Today, Fedora 11 will be unleashed upon the web. The release has been postponed for a few days, but this time it’s for real. It comes packed with lots of changes, such as improved boot time, Nouveau as the default NVIDIA driver, and of course the latest and greatest version of various open source packages.
Starting with those open source packages, Fedora 11 comes with KDE 4.2, GNOME 2.26, Xfce 4.6, Xserver 1.6, Firefox 3.5, Thunderbird 3, Python 2.6, GCC 4.4 (all packages have been rebuilt with GCC 4.4 as well), and much more. Obviously, Fedora 11 also inherits all the improvements made in those projects.
There’s also a lot of other cool stuff in Fedora 11. For instance, ext4 is now the default file system for Anaconda-driven installs, which would mean speed improvements for Fedora users. The boot time target is now 20 seconds (it was 30 seconds for Fedora 10), which really puts into perspective just how much the Linux desktop has improved in this area over the past couple of years.
The Nouveau driver for NVIDIA graphics chips is now the default in Fedora 11, and with it comes kernel modesetting support for this driver. Improvements have also been made in the areas of DRI2, DeviceKit integration, support for fingerprint readers, PolicyKit integration with CUPS, and a whole lot more.
Fedora 11 is not yet released to the mirrors, so I don’t have a download link for you just yet. It will be released later today.
The https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F11_bugs
page is great addition AdamW has brought to Fedora.
Personally I have been burned with Intel/Xorg/Kernel updates. The preview worked better on my EeePC than the current version.
That isn’t a new page, Common Problems has been around for many releases.
AdamW was a great pickup, but he didn’t bring the page.
indeed, the page was around for previous releases, and the F11 page follows that format in some ways. but I am sorta driving it for F11 and made it, er, bigger.
It’s kind of a hybrid of the previous Fedora Common Bugs pages and the Errata page layout I came up with for Mandriva, now. It’ll have a ‘Resolved Issues’ section like the Mandriva pages do, once updates start fixing some of those bugs.
kragil posted…
Could you tell us which model EeePC you have again? What exact issues are you encountering? I was actuually looking into replacing my Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04.2 install with Fedora after seeing the disappointment that was Jaunty (and Intrepid for that matter!) but your comments are giving me pause on whether that would be an improvement or not. Also, what do you think of the previous release, Fedora 10? Is it worth moving to from Hardy or am I better off staying put?
–bornagainpenguin
I have an Asus 1000HE. Here’s my results:
Fedora 10, 11 – Good battery life (7 hours, close to the 8 hours under XP), but Ath9k driver keeps dying after suspend – sometimes rmmod/modprobe would help, other times nothing short of a reboot would work.
Eeebuntu 3.0 – Wireless is flawless, immediately reconnects after suspend and resume. Poor battery life (5-6 hours).
I went with the shorter battery life and better wireless support.
If your wireless is a proprietary one then they won’t ship it. Fedora is a pure freesoftware distro.
You can use the rpmfusion repositories for stuff like that, nvidia driver, mp3 support. I use Fedora 11 on my other drive, very good KDE version with 4.2.
I’d recommend this to any KDE4 fans!
Edited 2009-06-09 20:09 UTC
fretinator replied…
Is that Fedora 11 the final release or was that under a beta or alpha release of Fedora? The poster I replied to said something about there being regressions between the alpha \ betas and the final release in the intel driver, which is in part why I’m looking at alternatives to Ubuntu for the time being. I know Fedora has in the past behaved better on hardware Ubuntu had issues with, so I was hoping that pattern would hold true for me here, but kragil says not so. You say everything is good except occasional network issues after suspend. Hmmm…
Before I forget, are you using packages from fedora-eee.com? (Do they even have Fedora 11 packages out yet? Their website made it look like this wasn’t the case yet.)
fretinator replied…
Oh I don’t blame you there! I’d have made the same choice! Only now I’m dithering between better video support for things like flash and for video playing…
Thanks for the reply!
–bornagainpenguin
Edited 2009-06-09 20:18 UTC
No, I was using a beta of 11. Actually, I had to install 10 and then do an online upgrade, because the beta 11 installer kept dorking the partitions and grub – so maybe it was 10 1/2!
