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Fedora 8 Released 194

Posted by CowboyNeal from the hot-off-the-presses dept.
Cat in the Hat writes "Fedora 8 has been officially released. Ars Technica has a run-down of what's new in Fedora 8, including the PulseAudio sound daemon, Nodoka visual style, and a new authentication system. 'Another major change in Fedora 8 is the new PolicyKit authentication system that makes authority escalation more secure. Instead of providing root access to an entire program when it needs higher privileges, PolicyKit makes it possible to isolate individual operations that require higher privileges and put them into system services that can be accessed through D-Bus. Another advantage of PolicyKit is that it will give administrators more control over which users and programs have access to individual operations that use escalated privileges.'"
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Fedora 8 Released More

Fedora 8 Released

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  • Another one? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by calebt3 ( 1098475 )
    Two distros so released so close to one another? You'd almost think that they were working toge...
    Oh. They are, aren't they? ;)

    • Re:Another one? (Score:4, Informative)

      by hdparm ( 575302 ) on Thursday November 08, 2007 @07:36PM (#21288811) Homepage
      RHEL 5.1 (if you mean this as one of two related distros) is a RHEL 5 re-packed to include all bug/security fixes to date, so if you need to do a new install, there's no need to pull hundreds of updates from RHN.

      Fedora 8 isn't related too much to RHEL (RHEL 5 was built on Fedora Core 6). I use only Fedora and Red Hat and I'm probably biased. However, F8 includes some neat stuff that warrants checking up by Linux users in general. It works great, too.

      • Fedora 8 isn't related too much to RHEL (RHEL 5 was built on Fedora Core 6).
        RHEL 6 will most likely be built on a future Fedora release, such as Fedora 9 or Fedora 10. In some sense Fedora 8 can serve as a preview of some of what's to come in RHEL.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by batkiwi ( 137781 )
        Can you OFFICIALLY update a server (no X11, no physical access) yet?

        FC1->2, 2->3, 3->4 (I gave up then) the only supported way to upgrade was to boot to the CD, which is a no-go for those of us with hosted dedicated servers.

        • I have use the yum upgrade method for quite some time. You may wish to check out the Fedora yum upgrade faq [fedoraproject.org] at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq [fedoraproject.org] - there is also a non-official guide to using yum to upgrade a number of RedHat distributions [brandonhutchinson.com] at http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Upgrading_Red_Hat_Linux_with_yum.html [brandonhutchinson.com]

          You may want to make sure you read some of the gotchas as if you have packages that are not from the Fedora Project and they are not upgraded or compatible with the newer version you ar

        • Can you OFFICIALLY update a server (no X11, no physical access) yet?
          Regardless of whether you can OFICIALLY do it, can you ACTUALLY do it? Both of my favorite distros (gentoo and debian) sport this feature... but does that mean the system will actually update dozens of packages without breaking something? Of course not. Based on my personal experience, people who cavalierly "emerge -U world" or "apt-get dist-upgrade" are nuts.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by petermgreen ( 876956 )
            Using apt-get dist-upgrade blindly is indeed nuts but if you read the release notes and pay attention to what apt plans to do you are pretty safe and unlike with fedora upgrading with the package manager is the supported and reccomended way to upgrade.

  • Not enough reasosns to move from Fedora 7, IMHO, but to each their own. Maybe I'll wait for Fedora 9.
    • Fedora 7 is horribly unstable, and I stuck with Fedora Core 6. 8 seems to be a lot more stable, and I am burning an install disc as I type this. 9 is probably going to be stable as well, and is predicted to be the basis for RHEL 6. If I were you, I would leave 7 in the dust, it is too badly botched...

