Fedora 12 Beta Released

AdamWill writes "The Fedora project has announced the release of Fedora 12 Beta, which is available here. This will be the final pre-release before the final release in November. New features of Fedora 12 highlighted in the announcement include substantial improvements and fixes to the major graphics drivers, including experimental 3D acceleration support for AMD Radeon r600+-based adapters; improved mobile broadband support and new Bluetooth PAN tethering support in NetworkManager; improved performance in the 32-bit releases; significant fixes and improvements to audio support, including easy Bluetooth audio support; initial implementation of completely open source Broadcom wireless networking via the openfwwf project; significant improvements to the Fedora virtualization stack; and easy access to the Moblin desktop environment and a preview of the new GNOME Shell interface for GNOME. Further details on the major new features of Fedora 12 can be found in the release announcement and feature list. Known issues are documented in the common bugs page."

Re:Fedora

[StarHeart]

Is "yum install httpd" really that hard? I know I have done this before on plenty of servers.

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't agree more with the sentiment, but as a KDE user, I'd recommend the RC of opensuse instead. Knock on wood, suse is the only distribution that *never* has failed me, and I've been through a bunch over the years.

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[jroysdon]

Looking at the list, I agree. Being a Fedora user, I tend to skip versions just because I don't want to spend the time to get all my one-offs working again. I skipped from FC6 to CentOS5 for a year on my desktop (based on the same major release versions), then went to F9, and now F11. CentOS5 is still solid and loved on my servers.

Fedora just has a twice a year release cycle they're expected to meet. That means sometimes you're just getting many incremental release updates and nothing major. I'm still curious to see what version will make it to RHEL6. I don't think they'll have time to pop out F13 to use as the foundation for RHEL6, but perhaps, since RHEL6 doesn't have to release until 2010 Q1, which could be as late as March.

Myself, I'll try it in VirtualBox and play around, but I probably won't move of my main laptop until F13. But I may try it in another LVM partition and finally blow away my left-over F9 space (I kept that partition just in case I had to dual-boot over to figure out something I'd forgotten, even though I do have backups).

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Anarke_Incarnate]

Lots and lots of brown, and shit that spontaneously stops working. That was just my experience, your mileage may vary. There's more to it than just package management. There are other differences when going to a Debian based distro, like managing initialization and system tools. I'd recommend OpenSUSE which also releases a new version in November.

Pulse Audio

[BassMan449]

I've used Fedora since Fedora Core 4 and am currently running 9,10, and 11 between different machines. I prefer Fedora over any other distro (having tried quite a few different ones in VMs before settling on Fedora). The only serious issue I've ever had with Fedora that I really wish would be fixed is the way the audio system works. They have tried pushing everyone over to pulse audio which overall I think is a great idea, but the problem is pulse audio isn't compatible with everything and when something tries to directly access ALSA or OSS it can break the whole sound system. So far I have had problems several times with me losing sound on my entire system with updates. I've also had it happen 3 or 4 times in a row. I know the whole ALSA, OSS, or PA debate is more than just Fedora but I think that is one of the biggest issues in all the distros that needs to be looked at and considered carefully.

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[wayland]

Those of us with multiple GPUs (screen cards) and/or multiple input devices also have cause to rejoice.  The multi-screen-card functionality has been mostly broken in recent versions of X, and if I understand correctly, this should be fixed in a recent version of X which I understood was supposed to be in F12.  But I could be wrong.

You'll note that this is also the first version of Fedora to come with Perl 6 :). 

Re:Fedora

[wastedlife]

You were trying to install a webserver without internet access? Where then did you find out about and get wampserver from? On a base install of windows there is no AMP stack and nothing telling you how to install software that you are looking for.

Re:Fedora

[Sillygates]

yum is very simple and there is a man/info page on it.

Installing a lamp stack is easy, and future yum updates will patch the entire stack. That being said, I'm assuming you're running an exernally facing lamp stack. What's your patch story? How are you getting your security fixes?

In my specific deployment, I drop packages on an http server, and I have yum clients running on a few hundred systems (I find these packages with a simple mirroring command rsync -avz rsync://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/......). After I test the updates, I put them in a repository that all the systems know about. All of these systems poll my repository for updates every 2 hours, and autoinstall/patch.

