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Fedora 18 Release Slips Another Week
An anonymous reader writes "The next major release of the Fedora Project's GNU/Linux distribution (named Spherical Cow) was originally scheduled for November 16th. However, an ambitious set of new features has resulted in the project slipping way past its scheduled release. It had fallen three weeks behind before even producing an alpha release and nine weeks behind by the time the beta release was produced. A major redesign in the distribution installer seems to have resulted in the largest percentage of bugs blocking its release. The set-back marks the first time since 2005 in which there was only one major Fedora release during a calendar year instead of two. Currently, the distribution is scheduled for release on January 15th."
I got tired a long time ago with the fast update cycle that Fedora uses. I've moved on the CentOS because of it. I need a stable workstation. Fedora is all well and good if you want to play with the bleeding edge, but I can't afford that on my systems anymore. I'll probably play with it in a VM to see what's up (or live CD it) but that's about it.
There is some really delicious irony to a project released named "Spherical Cow" finding that assumptions made in planning were not correct :)
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
It's odd that rngd is an 'ambitious new feature. It's been around for years and has never been deployed right.
Three things are wrong
1 - It's not on by default
2 - When you turn it on, the command line options are wrong, so it silently fails.
3 - When you fix the command line options, it barely feeds in entropy during boot time because the wakeup threshold in the kernel is set too low, so you get the boot time entropy starvation problem, even though you have an entropy source and rngd running.
Also, if they don't pick up the RdRand extensions to rngd to support Ivy Bridge's fast/secure RNG, then that is a big fail.
I have low expectations.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I do not think that there is a way for me to install it on my system. I can not even start anaconda, and error I get is the most useful one "Unknown error".
Little bit of debugging showed me that it has issues even mounting my disks (combination of LVM with ext4, ext4, luks etc.). Anaconda always caused me problems, but this is worse than before. Usually I would remove all disks but one I intend to use for Fedora and installation would work well, at this point I can not do even that.
Personally, I think 6 months is way too short of a time to iron out bugs plus insert new features (and then fix those bugs). As we've seen with Ubuntu, the bugs don't get fixed until at least 1-3 months after release. Slackware, for instance, does yearly releases and that seems to work well for them. The openSuSE guys are also considering (although not officially) yearly releases after the QA problems they had with getting 12.2 ready.
This is the first time since 2005 that a Fedora release received support for over a calendar year. Viva la BEEFY MIRACLE!
Porting from sysVinit init scripts to systemd unit files.
It is not just the new installer, the conversion to systemd is also only at 70% complete. From their Release 18 Feature List. I am still using Fedora 16 at home as I had no real reason to move to 17 yet and will probably skip it. I am not entirely sure I want systemd instead of sys v init though and might do a review of the choices out there such as arch. I have used Fedora exclusively on the machine since early 2010 ever since the open source ATI drivers came along. Over all it has been a nice eco system.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
I'll grant that my glance was cursory but much of that list just appears to be "making other shit thats been around for a while work on Fedora.XX" Which are unique to Fedora that would compel one to chose it over one of the other distributions (and I hope we are past the point of talking about installers)? This is not a troll, the same question could probably be asked of most Linux distros but as a front page /. post makes Fedora 18 delay seem important I ask about it.
The new blackberry 10 integration.
The installer UI, and sysv to systemd are things that need to get completed. As of about a week ago i posted a systemd service for slim that hopefully with this deadline extension will get included in the image as opposed to zero-day updates.
Good people go to bed earlier.
They should never have merged in the new Anaconda in the state its in. It is not production ready. It is basically impossible to create a new LV or btrfs subvolume and install into it. So you are left with installing into a real partition. And on most of my computers I'm using btrfs or LVM and I've given them the whole HD, so that's not really an option.
Additionally, the UI for selecting where to install into is so confusing that I cannot say with confidence that the install isn't going to wipe out any existing partitions.
The old UI was kind of fiddly, and perhaps it was a bit opaque to newer users since it required some detailed knowledge of what a partition was and how it relates to a physical hard-drive, and LVM volume group or a btrfs volume. But at least it worked and you could make it do what you wanted.
Perhaps this new UI will be a lot better in the end. All I know is that merging the work into mainline Anaconda at this stage of its development was a huge mistake. It means that it will be much harder to go back to the old one should the new UI not be ready in time, or prove to be not-constructible.
I consider it basic software engineer to never count on a given feature that isn't done (to the point of having had at least some testing) to be available on release. You don't let your salespeople sell it. And you don't announce it. This is something I've always had a lot of respect for Google for. They rarely announce things until they're actually done. Software engineering is too unpredictable to do it any other way.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I gave up since F16 (I use F12). I was able to completely install F16 jut great.
But it would never boot. After searching the bug tracking, I come to find that my
drive configuration was not supported (LVM + encryption). However, like I said,
I installed it. The installation succeeded. It's the same process install steps I
took with F12, which boots and runs fine. But what got me the most was the arrogance,
the author realized that he had broke the booting, but reasoned that nobody uses
that configuration anyway, so why bother; in other words, I don't care about the
users' - I don't use it that way so why should I bother to fix it.
Then I see vi was broken, gnone terminal resized itself to nothing, and other quirks...
They are driven by poorly informed managers rather than technological superiority.
I hope they can get their act together, but each release seems two steps back...
CAPTCHA = triggers (funny about that selection
I run a CentOS 6.3 desktop. My experience has been that updates, security and otherwise, have been released rather quickly after their upstream release, in about 1-3 days. I wouldn't expect quicker from anything done by a little batch of part-time volunteers.
Dunno about the mood of the developers; I don't frequent the lists. I've found, tho, that a lot of developers don't know how to deal with users, in person or otherwise.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I run CentOS as my desktop and it's great. That's what happens when Red Hat takes a good Fedora release and debugs and polishes it for several years.
However, there's no doubt that, at its core, CentOS is aging. At some point, I fully expect to move elsewhere because I will want be able to run what I want to run.
On Fedora 18: I've installed and played with several of the alpha, beta and test candidates. Other than the new Anaconda, this looks like a very nice release. The new Anaconda design, at present, does not present an obvious workflow. I.e., the first few times I used it I wasn't sure what I was supposed to click on or do next. Manual/custom partitioning has been a real quagmire. The new design is the kind of app that really needs little bubbles of explanatory text that pop up when you cursor over them. For starters. (An installer is a complex application, with intimate links to the distribution it installs, yet it needs the capacity to be quickly adapted to new releases. So, I'll cut them a lot of slack.)
Anyway, I've never understood why Fedora commits itself to the 6-month cycle, unless there are internal Red Hat requirements. At the least, have the deadline, but keep it internal only. Why set yourself up for public basing when you don't meet an artificial schedule?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
In Soviet Russia fedora LOVE I!