      • Re:Waiting for Fedora 9 (Score:4, Informative)

        by Eric Smith ( 4379 ) * on Thursday November 08, 2007 @08:58PM (#21289489) Homepage Journal

        Fedora 7 is horribly unstable,
        I've been running Fedora 7 on five machines, including one publicly-visible web and mail server, and have seen no stability issues at all, other than minor problems with one update kernel which were fixed in less than 24 hours. Of course, I'm probably using different parts of F7 than those with which you have had trouble. What areas caused problems for you? And weren't they fixed in F7 updates?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rayban ( 13436 )
          I've had lots of USB trouble myself (autosuspend cmd line doesn't help, sadly) with F7. I get hard process lockups on lsusb that are unkillable. It's got something to do with my Dell LCD's hub, but it's easier just not to use it than diagnose it. :) It's possible that it's because my machine is x86_64 and the support is still a little rusty though.
          • Dell sucks.

            I worked doing help desk for a few companies and Dells were always the oddball. The products we made required newer directx features and Dell never updates their drivers. Infact an nvidia based dell laptop can not use a nvidia driver because dell loves to modify it to save $.05 on each notebook because they are cheap.

            Dell also doesn't want to invest money on older hardware drivers and prefer you to buy a new dell.

            Its likely they modded the usb hardware where its no longer in spec iso compliant. A
        • I always wince when I read things like "XXX is horribly unstable". If it's a development branch and you need bullet-proof use something Q/A'd. If you want gee-wiz and maybe some more cutting edge performance (or simply to help develop a great project) then stick with the cutting edge.

          BUT, if you put any development quality software on a server for purposes other then your own testing my sympathy and willingness to listen to you are gone.
        • When I installed it, the installer crashed because I had a multicore processor (but the same processor was fine with FC6). The fix was to disable multiple cores while installing, then reenable them. Then, suspend didn't work, then it worked but unreliably, then it didn't work again. Then it was the network card. None of these things were problems with FC6. As everyone else said, Fedora is a development distro, and so stability is not something that can be expected, but 7 was just particularly bad (even

    • Re:Waiting for Fedora 9 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Pros_n_Cons ( 535669 ) on Thursday November 08, 2007 @09:52PM (#21289851)
      not enough reasons to move
      did you read the notes?
      http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/8/ReleaseSummary#head-4f0c6fbce5ef70b1b3c850fbd9dd725ddfd48a42 [fedoraproject.org]
      as someone else wrote
      * custom spins
      * fedora 8 on a usb key
      * pulseaudio
      * codecbuddy
      * yum improvements (yes it's fast)
      * packagemanagement improvements (change repos and more)
      * gui for firewall
      * online desktop
      * the whole fedoraproject.org website and associated projects
      * Network Manager suppose to have seamless capabilities
      * New Syslog demon
      * seamless bluetooth integration and laptop improvments
      I can go on. I'm very excited about this release you kidding?
      • The codec situation and the lack of cleartype fonts suck.

        With Ubuntu you can use getAutomatix to install them. Is there anything similiar with Fedora?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by xtracto ( 837672 )
        I agree, after reading some of the release info I got very interested in FC8. Specifically due to PulseAudio. I do not know why but ALSA has *never* liked me (since the first time I tried Linux back around 1997) in any distribution I have tried (Mandrake, Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu). Some applications always end the randomly blocking audio and whatnot. I hope the guy at PulseAudio get Linux sound RIGHT once and for all.

        About this GUI for firewall, i have an enquiry. Some weeks ago I was playing with ubuntu t

      • I don't think it has GCC 4.2 yet. this [vt.edu] shows gcc 4.1. I've had a few people I support asking for it; it'd be nice if a major distro came out with it.

        ~Wx

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by RupW ( 515653 ) *

          I don't think it has GCC 4.2 yet. this [vt.edu] shows gcc 4.1.

          Remember that's Red Hat's GCC 4.1 branch, not stock FSF 4.1, and it has a lot of 4.2 features backported to it, e.g. OpenMP and I think recent Intel + AMD processor tuning too.

          Actually Fedora are hoping to skip 4.2 altogether and use 4.3 for Fedora 9 - see this thread [gnu.org] from the GCC mailing list.

      • The Fedora 8 on USB key sounds interesting but isnt mentioned in the document linked. Have you heard anything more about it?

