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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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.

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.

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.

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:heres hoping

[CannonballHead]

theyve fixed pulseaudio while they were at it.

fixed that for you. :)

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: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. :>)