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Red Hat Software Linux

Fedora 12 Released 236

Posted by timothy from the new-hat-for-the-holidays dept.
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 More

Fedora 12 Released

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  • Great work! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sopssa ( 1498795 ) * <sopssa@email.com> on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @02:32PM (#30132038) Journal

    If you read the one page release notes [fedoraproject.org], it seems Fedora actually knows how to try to cater to more general audience too, while still supporting the core Linux audience. I have always thought that why Ubuntu became the "standard" general OS you introduce as first Linux, as Fedora does a lot more things a lot better (and the Red Hat delivered design is imo a lot better than whats delivered from Debian)

    What was interesting was the "better than ever tablet support". I have been thinking of getting a tablet pc for convenience in bed, and Linux would actually be quite perfect OS for it since theres no need to play games. Seems they're taken things like that into account too, while Linux community usually forgets the non-techie stuff.

    • Re:Great work! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @02:56PM (#30132512)

      It is subjective that Fedora does 'a lot more things a lot better'. They certainly have distinct aims from Ubuntu and gain some benefits, but I personally find Fedora to suffer some phenomena that Ubuntu does not:

      -Out-of-the-box media/driver experience: Fedora goes purist and the out-of-the-box experience suffers for it with lack of popular codecs and optimal drivers for nVidia cards. Ubuntu caters to the user experience and takes care of this out of the box. You have to add RPM fusion repositories to make Fedora cope with this, which isn't insurmountable, but isn't out of the box.

      -Fedora is not even stable within a release cycle in terms of offered featureset. I.e. I recall gaim 1.x being replaced with gaim 2.0 one day without requiring any particular update. This is good for enthusiasts who always want the cutting edge, bad for end-users who only want change at certain times they could expect (and for documenters doing screenshots). I recall once Fedora reving the kernel revision entirely without jumping releases. This wasn't bad in and of itself, but they jumped before nVidia supported it, and my X was hosed. Ubuntu is more conservative with this, knowing it will just be 6 months before a new cycle comes anyway.

      -Fedora is 'too' comfortable with cutting edge changes, even to the point of releasing versions ahead of upstream *or* backporting code from future versions into older versions that upstream projects didn't want to do. For example, they backported things from the 2.6.32 branch to 2.6.31. The upstream kernel people weren't comfortable enough with the features to allow them into 2.6.31 or any release that aligned with their cycle, so they simply put 2.6.32 stuff into 2.6.31. This has been a longstanding tendency with RH (everyone probably remembers the gcc 2.96 debacle). BTW, this is even worse in RHEL, where they will backport 2.6.3x changes to 2.6.18, severely breaking third party kernel modules that code for the 'API' of 2.6.18 that gets broken by the massive amount of backports. Some third party even writes to newer 'apis', but wraps it with '> 2.6.26' sorts of ifdefs and thus assumes the 'old' api and RHEL will completely screw those assumptions. Ubuntu *usually* doesn't jump the gun (GRUB 2 is an example of going before the upstream declares 'ready' though).

      -I *still* can't quite put my finger on it, but something about the Ubuntu desktop feels, subjectively to me, more whole rather than merely a conglomeration of the parts. This may simply be a matter of certain tastes they appear to me, because I can't nail it down.

      • 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.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by AdamWill ( 604569 )

          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 enc

        • 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

          Except when your distribution is hosted anywhere in the western world. 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.

          Rich.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Eil ( 82413 )

            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: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by AdamWill ( 604569 )
              Oh, yes? Are you a lawyer? Have you heard of the doctrine of contributory copyright infringement? Fedora's legal team has, which is why they're decidedly dicey about that sort of thing. That said, there are several proprietary drivers which are perfectly legally redistributable - NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom's own driver, for instance. Fedora does not distribute or implement a button for these not because it would be legally problematic but because it would be at odds with the Fedora project's philosophy and goal

          • 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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by AdamWill ( 604569 )

