Fedora 18 Released

ultranerdz writes "Fedora 18 has been released. Featuring a new installer UI, GNOME 3.6, Clojure, DragonEgg, KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.9, MATE Desktop, Samba 4, Secure Boot, and updated major packages versions, this is one of the most anticipated Fedora versions yet. After more than two months of slips and delays, Fedora 18 is finally here." I'm glad to see MATE becoming more widely available; it suits me, as a GNOME 2 fan but not a complete troglodyte.

Comments

How's the live version?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do my testing off USB.

Ok, that and my new system doesn't have a HDD yet. Got to split up those bills with my paycheck.

How is MATE?

[dstyle5]

I'm tiring of Gnome 3, but would like to stick with Fedora. What are /.ers opinions of MATE?

Re:How is MATE?

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME 3.6 is ok for me. I've been using XFCE since some days ago, but now I think I can handle GNOME 3.6.

They are slowly fixing it and you can add extensions to get a more Legacy Desktop feeling.

I am looking forward the next versions, and more extensions.

Re:How is MATE?

[armanox]

MATE seems to pick up right were GNOME 2 stopped. A few of the program names have changed to avoid conflicts with GNOME 3, but I've been using MATE on Fedora since F16 (been using KDE again too).

Re:How is MATE?

[qwertphobia]

Mate is nice. I wanted to like Gnome 3 but just couldn't... it's really backwards for me as a network admin. Gnome 2 is so much more streamlined to my work habits, so I was pleased to find the Mate project.

Re:How is MATE?

[lastx33]

I'm using Mate 1.4 and it is good and definitely improving. There are still some bits of integration, especially in the file manager, which could do with improvement but it's coming along at a pace considering they are also removing a lot of redundant code from Gnome 2. The user experience in pretty near to the final versions of Gnome 2 and coming versions should be even better. Overall, very nice.

Re:How is MATE?

[arth1]

While MATE is nice, it's not as nice as Gnome 2 was in all respects. You don't have compiz, so no wobbly windows or desktop cube, for example.
The renaming also has some side effects when used with programs that expect the gnome naming, so while most things work, not everything does.

Because MATE isn't quite there yet, and because systemd is an abomination unto Nuggan and grub2 doesn't co-exist with other bootloaders gracefully, I'm still on Fedora 14, and strongly considering going back to Gentoo.

Re:How is MATE?

[Anonymous Coward]

gnome 3 is fine for me too

Re:How is MATE?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, CDE builds and runs fine so I'm sticking with that.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

Re:How is MATE?

[Cassini2]

After trying very hard to like Unity for several versions, I tried Linux Mint. MATE is a pleasure to use. Everything is where I instinctively look to find it.

You can try prying MATE out of my cold dead hands.

Re:How is MATE?

[ssam]

(I have been running F18 with mate since mid december)
Note that fedora 18 repos only have small selection of mate packages. for example mate-panel-applets is missing, so no system monitor in your panel. none of the MATE apps (beyond the file manager and terminal), and when you run gnome3 apps they dont pick up theming. So while on paper fedora 18 has MATE as an option, the integration is poor. Hopefully this will be improved.

There is an unofficial more complete MATE repo, but it does not support F18 yet.

Re:How is MATE?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have compiz, so no wobbly windows or desktop cube, for example.

Just good news. Where do I sign.

Re:How is MATE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Same. XFCE has been a serviceable hold-over, and I'm thankful for that, but its gross deficiencies are really getting on my nerves.

Re:How is MATE?

[arth1]

Mate is nice. I wanted to like Gnome 3 but just couldn't... it's really backwards for me as a network admin.

Amen. Getting it to play well with remote X or typical rack KVMs with 1024x768 resolution is an exercise in futility. Not to mention running in VMs or remote windows, with the braindead hot spot corners and edges.
Sorry, Gnome 3 devs, I don't want to buy into your iPad envy.

Re:How is MATE?

[ssam]

If you want properly integrated MATE then Fedora is not the best distro. I suggest trying MINT to see how well it can work.

Re:How is MATE?

[Anonymous Coward]

and when you run gnome3 apps they dont pick up theming

This is really a problem with your theme selector (and possibly your theme). The programs that use gtk3 are not "Gnome 3 apps", they are ... programs that use gtk3. Gnome 2 was built around gtk2, so its theme selector doesn't properly set the configuration for gtk3, and I would guess this has carried into MATE. This wouldn't be a problem to fix, except that there are themes out there that only include support for gtk2 (because they are old), so there is no possible way for them to work with gtk3. If you really want to have a consistent theme, you need to 1) make sure your theme supports both gtk2 and gtk3, and 2) use a theme selector that supports this, like lxappearance.

I'm rather suprised that MATE's theme selector hasn't been patched to support gtk3, but perhaps they are holding that for a full migration of MATE from gtk2 to gtk3 (which is itself planned).

Re:How is MATE?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is nice to hear. I'd already decided that when I get a new computer in a few months, then I'll be switching to Mint. I've used Fedora from 7 to 14 and had so many problems with 14 randomly locking up that I decided I wasn't upgrading anymore (side note: after 14 was end-of-life'd, the locking up problems stopped altogether - so, not a problem with my machine). So, I'm still using 14 for a little while longer and then Fedora is history. I'm tired of having my operating system end-of-life'd every year and I'm tired of having to dick around with codecs and etc.

Re:How is MATE?

