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Open Source Operating Systems Linux

Fedora 14 Released and Reviewed — Advanced, and Not For Wimps 200

Several readers have sent word that Fedora 14, codenamed Laughlin, has been released. A brief listing of the major changes has been posted, and the download is available at the Fedora project's site. Reader jfruhlinger points out a quick review of the new version, saying, "Remember the days when being a Linux user was like being part of a select priesthood — arcane knowledge needed, but great rewards? Steven Vaughan-Nichols has tested out Fedora 14, and that was how it went. No Ubuntu-style handholding, but some powerful new features."
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Fedora 14 Released and Reviewed — Advanced, and Not For Wimps

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  • by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn@gm a i l . com> on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @01:46PM (#34104002) Journal

    Remember the days when being a Linux user was like being part of a select priesthood ...

    Oh, it still is like that in some respects [wikipedia.org].

  • KDE (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stoolpigeon ( 454276 ) * <bittercode@gmail> on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @01:48PM (#34104018) Homepage Journal

    I've always used KDE with RedHat/Fedora. He needs more friends that run Fedora.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Nimloth ( 704789 )
      Same here. KDE and XFCE on Fedora. No Gnome.
    • Re:KDE (Score:5, Interesting)

      by BassMan449 ( 1356143 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @02:11PM (#34104306)

      I thought the exact same thing. I've first used Fedora Core since 3 and almost immediately switched from GNOME to KDE. Especially now I would definitely take KDE 4.2+ over any version of GNOME.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dAzED1 ( 33635 )

        I started as a slackware guy, back in...well, I won't date myself. Then I built everything myself, in a linux-from-scratch style way. Then I moved to Gentoo for a while. Then, after I realized I wanted to get work done, stop farking around, and accept that I wasn't needing to prove something to someone (not by building my own "distro" at least) I moved to Fedora.

        Somewhere along the way, I went with XFCE. I was one of those people who had used Gnome because it was so lightweight compared to CDE. I was s

    • Yeah, I read that line and thought at first "well, _I_ use Fedora with KDE". After reflecting for a bit, I realized that in the past KDE users (I got the KDE habit from Slackware) mostly went for a SUSE (also originally Slack-based) install. I always get the Fedora KDE install, but it's never seeded as well as the Fedora proper torrent.
      • Why do linux distros not utilize usenet? It would be nice if there were actually linux iso on it so I can actually say that I really do use it to download distros.

        I get a better consistant speed on usenet than http or bittorent. More than twice as fast, infact

  • Wanker (Score:5, Informative)

    by chill ( 34294 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @01:52PM (#34104066) Journal

    Reading the comments to that blog shows he reviewed a Beta, not the release. Every single bug he said he ran into had been fixed before the release.

    • Re:Wanker (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @01:59PM (#34104164)

      Yeah, I saw that too. And then he ends the review with "they need more quality assurance". Apparently someone doesn't know what the term "beta" means.

      • Re:Wanker (Score:5, Funny)

        by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @02:21PM (#34104430) Homepage

        Apparently someone doesn't know what the term "beta" means.

        I'll tell you what it means:

        Beta (noun): Greek letter used to denote the last build of software before management decides to ship the product anyway.

        You've obviously never shipped code. ;-)

        • by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

          Funny but I remember when we did alpha, beta, and Gamma releases.
          Alpha was internal testing only.
          Beta was testing outside the company.
          Gamma was feature and UI complete only bug fixes.
          Then you did release.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          Beta (noun): Greek letter used to denote the last build of software before management decides to ship the product anyway.

          Hm. I always thought that's called a "prototype". ~

      • Apparently someone doesn't know what the term "beta" means.

        Very few people do anymore, what with Google releasing all of their products with the "Beta" label and never, ever releasing a production version of anything ;)

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by micheas ( 231635 )

          Apparently someone doesn't know what the term "beta" means.

          Very few people do anymore, what with Google releasing all of their products with the "Beta" label and never, ever releasing a production version of anything ;)

          IIRC, Google's definition of beta is "not showing a profit"

    • To give him what he's due; his article did mention that it was a Beta and he had hope for quick fixes. It's the slashdot summary which completely missed that.
      • Re:Wanker (Score:5, Informative)

        by ak3ldama ( 554026 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @02:18PM (#34104384) Journal

        The only indication that it is beta is that he released his review before Fedora 14 was actually released! First paragraph:

        That's not to say that the newest version of Fedora, Fedora 14 Laughlin, is hard to use. It's not. But, if you need a lot of handholding as you explore Linux, I think you'll be better off with Ubuntu.

