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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?
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?
Wait, seriously?!
RC means Release Candidate. In most sane systems, this means that it's the build they intend to be the final build. It's first build with all the debugging flags turned off, which is what differentiates it from a beta.
Once a Release Candidate has few enough bugs left open against it, then it becomes the final build. In a sane system, there is no difference between the final release and the release candidate immediately before it.
Otherwise it's not really a release candidate, it's a beta.
Once a Release Candidate has few enough bugs left open against it, then it becomes the final build.
In Microsoft language this is called "Service Pack 3".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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/
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.
You are blaming Fedora for something that isnt their fault.
1. DeVD's - RH is US-based. It would be illegal for them to include DeCSS libraries. You can get them from atrpms. Other US-based distributions arent going to have it either.
2. nvidia - actually nvidia is at fault here, they should either release specs or source for their drivers, so that they can be supported properly by Xorg. (As many other video card chipsets are) And as before, you can still add these yourself, either from atrpms or directly from nvidia.
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.
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.
For now, it looks like the 3D graphics hardware with the best open source support is the Intel GMA-X3000 integrated graphics in the G965 and GM965 chipsets. The performance is lower than the bleeding-edge ATI and Nvidia parts, but it's adequate for most purposes.
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"
not enough reasons to move
did you read the notes?
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/8/ReleaseSummary#head-4f0c6fbce5ef70b1b3c850fbd9dd725ddfd48a42
as someone else wrote
* custom spins
* fedora 8 on a usb key
* pulseaudio
* codecbuddy
* yum improvements (yes it's fast)
* packagemanagement improvements (change repos and more)
* gui for firewall
* online desktop
* the whole fedoraproject.org website and associated projects
* Network Manager suppose to have seamless capabilities
* New Syslog demon
* seamless bluetooth integration and laptop improvments
I can go on. I'm very excited about this release you kidding?
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
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...
...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.
Which points to the underlying reason why VMS didn't take off like Unix. It had features to burn, and pretty good documentation, but no community such as existed for unix, bsd and linux.
Even with decus the agenda was mostly controlled by DEC, and directed at selling more stuff. I knew most of the answer you gave to the GP's question, but I never played with that feature, even though I had seen it used.
If there was most open source stuff available specifically for VMS I would have learned more. Unfortunately the freeware CD which DEC put out mainly contained ported UNIX apps.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
On the same note, I may give it a try... if it detects my fakeraid, that would be nice (openSuSE did, but failed when initializing X for my desktop)... Latest ubuntu installed, but running two vidcards didn't work correctly, I had to remove one, and have both monitors on one card... S-L-O-W and no Compiz/Beryl :( .... if Fedora 8 can handle both video cards, and displays without issue, cool... if it supports the fakeraid, or at least has an easier to configure raid setup than the pain with Ubuntu.. I'll switch my main OS... most of my work is done in VMware anyways... so doesn't matter to me what my main OS is... As long as firefox, thunderbird, pidgin X-Chat run (pretty much everywhere). So long as I can use VMWare, I'm happy.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Actually Fedora are hoping to skip 4.2 altogether and use 4.3 for Fedora 9 - see this thread from the GCC mailing list.
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...