Dead platforms.... (Score:1, Interesting)
The itanium is still very much a good product, it simply has a very niche market. I have built and maintain a great deal of ia64 clusters, primarily for Nastran. For that particular product, it kicks fucking ass over all others for price/performance. Why would you use fedora on a system that costs 90k per node? Just use RHEL, sheesh.
gparted and ntfs-3g on live cd? (Score:3, Interesting)