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Fedora 8 Released
Cat in the Hat writes "Fedora 8 has been officially released. Ars Technica has a run-down of what's new in Fedora 8, including the PulseAudio sound daemon, Nodoka visual style, and a new authentication system. 'Another major change in Fedora 8 is the new PolicyKit authentication system that makes authority escalation more secure. Instead of providing root access to an entire program when it needs higher privileges, PolicyKit makes it possible to isolate individual operations that require higher privileges and put them into system services that can be accessed through D-Bus. Another advantage of PolicyKit is that it will give administrators more control over which users and programs have access to individual operations that use escalated privileges.'"
Two distros so released so close to one another? You'd almost think that they were working toge... ;)
Oh. They are, aren't they?
Not enough reasosns to move from Fedora 7, IMHO, but to each their own. Maybe I'll wait for Fedora 9.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
anyone old enough to remember VAX/VMS?
talk about the old coming back in style again. but giving too coarse a set of 'root privs' has always been inferior in unix compared to the privs level VMS had.
otoh, once you start going fine-grained, its a whole order of magnitude more 'management' and debugging. so, the benefit won't be entirely for free. but it will be worth it. the 'all or nothing' model has had a good run. but it is tired and in need of some modernization, even if taking hints from 30 year old OS's.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
I remember reading somewhere today that this release puts Fedora "back on track for predictability". I wonder if that bodes well for their perception?
In any event anyone who has followed along with the "Fedora Philosophy" knows that they always had the objective of releasing fairly quickly and all the while trying the latest and greatest technologies, however rough they are. You don't have to be a genius to know where the newest technologies end up all polished: RHEL.
I tried out the RC3 release a week ago and felt it a slight notable improvement over Fedora 7 in terms of polish and performance although that's just a brief evaluation. Here are some links (most I just pulled off the last link):
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/8/ReleaseSummary
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f8/
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F8Common
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f8.html
Oh wait ... looks like fedoraproject site is overwhelmed!
Just think of how good it could be if you could actually PAY people to put in the effort to make things right?
You mean something like MS does?
I just installed Ubuntu on my macbook, and now I'm tempted to go and try Fedora again after years of not touching it.
You don't need to reinstall. Just use a virtualization engine like vmware or VirtualBox.
It would become like Vista. Isn't that great? :D
I installed it earlier today, but I'm having all sorts of problems with GNOME. Right after I first started using it, a bunch of different programs starting dumping core. I don't think it's my PC, since it was working fine with Ubuntu for the past 8 months. I switched to KDE, and all of the programs there work. None have crashed. So I'm thinking that the version of GNOME bundled with FC8 is just unstable.
This really brings back memories. Back in the day, I had red Hat (3-5) installed on a sparc "borrowed" from the computer lab (one of the perks of working there after hours and lax security). Joe, one of my coworkers, was ex military. He taught me a lot about security, and I've been an OpenBSD convert ever since he rooted my box. I've also been homosexual since he rooted my ass, but that's another story. Good times.
http://www.suse.de/~agruen/acl/linux-acls/online/
Note the date on the document.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Obviously System V IPC has been available for years.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
Just think of how good it could be if you could actually PAY people to put in the effort to make things right?
Uhh, no thanks. I've already done that and guess what, the software was STILL crap, but I got a huge impression of a misplaced sense of authority and entitlement from the publisher...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Red Hat has many employees paid to work on Fedora. The changes in artwork from release to release are an indication.
Palm trees and 8
Attractive, but it seems to think anyone using it to install needs their hand held every inch of the way. I loved Fedora Core 2, 3, and 4, but they pretty much chased me away by 5 through their refusal to accept those of us who use Nvidia products and those who want to play the DVDs we purchase. There are many other distros out there a lot friendlier to install and use. Fedora is like a testing ground for Red Hat, so they really don't care about folks like me.
The Tea Party is just the GOP with a bag over its head.
Red Hat pays many of their developers / admins to work full time or part time on the Fedora project. They have a vested interest after all -- much of Fedora eventually makes its way into RHEL.
There are a few "official" links that people might find useful:
Release Summary -- http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/8/ReleaseSummary
Release Notes -- http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f8/en_US/
Fedora Project Leader's release announcement -- http://lwn.net/Articles/257644/
And of course the downloads at http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/
So why not dynamically resize your drive partition{s} to include some free space with GParted and then dual-boot?
You could also tri-boot with two partitions for stable "keepers" and a third as a "scratch install" space, just for testing... 'Bout 20GB oughta be plenty.
