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Comments: 236 +- Linux: Fedora 12 Released on Tuesday November 17, @01:30PM
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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."
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Great work! (Score:4, Insightful)
If you read the one page release notes [fedoraproject.org], it seems Fedora actually knows how to try to cater to more general audience too, while still supporting the core Linux audience. I have always thought that why Ubuntu became the "standard" general OS you introduce as first Linux, as Fedora does a lot more things a lot better (and the Red Hat delivered design is imo a lot better than whats delivered from Debian)
What was interesting was the "better than ever tablet support". I have been thinking of getting a tablet pc for convenience in bed, and Linux would actually be quite perfect OS for it since theres no need to play games. Seems they're taken things like that into account too, while Linux community usually forgets the non-techie stuff.
Re:Great work! (Score:5, Insightful)
It is subjective that Fedora does 'a lot more things a lot better'. They certainly have distinct aims from Ubuntu and gain some benefits, but I personally find Fedora to suffer some phenomena that Ubuntu does not:
-Out-of-the-box media/driver experience: Fedora goes purist and the out-of-the-box experience suffers for it with lack of popular codecs and optimal drivers for nVidia cards. Ubuntu caters to the user experience and takes care of this out of the box. You have to add RPM fusion repositories to make Fedora cope with this, which isn't insurmountable, but isn't out of the box.
-Fedora is not even stable within a release cycle in terms of offered featureset. I.e. I recall gaim 1.x being replaced with gaim 2.0 one day without requiring any particular update. This is good for enthusiasts who always want the cutting edge, bad for end-users who only want change at certain times they could expect (and for documenters doing screenshots). I recall once Fedora reving the kernel revision entirely without jumping releases. This wasn't bad in and of itself, but they jumped before nVidia supported it, and my X was hosed. Ubuntu is more conservative with this, knowing it will just be 6 months before a new cycle comes anyway.
-Fedora is 'too' comfortable with cutting edge changes, even to the point of releasing versions ahead of upstream *or* backporting code from future versions into older versions that upstream projects didn't want to do. For example, they backported things from the 2.6.32 branch to 2.6.31. The upstream kernel people weren't comfortable enough with the features to allow them into 2.6.31 or any release that aligned with their cycle, so they simply put 2.6.32 stuff into 2.6.31. This has been a longstanding tendency with RH (everyone probably remembers the gcc 2.96 debacle). BTW, this is even worse in RHEL, where they will backport 2.6.3x changes to 2.6.18, severely breaking third party kernel modules that code for the 'API' of 2.6.18 that gets broken by the massive amount of backports. Some third party even writes to newer 'apis', but wraps it with '> 2.6.26' sorts of ifdefs and thus assumes the 'old' api and RHEL will completely screw those assumptions. Ubuntu *usually* doesn't jump the gun (GRUB 2 is an example of going before the upstream declares 'ready' though).
-I *still* can't quite put my finger on it, but something about the Ubuntu desktop feels, subjectively to me, more whole rather than merely a conglomeration of the parts. This may simply be a matter of certain tastes they appear to me, because I can't nail it down.
Parent
Re:Great work! (Score:4, Informative)
Many of these problems you attribute to Fedora are also true of OpenSuse.
Rather than take the Ubuntu approach of popping up a "Do you want to download these non-OSS drivers button" which handles it almost perfectly in every instance and frees the Distro of legal risk, both Fedora and opensuse have historically left you to your own devices, assuring the marginalization of their product.
Opensuse now adds many one-click installs for some of these drivers. http://www.lebokov21.com/2008/01/29/opensuse-1-click-install-your-software/ [lebokov21.com]
Forced into this by US legal situation, the web page based One-Click is better than nothing, but small consolation to someone stuck with an odd-ball network card.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As far as Fedora is concerned, this is not a 'problem'. The problem is rather in distributions which rely to too great an extent on closed source drivers to provide hardware support. For instance, many Ubuntu users upgrading to 9.10 are finding they can no longer use the proprietary ATI/AMD driver for their video card and are using the free driver. Which, it seems, Ubuntu does not pay too much attention to maintaining, as many of them have problems. By contrast, Fedora considers it better that users are enc
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Uh, it's not illegal in any country for a distribution to prompt the user to download and install a package. It's only illegal for them to distribute it themselves. (Hence, the button.)
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Re:Great work! (Score:4, Informative)
Clearly you don't understand how that button works or why its there.
It is there so Ubuntu does not have to bundle drivers that are not OSS.
It causes these drivers to be downloaded directly from the FREE website of the driver manufacturers, be it AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, or whatever.
