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Upgrades Software Linux

First Look At Fedora 11 Beta Release 205

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the shiny-bits-for-playing-with dept.
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.
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First Look At Fedora 11 Beta Release More

First Look At Fedora 11 Beta Release

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  • ext4? This is madness! (Score:3, Funny)

    by MasterOfMagic ( 151058 ) on Friday April 03, 2009 @03:03PM (#27450451) Journal

    THIS IS FEDORAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!

    Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.

    Oh yeah, well tonight, I in fact plan on dining in Hell.

  • Ext4? (Score:4, Funny)

    by TheNinjaroach ( 878876 ) on Friday April 03, 2009 @03:04PM (#27450457)
    Doesn't Ext4 have occasional issues with data integr)_SF*@)_M#$ I'm surprised to see it used by defau#%FVN641

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      a patch was released today.

    • Re:Ext4? (Score:4, Funny)

      by sakdoctor ( 1087155 ) on Friday April 03, 2009 @03:20PM (#27450739) Homepage

      Spartans! Prepare for data loss!

    • No... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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, a

  • One question: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fallingcow ( 213461 ) on Friday April 03, 2009 @03:05PM (#27450473) Homepage

    Has PulseAudio been either removed or fixed?

    I'm off Linux until that crap gets sorted out. It infected Ubuntu too, for some reason.

    • Re:One question: (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03, 2009 @03:10PM (#27450555)

      That will never happen.

      It really sucked when most of the users could never have more than one application using audio simultaneously. Also controlling the devices could not be offered via unified user interface.

      If you have a problem with pulseaudio, please consider filing bug reports.

      • Re:One question: (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Fallingcow ( 213461 ) on Friday April 03, 2009 @03:31PM (#27450903) Homepage

        It really sucked when most of the users could never have more than one application using audio simultaneously. Also controlling the devices could not be offered via unified user interface.

        Yeah, I remember those days--a couple years ago, if not more. Audio was finally working great out of the box, and even not-that-bad to configure manually in Gentoo.

        Now, it's all screwed up again in the distros that switched to PulseAudio. We got alpha-quality software pushed on us.

        If you have a problem with pulseaudio, please consider filing bug reports.

        I assure you, there are plenty already.

        • Re:One question: (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Buelldozer ( 713671 ) on Friday April 03, 2009 @09:09PM (#27454063)

          Right on.

          I was just talking with a group of *nix heads two days and the outpouring of disgust around so many distros switching to PA was incredible.

          Apparently it didn't work well, or at all, for anyone in the group!

          The other commonality was everyone agreed that audio was finally starting to work _well_ before the switch!

      • Re:One question: (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Walpurgiss ( 723989 ) on Friday April 03, 2009 @03:53PM (#27451211)
        My problems with pulseaudio isn't a bug, but a design flaw. Until they create an option in the PA sound server to let you set DTS/DD streams to passthrough, bypassing the sound mixing, PA is fail to me.

        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.
        • Interesting... I seem to get pass-through working fine on my 8.10 Mythbuntu media center. But I think I also use the ALSA libs instead of Pulse. Thanks for the heads-up on this. Might explain a few weird audio things I've experienced.

      • Re:One question: (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Friday April 03, 2009 @04:56PM (#27451891) Homepage Journal

        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: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by shutdown -p now ( 807394 )

        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

      • Would it even be possible to file *more* bug reports? Frankly I'm not sure I have enough free time to report all the bugs.

        I don't mean to be harsh to the devs but does pulseaudio work for anyone BUT them?

      • It really sucked when most of the users could never have more than one application using audio simultaneously.

        I love that. Audio apps should not be stomping all over each other. If everything gets mixed together, it becomes a mess. I curse the fucking thing, and probably unplug the speakers.

        BTW, two ways to do it: traditional (first app wins) and stack-based (second app wins, first app goes to /dev/null until the second app quits)

        Thus my bug report: "audio from different apps gets jumbled together -- MAKE IT STOP!!!"

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Ant P. ( 974313 )

        It really sucked when most of the users could never have more than one application using audio simultaneously. Also controlling the devices could not be offered via unified user interface.

        I solved that problem by installing a PCI sound card I found in the trash. It can cope with me forkbombing sox processes at it and it has a unified user interface - the three sound buttons on my keyboard that run aumix.

        Compare this to Pulseaudio, which manages to combine the obtrusiveness of aRts, the unusability of a Gnome GUI, and the uselessness of a network server that sounds like trying to stream a wav file over 56k - on the rare occasions that it produces any result at all.

