Submitted by Fedora 8 Release Candidate 3 has been released. “Fedora 8 Release Candidate 3 has been released on the torrent site. Both DVD and Live images have been provided. Unless something goes terribly wrong, these will be the same bits (modulo gpg signed SHA1SUM files) that will go to the mirrors for the final Fedora 8 release.” Update: There is an interview up about CodecBuddy’s inclusion in Fedora 8 with the two developers behind this feature.
Going to try this one. Perhaps my laptop won’t die when I close the lid like with the newest Ubuntu.
Out of box ubuntu in fact won’t be killing your laptop. Culprit is the laptop mode, a “feature” that had to be enabled by manually changing configuration files, that slowly kills laptop hard drives.
Fortunately damage spreadout is way reduced because of this.
Not what I meant. I was talking about when I close my lid and my machine crashes and only can be revived back to life by killing the power.
Do you have an ATI chipset with fglrx enabled, by any chance? There is a bug with kernel 2.6.22 and the proprietary ATI driver that prevents suspend from working.
There are three things you can do:
1) Make it so that closing the lid *doesn’t* suspend the laptop (System –> Preferences –> Power Manager or something like that, my Ubuntu’s in French…); pick another option, like turning off the screen or powering down the computer.
2) Not use the proprietary ATI driver. Of course, this means you won’t be able to use desktop effects and 3D apps.
3) Install kernel 2.6.20 and use that one instead (that’s what I did). You do need to tweak /etc/default/acpi-support a bit, though, i.e. make sure the following options are set:
SAVE_VBE_STATE=false
POST_VIDEO=true
USE_DPMS=false
Good luck!
You do not have to enable anything. Ubuntu kills your laptop hd slowly out of the box.
K, sorry but I’m pissed by this behaviour and there is no official fix available.
Edited 2007-11-02 17:09
yes there is.
where ?
Really? Any source for this?
Well, no. Your laptop vendor slowly kills your hard disk out of the box, and Ubuntu doesn’t do anything to stop it. This could very well be a problem on other distributions as well. Windows basically ignores the firmware and sets its own defaults, so the hardware vendors haven’t had any incentive to make their defaults reasonable. It’s possible that some Linux distros handle this issue better than Ubuntu, but it’s not an Ubuntu-specific issue. Any distro that trusts the hardware power management defaults will have the same problem.
I expect Ubuntu and other distros to ship workarounds for this problem, but they should also start bitching and moaning at the OEMs, like their new pal, Dell. It really is their fault, although for practical reasons it’s easier for the OS distributors to address the problem for laptops that are already out in the field.
There are a bunch of workarounds. I used this one:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695/comment…
Computers suck. FOSS can make dealing with them a lot more pleasant, but the community cannot ignore whatever they can’t fix properly. All developers, especially systems programmers, at some point reach a catharsis about the futility of perfectionism and cease to be surprised or outraged by the inherent suck that surrounds their work. I recommend a good scotch.
hey butters, is there a way to check if this bug if affecting my particular laptop?
Install smartmontools if it’s not already installed. Then:
# sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count
The number of interest is the last one on the output line. Then repeat this command a minute or so later. Note any increase in this number. Repeat this a couple more times to make sure the number keeps increasing. If it does, then you have a problem.
You can also hear these load cycles. They sound like “clee-click”.
Supposedly these hard disks have an average of 600,000 load cycles before failure. But the one in this older laptop is over 1,200,000 and I haven’t had any problems… yet. As always, never trust a hard disk, and backup regularly.
A few years ago I experienced a particularly rough string of bad luck where I had three laptop hard disks fail in as many months. Since then I operate under the conservative assumption that a hard disk lasts about as long as a tub of ice cream. I like ice cream.
If what you are describing is the same as my experience, then your problem is solved in Fedora. On my Dell the screen would turn black and the keyboard would lock up using Ubuntu 7.10 – not Fedora 8 RC.
It’s not a “public” announce. It’s for testing propose only.
Anyway, that’s the free software touch…
Share it.
“Did we mention that the background changes color depending on the time of day?”
Sounds fun.
