Fedora 12 Released

AdamWill writes "The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 12 today. With all the latest open source software and major improvements to graphics support, networking, virtualization and more, Fedora 12 is one of the most exciting releases so far. You can download it here. There's a one-page guide to the new release for those in a hurry. The full release announcement has details on the major features, and the release notes contain comprehensive information on changes in this new release. Known issues are documented on the common bugs page."

Comments

Great work!

[sopssa]

If you read the one page release notes, it seems Fedora actually knows how to try to cater to more general audience too, while still supporting the core Linux audience. I have always thought that why Ubuntu became the "standard" general OS you introduce as first Linux, as Fedora does a lot more things a lot better (and the Red Hat delivered design is imo a lot better than whats delivered from Debian)

What was interesting was the "better than ever tablet support". I have been thinking of getting a tablet pc for convenience in bed, and Linux would actually be quite perfect OS for it since theres no need to play games. Seems they're taken things like that into account too, while Linux community usually forgets the non-techie stuff.

Re:Great work!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been thinking of getting a tablet pc for convenience in bed...

I know what you mean... I find it tiresome to have to turn my head to the desktop monitor every 15 seconds to follow the story line of "Anal Avengers 7" during foreplay.

Re:Great work!

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't make nearly as much sense if you haven't yet seen 1 through 6.

Re:Great work!

[Junta]

It is subjective that Fedora does 'a lot more things a lot better'. They certainly have distinct aims from Ubuntu and gain some benefits, but I personally find Fedora to suffer some phenomena that Ubuntu does not:

-Out-of-the-box media/driver experience: Fedora goes purist and the out-of-the-box experience suffers for it with lack of popular codecs and optimal drivers for nVidia cards. Ubuntu caters to the user experience and takes care of this out of the box. You have to add RPM fusion repositories to make Fedora cope with this, which isn't insurmountable, but isn't out of the box.

-Fedora is not even stable within a release cycle in terms of offered featureset. I.e. I recall gaim 1.x being replaced with gaim 2.0 one day without requiring any particular update. This is good for enthusiasts who always want the cutting edge, bad for end-users who only want change at certain times they could expect (and for documenters doing screenshots). I recall once Fedora reving the kernel revision entirely without jumping releases. This wasn't bad in and of itself, but they jumped before nVidia supported it, and my X was hosed. Ubuntu is more conservative with this, knowing it will just be 6 months before a new cycle comes anyway.

-Fedora is 'too' comfortable with cutting edge changes, even to the point of releasing versions ahead of upstream *or* backporting code from future versions into older versions that upstream projects didn't want to do. For example, they backported things from the 2.6.32 branch to 2.6.31. The upstream kernel people weren't comfortable enough with the features to allow them into 2.6.31 or any release that aligned with their cycle, so they simply put 2.6.32 stuff into 2.6.31. This has been a longstanding tendency with RH (everyone probably remembers the gcc 2.96 debacle). BTW, this is even worse in RHEL, where they will backport 2.6.3x changes to 2.6.18, severely breaking third party kernel modules that code for the 'API' of 2.6.18 that gets broken by the massive amount of backports. Some third party even writes to newer 'apis', but wraps it with '> 2.6.26' sorts of ifdefs and thus assumes the 'old' api and RHEL will completely screw those assumptions. Ubuntu *usually* doesn't jump the gun (GRUB 2 is an example of going before the upstream declares 'ready' though).

-I *still* can't quite put my finger on it, but something about the Ubuntu desktop feels, subjectively to me, more whole rather than merely a conglomeration of the parts. This may simply be a matter of certain tastes they appear to me, because I can't nail it down.

Re:Great work!

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

...as Fedora does a lot more things a lot better

That hasn't been my experience. I find Fedora does a lot less, and doesn't do it as well. The primary example of this is yum, which is a third rate program by comparision to apt. In fact, my personal opinion is that the success of Ubuntu has been down to properly maintained and comprehensive apt-repositories. When I left Fedora, yum had nothing in the same league as these, and dependency hell was very much still with the platform.

Fedora is a distro for admins who want ease of use, but not so much ease of use that they lose their jobs. They want the odd error or config mismatch so they need to directly intervene on occasion. So they won't go for debian or especially Ubuntu. On the other hand, they're not going to do all the legwork, so distros like slack or Gentoo are out of the question. Add in paid company support and "enterprise" editions, and you have the perfect distro for the in house admin of a medium to large business.

Re:Great work!

[icebike]

Many of these problems you attribute to Fedora are also true of OpenSuse.

Rather than take the Ubuntu approach of popping up a "Do you want to download these non-OSS drivers button" which handles it almost perfectly in every instance and frees the Distro of legal risk, both Fedora and opensuse have historically left you to your own devices, assuring the marginalization of their product.

Opensuse now adds many one-click installs for some of these drivers. http://www.lebokov21.com/2008/01/29/opensuse-1-click-install-your-software/

Forced into this by US legal situation, the web page based One-Click is better than nothing, but small consolation to someone stuck with an odd-ball network card.

Re:Great work!

[AdamWill]

Well, what alternative do you suggest for introducing desired new features into older kernel versions? It's not really the case that upstream 'didn't want to' backport things from 2.6.32 to 2.6.31, it's just not what upstream does. Upstream kernel maintainers do not maintain kernel version X once it's released, they go on to work on kernel version Y, pretty much. That doesn't mean it's somehow wrong for a distribution to do it, often it's the right thing to do, and Fedora is not the only distribution that does this (Ubuntu does it too, in some cases).

Again, for RHEL, what's the alternative? The whole point of RHEL is to provide long-term stable releases, but customers also want support for newer hardware. When RH has several thousand large customers all screaming for support for their shiny new SAN hardware that they just spent several zillion dollars on, saying 'well, we're not going to backport that driver to kernel 2.6.18' isn't really an option, and updating them all wholesale to a new kernel release probably wouldn't be the best idea in the world either. What would you suggest RH does instead?

Re:Great work!

[AdamWill]

I find Fedora does a lot less, and doesn't do it as well. The primary example of this is yum, which is a third rate program by comparision to apt. In fact, my personal opinion is that the success of Ubuntu has been down to properly maintained and comprehensive apt-repositories. When I left Fedora, yum had nothing in the same league as these, and dependency hell was very much still with the platform.

So, you mean, you have no direct experience with any recent Fedora, yet wish to criticise it anyway? Glad we got that cleared up. You're also conflating three different things in the above. The package management program has very little to do with what packages are available to it; the comparative quality or otherwise of apt-get and yum has zip all to do with what packages are available in the Fedora or Debian (or Ubuntu) repositories. 'Dependency hell', apart from being so vague these days as to be practically meaningless, is a separate issue again, as it rarely has anything to do with the package manager itself, but is to do with the quality of the packages. Again, given that you don't give any details on your actual current experience with Fedora or the date at which you 'left Fedora', it's hard to place much value in your experiences.

Fedora is a distro for admins who want ease of use, but not so much ease of use that they lose their jobs. They want the odd error or config mismatch so they need to directly intervene on occasion. So they won't go for debian or especially Ubuntu.

Here, I think you dropped this - it's your tin foil hat. Don't answer that door, it's the FBI!

Re:Great work!

[AdamWill]

As far as Fedora is concerned, this is not a 'problem'. The problem is rather in distributions which rely to too great an extent on closed source drivers to provide hardware support. For instance, many Ubuntu users upgrading to 9.10 are finding they can no longer use the proprietary ATI/AMD driver for their video card and are using the free driver. Which, it seems, Ubuntu does not pay too much attention to maintaining, as many of them have problems. By contrast, Fedora considers it better that users are encouraged to use the free drivers rather than the proprietary ones, and focuses on the development of the free drivers (Red Hat pays two full time developers to work on the radeon driver). In the long run, this is better for both Fedora users and all Linux users.

Re:Great work!

[sopssa]

The primary example of this is yum, which is a third rate program by comparision to apt. In fact, my personal opinion is that the success of Ubuntu has been down to properly maintained and comprehensive apt-repositories. When I left Fedora, yum had nothing in the same league as these, and dependency hell was very much still with the platform.

It's funny you say that, because that was also my problem - but with apt and debian. Also their repositories contain apps that are stupidly build and are missing features (and if you want those features, you have to compile it yourself which defeats the purpose of using a package manager to begin with).

Re:Great work!

[TorKlingberg]

-Fedora is not even stable within a release cycle in terms of offered featureset. I.e. I recall gaim 1.x being replaced with gaim 2.0 one day without requiring any particular update. This is good for enthusiasts who always want the cutting edge, bad for end-users who only want change at certain times they could expect (and for documenters doing screenshots).

On the other hand, with Ubuntu you are stuck with old versions of applications until you upgrade the whole system. For application software that is unlikely to break other things, I wish it was possible to upgrade to a new major version without upgrading everything else at once. It shouldn't be pushed as an automatic or opt-out update though, only manual or opt-in.

Re:Great work!

[Blakey Rat]

What was interesting was the "better than ever tablet support".

With all due respect, it could hardly be worse.

I'm guessing that what that really means is that they've progressed beyond "what's a tablet?" to "ok, we think we know what a tablet is... we added a tablet-looking icon!"

Sadly, I think Linux-in-general is about 5 years behind both Windows and OS X for tablet support. The really sad part of that? Apple doesn't even *make* a tablet. (Although, to be fair, they have a lot of users on Wacom drawing tablets, and that code I'm sure has come in handy for the iPhone. But still.)

Re:Great work!

[diegocg]

-Fedora is 'too' comfortable with cutting edge changes,

That's why I'm switching from Ubuntu to Fedora - I want cutting edge stuff, but not unstable enought to scare me and break all my stuff. Many fedora package maintainers are red hat programmers who are also important kernel/libc/gcc/gnome/pulseaudio/x.org hackers, they drop cutting edge stuff but it's their stuff and they fix it quickly. Ubuntu packagers however are usually just packagers. Often, Fedora maintainers test features in the distro _before_ they are merged in upstream. For example, this Fedora version includes many nice KVM improvements, the utrace kernel patches needed for Systemtap userspace probing which are not upstream, the out-of-the-tree nouveau driver enabled by default... It's certainly more unstable than Ubuntu, but it's also more interesting for my taste. Also, using fedora I help to test and stabilize features that will go later into other distros.

Re:Great work!

[tolan-b]

Well quite a lot of stuff is available in the backports repository.

Re:Great work!

[TorKlingberg]

Well quite a lot of stuff is available in the backports repository.

How much tricks does that require? Will it break stuff when finally upgrading to a new version of Ubuntu?

Re:Great work!

[Enry]

Not much in the way of tricks (a few extra repository lines). Debian backports (and I'm sure Ubuntu backports as well) are versioned such that when you upgrade to a new Debian release, the backport is replaced with the correct version.