        Well, what alternative do you suggest for introducing desired new features into older kernel versions? It's not really the case that upstream 'didn't want to' backport things from 2.6.32 to 2.6.31, it's just not what upstream does. Upstream kernel maintainers do not maintain kernel version X once it's released, they go on to work on kernel version Y, pretty much. That doesn't mean it's somehow wrong for a distribution to do it, often it's the right thing to do, and Fedora is not the only distribution that d

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

          by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:54PM (#30133522) Homepage Journal

          ``Again, for RHEL, what's the alternative? The whole point of RHEL is to provide long-term stable releases''

          And there you have it. It's about stability. If I write software, or a configuration file, or anything else that interfaces with YourSoftware version X, and it works today, I think it is completely reasonable to expect it to also work tomorrow. If you make a new release of YourSoftware tomorrow that doesn't work with my code anymore, it's not YourSoftware version X anymore. It's a different version.

          I don't want my distro to be pushing new versions on me that break compatibility.

          If you want to introduce new versions, that's fine. In fact, I'm all for it. Just don't replace my working software with the new software that may or may not preserve compatibility. If it doesn't preserve compatibility, I want to have to explicitly upgrade to it. Put it in the next version of the distro. Or put it in a new package which can be installed alongside the old package. But don't put it in the current version of the distro, in the same package, because then you'll have multiple incompatible versions of the same distro with the same version number.

          • Kernels in Fedora and RHEL *are* parallel installable and always have been. Installing a new kernel does not remove the old one, and they're both available for selection from the bootloader.

          • I don't want my distro to be pushing new versions on me that break compatibility.

            It sounds like you do want RHEL, because that's the whole point. Red Hat engineers backport the fixes and features and they retain ABI compatibility.

            Rich.

        • "Well, what alternative do you suggest for introducing desired new features into older kernel versions?"

          An easy one: Do Not Do It. Fedora is flagged and commited to be a "cutting edge" distribution. This is quite a good thing for both some enthusiasts and professionals that want/need to know where Red Hat is aiming to in the not-so-distant future. Well, Mr. Fedora: commit to it.

          Again, for RHEL, what's the alternative? The whole point of RHEL is to provide long-term stable "releases"

          Do it damn stable then

          • there's cutting edge, and then there's cutting edge. the original example scenario was 'backporting features from 2.6.32 to 2.6.31'. so you would advise we somehow shipped fedora 12 with a kernel version - 2.6.32 - which barely even existed at the final version freeze date?

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

        by TorKlingberg ( 599697 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:25PM (#30133020)

        -Fedora is not even stable within a release cycle in terms of offered featureset. I.e. I recall gaim 1.x being replaced with gaim 2.0 one day without requiring any particular update. This is good for enthusiasts who always want the cutting edge, bad for end-users who only want change at certain times they could expect (and for documenters doing screenshots).

        On the other hand, with Ubuntu you are stuck with old versions of applications until you upgrade the whole system. For application software that is unlikely to break other things, I wish it was possible to upgrade to a new major version without upgrading everything else at once. It shouldn't be pushed as an automatic or opt-out update though, only manual or opt-in.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tolan-b ( 230077 )

          Well quite a lot of stuff is available in the backports repository.

          • Well quite a lot of stuff is available in the backports repository.

            How much tricks does that require? Will it break stuff when finally upgrading to a new version of Ubuntu?

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by Enry ( 630 )

              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.

              • "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."

                Yes, but the upgrade path is in no way as tested as the "proper" "from last Stable release". And that's if it has been tested at least even once, which I wouldn't confy too much on.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Korin43 ( 881732 )
            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.

        • I wish it was possible to upgrade to a new major version without upgrading everything else at once. It shouldn't be pushed as an automatic or opt-out update though, only manual or opt-in.

          apt-pinning, include a later repo and pin any app you want to upgrade to the new repo, some distros (i.e debian) even support thise, but it **should** work on any that use sane version numbering (i.e you do not release a new version of a package and call it the same as the last).

