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Fedora 12 Beta Released
AdamWill writes "The Fedora project has announced the release of Fedora 12 Beta, which is available here. This will be the final pre-release before the final release in November. New features of Fedora 12 highlighted in the announcement include substantial improvements and fixes to the major graphics drivers, including experimental 3D acceleration support for AMD Radeon r600+-based adapters; improved mobile broadband support and new Bluetooth PAN tethering support in NetworkManager; improved performance in the 32-bit releases; significant fixes and improvements to audio support, including easy Bluetooth audio support; initial implementation of completely open source Broadcom wireless networking via the openfwwf project; significant improvements to the Fedora virtualization stack; and easy access to the Moblin desktop environment and a preview of the new GNOME Shell interface for GNOME. Further details on the major new features of Fedora 12 can be found in the release announcement and feature list. Known issues are documented in the common bugs page."
Time to break out the VM and try out Fedora again- if nothing else because of the sandbox and frankly, it looks like a fairly impressive release. Maybe even enough to run it right beside Kubuntu.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
First Snow Leopard, tomorrow Windows 7, new Ubuntu, now this... its like their cycles are all coming together.
Play the Windows 7 launch drinking game - here
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
In my opinion Fedora is the best distro out there, a lot nicer to use than Debian (and especially Ubuntu) too. Also their repositories contain lots of software and they're actually put there correctly - hundreds of times I've run into missing or non-working features with other distros repositories.
Seems they're actually also improving exactly what needs to be improved - graphics driver support, sound support, bluetooth support and wireless networking support. Other distros usually seem to go select just some more obscure improvements, but these should affect lots of users.
I like it.
If you don't like Fedora, you are free to use one of 400 other distros. From what I've seen of the last few releases, Fedora has done a pretty good job of improving the quality of its releases.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
A poke in the eye with a sharp stick is better than windows, what are you saying?
Why bother
You should definitely solely base your opinion of Fedora on 1) an incident years ago and 2) a beta version. I mean, why would anyone download and use an actual release?!? That's just crazy talk.
I've used Fedora extensively and had few problems with it. I can attest that sshfs worked flawlessly for me which was my primary purpose at the time: remote web site administration. I found Fedora to be a solid distro.
The only negative I can really say about it is that the software updater would often crash my Belkin wireless router requiring a factory reboot and reload of configuration file.
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver --Proverbs 25:11
They've also done a great job at banging out full digit releases frequently..
MABASPLOOM!
I've used Fedora since it was split off from RH, and I used RedHat going back to 5.2. For most of that time it was one of the best supported distros from the user community point of view. More recently the pendulum appears to have swung to Ubuntu. Aside from package management what are the differences I would notice by giving Ubuntu a try this time?
Couldn't agree more with the sentiment, but as a KDE user, I'd recommend the RC of opensuse instead. Knock on wood, suse is the only distribution that *never* has failed me, and I've been through a bunch over the years.
For those of us who are happy with our hardware support and don't use virtualisation, there's nothing I see in this release for us. Maybe Fedora 13 will be more interesting.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Yeah! The kicker is that none of them lock you out of features because you bought "the cheap one."
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
That's Belkin's fault. Get a router without crappy firmware, and it works fine. I've got a WRT54GL that has DD-WRT on it, and it just keeps running. The original Linksys firmware would die with any moderate torrenting or downloading.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Was the CD burned at slowest speed setting, using media that works with other live CD .isos?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Really? Only last week I was looking at NetworkManager - and it didn't support this - even in the development version... based upon the information I could find.
What gives?
I've been a loyal fedora user since Fedora 8 when I made the switch to it for my primary OS. I upgraded to Fedora 11 from Fedora 8, and now my system has been constantly becoming unresponsive, even the xconfig changes mentioned on their errata page reduced the freezing but still get it randomly. As for the commercial ATI drivers, they suck and all I get is a black screen with a blinking cursor so I for one am praying they have finally resolved this issue in the next release.
Some do though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xandros more or less does. Then again every time I've used Xandros (usually on an EEE PC) its been a horrible experience compared to Ubuntu, Debian and even Fedora.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
clearly you haven't used VMS.
*shudder*
Yeah that may be true but if you have to choose from 400 what features do they all have and how long will it take to find the ONE that has the features that I need. If none of them do, how many have ALL the features so I don't have to choose. I've been told that the beauty of Linux is that if the feature doesn't exist I can just write it myself.
.exe or a .msi that installs a feature that is missing that I need. Oh what is the command that is like yum for Mint? All the distros seem to have a different way to get missing software but I can never remember what it is and do they all actually get all the dependencies and versions correctly. I seem to never be able to guess which dependent version goes with what it is that I'm trying to install.
What if I don't have the time, skills or money for that I'll just go with the least confusing solution I can find that has the closest feature set.
I'll trade a bit of money and lock in for the simplicity of buying it off the shelf and knowing it's a multinational company with a huge customer service department.
Just playing Devil's advocate. I've been a Linux fan since kernel version 0.29. But I just can't find a distro that works out of the box. I'm playing with Mint but even that has holes and I just can't download a
Why bother
I've used Fedora since Fedora Core 4 and am currently running 9,10, and 11 between different machines. I prefer Fedora over any other distro (having tried quite a few different ones in VMs before settling on Fedora). The only serious issue I've ever had with Fedora that I really wish would be fixed is the way the audio system works. They have tried pushing everyone over to pulse audio which overall I think is a great idea, but the problem is pulse audio isn't compatible with everything and when something tries to directly access ALSA or OSS it can break the whole sound system. So far I have had problems several times with me losing sound on my entire system with updates. I've also had it happen 3 or 4 times in a row. I know the whole ALSA, OSS, or PA debate is more than just Fedora but I think that is one of the biggest issues in all the distros that needs to be looked at and considered carefully.
Send feature request to Red Hat and Fedora teams? They wrote Network Manager afterall.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Especially when I already have this kickass robe and wizard hat...
Really? You fail to do something that millions of other people do without issue, and the problem is Fedora?
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
How many times have you been able to do a 'yum update' or 'preupgrade' without having to worry about whether the system will be able to boot correctly?
How many times has anaconda crashed mid-install, or failed to detect your RAID and decided instead to wipe individual drives without really telling you, or any number of other nagging problems?
'Bleeding-edge' isn't an excuse by any measure; I never run into any problems when upgrading FreeBSD regularly and its ports tree stays far more current than Fedora's yum packages ever will manage.
Most distros are based on one of the major ones but with their own little tweaks toward their purpose. This means that they all pretty much boil down to a few different package management systems, that do their own dependency and version management. Some of the major distros and the package management system used:
Debian: apt
Red Hat: yum
Gentoo: portage
SUSE: yast
I primarily use Debian or distros that are based on it, such as Ubuntu and Mint. If you have a GUI, the simplest will be the Add/Remove Programs. More powerful but still GUI-based is Synaptic. On a command-line, you will use aptitude or apt-get to install software.
With Red hat based distros, such as CentOS and Fedora, I am not quite as familiar although i do some management of a CentOS box. "yum search [query]" will help search for what application you are looking for. And "yum install [application]" will install it. My CentOS box is headless so I cannot help with the GUI portion.
Your best bet with finding the right distro for you is to think about what you are looking to do. One of the base distros will usually have everything but the kitchen sink, but you will probably need to work to get it going. If you are looking to replace your desktop, search for "desktop linux" and see what is popular. You will likely find Ubuntu or Mint. Search for network storage linux and you will probably find Openfiler. Search for linux firewall and you will probably find out about IP Cop or Smoothwall. Search for linux web server and you may find that Debian or Ubuntu Server is a popular LAMP server distro. Since most of these specialize in one area, they are usually easy to configure to do what you want. But if you want to turn something like Openfiler into a general desktop, you are going to be in for a world of hurt trying to do it.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
I was bit by the preupgrade CLOSED NOTABUG "bug" where preupgrade requires a sizeable chunk of (temporary) disk space in /boot during an upgrade from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11. I ended up with a system that was unbootable, but repairable. No CDROM made things .. interesting, to say the least. I use pxeboot and kickstart to do all my installs because I hate having to swap CDs/burn DVDs
/boot, but I think I had a local copy of the install medium on disk, and softlinked the big file from /boot to where it actually resided. Then preupgrade went smoothly.
I don't recall exactly what I did to work around the huge file "needing" to be in
da w00t. mtfnpy?
So, does anyone know when Redhat Enterprise Linux 6 is supposed to come out, and whether it is going to be derived from Fedora 12 or some earlier version? Redhat EL 5 is getting a little long in the tooth. The kernel is still 2.6.18 plus patches.
Yes, because release numbers actually mean something.
Linux (and other free/open source software) really only comes in one version: AWESOME!
Most of these features that are listed are from the Red Hat and Fedora teams, and some make it upstream. DRI2 is pushed by RH/Fedora, Network Manager was created by Red Hat, and Fedora adds features to GNOME that have made it into upstream. Fedora stands out because they have many features before other distributions because Red Hat contributes much code to these projects.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Hey, thanks for that information.
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver --Proverbs 25:11
Thanks, I've used IP Cop or Smoothwall for a voip application. Pretty simple really. I tried to get Ubuntu Server (PPC) installed on my G4 but it didn't recognize the third party IDE cdrom drive and it failed to get past the trying to choose the install media. I haven't tried Debian yet but I suspect it will fail similarly. I'll take a look at Openfiler as I have a small system I want to turn into a NAS.
Why bother
My contacts at Red Hat say that F12 will be the basis for RHEL6, only they plan to do some additions like they are pushing to get btrfs out the door in time.
This sig has been distributed under the Creative Commons license.
"Couldn't agree more with the sentiment, but as a KDE user, I'd recommend the RC of opensuse instead."
or, for the exact same amount of money, you could try both and see which you prefer :)
"Really? Only last week I was looking at NetworkManager - and it didn't support this - even in the development version... based upon the information I could find."
Well, take a look at http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/2009/07/10/unwire-with-networkmanager/ .
Note there's two types of Bluetooth tethering (two possible protocols) - DUN and PAN. Some mobile devices can only do one or the other, some can do both. Only PAN has been implemented so far, there's no DUN support yet unfortunately. That's coming, probably for F13.
Right, we'll be doing nothing. Nothing, that is, except this:
http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-12/f-12-quality-tasks.html
oh, yeah, the days are going to be fricking *empty* around here. That's just the QA calendar, BTW, doesn't cover release engineering or development team's tasks. To translate, we'll do a full set of installation validation tests on the release candidate images, and weekly blocker bug review meetings at which the entire list of bugs marked as final release blockers are reviewed and managed. I spent most of today managing the blocker bug list, ensuring fixes were being worked on, confirming fixes, and clarifying the impacts of certain issues.
In the four days since the beta freeze was ended, around 200 bugfix updates have already landed in the F12 tree, including the whole KDE 4.3.2. But, yep, we're not doing any work on F12, you're perfectly right. Man, we're lazy.
Actually, most of the features described have been written mostly by Fedora contributors. The full release announcement text - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F12_Beta_Announcement - gives explicit credit for many of them.
Since it's Fedora's policy to contribute all possible work to upstream projects, of course other distributions benefit from this work. We don't play the game of having 'exclusive' features to trumpet in our distribution, we play the game of improving the F/OSS ecosystem for all. We don't really see that the fact that many other distributions will also benefit from this work doesn't mean they're important new features for Fedora users.
Of the features mentioned in the Slashdot story:
X.org improvements: Red Hat employee and Fedora project member Ben Skeggs is the major upstream contributor to the nouveau driver and implemented all the nouveau improvements described. Red Hat employees and Fedora project members Dave Airlie and Jerome Glisse are two of the major contributors to the ati/radeon driver and implemented many of the radeon improvements described. RH employees and FP members Adam Jackson and Kristian Hogsborg are major contributors to the intel driver. Adam and Dave also do substantial work on the X server itself and implemented the default support for multi-display spanning.
NetworkManager improvements: these were implemented by Red Hat employee and Fedora project member Dan Williams.
openfwwf: this is upstream work. We are, however, the first distribution to include it by default, as far as I'm aware (do correct me if I'm wrong).
Virtualization work: this is all contributed by the Red Hat employees and Fedora project members who make up the virtualization team, including Mark McLoughlin, Cole Robinson, and Justin Forbes.
Moblin integration: this is a co-operation between the Fedora project and the Moblin project. Fedora itself serves as part of the foundations of the upstream Moblin project (they do draw on other distributions as well for certain things).
GNOME Shell: maintainer and leading contributor is Red Hat employee and Fedora project member Owen Taylor.
Just playing Devil's advocate. I've been a Linux fan since kernel version 0.29. But I just can't find a distro that works out of the box.
Wow, that is just sad. You've been a fan of Linux for well over 15 years, but still can't find a distro that works out of the box? You have a lot more patience than I do. All of the distros that I've been using since '95 (Yggdrasil, Slackware, Redhat, Knoppix, Mandrake/Mandriva, and Ubuntu) have worked "out of the box" (i.e., off the floppies, CDs, internet, etc.) just fine for all of my family's uses. If I spent all that time being frustrated and let down by any operating system, I'd have given up on it long ago.
Open Source: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
The problem seems to be that when you choose "Linux", you keep trying different distributions.
How about always trying Fedora, and just try again a year later (or some such). Or always trying Ubuntu, or some other popular distro?
Also, with the newer distributions, going to the command line to install an application is generally not needed. Just find the graphical application installation method for the distro (google it), and go crazy.
There are tables of equivalent applications around on the internet as well, for all those little applications that you didn't realize had Linux equivalents.
As an added piece of advice: Create a bunch of bookmarks for websites (particularly responses on forums) that give answers to questions you have. That way, next time you have the same question (even if it is a year later), you can look up the answer much faster.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
ok, your comment stays unmodded, and mine gets modded as troll?