Re:Great work!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks. I was wondering where the anteater came from.

Re:Great work!

[brejc8]

I spent 2 years installing apt on fedora machines, and about 3 or 4 years ago I stopped, because yum is now just as good as apt. It has the same features, is just as easy and the performance difference is, to me, not visible.

Re:Great work!

[RAMMS EIN]

``Again, for RHEL, what's the alternative? The whole point of RHEL is to provide long-term stable releases''

And there you have it. It's about stability. If I write software, or a configuration file, or anything else that interfaces with YourSoftware version X, and it works today, I think it is completely reasonable to expect it to also work tomorrow. If you make a new release of YourSoftware tomorrow that doesn't work with my code anymore, it's not YourSoftware version X anymore. It's a different version.

I don't want my distro to be pushing new versions on me that break compatibility.

If you want to introduce new versions, that's fine. In fact, I'm all for it. Just don't replace my working software with the new software that may or may not preserve compatibility. If it doesn't preserve compatibility, I want to have to explicitly upgrade to it. Put it in the next version of the distro. Or put it in a new package which can be installed alongside the old package. But don't put it in the current version of the distro, in the same package, because then you'll have multiple incompatible versions of the same distro with the same version number.

Re:Great work!

[Anonymous Coward]

If the user perceives this as a problem with the distribution then it is a problem with the distribution. Until developers understand this, they will fail to attract new users.

Re:Great work!

[Anonymous Coward]

But Redhat still can't beat dpkg (and apt-get or aptitude). IMHO, popularity of Debian based distros, especially Ubuntu, is significantly based on Debian's solid, robust and reliable package manager.

If Redhat makes Yum as reliable and solid, it will help them a lot.

In fact, I don't think any package manager yet compares to dpkg and apt-get and aptitude in terms of user friendliness, robustness, features and reliability.

Re:Great work!

[turbidostato]

"Well, what alternative do you suggest for introducing desired new features into older kernel versions?"

An easy one: Do Not Do It. Fedora is flagged and commited to be a "cutting edge" distribution. This is quite a good thing for both some enthusiasts and professionals that want/need to know where Red Hat is aiming to in the not-so-distant future. Well, Mr. Fedora: commit to it.

Again, for RHEL, what's the alternative? The whole point of RHEL is to provide long-term stable "releases"

Do it damn stable then. No, changing APIs and behaviour is not "damn stable"; it break things.

"but customers also want support for newer hardware."

Then do your damn homework by means of proper QA or by means of a helluva expenditure in support (instead of one or two stable versions, like 4 and 5 do support half a dozen and publish new versions faster). But, please, oh please, don't break what is already working. That's exactly why I moved from RH to Debian (that and the fact they seem to want making themselves more palatable to newby/unkowledgeable admins than to veterans that know their trade).

Re:Great work!

[turbidostato]

"Debian backports (and I'm sure Ubuntu backports as well) are versioned such that when you upgrade to a new Debian release, the backport is replaced with the correct version."

Yes, but the upgrade path is in no way as tested as the "proper" "from last Stable release". And that's if it has been tested at least even once, which I wouldn't confy too much on.

Re:Great work!

[RiotingPacifist]

-Out-of-the-box media/driver experience: Fedora goes purist and the out-of-the-box experience suffers for it with lack of popular codecs and optimal drivers for nVidia cards. Ubuntu caters to the user experience and takes care of this out of the box. You have to add RPM fusion repositories to make Fedora cope with this, which isn't insurmountable, but isn't out of the box.

Installing microsoft fonts was a real PITA, there might be an easier way to do it but in fedora11 i needed to do it urgently and ended up having to compile, that's not acceptable!

Ubuntu *usually* doesn't jump the gun (GRUB 2 is an example of going before the upstream declares 'ready' though).

what about kde4 and pulseaudio? ubutnu is just as bad it just includes stuff as soon as upstream release it though.

Re:Great work!

[mejogid]

I've switched from Fedora to Ubuntu recently just because of various small things that add up. Synaptic has a much nicer feel to it than package-kit for me at this point, and PPAs are a brilliant system for keeping apps up to date over a single release cycle or testing out new applications - I'd love to see a Fedora equivalent if there is one. I also find following developer releases more pleasant with Ubuntu, having used Karmic a couple of months before release.

Fedora does somehow give me a nicer feeling than Ubuntu, perhaps since Core 3 was my first full time Linux distro, so I'd welcome any arguments to get me to switch back! I do appreciate the tech orientated development and user communities, and its out of the box experience is far more professional than many other distros in most areas.

Re:Great work!

[AdamWill]

Kernels in Fedora and RHEL *are* parallel installable and always have been. Installing a new kernel does not remove the old one, and they're both available for selection from the bootloader.

Re:Great work!

[RiotingPacifist]

I wish it was possible to upgrade to a new major version without upgrading everything else at once. It shouldn't be pushed as an automatic or opt-out update though, only manual or opt-in.

apt-pinning, include a later repo and pin any app you want to upgrade to the new repo, some distros (i.e debian) even support thise, but it **should** work on any that use sane version numbering (i.e you do not release a new version of a package and call it the same as the last).

I mean the sane choice is to use backports to get newer software (or back ports and pinning, if you don't want everything up to date), but to answere exactly what you asked for i would have to say apt-pinning.

Re:Great work!

[AdamWill]

That depends on whether you're taking a long view or a short view, and whether your goal is in fact simply to 'attract new users' no matter what the cost. For Fedora, it isn't.

Re:Great work!

[AdamWill]

there's cutting edge, and then there's cutting edge. the original example scenario was 'backporting features from 2.6.32 to 2.6.31'. so you would advise we somehow shipped fedora 12 with a kernel version - 2.6.32 - which barely even existed at the final version freeze date?

Re:Great work!

[RiotingPacifist]

I use fedora 11 and i still think yum sucks, while i wouldn't complain about dependency hell, I have been unable to update due to packages not being available yet (i never had this problem on ubuntu or debian), but hey those problems get resolved soon enough, my main beef is speed, yum is sloooow (compared to apt), while it does have some nice features presto/etc i find the speed still leaves me yearning for apt!

Re:Great work!

[AdamWill]

Installing microsoft fonts was a real PITA, there might be an easier way to do it but in fedora11 i needed to do it urgently and ended up having to compile, that's not acceptable!

Duh...huh? Compile *what*? You can't 'compile' the Microsoft core fonts, they're only available as a bundle of TTF files. Which you could 'install' by just sticking them in ~/.fonts .

Re:Great work!

[RiotingPacifist]

maybe you should tell people about it, I had to go through this, call me stupid but if i cant run yum install micorosft-fonts (or something similar, maybe microsoft-fonts-installer so it's clear redhat are not hosting the fonts), then something is very wrong. It may be as easy as you claim, but if your method isn't in the first page of google results then it doesn't count for jack.

on ubuntu it's
sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
or more likely it comes when your run sudo apt-get install *buntu-restricted-extras

but stick your head in the sand, that's how fedora is going to get market share

Re:Great work!

[zdzichu]

Being cutting edge is what I like in Fedora. As for some kernel backports -- among them are btrfs backports. Those are changes which weren't even written when .31 was released. But those changes and fixes are quite important and I'm happy that Josef merged them in .31 shipped by Fedora.

Re:Great work!

[LordLimecat]

Wouldnt fedora be precisely the WRONG distro to use as a server on a network, given that it is a bleeding edge distro?

Re:Great work!

[techno-vampire]

This wasn't bad in and of itself, but they jumped before nVidia supported it, and my X was hosed.

Are you still using nVidia's .run file and re-installing it after every kernel update, and if so, why? Add the RPMfusion repo and get both kmod-nvidia-whatever and akmod, plus the kernel-headers and Bob's your uncle. Just be sure to uninstall the binary blob before you reboot so that there's no conflict. Mostly, kmod's updated with the kernel, but if it isn't, akmod will rebuild it at boot and you'll never notice the difference.

Re:Great work!

[AdamWill]

Fedora is never going to have any market share, because we're not selling anything. There isn't a market. This isn't a glib point, it's an important one. No-one's playing for a share of a dumb customer base, here. That's not what Fedora is about.

Second Google result for 'fedora "microsoft fonts"': http://miltonpaiva.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/fedora-11-x64-%E2%80%93-microsoft-fonts/

Re:Great work!

[RiotingPacifist]

That is hardly "Which you could 'install' by just sticking them in ~/.fonts ." and while upon closer inspection it turns out i wasn't compiling running rpmbuild, i still think that is far more work than anybody should have to do to get a some essential fonts.

No-one's playing for a share of a dumb customer base, here.

Fair enough but us "dumb users" bring free testing, feedback, advertising, support to a distro and a small proportion of us are likely to turn into developers, so i think you'll find that ubuntu (and to a lesser extent debian) are looking to have us as users.

Re:Great work!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora has a long view? Does that include all the bugs that are marked "won't-fix" and ignored because a shiny new version is coming 'round the corner? The same darn bugs get filed version after version after version. How about rolling the bugs forward if they still exist in the newest version.

I grumble at Fedora for doing this, but it's becoming standard in all the "sucker-you-into-beta-testing" distros lately.

Re:Great work!

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Rather than take the Ubuntu approach of popping up a "Do you want to download these non-OSS drivers button" which handles it almost perfectly in every instance

Except when your distribution is hosted anywhere in the western world. Fedora is based and distributed from the US and a "do you want to infringe on the copyrights and patents of another company" button won't cut it.

Rich.

Re:Great work!

[tjwhaynes]

That is hardly "Which you could 'install' by just sticking them in ~/.fonts ." and while upon closer inspection it turns out i wasn't compiling running rpmbuild, i still think that is far more work than anybody should have to do to get a some essential fonts.

No - what was pointed to you was a way you could get all the Microsoft Core Web fonts installed under the control of the package management system. That is one way.

If you happened to have all the MS fonts on a USB key, you could have just plugged it into your Linux box and copied it into your ~/.fonts directory. This too would have worked for your user, but would not have allowed another user on the same machine to use the same fonts.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Re:Great work!

[Korin43]

Last time I checked, Ubuntu is all about the PPAs now. The backports aren't very interesting. Notice that the list is very short, and the only interesting backport I saw in my quick scan was Amarok. I didn't see Pidgin, Banshee, Filezilla, OpenOffice or Netbeans (all of which are out of date in Jaunty's stable repos).

I used Jaunty as the example because Karmic hasn't really had time to get behind.

Re:Great work!

[Eil]

Fedora is based and distributed from the US and a "do you want to infringe on the copyrights and patents of another company" button won't cut it.