[ssam]

if i could make gtk3 use the theme that they would use under GNOME3 that would be an improvement. a bit of inconsistency is better than grey boxes with no icons.

The mate roadmap has "Add GTK3 support for most themes" for 1.6, so i guess that is what is needed.

Re:How is MATE?

[Duncan J Murray]

I gave it a go with Mint 13 - and on the whole I really liked it. There was the odd minor bug, though - some blacking out of the display for no apparent reason used to happen quite often.

I think MATE is the way of the future for me - but I'm waiting for it to become a little more mature. In the meantime, I went back to Gnome 2 with 10.04, and I'm quite* happy.

D

*I say 'quite', because the old gtk seems to be holding me back re: versions of software, which seem to be developed for gtk3 and onwards - so some slight stunting the libreoffice and gimp regards.

Re:How is MATE?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

What's wrong with systemd?

Re:How is MATE?

[arth1]

What's wrong with systemd?

Where should I start?
It abstracts services to the point you can't find them.
It breaks existing sysv startup/shutdown scripts for commercial software. (The reply from vendors of commercial software is pretty unison: We don't support systems with systemd)
It assumes start and stop are always oneliners, so you end up writing startup/shutdown scripts anyhow cause systemd isn't good enough.
It breaks standard runlevels.
It uses the old MSDOS .ini file format, which is severely sysadmin-unfriendly (grep doesn't understand MSDOS [section]s, for example). ... and quite a lot more.

In short, it was clearly written by someone who didn't come from a Unix background. ... or, just try "systemctl -a | cat"[*] , and compare that to "chkconfig" and "rc-update show".

[*]: Yes, the cat is needed, or else it pauses and waits for input - whoever coded this should know that if the user wants paging, he can pipe it to a pager of choice for that task. But nooo, of course you have to do things differently to be different.

In short, it's as bad as pulseaudio, and for many of the same reasons.

Re:How is MATE?

[armanox]

I'm using GRUB 1 myself.

Re:How is MATE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said, but you missed the part that without the flag "--full", you get ?what? ellipsed output.

I'm guessing it was develped on an Android phone.

Re:How is MATE?

[AdamWill]

...you could just press the Super key. which brings up everything you can alternatively bring up using an edge or corner.

Re:How is MATE?

[AdamWill]

I'm not sure how this is 'informative' when it's an assertion backed by precisely zero evidence.

Re:How is MATE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the actual code for MATE, Cinnamon, Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 comes from developers associated with Fedora and RedHat. Exactly how is MATE better "integrated" in MINT?

Re:How is MATE?

[Anonymous Coward]

MATE in fedora is not complete (some useful packages missing). There are theme issues you run GTK3 apps (ie missing icons), given that most of the MATE applications are missing you end up using the GTK3 ones. Configuring power management is broken.

Re:How is MATE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora 14 was a great release, probably that last good version of Fedora

Re:How is MATE?

[KiloByte]

While MATE is nice, it's not as nice as Gnome 2 was in all respects. You don't have compiz, so no wobbly windows or desktop cube, for example.

Uhm... compiz works just great with MATE, exactly the same as with Gnome 2 (which required it to be installed separately just as well). Compiz works almost as good with XFCE, too.

And compiz has more than just wobbly windows. Nice zoom (Super-MWHEELUP). Partial transparency of windows on demand (Alt-MWHEELDOWN). Deuteranope/tritanope colour filters. And so on, so on.

Re:How is MATE?

[arth1]

Uhm... compiz works just great with MATE, exactly the same as with Gnome 2

Not in Fedora 18, the topic here. Thus my phrasing "You don't have compiz, so ...", because F18 does not have compiz.

(And thus no packages or subpackages that depends on it either, like desktop-effects, beryl, emerald, compiz-gconf...).

Funnily enough, compiz seems to be available for F17 and F19, just not F18.

Re:How is MATE?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Some of that is valid, and some of that just seems archaic.
Runlevels need to go away.
Writing an ini parser that can be used in conjunction with grep is trivial.

In short, it seems like a big improvement over the sysv init. I'm not sure who the commercial software companies are, but all of the scripts I've converted are pretty simple. Seems kind of stupid to not do it.

But what do I know, I Iike pulse audio as well.

Re:How is MATE?

[arth1]

Runlevels need to go away.

Why? Because you yourself never enter "init 2" to do important maintenance that has to be done offline, or set the runlevel to 3 on servers to avoid starting any kind of graphical crap?
It's very useful for those of us who do more than just run apps in a GUI.

Writing an ini parser that can be used in conjunction with grep is trivial.

No, it's not, without breaking compatibility and introducing yet another learning curve. And it won't be present on all systems, so you need to take an additional step to provide it yourself. And it won't do much good if what you wanted grep for was to pipe the filenames to sed, unless you also create a special tool for sed, and install/teach/remember it.

Your "solution" is an excellent example of how the new generation of Fedora devs think. They don't stop to think of why things were done certain ways, but charge on in their eagerness to change what wasn't broken, bullheaded and oblivious to history, providing inadequate workarounds later.

In short, the whole DOS .ini file use is an abomination and doesn't belong in Unix like systems. Kill it with fire.

Re:How is MATE?

[jackdoll]

I've been using MATE since F16 -skipped F15 because I couldn't stomach the G3 change. I am very pleased to say that MATE has run without a hitch on five machines, 2 AMD desktops, and three ancient Thinkpads, all running F17. I'm hoping people will use MATE and encourage it's development so it will become the live fork that many of us wish G3 had been. No offence meant to G3. This is from a 71yr-old geek who could not code a desktop, but I know what I like.