No EEE specific packages.
fretinator responded with…
LOL! But this means we still don’t know if doing aa straight install of Fedora 11 final will result in the regressions kragil mentioned.
kragil reported…
I’m looking to get a confirmation of the above quoted information and some specifics as to which model kragil and others seem to be having issues with. Does anyone else with an EeePC post on OSNews.com who can comment?
–bornagainpenguin
PS: Thanks for all your replies fretinator, I appreciate the info!
As soon as it hits mirrors I check it out.
I too will check it out when it is released, getting frustrated more with each passing ubuntu release, only thing fedora bugs me for is the way gnome opens a new window for each folder, but i’m sure i can change that somewhere
In Nautilus: edit –> preferences –> behavior
F11 rocks on my Vaio BZ12XN !
http://www.fedoraguide.info/index.php?title=Fedora11
The F11 torrents are already available: http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/torrents/
Intel 855 chipset is an epic fail both with and without nomodeset. There is a ton of bug reports regarding this and nothing has been happening for several weeks.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?component=xorg-x11-drv-intel…
There are some possible workarounds posted here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F11_bugs#Miscellaneous_problem…
Edited 2009-06-09 12:11 UTC
That’s not, in fact, true. The 855 bugs had huge activity going up to release (one of them was one of the reasons for one of the release slips), and they were actually fixed. 855, according to multiple reports, now works well, with modesetting: the cursor and opengl-related bugs were all fixed.
references:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=490366
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=488980
Sorry, but it doesn’t work on my laptop, the bug is still open without comments.
Without nomodeset the screen doesn’t work properly showing about 1/4 of the screen.
With nomodeset X crashes when playing a video file regardless of accelerator mode in X.
what bug #?
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=501153
And I’ve seen a bunch of bugs describing the X crash when trying to play Video.
I’ve commented on your bug. it looks like something specific to your particular system – from the log, your monitor’s EDID really does claim 1400×1050 as its preferred mode.
1. There is no Firefox 3.1
2. Fedora has recently dropped Mono, although it might have been a little late for Fedora 11.
http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2009/06/02/redhatfedora-drops-mono/
1. Firefox 3.5 beta 4 is the version in F11.
2. Fedora has not dropped mono at this time. We are substituting Gnote for Tomboy in F12 for several reasons including concerns about the size a native C++ app could save us on an already very cramped Live image.
On Mono, I thought I saw that Mono and Mono apps were going to be removed from the default installation media for Fedora 12. Yes, Mono and Mono apps will probably always be available in the repos, but removing Mono and Mono apps from a default install would be a good thing.
Edited 2009-06-09 15:03 UTC
I think that Tomboy is the only app on the default install or Live environment requiring Mono, so there would be no need to include those libs by default after Gnote is substituted. Having said that, “Removing Mono from Fedora” is a misleading blurb because, as you say, for now it’s still in the repos. There are some significant legal concerns with Mono that we are still assessing, so I consider that a fluid situation.
Paul, yes, I knew that about the Live CD’s. I was thinking more about the DVDs that currently install F-Spot and Mono stuff as part of the default install. In my mind, “dropping Mono” means removing it from any and all default installation media, i.e. not “installing it be default.”
Edited 2009-06-09 15:10 UTC
Precisely. The “Read more” text on OSNews for this article originally claimed Firefox 3.1, not Fedora.
One would only get any savings by substituting Gnote for Tomboy if one also dropped Mono libraries that Tomboy depends upon.
Since Gnote is the functional equivalent of Tomboy, the only benefits of doing this at all is the removal of the waste of space and potential liability that is Mono.
Surely Fedora realises that some of the features that the Mono project advertises itself as including, to whit:
http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page
are patented, proprietary technologies (that are not standards, and are not covered by any Open Specification Promise) which require a license to run and to redistribute?
Edited 2009-06-09 15:31 UTC
If you begin to worry about Microsoft and patents, then worry about more than Mono.
MS has patents that can be stretched to cover many Web technologies, compiler techniques and others. I believe they even have some good ones on OS technologies like virtual memory management and scheduling.
And anyone worrying about patents should certainly push to remove VFAT support.
Yes and no. There are many areas that may be subject to submarine patents. However, Mono is far more dangerous than those examples because you *can* directly trace Mono’s heritage. It a free implementation of a proprietary technology, but just because Mono is free software does not mean it’s not patent encumbered.