      • not enough reasons to move

        did you read the notes?

        http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/8/ReleaseSummary#head-4f0c6fbce5ef70b1b3c850fbd9dd725ddfd48a42 [fedoraproject.org]

        I can go on. I'm very excited about this release you kidding?

        You're missing what I consider to be the coolest part

        * Java Support : IcedTea

        IcedTea is OpenJDK with the remaining non-free parts replaced with free stuff, I'm not sure how much this impacts its usability but it's an awesome step forward.

        For how long has Java been a massive PITA on Linux. GCJ doesn't work for half the apps, Sun's Java (formerly) required you to go to their site, click on some licenses, then you can either have it sitting in ~/ unlike almost every other app or use their RPMs which aren't

        • Now if I want a working JVM it's sitting right there in my yum repo and I have one less non-standard app I have to worry about on my system.

          That's kind of funny.. considering IcedTea isn't the standard JVM implementation, Sun's is... Just the same, I can't speak for Fedora, I've been mostly openSuSE(before that SuSE) and Ubuntu for a couple years now... I've been leaning in strong favor of Ubuntu since 2006, and trying openSuSE a few times since then... No real issues getting Java setup in that time. Before that it had been painful to get Java (Sun's) setup properly, with the browser plugin.

          I'm all for open implementations myself, but

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by aztracker1 ( 702135 )
            On the same note, I may give it a try... if it detects my fakeraid, that would be nice (openSuSE did, but failed when initializing X for my desktop)... Latest ubuntu installed, but running two vidcards didn't work correctly, I had to remove one, and have both monitors on one card... S-L-O-W and no Compiz/Beryl :( .... if Fedora 8 can handle both video cards, and displays without issue, cool... if it supports the fakeraid, or at least has an easier to configure raid setup than the pain with Ubuntu.. I'll swi
  • anyone old enough to remember VAX/VMS?

    talk about the old coming back in style again. but giving too coarse a set of 'root privs' has always been inferior in unix compared to the privs level VMS had.

    otoh, once you start going fine-grained, its a whole order of magnitude more 'management' and debugging. so, the benefit won't be entirely for free. but it will be worth it. the 'all or nothing' model has had a good run. but it is tired and in need of some modernization, even if taking hints from 30 year old
    • >anyone old enough to remember VAX/VMS?

      Ok, where's DCL for Linux?
      • Ok, where's DCL for Linux?

        there is one! or used to be. I once cared - but then, well, I got better ;)

        I loved vms and dcl - but it had no future once DEC became compaq. worse when HP got that.

        it had its run, but I'd use a unix shell on a unix box and not hack around with dcl wannabees. I'm not sure the philosophies would really match that well, dcl and unix...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 )
      anyone old enough to remember VAX/VMS?

      Hell I'm old enough to remember punch-cards.

    • To be fair here, it has never been an 'all or nothing' model. Don't forget setgid. For example, most mail related programs run setgid with the corresponding programs setgid rather than setuid.

      One reason for the simplified security model in Unix was exactly because the more complicated system of Multics (with ACLs etc) tended to lead to poorer security since the security aspects were spread out all over the filesystem and ACLs instead of just being entirely in the code. Or to put it another way, securi

    • anyone old enough to remember VAX/VMS?

      I remember it. I liked the feature that allows you to "stack" directories like those anatomy transparencies in encyclopedias. You could layer the directories like this: safety:appupdates:apps:osupdates:os. The os files go at the bottom. Any updates go in osupdates. That way, you can keep the original file if there are any problems. You can just delete the update and the original file takes over. Ditto with apps and appsupdate. The safety layer prevents any wr
      • I remember it. I liked the feature that allows you to "stack" directories like those anatomy transparencies in encyclopedias. You could layer the directories like this: safety:appupdates:apps:osupdates:os. The os files go at the bottom. Any updates go in osupdates. That way, you can keep the original file if there are any problems. You can just delete the update and the original file takes over. Ditto with apps and appsupdate. The safety layer prevents any writes to the directory stack from affecting any fi

        • I think he is referring to the logical name searchlists:

          $ DEFINE/user SRC U:[CURRENT],U1:[BASELINE]
          The logical name SRC become translated as both current and baseline. If the file SRC:hello.c was in CURRENT, it would use that, it it wasn't it would be looked for in BASELINE instead.

