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Fedora 13 Is Out

ultranerdz writes "Fedora 13 has just been released. It includes major features such as automatic print driver installation, automatic language pack installation, redesigned user account tool, color management to calibrate monitors and scanners, experimental 3-D support for NVIDIA video cards, and more."

46 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Dialup networking off by default finally by suso · · Score: 4, Insightful

    While looking through the packages I noticed that Dialup Networking was NOT selected by default. Is this the first version to be that way? Kinda significant as in the end of an era.

  2. Direct Link to Changelog by ProdigyPuNk · · Score: 4, Informative
  3. Re:is it faster? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yes, starting with Fedora 12, yum has been *much* faster, because it only downloads the differences between the installed and updated package.

  4. Re:Let me save you some trouble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    It sucks. Just get Windows 7 already.

    Hey, that was my idea.

  5. Re:is it faster? by Luke+has+no+name · · Score: 4, Interesting

    But yum has a better output layout than apt-get, IMO. I wish the apt guys would look at YUM for inspiration.

  6. Sweet by sv_libertarian · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Now I begin my bi annual ritual of backing up my data, and making a new live CD (I always have the worst luck with direct download/upgrade for some reason). I still can't decide *WHY* I use Fedora over say Gentoo or Ubuntu (Ok, Gentoo is just too damned annoying to build and install). I do get tired of enabling mp3/flash/etc... in Fedora though.

    1. Re:Sweet by ls671 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      > Now I begin my bi annual ritual of backing up my data

      Well, at least you seem to have a backup scheme in place ;-)

      --
      Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
    2. Re:Sweet by Jim+Hall · · Score: 4, Informative

      Now I begin my bi annual ritual of backing up my data, and making a new live CD

      Why create a CD? It's better to use LiveUSB Creator to put the LiveCD bootable image onto a USB flash drive. There's even a nice GUI, works on Linux (of course) or Windows. Here's the How-to..

      And 1GB flash drives are cheap and plentiful these days ... if you can even buy a flash drive that small anymore.

    3. Re:Sweet by Vectormatic · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I have a perfectly good reason for using fedora over ubuntu. Fedora doesnt just fuck half the system up every release just to be new and flashy...

      and yeah, what the AC said, USB boot FTW, you just need a 1gb usb stick, which are pretty much free with a box of cereal these days

      --
      People, what a bunch of bastards
    4. Re:Sweet by burnin1965 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You really need to move to bootable USB.

      You really need to move to the 21st century. PXE Boot and network install, there is no need to clutter the environment with CDs, DVDs or USB devices when you have a perfectly good network. ;)

    5. Re:Sweet by sammyF70 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You might want to try Arch Linux then. I got fed up with the half annual ritual myself, and moved to Arch. it's *not* very easy to setup, but if you follow the step by step instructions you should have a running stable system fast. And from then on : "rolling updates, baby!"

      --
      "DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
    6. Re:Sweet by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Arch is for those who love vanilla bleeding edge packages. Not to say it's a bad thing (I do that, hence why I run Arch), but it's not quite the same as Fedora.

    7. Re:Sweet by Hatta · · Score: 4, Funny

      Fedora doesnt just fuck half the system up every release just to be new and flashy...

      They have much better reasons to fuck half the system up every release.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    8. Re:Sweet by Spewns · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You might want to try Arch Linux then. I got fed up with the half annual ritual myself, and moved to Arch. it's *not* very easy to setup, but if you follow the step by step instructions you should have a running stable system fast. And from then on : "rolling updates, baby!"

      I feel Arch is extremely easy to set up. But I can always understand if it's a little daunting to people who are coming from a strictly desktop/GUI environment. Once you're beyond that though, I'd imagine Arch is much less of a pain than other minimal distros.

    9. Re:Sweet by sammyF70 · · Score: 2, Informative

      You're right, in hindsight it wasn't very difficult to setup. It's just slightly more work than "pop in the CD and press install".