Uh, it's not illegal in any country for a distribution to prompt the user to download and install a package. It's only illegal for them to distribute it themselves. (Hence, the button.)

Re:Great work!

[icebike]

Clearly you don't understand how that button works or why its there.

It is there so Ubuntu does not have to bundle drivers that are not OSS.

It causes these drivers to be downloaded directly from the FREE website of the driver manufacturers, be it AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, or whatever.

No copyrights or patents violated.

Canonical IS based in the western world last time i checked.

Re:Great work!

[Richard W.M. Jones]

You may wish to read about contributory infringement.

Rich.

Re:Great work!

[Richard W.M. Jones]

I don't want my distro to be pushing new versions on me that break compatibility.

It sounds like you do want RHEL, because that's the whole point. Red Hat engineers backport the fixes and features and they retain ABI compatibility.

Rich.

Re:Great work!

[AdamWill]

that's what differentiates a useful user base from a dumb customer base, which is exactly the distinction I was trying to draw.

the page I linked is an alternative method which turns the fonts into a package and installs it system wide. It's somewhat more elegant. But creating a ~/.fonts folder and throwing TTF files at it certainly works, too. You pick your poison.

Re:Great work!

[AdamWill]

"How about rolling the bugs forward if they still exist in the newest version."

That's exactly what happens, if they are known to exist in the newest version. When a release is going EOL a warning is added to the bug that it will be closed in a month if we don't get information that it's still valid with a supported release. If no-one confirms the bug is still valid in the new release, how are we to know? The Bugzappers team is a dozen or so volunteers, not dozens of paid full-time staff; we can hardly go through several hundred bugs manually trying to reproduce each one to determine what to do with it. And a lot of them are hardware or configuration specific and there's not enough information in the bug report to reliably reproduce them in any case.

When bugs are eventually closed, the closure message specifically states that they can be re-opened if they are found to affect a currently-supported release.

Re:Great work!

[AdamWill]

Oh, yes? Are you a lawyer? Have you heard of the doctrine of contributory copyright infringement? Fedora's legal team has, which is why they're decidedly dicey about that sort of thing. That said, there are several proprietary drivers which are perfectly legally redistributable - NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom's own driver, for instance. Fedora does not distribute or implement a button for these not because it would be legally problematic but because it would be at odds with the Fedora project's philosophy and goals, as I mentioned in an earlier comment.

Re:Great work!

[Professional Slacker]

No you still don't get it. Please tell us how you can infringe on this:

"2.1.2 Linux/FreeBSD/OpenSolaris Exception. Notwithstanding the foregoing terms of Section 2.1.1, SOFTWARE designed exclusively for use on the Linux or FreeBSD operating systems, or other operating systems derived from the source code to these operating systems, may be copied and redistributed, provided that the binary files thereof are not modified in any way (except for unzipping of compressed files)."[1]

That is the license in question. There is no infringement, they are acting with in the license. There is a reason that the drivers are broken in to binary blobs with a stable abi, the the open source shim the connects that stable abi to the current kernel api.

[1]: http://www.nvidia.com/object/nv_swlicense.html

Re:Great work!

[Assembler]

Does the shim actually get around the requirements of the GPLv2? To my knowledge that hasn't been officially determined.

Re:Great work!

[smoker2]

Fuck off. The western world does not consist of the USA. Europe doesn't have software patents. And Fedora is supposed to be a bleeding edge distro, not one with 3 years of support - how many times does this have to be repeated ?

Re:Great work!

[smoker2]

Dumb users are dumb users. Why don't you stick to a "dumb users" distro and leave the bleeding edge to those who can handle it ? Maybe we don't feel the need to copy MS files into our clean distro. As for debian, they don't want you either. They don't even want debian users involved ...

Re:Great work!

[icebike]

>The western world does not consist of the USA.

Ubuntu is based in europe. Europe is considered part of the western world.

Europe has software patents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent#Europe

So.... wrong on all counts.

Re:Great work!

[Professional Slacker]

Kinda. The shim itself, which references the kernel headers and is definitely a derivative work, is released under the gpl. The blob, who knows what's in the by it's nature, but my understanding is that it exposes functions that represent hardware capabilities, and little if anything to do with what the OS does with those functions. It's the same set of functions that's exposed by the driver to windows, so hardly OS specific. I'm not sure about the legal status of the combined blob shim, but from a practical stand point it only interacts with kernel functions that aren't exposed as GPL_ONLY. Which is why the binary driver doesn't support KMS, because all the KMS functions are exposed as GPL_ONLY.

Hopefully Nouveau will have working 3d soon, as it's gpl throughout, and already has KMS working.

Re:Great work!

[zerocool^]

My major complaint du jour (as a sysadmin working with over 1300 RHEL systems) is that Fedora (and thus future RHELs) haven't moved to grub2 and GPT yet.

This isn't a major problem with Fedora, but the scuttlebutt is that RHEL6 is going to be based on Fedora 12; and we're going to be using RHEL6.x for probably 5 years into the future.

Without moving to GPT, we won't be able to boot off of logical (or physical) disks that are greater than 2TiB. This is a limitation of using an MBR. For the home user, this most likely isn't going to be a problem for a while - even the 2TB disks that are out there are smaller than 2 TiB, so they're fine for MBR's. But, for enterprise solutions, if you put 6 or 8 500GB disks in a rackmount and raid5 them, or 1TB disks and raid10 them, you're going to need a separate logical disk that you can install the MBR to.

There are a couple of work arounds - rumor has it that the Perc6e command line configuration utility can manually specify the logical disk size and truncate at (2TiB - 1k), but I've never gotten it to work. You can hex edit the MBR and chop it off at the 32 bit limit. Or, you can hack anaconda to support grub2, since it already uses parted (i think), but that's a bit of a kludge. Or, you can stick the MBR and /boot/ on a USB key, but that's kludgey too.

Other distros use GPT at this point, and supposedly it's completely backwards compatible. Windows 2008 can do it. But, last I checked (and I've been looking into this a lot lately), Fedora 12's repo still lists grub2 as ***this is experimental don't use unless you're a sadist*** etc.

~X

Re:Great work!

[turbidostato]

"so you would advise we somehow shipped fedora 12 with a kernel version - 2.6.32 - which barely even existed at the final version freeze date?"

It's always the same with technology: it's a moving target. There always will be the tomorrow's silver bullet. There will always be a newer faster processor, a newer better mobile, a newer better... just round the corner. If only we wait few weeks, if only we stretch our goals a bit... I am not saying ship Fedora with 2.6.32 if it's not ready, I say ship it with 2.6.31. You will have 2.6.32 on next Fedora release and you can bet that by that day there will be a new kernel version just a few days ahead then too.

Re:Great work!

[Junta]

First off, a disclaimer, as far as Fedora is concerned, they might as well keep doing what they are doing, or else there wouldn't me much difference between them and Ubuntu, as they have very similar release schedules and such. If someone feels like you, they have Fedora, if they feel like me, Ubuntu. Satisfying both of us with the same project would not be feasible. I simply want to be clear on what each distro does differently so that people are educated. Too often I see people play nice and be unwilling to call out the downsides of distro choices, making selecting one a more daunting task. Fedora's choices, in my opinion, cater to a certain class of enthusiasts but precludes suitability for 'everyone'.

That said, I would suggest discipline in development and forgoing features completely. I see backporting obvious bugfixes, but not features. In this case, if a feature will be in 2.6.32, either go with 2.6.31 and ignore it, or wait for 2.6.32 (i.e. the memory page dedupe feature). Backporting features and creating a relative frankenstein that is '2.6.31' in name only doesn't make sense to me. They already show they'd be willing to go to a new kernel post-release, so its not like they are even saying they have to wait 6 months. This isn't so terrible in Fedora, as the releases are at least in the near future and not a huge chasm to bridge. For RHEL, the monster they have created being called '2.6.18' holds no meaning. They've backported enough to not look like 2.6.18 did much, and yet there is so much not backported so it's not like any recent kernel either. It's an amalgamation of features/function changes that I don't like seeing in an enterprise 'service pack' series, exacerbated by that particular mix being validated only in RHEL and not the larger community.

You mention drivers, but new driver modules (frequently provided for by the hardware vendor) is a tad different from backporting major features (i.e. I think the choice of KVM in RHEL 5.4 would have been better served by waiting for RHEL6, advancing the schedule if they feel it is important enough). LSI probably already provided a driver developed against 2.6.18 and RHEL can fold that in, but don't fold in a major SCSI subsystem change while you are at it just because you think it safe. If I download a third party driver for a NIC that RHEL doesn't support, I don't want that compile to be impossible by going from RHEL5.2 to RHEL5.3, which often occurs.

Re:Great work!

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

The problem I have with Fedora is the F@#$@ release cycle. I want something that's both relatively up-to-date, but also doesn't release a new version every six months to do that. Of course, it doesn't help that every fedora installation I've ever had has gone belly up due to package management issues within a year...

I have been thinking of getting a tablet pc for convenience in bed

I am not gonna touch that.

Re:Great work!

[Junta]

Holy cow, they absolutely do not.

I understand kernel module 'ABI', the only attempts to make that promise have failed miserably. 'API' (I know that kernel devs *hate* that term to describe compiling against their headers, but practically speaking...) in the '2.6.18' kernel isn't even stable.

Also, many of the features in the kernel are not safe. I have seen RHEL5.1 servers start getting system errors by going to RHEL5.2, requiring workarounds in their platform because of a change in how they managed certain things having certain edge scenarios that are made worse. Not saying it's an insurmountable problem, but not the sort of thing I want to see in a production update from 5.1 to 5.2.

In userspace, I can't recall a glibc binary incompatible change in 5.x, admittedly, but I also don't think they go crazy with the glibc features so much (however, they did jump firefox versions in a manner that broke some firefox extensions that would work in 5.1 when they jumped in 5.2, a desktop 'friendly' change, but again, a change made because they can't stand to be 'stale', even though a whole lot of 'enterprise' is entirely about 'stale' for the sake of stability and low risk of breakage with third-party software/solutions.

Re:Great work!

[Junta]

Alternatively, I would respect Fedora still if they used 2.6.31 now, and updated Fedora 12 to 2.6.32 when it released without waiting for Fedora 13. I still wouldn't use it, but I would respect them more for properly serving the needs of the enthusiast in a healthier manner.

Re:Great work!

[Junta]

Hard to meet both requirements at work without requiring a lot of effort on your part.

If you don't mind the changes coming closer to upstream release regardless of the next 'major' release, Fedora may be best for you, but be prepared for them to make choices you don't seek out.

If you only want an app to update when you choose, and no other time, go with Ubuntu. If you have exceptions, be preparred to manage them on a case-by-case basis (I have some PPAs added to mine for projects I have enthusiast type interest in, for example). This necessitates more work, but it's the price to be paid if you care about 'key' applications and fear the rest of the system changing.