          This alongside, the ability to use a filespec with a default spec and a related spec in the basic RMS filename parser was extremely powerful.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by MichaelSmith ( 789609 )
            Which points to the underlying reason why VMS didn't take off like Unix. It had features to burn, and pretty good documentation, but no community such as existed for unix, bsd and linux.

            Even with decus the agenda was mostly controlled by DEC, and directed at selling more stuff. I knew most of the answer you gave to the GP's question, but I never played with that feature, even though I had seen it used.

            If there was most open source stuff available specifically for VMS I would have learned more. Unfortunately
          • The logical name SRC become translated as both current and baseline. If the file SRC:hello.c was in CURRENT, it would use that, it it wasn't it would be looked for in BASELINE instead.

            Yes, that was it - Logicals. They worked kind of like the PATH= statement in DOS (ie, a list of directories to search), and kind of like the tilde in linux (ie, a short form for a path).
    • OpenVMS allowed the use of privileged images as well as libraries. These allowed for subsystem seperation. Of course, you had to be a fairly disciplined programmer to ensure that privs didn't leak.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by noldrin ( 635339 )
      I remember when I removed system read privilege to my home directory. I was still able to login, but it would no longer run my login scripts. Anyways, I still miss notes.

  • Fedora 8 release summary and announcements (Score:5, Informative)

    by spevack ( 210449 ) * on Thursday November 08, 2007 @08:29PM (#21289255) Homepage
    There are a few "official" links that people might find useful:

    Release Summary -- http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/8/ReleaseSummary [fedoraproject.org]

    Release Notes -- http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f8/en_US/ [fedoraproject.org]

    Fedora Project Leader's release announcement -- http://lwn.net/Articles/257644/ [lwn.net]

    And of course the downloads at http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/ [fedoraproject.org]
    • I am running it right now...well actually the Live distribution. My DVD iso has not yet finished. Not bad. I have been running Fedora 5 for awhile and it is time to get with program and update. Maybe over Thanksgiving.

  • GNOME, KDE, and other custom spins (Score:4, Informative)

    by spevack ( 210449 ) * on Thursday November 08, 2007 @08:41PM (#21289347) Homepage
    For folks who are downloading, http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora [fedoraproject.org] is the best starting point to the GNOME, KDE, and other spins.

  • Fedora 8 running on USB keys (Score:5, Informative)

    by spevack ( 210449 ) * on Thursday November 08, 2007 @08:44PM (#21289365) Homepage
    Red Hat Magazine posted a HOWTO explaining Fedora 8 booting from a USB key [redhatmagazine.com].

    It is one of the more interesting features in Fedora -- users can build their own customized spin of the distro, and then run it on a USB key. Totally custom and portable.

  • Yet ANOTHER sound server? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Burz ( 138833 ) on Thursday November 08, 2007 @08:52PM (#21289439) Homepage Journal
    This is getting ridiculous.

    And Linux audio STILL has a problem with blocking IO! So now I get to have networked audio in a few PulseAudio-aware apps, while my softphone won't ring and my calendar alarm is mute because some web page in the background uses Flash.

    • Re:Yet ANOTHER sound server? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Rayban ( 13436 ) on Thursday November 08, 2007 @08:54PM (#21289453) Homepage
      PulseAudio emulates all the other systems with LD_PRELOAD libs so that they are all PulseAudio-aware. This means that your 1998 softphone that uses exclusive open() on /dev/dsp will function, with the magical policy of PulseAudio.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Burz ( 138833 )
        No, the problem is that ALSA also exhibits audio blocking by default, too. Many applications use ALSA directly, and some of those block audio even when nothing at all is trying to use OSS.