It is great to see they are doing some improvements to YUM. I’ve used Fedora off and on, since FC3, and YUM was always a major drawback for me. It has been slow, and unresponsive for the most part. I think that Fedora is a good distro, and I’m also glad to see the Codec-Buddy. Seems like in the past Fedora has made it difficult to get codecs, and you have to do a lot of copy and paste from various wiki pages to get everything that you needed. I’m not real sure how useful having a background that changes colors with the time of day is though. I guess it’s a cool technology, but better suited with Enlightenment, IMO, anyways.
I agree that back in F2-F3 Yum was dog slow. Never the less, it has steadily improved on each release.
As long as your have fastestmirror package installed, Yum/F8 can rival apt in speed.
There are still some issues to fix (the assoying checksum-match problem – that should be auto-handled instead of need a manual ‘yum clean all’), but there are getting there.
As for “Seems like in the past Fedora has made it difficult to get codecs” part, First it’s wasn’t Fedora’s fault – the U.S. prevented them from doing anything that might help the user break the U.S law. (By gaining access to questionable codecs such as MP3)… but it was never “hard”.
All you needed to do was to install a single RPM (livna-release) and install the missing codecs.
– Gilboa
Edited 2007-11-03 10:03
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I agree that back in F2-F3 Yum was dog slow. Never the less, it has steadily improved on each release.
As long as your have fastestmirror package installed, Yum/F8 can rival apt in speed.
There are still some issues to fix (the assoying checksum-match problem – that should be auto-handled instead of need a manual ‘yum clean all’), but there are getting there.
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The three distros I use in my daily life and my business are CentOS, Fedora, and Ubuntu. I ran F8 for a bit, recently, for testing purposes. And while yum has gotten a lot better and has perfectly acceptable performance, it still can’t match apt for speed. Apt handles dependencies faster, and downloads over my 12mbit connection faster. I think apt can pull bits from multiple servers at once.
That said, I have *not* had a chance to try out the new “presto” capabilities that have been enabled by default in F8. I’m anxious to see the benefits of delta patches.
Edited 2007-11-03 10:49
IMO, presto is not ready yet. (But I’ve yet to test it on newer versions of F8).
It was stable, but somehow, even on a dual quad-core Clovertown, yum seemed (IHMHO!) slower.
Hopefully it’ll be ready by F9.
As for speed, a couple of months ago I would have agreed with you… however, my local Debian mirror is down and I’m forced to use remote servers, slowing down apt considerably. (netselect-apt didn’t really help)
For now, with no local mirrors, apt is just as fast (or as slow) as yum.
– Gilboa
Edited 2007-11-03 10:58
I still have some machines running FC1. (They are POS stations which are never exposed to anything outside of their own small, trusted network.) I occasionally have need to install some package on them. And *oh my god!*, remember when yum downloaded all those zillions of little header files that it needed one by one uncompressed? Yum has, indeed, come far.
On delta updates. Suse has, of course, been doing them for years. At least they used to, and I assume they still do. I distinctly remember being thoroughly disappointed by their performance. Of course, that was a *long* time ago and things may have changed.
At any rate, the potential of deltas is huge for a distro like Fedora. I just spot checked (by adding up all the sizes of the updates in the i386 F7 updates directory), and Fedora has released over 6 Gigabytes of updates to F7 in less than six months. Of course, most people do not have *everything* installed, but still.
I should note, for those unaware, that this is not because Fedora is buggy and needs all those patches to fix stuff. Fedora tracks upstream, and if the upstream releases a 1.02 version to replace 1.01, Fedora will push that out.
If you anyone is interested in Presto, there are working repositories available at
https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/presto/
Presto is a pretty neat feature IMO. Check it out.
My understanding was that presto was going to be enabled by default in F8. I didn’t think to ask if the default repos would be presto-enabled. Will they be?
Nope. The infrastructure is not yet ready. Specifically Jeremy Katz is working on setting up Koji to autogenerate deltas when the main packages are built so that you don’t to have to generate them async and have a time period before the deltas are available as it is now. Will very likely be done before Fedora 9 release. Meanwhile the presto repositories are used for testing the plugin and making sure everything works well. I have been using it for a long time with zero problems.
the assoying checksum-match problem
Ah, I am not alone.