        Though later he says:

        There is a fix on the way for this problem, but it still wasn't in the late beta software I was trying out.

        The tags at the top do not mention it as beta, nor does the title. That is far from being genuine... I think this article is pure trash personally. I saw it yesterday in the /. firehose where it belonged. I can not believe it made the front page. Running around installing the latest linux distro (pre-release at that!) in a virtual machine is not news worthy and makes for junk journalism.

    • Re:Wanker (Score:4, Informative)

      by HeckRuler ( 1369601 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @02:19PM (#34104400)
      Well ok, but is the gist still correct? Is Fedora 14 for the elite uber-admins? While I'd like to be the sort of person who knows his box back and forth, I'd also like to just plug in [wireless-card/mic/spleunky/starcraft2/maptool/softwareRaid/Audacity/whatnot] and simply have it work. Those don't exactly go hand in hand. You know when you're on a date and you go to play a movie, but the sound isn't working and you try to fix it and she walks off around the point you start opening man pages?
      Yeah, I've been there and I don't particularly want to go back.
    • by sjvn ( 11568 )

      Actually, they were not fixed in the RC. Sorry, they weren't.

      • Re:Wanker (Score:4, Informative)

        by AdamWill ( 604569 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @07:58PM (#34107620) Homepage

        SJVN: Look at the bug reports I linked to: they have confirmations from multiple reporters that the bugs are fixed. I've got two F14 systems and a couple of VMs here, I can run Brasero on any of them and it works fine, for instance. The only bug that you mentioned that isn't fixed, exactly, is the USB 3.0 problem: USB 3.0 support was actually disabled on purpose because if we turn it on it breaks suspend/resume, and that hasn't changed for final (contrary to what I wrote in my comment). We did, however, document workarounds on the Common Bugs page - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F14_bugs#usb_3.0 [fedoraproject.org] .

        You never replied to my comment that 'release candidate' is a tricky concept when it comes to Fedora, because we have 'release candidates' of the Alpha and the Beta as well as 'release candidates' of the final release. I also asked if you could post the filename and sha256sum of the images you tested so I could confirm exactly what it is you were testing, but you didn't reply to that, either.

        It's possible that you really are testing the final release and you're seeing bugs that look exactly the same as bugs that other people saw in the Beta and subsequently confirmed were fixed but are in fact *different* bugs, I guess, but it seems unlikely, and there's no way to tell for sure unless you let us know exactly what images you tested.

  • hmmmm (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @01:52PM (#34104074)

    "Remember the days when being a Linux user was like being part of a select priesthood"

    Yeah, i do, and that's why linux is having a hard time converting people because most of the community is desperately trying to keep it that way. And before you call me a windows fanboy, I run it all, win7, mac, several flavors of linux.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You must be new here, Windows fanboy
    • Re:hmmmm (Score:5, Funny)

      by Sponge Bath ( 413667 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @02:04PM (#34104222)

      I run it all, win7, mac, several flavors of linux.

      Watch it polytheist, the Solders of the One will mod bomb you.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I don't know if you misspelled "Soldiers", but "Solders" is actually way funnier. Well done.

      • by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        So? I can make the same claim.

        Running both Windows 7 and MacOS gives me a lot of appreciation for what the Linux development community has accomplished.

        Having played with the competition, I have no interest in it.

      • Actually, they are probably too busy bombing Syfy HQ after that brutal cancellation.
    • by jedidiah ( 1196 )

      > Yeah, i do, and that's why linux is having a hard time converting people
      > because most of the community is desperately trying to keep it that way.
      > And before you call me a windows fanboy, I run it all, win7, mac, several
      > flavors of linux.

      "Most of the community" is doing nothing of the sort.

      The biggest problem people have is getting over the idea that they actually have a choice.

    • by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

      It was also when only the brave would try to do real work with it. Cutting edge is okay to play with at home. I will take Centos or Ubuntu Server for production systems thank you.
      Fedora is for the brave of heart and abundance of free time.

    • Who is trying to keep it that way?

      A lot of effort has gone into making Linux user friendly. I refuse to try and help friends who run Windows any more because it so damn hard to fix things, or even get things working. These days its Windows that needs config files edited or registry settings changed, while Linux (Mandriva at any rate) tends to be fairly easy to configure - for example to change the hosts file or MTU.

      The last time I tried to install software on Windows, I carefully followed instruction for t

      • Windows hasn't had to have config files or manual registry changes for any but the most obscure things for a long time. In fact, config files in Windows are very nearly deprecated. Whatever software you were installing (and which never gets named in posts like these for some reason), I doubt it was anything remotely mainstream, because the installers have been solid for years now. Even the transition to 64-bit Windows hosts has gone much more easily than planned.

