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

Leonidas? Cue the "300" jokes in 3... 2...

[tjonnyc999]

1... and GO!

Re:Leonidas? Cue the "300" jokes in 3... 2...

[0100010001010011]

THIS. IS. LINUX.

Re:Leonidas? Cue the "300" jokes in 3... 2...

[jamesmcm]

Tonight we design in Hell!

ext4? This is madness!

[MasterOfMagic]

THIS IS FEDORAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!

Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.

Oh yeah, well tonight, I in fact plan on dining in Hell.

Ext4?

[TheNinjaroach]

Doesn't Ext4 have occasional issues with data integr)_SF*@)_M#$ I'm surprised to see it used by defau#%FVN641

Re:Ext4?

[Anonymous Coward]

a patch was released today.

Re:Ext4?

[sakdoctor]

Spartans! Prepare for data loss!

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:Ext4?

[Anthony_Cargile]

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)

I thought since it was journaling, it prevents all of this by writing everything to the journal first and retains said data even if interrupted?

Re:Ext4?

[Jurily]

Tonight we dine in /dev/null

Re:Ext4?

[billcopc]

That's the problem, it writes the metadata journal first, and the actual data journal later. So you wind up with metadata pointing to not-yet-written data.

Common sense says it should be the other way around: it's much easier to detect the absense of a file, than to detect that an existing file is full of gibberish.

Re:Ext4?

[Jurily]

Sounds like a "yes it does have a severe data integrity issue" to me.

It's already been discussed. Basically, if you write a small file, rename it before the data reaches the disk, and power down, you lose.

People have been known to lose GNOME and Firefox config files for instance.

Re:Ext4?

[EvanED]

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.

Re:Ext4?

[nystire]

Gnome has config files? I thought that the devs just hardcoded everything to have the "best" defaults available. (Please note that I am a Gnome user, etc..)

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:

[Walpurgiss]

My problems with pulseaudio isn't a bug, but a design flaw. Until they create an option in the PA sound server to let you set DTS/DD streams to passthrough, bypassing the sound mixing, PA is fail to me.

PA seems like a great system for people who don't want to use an external dolby decoder for surround sound and are fine with everything either stereo or decoded by software. But for my needs, it currently fails to plain ALSA. Toss me a way to do proper passthrough and I'd sign up with PA again. It's not like I need or want sound mixing when I'm watching something with surround sound anyway.

Re:One question:

[Drew M.]

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/

Re:One question:

[Lendrick]

If someone is used to RedHat and wants a free version of it, they ought to be using Centos, which is pretty much an exact duplicate of RedHat Enterprise, except rebranded and free.

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:

[Just Some Guy]

It really sucked when most of the users could never have more than one application using audio simultaneously.

FreeBSD moved past that while staying on OSS.

Re:One question:

[shutdown -p now]

It really sucked when most of the users could never have more than one application using audio simultaneously.

I have been actively using Linux way before PulseAudio first appeared, and I don't recall that being a problem. In fact, rather, there were always too many solutions, from dmix in ALSA to sound daemons such as arts and esound. Why add another one to the list, especially if it's not good enough yet?

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

While it's definitely advantageous for users to file correct bug reports, not all of them understand the procedure, nor should they be made to. And, of course, developers shouldn't just ignore criticism under the excuse that it's not properly framed as a bug report.

For staters, how about this?

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:One question:

[Ant P.]

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.

I solved that problem by installing a PCI sound card I found in the trash. It can cope with me forkbombing sox processes at it and it has a unified user interface - the three sound buttons on my keyboard that run aumix.

Compare this to Pulseaudio, which manages to combine the obtrusiveness of aRts, the unusability of a Gnome GUI, and the uselessness of a network server that sounds like trying to stream a wav file over 56k - on the rare occasions that it produces any result at all.

PulseAudio on Fedora ..

[rs232]

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)..

Re:Bad summary.

[TheCycoONE]

It's 2.6.29 of course, but here's the document that says it: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Beats/Kernel

Finally Fedora?

[mcrbids]

I'm a long, long time RedHat user. (Since Red Hat Linux 5.1, if you're curious) And I've always upgraded every other release or so. RedHat 5.x, 6.2 (one of my favorites) 9.0, and then the Fedoras: 1, 3, 6, and 8. (which is what I type this on now)

Every single time I've upgraded, I've welcomed the upgrade. It was better, snazzier, more stable, etc. all the way up to Fedora Core 9.

