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GNOME GNU is Not Unix GUI Open Source Operating Systems Red Hat Software Software Linux

Fedora 18 Released 118

Posted by timothy from the barely-legal dept.
ultranerdz writes "Fedora 18 has been released. Featuring a new installer UI, GNOME 3.6, Clojure, DragonEgg, KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.9, MATE Desktop, Samba 4, Secure Boot, and updated major packages versions, this is one of the most anticipated Fedora versions yet. After more than two months of slips and delays, Fedora 18 is finally here." I'm glad to see MATE becoming more widely available; it suits me, as a GNOME 2 fan but not a complete troglodyte.
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Fedora 18 Released More

Fedora 18 Released

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  • How is MATE? (Score:3)

    by dstyle5 ( 702493 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @11:01AM (#42591895)
    I'm tiring of Gnome 3, but would like to stick with Fedora. What are /.ers opinions of MATE?

    • Re:How is MATE? (Score:5, Informative)

      by armanox ( 826486 ) <asherewindknight@yahoo.com> on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @11:05AM (#42591953) Homepage Journal

      MATE seems to pick up right were GNOME 2 stopped. A few of the program names have changed to avoid conflicts with GNOME 3, but I've been using MATE on Fedora since F16 (been using KDE again too).

      • Re:How is MATE? (Score:5, Informative)

        by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @11:18AM (#42592183) Homepage Journal

        While MATE is nice, it's not as nice as Gnome 2 was in all respects. You don't have compiz, so no wobbly windows or desktop cube, for example.
        The renaming also has some side effects when used with programs that expect the gnome naming, so while most things work, not everything does.

        Because MATE isn't quite there yet, and because systemd is an abomination unto Nuggan and grub2 doesn't co-exist with other bootloaders gracefully, I'm still on Fedora 14, and strongly considering going back to Gentoo.

        • What's wrong with systemd?

          • Re:How is MATE? (Score:5, Interesting)

            by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @04:22PM (#42596573) Homepage Journal

            What's wrong with systemd?

            Where should I start?
            It abstracts services to the point you can't find them.
            It breaks existing sysv startup/shutdown scripts for commercial software. (The reply from vendors of commercial software is pretty unison: We don't support systems with systemd)
            It assumes start and stop are always oneliners, so you end up writing startup/shutdown scripts anyhow cause systemd isn't good enough.
            It breaks standard runlevels.
            It uses the old MSDOS .ini file format, which is severely sysadmin-unfriendly (grep doesn't understand MSDOS [section]s, for example). ... and quite a lot more.

            In short, it was clearly written by someone who didn't come from a Unix background. ... or, just try "systemctl -a | cat"[*] , and compare that to "chkconfig" and "rc-update show".

            [*]: Yes, the cat is needed, or else it pauses and waits for input - whoever coded this should know that if the user wants paging, he can pipe it to a pager of choice for that task. But nooo, of course you have to do things differently to be different.

            In short, it's as bad as pulseaudio, and for many of the same reasons.

            • Some of that is valid, and some of that just seems archaic.
              Runlevels need to go away.
              Writing an ini parser that can be used in conjunction with grep is trivial.

              In short, it seems like a big improvement over the sysv init. I'm not sure who the commercial software companies are, but all of the scripts I've converted are pretty simple. Seems kind of stupid to not do it.

              But what do I know, I Iike pulse audio as well.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by arth1 ( 260657 )

                Runlevels need to go away.

                Why? Because you yourself never enter "init 2" to do important maintenance that has to be done offline, or set the runlevel to 3 on servers to avoid starting any kind of graphical crap?
                It's very useful for those of us who do more than just run apps in a GUI.

                Writing an ini parser that can be used in conjunction with grep is trivial.

                No, it's not, without breaking compatibility and introducing yet another learning curve. And it won't be present on all systems, so you need to take an additional step to provide it yourself. And it won't do much good if what you wanted grep for was t

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by armanox ( 826486 )

          I'm using GRUB 1 myself.

        • While MATE is nice, it's not as nice as Gnome 2 was in all respects. You don't have compiz, so no wobbly windows or desktop cube, for example.

          Uhm... compiz works just great with MATE, exactly the same as with Gnome 2 (which required it to be installed separately just as well). Compiz works almost as good with XFCE, too.

          And compiz has more than just wobbly windows. Nice zoom (Super-MWHEELUP). Partial transparency of windows on demand (Alt-MWHEELDOWN). Deuteranope/tritanope colour filters. And so on, so on.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by arth1 ( 260657 )

            Uhm... compiz works just great with MATE, exactly the same as with Gnome 2

            Not in Fedora 18, the topic here. Thus my phrasing "You don't have compiz, so ...", because F18 does not have compiz.