Re:How is MATE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Add to this random bugs popping where none were existing before. Oh, like aborting the boot sequence and entering "maintenance mode" because some odd mount from fstab failed. Perhaps random hangs when rebooting? Messed up dependencies because even in-house RH developers for some reason assume that daemons start instantly. "Magical" and not all that well documented special applications that autogenerate stuff on behind scenes? Reimplementing even basic functionality like "mount -a" with occasional addition of new and interesting bugs (e.g. how cool is to run try and run fsck on NFS mount because whoever wrote the code didn't think about NFS mounts in fstab). It's immature code, it's duplicating stable and well behaving stuff, and on a very personal note, decision that udevd, without which hotplug for linux de-facto doesn't work well, must become inseparable part of steaming pile of bovine fecal matter (a.k.a. systemd collective) thus forcing me and everybody else who only needs working /dev management for linux kernel, to deal with compiling systemd and gazillion of its dependecies just to extract binary one single thing that actually matters and works.

It's a busybox of system utilities that are directly or indirectly reimplemented just to do it and without any real reason to do it in this particular all-encompasing, bloated way. I assume that in future they will add their own shell as well, as bash or zsh probaly take too long to start after logging in on the console and in some twisted and absurd way, that is a problem that needs to be solved in utility that "only runs other stuff that needs to start on boot".

systemd is a pi**-poor solution to problem that didn't exist for power users and is of only interest to those that benchmark their systems based on "how long does it take to boot". All other alternatives are currently better, up to and including including GNU make as an init process.

And again on a very personal not, each project that promises or even remotely wishes to fork udevd even if just to keep it sane and separate from this prime example Vogon poetry gets my unreserved and complete support in time, in bug fixes and/or in donations as much as I can possibly give.

Xfce

[tepples]

I'm glad to see MATE becoming more widely available; it suits me, as a GNOME 2 fan but not a complete troglodyte.

I agree it's nice to have more options, provided it doesn't unnecessarily split the efforts of the community to produce free software attractive to users of various skill levels. But how is Xfce only for "a complete troglodyte"? As a GNOME 2 fan, I switched to Xfce in December of 2011 to get out from under Ubuntu Unity.

Re:Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

You should try the 2012/2013 Unity - very nice.

Also, I'm not sure why people switch to XFCE when there's KDE for people who want an environment and Fluxbox/LXDE for people who want lightweight.

http://memegenerator.net/instance/33415256

Re:Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

I generally run XFCE and IceWM myself and am trying out LXDE. I design UIs. I just don't want the overhead.

I wish I live in a cave. I imagine my heating and cooling bills would be less.

Re:Xfce

[vlm]

But how is Xfce only for "a complete troglodyte"?

He's making fun of my WM which is "awesome window manager" which is pretty much ratpoison with limited mouse support (weird, I know) and Lua scripting.

Note that I need and use a WM not a complete desktop GUI environment. I don't need or want a complete desktop GUI environment nor am I interested in one. Just a WM please.

Virtual tabs/screens, an interface into the system wide menu system, some way to move windows around on the screen, that's really all I want/need.

Re:Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

To be pedantic, AwesomeWM is very different from Ratpoison. Ratpoison is a manual tiler, Awesome is an automatic tiler*. You would be better off comparing it to something like DWM (Awesome was a DWM patch a long long long long time ago, if the rumors I've heard are true), WMFS, or Xmonad.

* For those who wonder, if you open another window in an automatic tiling WM, the WM will make space for the new application on its own. A manual tiler won't even bother, so you get/have to slice up the screen yourself.

Re:Xfce

[ssam]

when i get to work and plug a monitor into my laptop
* on GNOME2, GNOME3 and MATE, it automatically configures it to how how it was set last time (and remembers settings per monitor)
* on KDE i get a message saying, 'you plugged in a monitor, do you want to configure it', and then i can go into a rather epic config window and choose what i want (again)
* on light weight WMs it either does nothing, or just switches to a default dual screen setup (ie with the monitor on the wrong side)

Re:Xfce

[Tarlus]

There are many reasons why people might choose XFCE over KDE.

Re:Xfce

[cupantae]

First of all, Fluxbox is little more than a window manager, so that's not really comparable to Gnome, KDE, Xfce, LXDE or Unity, which are full desktop environments.

Personally, I like Xfce. Here are some reasons:
1. It's much lighter on resources than Gnome 2/3, KDE or Unity, and a lot snappier.
2. It does have a (fairly limited) compositor, which gives you transparency and shadow options. This doesn't add much in terms of "eye candy", but I'm not really interested in that, and I find these features far more useful than the fancy compiz stuff.
3. I find that Xfce programs play nicely with things outside of Xfce. You don't, for example, get the likes of nautilus starting up a whole load of other services when you actually just want a file manager.
4. Xfce programs have a greater tendency to let you customise things by inserting terminal commands than Gnome or KDE. As a result, I find the Xfce panel easier to work with than the KDE or Gnome ones.
5. I prefer the look of Xfce to any of the others, with the possible exception of Gnome 3. I know it looks more dated, but I like it anyway.
6. It's the only one of them for which I've never thought an "upgrade" was actually a downgrade.