Re:Great work!

[Junta]

Nowadays, I don't use Fedora or nVidia, so I'm good now. ATI packaging of drivers is more distro friendly (I don't *have* to wait for a third-party repo to package it for me, though that isn't Fedora's problem to fix).

I'm aware of rpm fusion, I even mentioned it by name. I don't think it's a very user-friendly approach though, but the goal is to 'bully' the proprietary vendors to do it the better way, and I can see that as an important goal, just not one I want to deal with the hassle to achieve.

Re:Great work!

[Junta]

That's fine to an extent, but I would find it more 'honest' to ship explicitly with a 2.6.32rc rather than saying 'oh we are using 2.6.31 (except where it isn't really)' if they simply couldn't stand to wait for the RC featureset to make it to release. I recognize Fedora is a bleeding edge distro, I just want to raise wareness, and making it more plain that you are 'shipping' pre-'release' upstream software shouldn't deter your target audience and wouldn't suggest a misleading state of 'mature' upstream usage.

Re:Great work!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck man, use a proper SAN and those problems go away. Assign a 25GB or so LUN for boot & OS volume group, and a separate one for your app.

Re:Great work!

[Anonymous Coward]

then you are not using the right software....

I was using a tablet in opensuse back in 2005. I had pressure sensitivity in gimp and inkscape and they worked really well. the windows wacom drivers made me want to stab something

probably because opensuse is the only distro that gives a damn about tablets. Now if only Ubuntu and Fedora could actually make wacom control applets...

Re:Great work!

[WuphonsReach]

Eh, that really only limits the disk that holds the /boot partition. (Our preferred setup is RAID1 for the boot disk, then RAID-10 or RAID-6 for the rest of the disks. So unless 15k RPM disks get over 2TB by 2012, it won't be that big of an issue.)

But yes, I would hope that RHEL 6 tackles that issue.

And if you have 1300 servers... it's past time to SAN. Take the disks out of the servers and switch to blades. (SAN is a lot harder sell for small businesses with less then 20 servers.)

Re:Great work!

[JohnBailey]

Wouldnt fedora be precisely the WRONG distro to use as a server on a network, given that it is a bleeding edge distro?

Well spotted. Nobody in their right mind is going to use a bleeding edge distro for this. There are exceptions though.. I think Nasa and a few others do use it, but they have the in house expertise to backport and maintain anything they like, which is not the norm by any stretch. I even saw the Fedora logo on the desktop of a movie CGI company in a video clip recently though, so YMMV.

Re:Great work!

[bill_mcgonigle]

Wouldnt fedora be precisely the WRONG distro to use as a server on a network, given that it is a bleeding edge distro?

Your question is impossible to answer without requirements. Do you need the features that just came out and want them packaged more than you want to avoid yearly OS updates? If so, Fedora is natural. If not, not so much.

Re:Great work!

[AdamWill]

it's a fairly fine distinction at that point. frankly, what _any_ distro ships for a kernel (except, perhaps, Slackware) bears rather small resemblance to the upstream kernel tarball with the same version number (don't believe me, grab any Ubuntu, SUSE or Mandriva kernel and count the patches). Given that, it's not something I lie awake at nights worrying about. I tend to care more about whether it works.

Re:Great work!

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't a glib point, it's an important one.

For a second, I thought the discussion was related to the Gnome libraries...

I gotta get out a bit more often :(

Re:Great work!

[amorsen]

This would be wrong Denmark. You may also have heard of the Pirate Bay trials in Sweden and Netherlands...

Official Fedora pages never even mention how to find other repositories, but I can certainly recommend rpmfusion.

Re:Great work!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, yes? Are you a lawyer? Have you heard of the doctrine of contributory copyright infringement?

Oh for fuck's sake. Don't pretend to know about stuff you obviously don't understand. There are *no* copyright issues involved. The media codecs are subject to possible *patent* claims and the css library to *DMCA violation* claims. They are all free and clear to distribute from the copyright point of view.

Re:Great work!

[antime]

Thumbs up to this. I wish the whole distro release system would go away. Unless there is a major change coming that will break everything (libc5 -> glibc6-type changes) I should not have to reinstall my system just because I want a new version of some application.

Re:Great work!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Rather than take the Ubuntu approach of popping up a "Do you want to download these non-OSS
> drivers button" which handles it almost perfectly in every instance and frees the Distro of legal risk,

Excuse me but are you a lawyer? How can you say that it frees the Distro of legal risks? What is the basis for that?

Re:Great work!

[Anonymous Coward]

Europe has software patents.

Which are currently regarded as legally unenforceable and thus are ignored.

Re:Great work!

[internet-redstar]

You have put it very correctly.

We use Fedora, RHEL, Ubuntu and OpenSuSE all the time for our Linux courses to IT Experts.
The new users only like Ubuntu and RHEL 'stability' doesn't match with their stupid backporting because they just like a lower version number. In the end it's very arrogant of Red Hat to pretend to know better than the LKML and they produce a less stable and less tested end result.

Let's hope Ubuntu will keep up their good work!
Jasper.

Re:Great work!

[talkingtent]

Slackware user here for years and years, then switched to Fedora Core 1. Got tired of yum and went back to Slackware. Looks like maybe I should try it out again. At least it's not Debian (sorry Debian fanboys)

Re:Great work!

[zerocool^]

I agree with you. We've done well keeping costs down with commodity hardware - if you put 6 big drives in a rackmount, it gives you a lot of space and IO, and that's done us just fine for a long time. But, when we move to bigger drives (750GB x6 + raid10) we hit that 2TB limit. Doing 2 small drives in raid1 for the OS and 4 drives in raid10 for the data really limits our space. And keep in mind, that's 1300 servers total; of which probably only 400 are for storage.

We've been testing SAN / DAS for a long time, we use it for many things already and it's where we're moving for our general cloudy storage anyway. Since all of our storage servers have a hot standby, it's a hard sell to jump into DAS / SAN when you can buy two cheap boxes that have equal total space for less than the cost of 1 box + SAN + all the associated stuff - especially when cheap is "good enough" when you have a hot spare box ready to take over in the event of failure. You can spend and spend in pursuit of better hardware that can attain more "9's" of uptime.

But the point being, we've got somewhat of a unique situation where we are always squeezing the limits out of cheaper commodity hardware and have done fine. However, the small business is going to be hit by this. RHEL6 is going to be the defacto base version from 2010 (?) 'till probably 2014, and by then, 2TiB will seem commonplace. You'll be able to buy a 4TB disk from newegg for $199, but won't be able to boot RHEL from it. That's annoying.

It seems very ... lazy? head in the sand? of RHEL to not address this issue.

Blah blah legal disclaimers about forward looking statements, nothing is in stone, all this is speculative, etc.

Re:Great work!

[AdamWill]

All true, but that's not what Paul was initially talking about; he was talking about things like copyrighted driver firmware, which some people want Fedora to distribute. I already mentioned in another reply that there's _different_ reasons why we don't distribute various different components.

Re:Great work!

[AdamWill]

It's a fairly large jump from 'grub2 isn't in Fedora 12' to 'Red Hat doesn't care about booting from 4TiB disks in the year 2014', isn't it? You might want to wait a bit and see what happens before you leap too many tall buildings in search of your conclusion. :)

Re:Great work!

[icebike]

See anyone suing Canonical ?

No I thought not.

Read the whole thread before rushing to post.
Canonical is complying with the patent holders requirements with this method. The button downloads the software directly from the patent holders site, which even you should be able to see requires the consent and approval of the provider.

Re:Great work!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree with the being 'too' comfortable with cutting edge changes comment. Fedora has always been my favorite linux distribution, but unfortunately I have now had to jump ship. Fedora 11 would not even install when I tried installing from the DVD, I always had to install via HTTP. Now with Fedora 12, it will install on my system, but after rebooting Fedora 12 freezes while starting services. Most of the time right after starting udev, but sometimes it will go as far as hal if I press Ctl+Alt+Backspace to get rid of plymouth. Ubuntu and Windows install without a hitch.

Re:Great work!

[Risen888]

I have been thinking of getting a tablet pc for convenience in bed

Eeeew.

Re:Great work!

[zerocool^]

Maybe.

But, my experience with RHEL has been that a Major Number release won't honestly change that much from point release to point release; moving to grub2/parted/GPT seems to be a drastic, disruptive change, compared to many of the point-release changes in 4.x and 5.x (moving from 2.6.24-128.123456 to 2.6.24-128.123456-1 seems to be the M.O.).

My concern is that if it doesn't make it into 6.0, it won't make it into 6.* - If we were saying "Oh, fedora 12 is going to be the base for RHEL5.5", then I wouldn't be worried, I would say there's plenty of time to vet the hardware and roll it into some future 6.0 release. But the fact that 6.0 is ComingSoon(tm) and potentially based on this Fedora release makes me a bit nervous about the likelihood that it'll be in any 6.x release.

Re:Great work!

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Debian developer, I disagree.

Re:Fedora?

[ccandreva]

Yes.

Re:Fedora?

[AdamWill]

Yes. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics - we have seen over 2.4 million installations of Fedora 11 so far, a 20% increase on Fedora 10. Methodology is extensively discussed on the linked page.

Re:it didn't detect my usb mouse so i can't instal

[armanox]

1 - Did you enable Legacy Device Support in your BIOS?
2 - Did you try the text install option?

Re:Fedora?

[armanox]

Why wouldn't people still use Fedora?

SystemTap

[krelian]

Also available in this release are SystemTap 1.0 for improved instrumenting and debugging of binaries, complete with Eclipse integration

I've tried SystemTap and it looks really really cool . I understand that this project is "dtrace for linux". Can someone with experience with both tools give a rundown on how SystemTap 1.0 currently compares with dtrace?

Re:SystemTap

[diegocg]

I don't know how it compares to dtrace (in this wiki it appears that they have feature parity for all the important stuff), but I can tell you that it works quite well and it's very complete and it's well documented. It really deserves the 1.0 version tag.

But in the kernel world very few people seems to use it, it seems that perf + static tracepoints have become the preferred tool for performance diagnostics.

Meh. I'll wait for Fedora 13

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll work the bugs out of Fedora 12 just in time for Fedora 13 to come out. Plus Fedora 13 will be better. // also holding out for 2160p Hi-Def 3-D Smell-A-Vision

Userbase

[Anonymous Coward]

It is nice always to hear about Fedora. It is a distribution what really deserves bigger userbase than what Ubuntu has. Hopefully Fedora does not loose the place for Ubuntu on amount of users. Nice cutting edge packages (stable!), VERY nice community (much better than what Ubuntu has) and very nice graphics by great artists.