I live in town with very greedy ISP, end watch for any extra traffic byte. After another kernel update( i tend to install only secutity or low size (< 1mb)updates ), start yum update kernel. metadata downloaded (5 MB!!!! terrific traffic, but necessary, 2-3 days w/o online and i compensate it), and… checksum error, try another mirror. Wait… another 5 mb metadata, checksum error… Damn, CTRL-C. Trying another mirror… CTRL-C CTRL_C CTRLC … 5 мб loaded, checksum error, another… I urgently open terminal to server, hands tremor, wrong password, annother try, ok, killall pppd, Yes, it shut up. 30 MB traffic to trash, great.
That was worst day, I loose not only traffic but faith in progress. RedHat is very serious company, they support guys that familiar with black magic (CPU TLB issues, non standard hardware, all that stuff beyond mortal ) and so loose in simple file downloading.
Edited 2007-11-03 11:22
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I live in town with very greedy ISP, end watch for any extra traffic byte.
“””
To quote Flash Gordon… why don’t you team up and fight ’em? 😉
For those who do not know about Pulse Audio, Linux.com has a good article about it here http://www.linux.com/feature/119926
only torrents? =(.
Why are torrents an issue for you? There are myriad of Bittorrent clients available on the Internet for any computing platform. These reange from fast and extremely simple (Transmission) to full-featured (Azureus.) Give Bittorrent a whirl. Cheers!
He could be using Comcast.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071021-comcast-traffic-block…
Why are torrents an issue for you?
Yes, it is slower, at least for me.
torrents are an issue for me too. I have Comcast broadband and I have been downloading the DVD for over 12 hours. bittorent-curses says I have 5.5 hours left! The problem with torrents is if not enough users have seeds available the download speed is very slow. I try to do my part and let bittorent upload from my torrent for several days after a release. Comcast is throttling uploads and probably limiting download speed of torrents too. I think there was some legal action against them recently.
Yes, Bittorrent is not often the fastest way to download.
Perhaps not a big surprise if some internet service providers may restrict Bittorrent traffic when many estimates state that Bittorrent and other peer-to-peer file sharing traffic may be responsible for about 40% of all Internet traffic.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-dominates-internet-traffic-07090…
Also according to Comcast the reason for occasionally delaying peer-to-peer file sharing traffic is “[i]to conserve bandwidth and allow customers to experience the Internet without delays.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/comcast-were-delaying-not-…
http://www.cio-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=10300CL7I43E
Comcast sells its customers a certain bandwidth down and up for a flat rate. They’re upset about Bittorrent because their customers are starting to use more of their allotted bandwidth more of the time. If their current bandwidth oversell ratio is too high in light of new usage models, then they need to reduce the amount of bandwidth they sell, increase rates to expand capacity, or switch to a metered bandwidth model that accounts for time-of-day variations in demand (like the electric companies).
They shouldn’t care what kind of traffic flows over their network. The should only care about the quantity of traffic. Network operators can get as creative and innovative as they want in shaping and pricing bandwidth quantitatively. But they should never shape or price bandwidth qualitatively. Whichever applications, services, or protocols their users prefer to consume a given amount of bandwidth has no bearing on the economics of their business.
In fact, I find it odd that a business that sells bandwidth would be opposed to a technology that creates a large demand for their product. What a horrible situation to be in. Cry me a river.
I use Optus in Australia which counts uploads as well as downloads against my usage. So I don’t use bitorrents as I would reach my cap quicker that way. I get shaped to 64Kb/s after 2000MB. And yes they did this becuase so many people are using P2P systems which actually costs them.
2000 MB per day? Per month?
Per month. I wish was per day.
what about those of us who have isp’s that rate limit torrents, or work for comapanies who only allow http access?
and frankly, ftp would be way faster.
Finally Fedora will have a KDE version. I will have to try it.
Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon was a massive dissapointment to me because they do stupid things like making Dolphin as the default file manager, among other things.
Why is it so hard to find a good KDE based distro? There are many things I don’t like in all of them.
I know everything can be customized in KDE, but I’d like to find a distro I could recommmend to other people too. You know, the kind of distro that would give a very good first impression.
Mepis 7.0 is also looking *very* interesting, but the final version is not released yet.
The only issue I see with using Mepis, is the fact that is is the work of only one developer. I’ll admit he’s doing great work, but I could easily see the distro falling out, such as was the case with Libranet. Personally, I would rather use a distro that has some backing, and support. The fact that the Mepis creator has been very quiet the past month, had several people worried, he might have health issues, when in fact, it just turned out, he got a job, and was devoting much time to something he can make money from.
