It’s Fedora release day! The Fedora project has pushed out version 13 of its cutting-edge Linux distribution. There’s a whole boatload of improvements, some of which come from the wider Free software ecosystem, but of course, there’s also a lot Fedora/Red Hat-specific stuff.
There’s some cool stuff in here, like using PackageKit for automatic printer driver installation as soon as you plug in your printer. The Anaconda installer has also been streamlined to improve the installation experience, especially in the storage devices and partitioning aspect.
NetworkManager has been improved considerably as well. “In Fedora 13 NetworkManager adds mobile broadband enhancements to show signal strength; support for old-style dial-up networking (DUN) over Bluetooth; and command line support in addition to the improved graphical user interface,” the team writes.
There’s a lot more in there for users, though, such as DisplayPort support for not only Intel video chips, but also Ati and NVIDIA now. The open source Radeon and NVIDIA drivers have been improved too; the 3D support for the Radeon driver has been moved out of the experimental phase, while 3D support in the Nouveau drivers has been added as experimental.
This is just a selection of course, so be sure to dive into the release notes to see if there’s anything in there to your liking. Hop on over to the download page to grab the release.
I’ve been using Fedora 13 for a while and it’s working good, even with the experimental 3D/Nouveau. I was able to play Openarea without any serious issues and the frame-rate was surprisingly good.
Some reviews I’ve seen claim Shotwell doesn’t work well but in my experience it works just as well as F-Spot. It imported all of my photos from my camera and I was able to make simple enhancements and changes to the photos.
The proprietary software was easy enough to add via the rpmfusion repos and blacklisting the nouveau driver made the NVIDIA binary work just fine.
What I do like is the update system and package manager, which isn’t root side(unlike Synaptic and the Ubuntu updater) so it themes proper as well. Overall, Fedora 13 has been a good experience for me and I’d recommend it if you like purely FOSS. The artwork is the usual good quality but I prefer the Solar Plymouth theme as default.
I’d like to add that this release includes 2d support for the Evergreen 5×00 range of ATI cards with the F/OSS driver.
Edited 2010-05-25 16:41 UTC
http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Rock-it-What-s-new-in-Fedora-…
That the the best summary an the net so far and also includes such info.
I don’t really like the Noveau drivers.
Is it easy to get the NVidia drivers through the package manager, just like it is with Ubuntu?
I’m also probably going to try the KDE version, since I’ve been looking for an excuse to try KDE.
All you need to do is add the rpmfusion repos, http://rpmfusion.org/, then install the NVIDIA driver and black list the novueau driver with the following command. su
sed -i ‘/root=/s|$| rdblacklist=nouveau|’ /boot/grub/grub.conf
Thank you! I will try this when I get home.
http://www.slackware.com/announce/13.1.php
I submitted this to OSNews, but they don’t want to cover it for some reason.
It is there now but (joke alert) you will probably still be compiling it by the time Fedora 14 comes out.
Ok, my first Linux Distro was Slackware 1.1 on Floppy. Nowadays, Fedora is right up my street.
That would be gentoo…slackware is a binary distribution
Slack is a hybrid.
I would not say that. Slackware, by default, install all binaries, docs, data and headers/development files (what others distros use to unfold on multiple packages). That means that it is easy to get a source of something it does not provides by default and compile it on your host machine (and install it).
Probably because of that people sometimes think that it is a hybrid distro, but it is not. What it provides, it provides in binary, prepackage tarballs (that are actually compressed tar files with simple control structures inside, besides what you would get with a “make install” step).
It is a nice distro anyway, but not my favorite anymore. Anyway, I am very grateful to Pat and happy he is still kicking it, he has my respect. Learned a lot about how things work because of it.
As for the RESPECT of Pat and Slackware, I agree. I’ve been a slacker since 97′ and I can’t live without it… I’ve even tried to use other distros such as Fedora and felt out of my element. So – “Debian, FreeBSD, and Slackware suits my taste.
Congrats to the Fedora Team!
I’ve been monitoring the progress.
Edited 2010-05-29 23:45 UTC
I still have a machine running slackware 9.1 … nice system that was.
