First Look At Fedora 11 Beta Release 205
Ars Technica has a first look at the latest beta release from the Fedora universe and it has several new shiny-bits including kernel modesetting, ext4, and faster boot times. "Fedora 11, which is codenamed Leonidas, is scheduled for final release at the end of May. It will include several new features and noteworthy improvements, such as RPM 4.7, which will reduce the memory consumption of complex package activity, tighter integration of PackageKit, faster boot time with a target goal of 20 seconds, and reduced power consumption thanks to a major tuning effort. This version of Fedora will ship with the latest version of many popular open source software programs, including GNOME 2.26, KDE 4.2, and Xfce 4.6. This will also be the first Fedora release — and possibly the first mainstream distro release — to use the new Ext4 filesystem by default.
Finally Fedora? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a long, long time RedHat user. (Since Red Hat Linux 5.1, if you're curious) And I've always upgraded every other release or so. RedHat 5.x, 6.2 (one of my favorites) 9.0, and then the Fedoras: 1, 3, 6, and 8. (which is what I type this on now)
Every single time I've upgraded, I've welcomed the upgrade. It was better, snazzier, more stable, etc. all the way up to Fedora Core 9.
Fedora Core 9 should never have been released. It was just barely alpha quality, and so buggy that merely changing the default font size would destabilize the system! I tried desperately to get it to work for about 2 weeks before shrugging, recovering my .kde directory from a backup, and rolling back to FC8. I'm not expecting an ultra-stable release with Fedora, I know it's more 'cutting edge' but when the computer crashes too badly to get to the website to file a bug report, I'm going to cut and run.
I haven't had the nerve to try 10, though I've heard good things about it. Once bitten, twice shy, and all that.
I have *loads* of respect for RedHat, but FC9 really tarnished their good image. I hope they're a bit more cautious about what they release in the future...
Re:ext4? This is madness! (Score:2, Interesting)
Madness you say?
I've been running ext4 on an arch linux server for a month now. No issues with the filesystem so far. It is also my first experience with syslog-ng and setting mark frequency to zero (disabled) took the box down.
No... (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it just has exactly the same behaviour that filesystems like XFS and JFS and probably most of other unix filesystems, specially those using delayed allocation (say, ZFS). Any app that can "lose data" in Ext4 needs fixing anyway because of portability (other OS behave exactly like Ext4, and have done so for years).
To "solve" this issue Ext4 has added some hacks (basically, do a fsync in the file after a rename or a truncate) that will slow down performance (caching is faster) for some apps, like rsync, and will encourage programming behaviours that can cause data loss in badly written apps that are run in OSes that do not behave like ext3/ext4/btrfs. But hey, that's what people asked for.
realtime kernel by default (Score:1, Interesting)
Fedora is using a realtime kernel by default. (Thank you!) All audio / video performance should be better all around.
Re:One question: (Score:5, Interesting)
PA seems like a great system for people who don't want to use an external dolby decoder for surround sound and are fine with everything either stereo or decoded by software. But for my needs, it currently fails to plain ALSA. Toss me a way to do proper passthrough and I'd sign up with PA again. It's not like I need or want sound mixing when I'm watching something with surround sound anyway.
Wrong focus (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't care if it boots in 20 or 30 seconds, kernel based mode setting (so it flickers a bit, XP also does this), ext4 (more testing plz) or any of that.
For my server Samba 4 would be interesting with Active Directory and some other goodies for Windows clients, but I guess this will take a while. Maybe some better management tools for virtual machines.
But on the desktop I would love to finally be able so sync my phone without jumping through hoops. Same with using a webcam. And I would love to run Office 2007 SP1 on it, since I could try converting some machines at work to Linux. This would make my live a LOT easier.
I guess I don't care all that much about Linux (the kernel) anymore. I care about apps. And good integration of them and polish. But wasn't that what distros were for?
Re:One question: (Score:4, Interesting)
It really sucked when most of the users could never have more than one application using audio simultaneously.
FreeBSD moved past that while staying on OSS.
Re:One question: (Score:3, Interesting)
It really sucked when most of the users could never have more than one application using audio simultaneously.
I have been actively using Linux way before PulseAudio first appeared, and I don't recall that being a problem. In fact, rather, there were always too many solutions, from dmix in ALSA to sound daemons such as arts and esound. Why add another one to the list, especially if it's not good enough yet?
If you have a problem with pulseaudio, please consider filing bug reports.
While it's definitely advantageous for users to file correct bug reports, not all of them understand the procedure, nor should they be made to. And, of course, developers shouldn't just ignore criticism under the excuse that it's not properly framed as a bug report.
For staters, how about this [lwn.net]?