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Red Hat Software Linux

Fedora 12 Released 236

AdamWill writes "The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 12 today. With all the latest open source software and major improvements to graphics support, networking, virtualization and more, Fedora 12 is one of the most exciting releases so far. You can download it here. There's a one-page guide to the new release for those in a hurry. The full release announcement has details on the major features, and the release notes contain comprehensive information on changes in this new release. Known issues are documented on the common bugs page."
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Fedora 12 Released

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  • Re:Fedora? (Score:3, Informative)

    by AdamWill ( 604569 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @02:37PM (#30132140) Homepage

    Yes. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics [fedoraproject.org] - we have seen over 2.4 million installations of Fedora 11 so far, a 20% increase on Fedora 10. Methodology is extensively discussed on the linked page.

  • by SUB7IME ( 604466 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:04PM (#30132646)

    Or grab a torrent! http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/ [fedoraproject.org]

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:05PM (#30132654)

    Actually, PPC has been dropped as a primary architecture for F13. You can always get it (as well as IA64) from the development branch if they don't make an actual release for it. (Se http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/development/ )

  • Re:SystemTap (Score:4, Informative)

    by diegocg ( 1680514 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:07PM (#30132686)

    I don't know how it compares to dtrace (in this wiki [sourceware.org] it appears that they have feature parity for all the important stuff), but I can tell you that it works quite well and it's very complete and it's well documented. It really deserves the 1.0 version tag.

    But in the kernel world very few people seems to use it, it seems that perf + static tracepoints have become the preferred tool for performance diagnostics.

  • Re:Great work! (Score:4, Informative)

    by icebike ( 68054 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:10PM (#30132744)

    Many of these problems you attribute to Fedora are also true of OpenSuse.

    Rather than take the Ubuntu approach of popping up a "Do you want to download these non-OSS drivers button" which handles it almost perfectly in every instance and frees the Distro of legal risk, both Fedora and opensuse have historically left you to your own devices, assuring the marginalization of their product.

    Opensuse now adds many one-click installs for some of these drivers. http://www.lebokov21.com/2008/01/29/opensuse-1-click-install-your-software/ [lebokov21.com]

    Forced into this by US legal situation, the web page based One-Click is better than nothing, but small consolation to someone stuck with an odd-ball network card.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:14PM (#30132806)

    Help others get Fedora. Seed your torrent for at least a few days. It'll be about a week to a week and a half before demands slows down. If you're concerned about bandwidth use your bandwidth scheduler.

    64 bit x86:

    Others:

    Sources: Fedora 12 source CDs [fedoraproject.org]
    Fedora 12 source DVD [fedoraproject.org]

  • Re:Great work! (Score:3, Informative)

    by AdamWill ( 604569 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:22PM (#30132968) Homepage

    As far as Fedora is concerned, this is not a 'problem'. The problem is rather in distributions which rely to too great an extent on closed source drivers to provide hardware support. For instance, many Ubuntu users upgrading to 9.10 are finding they can no longer use the proprietary ATI/AMD driver for their video card and are using the free driver. Which, it seems, Ubuntu does not pay too much attention to maintaining, as many of them have problems. By contrast, Fedora considers it better that users are encouraged to use the free drivers rather than the proprietary ones, and focuses on the development of the free drivers (Red Hat pays two full time developers to work on the radeon driver). In the long run, this is better for both Fedora users and all Linux users.

  • by SgtChaireBourne ( 457691 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:23PM (#30132974) Homepage

    Yeah, tried several--same problem. Finally found one that worked via FTP.

    Once you get it, help others get Fedora. Bandwidth schedulers can help if you're concerned about that. The demand will be there for a few days as people get it for work. Home users will try on the weekend, so if you can, help out by leaving your torrent up for a week or so.

    64 bit x86:

    Others:

    Sources:
    Fedora 12 source CDs [fedoraproject.org]
    Fedora 12 source DVD [fedoraproject.org]

  • Re:Great work! (Score:3, Informative)

    by diegocg ( 1680514 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:29PM (#30133110)

    -Fedora is 'too' comfortable with cutting edge changes,

    That's why I'm switching from Ubuntu to Fedora - I want cutting edge stuff, but not unstable enought to scare me and break all my stuff. Many fedora package maintainers are red hat programmers who are also important kernel/libc/gcc/gnome/pulseaudio/x.org hackers, they drop cutting edge stuff but it's their stuff and they fix it quickly. Ubuntu packagers however are usually just packagers. Often, Fedora maintainers test features in the distro _before_ they are merged in upstream. For example, this Fedora version includes many nice KVM improvements, the utrace kernel patches needed for Systemtap userspace probing which are not upstream, the out-of-the-tree nouveau driver enabled by default... It's certainly more unstable than Ubuntu, but it's also more interesting for my taste. Also, using fedora I help to test and stabilize features that will go later into other distros.

  • by brejc8 ( 223089 ) * on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:38PM (#30133280) Homepage Journal

    It works, and it works amazingly well. I admin 50+ machines and I used to always install both the nvidia and ati closed drivers because users want compiz. A year ago ati cards started working out the box, now so does nvidia.

  • by diegocg ( 1680514 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:42PM (#30133350)

    According to the feature matrix [freedesktop.org], they are already done with 2D support, video playback, dual head, Xrand, KMS and suspend/resume for all the chips, which are the neccesary functions for a functional gnome/kde desktop (minus compiz), so it's not suprising that distros are starting to include it.

  • Re:Great work! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Enry ( 630 ) <enry@@@wayga...net> on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:44PM (#30133384) Journal

    Not much in the way of tricks (a few extra repository lines). Debian backports (and I'm sure Ubuntu backports as well) are versioned such that when you upgrade to a new Debian release, the backport is replaced with the correct version.