      --
      "DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
    10. Re:Sweet by astrashe · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I really like the ruby packages -- it's easier for me to make ruby and rails work easily.

      I'm sure lots of people get by just fine with Ubuntu, and I haven't tried it for awhile, but it seemed to me that the package manager and the gems system were always tripping over each other.

      It's great that we have options, though. I've been running Linux for awhile, and in my experience, distros eventually melt down. They make bad decisions, try crazy schemes to monetize things, get too bogged down in ideology, chase off developers with fights, or whatever. Nothing lasts forever.

      So I'm glad that Ubuntu is out there if Fedora caves in, and Ubuntu people should be glad that Fedora exists in case Ubuntu goes way off track. That's why Linux is cool -- it's distributed enough that no single pinhead can break it.

    11. Re:Sweet by sv_libertarian · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You might want to try Arch Linux then. I got fed up with the half annual ritual myself, and moved to Arch. it's *not* very easy to setup, but if you follow the step by step instructions you should have a running stable system fast. And from then on : "rolling updates, baby!"

      Mmmmm I'll check it out. I've used Gentoo, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and Fedora. I loved Gentoo, but hated the install process, and wound up just going back to Fedora, and have stayed in a Red Hat induced rut.

  7. Re:is it faster? by armanox · · Score: 3, Informative

    Actually that goes back to Fedora 8 IIRC. It wasn't enabled by default until 12.

    --
    I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
  8. Skipped 12 by 0racle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I had to skip Fedora 12 because X and/or KDE couldn't handle both of my nvidia cards. Enabling one with both monitors worked fine, but having X configure both cards (binary nvidia of course) locked the machine completely.

    With support for Fedora 11 ending soon, I'm hoping this has been resolved.

    --
    "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
  9. Preparing to jump, who is with me? by Vectormatic · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm just trialing Fedora 13 in a VM right now, if i dont run into any showstoppers i'll be ditching ubuntu this week on my main rig

    best of all, i have a tasy intel SSD on my desk right now which will be the system-drive for my new fedora install

    anyone with me?

    --
    People, what a bunch of bastards
  10. Re:is it faster? by asto21 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Parent is talking about the Presto Plugin for yum. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePresto

  11. Windows mirrors linux mirrors windows. by irreverant · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You know, I've used a computer long enough to learn that this battle between windows and linux is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. I've noticed that when XP came out, it seemed very familiar, as a matter of fact, it sure seemed a lot like mandrake. This is the way it's been through out the years. Microsoft takes something that works great from linux and makes it theirs and sometimes makes it better, most of the time worse. And the same goes for linux, sometimes it starts out worse and gets' better because they borrowed it from microsoft or sometimes makes something worse and makes it better then microsoft takes it. The point i'm getting at, after noticing i'm rambling is that I believe there are certain behaviors and tendencies of computer users that have been leveraged by OS manufacturers. That somethings just work better with certain designs, take for example the automatic printer drivers install. That works really well with Windows 7 and apparently fedora is now getting with it. God knows i Hate using CUPS.

    --
    Of all the things I've lost; I miss my mind the most. - Mark Twain
    1. Re:Windows mirrors linux mirrors windows. by that+IT+girl · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Who, erm... who mentioned Windows? Maybe I missed something, but I just saw the news about Fedora 13.

      --
      10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
      20 DRINK COFFEE
      30 GOTO 10
    2. Re:Windows mirrors linux mirrors windows. by burnin1965 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Microsoft takes something that works great from linux and makes it theirs and sometimes makes it better, most of the time worse. And the same goes for linux, sometimes it starts out worse and gets' better because they borrowed it from microsoft or sometimes makes something worse and makes it better then microsoft takes it.

      From my experience Microsoft does borrow others ideas but usually they are in major releases when they need to have some bullet points to justify buying their latest software. Aside from the major releases Microsoft has a hard headed "not developed here" attitude that results in some crappy software.

