Fedora 16 Alpha Released

AdamWill writes "Fedora 16 Alpha is released today, featuring GNOME 3.1.4 with a unified input indicator for keyboard layouts and input methods, KDE 4.7, GRUB 2 on new installations (with GPT disk labels) and several other major changes. You can download it now. Remember to read the important information in the release notes and common bugs page."

Comments

Firefox 16

[ikkebra]

I first read this as Firefox 16 Alpha Released and it still made sense.

Re:Firefox 16

[Baloroth]

Nah, thats not for a few weeks yet. I think.

Re:Firefox 16

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait for it...
Waaaiit for it...
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FIREFOX 16 IS RELEASED!
NOW it is!
No tabs anymore, no menus and no buttons. Full Gnome 3 integration. Everything you could ever dream of in your worst nightma
FIREFOX 17 IS RELEASED!
Wait... what? How can that be? Isn't FF16 jus
FIREFOX 18 IS RELEASED!
GAAH! Stop i
FIREFOX 19 IS RELEASED!
I...
FIREFOX 20 IS
FIREFOX 20
FIRE
FI
F
F
F
F
F
F
F
I
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SINGULARITY

A movie by the Mozilla Foundation

Does it have a decent desktop?

[mattventura]

I upgraded to Fedora 15 (from 13) and was so horrified by Gnome 3 that I immediately installed Debian so I could use Gnome 2. Even the "classic Gnome" option is still unusable.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[Burdell]

I switched to XFCE (on Fedora 15). It is similar to the GNOME 2 "look and feel", especially if you spend just a little bit of time moving things around (although the default XFCE "look" isn't bad either).

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[AdamWill]

Then...that's probably not something Fedora can do a lot about.

Re:Does it have a decent desktop?

[ReinoutS]

If you want to put items on your desktop, that's simple: use gnome-tweak-tool or set the org.gnome.desktop.background.show-desktop-icons property to true manually. The fact that this isn't enabled by default doesn't convey an arrogant attitude, but is a simple design decision that flows from the fact that Gnome3 doesn't implement a traditional desktop metaphor, and it wants to minimize visual distraction. For sure, this doesn't mean Gnome 3 is finished. It's only just taking off. There's a lot more in store in the area of 'finding and reminding' in upcoming releases, for instance. In the mean time you can try out some of the Gnome Shell Extensions to tweak the environment to your liking.

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[supersloshy]

It's an alpha release. Expect it to not be stable and still have some kinks that need to be worked out before release. Just report everything you find (if it's not reported already) and hopefully they'll get fixed.

Re:Another bad Fedora release.

[AdamWill]

We don't support VirtualBox. Mainly because the Fedora kernel developers consider it a pile of...well...something awfully rude. If an issue with VirtualBox is isolated and traced back to something being wrong in Fedora, sure, it'll likely get fixed, but VBox is not something Fedora actively tracks and tests for.

Fedora supports the qemu/kvm/libvirt/virt-manager virtualization stack, and we do test that quite extensively. But running as a virt client is required functionality for Beta, not Alpha.

(FWIW, though, recent VBox releases _do_ have 3D passthrough, and I've seen reports of people getting it working with F15. So it sounds like you maybe have an old VBox?)

Re:Are panels still broken ?

[rubycodez]

yes, those are serious bugs but they put out a patch. Things have been much better for me since I applied that patch to my hard drive.

Really?

[neiras]

I upgraded to Fedora 15 (from 13) and was so horrified by Gnome 3 that I immediately installed Debian so I could use Gnome 2. Even the "classic Gnome" option is still unusable.

You do realize that GNOME 3 Classic Mode only has a few user facing differences from GNOME 2, right?

1. You have to hold ALT when right clicking the panels in order to customize them. No more by-mistake applet moves.
2. Panels now allow you to snap widgets to the center. New feature!
3. There are fewer available panel applets, because the API changed. No more CORBA.
4. The unified System Settings dialog replaces the System menu. I miss the old Preferences but can live with this.

I have a GNOME 3 desktop that is practically identical to my old GNOME 2 desktop. Having changed the GTK theme from the black Adwaita theme, it even looks like GNOME 2.

Fallback mode pretty much *is* GNOME 2. I really don't get what all the bitching is about. Surely a few missing panel applets and a unified settings dialog aren't reasons to discard a desktop environment.

Re:Really?

[mattventura]

1. You have to hold ALT when right clicking the panels in order to customize them. No more by-mistake applet moves.

How the hell is that at all intuitive or good UI design? In other applications, even on windows, you right click the toolbar to customize it. And what was wrong with the "lock to panel" option for applets?