“The only issue I see with using Mepis, is the fact that is is the work of only one developer. I’ll admit he’s doing great work, but I could easily see the distro falling out, such as was the case with Libranet. Personally, I would rather use a distro that has some backing, and support.”
Yes, I see your point. We can only hope it turns alright. I really like the concept of Mepis 7.0. If it’s a success, the project may get more developers.
Finally Fedora will have a KDE version. I will have to try it.
Huh? I’ve been exclusively using KDE as my desktop environment for ages under Fedora.
“Huh? I’ve been exclusively using KDE as my desktop environment for ages under Fedora.”
Yes but I’d like to find a *good* distro that has KDE as the *default* Desktop Environment. I’m a KDE “fan”, so I don’t want a distro that treats KDE as a second class citizen.
*And*, to recommend it to other people (mostly newbies), I want it to have good default settings, so they can feel comfortable with it right from the beginning.
So far, I’ve not been able to find a KDE based distro which meets both of these requirements.
EDIT: added quote
Edited 2007-11-02 22:58
”
Yes but I’d like to find a *good* distro that has KDE as the *default* Desktop Environment. I’m a KDE “fan”, so I don’t want a distro that treats KDE as a second class citizen. ”
Well, for the KDE spin of Fedora, KDE is the default desktop environment and pretty much the same as vanilla upstream KDE apart from a bit of a cleanup. Try it out, you might like it.
“Well, for the KDE spin of Fedora, KDE is the default desktop environment and pretty much the same as vanilla upstream KDE apart from a bit of a cleanup. Try it out, you might like it.”
Good to hear. Sounds like something I’ve been looking for.
“So far, I’ve not been able to find a KDE based distro which meets both of these requirements.”
Not sure what you are looking for, but Mepis, Mandriva, and openSUSE all have good defaults for KDE. They are all KDE based distros.
OpenSuse and PCLinuxOS both have a fantastic KDE
“Not sure what you are looking for, but Mepis, Mandriva, and openSUSE all have good defaults for KDE. They are all KDE based distros.”
I didn’t like the default panel layout of Mandriva 2008 (e.g. there is very little room for apps in the taskbar). It’s also a bit too commercial distro for my taste. Otherwise it’s pretty damn good. I especially prefer Mandriva’s software management tool over Adept (esp. when doing updates).
OpenSuse.. hmmm.. haven’t tried it yet. I have to admit that the deal with MS is still kind of a turnoff for me.
I’ll try Mepis 7.0 as soon as it’s out.
EDIT: added quote
Edited 2007-11-03 03:22
How about Slackware and its derivatives?
Give PCLinuxOS a try. Its probably one of the best KDE distros out there. Been using it for the past couple of years and have always gone back to it after trying out several others.
“Give PCLinuxOS a try. Its probably one of the best KDE distros out there. Been using it for the past couple of years and have always gone back to it after trying out several others.”
Actually, I already tried PCLinuxOS. Not sure why I didn’t like it either. It was quite good for my personal use but I couldn’t recommend it to other people in my country – mainly because it lacks good localization (e.g. the installation program is only in english and localization in Firefox didn’t work at all).
The most interesting feature of PCLinuxOS was the possibility to “roll your own distro” with just one command. Makes me wonder why distros don’t make monthtly versions with all the updates included. It would be much more user friendly if you wouldn’t need to install hundreds of megs of updates right after finishing the installation.
Fedora also has a “roll your own distro” application. It is called Revisor. Read about it: http://www.linux.com/articles/114347
“Fedora also has a “roll your own distro” application. It is called Revisor. Read about it: http://www.linux.com/articles/114347“
Thanks for the info. Maybe I should roll my own distro and recommend that..;) OTOH, I’d prefer to be able to just say “Download Distro X, it’s very good. You’ll absolutely love it!”.
Edited 2007-11-03 00:22
well you could roll your own, and then burn it to a DVD and say “here try this, you’ll love it” and because it’s still fedora they still end up with an active well supported linux install.
“well you could roll your own, and then burn it to a DVD and say “here try this, you’ll love it” and because it’s still fedora they still end up with an active well supported linux install.”
You’re right. I think I’ll do this. It could also save me some headaches when making my own Linux installs.