I am much more concerned about the close, direct lineage of Mono to Microsoft than other technologies with less-known heritages that may or may not have Microsoft encumbrances. There’s no disputing where Mono comes from while other technologies may be defensible in a variety of ways, such as prior art, superceding patents and the like.
i am not going to make a guess on where you stand on the issue… but, who says people *aren’t* worried about more than just mono? mono is just the topic at hand.
that being said, there are a couple of points that set this apart from other ‘issues’.
* mono is rapidly becoming a default install on many of the big distros, to the chagrin of a growing number of users and developers
* for those who would like to avoid mono, it’s good to make opinions heard before too much of the FOSS ecosystem becomes entrenched in something that a lot of people have a problem with. mono is still ‘new’ enough that it’s easy to avoid. a lot of people would like to keep it that way. they should have that option.
people bring up the ‘but xxx software package is also controversial’ argument all the time. nobody is ignoring the other ‘controversies’.
Fedora has not ‘dropped’ Mono, simply changed the default package set. Mono is available from the repositories just as it always was.
That would be fine. If this is the case, then the risk of getting sued for patent infringement through running and/or distributing the patented parts of Mono would then be confined to Fedora themselves (for distributing patented technologies without a license) and to those who deliberately installed Mono (for running patented technologies without a license).
Since Mono would no longer be part of the default installation, most Fedora users then wouldn’t use it, and there would be no risk to them of either getting sued or of becoming dependent on proprietary technologies requiring licenses.
Edited 2009-06-10 00:42 UTC
http://ftp.crc.dk/fedora/linux/releases/11/
For the impatient people like myself…
http://ftp.astral.ro/mirrors/fedora/pub/fedora/linux/releases/11/Li…
After install:
(1) yum install yum-fastestmirror so yum will automagically find my fastest mirror 🙂
(2) yum install yum-presto to enable DeltaRPM (binary diffs) which will reduce my download bandwidth by 70-90%
(3) Profit!
I have kept Fedora at bay after I started using Ubuntu 6.06. My last Fedora was FC5. However I’m willing to try again and again. I only need a help in better yum support after the basic installation.
Yum is too slow, and lacks packages by default. I need a guide that can point me to add more yum repos and build the repo to support various packages like – icewm, xfce, banshee, acrobat, gaim, vlc, mplayer, gnomad2, picard, astrix etc….
If you haven’t used Fedora since Core 5, you would be surprised how much faster is yum now. Maybe it isn’t so fast as apt, but almost.
You should know, that all extra media codecs, and stuff, is in just one repository called rpmfusion. Yo go there, install one package (plenty of instructions there), and you’ll have access to all that stuff you want to install after Fedora.
Good luck
Thanks a lot for rpmfusion link. That helps a lot. I’m burning the FC11 DVD right now and hope to stay on FC for some time. I’ll be updating my experience on FC11 on my blog tushar.blogpsot.com soon.
You might interested in
http://www.osnews.com/story/21652/Yum_It_s_Starting_to_Get_Tasty
The speed of yum in Fedora Core 5 and Fedora 11 is very much different. It doesn’t make sense to talk about yum lacking packages. Yum is merely a tool that downloads packages from the repository. In the case of Fedora, all of packages you mention is either in Fedora itself or in http://rpmfusion.org
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f11.html
Found this FTP site :
ftp://ftp.udl.es/pub/fedora/linux/releases/11/Fedora/
Seems to be working quite well for now, and i’ll have finished the download in 3 hours.
BTW, this FTP will be better suited if u live in Europe.
Fedora 11 looks nice. Now when can I expect these nice changes/features to trickle down to my Ubuntu box? To be honest I like both distros. I like the new features feel to Fedora but I miss the ability to update the disto to major new versions the way Debian distos can. Downloading a binary installer is so… old school.
Downloading an installer CD and reinstalling every once in a while is, IMO, the best, most reliable and cleanest way to do it… and there’s little chance of harming your /home directory if you have it in its own partition and run the installer with caution.
However, I recall reading an article a while back about Fedora trying to make in-place upgrades easier. Not sure what the latest details are on that, though.
you can actually update between Fedora releases with yum, we just don’t support or emphasize this method. If you ask our release engineering team and yum engineers they will give you a very long list of reasons why in-place upgrading can never be entirely a safe proposition. That’s why we rather recommend upgrading via images or preupgrade, which can be made much more reliable. But in practice, some people do upgrade with yum and it often works. There’s specific caveats for F10->F11 upgrading noted here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum#10-11
some of the features of F11 are also in or partly in Ubuntu 9.04, I guess. Most of the rest should make it into 9.10. Fedora upstreams stuff pretty fast.
