Submitted by “The Fedora Project attracts a lot of interest from the Linux faithful. While there are perhaps more newbie-friendly, corporate-friendly, or special-interest-focused distributions, Fedora continues to wear the innovation hat.
Fedora announced Fedora 9 Beta late last month, and Test Center reviewers replaced the current Fedora 8 install to see what the new version has to offer. Since Fedora 9 (Stirling) is still in beta, occasional bugs and some rough edges were inevitable. But there is a solid indication of the new things to come that makes the stable release, expected May 1, worth watching.”
I think they mean Sulfur as the codename..
No biggie, I am just an ass and like to point out other people’s mistakes to make myself feel better…
Edited 2008-04-11 21:57 UTC
I noticed that too… the codename bit that is.
First thing I noticed
Is it just me or hadn’t Fedora 9 Beta already been out 17 days before this review came out? Heck, I thought I was slow installing it the day after its release (mainly because the day 1 torrents were dog slow – it took many hours before they put a faster seed up for the 64-bit DVD).
In fact, if Fedora 9 Preview hadn’t been delayed (though the F9 schedule hasn’t been updated to indicate this as I write – Fedora tend to be laggy updating their Wiki schedule when there’s delays), the *next* pre-release of F9 would have been out before this Beta review, since it was originally scheduled for 10th April and the review of the Beta was published on 11th April.
BTW, F9 Beta had an “interesting” issue on my Dell Vostro 400. Because my Philips old-school 4:3 CRT monitor wasn’t recognised, X now defaults to widescreen resolution for unknown monitors and doesn’t put Mode lines in xorg.conf either (so, yep, the only way to get the 1280×1024 res I wanted was to hand-edit xorg.conf and put Mode lines in, ho hum). Even after I got the res sorted, the screen was shifted well to the left at 1280×1024 – at this point, I gave up and booted back into F8.
Didn’t like the “faces” GDM login default either – I’d rather type a username in (probably an easily hackable pref, but it’s a definite change for all previous GDM login defaults in every version of RH/Fedora I can ever remember).
Also hated that GNOME Terminal no longer lets you set the cursor blink to off (a GNOME 2.22 “innovation”) – the setting is now global and buried in the Keyboard prefs! Madness from the GNOME devs there – terminal cursors shouldn’t blink and also be forced to blink (or not blink) the same way as text carets in completely different apps!
Back in the days of Dumb Terminals like a DEC VT220, the default was for the cursor to blink. Yes you could switch it off.
I like blinking cursors.
What I want is an easy way to change my mouse color in Windows. In some applications, it just disappears into the background mush.
> I like blinking cursors
But it hurts your battery a bit (just a little one in the big powersave puzzle)
Edited 2008-04-12 13:14 UTC
> But it hurts your battery a bit
I really hope you’re kidding.
Hi did not kid. Blinking cursor needs a timer to turn it on and off. Timer wakes sleeping CPU. The more often CPU is waken, the less time it spends in battery conserving low power state.
The more unnecessary timers are disabled, the less power is wasted.
Even the DEC vt100 could to this.
I won’t comment on this. 🙂
Furthermore, I’d like to see all (!) applications to obey this setting, at least the modern ones. For example Opera: You can set your cursor to a nice black color with a white border. But when Opera starts loading a page, the mouse cursor changes into an ugly white shape with an hourglass attached.
Maybe this problem is related to X.org. I had similar experiences trying to get my 21″ Eizo CRT running at 1400×1050 which worked without problems in XFree86 (no joke), but X.org allows only 1152×864 (or was it 768? the geometry looked weird), and I can under no circumstances (even adding proven modelines doesn’t help) get this mode again. I rewrote xorg.conf and even forced modes, but this didn’t seem to impress the X server.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe that new software does fail at simple tasks that older software did flawlessly out of the box.
I think its possible to replace gdm by xdm or wdm and keep using Gnome.
Wow, that’s really strange. I always thought non-blinking cursors would be the default (like they are in classical xterms) for terminal emulators…
Out of curiosity, what card and driver? I can never get 1680×1050 with the nv driver, but the nvidia driver does it fine. If you’ve added mode lines and all that to no effect, you may be fighting a video driver issue.
Also, perhaps telling the driver to ignore EDIDs, if it supports such an option, might help?
Edited 2008-04-13 00:57 UTC
AGP GPU ATI Radeon If R250 / 9200 with 128 MB, running with the built-in ati driver. Eizo FlexScan F980 21″ CRT attached to analog VGA port.
I think so, too, it must be a change from XFree86 towars X.org (because it worked / works with XFree86 4.3. Even setting everything to audodetect does not work, it results in a strange and asymmetrical resolution (I think it was 1152×768 or something similar), the picture was “outside the screen” and the monitor needed manual adjustment.
