Fedora 19 Alpha Released 83
hypnosec writes "Following delays due to UEFI, the alpha version of Fedora 19 'Schrödinger's Cat' has been released. The alpha version brings with it all the features of Fedora 19, including the updated desktop options – GNOME 3.8, KDE Plasma 4.10 and MATE 1.6. Other new features include Developer's Assistant – a tool that would allow developers to code easily with ready templates, samples and more; OpenShift Origin – through which users will be able to deploy their own Platform-as-a-Service infrastructure; Ruby 2.0.0; Scratch; Syslinux – provides for simplified booting of Fedora; systemd Resource Control – which allows for modification of service settings without requiring a reboot; and Checkpoint & Restore. Downloads and release notes available at the Fedora Project site."
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Or grab the source and build a GNOME 2. It's not necessarily simple to do, but nothing stops you.
What's sad about the whole thing is that no distro seams to be able to offer BOTH 2 and 3 at least for now, so that users can use an environment that actually works instead of a slightly less working environment which may become better in a couple of years or so.
Re:You lost me at... (Score:5, Informative)
No one offers GNOME 2 because it's effectively dead. MATE is the replacement.
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No one offers GNOME 2 because it's effectively dead.
At least Red Hat will support GNOME 2 on RHEL 6 until 2020.
MATE is the replacement.
It would have been so much better if things had just worked. We have a lot of multiuser machines and not everyone wants to switch to GNOME 2 yet. We would have been so much happier if we could have GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 available in the login window and let users choose which one they wanted. It's just ridiculous that we have to rename everything just to get things to work side by side.
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after about 12 years of Red Hat then Fedora,
I switched to Fuduntu, and very pleased about it.
gnome 2, bottom panel the way I want it :)
(only thing still missing is the netspeed applet)
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Gnome 2 just won't work with the new gimp and vice versa.
Gimp works just fine with MATE or XFCE, heck, all of these use gtk-2 rather than the pile of regressions called gtk-3. On most distributions you can't install "real" Gnome 2 any more because Gnome 3 hijacked its names despite having little to do with it, but that's been worked around.
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Interesting. Can you have both of them installed at the same time?
Re:You lost me at... (Score:4, Informative)
Its pretty much impossible to install gnome2 and gnome3 on the same system, or have them both in the same repo (unlike plenty of other similar sized projects what you can have multiple versions installed (KDE3 and 4, as many GCC, python and kernel versions as you want))
https://lwn.net/Articles/466872/ [lwn.net]
mate solved this difficult technical problem, mostly by doing 's/gnome/mate/g' (since then they have modernised the code, removed most of the deprecated libraries, and added useful features)
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It's been a while since I actually tried, but I'm under the impression that it should work as long as you install it under a different prefix, such as /opt.
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might be doable. but i suspect not in a way that a distro could offer them both and have selecting between them at gdm work (most distros would not accept the kind of hacks you would need).
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Absolutely, that's the problem. If the distributions could offer both GNOME 2 and 3, hopefully even at the same time, then I would be very happy.
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That's the problem. We shouldn't have to rename something to MATE. It should have just worked.
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And a little further down, MATE 1.6. Fixed.
Re:You lost me at... (Score:5, Informative)
It's a bit like Windows 8.1 re-introducing the Start menu.
Maybe one day we'll wake up and the Gnome shell and Windows 8 were all a bad dream.
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Gnome 3.8 comes with "Classic mode" which re-introduces features like the top-left App menu and the window switcher panel at the bottom of the screen, but built on Gnome3 technology.
It's a bit like Windows 8.1 re-introducing the Start menu.
Maybe one day we'll wake up and the Gnome shell and Windows 8 were all a bad dream.
Stop ruining his bitching session.
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Sadly, Gnome 3.8 "classic mode" is a bad joke that has the superficial look of some details but hardly any of the functionality.
Just install MATE or XFCE and never look at Gnome again. From the direction they're going it doesn't seem Gnome 3 has any chances of being usable this decade.
Re:You lost me at... (Score:5, Funny)
dear gnome 2 users. here is gnome 3.0. we have changed everything, and it wont run on you 3 year old laptop any more. hope you like it because it will be really hard to keep using gnome2 while keeping up to date with other packages.if you don't like it please just wait a few years and we'll bring back some of the old features as a classic mode. hey, where have you all gone?