Why not? Similar methods are supported on Debian, Arch and other systems.
Is this documented anywhere?
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/PreUpgrade is a reasonable explanation. Best canonical reference we can find after a quick chat on IRC. mostly it’s in IRC logs or mailing list threads.
Why not? Similar methods are supported on Debian, Arch and other systems.
[q]
In fact upgrading a system like this using this piecemeal method is a very good way of ending up with a very broken system and is a very,very dumb idea to begin with.
Not to even mention the time,expense and bandwith wasted on downloading and installing every pidling upgrade that comes along the pike.
to upgrade without downloading binary installer run following two commands:
rpm -Uvh ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/11/Fedo…
yum upgrade
here are some details.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq#Fedora_10_-.3E_Fedora_1…
PS Such approach works since RedHat 7.3.
Regards,
Vitaliy
I would suggest upgrading using “preupgrade” package.
Just install it (it’s in yum repository), run it, choose what version you want to upgrade, and it’ll download and upgrade packages as necessary to get to latest Fedora version.
Only bad thing is once it has downloaded packages, you must restart, and wait for Anaconda to complete the upgrade process, so you can’t use your computer meanwhile. But it does work: i upgraded from 9 to 10 without problems.
what are the benefits of approach you mentioned?
The only benefit I see is you don’t have to reinstall grub to mbr in case you want fresh grub (i’m fine with 2 years old grub and once I feel myself I want new it’s one command and I have a new grub in mbr).
The disadvantages are:
It will download a lot of useless packages and as a consequences will run longer.
You can not use PC for a quite long time.
You’ll have to click several times in anaconda and that means it can not be done in automatic way (just imagine you have to upgrade 50 PC).
Preupgrade runs from a up2date environment and therefore is more reliable.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/PreUpgrade
Anaconda (and preupgrade) uses yum underneath and therefore does not download more packages than yum upgrade itself does. If you want to automate upgrades across 50 systems, use kickstart. Preupgrade has a command line mode as well btw.
On small pc park we have a lot of problems with preupgrade and no failure with yum upgrade approach during upgrades from Fedora 9 to 10.
Do you have different experience?
it downloads firstboot, anaconda-yum-plugins and several other useless rpms that it forgets to remove after installation.
I was under impression kickstart is for automating installation (not upgarde process). Can it do upgrades?
Have you tried it yourself?
Thank you for the information.
I have been successful with both yum upgrades and Preupgrade but if you have problems or requests for enhancements then you should be feeding them to bugzilla. Preupgrade itself uses Anaconda and the yum plugins so it does require them. It can clean up after itself, sure. Again, these should go into bugzilla.
Kickstart can always be used for upgrades as well of course.
It’s the suggested method of upgrading Fedora, as you can read here for all the extra informative details:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/PreUpgrade
Has Thunderbird 3 been released yet? Last I checked, TB 3 was still in beta.
I hope I can get it installed…for some reason I wasn’t able to try out any of the betas. When I tried the livecd, it would boot and then hang at the reading kernel message. I have a Intel C2D E2180 system.
Fedora removing Mono apps from their distro is a JOKE!!. Tomboy for gnote (reinventing the wheel?). What are they paranoid!?. Their is nothing wrong with Tomboy!. It is going to be real interesting come Fedora 12 time. The guy who develops Rhythm Box is packing it up. So now you can do what Ubuntu does and include Banshee (Mono app) or develop you own Media player like Novell did. Oh and the new artwork is plain bland. Same old theme, icons, as in previous three past fedoras, and horrible wallpaper!. Doesn’t even come close to openSuse, or MacOSX in terms of beauty!. Their art department is also a JOKE!!.
Edited 2009-06-09 16:39 UTC
removing a piece of controversial software from a default install while keeping it available in the repos to those who desire it is a joke? the funny thing is, the fedora developers seem to have removed tomboy from the default install to make room on the livecd more than for any sort of “paranoia”. thankfully, they have also responded to the community, and are taking into consideration the possible legal issues surrounding mono, as well. it’s the most responsible and respectful thing they could do, considering all of the rational complaints people have about mono. and here you are, blathering on about aesthetics.
yes, a joke, indeed. ha. ha ha. high-larious.
if you don’t like fedora, don’t use it. you obviously do not share the concerns and opinions of the people developing fedora; and, you certainly aren’t the target end-user.