Fedora Core 9 should never have been released. It was just barely alpha quality, and so buggy that merely changing the default font size would destabilize the system! I tried desperately to get it to work for about 2 weeks before shrugging, recovering my .kde directory from a backup, and rolling back to FC8. I'm not expecting an ultra-stable release with Fedora, I know it's more 'cutting edge' but when the computer crashes too badly to get to the website to file a bug report, I'm going to cut and run.

I haven't had the nerve to try 10, though I've heard good things about it. Once bitten, twice shy, and all that.

I have *loads* of respect for RedHat, but FC9 really tarnished their good image. I hope they're a bit more cautious about what they release in the future...

Re:Finally Fedora?

[armanox]

I stayed away from 9 myself, and then found that 10 after some updates returned most sanity to the Fedora universe.

Re:Finally Fedora?

[Binestar]

I'm a long, long time RedHat user. (Since Red Hat Linux 5.1, if you're curious)

You got lucky timing. As an "earlier than that" RedHat user, the 4.2-> 5.0 libc change was a horrible upgrade path. 5 worked great for new systems, but anyone with a good working 4.x system trying to upgrade to 5 had loads of problems. If you were to have gone through that upgrade you might not have stayed with RH as long as you have =)

Re:Finally Fedora?

[H0p313ss]

I'm a long, long time RedHat user. (Since Red Hat Linux 5.1, if you're curious)

I suddenly feel very, very old.

Ubuntu screwed it up

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

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?

Re:Ubuntu screwed it up

[EvanED]

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.)

Re:Ubuntu screwed it up

[BertieBaggio]

Honestly, what is this mythical use case in which hearing different sources of digital sound simultaneously is a good thing?

I can't tell from your tone if you're serious or being flippant. It seems like both. However, if you're serious... In addition to sibling posts, I have several other 'mythical' use cases too:

• I sometimes like to listen to music while playing games (when I'm either passing a quick 10-20 minutes, or in a game with crap music).
• I'm normally on a teamspeak server to keep in contact with my buddies.
• Audio notifications. Okay, so you kinda covered that one, but they can be kinda useful. I won't go into this as it's a preference thing.
• Web sites (flash). Sibling has this covered, but I'll mention it too. I hate having to close my media player (and lose my place in the music) to watch a tiny wee clip.

There are undoubtedly others that I can't think of because it's after 3 AM, but you get the idea I think. If you don't want mixing, that's your preference and I have nothing against it, but there are most definitely cases where it is desirable.

I have never understood why this auto-mixing is considered desirable.

Hope this cleared that up for you then.

Re:Bad summary.

[sakdoctor]

Brace yourself techno-vampire...

Re:ext4? This is madness!

[Anonymous Coward]

Madness you say?

I've been running ext4 on an arch linux server for a month now. No issues with the filesystem so far. It is also my first experience with syslog-ng and setting mark frequency to zero (disabled) took the box down.

No...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it just has exactly the same behaviour that filesystems like XFS and JFS and probably most of other unix filesystems, specially those using delayed allocation (say, ZFS). Any app that can "lose data" in Ext4 needs fixing anyway because of portability (other OS behave exactly like Ext4, and have done so for years).

To "solve" this issue Ext4 has added some hacks (basically, do a fsync in the file after a rename or a truncate) that will slow down performance (caching is faster) for some apps, like rsync, and will encourage programming behaviours that can cause data loss in badly written apps that are run in OSes that do not behave like ext3/ext4/btrfs. But hey, that's what people asked for.

ubuntu 9.04 beta and fedora 11 beta compared...

[dr_wheel]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_fedora_q209&num=1

Wrong focus

[Britz]

I don't care if it boots in 20 or 30 seconds, kernel based mode setting (so it flickers a bit, XP also does this), ext4 (more testing plz) or any of that.

For my server Samba 4 would be interesting with Active Directory and some other goodies for Windows clients, but I guess this will take a while. Maybe some better management tools for virtual machines.

But on the desktop I would love 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.

I guess I don't care all that much about Linux (the kernel) anymore. I care about apps. And good integration of them and polish. But wasn't that what distros were for?

Re:Wrong focus

[pembo13]

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?

Re:ext4? This is madness!

[Inner_Child]

Mother-in-law doing the cooking?

Re:In Defense of Pulseaudio

[ChunderDownunder]

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.