    • PulseAudio on Fedora .. (Score:5, Informative)

      by rs232 ( 849320 ) on Friday April 03, 2009 @03:13PM (#27450603)
      And if you could expand to explain how Pulse Audio [fedoraproject.org] differs and what benefits this will have for end-users? Or even for developers of existing applications too, such as Audacity/Jokosher/Rhythmbox/$general_audio_application.

      A lot of things have changed. For example, you can now change the volume of every playback stream seperately. Then, we have better hotplug support: Just plug in your USB speaker and it will appear in your mixer (as long as you use pavucontrol, of course, PA's native mixer tool; the classic gnome-volume-control which we still ship is not hotplug-capable). You can move streams during playback between output devices. With a single click in our "paprefs" tool you can aggregate all local audio devices into a virtual one, which distributes audio to all outputs, and deals with the small frequency deviations in the sound card's quartzes -- and that code even deals with hotplugging/unplugging. If that checkbox is checked, just plugin in your USB headset and you get audio through it. (This is actually pretty cool, and it might be something we enable by default in F9)..

      • Oh, man, that interview is funny. I notice that the last edit was June '08, so the interview took place before that.

        I really liked this part:

        The balkanization we have in Linux audio was the biggest obstacle in itself. Before we could think of moving everything to a new audio system we had to make sure that we have compatibility support with all that software that is out there right now (or at least the majority of it). There are so many audio systems and APIs around, some being very hard to virtualize, so

        • Hahah, nope. At least not in the version that was shipped (and made default!) with Ubuntu 8.10. From what I've heard, Fedora's version isn't any better off. Either the distros are fucking things up big time, or this dude's vastly overestimating the completeness of his software. Or both.

          They're referring to Flash 10 Beta, which I've found to be pretty usable. Certainly way better than previous versions, which mucked up my sound output.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Orp ( 6583 )

        I have a fully up-to-date Fedora 10 box (64 bit Intel dual core) and I have terrible issues with sound. I have a Creative soundblaster Audigy 4 (emu10k2.5). I have all sorts of issues with dropouts while watching video with pulseaudio. The only solution I've found is to uninstall pulseaudio, which sucks, because it's kind of cool. It's been suggested that Jack might help on top of pulseaudio... but I am lost in a maze of sound drivers and layers (jack/pulseaudio/alsa/oss/and good ol' /dev/snd). All I want i

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ADRA ( 37398 )

          Just a note that -may- be applicable to you, I've had issues with my 'Audigy 1' in Fedora 10. switching to my on-board card made all issues disappear. Are you sure this isn't a driver issue, or maybe an erroneous assumption on the part of the driver providers?

          I wish that this is addressed, by someone, but in the mean-time no Audigy for me.

          PS: The issue crept up when upgrading and it affects both ALSA 5.1 (a52enc from self-compiled sources) and 2.0 stereo out. Playing through any media player, I would get sk

    • Ubuntu screwed it up (Score:5, Informative)

      by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Friday April 03, 2009 @03:19PM (#27450705) Journal

      PulseAudio is the future... but it is also a bit of an X. Not a curse word, X the server. X is fantastic and has features that make other GUI's look very poor indeed. Pity that for most people 99% of it is never needed and indeed gets in the way.

      Linux, and for that matter all OS'es have always had trouble with sound. For some reason the powers that be (IBM) never really thought sound was needed beyond an occasional bleep. For a long time your soundcard was made by a taiwanese firm, the type of firm that you would expect to produce dirt cheap clones of western hardware, NOT the only supplier of sound for the IBM-PC (oh okay, leaving out a lot but still).

      OSS and even Alsa have problems with apps wanting to lock the soundcard to themselves. PulseAudio is supposed to once and for all end this and make it similar to X in that Pulse Audio can hook up any audio app and any soundcard, even over the network, and mix them together.

      Sadly it was released before it was ready and Ubuntu especially implemented it in a really bad way. Hence it got a bad rep because a beta was put badly into a "just works" distro.

      But trust me, once you get it working and you are the kind of person who has 2-3 PC's and can never remember which desktop is actually hooked up to a speaker set but just want to play music it is a very nice system.

      • Re:Ubuntu screwed it up (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Fallingcow ( 213461 ) on Friday April 03, 2009 @03:45PM (#27451089) Homepage

        I'm sure it's the future. The features sound great. Doesn't goddamn work right yet, though.

        That's why I said, "removed or fixed" rather than just "removed". I'll accept "fixed". Awesome. I'll also accept "change reverted until PulseAudio is beyond alpha (generously, beta) stages".

        Personally, I stopped having trouble with audio in Linux at least a couple years ago, so suddenly breaking it with a half-finished implementation of a new audio server is very, very annoying, especially from the "Just Works" distros. It would have been one thing if PulseAudio actually added some kind of functionality that I wanted, but there were zero new features I needed from my existing system, so it didn't. Also would have been fine if they switched it but everything I used kept working fine, but that didn't happen.

        • I'm in the same position. All it did was stop Skype from working and fuck with flash. I had to killall firefox after watching videos in order to get sound working in other apps. Annoying as hell.

          I just put a "killall pulseaudio" in my startup script, as removing pulseaudio actually removes ubuntu-desktop :|

      • Re:Ubuntu screwed it up (Score:5, Insightful)

        by k.a.f. ( 168896 ) on Friday April 03, 2009 @04:31PM (#27451665)

        OSS and even Alsa have problems with apps wanting to lock the soundcard to themselves. PulseAudio is supposed to once and for all end this and make it similar to X in that Pulse Audio can hook up any audio app and any soundcard, even over the network, and mix them together.

        I have never understood why this auto-mixing is considered desirable. I like that an application locks the soundcard. I listen to high-quality music while I work - why on Earth would I want another application mixing something else into that? The effect of two different tracks of music sequences superimposed is virtually always hideous cacophony - no thanks. I don't need a perky jingle to inform me that a download has finished. I am actively grateful to X for preventing the browser from interfering with my enjoyment. If I wanted your web site to make noise, I'd rub my thumb against the monitor! Honestly, what is this mythical use case in which hearing different sources of digital sound simultaneously is a good thing?

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by EvanED ( 569694 )

          I listen to high-quality music while I work - why on Earth would I want another application mixing something else into that?

          Because you want to pause your music player and watch a youtube video someone linked you to?

          (Granted, this is sort of Flash's problem for keeping the card locked longer than necessary, but it's still a problem. Sound is set up crappily on the system I'm on now, and it appears that only one program can access it at once unless I manually start esd or something like that. If I want to ha

          • Because you want to pause your music player and watch a youtube video someone linked you to?

            Hey, I think that's great. The music player gets muted until the youtube video is done playing.

            That's not what PulseAudio does. PulseAudio mixes, which is just retarded. It's adding latency and burning CPU time to make a hideous cacophony.

            Even when not mixing, you suffer resampling error.

            No thanks.

        • Re:Ubuntu screwed it up (Score:5, Informative)

          by BertieBaggio ( 944287 ) <bob@noSPAM.manics.eu> on Friday April 03, 2009 @09:16PM (#27454111) Homepage

          Honestly, what is this mythical use case in which hearing different sources of digital sound simultaneously is a good thing?

          I can't tell from your tone if you're serious or being flippant. It seems like both. However, if you're serious... In addition to sibling posts, I have several other 'mythical' use cases too:

          • I sometimes like to listen to music while playing games (when I'm either passing a quick 10-20 minutes, or in a game with crap music).
          • I'm normally on a teamspeak [teamspeak.com] server to keep in contact with my buddies.
          • Audio notifications. Okay, so you kinda covered that one, but they can be kinda useful. I won't go into this as it's a preference thing.
          • Web sites (flash). Sibling has this covered, but I'll mention it too. I hate having to close my media player (and lose my place in the music) to watch a tiny wee clip.

          There are undoubtedly others that I can't think of because it's after 3 AM, but you get the idea I think. If you don't want mixing, that's your preference and I have nothing against it, but there are most definitely cases where it is desirable.

          I have never understood why this auto-mixing is considered desirable.

          Hope this cleared that up for you then.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bersl2 ( 689221 )

        I've been running PulseAudio for many months now, and I've gotten most everything to work fairly well with it. ALSA requires more black magic than PulseAudio does, and that includes the fact that I had to compile PulseAudio and dependencies manually for my Slackware install.

        Also, for the few apps that just would not work in the presence of PA (especially recording apps), I haven't found a way to non-destructively disable it. The only app that this mattered for (Linux version of SL < v1.22---so 99.9% of /

      • OSS on Linux and even Alsa have problems with apps wanting to lock the soundcard to themselves.

        Not-so-minor correction above. FreeBSD automatically clones /dev/dsp so that any number of applications can use it simultaneously.

      • But trust me, once you get it working and you are the kind of person who has 2-3 PC's

        So, basically, it's a currently-broken solution for the problem that only 0.01% of Linux users have?

      • Is X really a GUI in the sense of having a look? Would Mac fans accept the claim that Pre-OS-X GUIs looked worse than X? My understanding is that OS X uses X, if so, that pretty much just leaves Microsoft Windows as a non-X windowing system.

  • Finally Fedora? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Friday April 03, 2009 @03:16PM (#27450657) Journal

    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:Finally Fedora? (Score:4, Informative)

      by armanox ( 826486 ) <asherewindknight@yahoo.com> on Friday April 03, 2009 @03:30PM (#27450897) Homepage Journal
      I stayed away from 9 myself, and then found that 10 after some updates returned most sanity to the Fedora universe.

    • Re:Finally Fedora? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Binestar ( 28861 ) on Friday April 03, 2009 @03:39PM (#27451005) Homepage
      I'm a long, long time RedHat user. (Since Red Hat Linux 5.1, if you're curious)

      You got lucky timing. As an "earlier than that" RedHat user, the 4.2-> 5.0 libc change was a horrible upgrade path. 5 worked great for new systems, but anyone with a good working 4.x system trying to upgrade to 5 had loads of problems. If you were to have gone through that upgrade you might not have stayed with RH as long as you have =)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ichthus ( 72442 )
        Bah! 5.0 was nice. I went from 4.1 (my first distro ever), where I had to download and build XFree86 from source to work with my Diamond Viper card, to 5.0. Granted, I didn't "upgrade". I did a clean install, and everything just worked. Well, except for my AWE32 sound card. I had to get the latest driver from good ol' Takashi Iwai for that. (Thanks man!) But, from there I went to Mandrake, and didn't come back to RH until Fedora Core 5 -- another great release.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Binestar ( 28861 )

          Yeah, as I said in my original post, 5.0 was fine as a new install (Or clean install if that's what you want to call it) but upgrading from 4 was troublesome.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by calc ( 1463 )

        I seem to recall there being lots of security updates shortly after RH5 release also, and RH at that time had no way to automated upgrades, eg apt-get or yum. Which was why I stopped using it and switched to Debian.

      • I had trouble with a fresh install of 5.0 (it was my first distro) with a file in the X configuration that was in the wrong directory. I was firtunate to have had some previous experience with Unix.

      • IIRC they had major problems in the initial release, but the first couple weeks of updates fixed them. Similar situation with 6.0, I believe.

        And then after that Red Hat and Fedora were both pretty stable (surprisingly so for the latter's "bleeding edge" philosophy), right up until Fedora 9...

        At least Fedora 10 works. It's not up to their usual standards (my home PC lost surround sound for some reason I haven't found time to look into), but after 9, having it function at all was a huge relief. My personal

    • 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 can certainly empathise with you. F9 is my currently installed distro. I installed F10 and was fairly unimpressed. However it wasn't Fedora's fault... it was KDE. I tried using Gnome for a while, but hated it for all the same reasons I've always hated it. So I went back to F9 and KDE 3.5.x.

      I've been using F11 (alpha) for over a month now and I have to say I am quite happy with it. Except that I broke yum... but, again, that's not Fedora's fault. KDE has now become *much* more usable. I'll probably stick w

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by H0p313ss ( 811249 )

      I'm a long, long time RedHat user. (Since Red Hat Linux 5.1, if you're curious)

      I suddenly feel very, very old.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by calc ( 1463 )

        Yea me too. ;-) I think the first RedHat I tried out was the mothers day release in 1995.

    • > 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.

      Did you forget the the mess with kernel/gcc/libc issues with 7.0???

    • I used F8 for quite a while too. I also found F9 was a bitch and that was what got me trying suse.

      But F10 is really, really slick. It's the stability, it's the boot times, the stability, the cleanliness, it's the stability. It's the vibe.

      I have it on every machine of mine now.

    • Just a minor nitpick. The last Fedora release to be called "Fedora Core" was FC6. Anything after that is simply "Fedora".

      Therefore, Fedora Core 9 was never released.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ADRA ( 37398 )

      I can't tell you about KDE, but F10 in general has been leaps and bounds better for me in terms of HW support and application behaviour. Pulse seems to be pretty much plug and play except for the 2-3 places that you have to navigate in order to get everything wired right.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zrq ( 794138 )

      I've been a RedHat and Fedora user for a similar length of time. However I stopped updating at Fedora 8. Fedora 9, 10 and 11 all use NetworkManager to configure the network interface, which breaks so many things that have been stable and working for a long time.

      I can understand the benefits that NetworkManager brings for a laptop that connects and disconnects from lots of different networks, but can anyone explain what the benefits of NetworkManager are for a desktop or server that is wired into a fixed

  • Does the Fedora 11 Beta have better video then Ubutu 9.4 Beta. Hopefully they can fix the "Static" soon.