The Fedora is someway very classic feeling distribution what does not try to pretend anything else what it is, like what Ubuntu does. And fedora users are kind and helpfull more than Ubuntu users.

If one distribution we should choose to be our flagship, there are three options, Fedora, openSUSE or Mandriva.

It is just sad that Ubuntu gets all the hype and media, even it is not so nice as Fedora+RedHat combination (compared to Ubuntus 6 months release + LTS).

Re:it didn't detect my usb mouse so i can't instal

[Anonymous Coward]

i mucked with all bios options conceivable.

i'm up on Windows all all 3 mice (2 usb and a ps2).

I'll take a picture and post it.

I'll leave all 3 mice in, much with BIOS some more and boot the install boot.iso again

they took away text install. the vga or lowres whatever is as good as the first gui install option

Re:it didn't detect my usb mouse so i can't instal

[CannonballHead]

Doesn't always work. I've had this issue with RedHat Linux as well. Sometimes USB just doesn't work very well (RH4/RH5). Haven't run into any version of SuSE/SLES that has the problem, so it's not always the BIOS.

Admittedly, though, I haven't had it with recent versions, only older versions (e.g., RH 4.6 or something).

Re:Fedora?

[EkriirkE]

Yes.

2012 = year of linux on the desktop

[Hognoxious]

OMG it's going to hit us!!!!

Oh, sorry. Wrong story.

Re:2012 = year of linux on the desktop

[boudie2]

Nice to see someone else who's spending too much time on /.
Made me laugh! Almost as much as which is better,
Fedora or Ubuntu.

Still no IA64 support...

[the linux geek]

At least Fedora hasn't suddenly dropped PowerPC with no announcement like OpenSUSE did, but sadly, there's still no new builds of the SPARC and Itanium versions of Fedora. I wonder if they're intentionally trying to drive people to RHEL on these platforms.

Re:Still no IA64 support...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, PPC has been dropped as a primary architecture for F13. You can always get it (as well as IA64) from the development branch if they don't make an actual release for it. (Se http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/development/ )

Re:Still no IA64 support...

[diegocg]

Maybe nobody cares about Itanium and Sparc (well, some people cares about sparc, but they probably use opensolaris) and there are not enought volunteers to handle those arches with the same priority x86 has?

Re:Still no IA64 support...

[the linux geek]

Red Hat evidently cares enough about Itanium to continue developing RHEL for it.

Re:Still no IA64 support...

[Anonymous Coward]

Itanium is a small market, but the dollar figures are quite large.

However the GP's point might be that nobody is going to volunteer to maintain IA64 support. It's paid for by Intel/HP and their customers.

Re:Still no IA64 support...

[Anonymous Coward]

PPC is deader than disco

Re:Still no IA64 support...

[LordLimecat]

As parent pointed out, you dont run itaniums on a workstation, and you dont run fedora on servers. If you do, youre asking for trouble-- it is NOT a server OS.

Re:Still no IA64 support...

[bill_mcgonigle]

I wonder if they're intentionally trying to drive people to RHEL on these platforms.

Fedora offers infrastructure to those willing to put the work into secondary architectures. Where architectures fall off, there is simply a lack of manpower.

Re:Linux sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi there, you must be from Digg. How are things going at the other news aggregate? Still rick rolling each other?

Fedora Server Hammered (of course)

[gyrogeerloose]

I just tried to download the Live CD--according to my browser's download manager, it was going to take16 hours! No better luck with FTP from the command line either. You may want to wait until tomorrow.

Re:Fedora Server Hammered (of course)

[Anonymous Coward]

mirrors much?

Re:Fedora Server Hammered (of course)

[SUB7IME]

Or grab a torrent! http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/

Re:Fedora Server Hammered (of course)

[gyrogeerloose]

Yeah, tried several--same problem. Finally found one that worked via FTP.

Re:Fedora Server Hammered (of course)

[und0]

You can try to join the BitTorrent swarm...

Re:Fedora Server Hammered (of course)

[reub2000]

Use bittorrent for anything that everyone else and their grandmother is currently downloading.

Re:Fedora?

[SnarfQuest]

Because it fails to install on most generic boxes, in my experiences with it. I usually use Debian because it just works.

Re:Fedora?

[alukin]

That's because of "great" F9 release with too many "innovations" like KDE 4.0... But they now recovering from that disease and trying to focus more on regular users and quality. At least F11 was impressive and I hope F12 is. Hell, Ubuntu 9.10 is near F9 by quality. They managed to break intel graphics support right after release! That's terrible.

I honestly hope that guys involved in distro development will not race for "features", they will race on quality instead.

Re:it didn't detect my usb mouse so i can't instal

[Simmeh]

This happened to a friend of mine with Ubuntu. Was a pain. I made sure it didn't put him off linux though.

Re:Fedora?

[whitedsepdivine]

No.

heres hoping

[nimbius]

theyve fixed some pulseaudio bugs while they were at it.

Re:heres hoping

[CannonballHead]

theyve fixed pulseaudio while they were at it.

fixed that for you. :)

Re:heres hoping

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no bugs in pulseaudio, the only problem with pulseaudio is you don't love it enough. If everyone could just get to know pulseaudio, to see it for what it truly is rather than just what you read about it, then I think you will find that pulseaudio not only manages your sound, but saves the environment, fixes the economy, cures cancer, and creates world peace.

You would have to be insane not to use pulseaudio, however that requirement will not be a problem for me...

Re:heres hoping

[Anonymous Coward]

I left Fedora at F11 when they decided to make the media players only usable with pulseaudio. In the prior versions you could remove pulseaudio and just use ALSA but in F11 the volume control in the media players won't work without pulseaudio. Neither will the little volume control in the desktop panel.

The developers actually went out of their way to patch the media players to not work with anything but that evil, evil pulseaudio. Insane! I saw that a bug was filed but was marked 'won't fix' by the the developers. That's when I started experimenting with Ubuntu, Debian, and openSuse.

Re:heres hoping

[kramulous]

I was having a bitch of a time too. For weeks it didn't work. As a last straw I rebooted. Everything was fine :)

Re:heres hoping

[Anonymous Coward]

Pulseaudio doesn't do anal. Dealbreaker.

Re:it didn't detect my usb mouse so i can't instal

[alukin]

Don't even hope! Multi-touch is not supported by windows yet. But there is a chance all 3 mice will work in F12 :)

Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver...

[Saint Aardvark]

I notice in the release notes they're using the Nouveau driver for NVidia cards. I've been meaning to check the status of that driver for a while now -- but is this common in distros yet? (I'm a sysadmin mostly working on servers, so I'm a little out of touch. :-)

Re:Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver...

[Simian Man]

As far as I know, Fedora is the first distro to use it by default. I'm really impressed with the progress they've made. Plymouth is quick, pretty and flicker free. I'm also using Xfce's built in compositing and everything is snappy looking. 2D games and videos work great.

Re:Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver...

[brejc8]

It works, and it works amazingly well. I admin 50+ machines and I used to always install both the nvidia and ati closed drivers because users want compiz. A year ago ati cards started working out the box, now so does nvidia.

Re:Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver...

[diegocg]

According to the feature matrix, they are already done with 2D support, video playback, dual head, Xrand, KMS and suspend/resume for all the chips, which are the neccesary functions for a functional gnome/kde desktop (minus compiz), so it's not suprising that distros are starting to include it.

Re:Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver...

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife's Dell D820 laptop suspends and resume properly with the nouveau driver. It doesn't do 3D, but I don't use 3D apps very often. I'll install the Nvidia binaries when I have to.

Re:Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver...

[reub2000]

The livecd is the very first operating system to correctly configure my dual-head setup out of the box. Good work.

Re:Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver...

[Richard W.M. Jones]

To be honest, the experience of nouveau for me has been pretty horrible. I've found that it crashes once every 2 or 3 days. The old nv driver was slow, but at least it was stable.

Note that this could just be my particular hardware/software combo, and I do tend to run only the bleeding edge. (Fedora 12? Pah! I'm already on Rawhide!)

Rich.

Re:Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver...

[AdamWill]

Do you have a bug filed?

I use nouveau all day every day and never have had it crash on me (had a few other bugs in the past, which I filed and Ben resolved.) If this were happening to all nouveau users I'd expect to have got a few more reports of it by now (I triage the nouveau bugs myself), so I think it's specific to your hardware.

Re:Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver...

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Well ... no. Until yesterday I hadn't managed to get a good stack trace (because the machine is basically hung solid after any crash).

Re:Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver...

[koogydelbbog]

my X has stopped working since they started using nouveau. doesn't seem to understand my newish card (NVidia G130M) with an odd resolution (1366x768). i haven't debugged it much more than that, just switched back to using ubuntu on the other partition (which is missing ethernet and wireless support but at least i can see something)

(nouveau page says that NV50 is supported so i should be ok. will try again.)

Re:it didn't detect my usb mouse so i can't instal

[AdamWill]

when you say 'it', what do you mean exactly? did you get f12 final already and try it? if you were testing a pre-release, there was a known bug up till very late which caused USB not to work on some systems, this is fixed in the final release.

Re:Fedora?

[Yvan256]

0.5

Will this become RHEL/CentOS 6

[MaraDNS]

Does anyone have any information about whether this particular release will become RHEL 6? While I am happy with RHEL (CentOS, actually) 5, it doesn't work with my 2007-era laptop's hardware. The Wiki page claims it does, but the reference backing it up is a 2008 article speculating on RHEL's future.

Re:Will this become RHEL/CentOS 6

[phunster]

In short no. The RHEL 5 series (CENTOS too) is based on Fedora 6, so I doubt that Fedora 12 is the basis for the upcoming RHEL 6.

Re:Will this become RHEL/CentOS 6

[evol262]

Our RedHat account manager indicates that RHEL6 will probably be based off F11 with some parts (likely the KVM bits) of F12.

Re:Will this become RHEL/CentOS 6

[mowall]

Does anyone have any information about whether this particular release will become RHEL 6?

The last info I saw on it was from this article.

Re:Will this become RHEL/CentOS 6

[bill_mcgonigle]

Our RedHat account manager indicates that RHEL6 will probably be based off F11 with some parts (likely the KVM bits) of F12.

yeah, RHEL 6 activity started branching a few months back.

Re:Fedora?

[whitedsepdivine]

They only show the number of installs. I would like to see the number from upgrades, and new install. The better statistic is how long does the average user have it installed.

Re:Fedora?

[Itadakimasu]

Nes.

Fedora 12 is the most exciting release ever

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a massive erection and I'm only halfway down downloading it. Talk about blue balls!

Speed access to Fedora Torrents

[Anonymous Coward]

Help others get Fedora. Seed your torrent for at least a few days. It'll be about a week to a week and a half before demands slows down. If you're concerned about bandwidth use your bandwidth scheduler.