            (And thus no packages or subpackages that depends on it either, like desktop-effects, beryl, emerald, compiz-gconf...).

            Funnily enough, compiz seems to be available [fedoraproject.org] for F17 and F19, just not F18.

    • Mate is nice. I wanted to like Gnome 3 but just couldn't... it's really backwards for me as a network admin. Gnome 2 is so much more streamlined to my work habits, so I was pleased to find the Mate project.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by arth1 ( 260657 )

        Mate is nice. I wanted to like Gnome 3 but just couldn't... it's really backwards for me as a network admin.

        Amen. Getting it to play well with remote X or typical rack KVMs with 1024x768 resolution is an exercise in futility. Not to mention running in VMs or remote windows, with the braindead hot spot corners and edges.
        Sorry, Gnome 3 devs, I don't want to buy into your iPad envy.

        • ...you could just press the Super key. which brings up everything you can alternatively bring up using an edge or corner.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by lastx33 ( 2097770 )
      I'm using Mate 1.4 and it is good and definitely improving. There are still some bits of integration, especially in the file manager, which could do with improvement but it's coming along at a pace considering they are also removing a lot of redundant code from Gnome 2. The user experience in pretty near to the final versions of Gnome 2 and coming versions should be even better. Overall, very nice.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      gnome 3 is fine for me too

    • Re:How is MATE? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Cassini2 ( 956052 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @11:41AM (#42592553)

      After trying very hard to like Unity for several versions, I tried Linux Mint. MATE is a pleasure to use. Everything is where I instinctively look to find it.

      You can try prying MATE out of my cold dead hands.

    • Re:How is MATE? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ssam ( 2723487 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @11:43AM (#42592607)

      (I have been running F18 with mate since mid december)
      Note that fedora 18 repos only have small selection of mate packages. for example mate-panel-applets is missing, so no system monitor in your panel. none of the MATE apps (beyond the file manager and terminal), and when you run gnome3 apps they dont pick up theming. So while on paper fedora 18 has MATE as an option, the integration is poor. Hopefully this will be improved.

      There is an unofficial more complete MATE repo, but it does not support F18 yet.

    • I gave it a go with Mint 13 - and on the whole I really liked it. There was the odd minor bug, though - some blacking out of the display for no apparent reason used to happen quite often.

      I think MATE is the way of the future for me - but I'm waiting for it to become a little more mature. In the meantime, I went back to Gnome 2 with 10.04, and I'm quite* happy.

      D

      *I say 'quite', because the old gtk seems to be holding me back re: versions of software, which seem to be developed for gtk3 and onwards - so some

    • I've been using MATE since F16 -skipped F15 because I couldn't stomach the G3 change. I am very pleased to say that MATE has run without a hitch on five machines, 2 AMD desktops, and three ancient Thinkpads, all running F17. I'm hoping people will use MATE and encourage it's development so it will become the live fork that many of us wish G3 had been. No offence meant to G3. This is from a 71yr-old geek who could not code a desktop, but I know what I like.

  • I'm glad to see MATE becoming more widely available; it suits me, as a GNOME 2 fan but not a complete troglodyte.

    I agree it's nice to have more options, provided it doesn't unnecessarily split the efforts of the community to produce free software attractive to users of various skill levels. But how is Xfce only for "a complete troglodyte"? As a GNOME 2 fan, I switched to Xfce in December of 2011 to get out from under Ubuntu Unity.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vlm ( 69642 )

      But how is Xfce only for "a complete troglodyte"?

      He's making fun of my WM which is "awesome window manager" which is pretty much ratpoison with limited mouse support (weird, I know) and Lua scripting.

      Note that I need and use a WM not a complete desktop GUI environment. I don't need or want a complete desktop GUI environment nor am I interested in one. Just a WM please.

      Virtual tabs/screens, an interface into the system wide menu system, some way to move windows around on the screen, that's really all I want/need.

  • Glad to see that the Fedora devs are listening to their userbase, according to the new fedUP [fedorapeople.org] tool. :)

  • Cinnamon (Score:4, Informative)

    by mx+b ( 2078162 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @11:12AM (#42592063)
    The summary forgot to include Cinnamon (unless it was removed after the beta? I am in the process of running an upgrade!). I have been pleasantly surprised with Cinnamon. In general seems a nice release, the main gripe was the new installer. Does not seem to allow as much choice in terms of packages to install; seems to be a big list of presets without much customization until after it is already installed. It is a pretty though.