But hopefully Fedora 8 will be good enough so that I don’t have to..
Edited 2007-11-03 01:31
have you tried debian-kde?
Unofficial DVD cover :
http://fedora.nicubunu.ro/cdart/werewolf/dvdjacket.png
CD :
http://www.molaora.com/data/files/SVG/werewolf_cover_0-1.svg
Not bad 🙂
Great feature list and they dont even explain everything.
Fedora team keeps bringing in new and exciting stuff. Can’t wait for the final its going to be the first distro i put on in about 3 years. I tried ubuntu 7.10 but there was some laptop issues that turned me off. Just not exciting enough i guess.
So i take it the fedora fixed the yum problems everyone had? they got a GUI and now its faster and mature.
They fixed mp3 problem everyone complained about for years?
merged repos and have very big repositories now.
what else did people complain about I can’t remember that was fedora specific? it appears they work to fix all their criticisms.
Nope, they have not ‘fixed the mp3’ problem. Until there is a codec that is totally free from any copyright and/or patent problems then it won’t ship with Fedora.
Full Stop. Never No Way. no How.
That is how it is. Please get used to this and don’t keep on asking for it with every release. It just is not going to happen. This has been explained ad nauseum for years (Sigh).
If you want mp3 (and other) codecs, then just add the livna repo to your YUM repo list and you are done.
Yes, YUM is much faster to get to the point where you start downloading.
Lets hope that the Laptop HDD problems that are in Ubuntu (OOTB) are not in Fedora.
I have rc3 running on a PPC Mac mini and everything works OOTB (like F7 BTW)
The CodecBuddy application with Fedora 8 allows you to install a free mp3 codec from Fluendo. All the other codecs Fluendo offer cost money. It is reasonable though, I think about $40.00 USD for a collection of windows media, mp3, mpeg, etc. Of course you can get the ugly gstreamer codecs from Livna for free. I thought it was a good compromise since it keeps Fedora free of patent problems but allows a user to easily add in media support.
Edited 2007-11-02 19:08
I think fluendo is pretty irrelevant as most users probably will add the livna and or freshrpm repos.
lol i like that dvd cover, its got a product key on it and in fine print says authentication code not actually required lol nice touch.
http://fedora.nicubunu.ro/cdart/werewolf/dvdjacket.png
That is an awesome DVD cover, I like the whole WEREWOLF naming convention they used since it was around Halloween I assume.
So is Fedora Core 8 going to install by default as either a Gnome gdm or KDE kdm manager?
I am a bit confused to how the install is going to perform or do you have to download KDE after the install?
So, we have several different spins which are variants of Fedora targetted towards different kinds of users. Among these, if you are a GNOME user, you pick the GNOME Desktop spin which is a live image that you can install to a hard disk or usb flash too. Similarly there is a KDE spin for KDE fans.
You can also download the regular Fedora DVD image and you get a choice of either GNOME or KDE. So have it the way you want it.
That sounds pretty cool thanks for the update on that, I like the usb flash option!
🙂
Fedora 8 sounds very nice. The new theme is ugly but I never keep the default theme anyway.
Improved firewall configuration and codec buddy will be sweet. Hopefully Fedora 9 will support file encryption like the new Ubuntu.
Hibernation is working again on my system with kernel 2.6.23. Its always a hit or miss thing but its working again so far.
I have some problems with Rawhide build Fedora 8. The audio cuts out when XFCE loads. I am wondering if this was fixed for RC3. I used to have to do a ‘pulseaudio -kill’ and then a ‘pulseaudio’ to get the server back up. Pulseaudio is nice but I am finding it is not supported by all the browser plugins yet and so you have to do a little more leg work patching things if you use Fedora for a lot of multimedia work.
I have a screenshot showing how you can blend several sound streams. Being able to control the volumes independently is pretty useful.
http://markbokil.org/images/pulseaudiovolume.png
Edited 2007-11-02 18:49
Unfortunately, I’ve got Comcast, so I’m not sure whether bittorrent will let me download at a reasonable speed or not. Does anyone know where I can download the isos from HTTP/FTP? I can’t seem to find them on the mirrors.
Mirrors take days to sync which is why this is torrent only. By the time mirrors pick this up, we would be ready for the general release is six days.