64 bit x86:

• Fedora 12 x86_64 Live KDE
• Fedora 12 x86_64 CDs
• Fedora 12 x86_64 Live
• Fedora 12 x86_64 DVD

Others:

• Fedora 12 i386 CDs
• Fedora 12 i386 DVD
• Fedora 12 i686 Live KDE
• Fedora 12 i686 Live
• Fedora 12 ppc CDs
• Fedora 12 ppc DVD

Sources: Fedora 12 source CDs
Fedora 12 source DVD

Re:Speed access to Fedora Torrents

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better, you can take the load off of Fedora's servers by downloading Ubuntu instead.

Re:Fedora?

[icebike]

Because it fails to install on most generic boxes,

That may be true for some values of "Generic", but this is less so than in the past.

Historically Fedora installs insecure, requiring that you run around closing ports and shutting down daemons that were set up by default.

Ubuntu and opensuse default to the opposite, which is all the home user really needs.

I can not say that 12 still carries on this absurd Red Hat tradition, because I have not yet given 12 a try.

Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[ewg]

You can really see the Ubuntu influence on the Fedora marketing materials: smiling faces, happy about "software that helps you work, play, organize, and socialize." Wait, did Fedora even have marketing materials before Ubuntu?

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[RAMMS EIN]

``Wait, did Fedora even have marketing materials before Ubuntu?''

They didn't need to, because they are the free version of Red Hat and Red Hat _was_ Linux in a lot of people's minds.

But when Ubuntu came around, it quickly got so popular that it scared the big distros into getting their act together. Ubuntu's killer combo was the combination of working package management with ease of use. Nowadays, that's sort of what people have come to expect from a Linux distro, but, before Ubuntu, that was far from given.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu seems to have lost its way. Every new release seems to introduce a lot of breakage, which in my opinion, outright destroys ease of use.

Maybe Fedora is the way to go, these days. They also compile their software with stack smashing protection, right? I think I'm going to give it a go.

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[jimicus]

``Wait, did Fedora even have marketing materials before Ubuntu?''

They didn't need to, because they are the free version of Red Hat and Red Hat _was_ Linux in a lot of people's minds.

But when Ubuntu came around, it quickly got so popular that it scared the big distros into getting their act together. Ubuntu's killer combo was the combination of working package management with ease of use.

The only amazing thing about that was it took RedHat so long to get their act together. rpm needed some way of searching package repositories for years. Mandrake had urpmi and Debian had apt-get years before RedHat had anything comparable.

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[RAMMS EIN]

``Mandrake had urpmi and Debian had apt-get years before RedHat had anything comparable.''

Yeah. And as a result of that, there are _still_ people who believe software installation on Linux is hard. That hasn't been true for over 10 years ... unless you choose to do it the hard way, or choose to run a distro that doesn't provide an easy way.

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[someSnarkyBastard]

Maybe Im just being a silly git here but I thought Fedora's main competencies were being on the bleeding-edge, security, and virtualization. In fact, the release notes include a blurb about lowering a lot of process and file permissions to lock things down tigher.

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[Culture20]

Unfortunately, Ubuntu seems to have lost its way. Every new release seems to introduce a lot of breakage, which in my opinion, outright destroys ease of use.

Agreed. Ubuntu Live CDs won't run on my gaming computer. The nv driver green-screens (the popular veritcal green lines), and vesa drivers won't load. Vesa's worse than the nv drivers because they cause xorg to reload every half second, so I can't type anything on an alternate virtual console. At least Fedora supports vesa correctly.

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[jimicus]

You'd be astonished (and, frankly, disturbed) how many bits of documentation on the Internet start with "First download the source code...." - and I'm not referring to outdated documentation or obscure things.

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[Chirs]

To be fair, you can't expect every little project to maintain multiple .deb and .rpm versions for all the various different distros out there.

For major projects it might make sense to start with "Install the package via your package manager..." but they'd probably still need to have the tarball-based instructions for cases where the package isn't available.

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[kelanden]

If you just do a Google search without specifying what distro you are using the first hits you get will often be for the original documentation from the devs. Upstream documentation necessarily assumes the software is being built from source when no official binaries are distributed (i.e. frequently).

If you can't easily find documentation tailored to your particular system it's the distro's fault.

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[McKing]

The only amazing thing about that was it took RedHat so long to get their act together. rpm needed some way of searching package repositories for years. Mandrake had urpmi and Debian had apt-get years before RedHat had anything comparable.

And even then, they gave us utter crap like "up2date". yum is nice (but slow), but the repositories are really what keeps me on Ubuntu. Earlier this year I needed to work on some CentOS systems and EPEL is nowhere near as nice as Universe -- and please don't blather on about random 3rd party repositories. Canonical did the right thing by creating a framework of trust with the Multiverse and Universe repositories, and almost any package you want is there and mostly well-maintained.

EPEL is pretty good in the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora world, but nowhere near as large and well-maintained as Universe, IMHO.

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[AdamWill]

EPEL is pretty good in the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora world, but nowhere near as large and well-maintained as Universe, IMHO.

You're conflating things you shouldn't conflate. RHEL has an intentionally restricted package set; it's restricted to what Red Hat can commit to offer very detailed support for (not a problem Canonical has with Universe or Multiverse). Fedora's package set is entirely different from RHEL's, and EPEL has no relevance to Fedora, you would not use an EPEL repository on a Fedora system.

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[gbarules2999]

yum is nice (but slow),

Yes. this is the only thing keeping me from using Fedora - Yum is mindbogglingly slow.

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[smoker2]

Buy a new computer. Seriously. I've never had issues with yum being slow, unless a server is down or there's a DNS problem. Your comment is FUD. In fact any ubuntu / debian post on this thread is FUD. The title is Fedora 12, either discuss it or fuck off.

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[gbarules2999]

I am discussing it. Settle down.

I'm running Fedora 12 right now. Yum takes a long time to refresh. Installing those Droid fonts that Google made took about five minutes, where apt-get would take about five seconds.

My computer is a Core 2 Duo E9300 with 4 GB of RAM. So it's certainly not the computer. And if Ubuntu can manage to do something that much faster than Fedora, I think I have something to base my assertion on. Other than that, though, Fedora's pretty good, so you can put your flame thrower down and get on with attacking random people on Slashdot as if that's something worth doing.

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[AdamWill]

you _are_ using a network-based package manager while the servers are being heavily spammed by people downloading the release. Aside from that...was that your first yum operation on a new install? I've never seen it go anywhere near that long except when it's first building the metainformation for newly configured repositories (i.e. just after install). It doesn't take that long on my 1.33GHz Atom with 4200RPM hard disk.

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[gbarules2999]

That was probably my fourth or fifth installation in Yum (I got alacarte, RPMfusion and the updates before that).

I just tried another package. It went faster than before, though still paused a lot more than apt-get does (it was the program, not the download speed). Fedora 11 did that, too - I used it for about a month and it was still pretty sluggish. It's certainly not as slow as whatever Sabayon was using, though, and it's definitely livable this time around.

I'll be honest - this Fedora release is pretty damn good. I may have found a new home. Well done.

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[bill_mcgonigle]

You can really see the Ubuntu influence on the Fedora marketing materials: smiling faces, happy about "software that helps you work, play, organize, and socialize." Wait, did Fedora even have marketing materials before Ubuntu?

Fedora has a very active marketing team now. Check the fedora-marketing list.

Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials

[AdamWill]

Not really sure, then. I'm not going to go around making any absolute declarations as I haven't used Ubuntu for several releases. I just found the five minutes number unusual, and not something I see around here. Not going to say yum is faster than apt-get, it may well not be, but it's certainly fast enough not to cause me any particular pain.

Dead platforms....

[jmorris42]

Dude, PPC is dead so get over it. The PS3/Cell was the last hardware you could actually buy and it dropped support for Linux in the latest hardware rev. And the previous support was crippled to the point of pointlessness.

SPARC is long in the grave. SPARC64 is still around but again, nobody actually has anything other than old ancient stuff that isn't going to have the resources for a pig[1] like Fedora. Excepting a few peeps buying new hardware, but they are going to run Solaris on new gear. Old zombie platforms is what NetBSD is for.

Itanium? Yes HP is still making a half-hearted effort to move units but really. Nice try but it too has failed in the marketplace.

These days the action is in small. ARM and MIPS are what we should be looking for in ports these days.

[1] No a slam, if you track current desktops, OO.o, FF, etc. the result is going to oink.

Re:Dead platforms....

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone please mark the above as troll.

Check IBM and other hardware vendors for PPC and Power CPUs.

Do you know what CPU is in the Wii and XBox360?

Have you used Fedora recently? It has come along ways since 1.0, and 2.0 where it required a lot of resources. I'm not fan of it, but the last recent was really nice. But I'm still a Debian fan when it comes to Gnu/Linux.

I'm shocked to see you mention MIPS and ARM, as being current ports, and not Sparc or PPC/Power.

What you are saying is like, why do people care about Gnu/Linux, when there is OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.

Please someone mark the above post as troll.

Re:Dead platforms....

[tolan-b]

Hacked Xbox 360s run PPC Linux :)

Re:Dead platforms....

[LordNimon]

PowerPC is doing very well in the embedded space, thank you very much. Freescale just released an 8-core CPU that runs Linux very well. I admit that Fedora 12 may not be a good distro for embedded devices, but you're spreading FUD when you put PowerPC in the same category as SPARC and Itanium.

Re:Dead platforms....

[Anonymous Coward]

The itanium is still very much a good product, it simply has a very niche market. I have built and maintain a great deal of ia64 clusters, primarily for Nastran. For that particular product, it kicks fucking ass over all others for price/performance. Why would you use fedora on a system that costs 90k per node? Just use RHEL, sheesh.

Re:Dead platforms....

[ak3ldama]

PPC and SPARC have been put out to pasture and unless something dramatic changes their days as a relevant desktop platform are gone. We absolutely must refocus on ARM as a x86 alternative platform. I have tried using Fedora 11 (soon will install 12) on an Athlon XP 1900 with 1GB of ram and it browses the web like a pig.[2]

2. See grandparents reference to the pig-like oink of slow platforms. This Athlon would perhaps be comparable to a Sun Ultra 60. I have one with 2x450Mhz and 1GB of ram and the comparison is fair. Desktop usage in my book demands maintainability, which makes the Sun non-viable. x86 is the chevy small block of the computing world.

Re:Dead platforms....

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, nobody cares about this hobbiest-dabbler crap that you pulled out of the garbage and installed in your mom's basement.

Maybe after she dies and you start paying the electric bill, you will figure out why nobody gives a shit about Sparc32.

