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.'"

Comments

Re:Another one?

[hdparm]

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.

Re:All Hail Choice!

[hdparm]

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?

Re:All Hail Choice!

[rayvd]

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.

Fedora 8 release summary and announcements

[spevack]

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/

Re:I tried the live cd

[The Cisco Kid]

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.

GNOME, KDE, and other custom spins

[spevack]

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

Fedora 8 running on USB keys

[spevack]

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.

Yet ANOTHER sound server?

[Burz]

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.

Re:Yet ANOTHER sound server?

[Rayban]

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.

Re:Yet ANOTHER sound server?

[Anonymous Coward]

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. :)

Re:Yet ANOTHER sound server?

[Spy Hunter]

Thankfully, it does appear that PulseAudio is the One True sound server that we can all finally agree on. It emulates esd, OSS, and ALSA, so legacy apps like Flash and your smartphone work. It supports hotplug of audio devices, including networked ones (using Zeroconf even). It supports synchronized output between multiple devices, even when those devices use different sampling rates or have out-of-sync clocks (it resamples automatically). It has a zero-copy low latency architecture, taking advantage of the latest high resolution timer and real-time scheduling capabilities in new Linux kernels (when available), and it supports latency measurement for sound/video sync even when high latency is unavoidable (such as over a network). It has a modern user interface that provides per-application volume sliders like Windows Vista, and allows on-the-fly routing of audio to devices, including "saving" audio streams to another device if the device they are using is unplugged.

The guys behind PulseAudio really "get it". They even decided to drop their typically-awful open-source project name "PolypAudio" in favor of the infinitely better "PulseAudio", for wider acceptance. You've got to give them points for that; the GIMP could learn a thing or two from them.

Re:Yet ANOTHER sound server?

[Spy Hunter]

Oh, and I forgot to mention that PulseAudio has aspirations to become "Compiz for audio", providing earcandy effects such as surround-sound positioning for on-screen events (so sounds from a window on the left of the screen come from the left speaker, etc) and muffled sound from background windows (so the Flash ad in Firefox's background tab doesn't blast your eardrums and the new-mail notification doesn't sound over the movie you're watching full-screen).

Re:Waiting for Fedora 9

[Eric Smith]

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?

Fast torrent this time

[schwaang]

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.

Mwo??? Available at Facebook?

[davidsyes]

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!

Re:Waiting for Fedora 9

[Pros_n_Cons]

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?

Re:I'm having problems with GNOME.

[kripkenstein]

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.

Re:Finegrained security

[Nibbler999]

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.