I'm not suggesting that with ALL your systems, but on at least one, and on as many different hardware combinations as possible...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I know, don't feed the .. well you know..
this is not a copy of any Microsoft or Apple function. This is closer to Trusted Solaris and ppriv command. that allows users to be given access to services and at what level they are usable, IE the OS is at ADMIN LOW because all user will be able to read that security domain but not write to it.. (read down/ write up) and all logs are published to admin high because most users can write to that level but not read it (so you can't find your actions in a log and remove them, but your programs can write to the log)
in this case though its just a gui interface (not a new function) to the SELinux modules to set privileges at a much greater granularity. example we can give your application root privileges to write to the CDR but only user privileges on every other action, or replace with any OS function including limiting which memory locations it can access, this way the escalation can not be used on any other service/thread or action.
This is apart of the Mandatory access Controls, that along with Role based authentication (root is not a user but a role) gives Linux the ability to be certified as a PL3 and higher system, While Windows in any current state or Mac OS or that matter, would never be able to achieve this accreditation.
For folks who are downloading, http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora is the best starting point to the GNOME, KDE, and other spins.
Red Hat Magazine posted a HOWTO explaining Fedora 8 booting from a USB key.
It is one of the more interesting features in Fedora -- users can build their own customized spin of the distro, and then run it on a USB key. Totally custom and portable.
Yeah, it's never a copy of anything. It's all pure innovation.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
1980? What is your comparison? DOS, CPM, or BSD?
If you really want to feel better, go to the go to the nearest Time Machine thread thread ( http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/16/0656212 ) and complain to kingdom come about how time machine is a copy of Windows.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
This is getting ridiculous.
And Linux audio STILL has a problem with blocking IO! So now I get to have networked audio in a few PulseAudio-aware apps, while my softphone won't ring and my calendar alarm is mute because some web page in the background uses Flash.
Downloaded it, installed it, messed around with it trying to get it to work, and then gave up and installed Fedora 7 again, all before the Slashdot article hit the front page.
For past Fedora releases I've had slow torrent downloads (and I'm not even on Comcast). This time I downloaded at nearly full bore the whole time. I don't know why that is, but thank you seeds.
http://mirror.facebook.com/fedora/linux/releases/
I wonder how long ballmer will be throwing chairs because one of his favored investments is giving away/make freely available an operating system he'd like to suffocate.
He is probably going to have a cozy little chat with one young Mr. Mark Zuckerberg. But, he'll start out easy. Won't throw REAL chairs in his office, but maybe lawn or bean-bags first.
Mark: (seeing chairs break the speed of light for the first time...) DUDE! Aurora Boralis, up close!
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
(Well, I'll be done once AT&T dialup in San Jose actually accepts my authentication credentials and I've checked that the wireless will pass traffic after associating with the office WiFi LAN...)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So far between the two, I like openSUSE 10.3 better (more recent kernel). feels more polished. Haven't try Gusty yet since I can never get the DVD writer to work in 7.04... I figure it maybe more polished than 10.3, but I happy for now.
Ubuntu could do it on the same (nVidia) hardware. Yes I put in the propritary drivers (and recompiled them when the kernel was updated). Also Ubuntu could boot from PATA drives in a mixed PATA/SATA system. Fedora 8 doesn't want to do that.
Umm... Why can't you PAY people to work on Fedora? (Or, any other Linux distribution, for that matter.) Nothing stopping you or anybody else. What you can't do is pay arbitrary people to work on proprietary software. That was a really weak, weak troll, IMHO.
If this posts I got office WiFi and SSH working...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Since when has Windows had Mandatory Access Controls? ACLs, yes, but MACs? Although Linux has them, I'm not sure if Fedora 8 has MAC on memory, packets, etc, but Linux in general does. Microsoft does not and from Vista's retraction of security measures due to breaking software (as, indeed, happened with XP Service Pack 2), it seems clear that Microsoft will not introduce security. This is NOT, repeat NOT, the fault of Microsoft (for the most part) but the fault of software vendors who have utilized holes to the point where those holes CANNOT be fixed - the cost of fixing all of the consequential bugs is prohibitive.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Oh, as for advanced audio, Windows does indeed have fairly sophisticated sound. I am impressed by some of the features of it and by the performance of some of the 5.1 and 7.1 drivers. However, remote sound (useful on remote desktops) isn't as good under Windows as it is under Linux. The Linux kernel can be made hard real-time, which Windows' kernel cannot, which should also improve the quality.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What about statically-linked apps?
/dev/dsp?
What if someone calls _open() instead of open()?
What if someone decides to call their sound device something other than
What about programs that need to be setuid and/or setgid?
What about 64-bit machines that can run both 32- and 64-bit apps?
