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Red Hat Software Linux

Fedora 13 Is Out 268

Posted by CmdrTaco from the if-that-hat-fits dept.
ultranerdz writes "Fedora 13 has just been released. It includes major features such as automatic print driver installation, automatic language pack installation, redesigned user account tool, color management to calibrate monitors and scanners, experimental 3-D support for NVIDIA video cards, and more."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Fedora 13 Is Out More

Fedora 13 Is Out

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  • Dialup networking off by default finally (Score:5, Insightful)

    by suso ( 153703 ) * on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @01:06PM (#32338956) Journal

    While looking through the packages I noticed that Dialup Networking was NOT selected by default. Is this the first version to be that way? Kinda significant as in the end of an era.

  • Direct Link to Changelog (Score:5, Informative)

    by ProdigyPuNk ( 614140 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @01:09PM (#32339014) Journal
    Here's the direct link to new features for desktop users:
    http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/13/html/Release_Notes/sect-Release_Notes-Changes_in_Fedora_for_Desktop_Users.html [fedoraproject.org]

  • Sweet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sv_libertarian ( 1317837 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @01:20PM (#32339184) Journal
    Now I begin my bi annual ritual of backing up my data, and making a new live CD (I always have the worst luck with direct download/upgrade for some reason). I still can't decide *WHY* I use Fedora over say Gentoo or Ubuntu (Ok, Gentoo is just too damned annoying to build and install). I do get tired of enabling mp3/flash/etc... in Fedora though.

    • Re:Sweet (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ls671 ( 1122017 ) * on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @01:29PM (#32339352) Homepage

      > Now I begin my bi annual ritual of backing up my data

      Well, at least you seem to have a backup scheme in place ;-)

    • Re:Sweet (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jim Hall ( 2985 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @01:30PM (#32339370) Homepage

      Now I begin my bi annual ritual of backing up my data, and making a new live CD

      Why create a CD? It's better to use LiveUSB Creator [fedorahosted.org] to put the LiveCD bootable image onto a USB flash drive. There's even a nice GUI, works on Linux (of course) or Windows. Here's the How-to. [fedoraproject.org].

      And 1GB flash drives are cheap and plentiful these days ... if you can even buy a flash drive that small anymore.

    • Re:Sweet (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Vectormatic ( 1759674 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @01:30PM (#32339376)

      I have a perfectly good reason for using fedora over ubuntu. Fedora doesnt just fuck half the system up every release just to be new and flashy...

      and yeah, what the AC said, USB boot FTW, you just need a 1gb usb stick, which are pretty much free with a box of cereal these days

      • Fedora doesnt just fuck half the system up every release just to be new and flashy...

        1) The newest release of Ubuntu is an LTS release, meaning it will be supported for at least 3 years.

        2) Fedora seems to royally fubar my machine when upgrading to the next release. I've had to install as new each and every time. This is why I keep my data in a separate partition.

      • Fedora doesnt just fuck half the system up every release just to be new and flashy...

        You mean except for well-known examples like their way too early adoption of PulseAudio or KDE4?

      • Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)

        by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @03:02PM (#32340542) Journal

        Fedora doesnt just fuck half the system up every release just to be new and flashy...

        They have much better reasons to fuck half the system up every release.

      • Re:Sweet (Score:5, Insightful)

        by astrashe ( 7452 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @03:23PM (#32340854) Journal

        I really like the ruby packages -- it's easier for me to make ruby and rails work easily.

        I'm sure lots of people get by just fine with Ubuntu, and I haven't tried it for awhile, but it seemed to me that the package manager and the gems system were always tripping over each other.

        It's great that we have options, though. I've been running Linux for awhile, and in my experience, distros eventually melt down. They make bad decisions, try crazy schemes to monetize things, get too bogged down in ideology, chase off developers with fights, or whatever. Nothing lasts forever.

        So I'm glad that Ubuntu is out there if Fedora caves in, and Ubuntu people should be glad that Fedora exists in case Ubuntu goes way off track. That's why Linux is cool -- it's distributed enough that no single pinhead can break it.

        • I'm sure lots of people get by just fine with Ubuntu, and I haven't tried it for awhile, but it seemed to me that the package manager and the gems system were always tripping over each other.