Re:Really?

[fnj]

The following is styled as if I am speaking to the Gnome developers, not the parent poster. If any of the following have been repaired since 3.0, I apologize, because 3.0 was so AWFUL it made me throw it on the floor within 5 minutes, and I haven't been inclined to waste any more time on the thing since then until I hear that all of the deficiencies noted below have been repaired.

You do realize that GNOME 3 Classic Mode only has a few user facing differences from GNOME 2, right?

The differences are actually significant and in the direction of LOSS of functionality. I guess you're not using the Drawer, Mini Commander, Weather, System Monitor, and CPU Freq Scaling applets, and I guess you don't have a simple compact digital clock with seconds and date in the upper right corner. Making it IMPOSSIBLE to set it up that way, and with control over the geometry, is NOT ACCEPTABLE because it is a GRATUITOUS loss of flexibility.

1. You have to hold ALT when right clicking the panels in order to customize them. No more by-mistake applet moves.

A stupid and pointless replacing of an intuitive and DISCOVERABLE operation by a HIDDEN and awkward one.

2. Panels now allow you to snap widgets to the center. New feature!

Allow? FORCE! That's not a feature, it's a bug. Give me CONTROL, dammit.

3. There are fewer available panel applets, because the API changed. No more CORBA.

I'm not an apologist. I'm a USER. I DEPENDED on those applets. Don't bore me with details of why your stupid infrastructure changes have led you to drop them. Just bring them back. ALL of them!

4. The unified System Settings dialog replaces the System menu. I miss the old Preferences but can live with this.

It's a pointless and needless complication, but yeah, it's not the most egregious of the mistakes.

I have a GNOME 3 desktop that is practically identical to my old GNOME 2 desktop.

That's nice for you, but I found that Gnome3 WOULDN'T LET me make a desktop that was even remotely like my old one.

Fallback mode pretty much *is* GNOME 2.

No, no, NO. It is NOT, and repeating that it IS, does not make it so.

You can still use GNOME 2 with Fedora 15

[sunr2007]

I was pretty frustrated with GNOME3 and just when i thought of giving up and going back to Fedora 14 i found this [1]. I now have a GNOME2 and it works like a charm. [1]http://k3rnel.net/2011/06/22/bluebubble-the-fine-manual/

!@#$%$^ GPT partitions...

[evilviper]

I can't !@##$%^& believe how Redhat and Fedora can't handle GPT right to save their !@#$@#% lives...

RHEL5 should have included the GRUB patches to handle booting from GPT partitions... They did not. When it was released, 1TB SATA drives were available. RAID-5 with 4x1TB drives? Sorry, no, can't boot from it, unless your RAID controller is smart enough to divvy it up into pieces to make up for for the idiots at RH. I've gone through all kinds of !@##$% because RHEL5 is THE enterprise Linux operating system, and yet it doesn't !@##@$% support installing to, or booting from GPT partitions, which means you're limited to 2TB volumes, max.

Okay, so they made a bad decision, but newer versions will solve all our problems, right? Wrong! Fedora goes back and forth with @$#$%%$^@ bugs around ANACONDA and GPT. Today, I can boot-up with a Fedora 15 disc, go through the menus, take a quick look at the layout, and find I've got 1/3rd unallocated on my 3TB hard drive, because it's using old msdos partitions, and there's no way for me to tell it to use GPT. @#$#$^$%! Put a GPT signature on it you say? Okay, now ANACONDA detects the disk is corrupted and asks if it should abort or wipe it out...

Partition everything manually, you say? Well I would, but GNU parted is absolutely the most god-awful tool I've ever used...

Okay here goes... mkpart 1GB 10GB
WARNING: Not aligned, performance will be terrible... Ignore/Cancel?

WTF? It converts my human units into billions of sectors, and can't be bothered to round it off to the nearest multiple of 8, or friggin' ask me if I want it to do so? Who the hell made this crap? Math is what computers are so damn good at, WTF do I need to pull out a pocket calculator to partition my !@#$#$% computer in the year 2011?

Redhat drives me nuts. Imagine if the most popular luxury sports-car maker out there engineered their cars so that they couldn't be driven for more than 1hr straight, before shutting-down and needing to be restarted. That's the kind of fundamental stupidity we're talking about, here. Middle-of-the-road consumer hardware is over 2TB now, when are they going to fix this !@#$#%?

I know, I know, I don't need to use parted. Someone else had half a brain and hated parted, too, and made gdisk just for this purpose: http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/ It doesn't take away from the sheer idiocy of either project...