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Fedora 8 Released

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hot-off-the-presses dept.

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.'"

10 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Another one? by hdparm · · Score: 3, Informative

    RHEL 5.1 (if you mean this as one of two related distros) is a RHEL 5 re-packed to include all bug/security fixes to date, so if you need to do a new install, there's no need to pull hundreds of updates from RHN.

    Fedora 8 isn't related too much to RHEL (RHEL 5 was built on Fedora Core 6). I use only Fedora and Red Hat and I'm probably biased. However, F8 includes some neat stuff that warrants checking up by Linux users in general. It works great, too.

  2. Re:All Hail Choice! by rayvd · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  3. Fedora 8 release summary and announcements by spevack · · Score: 4, Informative

    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/

  4. GNOME, KDE, and other custom spins by spevack · · Score: 3, Informative

    For folks who are downloading, http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora is the best starting point to the GNOME, KDE, and other spins.

  5. Fedora 8 running on USB keys by spevack · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:Yet ANOTHER sound server? by Rayban · · Score: 4, Informative

    PulseAudio emulates all the other systems with LD_PRELOAD libs so that they are all PulseAudio-aware. This means that your 1998 softphone that uses exclusive open() on /dev/dsp will function, with the magical policy of PulseAudio.

    --
    æeee!
  7. Re:Waiting for Fedora 9 by Eric+Smith · · Score: 3, Informative

    Fedora 7 is horribly unstable,
    I've been running Fedora 7 on five machines, including one publicly-visible web and mail server, and have seen no stability issues at all, other than minor problems with one update kernel which were fixed in less than 24 hours. Of course, I'm probably using different parts of F7 than those with which you have had trouble. What areas caused problems for you? And weren't they fixed in F7 updates?
  8. Re:Yet ANOTHER sound server? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Polypaudio might be your eventual savior. Polypaudio was made to be a drop in replacement for the very very old enlightenment sound daemon. esd was used so that multiple sound sources could be played at the same time on OSS. You might want to research alsa dmix in your local distributions forums. Good luck.
    Original poster obviously didn't look at all into what PulseAudio actually does, because the one thing PulseAudio does really well compared to everything that came before it is unify all these various sound interfaces under one very modern system.

    Incidentally, PulseAudio is PolypAudio. :) (Renamed, of course.) I've been using it on my Debian box for a while instead of ESD (for which it is a very nice replacement). One of my favorite things is that if I hold down a key to make my terminal beep (like the back arrow), the sound mixing is low latency--it plays immediately, and creates this awful sound. But it's what it should do--which makes it so cool. :)
  9. Re:I'm having problems with GNOME. by kripkenstein · · Score: 3, Informative

    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. GNOME is the default on Fedora, so that would be a catastrophe for them. Before we jump to conclusions, we should check one thing: did you verify the checksums on your CD after you burned it? Perhaps there were errors; this can mess up an installation.
  10. Re:Finegrained security by Nibbler999 · · Score: 3, Informative

    The new system is replacing userhelper, so there will be the same number of (or likely fewer) password popup prompts - not more. See the wiki (google cache) for details.