          I mean the sane choice is to use backports to get newer software (or back ports and pinning, if you don't want everything up to date), but to answere exactly what you asked for i would have to say apt-pinning.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by diegocg ( 1680514 )

        -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_ th

      • "-Fedora is 'too' comfortable with cutting edge changes, even to the point of releasing versions ahead of upstream *or* backporting .. This has been a longstanding tendency with RH (everyone probably remembers the gcc 2.96 debacle)"

        I honestly don't, do you mind providing a link. Did people come in one morning and find their gcc 2.96 had automatically upgraded itself?

        "something about the Ubuntu desktop feels, subjectively to me, more whole rather than merely a conglomeration of the parts. This may simp
      • I have a Thinkpad T60p. The video chip is an "ATI Technologies Inc M56GL [Mobility FireGL V5250]." With Fedora 12, for the first time, I have stable 3D video on this system. This includes running the proprietary drivers. I am currently running Compiz with Fedora 12 with the "experimental" ATI 3D support. The are still some issues with games, but for basic 3D the driver is solid. No problems with power management (suspect/hibernate)!

        One of Fedora's goals is to get rid of the need for distributing p

      • -Out-of-the-box media/driver experience: Fedora goes purist and the out-of-the-box experience suffers for it with lack of popular codecs and optimal drivers for nVidia cards. Ubuntu caters to the user experience and takes care of this out of the box. You have to add RPM fusion repositories to make Fedora cope with this, which isn't insurmountable, but isn't out of the box.

        Installing microsoft fonts was a real PITA, there might be an easier way to do it but in fedora11 i needed to do it urgently and ended up having to compile, that's not acceptable!

        Ubuntu *usually* doesn't jump the gun (GRUB 2 is an example of going before the upstream declares 'ready' though).

        what about kde4 and pulseaudio? ubutnu is just as bad it just includes stuff as soon as upstream release it though.

        • Installing microsoft fonts was a real PITA, there might be an easier way to do it but in fedora11 i needed to do it urgently and ended up having to compile, that's not acceptable!

          Duh...huh? Compile *what*? You can't 'compile' the Microsoft core fonts, they're only available as a bundle of TTF files. Which you could 'install' by just sticking them in ~/.fonts .

          • maybe you should tell people about it, I had to go through this [fedoraguide.info], call me stupid but if i cant run yum install micorosft-fonts (or something similar, maybe microsoft-fonts-installer so it's clear redhat are not hosting the fonts), then something is very wrong. It may be as easy as you claim, but if your method isn't in the first page of google results then it doesn't count for jack.

            on ubuntu it's
            sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
            or more likely it comes when your run sudo apt-get install *buntu-restricted-ext

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by AdamWill ( 604569 )

              Fedora is never going to have any market share, because we're not selling anything. There isn't a market. This isn't a glib point, it's an important one. No-one's playing for a share of a dumb customer base, here. That's not what Fedora is about.

              Second Google result for 'fedora "microsoft fonts"': http://miltonpaiva.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/fedora-11-x64-%E2%80%93-microsoft-fonts/ [wordpress.com]

              • That is hardly "Which you could 'install' by just sticking them in ~/.fonts ." and while upon closer inspection it turns out i wasn't compiling running rpmbuild, i still think that is far more work than anybody should have to do to get a some essential fonts.

                No-one's playing for a share of a dumb customer base, here.

                Fair enough but us "dumb users" bring free testing, feedback, advertising, support to a distro and a small proportion of us are likely to turn into developers, so i think you'll find that ubuntu (and to a lesser extent debian) are looking to have us as

                • That is hardly "Which you could 'install' by just sticking them in ~/.fonts ." and while upon closer inspection it turns out i wasn't compiling running rpmbuild, i still think that is far more work than anybody should have to do to get a some essential fonts.

                  No - what was pointed to you was a way you could get all the Microsoft Core Web fonts installed under the control of the package management system. That is one way.

                  If you happened to have all the MS fonts on a USB key, you could have just plugged it into your Linux box and copied it into your ~/.fonts directory. This too would have worked for your user, but would not have allowed another user on the same machine to use the same fonts.

                  Cheers,
                  Toby Haynes

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by zdzichu ( 100333 )

        Being cutting edge is what I like in Fedora. As for some kernel backports -- among them are btrfs backports. Those are changes which weren't even written when .31 was released. But those changes and fixes are quite important and I'm happy that Josef merged them in .31 shipped by Fedora.

