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Red Hat Software Businesses Operating Systems Software Linux

Fedora 11 Is Now Available 195

rexx mainframe writes "Fedora 11 is now available on BitTorrent. Fedora 11 offers ext4, a 20-second startup, and the latest GNOME, KDE and XFCE releases. Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3's latest pre-releases are available as well. Fedora 11 features Presto, a yum plugin that reduces bandwidth consumption drastically by downloading only binary differences between updates. It also features Openchange for interoperability with Microsoft Exchange. There are new security enhancements, improved and upgraded development tools, and cutting-edge features in areas such as virtualization."
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Fedora 11 Is Now Available

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  • by networkconsultant ( 1224452 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @12:05PM (#28266919)
    I hurt myself trying to install it.
    • by rbrausse ( 1319883 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @12:52PM (#28267725)

      and this is the reason why I use it on my private laptop: I want to know what will hit my servers with Debian stable in 4 years :)

      • Yeah, i looked into switching my laptop to Centos, but it's so far behind Fedora it just wasn't viable.
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by zr-rifle ( 677585 )

      I hurt myself trying to install it.

      ...so now it's bleeding edge?

    • by mrmeval ( 662166 )

      The preview is a crash monkey. noPulseaudio will not play nice with VLC, mplayer or the scrototem. I can't use the ATI Radeon drivers. I'll put up with it as I will not go back to ubuntu without them restoring long term features. I'll run win7 for 3D games.

  • Ho ho. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gbarules2999 ( 1440265 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @12:12PM (#28267057)
    I wish I had a spare partition to install this on. The Beta and Preview releases were good, and they seem to be interested in trying a few new things.

    The release announcement makes we wonder, though. [redhat.com]
    • Re:Ho ho. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by melted ( 227442 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @12:24PM (#28267293) Homepage

      That's what virtualization is for. I always install a new OS in a VM first. This time around, doing this led me to switching a couple of servers from Fedora to Ubuntu Server.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        I wish I could. My main computer's barely powerful enough to run one OS at a time, much less two.

        I know, I know, it's time for an upgrade. You tell my wallet that.
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Zocalo ( 252965 )
          Unless you're really fussed about free (speech) software or desperately strapped for hardware resources, you could try the free (beer) version of the VMware ESXi Hypervisor. You don't get all of the nice toys of the paid for version, but it's a pretty neat way of trying out distros when hardware resources are limited and has next to no impact when only running one VM. Some of the main advantages to this:
          • Unless resources are really tight, you can still run multiple OS's side by side should it be helpful
          • I'll take a look at it; thanks for the tip.
          • by Yfrwlf ( 998822 )
            I too am confused. How does VMWare suddenly allow them to run VMs when he just said his machine isn't powerful enough? How is your suggestion helping them and how is it "informative"? Also how is it any different than suggesting VirtualBox or other VM software? Sure, VMWare being bigger I'm sure has more features, but I just don't see how either one is relevant...
        • by melted ( 227442 )

          Throw more RAM in. It's so cheap these days, I've maxed out the RAM on all of my desktop machines.

          You don't need it to be terribly fast if you just want to evaluate.

      • Re:Ho ho. (Score:5, Funny)

        by MSG ( 12810 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @12:42PM (#28267567)

        Fedora 11 has been out for two hours. You've already downloaded it, evaluated it, and switched some of your servers to a different distribution?

        You work faster than anyone I've ever met. I am humbled by your awesome ability.

        • by dAzED1 ( 33635 )

          why is parent modded "funny?" He's making a legit point. To say, after it being available for 2 hours, that you evaluated the new version and uninstalled it and replaced it with Ubuntu is beyond silly. Hell, 2 hours from now I won't even be finished downloading it, much less evaluating it - and I have a decent pipe I'm pulling from.

          • 2 hours from now I won't even be finished downloading it, much less evaluating it - and I have a decent pipe I'm pulling from.

            How do you define "decent pipe"?
            A single 700MB ISO should take less than 2 minutes on 100Mbps fiber. Usually, it takes a bit longer than that, since the server may not allocate that much bandwidth to a single download, or there is likely to be a bottleneck somewhere else on the route. Still, I get a typical distro ISO in less than 5 minutes - equivalent to about a 20Mbps link. If it's taking 2 hours, there is something wrong - that's only 100kbps throughput.

        • Ultimately, couldn't see why I'd stick with Fedora anymore. Most of my servers run CentOS (which is a humongous pain in the ass), the new Ubuntu servers are for development only. If Ubuntu does well there, CentOS may have to give way, too.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by bwt ( 68845 )

            How are we supposed to evaluate your statements if you don't say HOW running distro A is a pain in the ass, and how distro B fixed it. From the fact that you don't even try to explain this I think we're left with the obvious conclusion: distro A doesn't meet your requirement of being distro B.

        • Perhaps he was checking it out in Rawhide? The only reason F11 is being released today and not a week ago was because of a bug in Anaconda ( https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-May/msg00011.html [redhat.com] ), and the only reason it wasn't released two weeks ago was because of another bug in Anaconda ( https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-May/msg00007.html [redhat.com] ). If he wasn't affected by either bug there's no reason he couldn't have been testing it for a while now.

          Just for contex
      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by flydpnkrtn ( 114575 )
        Wait, you were running servers using Fedora? Madness I tell you!

        If you want a RedHat-like OS on a server why not install CentOS?
        • Madness?

          THIS IS FEDORAAAAAA!

          *kicks you into a hole*

        • Why is the parent moderated funny ? It is a true comment. Fedora is only supported for 18 months or so, do you want to reinstall your server in 18 months time ?
          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by donaldm ( 919619 )

            Fedora is only supported for 18 months or so, do you want to reinstall your server in 18 months time ?

            To reinstall a server is silly unless you are performing a disaster recovery. In a commercial environment it is almost impossible to get some firms to approve of an update never mind an upgrade. I know of firms who are still running Redhat 2.1 which is now unsupported even though we have been hounding them about this for the last two years.

        • For better hardware support of course.

          The version of the kernel running on CentOS is practically ancient at any given point more than six months after release.

          • by Trongy ( 64652 )

            Are you not aware that Redhat backport drivers to the RHEL kernels while keeping the kernel major and minor version numbers the same?

            Centos kernels are practically the same as RHEL kernels.

            Redhat released RHEL 4.8 last month and Centos 4.8 is due real soon now. Their ancient 2.6.9 kernel has drivers to support all modern *server* hardware from major vendors. (probably not notebooks, webcams, scanners and other desktop doodads.)

      • Re:Ho ho. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @12:47PM (#28267639) Homepage

        I am a long time Redhat user. Have used Redhat since 4.2 and continued using it when it changed names to "Fedora." I'll be doing my install of Fedora 11 tonight I hope... too many things to do today. But one thing is certain -- I would never use Fedora to serve as a server. I know there are people who do, and god bless their hearts because they enable whatever they find to be included in with Redhat Enterprise Linux. The reason? No long term support. Ubuntu offers an LTS release every so often while also offering more cutting edge stuff as well. But Fedora is not exactly a cutting edge distro either. It is usually quite stable... people on the cutting edge use Rawhide.

        So with all that said, I use CentOS (and variants) on the server side and Fedora on the desktop. I have used CentOS on the desktop and it's okay, but it's pretty dull by comparison to Fedora for obvious reasons.

        Without long term support, a server will be a lot more work than it needs to be. I recall stepping into a role where the company's web site was hosted on a Fedora 4 server. I was shocked. I got that stuff rectified as soon as possible... Fedora 4 support has long since expired so there was no way to keep it updated. I moved to new hosting and put it all under CentOS. Done and done for years to come. Well, that's not entirely true -- I don't work there any more and I know the outsource company they hired isn't smart enough to manage those servers. (Why is it that almost all IT outsource services are Microsoft partnered and all but refuse anything to do with Linux or Mac OS?)

        • by melted ( 227442 )

          Calling those two boxes "servers" was probably too generous. They just run headless and do compute work pretty much non-stop, that's why I called them "servers". I use CentOS for internet-facing servers.

        • Fedora 4 support has long since expired so there was no way to keep it updated.

          At that point, it's just a slackware machine. Download the source for new versions of stuff and compile. ;)

  • 20 seconds? Mama mia (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Garbad Ropedink ( 1542973 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @12:16PM (#28267127)

    A 20 second boot? What happens after that?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @12:22PM (#28267239)

    Damn pirates.

