Fedora 13 Is Out

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."

Dialup networking off by default finally

[suso]

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.

Windows mirrors linux mirrors windows.

[irreverant]

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:Sweet

[ls671]

> 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

[burnin1965]

You really need to move to bootable USB.

You really need to move to the 21st century. PXE Boot and network install, there is no need to clutter the environment with CDs, DVDs or USB devices when you have a perfectly good network. ;)

Re:is it faster?

[Drew M.]

Speaking of issues with apt-get, my old comment:

When doing large scale automated apt-get update; apt-get upgrade tasks, ask what happens to apt-get/dpkg when a postinstall script fails, or there were file conflicts with another package. Yes, the machine never fetches updates again. Serious amounts of dpkg --configure -a, dpkg --purge --force-reinstreq, and apt-get -f install are required to even get it working again. Also don't ask what happens when a user wants to install a local package with dpkg -i that has a missing dependency. Yes it prints an error, but unknowingly to the user the package actually gets half installed and breaks the automated update jobs. Why isn't there a --force flag to prevent this from happening?

Yum and rpm have had these issues solved for years and years, why can't Debian fix it?

Re:Windows mirrors linux mirrors windows.

[that IT girl]

Who, erm... who mentioned Windows? Maybe I missed something, but I just saw the news about Fedora 13.

Re:Even though Fedora is my desktop of choice

[ProdigyPuNk]

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:is it faster?

[diegocg]

RPM is much faster these days, but yum (well, interpreted python) is still slow, and it doesn't handle dependencies like APT can do. However it has several nice features that were easy to implement in yum and that apt systems still lack. Delta updates are used by default, for example. And with a plugin you can get transactional upgrades in Btrfs or LVM. The Yum utils are also quite powerful. I also like that yum can do almost-everything while in .deb systems you need to use apt-get, apt-cache, dpkg and others (or use aptitude, which is another layer). After 8 years of APT, I didn't miss it when I migrated to Fedora 12.

Re:Windows mirrors linux mirrors windows.

[burnin1965]

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:Let me save you some trouble

[Dishevel]

Well almost everything that is not liked in Windows 7 is WONTFIX. In fedora WONTFIX really means "THEY WONTFIX BUT YOU CAN IF YOU WANT TO"

Re:Fedora?

[StuartHankins]

We use RHEL for production servers that do real work, and Fedora for fileservers. We prefer using Fedora because the interface and management tools are similar to RHEL.

But, yeah, if I were using this as a desktop system I'd probably go with something else.

Re:is it faster?

[shutdown -p now]

Who uses apt-get directly, anyway? Aptitude FTW.

Re:Sweet

[shutdown -p now]

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:Sweet

[Spewns]

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:Sweet

[astrashe]

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.

Lost and confused - it is for usability

[dbIII]

The command line interface to NetworkManager WAS added as a useability improvement - it is so somebody can more easily run the thing remotely or on a server with no graphical interface.
Sometimes it is just easier to use words to get a message across instead of pointing at pictures.
However if you really want to see where usability is improving look at Maemo, web interfaces to linux routers and interfaces on linux based systems associated with televisions.

Re:is it faster?

[JackieBrown]

I am trying to figure out what you listed that you can't do in debian.

Want to know which packages are installed? dpkg –get-selections

Want to verify a package's installation? automatic

Want to know, of those installed, which have been modified? debsum

Want to know what package owns a specific file? dpkg -S {/path/to/file}

Want to know every file that a package installs? dpkg --contents {.deb-package-name}

Also, a Debian package is just a compressed archive as well.

I think they are both useful formats and have probably borrowed a lot from each other.