“R has been upgraded to 2.10.1.” but it is 2.11.0 already
“gcc has been upgraded from 4.4.2 to 4.4.3.” -> but its 4.5.0 already
however Octave is the latest
gnumeric is 1.10.0 and I do not feel it will be updated to 1.10.4 …..
And finally no option to install GO-OpenOffice officially which feels faster.
however abiword is the latest.
It may sound ridiculous but Windows has the latest opensource apps packaged in many many cases. I do not like Windows but I rely on open source and though I manage to get way with compiling from source, many times it is not an option due to outdated libs.
These distros are not about the latest repo version of the packages, but the latest STABLE version.
GCC 4.5 adds a lot of new stuff, it will take a short while before it is tested for stability and added to the stream.
You can install the testing branches of packages if you really do need to be in that bleeding of an edge. I assume.
May I ask you why you want to have the latest version always?
Usually, the reason distros stick to some version is because they are well tested, patched (lots of packages are) and new versions sometimes break things. I am using openSUSE factory (going to be 11.3). Love it but I will have to get out and buy a new video card, as there is no 3d accelerated driver from nvidia for my old FX 5200 (which I like because I don’t play games on computers and, frankly, it is more than enough for my needs).
From the list you posted I used to rebuild octave but it seems they now package it in a very complete way (i.e. with all useful dependencies). I also prefer Go-OO.
Anyway, looks like a very good release. I will try it too.
And this applies to Fedora who pride themselves on being on the bleeding edge… how?
Sure they try to not include absolutely broken software, but they are all about new and shiny.
Well, even while trying you can guarantee a certain degree of quality without making some mess like one of the other bling-distros.
Last package point release does not necessarily means bleeding edge. Fedora is all about testing new features and technologies that seems to be promising. Things that need a test on the battlefield. That is why they push them into Fedora but it does not means that they should always use the last release, even though new releases sometimes come with new features.
At some point they have to freeze the target to get it ready to ship. They will probably update the packages through the repos shortly after things calm down. I mean, REALLY, give the repo maintainers a chance to breathe.
Not official, but I created go-oo.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d
[go-oo]
name=go-oo
baseurl=http://go-oo.mirrorbrain.org/stable/linux-x86_64/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
And then blacklist the original OpenOffice.org in fedora.repo and fedora-updates.repo and then installed it.
Fedora 13 is a good release so far, I just migrated from Arch Linux this weekend.
Seriously? You’re complaining about it not having gcc 4.5 which was just released 1 month ago? R 2.11.0 which was released just a month ago? Gnumeric 1.10.4 which was this month? Bah. At some point a distro needs to ship. If Fedora followed your advice then they’d never ship a product. They’d be stuck updating and testing packages till eternity because I guarantee a new version of something in fedora will come out this week and the next week and the week after ad infinitum.
Do you really work with that stuff in a productive environment? Or do you just count numbers?
Seriously if you really need the latest, you could download the SRPMS and set up some script that makes nightly builds from subversion or something, but then you should probably create some kind of test suite, that tests you system before it upgrades.
Just because the developer have shipped a later release doesn’t always mean that it is well tested by somebody else than the developers. You could argue that developers should test their own code, and they should, but the problem is that you tend to get blind to your own errors, so to be well tested a program should really be tested by somebody with a users perspective rather than a developers perspective.
This is one of the reasons it takes some time to assmble a linux distro. Even though Fedora is supposed to be bleeding edge, there need to be some form of QA for it to be usable, even for less mission critical things
This is why there is rawhide. A bleeding edge version of a bleeding edge distro.
GNU/Woot!
I just run the live-cd: it works great! Very fast! Maybe I’m going to install it on my desktop instead of Ubuntu.
I upgraded to the Fedora 13 Beta (KDE 64-bit) (from Fedora 11 KDE 64-bit) a few days ago, and the best improvements I’ve seen on my laptop (HP Pavilion dv3-2150us) are:
* Sound works flawlessly out of the box- this will help a lot of people who have a 2009-model Pavilion dvX laptop
* Resuming from suspend no longer forgets I have a battery plugged in (no mad dash to unlock and click on ‘don’t suspend in 15 seconds)
* Intel GMA4500MHD 3D is no longer a useless mess of incorrectly colored polygons.