  • ldap.conf/krb5.conf,nscd - sssd.conf - nslcd.conf

    I wish they would just stick with an authentication provider.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @01:57PM (#34104132)

    He reviewed the Beta version of F14!!! for crying out loud!!! Really thought that Slashdot was more responsible than this.

  • Review was BS (Score:3, Informative)

    by chrisj_0 ( 825246 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @01:58PM (#34104148)
    he reviewed the Beta and all the problems he listed are fixed. Read the comments at the end of TFA.
  • not the final release of Fedora 14. Fedora is still an excellent KDE distro, despite the fact that RedHat is a strong Gnome supporter.

    --
    Regards

  • by Sponge Bath ( 413667 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @02:01PM (#34104192)
    The new fedoraproject.org site uses 4 icons (freedom, friends, features, first) in the same colors as the Windows logo that can be pieced together like the Windows icon. Kind of odd.
    • by Intron ( 870560 )

      hmm. green, orange, red, blue - correct

      But Fedora is friendly rounded hippie shapes like guitar pics, Windows uses harsh, wavy squares like shards of glass. See the difference?

    • The new fedoraproject.org site uses 4 icons (freedom, friends, features, first) in the same colors as the Windows logo

      They are not in the same shades as the windows logo, they are only the same "color" on a loose assessment.

      that can be pieced together like the Windows icon.

      For very loose values of "like the Windows icon". They are four icons that could (as could any four icons) be placed in a 2x2 grid, but if you do that, it won't look like the Windows icon, because the four icons on the same shapes as th

  • The bad old days (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MonsterTrimble ( 1205334 ) <monstertrimble.hotmail@com> on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @02:16PM (#34104362)

    "Remember the days when being a Linux user was like being part of a select priesthood — arcane knowledge needed, but great rewards? Steven Vaughan-Nichols has tested out Fedora 14, and that was how it went. No Ubuntu-style handholding, but some powerful new features."

    Thankfully, I missed those days (in general) until I started playing with LXDE & E17. In fact, the main reason I use a ubuntu derivative now over Fedora is that it worked with a minimum of fuss. As a newbie, I was HAPPY for the handholding.

    • by martas ( 1439879 )
      a thousand times, ditto! i love linux, but never in a million years do i want to compile a kernel. trust me, there are a lot of people out there who feel exactly the same way. thanks, ubuntu, for giving people like me such a wonderful product!
      • Re:The bad old days (Score:5, Interesting)

        by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @02:40PM (#34104634) Homepage

        a thousand times, ditto! i love linux, but never in a million years do i want to compile a kernel. trust me, there are a lot of people out there who feel exactly the same way.

        Well, it's like changing a tire, writing your own interrupt handlers, or hand-optimizing memory usage.

        It's something everybody should do at least once in their life so they understand the process. And, once you've done it, you will never want to do it again. Those who sidestep the process never really understand and live in fear of it.

        Those who understand the process know what it's all about, and just mostly call AAA, install Ubuntu, or add more memory thereafter -- secure in the knowledge that if they really had to, they could probably muddle their way through it. But, in reality, it's a task best left for someone else and is mostly a waste of time. ;-)

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by ktappe ( 747125 )

          i love linux, but never in a million years do i want to compile a kernel.

          Well, it's like changing a tire, writing your own interrupt handlers, or hand-optimizing memory usage.

          It's something everybody should do at least once in their life so they understand the process. And, once you've done it, you will never want to do it again.

          It's not at all clear to me why everyone should compile a kernel at least once. Yes, I can do it if necessary but I see no reason why, especially with all the Linux evangelists trying to get it on every desktop, they feel the average Joe should ever know what compiling is let alone have to do it to an entire OS. You use a fork everyday but is really beneficial to know how to forge one? You write or print on paper regularly but should you have to know how to fell a tree and turn it into wood pulp? It seems r

          • by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @06:51PM (#34107234) Homepage

            It's not at all clear to me why everyone should compile a kernel at least once.

            Because, the notion that it's a task that is (or should be) reserved only for the tech wizards is intellectually offensive.

            One of my university profs (to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude) had very strong ideas about learning to do such things for yourself, and as a result, understanding more of the context and scope of it. You learn a lot more, and you remember it for longer -- it's not some random fact to be forgotten, it's something that you've internalized and that means something. As a result, when I wrote a microkernel as part of my OS theory class, I really got to understand how an OS works from the bare metal up. Have I done it since? Nope. Not at all. Am I grateful for having done it? Youbetcherass.