So there you go. That's why. I should add, though, that some of the Xfce programs (e.g. Midori, Squeeze, Ristretto) are of low quality and have to be substituted, but then again, I would never use Konqueror or Epiphany anyway. From what little time I've spent LXDE, I've found it suffers even more from this (I don't even like the terminal emulator).

Re:Xfce

[cupantae]

(I don't even like the terminal emulator)

Just in case anyone takes me up on this, I just tried LXTerminal again now, and I can't for the life of me remember what I didn't like about it.

Re:Xfce

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not have a KDE computer close to tell you exactly, but you have to click a button on the configuration to make it the default for the pair of monitors.

Re:Xfce

[timbo234]

Yeah, it's a problem with KDE but they are working on it:
"The best part of all this is that users won’t be exposed to the KCM very often, because connecting an already-known monitor will configure it and place it automatically depending on the last configuration. Connecting a previously unknown output should pop up a simple window/dialog..."
http://www.progdan.cz/2012/09/display-management-in-kde/

Feedback

[TitusC3v5]

Glad to see that the Fedora devs are listening to their userbase, according to the new fedUP tool. :)

Re:Feedback

[hey]

I just tried fed up and got "Error: can't get boot images"
Probably means its not ready just yet.

Re:Feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, had Ubuntu done something like this - introduce Unity, even as a default, but offer the choices of GNOME2/Mate and GNOME3, they'd have been fine. Or another thing they could have done - introduce a new variation called Gubuntu which could have offered either GNOME2 or GNOME3, offer Unity for Ubuntu itself, and essentially, offer all the options bundled together. As it is, Kubuntu is no longer under the Ubuntu flag, so that's one thing that Canonical no longer offers or supports.

Re:Feedback

[0racle]

I got the upgrade started by adding the following option to fedup-cli
--instrepo http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/18/Fedora/x86_64/os/

obviously replace x86_64 with i386 if you have to.

Re:Feedback

[hey]

Hey thanks. That works for me.

Cinnamon

[mx b]

The summary forgot to include Cinnamon (unless it was removed after the beta? I am in the process of running an upgrade!). I have been pleasantly surprised with Cinnamon. In general seems a nice release, the main gripe was the new installer. Does not seem to allow as much choice in terms of packages to install; seems to be a big list of presets without much customization until after it is already installed. It is a pretty though.

Re:Cinnamon

[rubycodez]

I like cinnamon and so use it at work, but with my home system it crashes my nvidia driver and/or seizes up the machine. so I put in Mate instead, and no problems since.

Re:Cinnamon

[craigminah]

I too thought Cinnamon was in the beta...I use it in Mint and it's fantastic.

Re:Cinnamon

[Sponge Bath]

I'm getting hungry.

Re:Cinnamon

[drinkypoo]

I had the same experience on Ubuntu, so it's not just you, it's Cinnamon. My comment after trying it was "not ready for prime time". You know you're not ready for a 1.0 when Unity is higher-quality software.

Re:Cinnamon

[arth1]

I'm getting hungry.

Then have a beefy miracle!

Re:Cinnamon

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for mentioning it - I was wondering whether Cinnamon was included here or not. So the only thing missing here is Razor-qt - with that, Fedora would have had everything except Unity, and some of the fringe Window Managers out there.

Re:Cinnamon

[Anonymous Coward]

Then have a beefy miracle!

Sheesh, Fedora 17 is so pre-Mayan Apocalypse grandpa.

Re:Cinnamon

[kthreadd]

The installer will need some adjustment.

Fedora 18 features an installer that is rewritten and redesigned from the ground up. It replaces the old 13+ year old installer from previous versions of Fedora. You can learn more about it at the new installer informational page on the Fedora wiki.

That's 13+ years of refinement. There was very little that was wrong with it.

Re:Cinnamon

[Anonymous Coward]

That's 13+ years of refinement. There was very little that was wrong with it.

Until you compare it to ubiquity.

Re:Cinnamon

[rubycodez]

or, to be fair, might be nvidia problem. I score unity lower for being nearly useless for multi-app workflow

Re:Cinnamon

[drinkypoo]

I score unity lower for being nearly useless for multi-app workflow

You really have to use virtual desktops. If you don't want to do that, it stinks on ice. It's not my favorite way to do things and Unity is not perfect at that either, but it hasn't actually crashed on me in ages (which is a nice development, since it used to do that a whole lot.)

Re:Cinnamon

[bluefoxlucid]

Yeah, Gnome 3's interface rocks the pants off just about anything. The windows get separated and expanded out when you hit the Activities view, whereas Unity leaves them all where they are and doesn't give a task bar (no, the thing on the left isn't a replacement). Result? You can quickly swap windows in Gnome 3 and move them around virtual desktops, creating and destroying desktops as you need to; whereas in Unity you get to curse at the screen a lot and try to squeeze yourself into 4 desktops where any kind of mult-iwindow co-existence is painful. The only problems in Gnome 3 are not being able to re-order virtual desktops and having an incompetent alt-tab behavior.

Re:Cinnamon

[bluefoxlucid]

It was called "Anaconda" and I submitted an extension called "Trouser Snake" so they needed to rename it.

Re:Cinnamon

[urdak]

Fedora 18 features an installer that is rewritten and redesigned from the ground up. It replaces the old 13+ year old installer from previous versions of Fedora. You can learn more about it at the new installer informational page on the Fedora wiki.

That's 13+ years of refinement. There was very little that was wrong with it.

