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Red Hat Software GNOME GUI Operating Systems Upgrades Linux

Fedora 17 Released 141

Posted by timothy from the sounds-like-a-movie-title dept.
ekimd writes "Fedora 17 aka "Beefy Miracle" is released. Some of the major features include: ext4 with >16TB filesystems, dynamic firewall configuration, automatic multi-seat, and more. Major software updates include Gnome 3.4, GIMP 2.8, and GCC 4.7. The full feature list can be found here. Personally, I still find Gnome 3 to be an 'unholy mess' so I'm loving XFCE with Openbox."
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Fedora 17 Released More

Fedora 17 Released

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  • Beefy Miracle (Score:5, Funny)

    by stevegee58 ( 1179505 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @10:32AM (#40142099) Journal
    Good heavens, what an unfortunate name for a Linux release.

  • Beefy Miracle? (Score:3)

    by Joehonkie ( 665142 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @10:33AM (#40142107) Homepage
    That is honestly the worst release name I ever heard. It sounds like a porn star nickname.

    • And the version sounds like a political cause. "Justice now! Release the Fedora 17!"

    • Re:Beefy Miracle? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @10:44AM (#40142227) Homepage

      Unfortunately a lot of linux distro coders don't seem to know where the dividing line between wryly amusing and lame is when it comes to naming releases. The novelty of Ubuntus silly release names wore off for me personally around 5 years ago. All I want a OS so please just stick with the release numbers and don't treat me like a 7 year ago girl looking for a new cuddly toy.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by philip.paradis ( 2580427 )

        don't treat me like a 7 year ago girl looking for a new cuddly toy

        And with that, I'm honestly afraid of the kind of replies you're apt (oh wait, they use yum... crap, that makes this worse) to get related to this release's codename.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbolden ( 176878 )

        Names are useful for the creative team who doesn't know which backend their creative materials (look and feel) are going with. When the creative starts, it might be Fedora 16.2, 17, 17.5, 18... Apple has proven that these names from creative can be used for branding and Debian... have followed suit.

        It makes sense. You don't like cute names you aren't the target.

        • Names are useful for the creative team who doesn't know which backend their creative materials (look and feel) are going with. When the creative starts, it might be Fedora 16.2, 17, 17.5, 18...

          I have no problems working on features and fixes for future Linux kernel versions without needing to know what actual version name the release will be called. I don't see how the distro developers can't do the same thing.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jbolden ( 176878 )

            I imagine they could do the same thing. But it is easier to have a name. Particularly if they are working on multiple projects. Then that name sticks.

        • i like debian's release names cos my whole family is a fan of toy story. dunno what they gunna do when the list of character names runs out though. maybe then they can go with finding nemo, another excellent pixar classic :)

      • Re:Beefy Miracle? (Score:5, Informative)

        by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @11:06AM (#40142541) Homepage Journal

        The most significant difference between Fedora and Ubuntu here is that in Fedora, the only time you're likely to see a release name is on a Slashdot article, and then if you look at /etc/issue*. Everybody else calls it Fedora 17. In Ubuntuland everybody calls the release by at least the noun part of the release name. For Fedora, its terribly inconsequential, and I say that as the guy who named Fedora 12.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          In Ubuntuland everybody calls the release by at least the noun part of the release name.

          Since when? All the people I see talking about an Ubuntu release use the adjective: Hardy, Lucid, Oneiric, etc..

      • Unfortunately a lot of linux distro coders don't seem to know where the dividing line between wryly amusing and lame is when it comes to naming releases.

        The same can be said for FOSS developers generally.

        The problem only gets worse when they port their apps to other operating systems and markets.

        • Just today I was looking at windowing test tools...
          and found this:
                  windowlicker - Java GUI Testing Framework - Google Project Hosting
                  code.google.com/p/windowlicker/

          What a terrible name... especially if you google it.

          • holy crap i must try out this windowlicker. sounds awesome!

            oh wait hang on its java... i'd rather actually lick a window
      • I expect nothing less from a community that insists on abbreviating "distribution" to "distro".

  • Very unfortunate name (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Otherwise known as the "BM" edition. Lame...

  • Who cares about your taste? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Isn't this supposed to be news?, who cares what you think about Gnome 3?

    I don't say it might not be a valid discussion (which has been made over and over), but just stating that you hate it on the summary as you do seems to be very out of place.

    • Re:Who cares about your taste? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by slackware 3.6 ( 2524328 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @11:10AM (#40142597)
      The KDE option is their for those that don't like Gnome3.
      Now I drive Dodge trucks so should I whine and bitch about Chevys and what an unholy mess their electrical systems are?
      And Timothy there are many different desktops if you don't know how to install a different DE use Ubuntu and STF up.