      • This wasn't bad in and of itself, but they jumped before nVidia supported it, and my X was hosed.

        Are you still using nVidia's .run file and re-installing it after every kernel update, and if so, why? Add the RPMfusion repo and get both kmod-nvidia-whatever and akmod, plus the kernel-headers and Bob's your uncle. Just be sure to uninstall the binary blob before you reboot so that there's no conflict. Mostly, kmod's updated with the kernel, but if it isn't, akmod will rebuild it at boot and you'll never

  • Also available in this release are SystemTap 1.0 for improved instrumenting and debugging of binaries, complete with Eclipse integration

    I've tried SystemTap and it looks really really cool . I understand that this project is "dtrace for linux". Can someone with experience with both tools give a rundown on how SystemTap 1.0 currently compares with dtrace?

    • 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.

  • 2012 = year of linux on the desktop (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @02:55PM (#30132488) Homepage Journal

    OMG it's going to hit us!!!!

    Oh, sorry. Wrong story.

  • Still no IA64 support... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the linux geek ( 799780 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @02:56PM (#30132494)
    At least Fedora hasn't suddenly dropped PowerPC with no announcement like OpenSUSE did, but sadly, there's still no new builds of the SPARC and Itanium versions of Fedora. I wonder if they're intentionally trying to drive people to RHEL on these platforms.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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/ )

    • Dead platforms.... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jmorris42 ( 1458 ) *

      Dude, PPC is dead so get over it. The PS3/Cell was the last hardware you could actually buy and it dropped support for Linux in the latest hardware rev. And the previous support was crippled to the point of pointlessness.

      SPARC is long in the grave. SPARC64 is still around but again, nobody actually has anything other than old ancient stuff that isn't going to have the resources for a pig[1] like Fedora. Excepting a few peeps buying new hardware, but they are going to run Solaris on new gear. Old zombie

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tolan-b ( 230077 )

        Hacked Xbox 360s run PPC Linux :)

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by LordNimon ( 85072 )
        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.

      • PowerPC is still popular in the embedded space as well as in the high performance space. IBM's Power6 is a beast.

        I still do development for telecommunications platforms based on PowerPC, although I suspect that they will be phased out over time in favour of x86.

        As for ARM and MIPS, I've done kernel development for both of them and it's a real pain. There are a bazillion variations of each and they're way late in the game to get major kernel features.

    • That would make sense if Fedora were a server OS. But it's not. Can you name a single in-production workstation based on Itanium or Sparc? Don't say "Sun" -- they dropped their last Sparc workstation over a year ago.

      I don't know which platforms RHEL currently supports (redhat.com is quite unhelpful on that score) but Googling the site doesn't turn up anything for the Sparc or IA64 later than 2007. I suspect Red Hat is just not interested in non-commodity architectures any more.

  • I just tried to download the Live CD--according to my browser's download manager, it was going to take16 hours! No better luck with FTP from the command line either. You may want to wait until tomorrow.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:heres hoping (Score:4, Insightful)

      by CannonballHead ( 842625 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:25PM (#30133028)

      theyve fixed pulseaudio while they were at it.

      fixed that for you. :)

    • Re:heres hoping (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:43PM (#30133368)

      There are no bugs in pulseaudio, the only problem with pulseaudio is you don't love it enough. If everyone could just get to know pulseaudio, to see it for what it truly is rather than just what you read about it, then I think you will find that pulseaudio not only manages your sound, but saves the environment, fixes the economy, cures cancer, and creates world peace.

      You would have to be insane not to use pulseaudio, however that requirement will not be a problem for me...

    • I was having a bitch of a time too. For weeks it didn't work. As a last straw I rebooted. Everything was fine :)

  • Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Saint Aardvark ( 159009 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:05PM (#30132652) Homepage Journal

    I notice in the release notes [fedoraproject.org] they're using the Nouveau [freedesktop.org] driver for NVidia cards. I've been meaning to check the status of that driver for a while now -- but is this common in distros yet? (I'm a sysadmin mostly working on servers, so I'm a little out of touch. :-)

    • Re:Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver... (Score:4, Informative)

      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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by diegocg ( 1680514 )

      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.

