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Fedora 12 Released

Posted by timothy on from the new-hat-for-the-holidays dept.

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."

19 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. Great work! by sopssa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Great work! by Junta · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    2. Re:Great work! by icebike · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

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      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
    3. Re:Great work! by TorKlingberg · · Score: 3, Insightful

      -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.

    4. Re:Great work! by diegocg · · Score: 3, Informative

      -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.

    5. Re:Great work! by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 3, Insightful

      ``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.

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      Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
    6. Re:Great work! by icebike · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

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      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
  2. 2012 = year of linux on the desktop by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    Oh, sorry. Wrong story.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  3. Still no IA64 support... by the+linux+geek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Still no IA64 support... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      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/ )

  4. Re:Fedora Server Hammered (of course) by SUB7IME · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  5. Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver... by Saint+Aardvark · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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. :-)

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    Carousel is a lie!
    1. Re:Huh, they're using the Nouveau driver... by brejc8 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
  6. Re:SystemTap by diegocg · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  7. Ubuntu influence on marketing materials by ewg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

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  8. More Torrents == Faster Fedora12 Downloads by SgtChaireBourne · · Score: 4, Informative

    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:

    Others:

    Sources:
    Fedora 12 source CDs
    Fedora 12 source DVD

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    Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
  9. Re:heres hoping by CannonballHead · · Score: 3, Insightful

    theyve fixed pulseaudio while they were at it.

    fixed that for you. :)

  10. Re:heres hoping by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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...

  11. Re:gparted and ntfs-3g on live cd? by Stickster · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.