    • I like cinnamon and so use it at work, but with my home system it crashes my nvidia driver and/or seizes up the machine. so I put in Mate instead, and no problems since.

      • I had the same experience on Ubuntu, so it's not just you, it's Cinnamon. My comment after trying it was "not ready for prime time". You know you're not ready for a 1.0 when Unity is higher-quality software.

        • or, to be fair, might be nvidia problem. I score unity lower for being nearly useless for multi-app workflow

          • I score unity lower for being nearly useless for multi-app workflow

            You really have to use virtual desktops. If you don't want to do that, it stinks on ice. It's not my favorite way to do things and Unity is not perfect at that either, but it hasn't actually crashed on me in ages (which is a nice development, since it used to do that a whole lot.)

          • Yeah, Gnome 3's interface rocks the pants off just about anything. The windows get separated and expanded out when you hit the Activities view, whereas Unity leaves them all where they are and doesn't give a task bar (no, the thing on the left isn't a replacement). Result? You can quickly swap windows in Gnome 3 and move them around virtual desktops, creating and destroying desktops as you need to; whereas in Unity you get to curse at the screen a lot and try to squeeze yourself into 4 desktops where any
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The installer will need some adjustment.

      Fedora 18 features an installer that is rewritten and redesigned from the ground up. It replaces the old 13+ year old installer from previous versions of Fedora. You can learn more about it at the new installer informational page on the Fedora wiki.

      That's 13+ years of refinement. There was very little that was wrong with it.

      • It was called "Anaconda" and I submitted an extension called "Trouser Snake" so they needed to rename it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by urdak ( 457938 )

        Fedora 18 features an installer that is rewritten and redesigned from the ground up. It replaces the old 13+ year old installer from previous versions of Fedora. You can learn more about it at the new installer informational page on the Fedora wiki.

        That's 13+ years of refinement. There was very little that was wrong with it.

        Really? As someone who installed/upgraded about 26 versions of Redhat and Fedora over the last 13 years, I can tell you, there was plenty wrong with it. The most obvious gaping hole was that while a package (out of the 2000 packages on the list) was installing, the whole thing froze. Usually this wasn't a big problem, but in rare cases where one of the 2000 packages had a script bug (and this happened SEVERAL times over the last 13 years), the whole installation froze, and there was nothing you could do abo

  • yum vs apt vs pacman (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dimwit ( 36756 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @11:42AM (#42592583)

    So the only thing that keeps me from using Fedora is yum. I do a lot of "experimental" or "temporary" package installations. I want to try out a new editor or a new programming language or something, so I do an installation. All of the various package managers will automatically pull in the dependencies, which is great, but yum doesn't uninstall these dependencies when I uninstall the original package. So, say I install something that requires 9803942834 dependencies. When I uninstall it under Debian, all those dependencies leave with it - when I uninstall it on Fedora, I still have 9803942834 - 1 packages laying around. It's annoying. Get that fixed with yum, and I'll give Fedora a shot again.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Dimwit ( 36756 )

      ...and looking, apparently they fixed that a while ago. Interesting. I'll have to check it out.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ssam ( 2723487 )

      Yum/rpm has only 1 level of depends.

      Apt/dpkg has depends, recommends and suggests. by default 'depends' and 'recommends' get installed. but if you want small and light you can set apt to just install 'depends'. if you want all the features of a program to work when you install it then you can install the 'recommends' and 'suggests'. i'd love to see yum/rpm pick this up.

      • Or alternately, just migrate Fedora wholesale onto dpkg.

      • It's already available in RPM. There's periodic discussion about using it in Fedora, but the discussion always turns to perfectly valid theoretical scenarios in which soft dependencies can cause problems. I'd still like to see us use them on the basis that in *practice* there's a perfectly respectable RPM-based distro out there which has been using them for years and has been able to manage any problems which come up - Mandriva/Mageia - but the naysayers have a valid point at least in theory, soft dependenc

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by tonyAG ( 655960 )
      Have you looked at the yum history ability. Esp the ability to 'undo' a transaction? Do man on yum and look for 'rollback'.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nuonguy ( 264254 )

      I wish yum handled this better. I've been getting by with the yum-plugin-show-leaves, it at least tells which packages are new leaves when you uninstall something. Have you tried yum-plugin-remove-with-leaves [fedoraproject.org] ? Quote:

      This extension removes unused dependencies which have been incorporated by an installation package that would otherwise not be removed. Helps maintain a system clean of libraries and unused packages.