Re:Dead platforms....

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention IBM's Power4, Power5, Power6, and soon Power7 platforms.
These are great Linux platforms in the corporate scene, and RHEL & SLES are the top distros.

Should be interesting to see what Novell will do here, after dropping ppc support in openSUSE.
Do they really want to give the entire market to RH?

Re:Dead platforms....

[jmorris42]

> Check IBM and other hardware vendors for PPC and Power CPUs.

And how many people are going to run Fedora on a stack of blades? The only reason Fedora PPC still exists is because RH sells enough RHEL to those customers to justify it.

> Do you know what CPU is in the Wii and XBox360?

Do you know that Fedora doesn't run on either of those platforms? And even if you could break the hardware DRM, the lack of drivers, etc. and shovel it on the hardware, the resources suck on both. The Wii is pitiful and the Xbox is underendowed enough in the ram dept that Fedora would be an unpleasant experience.

> Have you used Fedora recently?

F12 is downloading currently at home on my F11 desktop. I'm typing this on a Thinkpad X31 running F11. Fedora sucks. The other choices suck more, especially since I have invested over a decade in RH based distros and know how to work around their suckage more. Now get the hell off my lawn ya punk kid!

> It has come along ways since 1.0, and 2.0 where it required a lot of resources.

What the hell are you babbling about? FC1 and FC2 were slim petite distros compared to F11. Anaconda did have some serious bloat back around that time which pushed the minimum ram to install up beyond what you needed to actually use the machine after the install, but now you can't really use a machine that was current in the F1 timeframe without upgrading pretty much everything in the box.

> What you are saying is like, why do people care about Gnu/Linux, when there is OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.

No. What I am saying is that until we decide to stop trying to chase Apple and Microsoft's taillights and instead try to make Linux the best *NIX in the world we are doomed to bloat. If you don't like that and want to actually use older hardware you currently have no choice other than to use an unbloated traditional UNIX such as NetBSD or OpenBSD.

The comment about Solaris should have been simple enough to understand. Seriously, how many people are buying current SPARC64 hardware to run anything but Solaris on? And because the number buying SPARC hardware has been pitiful for years there isn't much old stuff to repurpose anymore until you go back to truly ancient gear.

Re:it didn't detect my usb mouse so i can't instal

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, it's f12 from the mirror. http://ftp.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/fedora/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/images/

another thing is that boot.iso is hidden somewhere...I'm certain it's in the DVD.iso. It means I have to finish torrenting before I could do anything.

I was hoping to boot and http install from informatik.

I'm installing suse 12.2 using 3 mouses now. I'm that fast. I also tried ubuntu but the cd was bad.

sorry to complain. thanks for all the hard work. lately i have to skip fedora release on occasions and run other distros when i can't install.

this is a decent machine (hp dc5000 tower w/ HT).

More Torrents == Faster Fedora12 Downloads

[SgtChaireBourne]

Yeah, tried several--same problem. Finally found one that worked via FTP.

Once you get it, help others get Fedora. Bandwidth schedulers can help if you're concerned about that. The demand will be there for a few days as people get it for work. Home users will try on the weekend, so if you can, help out by leaving your torrent up for a week or so.

64 bit x86:

• Fedora 12 x86_64 Live KDE
• Fedora 12 x86_64 CDs
• Fedora 12 x86_64 Live
• Fedora 12 x86_64 DVD

Others:

• Fedora 12 i386 CDs
• Fedora 12 i386 DVD
• Fedora 12 i686 Live KDE
• Fedora 12 i686 Live
• Fedora 12 ppc CDs
• Fedora 12 ppc DVD

Sources:
Fedora 12 source CDs
Fedora 12 source DVD

Re:More Torrents == Faster Fedora12 Downloads

[brejc8]

Currently downloading and saturating my 100Mbps connection.

Re:More Torrents == Faster Fedora12 Downloads

[EkriirkE]

Currently downloading via
preupgrade

Re:Fedora?

[flabordec]

SNES!

Not just IA64 either

[Anonymous Coward]

The same applies to Xen. STILL no Xen Dom0 support. Come on, guys. Fedora is nice and all, but most of the Virtualization research, and advances, is with Xen.

RHE follows the same path. Yeah, RH pays token, grudging lipservice to Xen. But the efforts there are half hearted and what they offer is so old as the not be of interest.

I know RH invested money and placed their bet on KVM. But it's a bad bet to piss off your customers. And right now, I'm looking elsewhere.

Re:Not just IA64 either

[Richard W.M. Jones]

If you want Xen dom0 support, get Xen dom0 patches upstream in the kernel. It's exactly because they aren't there that Fedora doesn't support it. Xen as an open source technology is twitching and not quite dead anyway, and the reason for that is entirely because upstream didn't get their stuff into the kernel or care enough about the open source bits.

Rich.

Re:Not just IA64 either

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat has thrown Xen on a gurney. Soon it'll be pushing up daisies right next to BSD. Any attractive feature in Xen will make its way into KVM/Qemu and you can use xenner to bridge the gap before migrating.

Market, Not Conspiracy

[fm6]

That would make sense if Fedora were a server OS. But it's not. Can you name a single in-production workstation based on Itanium or Sparc? Don't say "Sun" -- they dropped their last Sparc workstation over a year ago.

I don't know which platforms RHEL currently supports (redhat.com is quite unhelpful on that score) but Googling the site doesn't turn up anything for the Sparc or IA64 later than 2007. I suspect Red Hat is just not interested in non-commodity architectures any more.

Re:Market, Not Conspiracy

[WuphonsReach]

That would make sense if Fedora were a server OS.

It's pretty much the primary testing ground for what goes into RHEL, which *is* a server OS. Which puts it a lot closer to being a server OS then most distros.

The impression that I've gotten ever since FC1 came out is that FC is very much a bleeding-edge, beta-quality, distro with frequent releases in order to test technologies that will go into future Red Hat server offerings. If you want better desktop polish, folks would recommend Ubuntu, SUSE or Mandrake.

Re:Market, Not Conspiracy

[fm6]

I look at the Fedora web site, and I don't really see any discussion of server features. You can use Fedora as a server (I've done it) but that doesn't seem to be the emphasis.

But I'm really clouding the issue by talking about desktop-versus-server. It's enough to point out that Red Hat is neglecting Sparc and Itanium on all it's products. So there's no grand strategy for these architectures — Red Hat no longer considers them worth any attention at all.

Re:Market, Not Conspiracy

[AdamWill]

Fedora is not RHEL. The original poster was correct. Fedora is its own product, and it is not intended to be a server distribution. It is expressly mainly a desktop distribution. Nothing to do with servers is anywhere on the list of important things that need to work in a Fedora release, for instance. I haven't spent the last few weeks up till three AM trying to get fixes for bugs in apache. :)

Re:it didn't detect my usb mouse so i can't instal

[AdamWill]

thanks for the info. Well, that sucks :/ you _should_ be able to complete an install - even a graphical one - using only the keyboard (usual tab / space / enter stuff), though I'm not sure if you want to :). The bug I was thinking of is https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=524808 , you could try the kernel parameter 'intel_iommu=off' or 'iommu=soft' . But I really doubt it's that issue if you're on final, it seemed pretty certain that it was fixed.

Re:Fedora?

[Anonymous Coward]

N64ES!

Re:Fedora?

[Anonymous Coward]

SNES

RH backporting debacle ..

[rs232]

"-Fedora is 'too' comfortable with cutting edge changes, even to the point of releasing versions ahead of upstream *or* backporting .. This has been a longstanding tendency with RH (everyone probably remembers the gcc 2.96 debacle)"

I honestly don't, do you mind providing a link. Did people come in one morning and find their gcc 2.96 had automatically upgraded itself?

"something about the Ubuntu desktop feels, subjectively to me, more whole rather than merely a conglomeration of the parts. This may simply be a matter of certain tastes they appear to me, because I can't nail it down"

You gets what you pay for. But to answer why Ubuntu is more whole, maybe because there is Canonical behind it. But then again I have been a user of openSuSE, and while all the parts were there, they weren't as polished as a Ubuntu distro. I guess it's what you're used to and besides no one is forcing you to upgrade ...

Re:RH backporting debacle ..

[Junta]

I honestly don't, do you mind providing a link. Did people come in one morning and find their gcc 2.96 had automatically upgraded itself?

This was relatively back in the day, but the GCC maintainers still have their page up:
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.96.html

RH decided they were impatient with gcc 3.0 and just plopped down a random cvs snapshot in their distro, much to the chagrin of the gcc community.

Re:Fedora?

[armanox]

I haven't seen any issues with Fedora installing on Generic boxes. Been using since Red Hat 6.1 on all kinds of systems (I know Fedora dropped support for i585, but, how many people want to run Fedora on a Pentium?)

Re:Fedora?

[armanox]

Fedora by default sets up the Firewall (IPtables) to block everything other then SSH and NFS4 IIRC. The daemons can be a mess - I know I don't need Bluetooth services on any of my systems. Fortunately disabling services is simple.

Multi-touch in Windows 7

[westlake]

Multi-touch is not supported by windows yet.

Kindle goes multitouch on Windows 7

Dell SX2210T - multi-touch, Windows 7 ready, full HD monitor

Windows 7 could hasten touch-screen computers

ATI works out of the box!

[thule]

I have a Thinkpad T60p. The video chip is an "ATI Technologies Inc M56GL [Mobility FireGL V5250]." With Fedora 12, for the first time, I have stable 3D video on this system. This includes running the proprietary drivers. I am currently running Compiz with Fedora 12 with the "experimental" ATI 3D support. The are still some issues with games, but for basic 3D the driver is solid. No problems with power management (suspect/hibernate)!

One of Fedora's goals is to get rid of the need for distributing proprietary drivers. So far they seem to be doing a very good job.

Re:it didn't detect my usb mouse so i can't instal

[HeronBlademaster]

RHEL3 has issues with some chipsets here (causing USB mice to not work at all, or to work intermittently) at work; RHEL5 usually works fine on those same machines, but obviously I haven't taken a survey to find out for sure. I suppose it's possible that Fedora 12 has the same sort of issue with certain chipsets.

gparted and ntfs-3g on live cd?

[Culture20]

Does the Live CD have gparted and ntfs-3g yet? It's kind of silly having to use Ubuntu Live CDs to partition prior to installing Fedora.

Re:gparted and ntfs-3g on live cd?

[AdamWill]

the installer has a partitioning tool (which is actually based on libparted, as it happens). why would you need ntfs-3g to do partitioning? you only need it if you actually want to mount the partition and write to it.

Re:gparted and ntfs-3g on live cd?

