Fedora 9 Preview Cleared for Launch

According to a post made yesterday to the Fedora announce mailing list, a Fedora 9 preview has been cleared for launch. "This is a Preview release, it is fairly close to what the final product will be like. This is the most critical release for the Fedora community to use and test and report bugs on. This is the last major public release before the final GOLD Fedora 9 release on May 13th (we hope). [...] Live images, KDE Live images, CDs and DVD options are available. http://torrent.fedoraproject.org has a section marked 'F9-Preview.'"

like it, but

[thermian]

This issue of not having media codecs other then the free ones is a real deal breaker for me.

Yes I know, they aren't 'free as in freedom'. Sad, but true. However, when I install desktop linux I don't want to fart about trying to find media codecs. They should be there, in the install, or immediately available via an obvious link once installation is complete. It should be a one click and done experience, has to be really.

Yes I could find them myself, but I'm not really the problem, since I'm pretty much addicted to linux for everything but desktop. I'll remain a fan, and live in hope of a decent out of the box desktop experience.

No, the problem is the vast numbers of techno numpties who won't use linux as long as it has this glaring hole in its out of the box state.

Mark me as troll if you wish, but this is a serious issue that the purists don't want to confront. In spite of what they beleive, ogg is not enough...

Re:like it, but

[Anonymous Coward]

As a fedora user, I'll bite.

First, blame those that made the codecs non-free, not those who suffer because of it. There is nothing that they can do about non-free codecs and there's no use complaining.

Beyond that, it's not exactly hard to add non-free codecs. Add the livna repository and you'll be able to get them off your package manager. There may not be any flashing banners telling you how and where to download non-free codecs, but it's not hard to do either.

Finally, you shouldn't need non-free codecs as soon as you install the operating system.

Re:like it, but

[jd]

I think conventional wisdom is that in Microsoft's case, it is a chair of smiting. It's not simply a Microsoft problem, however. It has a lot to do with software patents, price gouging and dodgy attitudes towards reverse engineering throughout the industry. Yes, it costs money to develop high-end codecs, and it is entirely reasonable for corporations to try to make a profit from their work, but that argument only goes so far and current practices go way beyond reasonable.

Re:like it, but

[techno-vampire]

The aforementionned person new to linux will get Ubuntu.

I've been using Fedora along with Windows for a number of years now. My sister has an older machine (800mhz) and Win2K was getting slower and slower, even with all the firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware stuph. In fact, it was the anti-virus that was slowing it down more than anything else; the daily scans took forever and made it almost unresponsive. Then, she tried a Live CD of Ubuntu. In less than 15 minutes she knew it was for her. The next morning, she installed it. The first time it rebooted, it let her know she needed proprietary drivers for her nVidia Geoforce video card and got them. It's now her main OS, and Win2K is the Dark Side to her. I'm happy with Fedora, and will be moving from 8 to 9 when the time comes, but I'd never have suggested it to her. Fedora's a geeky, bleeding edge test bed of a distro, and all she wants or needs is something that Just Works. That's why there are so many Linux distros: different people need and/or want different things, and no matter what you want in the way of Linux, there's at least one distro that's right for you.

Re:like it, but

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not because of them being purists. The relevant codecs in fact are free software and all that.

Fedora is based in the US. In the US, we are blessed with these lovely things called patent laws. In particular, it is legally iffy for Fedora to distribute things like MP3 codecs and such. Really, the way to fix this is to get rid of the stupid things altogether... software patents are ridiculous.

(And a lot of the non-free stuff isn't re-distributable anyway, so they can't package it. Ubuntu's flash "package" is just a script that downloads and installs it. Might as well use the rpm Adobe provides.)

Re:Differences

[Znork]

"dependancy hell" issues

Dependency hell isn't really a function of the package format, the issue is intrinsic to reasonably complex software dependency environments, and the hell is what you get for not using an automatic depsolver. Of course, as there originally wasn't one that handled RPM's (like apt for debs), it's tended to get the blame.

When I used Fedora back in the Core 3 days I used Apt4RPM and Synaptic

These days you'd probably use yum and yumex. Using yum-priorites for repos and you'll have very little trouble even with several third party repos active.

Re:like it, but

[Richard W.M. Jones]

The problem is that the desktop experience has become, thanks to the almighty Microsoft, (whose name we speak in hushed tones, lest they smite us with their stick of smiting), have defined the desktop as being a place where even a moron can get a decent experience with minimal work, or none, in some cases.

Last time I checked, Windows out of the box couldn't create PDF files, display DivX movies, open tarballs, can display but not edit DOC, PPT, can't display web pages properly, can't create ZIP files [maybe it can do this one now?] etc. It doesn't have a system where you can install one of 1000s of programs just with a few clicks from a menu (and for free). It doesn't have virtualization or a SQL database or any programming languages at all.

Rich.