      • Chevys and what an unholy mess their electrical systems are?

        Not enough can be said on this topic.

        Signed,

        A Chevy Colorado Owner

  • Besides the name and the Desktop... (Score:5, Informative)

    by hey ( 83763 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @11:56AM (#40143409) Journal

    ... which is always fun to talk about. Fedora is really pushing the state of Linux forward more than any other distro.
    systemd for faster boot and starter reactions to changes (eg USB device plugged in). Moving every thing to /usr to make the filesystem more sane.
    Single window gimp! And lots more.

    • Re:Besides the name and the Desktop... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mickwd ( 196449 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @03:17PM (#40146591)

      Moving every thing to /usr to make the filesystem more sane.

      Meaning that the system no longer supports /usr in a separate filesystem: http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken [freedesktop.org].

      Of course, you can still use /usr in a separate filesystem from / if you boot with an initrd, but you now almost need half an operating system (busybox, rescue shell and utilities, perhaps support for lvm and/or RAID) just to boot your real operating system.

      Why would you want /usr on a separate filesytem? Perhaps you want it in LVM, so you can resize it easily if necessary (maybe to make room for installing a new desktop environment, for example), but don't want you root file system in LVM. Perhaps you want to periodically fsck /usr on boot, and fall into single-user mode if it fails. Perhaps you want /usr (which is a read-mainly file system) on a small SSD, and all other file systems (which are written to more frequently) on spinning disk storage. Perhaps you want to mount /usr over NFS. Not that I can still see many people doing this but it seems a pity to prevent something that has worked fine in the past - and in these days of "running applications in the cloud" it seems Linux will no longer run applications in the local network (ie. NFS-mounted /usr).

      Seriously, read the level of professionalism and maturity on that page. This is the level or maturity to which Linux slowly seems to be sinking. As a long-time Linux user and supporter I find this deeply disappointing.

      And what's the reason for all this? Because the udev developers can't wipe their own a{r|s}es, put their house in order, and properly sort out which files go where (or at least sort out what needs to be done to mount any necessary non-root filesystems, mount them, and then continue with any programs/scripts which use them). Instead, all of that gets pushed out to initrd (ie. oh no it's hard, let's give it to someone else to do). Seriously, they're like a bunch of 8-year-olds bragging to their friends that they won't clean their bedrooms, even when mummy thinks they should.

  • rpm, yumm & package managers (Score:3)

    by unixisc ( 2429386 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @01:02PM (#40144449)

    One thing I'm wondering - how improved is their package management? As I've noted in the past, apt-get is far more advanced, and on the BSD side of things, so is PBI. So has Fedora/Red Hat done anything to enable packages in rpm format to be more easily installed, as in not run into dependency hell?

    Also, how does Fedora compare w/ other rpm based distros, such as Mageia, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS and so on?

    • Re:rpm, yumm & package managers (Score:4, Informative)

      by domatic ( 1128127 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @01:29PM (#40144871)

      It isn't the packaging tools that make Debian and the BSDs more consistent in package installation. If anything, RPM has more advanced features than either debs or ports. The Debian and various ports repositories have standard practices for naming, versioning, dependencies, and integration that are adhered to year after year. It is concern for the long term integrity of these package repositories AS A WHOLE that make them easy to deal with. But bullet point differences between Deb and RPM? Not so much.

      Debian based distros also tend to limit themselves in how they diverge from the Debian Mothership and periodically resync in any case. I routinely port source packages between Ubuntu and Debian all the time. Since the naming and dependency maps don't diverge much, I mostly succeed at doing this. On the other hand, a SUSE SRPM isn't likely to port easily to Fedora absent a lot of low level surgery on the package metadata. Each RPM distro tends to be an island universe. Deb based distros all have Debian for a parent or grandparent hence the high compatibility at the source level.

      For that matter RHEL and spinoffs like Centos and Scientific mostly achieve this as well though the experience is mostly like using Debian Stable without the option of (easily) backporting SRPMS from newer distros.

    • Yum is pretty solid. There are only two things that kind of bug me about it:

      1. Sometimes (especially when dealing with third-party repos e.g. RPM Fusion) you'll see what looks like the same package listed 4 times. My guess is that there is a separate package for each architecture. Simply omitting the package portion from the name when you run the install command seems to pick the correct package(s). Still a bit confusing though, especially in cases where there are other compounding factors like differen

      • Setting up the third-party repos isn't as dummy-proof as setting up PPAs in Ubuntu. (It's a pretty straightforward but largely manual process, unless I'm missing something. And if I'm missing something, then that is a problem in itself.)

        It's one click in a web browser, though it would be nice if the system itself had a option to install it, even if it gave you a "you're being naughty and installing non-free stuff" warning. You also have to know it exists in the first place.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      People who still ask this question tend not to have used yum/rpm in about a decade.