Relying on LD_PRELOAD is a hack and a kludge.
I've been Googling around, and I've yet to find a convincing reason to use PulseAudio over jackd. Why reinvent the wheel? Jackd has network transparency (see NetJack). People say jackd is for professional audio, and PulseAudio is for desktop user. I don't see a reason why jackd cannot be made for desktop users. After all, CoreAudio framework on Mac OS X works for both desktop and professional audio. I've also used jackd just to listen to music or watch movies. What are the GNOME people thinking?
I once had a signature.
I have use the yum upgrade method for quite some time. You may wish to check out the Fedora yum upgrade faq at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq - there is also a non-official guide to using yum to upgrade a number of RedHat distributions at http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Upgrading_Red_Hat_Linux_with_yum.html
You may want to make sure you read some of the gotchas as if you have packages that are not from the Fedora Project and they are not upgraded or compatible with the newer version you are upgrading to you may need to delete them.
Note also that there are some difficulties in the x84_64 CPU architecture as more things become native 64-bit and thus some conflicts with older releases may happen...
Alternatively, you could... you know... install the relevant applications to provide the missing features? Like back in the stone-age (oh, i dunno, say 4 years ago or more?)
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Finally, you won't have to install a custom package to get decent cryptography performance in Fedora. It took them a long time to get away from 4.1.4.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Hi, Just wondering if PulseAudio plays nicely with Audacity these days, I have a pc set up for Audio manipulation/editing/music composition stuff that I was going to upgrade (setting up a 64 bit box at last!), thought I might have a look at the offerings of "the dark side" (rpm based systems - I use Debian) oops....is that term a Microsoft TM?
BM3
"This means that your 1998 softphone that uses exclusive open() on /dev/dsp will function".
/dev/dsp directly as well, AFAICT, and it was just built a couple months ago. Stop assuming only ancient programs use this technique - modern ones do too.
Maybe my 2007 Skype client might work with PulseAudio? Cause it uses
creation science book
had been on fedora for a few years, but was getting fed up of the fast upgrade cycle.
:|
Ubuntu is, er, different
Max.
Who the hell modded you troll? Your post was hilarious -- it had me laughing out loud. I think the modders need to get out more.
I always wince when I read things like "XXX is horribly unstable". If it's a development branch and you need bullet-proof use something Q/A'd. If you want gee-wiz and maybe some more cutting edge performance (or simply to help develop a great project) then stick with the cutting edge.
BUT, if you put any development quality software on a server for purposes other then your own testing my sympathy and willingness to listen to you are gone.
Quack, quack.
OpenVMS allowed the use of privileged images as well as libraries. These allowed for subsystem seperation. Of course, you had to be a fairly disciplined programmer to ensure that privs didn't leak.
...PolicyKit makes it possible to isolate individual operations that require higher privileges...
I'm not sure I like that one too much. Finegrained security models have always been a bloody nightmare, one way or another, and very often don't get used/are switched off, resulting in the opposite effect of that intended. Look to Vista to see why it sn't a good idea - users feel their are being bugged by constant dialog boxes asking them to confirm that it is OK to do trivial tasks, or asking for administrator passwords etc. People just want to get on with life, so this is a huge irritation - it may be true that all you need is to spend a little time and effort on setting it up, but people in general are not security minded and meticulous. This is, by the way, why Windows became so popular despite the huge problems with security and stability - a PC was almost an appliance that allowed you to use the internet and write documents, you just turned it on and used it.
Vista isn't the only example of finegrained security, only the latest and perhaps the one that has succeeded in pissing off most people. Oracle has it's own, very finely grained model, which I have never seen used seriously; and then there is RACF on IBM's mainframes, not a joy to work with either, IMO.
I think the basic UNIX security model is just about as much as most people want to bother with.
>Maybe someday we'll get real exclusive use on files.
Maybe in year 3000, webusers over IIS will not lock my local files.
(not joking, this is one of my major Windows annoyances)
And that's the problem with you people, all you do is complaining.
Now someone is actually doing his best to solve the sound problem instead of sitting around and complaining and doing nothing productive, and what do they get? MORE complaints. Get this into your head, nothing's going to happen if you complain and do nothing. The hard work is done by other people, for you, for free. The least you can do is show some respect.
I know that I should have participated in the test releases to check out the state of the new IEEE1394 system that was brought in (terribly) in Fedora 7, however has anyone tested to see if apps like dvgrab/kino work with the new IEEE1394 stuff in Fedora 8?
it's important that folks try out the test releases (I will do with 9 onwards) so that all the peculiar user functionality is tested and works. The Fedora 7 IEEE1394 bug happened because no one tried to grab a DV video stream from a video camera with Kino/Cinerella etc during the testing and so it went out broken. Fedora 7 brought in a new firewire system but the apps in the distro still expected the old firewire stuff to be there - no one noticed, so no one fixed it...
rdAnd if it didn't post?