        Adding another userspace soundserver will just compound the confusion that already exists, while leaving the largest architectural flaw in place.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rayban ( 13436 )
          You're supposed to configure the ALSA plugin for PulseAudio so that ALSA apps get PulseAudio automagically:

          http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio [archlinux.org]

          PulseAudio is designed to fit into your audio stack all over the place. Since they'd never get any adoption if everything had to be recoded, they took the smart route and added input/output plugins and emulation systems for every system that exists already.

          It's a smart move. Once developers realize that PulsaAudio is on *every* modern system, apps will st

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Spikeles ( 972972 )

            Once developers realize that PulsaAudio is on *every* modern system
            Yes, but isn't DSP supposed to be on *every* modern system? Then wasn't ESD.. no.. i'm sure it was ALSA.. no wait, wasn't it aRTS?
      • "This means that your 1998 softphone that uses exclusive open() on /dev/dsp will function".

        Maybe my 2007 Skype client might work with PulseAudio? Cause it uses /dev/dsp directly as well, AFAICT, and it was just built a couple months ago. Stop assuming only ancient programs use this technique - modern ones do too.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by pizzach ( 1011925 )
      I assume you are talking about some programs using OSS, which actually has little to do with PulseAudio. With Linux boxes you are generally best off searching out at least Alsa when possible. OSS...is just about as bad as esd.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Burz ( 138833 )
        No I am talking about ALSA.

        And anyway, if the presence of OSS-using programs blocks the newer architecture, then nothing's been fixed. You can't expect users to learn these details about apps and juggle them to keep their soundcard accessible.

        I have a system right in front of me with NO /dev/dsp or other OSS apps on it, and the audio still blocks. You still need a soundcard with mutli-channel hardware in order for the audio to seem non-blocking.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rayban ( 13436 )
          Read the PulseAudio docs on padsp, the PulseAudio /dev/dsp emulation layer. It's designed to transparently intercept all /dev/dsp calls and route them through PulseAudio itself.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Burz ( 138833 )

            Read the PulseAudio docs on padsp, the PulseAudio /dev/dsp emulation layer. It's designed to transparently intercept all /dev/dsp calls and route them through PulseAudio itself.

            Really? Transparent??

            Like artsdsp and esddsp?

            Ha. Linux people really don't "get" user-friendly, do they? Why should I or anyone I'm showing Linux to have to add shell commands to their apps to get them working with audio???!! You idiot!

            And it doesn't help with blocking caused by programs that use ALSA directly. The blocking isn't just an OSS thing, it a stupid kernel developer thing.

        • OSS blocking audio is a classic Linux problem. Though nowadays most programs have switched over to alsa anyway including Flash etc. If you have no dsp, then OSS is not your problem. You would get an error dialog every time an OSS program tried to access dsp. I have never had a problem with audio blocking on alsa, but I have heard of something like it happening. Polypaudio might be your eventual savior. Polypaudio was made to be a drop in replacement for the very very old enlightenment sound daemon. e

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Polypaudio might be your eventual savior. Polypaudio was made to be a drop in replacement for the very very old enlightenment sound daemon. esd was used so that multiple sound sources could be played at the same time on OSS. You might want to research alsa dmix in your local distributions forums. Good luck.

            Original poster obviously didn't look at all into what PulseAudio actually does, because the one thing PulseAudio does really well compared to everything that came before it is unify all these various sou

            • Those were the exact reasons why Ubuntu tried setting PulseAudio to default a year or two ago. But then it was so buggy they were forced to return to just Alsa. Let's hope that Fedora doesn't suffer the same fate.