  • by pablo_max ( 626328 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @12:24PM (#28267291)

    Seriously, why does linux have so many release cycles. That's one thing I didnt like about Ubuntu. It took me forever to get it running just the way I wanted and by then a new version was out and I had the pressure to upgrade..and of course..I had to set up everything again since invariably, it broke something.
    It's funny how many people here bitched that windows was coming out with Win 7 so soon after vista, but they don't mind that linux seems to release something every couple months depending on the distro. Odd.

    • Because all a distro release is, is basically a service pack. Everything gets updated in one easily maintained package thats checked (or at least should be) for any incompatibilities. For example, if you upgrade some libraries but have an older version of another program, that program won't work unless you update it, distro upgrades update everything so they all play nicely with each other.
    • why does linux have so many release cycles...It's funny how many people here bitched that windows was coming out with Win 7 so soon after vista, but they don't mind that linux seems to release something every couple months depending on the distro. Odd./quote. Not really. If you knew which packages to download, it would be relatively easy to upgrade from one version of the distro to another. With Windows, you're on one version or another, and there's no way for you to get the latest version of their kernel unless you upgrade. As long as you get onto one of the LTS versions of Ubuntu, you'd be able to wait for as long as you could on Windows. Moving quickly is the biggest strength of open source development. That and choice, so that'd be the two big strengths of open source. And the community.

      • by migla ( 1099771 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @01:15PM (#28268057)

        Moving quickly is the biggest strength of open source development. That and choice, so that'd be the two big strengths of open source. And the community.

        Yes, our three main weapons are speed, choice, community and an almost fanatical devotion to freedom.

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Exactly, the four best things about linux will always be speed, choice, community, freedom, and the fact that it costs nothing.
          • by bytesex ( 112972 )

            You said it: among the best qualities of Linux there will always be speed, choice, community, freedom, the fact that it costs nothing, and the body hair of Alan Cox.

    • by Ex-Linux-Fanboy ( 1311235 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @12:43PM (#28267579) Homepage Journal

      why does linux have so many release cycles

      Because Fedora is a cutting-edge testing release that's done about twice a year. The RedHat Linux way is to take software that Microsoft would only make available to internal testers in Redmond, and make it available to the general public as "Fedora".

      If you want something with fewer release cycles, you're best bet is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (which every three years or so, takes a release of Fedora, declares it stable, renames it "RHEL", and updates that version of Fedora for seven years). If you're too cheap to buy RHEL, you can get CentOS [centos.org], which is a free derivative of RHEL. CentOS 5.3 is the Linux equivalent of "CentOS 5, service pack 3" [1]

      [1] Well, except that adding new drivers to older releases of CentOS is harder than it is to do with Microsoft Windows. What can I say, Linux isn't perfect.

    • by Rubel ( 121009 )

      I sympathize, although for my desktop system I do prefer just grabbing the latest stable stuff every nine months or so ala the Ubuntu release cycle. But for a server of course, it's nice to have things stable. Or is it UI changes that bug you?

      But as the Anonymous One suggested, there are other flavors of Linux which move at a slower pace, such as http://debian.org/ [debian.org] or RHEL (or the free version of it, CentOS).

    • by sgage ( 109086 )

      "It took me forever to get it running just the way I wanted and by then a new version was out and I had the pressure to upgrade..and of course..I had to set up everything again since invariably, it broke something."

      Took forever, pressure to upgrade, invariably broke something. Nice totalizing language, troll. You don't have to upgrade, and if you choose to, just do an in-place upgrade. In going from Hardy to Intrepid to Jaunty this has worked flawlessly for me.

      "It's funny how many people here bitched that w

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        Actually, I just upgraded to Jaunty on a machine that had only seen about 40 hours of use since I installed Intrepid on it, and it hosed the system. The filesystem was still there, but I couldn't get it working for several hours. Finally, I just clean-installed Jaunty, since I didn't have much I wanted to save.

        GP may be trolling or not, but don't imagine that upgrades are always hearts and flowers.

        Oh, and I'm not upgrading my Fedora 10 box right away, either, just in case.
      • First of all, I don't recall many people bitching about Win7 coming out so soon after Vista

        That's not true at all (well, it's not true that it hasn't occurred, although I don't doubt you when you say you don't recall it). I've heard plenty of bitching about this topic. I think that the GP has a valid point, except that he's fallaciously acting as if the users all have the same opinions.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      Seriously, why does linux have so many release cycles.

      Because people want the latest versions of software?

      That's one thing I didnt like about Ubuntu. It took me forever to get it running just the way I wanted and by then a new version was out and I had the pressure to upgrade..and of course..I had to set up everything again since invariably, it broke something.

      You didn't have to upgrade at all. No one forces you to do so if everything already works just fine.

      It's funny how many people here bitched that windows was coming out with Win 7 so soon after vista, but they don't mind that linux seems to release something every couple months depending on the distro. Odd.

      Because it doesn't cost me a couple of hundred dollars to upgrade from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10? Or from Fedora 10 to 11? I'm sure that has nothing to do with it.

    • What's bad about Ubuntu is the crazy upgrade restrictions. Often you can only upgrade to the newest version from the immediately previous version. Then you try to upgrade to the previous version and find that the upgrade is no longer available. What a mess!

    • Linux doesn't have short release cycles, distros do. Only some of them at that, if you want a slow release cycle install Debian stable.

    • If you want fewer releases use a long term support release.

      For Ubuntu they are marked LTS and come out every two years. The last was 8.04 (Hardy)

      For Fedora / RedHat they are the RedHat Enterprise Linux releases, and are about every three years, or the free CentOS copy of same.

      And I don't remember anyone bitching about Win 7 coming out. Despite the bias towards linux around here I think most people will be glad to see the back of Vista.

    • by init100 ( 915886 )

      It took me forever to get it running just the way I wanted and by then a new version was out and I had the pressure to upgrade

      You were pressured to upgrade? Some mafia-style hitmen came and demanded that you upgrade?

      My home desktop runs Fedora 7. Sure, it has had no updates for almost a year, but it is working well for what I use it for (video encoding). Why upgrade if you don't really feel like it? My machine is probably going to be upgraded soon, since I'd like the system not to be too old, but I hardly feel any pressure to upgrade every time. I try each release in a VM, before I decide if the real home machine will get an upgra

  • by viralMeme ( 1461143 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @12:24PM (#28267303)
    Fedora 11 Screenshot Tour [fedoraproject.org]

    --

    I like it except it doesn't have X feeture :)
    • I realize it's a desktop OS as well, but whenever I think of "screenshots" for Linux, my eye twitches.

      • by bsDaemon ( 87307 )

        Well, Gnome screens are Gnome screens are Gnome screens. However, that particular pages contains screenshots of Sugar as well, which I believe was for the OLPC or some such. But, I've never seen it before to realize just what a hideous, obnoxious mess thing it really is. Thus, for me, it was worth following the link.

    • This is cool and all, but it doesn't have a screenshot of what I want: sound.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by H0p313ss ( 811249 )

      Fedora 11 Screenshot Tour [fedoraproject.org]

      So... just like Ubuntu only blueier.

      Perhaps we could roll a new Ubuntu sub-project: Blubuntu

  • by Ex-Linux-Fanboy ( 1311235 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @12:24PM (#28267305) Homepage Journal

    This release of Fedora is the release that will probably be the basis for the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). This is a good thing, because I like using commercial software on Linux (read: I like using VMware Player to run virtual machines), and right now RHEL 5 does not run with the 2007-era hardware I have, being based on a version of Fedora from 2006.

    Once this becomes RHEL, commercial ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) will start supporting the release and both the hardware I use and the commercial software I need to be productive (sorry guys, I find VirtualBox a lot more buggy and less intuitive to use than VMware) will be supported in a version of Linux that will have the stability I need.

    Can anyone confirm that RHEL6 will be based on Fedora 11?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Wikipedia says yes [wikipedia.org]

    • This is a good thing, because I like using commercial software on Linux (read: I like using VMware Player to run virtual machines),

      Why would you need RHEL to run VMware Player? It's been in the Ubuntu repositories since 6.06.