The opposite of progress is congress
Another plus about fedora is that they release i686 binaries.
Really, Canonical. How many people really need i386-targeted binaries? I got my first 386 in 1990.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Just think of how good it could be if you could actually PAY people to put in the effort to make things right? Money is one incentive to drive quality, I suppose, but if you read up on quality work, quality products tend to be motivated by other factors, especially job satisfaction. Many of the devs out there would love to be wealthier, but they do their jobs because they love the work. Look at Linus and Linux. It must be maddening to work on the code, but he loves it (and I'm sure the other devs do, too); look at the quality of the kernel code. I find that my GPL'd code is better than the quality of the code I write for work.
"You could almost look at defense of Microsoft as a form of the Stockholm syndrome." -neapolitan
OK. I downloaded the torrent. I can see two ISOs and an SHA1 file. I am not one to immediately trust an SHA1 that was part of the file I just downloaded. I'd rather calculate the SHA1 values and compare them to values stored on the FedoraProject site.
A google search for SHA1 on fedoraproject.com failed to find a single hit.
How do I verify that what I just downloaded is, in fact, really Fedora 8, and not a simple boot-loader with code to write random numbers to all sectors to all my attached hard disks?
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
I didn't even know that 7 was out.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
After I read this article, I installed the pulseaudio packages on Ubuntu. It wasn't quite as easy or integrated as a default install would have been, but I got it working fairly well in about 15 minutes. Just Google for Ubuntu and PulseAudio for the forum articles.
The GNOME stuff (totem, rhythmbox, etc) works flawlessly with pulseaudio's gstreamer plugins. The only trouble I'm having now is with vlc, which doesn't seem to support it in any straightforward way. There are workarounds, but I haven't had a chance to really chase it yet. Overall, not bad for 15 minutes -- all but one program works great, and I didn't need to install Fedora to do it.
That said, I'm tempted to install FC8, since I haven't tried Fedora since FC3. It certainly sounds like it's got some nice features.
If you want a fast FTP connection w/o having to look for a mirror, try ftp://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/fedora/linux/releases/8/ Torrents are nice and all, but they're not for everyone...
but MACs? Although Linux has them, I'm not sure if Fedora 8 has MAC on memory, packets, etc, but Linux in general does.
I was under the impression "general" linux does not have MAC, it is a DAC system and SeLinux is adding that MAC ability. Atleast as a true system ie trusted Solaris.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
The Policy Kit crap got me to format SuSE 10.3 away. The only way to access USB devices on SuSE 10.3 is by loging on root.
I erased my SuSE 10.3 and installed Fedora 7 to fix the problem.
Fedora has issues of its own with the paranoiac selinux mode but with it disabled it can actually be used as a desktop machine, not just a server.
Yes, but SELinux has been installed by default in Fedora and RHEL for some time now. True, the other distributions are lagging behind a bit[1], but I'm sure they'll catch up in time. And after all, this is a Fedora story...
[1] It pisses me off no end that my Ubuntu server doesn't come with SELinux, and that it's a massive pain in the arse to try and add it afterwards. The only reason it's Ubuntu is because it's a Sparc box. Were Sparc hardware supported by Fedora and/or CentOS, Ubuntu would be ditched in a flash...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
They're not from the USA, so they can afford to ignore USA laws :) RedHat can't
You don't need to reinstall.
Simply install and configure the cool bits on your distro!
My second machine is an AMD K6-2 which shows up on boot as a 586 -- Fedora liveCDs refuse to boot for some strange reason. Same problem with Fedora 7. Yet, I installed it from the installation repository and it runs fine to this day. One of the reasons I run Linux is because I am fed up with the new computer every three years nonsense requisite in the windoze arena. One of the strengths of Linux is that it runs on older stock. I hope we don't shed that valuable asset as Linux becomes increasingly mainstream. -- ER
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
That's OK, others did the work for you. Apparently it's fine now, at least the threads in Bugzilla say so.
In fact the 1394 stack in F7 was completely and utterly hosed. It didn't work for external disks either. Should be OK in F8 now, but I have yet to try.
Cheers
All this worked well from Fc7.
Aside from the above, it appears to be fine. I refused their codecbuddy install as I want to visit the livna and other repositories for their versions. I hope that with pulseaudio, that there will be a standardizing on codec interfacing, so that one set of codecs will serve all multi-media applications.
Les
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada