Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
Windows 7 is the best OS I've used in years!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.