    • When RHEL6 comes out, you might be using hardware from 2010-2011. I see something similar to a chicken and egg problem. Or maybe it's closer to the short story "The Gift of the Magi"; You give RH time to make a new version, letting your hardware age... and eventually RH gifts you with a comb, but you sold your hair!
  • Fedora is probably the only general audience distribution that supports disk encryption and lockup security features user-friendly and out-of-the-box.

    Has anyone got full disk encryption in daily use?

    • Yup, on F-10. Hassle-free, and I can even get into it with a Livecd if I hose the machine and know the passphrase.
    • by Bazer ( 760541 )

      I had until I caught a bad case of brain-dead and nuked the LUKS header on my /home partition. (I wanted to resize an LVM volume and called pvcreate on the wrong partition)

      That header consists of 512 bytes which contain the only key to your precious data. No redundant keys and no backups (see below). The LUKS dev team's advice on this issue is:

      • don't backup the keys (it's dangerous from a cryptographic standpoint)
      • be careful
    • Full disk encryption is very setup with ubuntu on the alternative-installer disk.
    • Yep, we use it at work (it was mandated recently that we must encrypt and that Linux can use FDE). I was going to switch from F10 to openSuse but openSuse 11.1 doesn't support FDE yet, only individual partition encryption, (apparently it is in the works for 11.2) and so I went to F11 preview. Tick one box on install, give it a password and off you go.

      Ubuntu does support it as well, but it is on the "alternative" disk rather than the standard disk. I don't know much more than that, though, because I've never

  • Yay, KMS! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MostAwesomeDude ( 980382 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @01:09PM (#28267961) Homepage

    Fedora 11 is the first release of any major distribution to include kernel mode-setting (KMS) for Intel GMA, ATI Radeon, and nVidia TNT2/GeForce chipsets. This is an excellent step forward in terms of moving off of crufty old graphics APIs and being able to use video cards in a more uniform, reliable manner.

  • Preupgrade (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ichthus ( 72442 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @01:15PM (#28268045) Homepage
    I just used preupgrade to move from fc10 on my Samsung NC10 netbook. As I type this, Anaconda is installing the packages for upgrade.

    So far, this upgrade is going smoothly. According to the release notes, I should see an improvement in battery life. We'll see...
    • Please reply back with results. Never used preupgrade, but would be interested in seeing how well it goes for you.
      • by ichthus ( 72442 )
        Will do.

        (Currently installing package 1339 of 1474 (gutenprint-foomatic)) It's got a while left...
      • by ichthus ( 72442 )
        It finished installing packages, did a bunch of finalizing blah blah, and then rebooted. I'm now up and running with fc11, with all of my configurations still intact. The only problem I can see so far is that the LCD brightness applet on the panel doesn't work.

        So far, admittedly after only a few minutes of playing with it, I'd call this upgrade a success. And, it was as simple as running 'preupgrade' as root.

        Next, my headless bitTorrent/web/samba box gets to go from fc9 to fc11.
  • by FranTaylor ( 164577 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @01:50PM (#28268605)

    The desktop may be bleeding-edge, but the server components are rock-solid.

    I might have a tough time adjusting the volume or getting the desktop applets to work right, but the server implementations are stable and work right every time.

  • Meh... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Murpster ( 1274988 )
    I began using Slackware back when the shiny new Linux kernel was 0.95a and used Slackware until about 1996 or early 1997 when I switched to RedHat. I was a huge fan of RedHat and the first few Fedoras, but with newer releases, they seem to be focusing on making a Winux system for dummies and put more effort into making snazzy looking desktop environments and writing clunky inefficient GUIs for simple systems tasks. The systems aren't as reliable as they used to be, you get all kinds of garbage dependencies
    • Don't worry... I'll get off your lawn. :)

  • 11? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tubal-Cain ( 1289912 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @05:11PM (#28271663) Journal

    Whoops. Completely missed 11. I've been tracking 12 [google.com].

    (Alpha comes out July 7)

  • by TheStonepedo ( 885845 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @11:20PM (#28274763) Homepage Journal

    Is that on my grandmother's Pentium II laptop or my boss's multi-core workstation? Startup time seems like an arbitrary statistic for a Linux distribution that should run on a broad range of outdated and current hardware.

    • by armanox ( 826486 )
      When they cut boot time for Fedora 9 I seem to remember the test system being a Pentium 3.

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