          Yeah, well, that's because the Debian packagers flat out refused to work with the Ruby developers. The Ruby guys all wanted to integrate Gems and APT packages, so that APT could load a package which would call Gem to do the build. The Debian guys flatly refused, it was "Do it our way or not at all". So Ruby opted for t

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by astrashe ( 7452 )

            That's really interesting. I didn't know that. I ran Debian for a long time -- what you've said really sounds like Debian. :)

            Yum and ruby's gems system are integrated. I tended to credit the yum people for that, but from your comment maybe it has more to do with the gems people.

            I really dig yum -- I love the plugin that just grabs the diffs. I love that they have plugins at all.

            Fedora isn't as polished as Ubuntu, but it really feels like engineers are front and center, and that they're working on the in

      • fedora fucked up my data. fedora 9...worst....fedora...release....ever!

    • Re:Sweet (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sammyF70 ( 1154563 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @01:46PM (#32339648) Homepage Journal
      You might want to try Arch Linux then. I got fed up with the half annual ritual myself, and moved to Arch. it's *not* very easy to setup, but if you follow the step by step instructions you should have a running stable system fast. And from then on : "rolling updates, baby!"

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by shutdown -p now ( 807394 )

        Arch is for those who love vanilla bleeding edge packages. Not to say it's a bad thing (I do that, hence why I run Arch), but it's not quite the same as Fedora.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Spewns ( 1599743 )

        You might want to try Arch Linux then. I got fed up with the half annual ritual myself, and moved to Arch. it's *not* very easy to setup, but if you follow the step by step instructions you should have a running stable system fast. And from then on : "rolling updates, baby!"

        I feel Arch is extremely easy to set up. But I can always understand if it's a little daunting to people who are coming from a strictly desktop/GUI environment. Once you're beyond that though, I'd imagine Arch is much less of a pain than other minimal distros.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by sammyF70 ( 1154563 )
          You're right, in hindsight it wasn't very difficult to setup. It's just slightly more work than "pop in the CD and press install".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thule ( 9041 )
      Make a local mirror, pxe boot, upgrade.

      Or

      Make a local mirror, install the new fedora-release rpm's and do a 'yum upgrade'.

      Or

      If you have FiOS, don't make a local mirror, just 'yum upgrade' after installing the new fedora-release rpm.

      There only time yum upgrade didn't work was when they switched rpm payloads a few versions back.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pyser ( 262789 ) *

      I think I'm going to hold off. I just finished upgrading most of my Linux boxen to Fedora 12. It was several months and 6+ yum updates before all were finally stable and things worked as they should.

      Upgrading is inevitable, because the old stuff falls out of "support", but it's not worth it to me any more to jump on a new release just because it's there. Same thing happened to me back at Fedora 5, and 10 disagreed with some of my hardware.

      • > Same thing happened to me back at Fedora 5, and 10 disagreed with some of my hardware.

        I have similar problems that will prevent me from putting F13 on either of the machines I use.

        My desktop box is stuck on F11. Linux (upstream) has had a broken driver for my Highpoint RAID card for years. (Years as in the newest OS I know of that has a working driver was RHEL4) I managed to get the free driver at Highpoint's site to build on F11's original kernel with a little patching but later ones break new thing

  • Skipped 12 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 0racle ( 667029 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @01:21PM (#32339220)
    I had to skip Fedora 12 because X and/or KDE couldn't handle both of my nvidia cards. Enabling one with both monitors worked fine, but having X configure both cards (binary nvidia of course) locked the machine completely.

    With support for Fedora 11 ending soon, I'm hoping this has been resolved.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by McNihil ( 612243 )

      With my old nVidia system with onboard graphics Fedora 13 locks up at install. Both the analog and digital video out go dark. Sticking with 12 for a bit... possibly till 14 is done.

    • Hmm, what exactly are you personally losing when support for 11 ends?

    • I haven't tried a GIT build recently, but as of my last attempt, multi GPU was still broken. Xorg Bug 25593 [freedesktop.org]

  • Preparing to jump, who is with me? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Vectormatic ( 1759674 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @01:23PM (#32339234)

    I'm just trialing Fedora 13 in a VM right now, if i dont run into any showstoppers i'll be ditching ubuntu this week on my main rig

    best of all, i have a tasy intel SSD on my desk right now which will be the system-drive for my new fedora install

    anyone with me?