It still needs work on the screen brightness not changing (the /sys/devices/ files change, but nothing actually happens), and the wireless card still isn’t supported until I installed broadcom-wl. I don’t think startup was any faster though.
As an interesting note, sound was good in Ubuntu 10.04 but horribly broken in Kubuntu 10.04 (half-second stutter, prevented the liveCD from shutting down). So much for project TimeLord or whatever they were calling it.
Edited 2010-05-25 21:55 UTC
I upgraded online from fc12 to fc13. Anaconda fails with a bug (if it sees “ntfs-ng” rather than “ntfs” in fstab) but once I booted back into fc12 and altered fstab the installation ran fine. Or so it seems so far. I hope they’ve improved the fonts which, out of the box, were dreadful on fc12 though some very good work at infinality.net save the day. Mail is down, though, as they haven’t yet upgraded amavisd to work with new versions of db4 so it won’t run. I’ll give them a week or so but if no luck then I’ll return to Debian. Debian is the only one that has been reliable for me. They are very good at tying up loose ends and minimizing the permanent betaware come construction site aspects of Linux that bedevil other distros including Fedora in my experience.
Yup, stability is good, but how do you manage their “only free” obsession ? Do you carry around a pen drive with your drivers ?
You can call in third-party, non-free repositories on Fedora just as you can with other distros. The main one with all the important stuff is rpmfusion. So in practice I have found no problem. The other issue here was the fonts out of the box on fc12 which were barely usable, imho. Fortunately, someone at infinality.net, which also has a repo, put out some very good fixes and some very thorough font configuration files with the result that font rendering became not just good but excellent.
Setting up Fedora with all the eye-candy and multimedia stuff is not as easy as it is on Ubuntu, for example, but it is only slightly less easy. If that were to change for the worse, then my guess is Fedora would lose a lot of users.
If Fedora is too beta, and it is a beta, CentOS might be a good free alternative. The CentOS team produces CentOS from the RHEL code, minus the RH branding, and the two are roughly equivalent. Since it is focused on stability, CentOS is a little dated when it comes to applications. Right now, it is sitting at 5.5, but 6.0 should be out in the next couple of months.
I installed yesterday in a P4 machine that was running FC12. Feel that it is running smooter.
This machine had a FC5 and a video capture card, that was hard to configure at that time, and I could not configure well in FC12. This time I had no need to configure anything.
So, I’m a kind of happy.
One thing that was strange is when tried to install a software using yum. It took a while because it conflicts with automated update checking that is installed by default. Disabled thet auto check, I prefer to verify by myself in a weekly basis.
I will play with this one and if it runs well, will install in my main PC on next week. I’m a Fedorer, but do not migrate until testing by myself. Last time I skipped FC9 to FC11.
Rgds,
Welcome to PackageKit. Like PulseAudio and KDE 4.0, this is clearly the way to go for desktop Linux, so a lot of distro have to implement it. This way, many people will test it, and maybe in the end it will become stable, useful, and usable. You’re lucky to have the chance to try it out… or maybe not.
Edited 2010-05-26 20:48 UTC
To those morons modding me down because of may saying “Slack is a hybrid”. There are more meanings to “hybrid” then bastard! It’s the best of two worlds: binary packages and source. A hybrid car doesn’t mean it’s some kind of “bastard-car”.
I did not mod you down. Actually I very rarely do it. But you were wrong on your premises. As I explained, what makes Slackware different from other distros is the very fact that it installs also what is needed to compile and install stuff from source. Another difference is that Pat assumes that if you are going to compile and install things on your system you probably know what you are doing. As so, Slackware package management system is more relaxed about that (and a lot more bare too) than of the others distros. As so you can carry on with your will. There other differences but lets stop here.
Anyway, you are on osnews. There are no gifts here besides the very delightful one associated to be able to express your thoughts. Free yourself of aspirations about point systems, they are broken by principles.
The only thing I want to know if yum has improved or not? does it still takes lot of time to install small package? Where does it stands in front of apt? Also does it now supports as many packages as debian?