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Can anyone explain to me the reasoning behind the hatred of gnome 3?
Besides the whole "my gui doesn't work like win95 anymore and I really want to use something named gnome" crybaby shtick, I mean. Is there something besides that which I'm missing?
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No, idiot. I've spent more time than it's worth doing that and the vast, vast majority of what it's revealed are:
a) legitimate but ultimately insignificant bug reports which are not fundamental design flaws
(the minority)
or,
b) people who literally have zero ability to differentiate their emotions from reality and yell and scream about how awful it is because it's different.
While I understand the sentiment, I don't care at all. If it doesn't feel like windows 95, and you hate it, that's cool, but it doesn't
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1. If you're looking for an idiot, you should probably look in a mirror.
2. If you can seriously defend the way for instance virtual desktops are handled, and how you're forced to continuously race your mouse-pointer back and forth across your widescreen monitor to accomplish anything with them, you're welcome. And NO, keyboard shortcuts or plugins and what not does NOT qualify as "solutions". Those are epic fail workarounds.
3. That's just the beginning. If you're serious about finding out what's wrong with
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I'm expressly not looking for idiots. I wanted a real answer to why the hatred for gnome3 is so strong, but it seems like the only strong criticisms of it are idiotic in nature.
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Ok, I'll keep this brief.
Anything that makes you move your cursor back and forth for miles during a day is just plain fail. It's not just bloody annoying, it's an ergonomic problem, and it shows that you actually didn't think things through.
I specifically dismissed plugins and keyboard shortcuts because they are A) far from intuitively discoverable, B) indistinguishable from magic to any non-hard core user, and C) it's the absolute favorite excuse for gnome-apologists when you point out a flaw in the UI. I'
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We're not talking about some convoluted 5-key shortcuts here. We're talking about pressing the super key.
Re:You lost me at... (Score:4, Interesting)
Some of us manages hundred or thousands of Linux desktops and workstations. One of the reasons why we were able to deploy Linux at all and throw out Windows XP was in large parts thanks to GNOME and all the great work that has been used to refine it.
GNOME 3 is at a stage where it might work on someones personal laptop, but it's not yet something which you want to deploy it in a large enterprise environment. There's a lot of good ideas in GNOME 3, but it's not yet ready. This would have been a non-issue if we had been able to have both GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 installed side by side in a setup supported by the distributions. I know that MATE exists, and that's good; but it's sad that we had to rename everything and break a lot of things that worked.
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I basically completely agree with this.
I like gnome 3 specifically for these reasons. I like the ideas, and I like where it's going, and I actually think it's great for personal use.
I'm 100% sympathetic to it's effect on larger, centrally-administered networks, but I still don't really understand the hate for it. Can't you just keep using gnome 2, or xfce, or kde, or whatever? Is the fallback mode that awful?
I agree that it's not ready for primetime, but that doesn't explain the vitriol, especially since
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it is very different. some people prefer gnome2 over gnome3, just like some people prefer kde or e17 or xfce or xmonad. it would be odd for a distro to say we are removing gnome, you will use e17 now. (you can't parallel install gnome2 and gnome3, or easily have them both in the same distro).
it has higher system requirements. on my netbook i could no longer use an external display, because my GPU did not support large enough openGL textures. with gnome2 it was fine. llvmpipe may be a solution now, but i can
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Thanks for your viewpoint. I basically agree with this on the major points completely.
It sounds like I had similar experiences when I first tried it for one of the earlier 3.x releases (not the original rollout, which sounded like an extinction-level event). It crashed frequently, there were module incompatibilities that would cause it to hang with gdm, there were usability issues that seemed like they were obviously of the "we'll get to that later" nature, etc. It had issues with certain graphics cards.
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thanks for your input, as well.
I 100% understand and sympathize with this. The release of gnome3 was completely mismanaged and caused all kinds of collateral damage, but for me, the reaction to it is separate from the desktop. I like the product, just not how it was done.