Agreed. Keep mono and mono apps in the repos for people who want to use them, but keep them out of the default install on the live CD’s and DVD.
I don’t agree with you. The default theme is very good as it combines usability with beauty. The icons looks the same as usual so people don’t need to relearn, the background is nice with no distinct details that makes filenames or icons hard to read or see. Yet the background have some subtle details that can serve as landmarks.
Very professional indeed!
Fedora is the distro that drives Linux forward. It’s amazing how stable and robust distro Fedora is even when it is so “bleeding edge”. Fedora and FOSS developers are doing really impressive work.
Looking forward to Fedora 12.
An uncompleted feature list of Fedora 12:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/12/FeatureList
Thanks for the link.
That Multiseat feature looks interesting. Have been looking for an easy way to set it up for years.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Multiseat
The other features look very exciting too.
Real good Fedora Team!. I can see why your distributions are just plain Betaware!. Got this reply to a post from the Ubuntu forums about Fedora 11. Real Good!!. What are we suppose to just use onboard sound?!.
”
If you have a Soundblaster Live! or Audigy soundcard (that uses the emu10k1 drivers) you will have a horrible experience with F11. You will have kernel failures. I, and several others, filed at bug report at bugzilla and no one even triaged it. All I hear, weeks after the bug reports, are crickets chirping.”
That’s from a guy who has a bee in his bonnet and is, frankly, inaccurate. The bug has been assigned to the kernel team, whose responsibility it is.
Also, it only affects S/PDIF output, *not* analog output (which is what the vast majority of people use).
Edited 2009-06-09 23:48 UTC
for more details – the bug report is:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=502698
an intersecting bug report is:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=496320
(it defaults to digital output rather than analog, which is wrong – so you have to manually switch it to analog if that’s what you have. that bug should be fixed quite quickly.)
common issues page entries:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F11_bugs#emu10k1-digital
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F11_bugs#emu10k1-digital-fail
Upgrade from 10 to 11 didn’t go smoothly
X is not starting and several services are failing. I installed nvidia drivers, but still X does not start. Sorry for the terse post but I’ll post again later when I get around to fixing it.
Sounds like every Ubuntu upgrade attempt I’ve made..
I find it easier these days to have /home on its own partition.. I do a fresh install on an LVM partition, and switch over. Other than the time to install I’m usually up and fully running within an hour. Usually beats figure out the upgrade niggles.
Yeah, I know I should do that; on my workstation I’m a little safer than on my laptop, and have a similar setup (but with Solaris Express).
Bummer.
I used preupgrade on my F10 with Nvidia drivers from RPMForge and it went without a hitch. Even the NVidia drivers were upgraded seamlessly and worked on the first boot of F11. I use the Compiz Fusion repo from fedoraforum.org, and even Compiz worked right after the upgrade.
The only thing I had to fix manually was to remove the VirtualBox rpm for F9 and reinstall with the F11 one.
Did you use the nvidia driver from RPM forge?
This is going to be one of those annoying anecdotal comments you usually hate to read in stories like this.
My previous experiences with Fedora have always been twofold: either it works perfectly or it fails miserably. The previous release was a total catastrophe on this laptop, but all issues have been resolved with the new release. This one just works ™.
(This is within parenthesis for a reason: the behavior described above should/could really be used to address the problems related to the current de facto craze of six month release cycles.)
Fedora 11 feels great and looks polished. A true Fedora release. The people involved really hit the bull’s-eye with this one.
I hope some day Fedora team and associated stake holders manage to catch up with the one and only thing Ubuntu is doing better…
… the hype.
strcpy said…
This has been my experiences as well. Every other release or so of Fedora is worth its weight in gold, you become a fanatic and rush out and tell everyone how great you think it is. The release after that…not so good.
strcpy said…
If Fedora wants that–and its not really clear that they do–they’ll need to get cracking on their forums and making them seem more friendly to the Windows “poweruser” types. Those are the ones who move to Ubuntu and discover they can learn how to tweak their systems for speed and responsiveness, just like they used to do in Windows 9x with registry hacks and DOS configuration… These are the people who seem to be causing all hype.
–bornagainpenguin