              You're very lucky if movies didn't go out of sync with esd when playing movies. It's latency had a tendency to be horrible. While PulseAudio fixes this, I can't help but wonder if it is as needed as it once was. ALSA has matured and few programs only offer OSS output anymore. All of my inst

          • I rarely/never seem to find OSS apps blocked, whereas I run into troubles with ALSA (specifically with Amarok and Kaffeine using the Xine backend, and on occasion Audacity):

            Firefox runs some random Flash thingie
            I start Amarok (ALSA): Xine could not initialise any audio drivers
            I switch Amarok to PulseAudo: device is busy
            I switch Amarok to OSS (or just keep it on autodetect) - now it works
            I start jackd using ALSA - also works?

            There's never really anything that doesn't work (well, Doom 3...) but I can'

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Burz ( 138833 )
            The problem is in the kernel. No userspace tool (like piles of junky sound servers) will fix it.

            Why did you take what I said about ALSA and leave out of your answer?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by doti ( 966971 )
      I agree.

      This should be handled by ALSA, on the audio driver level.

      • It is actually. ALSA's dmix allows multiple programs to use the sound card concurrently and transparently, regardless of hardware support. Dmix has been on by default for at least a year or two now (since ALSA 1.0.8, IIRC), and you could enable if you wanted it before that.

    • I've been Googling around, and I've yet to find a convincing reason to use PulseAudio over jackd. Why reinvent the wheel? Jackd has network transparency (see NetJack [sf.net]). People say jackd is for professional audio, and PulseAudio is for desktop user. I don't see a reason why jackd cannot be made for desktop users. After all, CoreAudio framework on Mac OS X works for both desktop and professional audio. I've also used jackd just to listen to music or watch movies. What are the GNOME people thinking?

    • Re:Yet ANOTHER sound server? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Thursday November 08, 2007 @11:21PM (#21290541) Journal
      Thankfully, it does appear that PulseAudio is the One True sound server that we can all finally agree on. It emulates esd, OSS, and ALSA, so legacy apps like Flash and your smartphone work. It supports hotplug of audio devices, including networked ones (using Zeroconf even). It supports synchronized output between multiple devices, even when those devices use different sampling rates or have out-of-sync clocks (it resamples automatically). It has a zero-copy low latency architecture, taking advantage of the latest high resolution timer and real-time scheduling capabilities in new Linux kernels (when available), and it supports latency measurement for sound/video sync even when high latency is unavoidable (such as over a network). It has a modern user interface that provides per-application volume sliders like Windows Vista, and allows on-the-fly routing of audio to devices, including "saving" audio streams to another device if the device they are using is unplugged.

      The guys behind PulseAudio really "get it". They even decided to drop their typically-awful open-source project name "PolypAudio" in favor of the infinitely better "PulseAudio", for wider acceptance. You've got to give them points for that; the GIMP could learn a thing or two from them.

      • Re:Yet ANOTHER sound server? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Thursday November 08, 2007 @11:42PM (#21290723) Journal
        Oh, and I forgot to mention that PulseAudio has aspirations to become "Compiz for audio", providing earcandy effects such as surround-sound positioning for on-screen events (so sounds from a window on the left of the screen come from the left speaker, etc) and muffled sound from background windows (so the Flash ad in Firefox's background tab doesn't blast your eardrums and the new-mail notification doesn't sound over the movie you're watching full-screen).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by noldrin ( 635339 )
          My personal mission is to eradicate all unneeded earcandy. Although I still welcome our PulseAudio overlords, sound conflicts in Linux have still been one of those rough edges that's embarrassing for newbies to see.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Ed Avis ( 5917 )
        Is anyone collecting a list of bad free software project names? My favourite is 'RabbitWare Linux' which was, alas, never released.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Otter ( 3800 )
          I think the open-source CMSs have locked up at least the top five slots (Joomla, Pheap, Blosxom, ...). Although PolypAudio would have been competitive if they hadn't changed the name. It sounds like you'd need chemotherapy after installing it.
    • And that's the problem with you people, all you do is complaining.

      Now someone is actually doing his best to solve the sound problem instead of sitting around and complaining and doing nothing productive, and what do they get? MORE complaints. Get this into your head, nothing's going to happen if you complain and do nothing. The hard work is done by other people, for you, for free. The least you can do is show some respect.