    • Seems Fedora 13 has 2.6.9.33 kernel? Trim support by default? I have been curious to try Fedora for a while and have a new workstation (with ssd) coming in a week or so. Maybe I should try this instead of 10.4.

    • I'm in a similar situation. Downloading the image via torrent now (shall seed), then the wipe of the OCZ Vertex 60GB begins.

  • Windows mirrors linux mirrors windows. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by irreverant ( 1544263 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @01:26PM (#32339312) Homepage
    You know, I've used a computer long enough to learn that this battle between windows and linux is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. I've noticed that when XP came out, it seemed very familiar, as a matter of fact, it sure seemed a lot like mandrake. This is the way it's been through out the years. Microsoft takes something that works great from linux and makes it theirs and sometimes makes it better, most of the time worse. And the same goes for linux, sometimes it starts out worse and gets' better because they borrowed it from microsoft or sometimes makes something worse and makes it better then microsoft takes it. The point i'm getting at, after noticing i'm rambling is that I believe there are certain behaviors and tendencies of computer users that have been leveraged by OS manufacturers. That somethings just work better with certain designs, take for example the automatic printer drivers install. That works really well with Windows 7 and apparently fedora is now getting with it. God knows i Hate using CUPS.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by that IT girl ( 864406 )
      Who, erm... who mentioned Windows? Maybe I missed something, but I just saw the news about Fedora 13.

    • Re:Windows mirrors linux mirrors windows. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by burnin1965 ( 535071 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @02:00PM (#32339854) Homepage

      Microsoft takes something that works great from linux and makes it theirs and sometimes makes it better, most of the time worse. And the same goes for linux, sometimes it starts out worse and gets' better because they borrowed it from microsoft or sometimes makes something worse and makes it better then microsoft takes it.

      From my experience Microsoft does borrow others ideas but usually they are in major releases when they need to have some bullet points to justify buying their latest software. Aside from the major releases Microsoft has a hard headed "not developed here" attitude that results in some crappy software.

      One example where it took them ages to pull there head out, tabbed browsing.

      Some examples where Microsoft is still producing retarded software:
      - Focus follows mouse.
      - Roll up windows.
      - Multiple desktops.

      And the open source crowd, they not only borrow but they try lots of new ideas and are happy to significantly modify borrowed ideas and try new things. But sometimes the borrowed ideas are too similar to the garbage from Microsoft.

      I.e. Trying to eliminate or hide the ability to perform tree / list file management in the Nautilus browser and instead opening new windows all over the desktop for each directory. Microsoft tried this crappy UI in Windows, it sucked, and it sucked just as much in Gnome.

      The greatest benefit linux has going for it is the diversity in the software and the ability to choose and modify. This is a virtually non-existent feature in Windows and OS X.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drsmithy ( 35869 )

        Some examples where Microsoft is still producing retarded software:
        - Focus follows mouse.

        Is a UI catastrophe.

        - Roll up windows.

        Are of highly questional utility given the Taskbar.

        - Multiple desktops.

        Are dramatically overrated.

        I.e. Trying to eliminate or hide the ability to perform tree / list file management in the Nautilus browser and instead opening new windows all over the desktop for each directory. Microsoft tried this crappy UI in Windows, it sucked, and it sucked just as much in Gnome.

        Actu

    • Re:Windows mirrors linux mirrors windows. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @02:01PM (#32339862) Journal

      Your comment isn't talking about Windows and Linux at all. You are almost entirely talking about Explorer and GNOME/KDE. There are a few underlying system services, like CUPS, grub, kudzu, etc., but you're mostly talking about UI.

      If that's all you care about, good for you. The rest of us want much more from an operating system than a vaguely familiar interface. The more extensively you actually use it, the more apparent the differences become.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PRMan ( 959735 )

      take for example the automatic printer drivers install. That works really well with Windows 7

      Yes, but it worked much better on Ubuntu first...

  • Even though Fedora is my desktop of choice (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Scareduck ( 177470 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @01:37PM (#32339508) Homepage Journal
    ... it still has some gaping flaws.
    • gthumb absorbs all memory in sight when downloading images from a camera. This alone makes it useless for anyone into photography. I see gthumb has been replaced by Shotwell, so hopefully this amounts to an improvement.
    • Printer configuration is insanely complex and obscure. Really, this is a gripe about CUPS, but I just don't like either that much.
    • NetworkManager is an abortion that doesn't play well with the usual Unixy config files, but is strangely necessary for the desktop to operate correctly. I think this finally got fixed in more recent versions (Fedora 12).
    • Audio is just plain broken. Major features -- such as the ability to mix external audio -- have been missing since Fedora 11. Nobody seems to care, or know how the new audio system, Pulse Audio, works.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 0123456 ( 636235 )

      NetworkManager is an abortion that doesn't play well with the usual Unixy config files, but is strangely necessary for the desktop to operate correctly. I think this finally got fixed in more recent versions (Fedora 12).