Really? As someone who installed/upgraded about 26 versions of Redhat and Fedora over the last 13 years, I can tell you, there was plenty wrong with it. The most obvious gaping hole was that while a package (out of the 2000 packages on the list) was installing, the whole thing froze. Usually this wasn't a big problem, but in rare cases where one of the 2000 packages had a script bug (and this happened SEVERAL times over the last 13 years), the whole installation froze, and there was nothing you could do about it - you wouldn't even know about it because the display blanked, and that's it. At least after a rewrite they used a normal GUI framework, where while running a package's script, the event loop continues to run, and the GUI still works.

Firewalld

[Anonymous Coward]

Would have been nice if they simplified the cryptic QoS syntax or even include it. Perhaps the next version.

uh huh

[Anonymous Coward]

Now let's all talk about how Windows Updates are terrible, lol.

Razor-qt

[Anonymous Coward]

... and Razor-qt for those who want a Qt based lightweight desktop

Re:Razor-qt

[Karzz1]

Amen Brother! I really don't like GTK, and Razor-qt has really become quite usable on my old laptop (PIII 1.2Ghz, 512MB RAM, GeForce2MX Mobile 32MB).

I also use it as a fall back desktop on my Gentoo machines in event I break something on the main desktop. Razor-qt compiles in a few minutes compared to the hours it takes to recompile KDE.

Also, if you use kwin as the window manager you get all the desktop effects available in KDE without the overhead of Plasma.

LXDE

[Anonymous Coward]

> ... and Fluxbox/LXDE for people who want lightweight...

As a former XFCE, and a current LXDE user, I would say that XFCE and LXDE are in the same class.
Fluxbox, Blackbox and similar are just window managers and not really compatible.

I recommend LXDE over XFCE, because it is lighter, more modular and the functionality is comparable to XFCE or GNOME 2.

yum vs apt vs pacman

[Dimwit]

So the only thing that keeps me from using Fedora is yum. I do a lot of "experimental" or "temporary" package installations. I want to try out a new editor or a new programming language or something, so I do an installation. All of the various package managers will automatically pull in the dependencies, which is great, but yum doesn't uninstall these dependencies when I uninstall the original package. So, say I install something that requires 9803942834 dependencies. When I uninstall it under Debian, all those dependencies leave with it - when I uninstall it on Fedora, I still have 9803942834 - 1 packages laying around. It's annoying. Get that fixed with yum, and I'll give Fedora a shot again.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[Dimwit]

...and looking, apparently they fixed that a while ago. Interesting. I'll have to check it out.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[Anonymous Coward]

The "yum history" system is a great solution for this. It gives you an easy way to roll back whole package transactions.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[Anonymous Coward]

When you remove a package under Debian APT does not automatically remove the dependencies, you have to run apt-get autoremove after un-installing the package you were testing. If you want to have YUM remove dependencies which are no longer required, you can set it up to do that for you. See this documentation page: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/14/html/Software_Management_Guide/ch06s17.html

Your "issue" was taken care of years ago, so maybe it is time to give Fedora another shot.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[ssam]

Yum/rpm has only 1 level of depends.

Apt/dpkg has depends, recommends and suggests. by default 'depends' and 'recommends' get installed. but if you want small and light you can set apt to just install 'depends'. if you want all the features of a program to work when you install it then you can install the 'recommends' and 'suggests'. i'd love to see yum/rpm pick this up.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[tonyAG]

Have you looked at the yum history ability. Esp the ability to 'undo' a transaction? Do man on yum and look for 'rollback'.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't stand how yum is case sensitive.. It's one big thing to me that gives apt a huge advantage. Just 2 days ago I tried to install a package (can't remember the name so ill call it package) doing yum install package.. Yum spits back package not found, did you mean Package

If its the only damn package named package (for example no package named Package), then it should just say we found Package, do you want to install? Or just install Package. It's annoying as shit having to know the exact package name (and one thing I like about aptitude and its auto search.. Type pack and it will go pack not found but here's 20 other packages that contain pack)

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[Anonymous Coward]

A yum plugin called yum-plugin-remove-with-leaves removes all dependencies.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're serious about what you're saying then setup something like Vagrant/Virtualbox or similar

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[Anonymous Coward]

yum install yum-plugin-remove-with-leaves
yum remove --remove-leaves

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[bluefoxlucid]

so, "install a plug-in to remove a specific package's dependencies" versus "we track and mark all the manually installed packages, and you can promote/demote packages at will. At any point you can ask apt what all the auto-removable packages are and do house keeping, or mark one or two you want to keep and then do housekeeping." One of these is a more powerful tool.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[bluefoxlucid]

Or alternately, just migrate Fedora wholesale onto dpkg.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[AdamWill]

It's already available in RPM. There's periodic discussion about using it in Fedora, but the discussion always turns to perfectly valid theoretical scenarios in which soft dependencies can cause problems. I'd still like to see us use them on the basis that in *practice* there's a perfectly respectable RPM-based distro out there which has been using them for years and has been able to manage any problems which come up - Mandriva/Mageia - but the naysayers have a valid point at least in theory, soft dependencies make dependency management a lot more complex and can result in some pretty broken corner cases.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[jaminJay]

YUM does those things: Because I'm lazy...

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[arth1]

Unix-like systems are case sensitive -- deal.