No copyrights or patents violated.
Canonical IS based in the western world last time i checked.
Parent
Re: (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 d
Re:Great work! (Score:4, Insightful)
``Again, for RHEL, what's the alternative? The whole point of RHEL is to provide long-term stable releases''
And there you have it. It's about stability. If I write software, or a configuration file, or anything else that interfaces with YourSoftware version X, and it works today, I think it is completely reasonable to expect it to also work tomorrow. If you make a new release of YourSoftware tomorrow that doesn't work with my code anymore, it's not YourSoftware version X anymore. It's a different version.
I don't want my distro to be pushing new versions on me that break compatibility.
If you want to introduce new versions, that's fine. In fact, I'm all for it. Just don't replace my working software with the new software that may or may not preserve compatibility. If it doesn't preserve compatibility, I want to have to explicitly upgrade to it. Put it in the next version of the distro. Or put it in a new package which can be installed alongside the old package. But don't put it in the current version of the distro, in the same package, because then you'll have multiple incompatible versions of the same distro with the same version number.
Parent
Re:Great work! (Score:4, Insightful)
-Fedora is not even stable within a release cycle in terms of offered featureset. I.e. I recall gaim 1.x being replaced with gaim 2.0 one day without requiring any particular update. This is good for enthusiasts who always want the cutting edge, bad for end-users who only want change at certain times they could expect (and for documenters doing screenshots).
On the other hand, with Ubuntu you are stuck with old versions of applications until you upgrade the whole system. For application software that is unlikely to break other things, I wish it was possible to upgrade to a new major version without upgrading everything else at once. It shouldn't be pushed as an automatic or opt-out update though, only manual or opt-in.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I used Jaunty as the example because Karmic hasn't really had time to get behind.
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Not much in the way of tricks (a few extra repository lines). Debian backports (and I'm sure Ubuntu backports as well) are versioned such that when you upgrade to a new Debian release, the backport is replaced with the correct version.
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-Fedora is 'too' comfortable with cutting edge changes,
That's why I'm switching from Ubuntu to Fedora - I want cutting edge stuff, but not unstable enought to scare me and break all my stuff. Many fedora package maintainers are red hat programmers who are also important kernel/libc/gcc/gnome/pulseaudio/x.org hackers, they drop cutting edge stuff but it's their stuff and they fix it quickly. Ubuntu packagers however are usually just packagers. Often, Fedora maintainers test features in the distro _before_ th
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Being cutting edge is what I like in Fedora. As for some kernel backports -- among them are btrfs backports. Those are changes which weren't even written when .31 was released. But those changes and fixes are quite important and I'm happy that Josef merged them in .31 shipped by Fedora.
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Fedora is never going to have any market share, because we're not selling anything. There isn't a market. This isn't a glib point, it's an important one. No-one's playing for a share of a dumb customer base, here. That's not what Fedora is about.
Second Google result for 'fedora "microsoft fonts"': http://miltonpaiva.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/fedora-11-x64-%E2%80%93-microsoft-fonts/ [wordpress.com]
Re: (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).
SystemTap (Score:2)
Also available in this release are SystemTap 1.0 for improved instrumenting and debugging of binaries, complete with Eclipse integration
I've tried SystemTap and it looks really really cool . I understand that this project is "dtrace for linux". Can someone with experience with both tools give a rundown on how SystemTap 1.0 currently compares with dtrace?
Re:SystemTap (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know how it compares to dtrace (in this wiki [sourceware.org] it appears that they have feature parity for all the important stuff), but I can tell you that it works quite well and it's very complete and it's well documented. It really deserves the 1.0 version tag.
But in the kernel world very few people seems to use it, it seems that perf + static tracepoints have become the preferred tool for performance diagnostics.
Parent
2012 = year of linux on the desktop (Score:5, Funny)
OMG it's going to hit us!!!!
Oh, sorry. Wrong story.
Still no IA64 support... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, PPC has been dropped as a primary architecture for F13. You can always get it (as well as IA64) from the development branch if they don't make an actual release for it. (Se http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/development/ )
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> Check IBM and other hardware vendors for PPC and Power CPUs.
And how many people are going to run Fedora on a stack of blades? The only reason Fedora PPC still exists is because RH sells enough RHEL to those customers to justify it.
> Do you know what CPU is in the Wii and XBox360?
Do you know that Fedora doesn't run on either of those platforms? And even if you could break the hardware DRM, the lack of drivers, etc. and shovel it on the hardware, the resources suck on both. The Wii is pitiful and t
Fedora Server Hammered (of course) (Score:2)
I just tried to download the Live CD--according to my browser's download manager, it was going to take16 hours! No better luck with FTP from the command line either. You may want to wait until tomorrow.