[BassMan449]

I don't know about gparted but I doubt ntfs-3g will ever be included by default because of IP restrictions. Fedora has always been very careful about anything with IP attached and doesn't include it in the repos. You have to get it from RPM-Fusion.

Re:gparted and ntfs-3g on live cd?

[Stickster]

I don't know about gparted but I doubt ntfs-3g will ever be included by default because of IP restrictions. Fedora has always been very careful about anything with IP attached and doesn't include it in the repos. You have to get it from RPM-Fusion.

Actually, ntfs-3g was a ground-up design, and is part of Fedora, and included in most installs. If you have an existing Windows partition on NTFS, you don't need any special utilities or a third-party disc. You can simply resize the partition using the built-in functionality in the installer, and then install into the freed space. There's even an easy "Shrink existing system" option in the installer to make it clearer to those who aren't experts on partitioning mumbo-jumbo.

That aside, thanks for the understanding about legal encumbrances. We make it a point to treat all users as potential remixers and redistributors of our distribution, and want to ensure we're not passing any legal problems off to them.

Re:gparted and ntfs-3g on live cd?

[smoker2]

It's nice to see someone who knows something post for a change. I have F9 and I never had to install "out of band" rpms to get ntfs working.In fact my FC4 install seems to write to NTFS partitions fine. But you have to bear in mind we are surrounded by ubuntu losers here, those who are only linux users because it was sold to them in an attractive manner. The rest of us are here because it was the right thing to do. They are here because it was the trendy thing to do.

Re:gparted and ntfs-3g on live cd?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having moved from Ubuntu to Fedora this evening, I'm hard pressed to find anything relavent that the two distros do differently. They both work wonderfully on my machine. I'll stick with Fedora 12 for now so I can migrate to CentOS 6 whenever it comes out.

But if it makes you feel better to say that you're a better person for using Fedora, and gosh darn those blasted Ubuntarded fiends who jump on the bandwagon of good free operating systems (as if they're all gathering to something worth using!), then please, by all means, get right back up on your soapbox and let 'em have it, you cheeky devil. You deserve that "funny" mod.

If, on the other hand, you really do feel as if you are a better, more elite person because you don't run an operating system of which the internals are generally the same as the ones your operating system runs, then you would be well advised to reconsider your internal notion of success and failure. The OS you run matters far less than the color socks you wore today (I wore blue, by the way) to the vast majority of the population, and I'm almost hesitant to say, pretty much everyone who isn't you.

Re:gparted and ntfs-3g on live cd?

[Anonymous Coward]

For at least the last 3 years - since I have been using Fedora - it's been possible to resize, create and delete partitions - yes, even ntfs partitions - from within the installer. It's done within anaconda (the installer) though, using parted, rather than gparted.

PPC still popular in embedded and high performance

[Chirs]

PowerPC is still popular in the embedded space as well as in the high performance space. IBM's Power6 is a beast.

I still do development for telecommunications platforms based on PowerPC, although I suspect that they will be phased out over time in favour of x86.

As for ARM and MIPS, I've done kernel development for both of them and it's a real pain. There are a bazillion variations of each and they're way late in the game to get major kernel features.

Re:it didn't detect my usb mouse so i can't instal

[Wildside99]

RH4/RH5?? Not sure USB was supported by much around the time those came out.

Maybe you meant RHEL4/RHEL5. Those distributions don't keep up well with newer devices.

Re:it didn't detect my usb mouse so i can't instal

[CannonballHead]

I did mean RHEL, my mistake. I refer to it as RH by default, hehe.

Re:Fedora?

[kramulous]

ID10Ts

Upgrade from f11 left system totally broken

[dee.cz]

Fedora was constantly broken, sound broken since f11, other misc breakages once in 1-3 months.

Vista is very stable, one update caused infinite reboot, also found some rendering bugs.

Ubuntu is the best, the worst problem in years was it forgot static IP during upgrade

Snow Leopard seems poorly tested, bundled app from Apple crashes, some settings don't work (still very short experience)

It's just my experience, using all systems for the same tasks, development of Lightsmark. The message is clear: ditch Fedora, get Ubuntu.

As a Fedora user

[aussersterne]

who is currently at 11 and will probably upgrade, I have installed Fedora cleanly on:

- Parents white-box PC
- Wife's Toshiba Satellite
- Personal laptops (Thinkpad T21->Thinkpad T23->Toshiba Portege m200->Thinkpad T60)
- Best friend's white-box PC
- Quad-processor Compaq Proliant Xeon server
- Acer netbook

All in the last few years. I've used Fedora Core 1, Fedora 3, Fedora 4, Fedora 7, Fedora 8, Fedora 9, Fedora 10, and Fedora 11.

Never had any trouble; insert CD, install, go.

Re:As a Fedora user

[smoker2]

I've never had a problem either. And I've been running fedora since FC1 and Red Hat before that. Fedora is for those that can, ubuntu is for those that wish they could, but can't be bothered (or can't understand it but still want the kudos of linux). They may as well run OS X.

I'm disappointed they chose Empathy

[Omnifarious]

It has no support for OTR, which is the most widely supported multi-protocol encryption standard. They're working on supporting it now, but it isn't there yet, and I think the major distributions should've waited to make it the default IM client until OTR support was there.

Re:I'm disappointed they chose Empathy

[bill_mcgonigle]

yum install pidgin

Re:I'm disappointed they chose Empathy

[Omnifarious]

That does indeed solve the issue for me. But it takes two to encrypt, and all my friends might not do that.

Re:I'm disappointed they chose Empathy

[bill_mcgonigle]

I would guess, and I should stress I'm not sure, that the Fedora-philosophy would be that two Fedora users ought to be using an XMPP-based chat, with encryption. But, yeah, Fedora is very stuck on GNOME as a party-line, and it has blinders on about that. I use Pidgin on KDE on Fedora, and it all works well, but it's a bit less polished than the GNOME stack and not "core". Fedora gives up features for polish, that's for sure.

Re:Dead platforms.... Resurection

[omb]

Getting a platform CPU, peripherals, support chips into the kernel is HARD at first, once the architecture is in, ressusitating it in later kernels is much easier, since functional abstractions got done on the way in, and Intel paid for the IA64 in the first place and have many good kernel developers.

If, and I doubt it, the Itanic is ever competitive, it will not be hard to bring it back in unless it is a complete re-design. The real, sadly orphaned good architectures eg the Alpha will probably never make it back, thank you NOT Carey.

The arm has a place as does a well designed runner against 86_X.

My mobile broadband works again

[ralphc]

Somewhere shortly after Fedora 10 came out there was a kernel update, and my Sierra Wireless 3g card stopped working. It stopped working on Ubuntu about the same time, and there were bug reports in both places, but no fixes. Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04 didn't fix it, but with Fedora 12 it works again. I'm typing this from a VMWare running the Fedora 12 Live ISO and the 3g in a USB port.

Re:My mobile broadband works again

[NoNickNameForMe]

It was probaby due to changes to Network Manager and how it detects 3G modem cards. YMMV. I have a Huawei E220 USB modem. It was fixed during Fedora 11, I use it everyday. However, I had to delete the old settings and recreate the modem entry. Glad to hear you got it working in F12.

I'm upgrading

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm so upgrading to Fedora 12, I tried the Alpha, it's Awsome !!!!

But...

[Junta]

However, I don't see the point in sticking with 2.6.18 for stability purposes, and then turning around and making drivers that compile against 2.6.18 impossible to compile against your '2.6.18' because '2.6.18-164-el5' is nearly as much patch as it is original kernel.

Re:Fedora?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Historically Fedora installs insecure, requiring that you run around closing ports and shutting down daemons that were set up by default. Ubuntu and opensuse default to the opposite, which is all the home user really needs.

That implies that somehow this is not what corporate installations need?

Re:Fedora?

[Shimdaddy]

Fedora also ships with selinux enforcing by default, and was one of the first distros to do so. As far as I know, you still have to install it in Ubuntu. Also, I'm not sure what you're talking about with the "lots of daemons running and ports open" stuff -- this hasn't been my experience at all.

Re:it didn't detect my usb mouse so i can't instal

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Sure it did. It's also got a horrid command-line only interface, right? And maybe it required you to compile drivers from source? Any more 90s-era fud you wanna toss out there? ;)

Re:Linux sucks

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Dude, rick-rolling people is so yesterday - this is the new thing.

1GHz Pentium 3 with 512MB of RAM

[guacamole]

Will it run Fedora 12 or should I switch to something lighter?

Re:1GHz Pentium 3 with 512MB of RAM

[AdamWill]

'lightness' is a function of the software you have installed, not the distribution you're running. A 'light' distribution might make it easier to achieve a 'light' package load out and, yes, there are a few dependency choices a 'light' distribution might make differently, but it's nothing really deal breaking. You could run Fedora - or another 'big' distribution, like Mandriva or Ubuntu - perfectly well on such a system, if you make sensible application choices. You might want to look at LXDE as a desktop, Midori as a browser, claws or something of its ilk as a mail client...look for lighter applications than the typically omnivorous Firefox, Thunderbird / Evolution and so on.

(having said that, I ran Mandriva with GNOME and Evo / Firefox all the way up to GNOME 2.12 on a system with 192MB of RAM. It did require a bit of patience at times. :>)

Re:it didn't detect my usb mouse so i can't instal

[Anonymous Coward]

Tried to install from a USB stick created with unetbootin, got a "root device not found" error on boot. Don't know if it's the live image or unetbootin to blame.

Installing from a live CD worked fine though and finally I have a Linux desktop with usable KDE4 and PulseAudio working exactly how it should out of the box.

Re:Fedora?

[Anonymous Coward]

block everything other then SSH and NFS4 IIRC

So, it is possible to play multiplayer Need For Speed 4 in Fedora?

cool!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Fedora 12, welcome!

[Max_W]

I know to well that when in a city there is one major ISP (Internet Service Provider) and this ISP is owned by a corporation, which happened to be a competitor of your company, than an access to your website may well become unstable.

It is not a technical issue, it is an issue with the human nature.

The same with an OS. Behind nice images and blue-sky pictures of each OS there are human interests and characters of real people.

The more good working OS are on the market the better. I have on my computers always 2 OS, with dual boot. Even though I work mainly with one I keep spending some time on learning the second OS, learning its features, one at a time, etc.

It may happen that one day I will give a try to Fedora 12 too. It is not because my current distribution is not working, it s because I am not that young already and I know people only too well.

We need more good OSs, more good ISPs, and so on, so that there is always a free choice and a competition.

Re:it didn't detect my usb mouse so i can't instal

[AdamWill]

I think that's a general problem with unetbootin. We'd recommend using livecd-iso-to-disk or liveusb-creator to create the image. You can actually just dd the image onto a USB stick and it should work, but that's a new feature for F12 and not heavily tested yet.