First, Obama wasn't a change for the sake of change - there was an election. You had to either choose someone, or not choose someone. You couldn't maintain status-quo by simply not showing up. So, considering a change of some sort was going to happen, you had to choose which sort of change you wanted. But just as the problems weren't caused by Bush, they also certainly weren't caused by Obama either. The american political system is much bigger than that, and hides well the fact that people like the speaker of the house is, in many ways, more powerful than the president.
Further along that same vein though - you also do need to "change" your desktop every so often (more often than you are forced to change the president). Within months you at the very least need to do patches. I started with Slackware back in...whatever the hell year that was mid-90s. I've been through many distros since then. You change based on what your needs are, you change to become experienced in the alternatives, and you change because we're an adapting, growing world.
I gave up on Ubuntu some time back because it took tasks I always found to be easy (changing xconfig, for instance) and made them difficult - by burying extra configs and such in various places. An upgrade one day and suddenly selinux is enabled on my home desktop (overkill imo) and most of my crap stopped working. Etc, etc, until I just got rid of it and went back to gentoo - which of course, by now, I've dropped.
But guess what? with the backing from IBM, with more and more people signing on to it - you need to learn it. Or at least, use Debian. There are some fundamental differences between Debian and distros like Fedora/RedHat - and if you don't know them, you'll be at a loss when faced with them.
If your career doesn't put you in jeopardy of that (ie, you're not in IT, research, banking, or engineering) then...stick with whatever does what you currently need to do. Watching trends and planning for the future isn't a worthless task however. Anyone who has watched Shuttleworth's efforts and not seen how successful they'd be wasn't paying attention, and as such people who need to be versatile have at least, by now, familiarized themselves with the Debian distro (if they weren't already familiar with it). Ubuntu had a HUGE grassroots thing going for a long while, and did a great job of converting those efforts to a viable corporate option while not leaving their initial fans out to dry. I commend Mark for the great job he did there. Doesn't mean I like Ubuntu - I'd rather run off a livedvd from various other groups than use Ubuntu. But it's got undeniable appeal, and isn't something that is "change just to change"
I've been running 11 for a few months now and it's .... ok....
Before switching to Fedora I was using Slackware for almost two years and now I am using Fedora from last 3 and half years. I thinks Fedora is the best Distro out their, I am using it as my primary OS on my work and home laptops (F10, F11) without any issue. At work I use wireless Internet, Fedora support Intel base wireless cards out of the box, at home i use wired network. At my previous job as sysadmin (telecommute) our all servers were running xen/UML virtualization and host/guest OSs were Fedora. I remember we have to upgrade the host/guest OSs using yum and the whole process of upgrading online was easy. someitme we get into issue which get resolved in no time. So IMHO Fedora is the best Linux distro and with my past experience i do not find any issue using Fedora as Server OS.
http://askaralikhan.blogspot.com/
MAKE IT LIIIKEE## TENABRAAAYYYYY##@@!!!
these other words are here to limit the percentage of caps in my original post. In case you were wondering, yes, it is satirical. I enjoy the occasional amusing flame war on a disused game website as much as the next guy. I hope this is enough non-caps.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
For what its worth I have a fedora proof box as well. Ubuntu, Debian, Mandrake, Gentoo, Suse, ( heck BeOs 5 ) have no problem with it. Fedora does. Weird.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Mod him Informative for providing release dates.
Mod him Off-topic for recommending Ubuntu in a Fedora story.
Never mod because you agree, disagree, like, or dislike a post. There are no mod options for "+1 Agree."
Yeah, I know you were making a joke (and it was cute), but this needed to be said.
Put identity in the browser.
I respect Red Hat and Fedora for being such pure FOSS organizations. Kudos. You guys prove that you can have your cake (be FOSS) and eat it, too (make a good profit).
Put identity in the browser.
Obviously, you are mistaken. If you do not see bluetooth PAN options, it may be: 1) BT PAN disabled/unavailable on your phone; 2) bug in NM -- google for fedora 12 network manager test day, it was tested back then.
Also notice, that BT DUN (I think more popular than PAN) networking is coming to NM after release.
:wq
A friend of mine downloaded Fedora 12 Beta and found it would not boot on his laptop. I tried the same CD on mine and it worked without any issues. It is rather odd considering my Fedora 11 DVD works on both machines so there could be a problem with his laptop reading CD's although my laptop is over 2 years older than his.. To say Fedora is shit because the media does not boot in your machine is not trying to analyse the issue and deserving the label of "troll".
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Tthe R600 is two generations out of date. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but it's taken 3 years to get experimental 3D support? Am I missing something fundamental? If I'm not, that's pretty appalling turnaround regardless of development model.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I do not have any PPC stuff myself, but I often see Yellow Dog linux recommended. I have heard that PS3 development has started to overshadow the Mac development though.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
no
Why bother
What I like most about Fedora - audio is done right. On Ubuntu it is a mess. Read Lennart Poettering blog to learn why.