      One example where it took them ages to pull there head out, tabbed browsing.

      Some examples where Microsoft is still producing retarded software:
      - Focus follows mouse.
      - Roll up windows.
      - Multiple desktops.

      And the open source crowd, they not only borrow but they try lots of new ideas and are happy to significantly modify borrowed ideas and try new things. But sometimes the borrowed ideas are too similar to the garbage from Microsoft.

      I.e. Trying to eliminate or hide the ability to perform tree / list file management in the Nautilus browser and instead opening new windows all over the desktop for each directory. Microsoft tried this crappy UI in Windows, it sucked, and it sucked just as much in Gnome.

      The greatest benefit linux has going for it is the diversity in the software and the ability to choose and modify. This is a virtually non-existent feature in Windows and OS X.

    3. Re:Windows mirrors linux mirrors windows. by evilviper · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Your comment isn't talking about Windows and Linux at all. You are almost entirely talking about Explorer and GNOME/KDE. There are a few underlying system services, like CUPS, grub, kudzu, etc., but you're mostly talking about UI.

      If that's all you care about, good for you. The rest of us want much more from an operating system than a vaguely familiar interface. The more extensively you actually use it, the more apparent the differences become.

      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
  12. Re:is it faster? by jgagnon · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hey... he's a well paid sysadmin, give him a break. ;)

    --
    Remember to maintain your supply of /facepalm oil to prevent chafing.
  13. Even though Fedora is my desktop of choice by Scareduck · · Score: 3, Interesting
    ... it still has some gaping flaws.
    • gthumb absorbs all memory in sight when downloading images from a camera. This alone makes it useless for anyone into photography. I see gthumb has been replaced by Shotwell, so hopefully this amounts to an improvement.
    • Printer configuration is insanely complex and obscure. Really, this is a gripe about CUPS, but I just don't like either that much.
    • NetworkManager is an abortion that doesn't play well with the usual Unixy config files, but is strangely necessary for the desktop to operate correctly. I think this finally got fixed in more recent versions (Fedora 12).
    • Audio is just plain broken. Major features -- such as the ability to mix external audio -- have been missing since Fedora 11. Nobody seems to care, or know how the new audio system, Pulse Audio, works.
    --

    Dog is my co-pilot.

    1. Re:Even though Fedora is my desktop of choice by ProdigyPuNk · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Best thing I ever did when I installed Debian was to rip out Pulse Audio. Haven't had an audio related problem since then. It's really not needed for 99% of the applications in the repos. Do yourself a favor and just ditch it.

    2. Re:Even though Fedora is my desktop of choice by TheTyrannyOfForcedRe · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Pulseaudio has be perfect on Ubuntu Lucid. I'm as amazed any anyone. It was a total disaster for the longest time and then all of a sudden no more issues.

      --
      "Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units, and false teeth."
    3. Re:Even though Fedora is my desktop of choice by V!NCENT · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yeah keep hearing that... I never had a problem with PulseAudio since day with Fedora.

      But then again I did my homework before buying my computer. You see, it turns out PulseAudio has a fallback mechanism for when there is no PulseAudio driver for your sound card and then reverses the routing to Alsa and OSS drivers.

      Cool and all... but given the fact that most Alsa drivers are dirty hacks, problems survice, like stuttering audio and not hearing audio at all sometimes.

      The exeption to this rule is Skype, which is a horribly dirty hack on Linux and there is a reason that some parts of it are now open sourced so that some people would fix their shit for them, which they didn't because Skype is proprietary and just plain ugly.

      Just my $0,02. But remember to do your homework next time before you badmouth something :)

      --
      Here be signatures
  14. Thanks Fedora guys by pizzach · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I appreciate you guys putting gWaei into the repositories. I was forced to install Fedora 13 rawhide to do some testing with gtk+-2.20 (I think) and I was impressed with the package manager. Much cleaner than synaptic. Though I didn't like the lack of progress bars for so many things.

