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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.
Has PulseAudio been either removed or fixed?
I'm off Linux until that crap gets sorted out. It infected Ubuntu too, for some reason.
It only has problems if the system goes down unexpectedly during a series of disk writes, or if the system is rebooted before ext4 has flushed its write cache (30-60 seconds)
Sounds like a "yes it does have a severe data integrity issue" to me.
I'm sure it's the future. The features sound great. Doesn't goddamn work right yet, though.
That's why I said, "removed or fixed" rather than just "removed". I'll accept "fixed". Awesome. I'll also accept "change reverted until PulseAudio is beyond alpha (generously, beta) stages".
Personally, I stopped having trouble with audio in Linux at least a couple years ago, so suddenly breaking it with a half-finished implementation of a new audio server is very, very annoying, especially from the "Just Works" distros. It would have been one thing if PulseAudio actually added some kind of functionality that I wanted, but there were zero new features I needed from my existing system, so it didn't. Also would have been fine if they switched it but everything I used kept working fine, but that didn't happen.
You don't have to "reinstall" to upgrade. All you have to do is boot from the install media and chose "upgrade".
I can't believe how everyone is repeating this misconception.
I don't care if it boots in 20 or 30 seconds
Apparently quite a few people do.
kernel based mode setting (so it flickers a bit, XP also does this)
Well, I mean "we" are tring to be better than that though, right?
ext4 (more testing plz)
That's been in Fedora testing for quite some time. So I would leave that decision up to them and not assume they weren't testing it.
management tools for virtual machines
Better than virt-manager i take it?
to finally be able so sync my phone without jumping through hoops. Same with using a webcam. And I would love to run Office 2007 SP1 on it, since I could try converting some machines at work to Linux. This would make my live a LOT easier
That's a bit beyond the scope of a distribution though, no?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
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.
I have never understood why this auto-mixing is considered desirable. I like that an application locks the soundcard. I listen to high-quality music while I work - why on Earth would I want another application mixing something else into that? The effect of two different tracks of music sequences superimposed is virtually always hideous cacophony - no thanks. I don't need a perky jingle to inform me that a download has finished. I am actively grateful to X for preventing the browser from interfering with my enjoyment. If I wanted your web site to make noise, I'd rub my thumb against the monitor! Honestly, what is this mythical use case in which hearing different sources of digital sound simultaneously is a good thing?
I don't even search my disks hardly ever, since I keep everything logically organized myself, so metadata is one of those features (next to indexing) that I don't even appreciate, although I'm sure there are users that do.
Keep in mind that "metadata" here is referring to much more than things like extended attributes, and in fact is probably NOT referring to those. "metadata" here means stuff like the inode and indirect blocks, which you definitely DO care about because it's what lets you access your data.
Metadata journaling saves this information so that you don't have things like blocks that are doubly-allocated or just lost because they aren't part of any file but aren't on the free list, which is what fsck saves.
I listen to high-quality music while I work - why on Earth would I want another application mixing something else into that?
Because you want to pause your music player and watch a youtube video someone linked you to?
(Granted, this is sort of Flash's problem for keeping the card locked longer than necessary, but it's still a problem. Sound is set up crappily on the system I'm on now, and it appears that only one program can access it at once unless I manually start esd or something like that. If I want to have sound in Flash (and thus youtube), which I want fairly often, I might need to have nothing else holding the sound card when I start firefox. It's definitely the case that if I go to a page with flash, the sound card remains locked by FF until I close it. Which means if I want to start listening to other music, I have to close firefox, which at best is annoying and at worst loses state.)
Having read "The Perfect Setup" - all those config files in your home directory? That is waaaaaaaaaay too complicated.
We, the people, just want a plug and play solution to detect the hardware, set some reasonable defaults and provide intuitive gnome wizards (or kde 4.x if you prefer) to configure the rest.
I hear it'll be the year of the Linux Desktop soon. :( I could list other non plug and play bugbears... It's 2009; the days of hand-editing umpteen configuration files for I/O devices should be over.