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Red Hat Software Linux

Fedora 12 Beta Released 236

Posted by timothy from the crimson-chapeau dept.
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."
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Fedora 12 Beta Released More

Fedora 12 Beta Released

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  • Time to break out the VM and try out Fedora again- if nothing else because of the sandbox and frankly, it looks like a fairly impressive release. Maybe even enough to run it right beside Kubuntu.

    • I'll be giving it a shot too - ironically, I support RHEL professionally, but have hated Fedora since FC8. It's not even a Gnome/KDE thing, since I use KDE on my PC-BSD laptop and Gnome on my Debian desktops.

      I'm hoping to have a good experience with 12 :)

      • What is to hate? I'm curious. I work with Fedora, CentOS, SuSE and a little Ubuntu, and Fedora has been pretty solid for me.

        • You know, I'm not sure :D

          It's really one of those look and feel things, I guess. I should probably go to the trouble of putting my finger on it some day.

          SELinux probably has a lot to do with it, especially since it pops up like mad unless you do a lot with it. I've traditionally also had very bad luck with wifi configuration (but that's not much different for Fedora than Debian).

          • You can turn SElinux off pretty easily, if it annoys you. I don't bother with it. I've had the same troubles with wifi across all versions, as they all seem to turn to Madwifi, and it doesn't (last I tried) support the Atheros chipsets very well yet.

            Sounds like for each of us, it's what you're familiar and comfortable with. I hate SuSE/YAST, and have been unimpressed with Ubuntu. But that's probably because I cut my teeth on Redhat/Fedora.

    • What's the point of running two distros? No, seriously. I've never understood this in the age of VMs.
      • Unless you meant on two different machines. But if you meant dual booting, then please enlighten me as to the advantages of this setup.

  • Many launches (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Goffee71 ( 628501 )
    First Snow Leopard, tomorrow Windows 7, new Ubuntu, now this... its like their cycles are all coming together.
    Play the Windows 7 launch drinking game - here [blogspot.com]

    • Your drinking game forgot the shot for every time someone says "Windows 7 is the best OS they've used in years." I can't believe how many times I've seen that posted (cut/paste?) all over the web.

    • Maybe Shuttleworth will eventually get what he wanted [slashdot.org] after all!

    • First Snow Leopard, tomorrow Windows 7, new Ubuntu, now this... its like their cycles are all coming together.

      So in a week or so, all of our OSs will have a terrible case of PMS? Yikes!

    • Fedora Core is on a six month release cycle. They always look like they're keeping current with somebody :-)

  • Fedora vs. Ubuntu (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Picass0 ( 147474 ) on Wednesday October 21, 2009 @02:18PM (#29827225) Homepage Journal

    I've used Fedora since it was split off from RH, and I used RedHat going back to 5.2. For most of that time it was one of the best supported distros from the user community point of view. More recently the pendulum appears to have swung to Ubuntu. Aside from package management what are the differences I would notice by giving Ubuntu a try this time?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anarke_Incarnate ( 733529 )
      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dHagger ( 1192545 )

        ..."brown, and shit"... was that intentional?

        Seriously, I have to agree about Ubuntu. I've been using Ubuntu since 6.10, and for the last few releases things have deteriorated. They are pushing things into the distribution before they are ready and/or doing a poor job integrating them. Pulseaudio has never worked OK for me. Notification OSD does not work at all for me, placing notifications outside of the visible area, and replacing a system that works fine. Multi-monitor support (except for fixed configura

        • as an FYI, I used to use Mandrake and moved TO SUSE. The integration of tools is better. YaST for ease of use is near unbeatable.

          • I have to differ. I absolutely hate YAST. It probably means I'm getting old and rigid, but I find Fedora/CentOS's positioning of the admin tools so much easier to find. I've not yet gotten updates working properly on SuSE, which probably has something to do with the furshluginer network and firewall configurations foisted on us here.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kelson ( 129150 ) *

          Pulseaudio has never worked OK for me.

          Pulseaudio has never quite worked right for me, either, and I use Fedora. In my case, audio either works or it doesn't, and I haven't quite been able to nail down a consistent pattern.

          • As someone who has been using various versions of Ubuntu since 5.04 (Or maybe 4.10. I Can't really remember), pulse audio is *finally* working on Ubuntu 9.10, as of a couple days ago. Hopefully they don't break it again prior to releasing it in ~10 days.

