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Fedora 19 Released
hypnosec writes "The Fedora Project has officially announced the release of Fedora 19 'Schrödinger's Cat' today. New features for the open source distribution include the developer's assistant, which accelerates development efforts by providing templates, samples and toolchains for a different languages; OpenShift Origin, which allows easy building of Platform-as-a-Service infrastructure; node.js; Ruby 2.0.0; MariaDB; Checkpoint & Restore, which allows users to checkpoint and restore processes; and OpenLMI, which makes remote management of machines simpler. The distribution also packs GNOME 3.8, KDE Plasma Workspace 4.10 and MATE Desktop 1.6."
Damn. Now I'll never know if my system is up or down w/o opening the case.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'm not going to click the link; I don't want to risk killing it.
I'm better off not knowing.
I've said it before, and I'll said it again: Fedora's GNOME has really lost me. I've been a longtime Fedora user, and I still like the distro, but I'm giving GNOME a pass in Fedora 19 and going back to Xfce.
Fedora 19 includes GNOME 3.8 as the graphical desktop, and I've previously noted that GNOME 3 has poor usability. The GNOME developers have continued this poor usability trend in GNOME 3, which fails to meet two of the four themes of successful usability: Consistency and Menus. Where are the menus? There is no "File" menu that allows me to do operations on files. There is no "Help" menu that I can use when I get stuck. The updated file manager (Nautilus) doesn't have a menu, but other programs in GNOME 3 do (Gedit has menus, and is part of GNOME). Also: when you maximize a Nautilus window, either to the full screen or to half of the screen, the title bar disappears. I don't understand why. The programs do not act consistently.
I will give a positive comment that the updated GNOME file manager now makes it easier to connect to a remote server. This used to be an obvious action under the "File" menu, but in GNOME 3 it is an action directly inside the navigation area. So that's a step in the right direction.
The updated GNOME desktop environment seems to avoid familiar "desktop" conventions, tending towards a "tablet-like" interface. This further removes the obviousness of the new desktop, and it's familiarity.
So it's not really that "Fedora has lost me," but the GNOME desktop. I consider Xfce to have much better usability than GNOME. While I haven't done a formal usability study of Xfce, my heuristic usability evaluation is that Xfce meets all four of the key themes: Familiarity, Consistency, Menus, and Obviousness. The menus are there, and everything is consistent. The default Xfce uses a theme that is familiar to most users, and actions are obvious. Sure, a few areas still need some polish (like the Applications menu, and some icons) but Xfce already seems better than GNOME.
Additionally, if you are technically capable, you can dramatically modify the appearance of Xfce to make it look and act according to your preferences. At home, I've modified my Xfce desktop to something similar to Google's Chromebook (see example and instructions). It works really well and I find it is even easier to use than the default Xfce desktop.
I approve of the code name of this release
They're both fine. What's more surprising to me is that both of them have completely missed the functionality that puppet, cfengine, et. al. provide.
It used to be that distros would adopt and integrate such functionality. So many of the Fedora 'spins' could simply be expressed as a puppet script. Having a well-supported "make me a mailserver" etc. would be great too.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
And whether you really really want it to always display correctly on the login screen on VTs...sigh.
Personally, I've found yum to be much much slower than apt under normal/default usage.
However, rpm has been MUCH MUCH easier to use than dpkg and it runs quite well. I LOVE the syntax of rpm. I also love apt and its syntax for what it does. If those two could get married, I'd be very happy.
Another one that's pretty darn awesome is emerge. I feel like they got it right almost all around, except that it wasn't made with binary packages in mind, so that part isn't as elegant (IMO).
Give me debdelta and we can talk. Everyone say apt is faster that yum, but until deb based distributions give me the equivalent of deltarpm as an stable feature, yum will always be faster for me on my awful internet connection that apt
The 'real' difference between apt and yum is not as large as it seems, because apt 'cheats' - it has a cron job to download metadata in the background. yum refreshes its metadata only when you run a yum command, so if you don't run them very often, every time you do, you have to wait through a metadata refresh. That's usually what people are complaining about when they complain about yum being slow.
Having said that, even after accounting for that factor, yum's performance could stand improvement, and in fact we're working on that. The package manager currently called 'DNF' is really 'the next major version of yum' being developed in a sort of stealth mode. yum itself is in maintenance-only mode, and all new work is being done on DNF. Once it's mature enough, it will become The New Yum in a future Fedora release. If you're impatient, you can install dnf on Fedora 18 or Fedora 19 and use it instead of yum, with most of the same syntax. It has not yet reached feature parity with yum - including some significant features like 'yum history' - but what it does, it does noticeably faster than yum does it.
I think it was a good decision to continue using that name when bugs started to appear, like this bug Fedora 19 bugs cannot be reported because the server side cannot handle the release name "Schrödinger's Cat"
Funnily enough, on Fedora:
yum groupinstall mail-server
Puppet is really for *site-specific* configuration stuff, in my way of looking at things.
And no, Fedora spins could not simply be expressed as puppet scripts, unfortunately. We are considering various proposals for updating how Fedora images are generated (the current system for building live images is pretty hideous behind the scenes), some of which incorporate the use of something like puppet, but something like puppet in itself is not sufficient infrastructure for generating operating system images, it requires rather more bits.
I do love being told I don't know anything by ACs.
Sigh... How many times will this need to be explained? All MySQL code was always Copyright MySQL AB. External contributions to the project required copyright assignment to MySQL AB (just like contributions to GNU projects require copyright assignment to FSF). Sun Microsystems bought the copyright to MySQL, and Oracle bought Sun. The copyright holder can release their IP under any license they want. They cannot revoke the GPL (or other copyleft) license on anything already released under that license. You don't lose your rights to anything MySQL AB and/or Sun Microsystems already released under GPL. But you have no right to demand that the copyright owner release future versions under any particular license.
It speeds up network connections? Where can I get this magical software?!
And even more ironic is that slashdot still can't handle UTF-8...
Spending countless man--hours on rounded corners and bandwidth-eating Ajax is apparently more important than fixing the broken text input.
It would not make sense for a distro like Fedora to be as stringent with packaging policies as stable Debian is,
Have you packaged something for fedora before? It's packaging policies are quite stringent.
Here's a portion of it
It isn't integrated into apt but debdelta exists and is used daily:
http://packages.debian.org/sid/debdelta
Spacewalk (which is the 'upstream' version of RH's Satellite, btw) and puppet aren't exactly intended to do the same things, AFAIK. Google has some useful results, inc. http://www.brightprocess.com/?p=306 and http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2009-November/085138.html . I'm no expert on the field (I'm much more down at the duct tape end) but it looks like people actually tend to use both together.
As much as I dislike RMS, I don't think he's a sellout. I very much doubt the FSF would ever sell the GNU copyrights to an organisation that doesn't have similar ideals.