• When you use "find", you have to specify -name '*.jpg' -o -name '*.JPG' to find both.
• A variable foo in bash isn't the same as the variable FOO (or Foo or fOo or foO or FoO or fOO).
• "makefile" is not the same as "Makefile", and both can (and sometimes do) exist in the same directory.
• The command GET does not do the same as get
• "filename.z" is not the same as "filename.Z" - the former is a pack file and the later a compress file. (Or they may both be text files, because file extensions are only advisory.)

There are operating systems that are case insensitive by default, but Linux isn't one of them. Most would consider this a strength of Linux.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[Nivag064]

From the man page for the 'find' command:

            -iname pattern
                            Like -name, but the match is case insensitive. For example, the
                            patterns `fo*' and `F??' match the file names `Foo', `FOO',
                            `foo', `fOo', etc. The pattern `*foo*` will also match a file
                            called '.foobar'.
              [...]
              -ipath pattern
                            Like -path. but the match is case insensitive.

              -iregex pattern
                            Like -regex, but the match is case insensitive.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[nuonguy]

I wish yum handled this better. I've been getting by with the yum-plugin-show-leaves, it at least tells which packages are new leaves when you uninstall something. Have you tried yum-plugin-remove-with-leaves ? Quote:

This extension removes unused dependencies which have been incorporated by an installation package that would otherwise not be removed. Helps maintain a system clean of libraries and unused packages.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[bluefoxlucid]

Apt/Deb has 4 levels of dependency, breaks much less often (though rpm --rebuilddb fixes the infrequent breakage), is much faster (yum is slow as hell, like running apt-get update on every operation.. `yum list installed` needs to access the mirrors?), is easier to make packages with, and has built-in tracking of actually selected packages and orphaned dependencies.

Yum/RPM has 'Requires' (as 'Dependencies'), occasionally breaks (rm /var/db/rpm/__db* && rpm --rebuilddb && yum clean), is slow and absolutely unusable without an internet connection, still uses the ridiculously complicated and inflexible SPEC format and build system (I've used both), and has some hackish and not-quite-adequate tools to semi-mimic `apt-get autoremove` but isn't quite there.

One of these is technically better.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[Anonymous Coward]

Set clean_requirements_on_remove=1 in /etc/yum.conf

No plugins needed. It's there, just not the default. It may flip out if you have packages still installed from really old versions that don't have the right metadata set, but you can fix that with yumdb set reason user (to say you meant to install it). It assumes reason=dep by default, iirc.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[crdotson]

Bzzzt! Wrong answer. OSes should be case-preserving but not case sensitive. Just because *ix systems have been doing it that way for ~40 years doesn't make it right. It certainly beats the hell out of all-uppercase 8.3, but still.

It would probably be a nightmare (cause a lot of compatibility problems) to change this with the filesystem or variable names at this point, but there's really no good reason I can think of to make new tools case sensitive.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[arth1]

there's really no good reason I can think of to make new tools case sensitive.

PowergenItalia is not the same as PowerGenitalia
PenIsland is not the same as PenisLand
ExpertsExchange is not the same as ExpertSexchange
WhoRepresents is not the same as WhorePresents
Therapist is not the same as TheRapist
MoleStation is not the same as Molestation
SpeedOfArt is not the same as SpeedoFart
GoTahoe is not the same as GotAHoe

These are real life examples on where case insensitivity has created problems that case sensitivity can solve.

Also, in some languages capitalized letters lose accents. And what's an accent or umlaut in one language is a separate letter in another. So you end up with names and variables that change whether they match with the language, unless you limit yourself to a subset, like ASCII.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[crdotson]

Yes, but give an example where you would want both of those names above in the same directory. I said case preserving, just not case sensitive.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[jaminJay]

And it's not apt/deb. Deb is the whole reason I gave up on Linux for a decade and will never return to a Debian-based distibution. The problems with RPM you list in the second paragraph have happened to me in the past, but not for over two years and only when I was doing things "off the beaten track". Also, I understand the SPEC format and have no idea how Deb is easier. So, this boils down to opinion, and your opinion appears to be based on whimsy at best, rather than fact.

TL;DR: RPM's not the greatest solution (fact), but Apt/Deb is worse (opinion).

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[bluefoxlucid]

Don't know how deb would get you to give up on Linux. What specific problems did you have?

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[jaminJay]

Dependency hell, as well as dpkg recalculating the dependencies after every modification to the list instead of waiting until the end. There were other problems, but all of their solutions involved adding packages and it quickly became so tedious it wasn't worth persisting with.

Re:yum vs apt vs pacman

[bluefoxlucid]

'dependency hell' doesn't sound like a thing to me. People complain about 'dependency hell' in Fedora/RPM and in Deb, all the time. That's everyone's excuse for running away from stupid broken Redhat and for running away from stupid broken Debian. I've run into dependency issues where I had to knock a package out because neither Yum nor Apt is smart enough to iteratively construct a dependency graph until convergence. I can probably trigger it in a few known cases (install Puppet 2.7, then add the puppetlabs repo and install Puppet 3.0... on Ubuntu 12.10) and get it added to apt, while Yum will probably lag behind forever. Note that the same happens with i.e. Percona, if you switch to Percona-Cluster-XtraDB from just Percona-Server... it can't reconcile that it needs to remove the Percona-Server-shared package (which is required for a dependency) and replace it with Percona-Cluster-XtraDB-shared (which satisfies the same dependency), so you have to rpm -e --force it and then install the package and Yum is happy.

