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First Look At Fedora 11 Beta Release
Ars Technica has a first look at the latest beta release from the Fedora universe and it has several new shiny-bits including kernel modesetting, ext4, and faster boot times. "Fedora 11, which is codenamed Leonidas, is scheduled for final release at the end of May. It will include several new features and noteworthy improvements, such as RPM 4.7, which will reduce the memory consumption of complex package activity, tighter integration of PackageKit, faster boot time with a target goal of 20 seconds, and reduced power consumption thanks to a major tuning effort. This version of Fedora will ship with the latest version of many popular open source software programs, including GNOME 2.26, KDE 4.2, and Xfce 4.6. This will also be the first Fedora release — and possibly the first mainstream distro release — to use the new Ext4 filesystem by default.
And if you could expand to explain how Pulse Audio differs and what benefits this will have for end-users? Or even for developers of existing applications too, such as Audacity/Jokosher/Rhythmbox/$general_audio_application.
A lot of things have changed. For example, you can now change the volume of every playback stream seperately. Then, we have better hotplug support: Just plug in your USB speaker and it will appear in your mixer (as long as you use pavucontrol, of course, PA's native mixer tool; the classic gnome-volume-control which we still ship is not hotplug-capable). You can move streams during playback between output devices. With a single click in our "paprefs" tool you can aggregate all local audio devices into a virtual one, which distributes audio to all outputs, and deals with the small frequency deviations in the sound card's quartzes -- and that code even deals with hotplugging/unplugging. If that checkbox is checked, just plugin in your USB headset and you get audio through it. (This is actually pretty cool, and it might be something we enable by default in F9)..
davecb5620@gmail.com
PulseAudio is the future... but it is also a bit of an X. Not a curse word, X the server. X is fantastic and has features that make other GUI's look very poor indeed. Pity that for most people 99% of it is never needed and indeed gets in the way.
Linux, and for that matter all OS'es have always had trouble with sound. For some reason the powers that be (IBM) never really thought sound was needed beyond an occasional bleep. For a long time your soundcard was made by a taiwanese firm, the type of firm that you would expect to produce dirt cheap clones of western hardware, NOT the only supplier of sound for the IBM-PC (oh okay, leaving out a lot but still).
OSS and even Alsa have problems with apps wanting to lock the soundcard to themselves. PulseAudio is supposed to once and for all end this and make it similar to X in that Pulse Audio can hook up any audio app and any soundcard, even over the network, and mix them together.
Sadly it was released before it was ready and Ubuntu especially implemented it in a really bad way. Hence it got a bad rep because a beta was put badly into a "just works" distro.
But trust me, once you get it working and you are the kind of person who has 2-3 PC's and can never remember which desktop is actually hooked up to a speaker set but just want to play music it is a very nice system.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_fedora_q209&num=1
It was my impression that Fedora was primarily used by people seeking a "stable and low maintenance" RPM-based distro that they don't have to pay for. I've only used it a bit (intranet server at a former employer) so I'm not in on the distro's culture, but that's the impression I've gotten from reading comments by its users and paying (some) attention to its development over the years.
Nope, you would be thinking (or should be thinking) of CentOS http://www.centos.org/