            Actually, if 9.10 is released as it currently stands, it'll be the first version of Ubuntu that just plain works on all my desktop computers. The caveat is that they probably moved to grub2 a little early, but at least they'll get all the kinks out by 10.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by epine ( 68316 )

      I deliberately maintain a heterogeneous home network involving OpenBSD, FreeBSD, a daily flavour of Linux, an iMac (not my own), and Windows clunkers that can be pulled out of a closet if truly necessary.

      I've never had an OpenBSD lemon, but then I tend to ask less of it. It has a defined role. FreeBSD rocks, when it works at all. The 5.x series was about as stable as the Apollo 13 re-entry. I've mostly used it as a web application server. The FreeBSD mojo is a little different than the OpenBSD mojo, so

  • Not a particularly exciting release (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Improv ( 2467 ) <pgunn01@gmail.com> on Wednesday October 21, 2009 @02:20PM (#29827257) Homepage Journal

    For those of us who are happy with our hardware support and don't use virtualisation, there's nothing I see in this release for us. Maybe Fedora 13 will be more interesting.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by jroysdon ( 201893 )

      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

    • Re:Not a particularly exciting release (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gr8_phk ( 621180 ) on Wednesday October 21, 2009 @02:59PM (#29827773)
      I agree. My Fedora sequence has been: 3,4,5,7,9,10, and now 12. The pace of improvement has slowed down to where it's not that exciting, but that's actually a good thing IMHO it means things are "good" and "stable". I'm still unhappy that 12 doesn't seem to have the driver for e1000 wireless in the install (you can yum it from the other repo but not until final I guess). I believe that is in 2.6.32 kernel, so it should make it for Fedora 13.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by wayland ( 165119 )
      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: (Score:2)

        by Improv ( 2467 )

        Hmm. Perl6 is kind of tempting, although I imagine it'll only be really interesting once people port most of CPAN over to it.

        I probably should not be surprised to hear that a number of other people skip boring releases of Fedora - I don't know a lot of other Fedora users - it seems that apart from the conservative sysadmin types, most people are using Ubuntu now (well, except for the Gentoo ricers).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by armanox ( 826486 )
          I don't know too many people that are still using Ubuntu - they switched to either Fedora or Debian.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by grcumb ( 781340 )

          Hmm. Perl6 is kind of tempting, although I imagine it'll only be really interesting once people port most of CPAN over to it.

          From the Perl6 FAQ [programmersheaven.com]:

          Will I be able to use Perl 5 modules with Perl 6?

          Yes; this will likely be achieved by embedding a Perl 5 interpreter, which is what Pugs, one of the prototype Perl 6 compilers, does now. The syntax for using a Perl 5 module is:

          use perl5:Module::Name;

          So go ahead, move on to Perl 6 and enjoy yourself.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by AdamWill ( 604569 )

        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 sp

    • Systems with NVIDIA graphics chips also gain initial support for suspend and resume functionality via the default Nouveau driver.

      that seems like a big one!

  • Really? Only last week I was looking at NetworkManager - and it didn't support this - even in the development version... based upon the information I could find.

    What gives?

  • ATI Driver Issues (Score:4, Interesting)

    by KJACK98 ( 623902 ) on Wednesday October 21, 2009 @02:44PM (#29827563)
    I've been a loyal fedora user since Fedora 8 when I made the switch to it for my primary OS. I upgraded to Fedora 11 from Fedora 8, and now my system has been constantly becoming unresponsive, even the xconfig changes mentioned on their errata page reduced the freezing but still get it randomly. As for the commercial ATI drivers, they suck and all I get is a black screen with a blinking cursor so I for one am praying they have finally resolved this issue in the next release.

    • The release notes mentions an experimental ATI driver that you could try.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Eil ( 82413 )

      Did you file a bug report? If no, did you check to see that a bug report existed?

  • Pulse Audio (Score:3, Informative)

    by BassMan449 ( 1356143 ) on Wednesday October 21, 2009 @03:01PM (#29827797)
    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.
  • I was bit by the preupgrade [fedoraproject.org] CLOSED NOTABUG "bug" where preupgrade requires a sizeable chunk of (temporary) disk space in /boot during an upgrade from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11. I ended up with a system that was unbootable, but repairable. No CDROM made things .. interesting, to say the least. I use pxeboot and kickstart to do all my installs because I hate having to swap CDs/burn DVDs

    I don't recall exactly what I did to work around the huge file "needing" to be in /boot, but I think I had a local copy of t

  • So, does anyone know when Redhat Enterprise Linux 6 is supposed to come out, and whether it is going to be derived from Fedora 12 or some earlier version? Redhat EL 5 is getting a little long in the tooth. The kernel is still 2.6.18 plus patches.

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