Fedora 17 has been released. Major new features: “GNOME 3.4 and KDE 4.8; OpenStack, Eucalyptus, CloudStack and Open Nebula; ICC profiles for color printing and an improved gimp; Still more virtualization improvements.” And, of course, loads and loads more.
Some maturity coming to Fedora, again.
“Some applications’ menus are now integrated with the GNOME Shell. The new menus reduce visual clutter and help unite applications’ appearance.” – really looking for that!
It also comes with multi-seat usb that this kickstarter project uses for a new kind of thin client <a href=”http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1666707630/plugable-thin-client….
There’s nothing left to lose but try this with KDE. I wonder if Red Hat staff will want GNOME Shell as their leading edge desktop to be deployed in future RHEL 7. I’m on CentOS but I definitely giving up on it since it’s not so easy to add recent software. Hopefully Cinnamon & Mate get their spins too.
Edited 2012-05-29 19:26 UTC
Why not? Gnome Shell will be released as preview on RHEL 7 development so enterprise client will try it out. How is that different from the transition of Gnome 1.x to 2.x?
It’s different from the 1.x to 2.x transition in that it’s vastly smoother. Ask anyone who actually lived through it. 😉 Remember, back then there wasn’t a Fedora for the bleeding edge and a RHEL for the more conservative business types, there was only Red Hat Linux for both worlds.
As for Gnome 3.x being used in baseline RHEL installs… by the time it matters we’ll have several more years worth of point releases and refinement in Gnome.
Because GNOME Shell is a toy. Not very practical for their kind of business… well, I sincerely don’t want a Red Hat insider that works in favour of GNOME Shell to dictate CEO decisions.
… Or they can simply default to XFCE in the “Server” versions and GNOME 3 in the “Desktop / workstation” versions.
Alternatively, KDE under Fedora is now a class A citizen (Kudos to the Fedora KDE team).
– Gilboa
Cinnamon should already be available for install in F17 (not sure since I don’t have it installed):
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=771252
The bug report makes an interesting read because several comments (33, 38, 39, 40) show how many people still dislike Gnome Shell, even at a .4 release, and even if they’re involved with Fedora development.
Rehdon
I’ve realized I’m still using Fedora Core 8!!
And I have a box with FC4
Hey, me too!
uname -a
Linux media 2.6.26.8-57.fc8 #1 SMP Thu Dec 18 19:19:45 EST 2008 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/17/html/Release_Notes/se…
“Minimum RAM for text-mode: 768 MiB”
Wow!
That is a safe minimum requirement for the current installer that is under redesign for Fedora 18. An user was able to use less (256 MiB RAM) by increasing the swap space to 1024 MiB rather than 512 MiB.
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpost.php?p=1578957&postcount=17
Edited 2012-05-29 21:57 UTC
Still very far way from the 8MB I was using with my first Slackware distro, back in 1995.
F17 can be installed (slowly) using the text mode installer w/ 512MB and swap.
Once installed F17/x86_64 + XFCE + Chrome requires ~300-350MB.
On the same machine, Windows 7 x64 ate ~850MB w/ Avast AV and *no* browser. *
– Gilboa
* Both installed on an Asus 1201N w/ 2GB RAM and nVidia binary drivers.
Fedora isn’t exactly the ‘light weight’ Linux distribution, but that’s still insanity for the text-mode installer to require that much memory.
I was recently attempting to install Bohdi Linux on a Pentium 2 300Mhz with 256Mb of RAM. It booted up, but then would crash after a few seconds, so I never could quite get it installed. But it did look pretty!
Anyone know off hand how much ram some of the other installers require? Graphical and Text Mode?
I don’t know exact amounts of RAM required for installs, but most modern Linux distros can install in graphical mode with 512MB of RAM or less. Last year as an experiment I installed openSUSE in a virtual machine with 256MB of RAM using the graphical installer. It was a bit slow, but it worked. Ubuntu’s text-based installer will work in less than 256MB of RAM and the graphical installer works with 512MB, though I’m not sure how low it can go. Over 512MB is high, even for a graphical installer.
Probably because Anaconda uses Python?
Yeah, I remember running into problems trying to install Fedora several versions ago in a virtual machine. My computer has only 1GB to begin with, so obviously the virtual machine can’t be allocated a whole lot. I don’t remember exactly what I did, but I think it went something along the lines of:
1. Get out of KDE, GNOME, Xfce or whatever else I was in at the time and start an Openbox session. With so little RAM and such obscene installation system requirements, I needed to free up as much memory as possible.
2. Increase the RAM in the virtual machine. Normally I only allocate 64 to 256 megabytes of RAM to virtual machines for the installation process, but this obviously had to be increased. I probably set it to use close to or more than half of the total RAM.
3. Boot Finnix in the virtual machine and create a swap partition with quite a bit of swap space. Once again, I don’t remember the exact amount, but whatever it was I probably set it based on the amount of allocated memory.
It’s insane just how much of a pig the Fedora installer is. I normally prefer text-based installers due to their simplicity, speed and light use of resources, but needless to say I was surprised by Fedora’s installer. It provided none of these features.
Edited 2012-05-31 02:59 UTC