  • The tablets make me bitter.. (Score:3)

    by EasyTarget ( 43516 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @11:43AM (#42592609) Journal

    That's great, but.. does it still have tablet oriented nonsense like immovable huge dialog boxes that (for example) completely obscure the Print Preview in FFox, preventing me from previewing whatever I'm thinking of printing. Sigh.
    Very big nuisance on my netbook with it's small screen. I kept it back at F16 just because of that. I'll upgrade, but wondering if the F18 experience will be a good one.

    • Re:The tablets make me bitter.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by kwalker ( 1383 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @12:45PM (#42593709) Journal

      If you don't like GNOME 3, you can pick a different spin:

      Available spins as of this morning:
      Fedora 18 Desktop Edition
      Fedora 18 KDE Spin
      Fedora 18 LXDE Spin
      Fedora 18 Xfce Spin

      Or you can do a minimal install from the installer ISO (Either on DVD, USB stick, or even over a network), then install a desktop of your choice from the following (Incomplete) list:
      GNOME 3.6
      Cinnamon
      MATE
      KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.9
      Xfce 4.10
      Enlightenment

      I don't know if dialogs are still immovable, my ISO is still downloading.

      http://get.fedoraproject.org/ [fedoraproject.org]

      • If you don't like GNOME 3, you can pick a different spin:

        Thanks, I know and love them all ;-)
        But I took the time to learn Gnome3 when it appeared, and have come to appreciate it as a very 'calm' and fluid place to work.
        It has a few niggles (like the dialogs) but most are fixable with shell extensions etc..

        I don't know if dialogs are still immovable, my ISO is still downloading.

        I'm currently dd'ing mine to a USB stick; curious to see how it goes :-)

      • Update: Immovable dialogs still presetn, and it has got worse: the system settings window cannot be repositioned now (no alt-grab possible on it) which might make F18 unusable on the netbook since it will push some settings etc off the screen completely.
        Ho humm.. I'll still use it on my desktop. But might need to try ubuntu/unity on the aspire.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kwalker ( 1383 )

          Very very strange. I've got an F18 (i686 PAE) VM spun up and I'm looking at it now. The "System Settings" window is up on my screen and it's taking up about 1/3 of the 1280x1024 screen. I can drag it around like any window, but it won't maximize, even throwing it against the top of the screen doesn't maximize, but other windows do.

          I did notice a layout bug in Anaconda, particularly the partition/lvm layout has some stuff running off the right edge of the screen, but I'm not seeing any problems with System S

  • Love MATE (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    MATE has matured over the last year, was a bit buggy at first fork. Very happy to have a simple clean DE.

  • GNOME2!!! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Awesome. Now I just wish they would dump systemd for initv scripts, dump pulseaudio for OSS and remove all those broken X11 extensions so I can go back to using xv and netscape the way god intended.

  • Linux mint kde rules (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Vince6791 ( 2639183 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @02:36PM (#42595379)

    Kde is most stable on mint and kubuntu distros. Unity crashes and freezes once in a while same with the rest of the gui's and distros. The crashes and freezes reminds me of windows98 and XP issues. You want reliability go with kde using either mint or kubuntu. I have tried lxde, xfce, mate, cinnamon and they are all buggy and occasionally slow down.

    But, I also had metroUI for windows 8 freeze on me a couple of times but the difference is that it did not crash the whole OS. The only thing I had to do to make metro work again is hit the Windows key to go into desktop and hit the key again to go into metro.

    I hope ubuntu 13.04 fixes a lot of issues.

    • Ubuntu 13.04 is going to prep the system more for systemd by integrating parts of systemd instead of hackish compatibility layer bullshit. Maybe in 13.10 they'll dump upstart for systemd.

  • Kernel OOOPS with Fedora 18 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Thanks for Fedora 18. It just made my day. 1 day installation and the whole upcoming days to restore my corrupted backup.

    VFS: Busy inodes after unmount of fuse. Self-destruct in 5 seconds. Have a nice day...
    BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 00000034
    IP: [ ] _raw_spin_lock+0xd/0x30
    *pde = 00000000
    Oops: 0002 [#1] SMP
    Modules linked in: xfs dm_crypt fuse ebtable_nat xt_CHECKSUM ipt_MASQUERADE ....
    Pid: 17180, comm: gvfsd-trash Not tainted 3.x.x-x.fc18.i686 #1 LENOVO xxxxxxx/xxxxxxx
    EIP: 0060:

  • You've still got the gnome logo for a mate/fedora story. :(

    A logo featuring an image like this [blogspot.com] maybe?

  • Samba4 is only half there - AD DC is not available because of MIT Kerberos.

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