I’ll surely try this, thank you.
Edited 2008-04-13 01:12 UTC
I’m excited about trying DRI2 stuff (F9 will have a preview). It should (finally) allow compiz to run without sacrifying direct rendering and Xv (well at least on a few cards which will have the TTM driver ready).
Fedora is great but why is it so slow?
I don’t mean boot time, yum or something like that but the behaviour of the system. I have set up so many times Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian systems, always start only the services i need but Fedora is always the slowest system (application start, reaction of user input,…)
For example i have a Pentium M1.3Ghz Notebook with 512MB RAM. I can install Ubuntu and Debian with gnash and can watch youtube videos without a problem but if i install Fedora with gnash video and audio runs out of sync and the system becomes really slow.
I just wonder why? At the end it is the same software! Has it something to do with SELinux? With extreme differences in compiler options between Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu packages? etc. I don’t know, but even if i disable SELinux Fedora is slower than Ubuntu and Debian.
I would immediately switch to Fedora, but the general performance have to be much better or someone have to tell me what i’m doing wrong.
Edited 2008-04-12 17:05 UTC
Beyond startup times (a know issue with Fedora) – I’m unaware of any performance issues with Fedora.
Beyond that gnash issue (that may result from a driver and/or FF3 compatibility issue) your observation is, well, subjective observation that cannot be used (by the developers) to fix the problem.
Can you benchmark your machine and give concrete numbers?
– Gilboa
P.S. I’d suggest you file a bug report against gnash under http://bugzilla.redhat.com
>Beyond startup times (a know issue with Fedora)
Yes, i know. People often complain about startup time and yum. But that’s not a big problem for me. I don’t re-start my system that often.
But the general performance is really annoying.
Gnash is just one example another would be startup time of a gnome-terminal, etc.
It isn’t a FF3 compatibility problem, i have this experience with Fedora8.
I don’t know if it makes much sense to fill a bug. Because it is not a bug by itself. On my powerfull desktop everything is in sync. But on my small laptop i feel the performance differences quite bad.
Same here. I restart the machine only when there’s a critical kernel update.
Everything else is just init 1 && init 5.
General performance? In what sense?
As for gnome-terminal – its easy to measure.
Cold boot distro A, login, open xterm, time gnome-terminal.
Cold boot distro B, login, open xterm, time gnome-terminal. Rinse and repeat.
Once done, post the numbers in a bug report. (+Drop a message @fedora-devel ML)
It isn’t a FF3 compatibility problem, i have this experience with Fedora8.
Of-course it does.
Just make sure you use numbers and not subjective views. (It feels faster)
Memory usage?
Too many CPU eating services?
Run-aware process?
etc.
top, iotop, vmstat and free are your friends.
– Gilboa
I downloaded Fedora 9 beta last night. Installed it as a clean install. Initially Anaconda, the Fedora installer, crashed when I selected to install on Linux partitions with encryption on. I disabled encryption.
Initially soundcard detection failed. I ran a yum update to get the latest rawhide changes and then soundcard detection worked. Pulseaudio appears to be working well. My external USB2 drives mounted correctly and appear on the desktop. I installed audacious music player and the mp3 libraries from Livna.
In terms of web browsing I ran into a lot of problems with swfdec, the open source Flash engine. It kept locking up Mozilla Seamonkey. I ended up removing swfdec and installing the Flash 9 RPM off of Adobe’s site. To jazz up the theme a bit I installed the Murrine theme engine ‘yum install gtk-murrine-engine’. First impression is pretty good but some rough areas still. Good for people that like to tweak. I would wait until the Final release if you are looking for a stable desktop ready to go. I have concerns that new users will be irritated with swfdec if it is installed as the default Flash engine.
Screenshot of the beta goodness:
http://markbokil.org/images/fedora-9-sulfur.png
Edited 2008-04-12 17:12 UTC
swfdec won’t be installed on the general release. It was installed on the beta with the plan on evaluating feedback.
I liked it but I found a few bugs that were too persistent – I couldn’t work around them – but it was looking good. I tried the KDE 4 version with the latest KDE packages nicely rolling in through yum. One problem I found was that repos were actually hard to find and enable sucessfully. I activated the Livna Development one and also the Adobe Flash one, and of course the Rawhide and KDE4 ones as well – but Atrpms and the Fedora 8.92 repos wouldn’t get along – it’s a typical story I guess. I had video working, I swear, but after one update it was killed permanently. I got pretty tired of the silly Login screen of KDM (KDE3) that you are forced to use. I must say that I liked the bleeding edge for a while but I came back to earth finally and reverted back to my usual Distro (openSuse) after I realized that I needed to get some work done. I will try it again probably after it is released.