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."

Comments

Fedora

[sopssa]

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.

Re:Fedora

[Stupendoussteve]

Theory: Every time I try to install the same broken package, it fails! I've tried hundreds of times!

Re:Fedora

[StarHeart]

Is "yum install httpd" really that hard? I know I have done this before on plenty of servers.

Re:Fedora

[discogravy]

There's a menu item for installing software, but honestly, if you don't know what yum is and how it's used to install software in redhat-based distros -- especially if you couldn't be bothered to google it and instead thought installing windows would be easier -- windows is where you need to be. that's not meant as an insult either; linux is not for you.

Re:Fedora

[wastedlife]

You were trying to install a webserver without internet access? Where then did you find out about and get wampserver from? On a base install of windows there is no AMP stack and nothing telling you how to install software that you are looking for.

Re:Fedora

[h4rr4r]

So are you a troll or an idiot?

Because with the story you are laying out here it is one or the other.

Re:Fedora

[AdamWill]

well. um. it does. yum takes care of the dependencies for you. all you have to do is tell it what you want to install.

try as I might, I _really_ can't see any qualitative difference between the two. You seem to be assuming that it's blindingly obvious that you should use this 'wampserver' thing to install the stack on Windows, but I've no idea why. I'd never heard of it until I came across this thread. How did you magically know that the right tool to use to install the stack on Windows was 'wampserver'? I'm betting you didn't; you either did research yourself and found this tool, or you were given the benefit of this knowledge by someone else who had. How is that any different from doing a couple of minutes of research yourself to learn about yum, or being told about it by other people in this thread?

also, you didn't answer the question about updates, which is rather important. Does this 'wampserver' thing take care of keeping the whole stack up to date with security updates for you?

Re:Fedora

[crhylove]

I disagree. There are plenty of easy to use distros out that replace windows in every way. Linux Mint is a favorite of mine. I install it on Grandma's Machine with Open Office, show her how to export .pdf, and never get another phone call.

Windows is for teen age boys who want to get viruses and the latest game.

Mac is for people with too much money, and too fancy of a haircut.

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Picass0]

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?

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[dHagger]

..."brown, and shit"... was that intentional?

Seriously, I have to agree about Ubuntu. I've been using Ubuntu since 6.10, and for the last few releases things have deteriorated. They are pushing things into the distribution before they are ready and/or doing a poor job integrating them. Pulseaudio has never worked OK for me. Notification OSD does not work at all for me, placing notifications outside of the visible area, and replacing a system that works fine. Multi-monitor support (except for fixed configuration in xorg.conf) has been partially broken on all the 6-8 computers I've tried it on. The beta of Kubuntu 9.10 did not have working multi-monitor support at all!

So I'm currently running Windows 7, which beats the *brown* out of Ubuntu. At least on my new shiny hardware. I'm thinking about trying another distribution, just have not decided which one yet. Fedora sounds nice (especially the thing about improved sound and video), you recommend OpenSUSE, and I've also heard a lot of good things about Mandriva. Decisions, decisions...

Re:Fedora vs. Ubuntu

[Daengbo]

Agreed. Ubuntu doesn't seem to have enough core developers for what they try to do. My feeling is that they have grown out of control. The original "one CD with limited options and only the best software" mantra that made Ubuntu 4.10 interesting has been cast off, universe and multiverse are huge and unmanageable, and core technologies are broken every release.

When your default applications have blocker bugs (F-Spot photo manager sidebar is invisible, F-Spot doesn't work on a supported platform, included plug-ins don't work on Totem movie player or Rhythmbox music manager, or Brasero burning application can't burn a DVD, for starters) and well- and long-supported chipsets with open drivers fail to work with new versions (RaLink wireless and i945 graphics), there really is no reason to release.

Canonical needs to step back, Ubuntu needs to consolidate, and both need to focus on "just works in default install" issues.

Re:Great!

[nschubach]

Yeah! The kicker is that none of them lock you out of features because you bought "the cheap one."

ATI Driver Issues

[KJACK98]

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.

Re:Not a particularly exciting release

[gr8_phk]

I agree. My Fedora sequence has been: 3,4,5,7,9,10, and now 12. The pace of improvement has slowed down to where it's not that exciting, but that's actually a good thing IMHO it means things are "good" and "stable". I'm still unhappy that 12 doesn't seem to have the driver for e1000 wireless in the install (you can yum it from the other repo but not until final I guess). I believe that is in 2.6.32 kernel, so it should make it for Fedora 13.

Pulse Audio

[BassMan449]

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.

Re:12 releases and it's still a piece of shit.

[jjohnson]

Really? You fail to do something that millions of other people do without issue, and the problem is Fedora?