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Fedora Core 6 Preview
An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this week Jesse Keating announced the availability of Fedora Core 6 Test 1. New items in FC6T1 include Intel Macintosh support (well, mostly), update notification applet, GNOME 2.15, KDE 3.5.3, and the Fedora Core 6 Extras development repository is already available. With FC6T1's availability, Phoronix has published their own preview of this release. The article is focused on an editorial about changes to come for Fedora Core 6, as well as images from Fedora Core 6 Test 1. The next Fedora Core 6 testing release (Test 2) is due out in July, while the final release is due out this September."
Do I still need to jump through ridiculous hoops to get mp3 support in rhythmbox and get *any* support in totem?
Out of the box, Totem can't play *anything*.. completely useless.
At least make it like Ubuntu, where I can add a repository that has all the stuff they can't ship in the box.
As someone whose been using Fedora since Core 1, this release seems more evolutionary. Even without major changes between releases, the accumulated bug fixes contribute to a desktop that 'works' better and has the functionality I need. We all remember the bad old days of manually mounting your USB peripherals.. well now I have suspend, easy networking (thanks to NetworkManager) and useful stuff like Beagle to play with, so thats quite good progress. This release will be worthwhile just to get the latest of everything, and it looks as if some nice eye-candy will be ready in GNOME 2.16.
I personally would like to see a general reduction in memory usage in GNOME and various apps; it's been moving in the right direction, I hope it stays that way. I believe there is an effort to remove various deprecated libraries to help here.
At least Ubuntu is moving in this direction. Consider also that Ubuntu is only what, 2 or 3 years old? And Fedora has the benefit of running upstream of a commercial linux distro where features like this are considered important. Ubuntu has been working backwards, hitting the desktop market first and only just now breaking into the server market.
With 1/5th the age of a distro that gets to exchange features back and forth with a commercial, enterprise linux if a few security features is all that you can complain about that's not too shabby. And according to it's creator Ubuntu will NEVER leave us hanging by commercializing and forking off into a crappier, less stable, free derivitive.
Besides, linux distros have not been including the technologies you link to for "years" and even if they have... Ubuntu is years behind simply by chronology yet still has managed to beat out fedora by making a professional desktop ready linux in a fraction of the time. Try to keep a little perspective and save your sour grapes *sighs* for apples vs. apples comparisons. Ubuntu is a baby in the distro market compared to redhat/fedora.
Redhat hacks KDE beyond the feel and proper use of KDE. Fedora replaces a lot of QT applets with GTK ones to perform a lot of functions. KDEsu is a prime example although there is others.
If you are a KDE fan, than you're being shortchanged if you run Fedora or Redhat products.
SuSE used to be a great product, but 10.1 had so many problems I've lost confidence.
Give Mandrake, Gentoo, Kubuntu a try.
If you really need to do it via the GUI, just point your browser at http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-5.rpm - Firefox as installed on FC5 understands by default what program needs to handle RPM packages.
I'm sure the Fedora team has thought of putting some 'install illegal codecs' button somewhere in the GUI, but RedHat's lawyers probably say it's a very bad idea. If Livna does it all independently then RedHat can easily claim clean hands and get the case dismissed if Fraunhofer tries to sue them. It might be harder to get the suit dismissed if they do as you suggest, and that means lots of money - a patent holder's lawyer would be able to argue that it is tantamount to Microsoft putting a link on the GUI to the Pirate Bay in Windows.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Based on http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu%2C+fedora+%7 C+fc5+%7C+fc4+%7C+fc3%2C+RHEL+%7C+redhat+%7C+red+h at%2C++suse%2C+debian&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all at Google Trends, my belief is that RH and Fedora are losing ground while Ubuntu is making a serious run at becoming the most popular distribution.
I'm still using FC5 on my desktop for now, largely because I found it the simplest to 'extend' with non-vendor apps and drivers (such as the proprietary ATI drivers and the intense multimedia support available via the Livna repository to replace the frankly useless sound and video "support" in the vanilla FC5). I am fairly likely to stick with it either until FC7 or until Ubuntu reaches the critical mass where most app and driver vendors explicitly support it as a preferred distro.