Of course, in apt you can just apt-get -f install and it figures out what's wrong and fixes it. (-f means 'fix', and -f install fixes whatever's broken by installing the correct thing, replacing dependencies as needed without crying about it).

The tablets make me bitter..

[EasyTarget]

That's great, but.. does it still have tablet oriented nonsense like immovable huge dialog boxes that (for example) completely obscure the Print Preview in FFox, preventing me from previewing whatever I'm thinking of printing. Sigh.
Very big nuisance on my netbook with it's small screen. I kept it back at F16 just because of that. I'll upgrade, but wondering if the F18 experience will be a good one.

Re:The tablets make me bitter..

[kwalker]

If you don't like GNOME 3, you can pick a different spin:

Available spins as of this morning:
Fedora 18 Desktop Edition
Fedora 18 KDE Spin
Fedora 18 LXDE Spin
Fedora 18 Xfce Spin

Or you can do a minimal install from the installer ISO (Either on DVD, USB stick, or even over a network), then install a desktop of your choice from the following (Incomplete) list:
GNOME 3.6
Cinnamon
MATE
KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.9
Xfce 4.10
Enlightenment

I don't know if dialogs are still immovable, my ISO is still downloading.

http://get.fedoraproject.org/

Re:The tablets make me bitter..

[EasyTarget]

If you don't like GNOME 3, you can pick a different spin:

Thanks, I know and love them all ;-)
But I took the time to learn Gnome3 when it appeared, and have come to appreciate it as a very 'calm' and fluid place to work.
It has a few niggles (like the dialogs) but most are fixable with shell extensions etc..

I don't know if dialogs are still immovable, my ISO is still downloading.

I'm currently dd'ing mine to a USB stick; curious to see how it goes :-)

Re:The tablets make me bitter..

[EasyTarget]

Update: Immovable dialogs still presetn, and it has got worse: the system settings window cannot be repositioned now (no alt-grab possible on it) which might make F18 unusable on the netbook since it will push some settings etc off the screen completely.
Ho humm.. I'll still use it on my desktop. But might need to try ubuntu/unity on the aspire.

Re:The tablets make me bitter..

[kwalker]

Very very strange. I've got an F18 (i686 PAE) VM spun up and I'm looking at it now. The "System Settings" window is up on my screen and it's taking up about 1/3 of the 1280x1024 screen. I can drag it around like any window, but it won't maximize, even throwing it against the top of the screen doesn't maximize, but other windows do.

I did notice a layout bug in Anaconda, particularly the partition/lvm layout has some stuff running off the right edge of the screen, but I'm not seeing any problems with System Settings.

Love MATE

[Anonymous Coward]

MATE has matured over the last year, was a bit buggy at first fork. Very happy to have a simple clean DE.

GNOME2!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome. Now I just wish they would dump systemd for initv scripts, dump pulseaudio for OSS and remove all those broken X11 extensions so I can go back to using xv and netscape the way god intended.

Re:GNOME2!!!

[armanox]

I wish they would dump the systemd and go back to init scripts.

Linux mint kde rules

[Vince6791]

Kde is most stable on mint and kubuntu distros. Unity crashes and freezes once in a while same with the rest of the gui's and distros. The crashes and freezes reminds me of windows98 and XP issues. You want reliability go with kde using either mint or kubuntu. I have tried lxde, xfce, mate, cinnamon and they are all buggy and occasionally slow down.

But, I also had metroUI for windows 8 freeze on me a couple of times but the difference is that it did not crash the whole OS. The only thing I had to do to make metro work again is hit the Windows key to go into desktop and hit the key again to go into metro.

I hope ubuntu 13.04 fixes a lot of issues.

Re:Linux mint kde rules

[bluefoxlucid]

Ubuntu 13.04 is going to prep the system more for systemd by integrating parts of systemd instead of hackish compatibility layer bullshit. Maybe in 13.10 they'll dump upstart for systemd.

Re:Linux mint kde rules

[Anonymous Coward]

Kde is most stable on mint and kubuntu distros.

Meh. I haven't noticed any difference. Mint is great for the initial installation, since it includes all the libs and nonfree stuff you are likely to need for daily tasks, but I don't really care for the various Mint tools. Once the distro is installed, there doesn't seem to be much value added for me over the upstream packages.

I've run KDE via Mint, Kubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora, and Chakra. It's difficult to stay current with new KDE releases using the Ubuntu derivatives. OpenSUSE is supposed to be one of the more KDE-friendly distros, but I don't like how yast is involved in everything. Chakra is a KDE showcase but is really only good if you want a pure KDE/Qt environment.

I've settled on Fedora for now. Hopefully Spherical Cow won't make me hate life.

Kernel OOOPS with Fedora 18

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for Fedora 18. It just made my day. 1 day installation and the whole upcoming days to restore my corrupted backup.