      • One thing I'm wondering - how improved is their package management? As I've noted in the past, apt-get is far more advanced

        People who still ask this question tend not to have used yum/rpm in about a decade.

        That is just not true. I've used a cheap virtual machine with limited memory ( 512 MB) for hosting stuff, and I'm waiting for my Raspberry Pi to arrive which has 256 MB memory.

        Using yum on such systems is utter, and complete, pain. It will simply not work with anything less than a gig of memory. Apt however, will work flawlessly. There is VERY MUCH room for improvement concerning package management.

        • Using yum on such systems is utter, and complete, pain. It will simply not work with anything less than a gig of memory.

          Sure it wil, though some plugins will slow it down. I've personally used yum on a ps3.

          • Perhaps for the incidental installation of an editor that has hardly any libraries it depends on.

            • I've pulled down large updates including openoffice on a Linux equipped PS3 so I know yum works on systems with low RAM. The real stickler is protectbase if you use ps3bodega, protectbase slows yum down a lot. But the thing works with less than a gig of RAM.

              • Interesting; apparently your use case precludes the memory problems I've seen. Have you ever run "yum update", in which it encountered a libc update? Or perhaps an update to an X library? Basically anything that has a large number of dependencies. Also, you're increasing the memory we're talking about, we started with 512 MB, and you're now saying it works with less than a gig of RAM.

                By contrast, apt-get works perfectly with 128 MB of ram.

                • Yes, I've ran updates that pulled down large amounts of stuff...and secondly the PS3 only has 256MB of RAM.

                  When was the last time you used yum anyway? Yes, the more RAM you have the faster it'll be, but it IS usable on low RAM systems.

                  • For about two years, I've administrated three RedHat 5 systems, which were upgraded every now and then until they reached 5.5. The memory on those systems varied between 128 and 512 MB memory, two were virtualized with Xen. It seemed that 384 MB was the lower limit for these systems to run "yum update" without hitting swap. These were standard LAMP webservers. Often, I'd shut down MySQL, Apache and Postfix to run yum.

                    Anyway, since you say you did fine with 256 MB, I'm going to revisit the scenario, and see

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MSG ( 12810 )

      I'm not sure if you're trolling, but apt-get has never been more advanced than yum (at least, not since yum was included in Fedora). Notable features of yum that apt-get lacks include the ability to install a package from a local file, resolving and installing its dependencies from repositories, and the ability to resolve and install a package given a path or the name of a feature it "Provides". Yum's a little slower than apt-get, but it's definitely the more capable of the two.

      As for dependency hell: tha

  • Why use openbox with xfce anyway? (Score:3)

    by Marrow ( 195242 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @02:22PM (#40145717)

    Plain old xfce works just fine without any trickery. Except for the creation of custom icons. That requires a few more steps than I like, but I'll live. Its very very stable.

    • That's a fair question. I use Openbox with XFCE because you can customize keybindings for any kind of window manipulation you like - shoving windows to the left and right border, resizing, vertical maximizing, flipping between workspaces...

      It's a nice middle-of-the-road solution for people who are sick and tired of fiddling with windows with the mouse but aren't ready to go whole hog with a tiling WM or setting up a desktop with panels, etc. from scratch.

  • Please... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AdamWill ( 604569 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @03:14PM (#40146553) Homepage

    ...don't turn yet another Fedora release thread into a GNOME Shell argument, people. It's just a desktop. We have lots of them.

    If you don't like GNOME, don't use it. You can pick GNOME, KDE, Xfce, LXDE or Sugar right from the package customization screen of a Fedora 17 DVD install, or you can download any one of those desktops as a live spin at https://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options#desktops [fedoraproject.org] or https://spins.fedoraproject.org/ [fedoraproject.org] .

    If you don't like GNOME, don't use it, but that doesn't mean you can't use Fedora, or that Fedora is bad.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I was able to get rid of most of the dumb stuff in gnome3, and return Fedora 16 to a useful state by adding cinnamon.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by EPDowd ( 770230 )
      I just find that everything I do in gnome 3 takes more steps...ie more clicks, more resizing, more drilling down, and on top of it all one additional click that does nothing more then get you off that useless page that is your faux desktop. For me and the way I use my computers this is not a step forward, but two steps back. If gnome 3 was on a smart phone, or a tablet, and I ran one application at a time, it would be pretty, and get the job done. But I run this on a desktop computer with fair horse power,

      • What kind of system do you have, and what size monitor? Just wondering.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by EPDowd ( 770230 )
          The smallest is is dual core P4 with 3gb of memory and a 22 inch flat screen monitor. The largest is a 64 bit quad core (intel) with 4gb of memory and a 27 inch monitor.

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