    If I want an easy to set up distribution, I would probably prefer Fedora over Ubuntu nowadays. I give the Fedora guys props. (When I say easy to setup, I don't necessarily mean newbie friendly.)

    --
    Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
  15. Re:is it faster? by suso · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You are joking I hope.

    Having used both rpm and apt for a long time now in a sysadmin setting, I can say that both have their pluses and minuses. rpm to me has a much more professional feel to it IMHO. I really wish that dpkg had the -V flag like rpm does, I've used that more times than you probably could imagine. rpm always seems faster at finding a package name given a file path and at listing out the files in a package. On the flip side, rpm historically hasn't had good depenencies and I never liked how they always wanted to compile in support for everything in rpm, which is one reason I liked being able to configure all that in emerge on Gentoo. Plus rpm used to have all kinds of problems with the database getting locked or corrupt. I switched to Gentoo as a workstation a while back when I tried to uninstall kernel-source and it said I couldn't because some audio library depended on it. That just shouldn't ever happen. But then I switched to Ubuntu because Gentoo development goes so fast that if you don't emerge -pv system practically every night, you end up not being able to upgrade at all.

    So the point is that there are always reasons for the various package management systems being the way they are and because most people are unique, there are always going to be people who like those different features. You shouldn't poke fun of their choices until you understand them better. Hence the phrase, don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes.

  16. Re:GDMConf by armanox · · Score: 2, Informative

    GDM Configurator was dropped by GNOME, not Fedora.

    --
    I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
  17. Re:is it faster? by Drew+M. · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Speaking of issues with apt-get, my old comment:

    When doing large scale automated apt-get update; apt-get upgrade tasks, ask what happens to apt-get/dpkg when a postinstall script fails, or there were file conflicts with another package. Yes, the machine never fetches updates again. Serious amounts of dpkg --configure -a, dpkg --purge --force-reinstreq, and apt-get -f install are required to even get it working again. Also don't ask what happens when a user wants to install a local package with dpkg -i that has a missing dependency. Yes it prints an error, but unknowingly to the user the package actually gets half installed and breaks the automated update jobs. Why isn't there a --force flag to prevent this from happening?

    Yum and rpm have had these issues solved for years and years, why can't Debian fix it?

  18. Re:is it faster? by diegocg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    RPM is much faster these days, but yum (well, interpreted python) is still slow, and it doesn't handle dependencies like APT can do. However it has several nice features that were easy to implement in yum and that apt systems still lack. Delta updates are used by default, for example. And with a plugin you can get transactional upgrades in Btrfs or LVM. The Yum utils are also quite powerful. I also like that yum can do almost-everything while in .deb systems you need to use apt-get, apt-cache, dpkg and others (or use aptitude, which is another layer). After 8 years of APT, I didn't miss it when I migrated to Fedora 12.

  19. Re:Let me save you some trouble by Dishevel · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well almost everything that is not liked in Windows 7 is WONTFIX. In fedora WONTFIX really means "THEY WONTFIX BUT YOU CAN IF YOU WANT TO"

    --
    Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
  20. Re:Fedora? by StuartHankins · · Score: 2, Insightful

    We use RHEL for production servers that do real work, and Fedora for fileservers. We prefer using Fedora because the interface and management tools are similar to RHEL.

    But, yeah, if I were using this as a desktop system I'd probably go with something else.

  21. Re:Fedora? by burnin1965 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Fedora still feels stuck in 1999 as far as I've used it

    Sounds like you have never used Fedora.
    Fedora 12
    Fedora 13

  22. Re:is it faster? by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Who uses apt-get directly, anyway? Aptitude FTW.