It's especially true for me with Fedora. RHEL and CentOS are great, in my opinion, but Fedora is basically a non-starter because of issues like this that ripple their way throughout an entire installation. I originally tried installing
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well that's basically how I feel, too. Except I've found gnome-shell to be pleasnat and usable, especially after installing a newer version and just trying it out for a bit. I originally found myself excessively having to switch to the activities/workspace overview mode because of, say, having a bunch of pdf or documents open whose thumbnails were difficult to distinguish between or because the thumbnails felt like they had a randomness to their ordering. And not knowing that I could slide between worksp
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Good luck with that code name (Score:1)
Let's just see how much breaks with that ASCII compliant name. :-)
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It doesn't matter if things do break, we'll never find out thanks to this ;-)
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=922433 [redhat.com]
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Probabilistic distro (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Probabilistic distro (Score:5, Funny)
You will not know if it will erase your disk until you try to boot it.
It's more like:
If the display on your Fedora19 box is in sleep mode and you know that the Fedora 19 kernel panics once a day because of a poorly written kernel module you cannot know whether it OS has panicked until you wake the display. Until then all you can do is calculate the probability that the kernel has panicked as the sleep time of the display approaches 24 hours. Thus your Fedora 19 box is both in a state of kernel panic and running normally at the same time until you wake the display and 'fix its state'. The interesting thing is what happens if you try to cheat by pinging your Fedora 19 box from your laptop. Assuming you have a perfect network connection you can only tell whether the system is up or not, you cannot tell whether it's lack of response is due to a kernel panic or a segfault in the network daemon. You can only calculate the probability of the lack of response being due to a panic since, on your badly broken Fedora 19 box, panics happen more frequently than segfaults in inetd do. So you get closer to inferring the state of your Fedora 19 box but you cannot be entirely sure by simply pinging it, you need more information but not so much that you fix the state.
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Re:Probabilistic distro (Score:4, Funny)
That was awesome. But not until I read it.
Right, until then it sucked and was awesome simultaneously.
Good Name (Score:1)
Does that mean that it will be both good and shit at the same time?
Installer? (Score:4, Interesting)
Did they fix the installer? Once I got it installed, Fedora 18 (with KDE) is pretty good, but the installation was a bitch. The installer choked on my hard drive, because it was already partitioned. I had to get to the shell and delete the partitions manually to get it to work.
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I just tried the DVD. Not great but felt slightly better than 18, until I had to set the root password and realized that it didn't detect the keyboard.
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I just tried the DVD. Not great but felt slightly better than 18, until I had to set the root password and realized that it didn't detect the keyboard.
No problem, everyone just leaves the root password blank anyway.
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Installer a little better than F18's (Score:5, Interesting)
They've fixed a few annoyances in Anaconda in F19 Alpha including actually offering MATE as a desktop option (F18 never showed it in Anaconda - you had to know to groupinstall it later on). Still no package version numbers or install time remaining when the packages are being installed though - both blatantly obvious requirements!
The Anaconda interface is still LUDICROUSLY SHOUTY (yes, much of it is fully capitalised and even adds bolding on top of that!) and the custom disk partitioning still needs further work. It has a nasty mixture of size units (yes, it's possible to see K, MB and GB all on the same screen) and the option - if it exists - to "use all remaining space on device" when creating a new partition (which you're surely almost always going to need?) didn't jump out at me.
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That's actually only partially true. Fedora 18 didn't include MATE as an option while doing a DVD install, but if you changed the package location in Anaconda to "closest mirror", you would suddenly get a much larger set of available desktops, including Cinnamon, MATE and others. The reason for this should be obvious: there's only so much space on a DVD, so we tend to keep the set of packages on it limited to the most popular set. Which at the time of Fedora 18's release did *not* include Cinnamon or MATE.
W
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"Still no package version numbers or install time remaining when the packages are being installed though - both blatantly obvious requirements!"
Why is "package version numbers" a 'blatantly obvious requirement'? What actual use is it? If anything it's debugging info, and it is stored in the appropriate logs. Just because you're used to seeing it doesn't mean that seeing it is of any practical use.
Install time remaining is not practically possible to determine reliably. It's a classic progress bar problem. W
State of the cat? (Score:2)
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MariaBD (Score:5, Interesting)
After wikipedia (on *. yesterday) and of course my revered Slackware, MariaDB really seems to be getting traction.
Maybe time to have a look...
Window Manager / Desktop Environment (Score:2)
feature list (Score:2)