As a standalone dev box, I'd assume you'd be running a gui, and fedora will automatically show you popup notifications to update, as a massive deployment, you can do something like I do (or pay for an up2date subscription, if you choose that route...).

I believe that the only problem you have is a refusal to any research/browsing whatsoever, and you are blaming your misunderstandings on the operating system.

Re:Fedora

[StarHeart]

Then your best bet would be to create a local repository out of the contents of cds, or a dvd. Which should be a basic thing you are going to do anyway if you have more than a few servers that don't have access to the internet. Then you would mirror in updates, and let them update from that.

There is graphical software that will let you install stuff straight from discs, and even ask for the right disc.

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[AdamWill]

Um. Nothing was really *broken* that I can think of, but F12 does improve the situation here. Systems with multiple monitors connected will boot in span mode (display spanned across all connected displays) by default (as long as the driver uses RandR 1.2; that's the case for intel, ati and nouveau, the default drivers for 95% of all graphics hardware out there), and spanning multiple monitors work on NVIDIA cards (with the default open source nouveau driver) out of the box now (in F11 it wouldn't work in span mode unless you made a manual xorg.conf tweak). Those are the major differences to F11 in this area.

Re:Great!

[AdamWill]

Right, we'll be doing nothing. Nothing, that is, except this:

http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-12/f-12-quality-tasks.html [fedorapeople.org]

oh, yeah, the days are going to be fricking *empty* around here. That's just the QA calendar, BTW, doesn't cover release engineering or development team's tasks. To translate, we'll do a full set of installation validation tests on the release candidate images, and weekly blocker bug review meetings at which the entire list of bugs marked as final release blockers are reviewed and managed. I spent most of today managing the blocker bug list, ensuring fixes were being worked on, confirming fixes, and clarifying the impacts of certain issues.

In the four days since the beta freeze was ended, around 200 bugfix updates have already landed in the F12 tree, including the whole KDE 4.3.2. But, yep, we're not doing any work on F12, you're perfectly right. Man, we're lazy.

Re:Most "Features" Have Nothing To Do With Fedora

[AdamWill]

Actually, most of the features described have been written mostly by Fedora contributors. The full release announcement text - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F12_Beta_Announcement [fedoraproject.org] - gives explicit credit for many of them.

Since it's Fedora's policy to contribute all possible work to upstream projects, of course other distributions benefit from this work. We don't play the game of having 'exclusive' features to trumpet in our distribution, we play the game of improving the F/OSS ecosystem for all. We don't really see that the fact that many other distributions will also benefit from this work doesn't mean they're important new features for Fedora users.

Of the features mentioned in the Slashdot story:

X.org improvements: Red Hat employee and Fedora project member Ben Skeggs is the major upstream contributor to the nouveau driver and implemented all the nouveau improvements described. Red Hat employees and Fedora project members Dave Airlie and Jerome Glisse are two of the major contributors to the ati/radeon driver and implemented many of the radeon improvements described. RH employees and FP members Adam Jackson and Kristian Hogsborg are major contributors to the intel driver. Adam and Dave also do substantial work on the X server itself and implemented the default support for multi-display spanning.

NetworkManager improvements: these were implemented by Red Hat employee and Fedora project member Dan Williams.

openfwwf: this is upstream work. We are, however, the first distribution to include it by default, as far as I'm aware (do correct me if I'm wrong).

Virtualization work: this is all contributed by the Red Hat employees and Fedora project members who make up the virtualization team, including Mark McLoughlin, Cole Robinson, and Justin Forbes.

Moblin integration: this is a co-operation between the Fedora project and the Moblin project. Fedora itself serves as part of the foundations of the upstream Moblin project (they do draw on other distributions as well for certain things).

GNOME Shell: maintainer and leading contributor is Red Hat employee and Fedora project member Owen Taylor.

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[donaldm]

A friend of mine downloaded Fedora 12 Beta and found it would not boot on his laptop. I tried the same CD on mine and it worked without any issues. It is rather odd considering my Fedora 11 DVD works on both machines so there could be a problem with his laptop reading CD's although my laptop is over 2 years older than his.. To say Fedora is shit because the media does not boot in your machine is not trying to analyse the issue and deserving the label of "troll".