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.

Comments

One question:

[Fallingcow]

Has PulseAudio been either removed or fixed?

I'm off Linux until that crap gets sorted out. It infected Ubuntu too, for some reason.

Re:One question:

[Anonymous Coward]

That will never happen.

It really sucked when most of the users could never have more than one application using audio simultaneously. Also controlling the devices could not be offered via unified user interface.

If you have a problem with pulseaudio, please consider filing bug reports.

Re:One question:

[Fallingcow]

It really sucked when most of the users could never have more than one application using audio simultaneously. Also controlling the devices could not be offered via unified user interface.

Yeah, I remember those days--a couple years ago, if not more. Audio was finally working great out of the box, and even not-that-bad to configure manually in Gentoo.

Now, it's all screwed up again in the distros that switched to PulseAudio. We got alpha-quality software pushed on us.

If you have a problem with pulseaudio, please consider filing bug reports.

I assure you, there are plenty already.

Re:One question:

[amRadioHed]

Criticizing Ubuntu is fair enough since they intend to be a user friendly distro, but criticizing Fedora for switching to PA early is way off base. It says right in Fedora's objectives they aim to "Be on the leading edge of free and open source technology". If you want a stable and low maintenance system I think Fedora is not the distro for you.

Re:One question:

[cetialphav]

Really? Most people I hear of using it do so because they're used to Red Hat and want a free version of it, not to be on the "leading edge".

Obviously, I can't speak for why most other people use Fedora. I suspect anyone using it for the reasons you state are misinformed.
Fedora's goal is to be bleeding edge. They are pulling the latest versions of almost everything with the philosophy that the only way to stabilize these things is to get them into a real system used by people.

This will mean occasional brokenness as seen with KDE4, pulseaudio, networkmanager, etc. Obviously, Fedora does not want to put out a broken distribution and so they work hard to get things usable. But if you are looking for the stability of RedHat distributions, Fedora is the wrong place to look.

Re:One question:

[Buelldozer]

Right on.

I was just talking with a group of *nix heads two days and the outpouring of disgust around so many distros switching to PA was incredible.

Apparently it didn't work well, or at all, for anyone in the group!

The other commonality was everyone agreed that audio was finally starting to work _well_ before the switch!

Re:Ext4?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Ubuntu screwed it up

[Fallingcow]

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.

Re:Ubuntu screwed it up

[k.a.f.]

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?