I’ve been tryign to install Fedora since I hear dabout test3 and I haven’t had much success. I think that redhat has been doing some interesting things with the project that i wanted to check out. My only problem is that fro some reason Fedora has issues installing on any harddrive I have on the promise controller. It keeps giving me an error. Now considering I don’t have the same issues at all with Ubuntu or any other distro for that matter I find it really dissapointing. I’ve trid with older versiosn to see if it was just isolated to F8 but F7 did the same. I’ll try again. hopefully it will work this time.
i think that is an old anaconda bug that nobody has managed to fix yet
and i hope to test this then move to f8 when its final
kudos to the fedora dev team, it really is the coolest distro out there.
really !
cheers
anyweb
When is final release due? the schedule syas the 8th but that can’t be right.. can it?
Why wouldn’t it be right. Thats the planned release date.
My torrent finally downloaded and I installed RC 3. The install went smoothly. I did a clean install but left my home directory unformated. I selected Fluxbox, Xfce as additional window managers. I clicked next, next and let it install. I rebooted into Fluxbox and all my Gnome applications were working smoothly. I opened up a shell and typed in ‘yum install gftp seamonkey pan’ to get a couple applications I didn’t add during install. They all loaded correctly. I fired up Seamonkey and browsed the web. I exited Fluxbox and logged into Xfce. I ran totem and attempted to play an mp3. CodecBuddy appeared and I clicked the Fluendo free codec. Totem played the mp3. I played some internet music using Flash on a web site and then blended the volumes together using Pulseaudio’s volume control. Amazingly slick distro so far. Newbies will love the GUI for adding in codecs. My first impression is that it installed more easily than Fedora 7 and it is faster to load and more stable. I haven’t run into any bugs yet. I have openoffice set to using the new IcedTea Java build. I left my torrent running so grab it before Comcast cuts me off. 😉
Edited 2007-11-03 12:57
I saw an option under Window Managers during installation and clicked on Fluxbox. I have never used this minimal window manager. It is kind of cool. I took a screenshot to show it working on Fedora 8. I am running the Clearlooks new theme but I modified the background color to be dark gray instead of blue.
http://markbokil.org/images/fluxbox.png
Edited 2007-11-03 14:19
I wonder what the Red Hat Global Desktop will be like, I hope they borrow a lot from Fedora Core ‘the later releases’ in it so it will have full functionality.
I have RHEL5 Client on my workstation at the office and it is still missing some gtk2 libs that are not available to it as of yet.
I can’t wait to install FC8 on my laptop and other workstations when it is finalized.
Kudos to Fedora, keep up the excellent work!
Red Hat Global Desktop is based on the RHEL 5.x stream and unlikely to pick many features from later Fedora releases.
Also note that it is Fedora 8, not FC8 since Core and Extras repositories are merged from Fedora 7 onwards and anyone interested could contribute to any package in the repository.
I have RHEL5 installed and using my RHN account for the ability to download updates from the channel. I have yet to find a SVN to install (gui-style) because some qt or some libs are not available. I most likely will file a bug report or bring it to their attention.
RHEL5 is solid and good for workstations/laptops, the only reason why I have it loaded to begin with is studying for the RHCE and at work I normally take 1 hour a day to prepare.
nice too, couple of issues though,
I installed it today on a Dell Latitude D430, the first install ran into problems when i selected ‘add additional repositories’ , it basically got stuck in some mounting loop with the cd-rom drive (dvd actually) and a quick google led me to just stick with the default packages (had to reboot, restart install).
This time it installed fine then rebooted to start F8 for the first time, and when attempting to startx (rhgb) it never really succeeded so all I saw was a grey screen with my mouse cursor as an X. I shut the system down by pressing on the power button (gracefully). The next boot attempt worked fine and it brought me through the firstboot wizard, I logged into X and was surprised to see the wireless nic was recognised and initialised just fine ! I opened a terminal and used neat to configure the wireless settings and i’m using it wirelessly right now !.
I tried to test the ‘codecbuddy’ by double clicking on an mp3, rhythmbox opened up and i don’ t know if it’s me but I find that application a bit strange. The mp3 was not listed and i could see no way of adding it. I then tried to open the mp3 with xmms and it popped up the usual error about ‘no mp3 codec etc…’
ok… finally I right clicked on the mp3 and chose to open it with ‘movie player’, this started Totem which then popped up CodecBuddy !