      I tried the beta at the weekend and NetworkManager resolutely refused to enable my wireless LAN; I had to go to the command line and 'ifup wlan0' to get it to work. I guess that's better than the Ubuntu NetworkManager repeatedly asking for my 64-character WPA2 password even though it's already been configured.

      Audio is just plain broken. Major features -- such as the ability to mix external audio -- have been missing since Fedora 11. Nobody seems to care, or know how the new audio system, Pulse Audio, works.

      It's not just Fedora, I don't believe anyone anywhere knows how Pulse Audio works :).

    • Re:Even though Fedora is my desktop of choice (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ProdigyPuNk ( 614140 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @01:56PM (#32339796) Journal
      Best thing I ever did when I installed Debian was to rip out Pulse Audio. Haven't had an audio related problem since then. It's really not needed for 99% of the applications in the repos. Do yourself a favor and just ditch it.

      • Re:Even though Fedora is my desktop of choice (Score:4, Interesting)

        by TheTyrannyOfForcedRe ( 1186313 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @03:08PM (#32340626)
        Pulseaudio has be perfect on Ubuntu Lucid. I'm as amazed any anyone. It was a total disaster for the longest time and then all of a sudden no more issues.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by V!NCENT ( 1105021 )

        Yeah keep hearing that... I never had a problem with PulseAudio since day with Fedora.

        But then again I did my homework before buying my computer. You see, it turns out PulseAudio has a fallback mechanism for when there is no PulseAudio driver for your sound card and then reverses the routing to Alsa and OSS drivers.

        Cool and all... but given the fact that most Alsa drivers are dirty hacks, problems survice, like stuttering audio and not hearing audio at all sometimes.

        The exeption to this rule is Skype, which

        • Can you please point me to this hardware compatibility list that you checked when you were "doing your homework". Because from what I can tell PulseAudio doesn't have any sound card drivers. It is just a sound server that provides network transparency and better mixing capabilites as an additional layer on top of the kernel sound support. It always uses an underlying layer like ALSA or OSS to talk to the hardware, as seen in this module diagram [wikimedia.org]. Here is a full list of the PulseAudio modules [pulseaudio.org] - note that ther

        • Alsa was rock solid on this computer with Ubuntu 7.04. With PulseAudio in 8.x sound was completely useless. 9.10 was fixable and now works reasonably well but it still goes into a fugue state from time to time. Did they remove the drivers for Nvidea's onboard sound? I ended up having to get an ancient C-Media card to get it working again and that's in Alsa emulation mode. It was a cheap enough fix but I'd like to get the onboard sound working as it would improve airflow to my graphics card.
    • even though fedora is my desktop of choice, it just fails to boot on my brand new mac book. grown...

  • Thanks Fedora guys (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pizzach ( 1011925 )

    I appreciate you guys putting gWaei into the repositories. I was forced to install Fedora 13 rawhide to do some testing with gtk+-2.20 (I think) and I was impressed with the package manager. Much cleaner than synaptic. Though I didn't like the lack of progress bars for so many things.

    If I want an easy to set up distribution, I would probably prefer Fedora over Ubuntu nowadays. I give the Fedora guys props. (When I say easy to setup, I don't necessarily mean newbie friendly.)

  • I use Fedora 12 right now. Every time I shutdown the system from command line in a terminal or console as root, the next time my computer boots, the GDM starts in 800x600 resolution or something like that. Restarting GDM once again fixes this. What's going on here? Is there a way to disable this nanny GDM behavior? Looked in a lot of obvious places, like it's configuration files, and I couldn't find the solution.

    Another issue, is there a way to initiate a proper shutdown by pressing the power button of you

  • Seriously... who releases a version 13 of anything? I did this recently on a project as an internal release and within a week a showstopper bug revealed itself so we had to patch it and jump to version 14.

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