    • The livecd is the very first operating system to correctly configure my dual-head setup out of the box. Good work.

    • To be honest, the experience of nouveau for me has been pretty horrible. I've found that it crashes once every 2 or 3 days. The old nv driver was slow, but at least it was stable.

      Note that this could just be my particular hardware/software combo, and I do tend to run only the bleeding edge. (Fedora 12? Pah! I'm already on Rawhide!)

      Rich.

  • Ubuntu influence on marketing materials (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ewg ( 158266 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @03:15PM (#30132828)
    You can really see the Ubuntu influence on the Fedora marketing materials: smiling faces, happy about "software that helps you work, play, organize, and socialize." Wait, did Fedora even have marketing materials before Ubuntu?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 )

      ``Wait, did Fedora even have marketing materials before Ubuntu?''

      They didn't need to, because they are the free version of Red Hat and Red Hat _was_ Linux in a lot of people's minds.

      But when Ubuntu came around, it quickly got so popular that it scared the big distros into getting their act together. Ubuntu's killer combo was the combination of working package management with ease of use. Nowadays, that's sort of what people have come to expect from a Linux distro, but, before Ubuntu, that was far from given

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jimicus ( 737525 )

        ``Wait, did Fedora even have marketing materials before Ubuntu?''

        They didn't need to, because they are the free version of Red Hat and Red Hat _was_ Linux in a lot of people's minds.

        But when Ubuntu came around, it quickly got so popular that it scared the big distros into getting their act together. Ubuntu's killer combo was the combination of working package management with ease of use.

        The only amazing thing about that was it took RedHat so long to get their act together. rpm needed some way of searching package repositories for years. Mandrake had urpmi and Debian had apt-get years before RedHat had anything comparable.

        • ``Mandrake had urpmi and Debian had apt-get years before RedHat had anything comparable.''

          Yeah. And as a result of that, there are _still_ people who believe software installation on Linux is hard. That hasn't been true for over 10 years ... unless you choose to do it the hard way, or choose to run a distro that doesn't provide an easy way.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jimicus ( 737525 )

            You'd be astonished (and, frankly, disturbed) how many bits of documentation on the Internet start with "First download the source code...." - and I'm not referring to outdated documentation or obscure things.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Chirs ( 87576 )

              To be fair, you can't expect every little project to maintain multiple .deb and .rpm versions for all the various different distros out there.

              For major projects it might make sense to start with "Install the package via your package manager..." but they'd probably still need to have the tarball-based instructions for cases where the package isn't available.

      • Unfortunately, Ubuntu seems to have lost its way. Every new release seems to introduce a lot of breakage, which in my opinion, outright destroys ease of use.

        Agreed. Ubuntu Live CDs won't run on my gaming computer. The nv driver green-screens (the popular veritcal green lines), and vesa drivers won't load. Vesa's worse than the nv drivers because they cause xorg to reload every half second, so I can't type anything on an alternate virtual console. At least Fedora supports vesa correctly.

  • gparted and ntfs-3g on live cd? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Culture20 ( 968837 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @04:35PM (#30134258)
    Does the Live CD have gparted and ntfs-3g yet? It's kind of silly having to use Ubuntu Live CDs to partition prior to installing Fedora.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by AdamWill ( 604569 )
      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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BassMan449 ( 1356143 )
      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.

      • Re:gparted and ntfs-3g on live cd? (Score:4, Informative)

        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: (Score:3, Funny)

          by smoker2 ( 750216 )
          It's nice to see someone who knows something post for a change. I have F9 and I never had to install "out of band" rpms to get ntfs working.In fact my FC4 install seems to write to NTFS partitions fine. But you have to bear in mind we are surrounded by ubuntu losers here, those who are only linux users because it was sold to them in an attractive manner. The rest of us are here because it was the right thing to do. They are here because it was the trendy thing to do.

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