            I'm not saying that literally everyone should compile a kernel -- my mother, for instance, not so much. But, in terms of demystifying the process, I think it's a valuable thing to learn.

            I remember several years ago when my father (at the time in his late 60's, and a computer n00b) came to the conclusion he needed to install a printer driver. The chain of thought to arrive at the conclusion that there is a) such thing as a printer driver, b) you need one to make your printer work, and c) determining the steps to install a printer driver is quite impressive. It represents grasping several concepts before you can even move onto trying to find a solution -- but, in the end, he understood what drivers did (broadly), why we need them, and how to install one.

            If you just threw up your hands and said "zomg, that's just way too complicated and therefore beyond me", you're going to curl up in a ball the first time things get difficult.

            So, yes, if you consider yourself more than a Linux hobbyist, and just want to give yourself a little more in-depth understanding ... compile a kernel. Break your machine like the rest of us have. Panic. Fix it. At the very least, it demystifies the process ... and on the other hand, forces you to understand at least at a high level that there are such things as kernels and drivers, but that it's not some arcane magic.

            Now, get off my damned lawn and go compile a kernel or something. ;-)

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by roothog ( 635998 )

          It's something everybody should do at least once in their life so they understand the process.

          I'm a little confused. What aspect of the process requires understanding?

          Compiling a kernel is:
          - make menuconfig
          - make && make modules_install
          - mv bzImage /boot
          - emacs /boot/grub/grub.conf

          Maybe I'm just jaded, but I'm missing how this is enlightening and/or instructive. Why is it useful for people to know these steps?

      • Re:The bad old days (Score:5, Interesting)

        by jimicus ( 737525 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @02:49PM (#34104750)

        IME, there are three sorts of Linux users.

        The Newbie - uses Ubuntu or something similar - doesn't want to compile anything, just wants something other than Windows with the minimum extra effort.

        If you go back in time to before Ubuntu existed, this sort of person was very rare and often graduated to "enthusiast" level quite quickly.

        The Enthusiast - uses the unstable, beta stream of a well-known distribution or Gentoo, happy to compile whatever's necessary and will put up with a hell of a lot. For most outsiders, watching these people is like seeing someone in an abusive relationship. You know it doesn't have to be like that, you know they're setting themselves up for punishment but the only person who can pull them out of it is themselves.

        The Professional - uses Debian, CentOS or RHEL. Has no intention of wasting time compiling stuff, and wants to be able to get as many packages as possible without any compiling. Is not afraid of compiling if strictly necessary. May have a need to run commercial package(s) which are only supported on these distributions. Usually reached this point having come from some other Unix or bubbled up from the Enthusiast.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by martas ( 1439879 )
          Hm, it seems I don't fit your taxonomy. I've used Ubuntu for several years now as my primary OS, and, having been a CS student for some of that time, I don't consider myself a newbie; I've gotten my hands dirty trying to compile at least a few not-so-well-managed projects from source (though never the kernel). I don't consider myself what you call an "enthusiast" either - I have no interest in intentionally using unstable code. That leaves "professional", but, as people like you would probably be very quick
          • by jimicus ( 737525 )

            Well, to be fair there are exceptions to every rule - everyone everywhere in the world would agree with me on that one!

            I neglected an extra in the "Professional" category, BTW, which I realised as soon as I posted - an IT professional who uses Linux on their desktop as a general working environment - almost invariably chooses Ubuntu AFAICT.

        • Funny, but, well...meh.

          I started on Slackware (7.1), graduated to Gentoo, and now use a mix of Slackware, Gentoo, Ubuntu and Debian machines. They all have their advantages. I like Gentoo on servers because you can make it as streamlined as you want. I like Ubuntu on laptops because wireless just works and my laptops are just tools. I'll always have a soft spot for Slack because it was a great way to learn Linux, but I like the fact that with Ubuntu/Debian/Gentoo, I don't have to keep reinstalling th
        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by roothog ( 635998 )

          You're missing a category: People who were enthusiasts for a lot of years and got burned out trying to keep their computers running. I run Ubuntu now.

        • I went from debian to gentoo to ubuntu to osx and now back to ubuntu.

          What am I?

        • Is there room for a Professional-Enthusiast hybrid? I.e. left Gentoo for Debian because he values his time, but uses the unstable branch because he values having up-to-date packages.
        • by int69h ( 60728 )

          Almost every professional I know uses Ubuntu or OSX on the desktop. Only a masochist would willing run Debian stable, CEntOS, or RHEL for that purpose. I personally run Fedora because I've been with Redhat since 1995 and I think Ubuntu looks like pig vomit out of the box. I bubbled up from DEC ULTRIX.