  23. Re:Fedora? by r_jensen11 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Fedora has one of the best PPC32 communities I've found. The only other option I've found was Debian- Gentoo was one option, but that PPC32 community seems to be less than 10 people. Otherwise OpenSuSE's dropped PPC32 and finding versions for either Ubuntu or Slackware is a herculean challenge

  24. Re:is it faster? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I completely agree. The apt-get tool is powerful, but the interface and output is terrible. With YUM all package management is pretty straight forward and easy to explain to a new comer. Want to install software?

    yum install packagename

    Remove software?

    yum remove packagename

    Want to find a package?

    yum search keyword

    With the apt-get family of tools, most of the commands are short and.or cryptic. It may get the job done and apt-get may be a little faster, but it's so ugly and cryptic that it's not work the extra performance. The differences between the man pages are pretty eye-opening too. The apt-get manual is obvious written by programmers and sysadmin types for the same, where the yum page is written for human beings.

  25. Re:Fedora? by burnin1965 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I was at a linux install-fest a couple months ago where we were installing Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10 on a pile of donated computers that were given to families that could not afford a new computer. Some of the kids there were swearing up and down by Ubuntu, how special and wonderful it is and how Fedora was no match.

    While testing one of the Fedora systems one of the kids wandered by and exclaimed "Ubuntu!!! .... oh, that's Fedora". Silly kids.

    The point of the story, other than some differences in file locations and scripts there is far greater similarity between Ubuntu and Fedora than there are differences. They are both using the same open source software. Its not like Windows vs OS/X. And selecting a brown color theme for your desktop is not some advanced futuristic feature. Grow up.

    Case in point, Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop

  26. Lost and confused - it is for usability by dbIII · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The command line interface to NetworkManager WAS added as a useability improvement - it is so somebody can more easily run the thing remotely or on a server with no graphical interface.
    Sometimes it is just easier to use words to get a message across instead of pointing at pictures.
    However if you really want to see where usability is improving look at Maemo, web interfaces to linux routers and interfaces on linux based systems associated with televisions.

  27. Re:Let me save you some trouble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Bullshit. I can fix a package for my OSS OS.

    However, if I don't get the original maintainers to accept my patch and include it into the official distribution I'm as good as dead.

    Do you realize the work needed to re-patch your system continuously?

    And WONTFIX means they will not look at my patch favorably.

    Hell I have some patches that have been given green light but are still in a limbo until they are committed and it has been like 6 months.

    And that is for an OS I care about and care about individual developers not having the time to do something. If RH did that to me I would move on to Ubuntu.

  28. Re:Prien715 is Weird by laddiebuck · · Score: 2, Interesting

    GP is an idiot but so are you. I happen not to give a shit about the tech industry -- about all I follow is a couple of Slashdot stories every week. I just need to get things done as efficiently as possible. There's no faster way for just about any general-purpose task involving a computer than the Unix shell. When you get to specialised tasks, it's often the case that a program that deals with text interfaces is still going to be the fastest, because you can mangle text or edit it much better with grep/awk/sed/cut and vim/emacs or in a pinch perl/python than with anything else. And if your OS is built around text, which you get with the Unix CLI, then you're gold.

    All I'm trying to say is that the computer to me is not a "reason-to-live" as you put it, just another tool like my car. But it so happens that the fastest way to get things done and get things done that would be impossible with other interfaces, and do all this with the minimum rise in blood pressure, is the Unix CLI. And that's why I run Debian Linux -- it doesn't get in my way, just gives me more power than the non-Unixlike OSes. (OS X really gets in my way and I hate it even though it has acceptable underlying tools.)

  29. Re:is it faster? by JackieBrown · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I am trying to figure out what you listed that you can't do in debian.

    Want to know which packages are installed? dpkg –get-selections

    Want to verify a package's installation? automatic

    Want to know, of those installed, which have been modified? debsum

    Want to know what package owns a specific file? dpkg -S {/path/to/file}

    Want to know every file that a package installs? dpkg --contents {.deb-package-name}

    Also, a Debian package is just a compressed archive as well.

    I think they are both useful formats and have probably borrowed a lot from each other.