  • by LordNimon ( 85072 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @04:04PM (#30133700)
    PowerPC is doing very well in the embedded space, thank you very much. Freescale just released an 8-core CPU that runs Linux very well. I admit that Fedora 12 may not be a good distro for embedded devices, but you're spreading FUD when you put PowerPC in the same category as SPARC and Itanium.
  • by westlake ( 615356 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @04:16PM (#30133918)
  • by AdamWill ( 604569 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @04:57PM (#30134666) Homepage
    the installer has a partitioning tool (which is actually based on libparted, as it happens). why would you need ntfs-3g to do partitioning? you only need it if you actually want to mount the partition and write to it.
  • by AdamWill ( 604569 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @05:29PM (#30135244) Homepage

    EPEL is pretty good in the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora world, but nowhere near as large and well-maintained as Universe, IMHO.

    You're conflating things you shouldn't conflate. RHEL has an intentionally restricted package set; it's restricted to what Red Hat can commit to offer very detailed support for (not a problem Canonical has with Universe or Multiverse). Fedora's package set is entirely different from RHEL's, and EPEL has no relevance to Fedora, you would not use an EPEL repository on a Fedora system.

  • by jmorris42 ( 1458 ) * <{jmorris} {at} {beau.org}> on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @05:39PM (#30135446)

    > Check IBM and other hardware vendors for PPC and Power CPUs.

    And how many people are going to run Fedora on a stack of blades? The only reason Fedora PPC still exists is because RH sells enough RHEL to those customers to justify it.

    > Do you know what CPU is in the Wii and XBox360?

    Do you know that Fedora doesn't run on either of those platforms? And even if you could break the hardware DRM, the lack of drivers, etc. and shovel it on the hardware, the resources suck on both. The Wii is pitiful and the Xbox is underendowed enough in the ram dept that Fedora would be an unpleasant experience.

    > Have you used Fedora recently?

    F12 is downloading currently at home on my F11 desktop. I'm typing this on a Thinkpad X31 running F11. Fedora sucks. The other choices suck more, especially since I have invested over a decade in RH based distros and know how to work around their suckage more. Now get the hell off my lawn ya punk kid!

    > It has come along ways since 1.0, and 2.0 where it required a lot of resources.

    What the hell are you babbling about? FC1 and FC2 were slim petite distros compared to F11. Anaconda did have some serious bloat back around that time which pushed the minimum ram to install up beyond what you needed to actually use the machine after the install, but now you can't really use a machine that was current in the F1 timeframe without upgrading pretty much everything in the box.

    > What you are saying is like, why do people care about Gnu/Linux, when there is OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.

    No. What I am saying is that until we decide to stop trying to chase Apple and Microsoft's taillights and instead try to make Linux the best *NIX in the world we are doomed to bloat. If you don't like that and want to actually use older hardware you currently have no choice other than to use an unbloated traditional UNIX such as NetBSD or OpenBSD.

    The comment about Solaris should have been simple enough to understand. Seriously, how many people are buying current SPARC64 hardware to run anything but Solaris on? And because the number buying SPARC hardware has been pitiful for years there isn't much old stuff to repurpose anymore until you go back to truly ancient gear.

  • by Stickster ( 72198 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @06:04PM (#30135882) Homepage

    I don't know about gparted but I doubt ntfs-3g will ever be included by default because of IP restrictions. Fedora has always been very careful about anything with IP attached and doesn't include it in the repos. You have to get it from RPM-Fusion.

    Actually, ntfs-3g was a ground-up design, and is part of Fedora, and included in most installs. If you have an existing Windows partition on NTFS, you don't need any special utilities or a third-party disc. You can simply resize the partition using the built-in functionality in the installer, and then install into the freed space. There's even an easy "Shrink existing system" option in the installer to make it clearer to those who aren't experts on partitioning mumbo-jumbo.

    That aside, thanks for the understanding about legal encumbrances. We make it a point to treat all users as potential remixers and redistributors of our distribution, and want to ensure we're not passing any legal problems off to them.

  • Re:Great work! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Korin43 ( 881732 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @06:11PM (#30135952) Homepage
    Last time I checked, Ubuntu is all about the PPAs now. The backports aren't very interesting [ubuntu.com]. Notice that the list is very short, and the only interesting backport I saw in my quick scan was Amarok. I didn't see Pidgin, Banshee, Filezilla, OpenOffice or Netbeans (all of which are out of date in Jaunty's stable repos).

    I used Jaunty as the example because Karmic hasn't really had time to get behind.
  • Re:Great work! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Eil ( 82413 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @06:16PM (#30136022) Homepage Journal

    Fedora is based and distributed from the US and a "do you want to infringe on the copyrights and patents of another company" button won't cut it.

    Uh, it's not illegal in any country for a distribution to prompt the user to download and install a package. It's only illegal for them to distribute it themselves. (Hence, the button.)

  • Re:Great work! (Score:4, Informative)

    by icebike ( 68054 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @06:21PM (#30136088)

    Clearly you don't understand how that button works or why its there.

    It is there so Ubuntu does not have to bundle drivers that are not OSS.

    It causes these drivers to be downloaded directly from the FREE website of the driver manufacturers, be it AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, or whatever.

    No copyrights or patents violated.

    Canonical IS based in the western world last time i checked.

  • by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Wednesday November 18, 2009 @01:52AM (#30140238) Homepage Journal

    Our RedHat account manager indicates that RHEL6 will probably be based off F11 with some parts (likely the KVM bits) of F12.

    yeah, RHEL 6 activity started branching a few months back.

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