  • I would use Fedora over Ubuntu any day, if not for two things:

    1) Have to 'reinstall' to upgrade to next version. I know there's a way to live upgrade, but it's still 'at your own risk' right?
    2) openbsd-style netcat. Seriously, why reimplement netcat and change all the options? Hobbit forever.

    I have experience working with many distros, and Fedora is far better in terms of quality and security in my experience than anything else. Selinux is great... but god forbid if you have to maintaining the policy yo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pembo13 ( 770295 )

      1) Have to 'reinstall' to upgrade to next version. I know there's a way to live upgrade, but it's still 'at your own risk' right?

      Lookup `preupgrade`

      2) openbsd-style netcat. Seriously, why reimplement netcat and change all the options? Hobbit forever.

      I don't know. That's a bit obscure to hope it just fixes itself. Is there a bug number?

    • nice benchmarks, but as a desktop user what are the pros/cons of each?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by teg ( 97890 )
        Not nice benchmarks either, as the beta has debugging enabled. It's rather pointless - as is a couple of the other tests (especially the gcc one) when just listed as a graph.

  • Wrong focus (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Britz ( 170620 ) on Friday April 03, 2009 @04:04PM (#27451337)

    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: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pembo13 ( 770295 )

      I don't care if it boots in 20 or 30 seconds

      Apparently quite a few people do.

      kernel based mode setting (so it flickers a bit, XP also does this)

      Well, I mean "we" are tring to be better than that though, right?

      ext4 (more testing plz)

      That's been in Fedora testing for quite some time. So I would leave that decision up to them and not assume they weren't testing it.

      management tools for virtual machines

      Better than virt-manager i take it?

      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

      That's a bit beyond the scope of a distribution though, no?

      • I don't care if it boots in 20 or 30 seconds

        Apparently quite a few people do.

        Apparently so. On a completely unrelated note, apparently, quite a few people still cannot make suspend-to-RAM or suspend-to-disk work in Linux on their hardware...

        to finally be able so sync my phone without jumping through hoops. Same with using a webcam.

        That's a bit beyond the scope of a distribution though, no?

        Not at all. It's up to the distro to correctly hook up all the low-level machinery to achieve the "plug and play" feel that GP requests. In particular, if his phone and cam need some additional software and/or drivers, that layer should be able to detect the device, and and download and configure all the needed stuff from the distro repositories. Vista can do this, and it doesn't even have a decent package repository otherwise...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pembo13 ( 770295 )

          quite a few people still cannot make suspend-to-RAM or suspend-to-disk work in Linux on their hardware

          Does that work reliably on any open hardware platform? (Windows, Linux, BSD)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EEPROMS ( 889169 )
      Just run codeweavers (pre hacked version of wine) or wine (do your own hacks) to get Office 2007 running on Linux

  • Ubuntu did a shit job of implementing audio configurations. This boggles the mind because even while they were implementing it you could simply read PerfectSetup [pulseaudio.org] to learn everything you need to know. I did this on both Gutsy and Hardy with 100% success (not an exaggeration.) I am now running Intrepid on HP Elitebook 8730w [linlap.com] and pulseaudio is part of the solution. I haven't gone through PerfectSetup yet, but that's coming. Save your hatred of pulseaudio, it's misplaced. It is the job of the distribution to pro

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ChunderDownunder ( 709234 )

      Having read "The Perfect Setup" - all those config files in your home directory? That is waaaaaaaaaay too complicated.

      We, the people, just want a plug and play solution to detect the hardware, set some reasonable defaults and provide intuitive gnome wizards (or kde 4.x if you prefer) to configure the rest.

      I hear it'll be the year of the Linux Desktop soon. :( I could list other non plug and play bugbears... It's 2009; the days of hand-editing umpteen configuration files for I/O devices should be over.

      • Having read "The Perfect Setup" - all those config files in your home directory? That is waaaaaaaaaay too complicated.

        That's why I said it's the distribution's job to do all that stuff. Ubuntu didn't, which is why I said they did a shit job. If they had, everything would have worked fine, which is why I said it's not pulseaudio's fault. And you are a bozo, which is why I had to explain my comment (which wasn't that complicated) all over again.

  • is it just me or is anyone else getting tired of people saying that linux isn't ready for the desktop because their windows applications won't run , or that X or Y network protocol doesn't communicate well with Windows active directory and file and print sharing? I'm personally sick of people looking for a way they can emulate their Windows network and environment in Linux. It is kind of sickening how much time is devoted just so we can hack Windows crap to work in Linux.

    Yes it is neat that it works, but

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