Re:Fedora Server Hammered (of course) (Score:4, Informative)
Or grab a torrent! http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/ [fedoraproject.org]
Parent
More Torrents == Faster Fedora12 Downloads (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, tried several--same problem. Finally found one that worked via FTP.
Once you get it, help others get Fedora. Bandwidth schedulers can help if you're concerned about that. The demand will be there for a few days as people get it for work. Home users will try on the weekend, so if you can, help out by leaving your torrent up for a week or so.
64 bit x86:
Others:
Sources:
Fedora 12 source CDs [fedoraproject.org]
Fedora 12 source DVD [fedoraproject.org]
Parent
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:Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver... (Score:4, Informative)
It works, and it works amazingly well. I admin 50+ machines and I used to always install both the nvidia and ati closed drivers because users want compiz. A year ago ati cards started working out the box, now so does nvidia.
Parent
Ubuntu influence on marketing materials (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
``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. Nowadays, that's sort of what people have come to expect from a Linux distro, but, before Ubuntu, that was far from given
Re: (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: (Score:3, Informative)
EPEL is pretty good in the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora world, but nowhere near as large and well-maintained as Universe, IMHO.
You're conflating things you shouldn't conflate. RHEL has an intentionally restricted package set; it's restricted to what Red Hat can commit to offer very detailed support for (not a problem Canonical has with Universe or Multiverse). Fedora's package set is entirely different from RHEL's, and EPEL has no relevance to Fedora, you would not use an EPEL repository on a Fedora system.
gparted and ntfs-3g on live cd? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:gparted and ntfs-3g on live cd? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know about gparted but I doubt ntfs-3g will ever be included by default because of IP restrictions. Fedora has always been very careful about anything with IP attached and doesn't include it in the repos. You have to get it from RPM-Fusion.
Actually, ntfs-3g was a ground-up design, and is part of Fedora, and included in most installs. If you have an existing Windows partition on NTFS, you don't need any special utilities or a third-party disc. You can simply resize the partition using the built-in functionality in the installer, and then install into the freed space. There's even an easy "Shrink existing system" option in the installer to make it clearer to those who aren't experts on partitioning mumbo-jumbo.
That aside, thanks for the understanding about legal encumbrances. We make it a point to treat all users as potential remixers and redistributors of our distribution, and want to ensure we're not passing any legal problems off to them.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics [fedoraproject.org] - we have seen over 2.4 million installations of Fedora 11 so far, a 20% increase on Fedora 10. Methodology is extensively discussed on the linked page.
Re: (Score:2)
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Because it fails to install on most generic boxes, in my experiences with it. I usually use Debian because it just works.
Re: (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.
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2 - Did you try the text install option?
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Doesn't always work. I've had this issue with RedHat Linux as well. Sometimes USB just doesn't work very well (RH4/RH5). Haven't run into any version of SuSE/SLES that has the problem, so it's not always the BIOS.
Admittedly, though, I haven't had it with recent versions, only older versions (e.g., RH 4.6 or something).
Multi-touch in Windows 7 (Score:3, Informative)
Multi-touch is not supported by windows yet.
Kindle goes multitouch on Windows 7 [betanews.com]
Dell SX2210T - multi-touch, Windows 7 ready, full HD monitor [gizmag.com]
Windows 7 could hasten touch-screen computers [usatoday.com]
Re:heres hoping (Score:4, Insightful)
theyve fixed pulseaudio while they were at it.
fixed that for you. :)
Parent
Re:heres hoping (Score:4, Funny)
There are no bugs in pulseaudio, the only problem with pulseaudio is you don't love it enough. If everyone could just get to know pulseaudio, to see it for what it truly is rather than just what you read about it, then I think you will find that pulseaudio not only manages your sound, but saves the environment, fixes the economy, cures cancer, and creates world peace.
You would have to be insane not to use pulseaudio, however that requirement will not be a problem for me...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
yeah, RHEL 6 activity started branching a few months back.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
'lightness' is a function of the software you have installed, not the distribution you're running. A 'light' distribution might make it easier to achieve a 'light' package load out and, yes, there are a few dependency choices a 'light' distribution might make differently, but it's nothing really deal breaking. You could run Fedora - or another 'big' distribution, like Mandriva or Ubuntu - perfectly well on such a system, if you make sensible application choices. You might want to look at LXDE as a desktop,