After going with the default option (free codec) and answering yes to the licence aggreement I was listening to my mp3. WOW. Well done Fedora team, finally ! 🙂 Not exactly straightforward (why didn’t ryhthmbox prompt me with the codecbuddy or xmms ?), but about time.
here’s some screenshots of same > http://www.linux-noob.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=3288
anyone know why the anaconda installer doesnt save any screenshots to /root/anaconda-screenshots during the installation any more ? it used to work (fcr6 at least)
About rhythmbox, you might want to read the codec buddy interview which explains it better. XMMS doesn’t use gstreamer, upstream is pretty much dead and isn’t installed by default. For the other bugs, file bug reports in http://bugzilla.redhat.com. Oh btw, the RHGB bug you mention is already fixed via a update (actually a downgrade to a previous version via epoch)
Edited 2007-11-03 21:27
thanks Rahul, I actually saw the two rhgb updates after posting but was not sure if they resolved the issue or not as it was a firstboot issue.
anyways, i have read the interview and it explains things quite well about codecbuddy but I still must ask, if Totem is the default ‘codecbuddy’ application for mp3 playback et al, then why doesnt Totem open the mp3 by default (instead of rhythmbox)
I think that will confuse noobs out there, hopefully they’ll add the rhythmbox functionality via gstreamer before f8 goes live.
any ideas about why my anaconda-screenshots seem to be invisible, ie: it reports that it’s taking them during the installation but once done they are no where to be found.
cheers
anyweb
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That’s a good question… for a number of reasons. While Gnome is my favorite DE, and I mostly like Gnome apps, I’ve found that Rhythmbox never fails to disappoint. A music player that’s been in development for years which doesn’t understand .pls files? No thanks! For all their limitations, XMMS and Totem are better music players.
I don’t think Rhythmbox was designed to play lists or files here and there, but rather for dealing with a well managed (fully tagged & everything) music library. On that aspect, it’s doing an adequate job, although it could have better tagging or VFS support. As for XMMS, it’s okay, as long as your needs haven’t changed since 2004…
The interview states that codeina was developed for Totem, hence why RB cannot use it. I’m looking forward for the generic interface for applications, although I’ll probably just use the livna repos for codec woes.
The interview states that codeina was developed for Totem, hence why RB cannot use it. I’m looking forward for the generic interface for applications, although I’ll probably just use the livna repos for codec woes.
that’s my whole point !, when you double click on an MP3 in Fedora 8 Rhythmbox opens, not Totem, so no one will see the Codecbuddy wizard unless they experiment.
I just don’t understand the logic of this, having codec buddy is good, but if you want to make it work as it should then mp3 playback should default to Totem (because that’s the only application that codecbuddy is aligned with in this circumstance).
Personally I don’t like rhythmbox or totem, i’d use xmms for mp3 playback and mplayer for video applications, but for new users who’ve just installed the distro, it doesnt make sense to hide the positive aspect of codecbuddy because someone decided that rhythmbox should be mapped to mp3 playback instead of codecbuddy’s buddy, Totem.
cheers
anyweb
Edited 2007-11-04 19:55
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that’s my whole point !, when you double click on an MP3 in Fedora 8 Rhythmbox opens, not Totem, so no one will see the Codecbuddy wizard unless they experiment.
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Like I said, if you have any issues, just file bug reports in http://bugzilla.redhat.com. Arguing here isn’t making any difference.
ok done
Bugzilla Bug 366101: double clicking mp3 opens rhythmbox instead of totem, so end user does not see codecbuddy
cheers
anyweb
I’m really liking what im hearing on this release.
I hope someone writes a very thorough article on Fedora and its features and it gets some exposure. Figures i been waiting for these delta RPM’s and now they have it and im getting satellite in a week =) Delta will still help cause satellite are very nasty about going over your bandwith cap. if you d/l over so many gigs a month they drop your speed to 14k down and 2k up until the month is over.. ouch. This is the main reason I haven’t been using linux (downloades) the updates are just WAY too much for someone who’s been on a 56k that only connects at 26.6
Props to the team you guys are really making alot of headway on every angle.
once the basic infrastructure is ironed out like deltas, yum speed, gui tools, and more mature selinux policies fedora can really focus on what it does best, bring new technology.