        • My first Linux was Linux for Playstation 2. Had seen all the submissions/comments about Linux and thought that getting the Linux kit for the PS2 would be an interesting learning experience and add some functionality to the thing. I'm not a developer or programmer, just a user and I had Sony's wacky Kondara-ized Red Hat useful within a day. Being a MIPS platfrom I could forget having packages of stuff outside of the installed stuff ready to use so I had to compile everything. My first compile was either

      • i love linux, but never in a million years do i want to compile a kernel

        I started dual-booting DOS/Linux several years before Fedora Core 1 came out, with RedHat. Back then, the only way to upgrade your kernel was to download the source on Dial-Up, compile it, install it and edit LILO to reflect it. It wasn't that hard, actually, although as time went on, there were more and more options to select when you configured the makefile. Now, you simply let yum, apt-get or whatever package manager your distro

      • It's not that hard; it's just tedious because you rarely get the kernel exactly right the first time...or even the tenth. And once you get the right .config for your hardware, make sure you save it, because you don't want to have to figure it out again next time.
        • by martas ( 1439879 )
          heh, well, the point i was trying to make is that since i can avoid it, i will, not that it's so nut-crushingly hard that i'd never do it... thanks for the pointer regarding saving the .config file though, i'll keep it in mind just in case.
    • by MSG ( 12810 )

      As a newbie, I was HAPPY for the handholding.

      This gets repeated a lot, and I wish people were more specific about it. The perception seems to be that Ubuntu is easier to use in all aspects, or in general, and I find that not to be the case. Most of the hardware detection and setup tech that makes Ubuntu easy to use was developed in Fedora-land and appeared there first. In general, Fedora has tended to be easier to use.

      Ubuntu, however, makes it easier to get proprietary video drivers and multimedia codecs. For that specific part of setup, Ubuntu is

  • by Jimmy King ( 828214 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @02:19PM (#34104402) Homepage Journal

    Sure, I remember those days. Now that I use Linux for real work, with live production servers, and not just screwing around in my bedroom I don't have time for that nonsense. I greatly prefer the more common state of things where the mostly automated configuration is probably pretty close to what I need, but I still have the option to make use of that arcane knowledge to tweak things if I need/want to.

    Don't get me wrong, that kind of distro still has its place in the world, but it shouldn't be the standard way of things.

  • Terrible review (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @02:58PM (#34104862)

    Half the article describes his test laptop and the theme he used. Then he didn't get USB3 to work, and suggested you overwrite your modules file (hint: use 2 > characters, not one). Then he complained about the CD burning program. Who burns CDs anymore?

    Nothing about SELinux, nothing about filesystems, nothing about updated packages like SSH, Postfix, Bind, or anything.

    a better article summary: "Beta Fedora makes a weak desktop, and I didn't bother to try any of the cool features of Linux"

    • by hawguy ( 1600213 )

      Technically, he suggested that you overwrite your xhci.conf file, not your modules file. Do you know for a fact that it's incorrect advice to solve the problem he's experienced? Sometimes you *do* want to overwrite the file rather than appending.

      If no one burns CDs anymore, then it seems that they should omit Brasero entirely, rather than including a version that crashes.

      In any case, since you asked, I still burn CD's and DVD's from time to time. My car stereo doesn't have an aux jack or USB port so CD-ROM

      • /etc/modprobe.d is a typical example of the neat system of config snippets: *any* file in it with the extension .conf is parsed assuming the same format and purpose as /etc/modprobe.conf . /etc/modprobe.d/xhci.conf is not part of any Fedora package or any upstream codebase, it's just a convenient filename to stick in /etc/modprobe.d for this purpose. Which is the reason for the use of > rather than >> , though I suppose >> would have worked just as well.

    • Nothing about SELinux, nothing about filesystems, nothing about updated packages like SSH, Postfix, Bind, or anything.

      Maybe because most of those things are relatively stable, common to various Linux distributions, and have nothing to do with the desktop user experience.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by MSG ( 12810 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @03:37PM (#34105332)

    Can we get over the quality of the review and celebrate the release of Fedora 14, already? I've been running it since the beta release, and I'm very happy with it. Fedora 14 is another great release by a group of people who are dedicated to Free Software!

  • virtualbox (Score:3, Informative)

    by nnet ( 20306 ) on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @05:24PM (#34106472) Journal
    Installed and runs fine on virtualbox for me....

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