VFS: Busy inodes after unmount of fuse. Self-destruct in 5 seconds. Have a nice day...
BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 00000034
IP: [ ] _raw_spin_lock+0xd/0x30
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0002 [#1] SMP
Modules linked in: xfs dm_crypt fuse ebtable_nat xt_CHECKSUM ipt_MASQUERADE ....
Pid: 17180, comm: gvfsd-trash Not tainted 3.x.x-x.fc18.i686 #1 LENOVO xxxxxxx/xxxxxxx
EIP: 0060:[ ] EFLAGS: 00010286 CPU: 1
EIP is at _raw_spin_lock+0xd/0x30
EAX: 00000034 EBX: efd85a50 ECX: 00000003 EDX: 00000100
ESI: efd85a54 EDI: efd2c000 EBP: eff8bf10 ESP: eff8bf10
DS: 007b ES: 007b FS: 00d8 GS: 00e0 SS: 0068
CR0: 80050033 CR2: 00000034 CR3: 2f7bb000 CR4: 000007d0
DR0: 00000000 DR1: 00000000 DR2: 00000000 DR3: 00000000
DR6: ffff0ff0 DR7: 00000400
Process gvfsd-trash (pid: 17180, ti=eff8a000 task=eff01920 task.ti=eff8a000)
Stack:
eff8bf28 c06211fd 00000000 efd2c000 efd2c09c f876c560 eff8bf30 c061d0d4
eff8bf3c c055daaf efd2c000 eff8bf48 c055db70 efd2c000 eff8bf5c c055dc72
efd2c000 efd2c054 efc11c00 eff8bf74 c055e261 ef55b540 f3d0a5a0 ef55b540
Call Trace:
[ ] selinux_inode_free_security+0x2d/0x70
[ ] security_inode_free+0x14/0x20
[ ] __destroy_inode+0x1f/0xc0
[ ] destroy_inode+0x20/0x50
[ ] evict+0xd2/0x150
[ ] iput+0xc1/0x140
[ ] fsnotify_destroy_mark+0x117/0x120
[ ] sys_inotify_rm_watch+0x5a/0x90
[ ] sysenter_do_call+0x12/0x28
Code: ff ff ff ff 89 e5 ba 01 00 00 00 e8 ee fe ff ff 5d c3 90 90 90 90 90 90 ....
EIP: [ ] _raw_spin_lock+0xd/0x30 SS:ESP 0068:eff8bf10
CR2: 0000000000000034
---[ end trace 8079874ae18c4783 ]---

Re:Kernel OOOPS with Fedora 18

[Anonymous Coward]

On the bright side, it looks like SELinux has protected your data from theft. Good job, NSA! Also, you have some trash mechanism that is good at permanently deleting files.

Seriously, though, some combinations of things cause that to happen. For me, it was a combination of udev, the crypt device-mapper target, and compiling one too many things out of the kernel. [The kernel program can't possibly know that I need an aes-xts-essiv:sha256 crypt, so it will let me deselect AES, XTS, the SHA256 algorithm, and the ESSIV functionality all day long.] I try to open the crypt on boot and get that same, good ol' NULL pointer dereference message. Is it beyond hope to use a utility disk (maybe a not-version-18 Fedora Security Spin) to see if you can get back at that data?

So maybe there was a module missing, and you found out at exactly the wrong time. I've been there and feel your pain.

MATE, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me take this opportunity to tell you about tiling WMs.

I used to use GNOME 1.4 when I started using Linux.
Got super excited for GNOME2 when Gtk 2 was in development.

Used GNOME 2 for many years. It's what CentOS 5 and 6 ship with.

Tried Fedora a while back (use CentOS at work, wanted newer packages for some apps). WTF GNOME 3 DO NOT WANT.

Tried XFCE, KDE, E. Nope. Do not want. I want GNOME 2.
Finally I give up. Played with several tiling WMs (wmii, awesome, xmonad, i3) and picked i3.

Not looking back. If you use Linux for software engineering and spend all day with terminals, browsers, and text editors open, check out a tiling window manager.

Now I don't care what the latest Linux desktop environment disaster is. Tiling WM is just better.

P.S. Fuck GNOME 3 and all the fools that ruined a perfectly good project.

Re:MATE, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the comments, I'll probaby try them.

Story logo.

[ChunderDownunder]

You've still got the gnome logo for a mate/fedora story. :(

A logo featuring an image like this maybe?

Great Strides in the Proper Heading

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd about given up on the Fedora Project (think Fedora 15/Gnome 3). Mate's integration in Fedora 17 kept me lingering around for a little while longer, and though I watched the delayed release, be delayed again, Fedora 18 seems on a much better heading.

Though some of the bells and whistles remain on Mate's integration, on a netinstall with Mate, I think I have the leanest, yet functional, Fedora install I've seen in years. Mate/Gnome 2 reintegration into Fedora seems a *lot* less painless than Gnome 3's entry

Minor highlights I noted - New Anaconda, yes, but: encryption install works (inclusive of swap!), additionally, if multiple partitions have the same passphrase, you only get prompted once. Yum seems to have multiple concurrent rpm downloading.

Thus far, with only one day's use, the only lacking feature I've noted, would be on the sound architecture. It's an issue that's plagued linux for a while in pulse/alsa/oss. Sound playback overall seems fine on a Netbook. But then little things, like why the microphone doesn't work (bad static) with Skype, or when I plug in my HDMI cable to a TV, why doesn't my volume control have an easy way to pipe sound via HDMI and not the Analog? Worse, why do I need to install, and delve into pavucontol? To me, that's a minor issue, as compared to say, Mint/Mate, where my non-standard (Acer AO756) touchpad hardware didn't seem to exist.

about fedoa 18

[Anonymous Coward]

according to project managers its anaconda intaller is the main reason behind its delay bt it may be a system crash behind the delay of Fedora 18

Samba4?

[sans17]

Samba4 is only half there - AD DC is not available because of MIT Kerberos.