  • Fast torrent this time (Score:4, Interesting)

    by schwaang ( 667808 ) on Thursday November 08, 2007 @09:08PM (#21289577)
    For past Fedora releases I've had slow torrent downloads (and I'm not even on Comcast). This time I downloaded at nearly full bore the whole time. I don't know why that is, but thank you seeds.

  • Mwo??? Available at Facebook? (Score:5, Funny)

    by davidsyes ( 765062 ) on Thursday November 08, 2007 @09:14PM (#21289625) Homepage Journal
    http://mirror.facebook.com/fedora/linux/releases/ [facebook.com]

    I wonder how long ballmer will be throwing chairs because one of his favored investments is giving away/make freely available an operating system he'd like to suffocate.

    He is probably going to have a cozy little chat with one young Mr. Mark Zuckerberg. But, he'll start out easy. Won't throw REAL chairs in his office, but maybe lawn or bean-bags first.

    Mark: (seeing chairs break the speed of light for the first time...) DUDE! Aurora Boralis, up close!
  • Finally, you won't have to install a custom package to get decent cryptography performance in Fedora. It took them a long time to get away from 4.1.4.
  • had been on fedora for a few years, but was getting fed up of the fast upgrade cycle.

    Ubuntu is, er, different :|

  • Finegrained security (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jandersen ( 462034 ) on Friday November 09, 2007 @04:33AM (#21292299)
    ...PolicyKit makes it possible to isolate individual operations that require higher privileges...

    I'm not sure I like that one too much. Finegrained security models have always been a bloody nightmare, one way or another, and very often don't get used/are switched off, resulting in the opposite effect of that intended. Look to Vista to see why it sn't a good idea - users feel their are being bugged by constant dialog boxes asking them to confirm that it is OK to do trivial tasks, or asking for administrator passwords etc. People just want to get on with life, so this is a huge irritation - it may be true that all you need is to spend a little time and effort on setting it up, but people in general are not security minded and meticulous. This is, by the way, why Windows became so popular despite the huge problems with security and stability - a PC was almost an appliance that allowed you to use the internet and write documents, you just turned it on and used it.

    Vista isn't the only example of finegrained security, only the latest and perhaps the one that has succeeded in pissing off most people. Oracle has it's own, very finely grained model, which I have never seen used seriously; and then there is RACF on IBM's mainframes, not a joy to work with either, IMO.

    I think the basic UNIX security model is just about as much as most people want to bother with.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Nibbler999 ( 1101055 )
      The new system is replacing userhelper, so there will be the same number of (or likely fewer) password popup prompts - not more. See the wiki [66.102.9.104] (google cache) for details.

  • I know that I should have participated in the test releases to check out the state of the new IEEE1394 system that was brought in (terribly) in Fedora 7, however has anyone tested to see if apps like dvgrab/kino work with the new IEEE1394 stuff in Fedora 8?

    it's important that folks try out the test releases (I will do with 9 onwards) so that all the peculiar user functionality is tested and works. The Fedora 7 IEEE1394 bug happened because no one tried to grab a DV video stream from a video camera with

  • Another plus about fedora is that they release i686 binaries.

    Really, Canonical. How many people really need i386-targeted binaries? I got my first 386 in 1990.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by noldrin ( 635339 )
      One day I'm going to upgrade my 386 from PC DOS 7, to FreeDOS. But as it's only current use is a door stop, it's not a high priority for me.
  • OK. I downloaded the torrent. I can see two ISOs and an SHA1 file. I am not one to immediately trust an SHA1 that was part of the file I just downloaded. I'd rather calculate the SHA1 values and compare them to values stored on the FedoraProject site.

    A google search for SHA1 on fedoraproject.com failed to find a single hit.

    How do I verify that what I just downloaded is, in fact, really Fedora 8, and not a simple boot-loader with code to write random numbers to all sectors to all my attached hard disks?

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