Fedora Core Project

Fedora 23 Review: Well, it’s Little Complicated

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 19:16:00 +0000

workin' it like Monday morning

Fedora 23 arrived a week later than originally planned, just like Fedora 22. While there are couple of Fedora spins, featuring popular desktop environments, for the past couple of days, I’ve been using the main release which is based on GNOME Shell (3.18).

Review OK, – but the latest Fedora, number 23, represents a significant update that was worth waiting for.

That’s thanks not just to upstream projects like GNOME, now at 3.18, but also some impressive new features from team Fedora.

Like its predecessor, this Fedora comes in three base configurations – Workstation, Server and Cloud. The former is the desktop release and the primary basis for my testing, though I also tested out the Server release this time around.

The default Fedora 23 live CD will install the GNOME desktop though there are plenty of spins available if you prefer something else. I opted for GNOME since a lot of what's new in GNOME, like much improved Wayland support is currently only really available through Fedora.

It’s true that GNOME 3.18 comes with many subtle refinements and features, but one of these features (a major one unfortunately) looked confusing to me, just like I find it difficult to cope with the default desktop layout of GNOME3, which is why I only use the ‘Classic Desktop Session’ as it resembles the old GNOME2 desktop (well, to a certain degree). Fedora 22 also had let go of one majorly useful utility (systemd’s ‘readahead’ component) and unfortunately, Fedora 23 too comes without it.

However, due to my history with GNU/Linux, I’ve formed certain viewpoints about GNOME and Fedora etc, thus I was not surprised to find myself in this kind of a situation. In simple terms, I know what I should and what I should not expect. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, I’ll explain them as the article progress.

The Desktop…

Except for the new wallpaper, there are no apparent new changes on the GNOME classic desktop session. However, as soon as I started to open applications, I noticed that due to the colors used in the default theme, it’s quite difficult to read the application window titles on the bottom panel.

There shouldn’t exist such issue in the original GNOME Shell since the concept of minimizing an application is absent. And since the ‘Classic Desktop Session’ is rendered using Shell Extensions, this is probably due to a malfunctioning extension. Still, it’s quite frustrating, though I can’t exactly blame the GNOME developers since their focus has been on the original GNOME Shell layout, not the ‘Classic Session’. And maintaining two desktop shells, especially if they’re based on two fundamentally different design guidelines (or perspectives shall I say), is a difficult task.

Anyhow, speaking of changes, most of the new changes have been focused around individual applications, not the desktop itself. And one of the applications that has received a lot of subtle new changes is the file manager, a major component of any serious desktop environment. I’ll list a few that I noticed.

When entering to an empty folder, ‘Files’ (file manager) now displays a nice ‘Folder is Empty’ template. I don’t think it’s that important, but it’s a subtle enhancement.

The files places section of the Sidebar is now replaced by the single ‘+ Other Locations’ entry. Once clicked, it displays all the found networks, locally available mount-points etc. While this change has simplified the file manager’s look-n-feel, I prefer the old one due to its ability to give easy access to these locations.

It all looks good now, but unless you have the file manager opened, there is no way to know anything about it. You must first open the file manager to see what the current state of the file or folder copying is. I find it very frustrating and this is a major issue for me.

In turn, I quite prefer what Ubuntu’s Unity & KDE (it displays it on the bottom-taskbar) have done actually because you can just glance at the desktop and get a sense of the current state of the file or folder copy progress. Very intuitive.

Boot-Up Speed…

Everyone loves a fast booting operating system, bun unfortunately, Fedora 23, just like its predecessor, is not going to impress anyone. Fedora 23 was 56.5% slower to boot compared to Fedora 21 and 49% slower compared to Ubuntu 15.10.

Hardware Recognition and ACPI…

Just like its predecessor, Fedora 23 was able to properly configure nearly all my hardware devices. I reported that Fedora 22 was even able to recognize my proprietary fingerprint reader, but I couldn’t really use it because it failed to recognize the finger print. Well, in Fedora 23 I was never able to log into the desktop by swiping my finger (maybe giving the middle finger would’ve worked! ). But, once on the desktop, I was able to perform some administrative tasks such as unlocking user management utility by swiping my finger. But it too doesn’t always work.

System Responsiveness…

Despite all the newer, faster and more powerful hardware, the hard disk drive is still by far the bottleneck of computing, because it’s the slowest (relatively speaking). So stressing it and then testing how the operating system behaves, makes sense.

How I achieve that or what I do is very simple. I copy a file (about 1.5 GB, though there isn’t a limit to its size) within two locations of my ‘Home’ folder and as soon as it starts, I try to open a multimedia file (here I installed VLC manually) and then try to open a couple of programs through the start-menu (if one is available) and also by searching, because the idea is to put the hard disk under pressure.

When this is all happening I notice if the multimedia playback gets interrupted, how many programs get opened and I also observe the sensitivity of the cursor. Then based on that experience I make a judgement (yikes! ). That’s it.

So how did it go under Fedora 23?

As you can see, Fedora 23 did take its time when shutting down and was the slowest of the bunch (about 134.5% compared to Fedora 21, 100% compared to Fedora 22 and 88.9% compared to Ubuntu 15.10).

Final Words…

First of all, please remember that this review, just like the previous Fedora reviews, is based on the GNOME Shell’s Classic Desktop layout, not the GNOME Shell, so all my judgments revolve around it.

Performance-wise, its true that Fedora 23 is degraded, more or less, though, depending on what performance aspect we’re considering. But that’s not what troubles me. Because if it’s technical, then it can be fixed. What troubles me is their attitude, and unfortunately attitudes are not that easy to fix.

Fedora 22: Don't be glum about the demise of Yum – this is a welcome update

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 07:45:00 +0000

Retreat from the dark side

Review The big news with Fedora 22, just delivered, is the Fedora project actually managed to stick pretty close to its proposed schedule.

Fedora 22 arrived just one week later than scheduled – but what's a week after the month-long delays of the last few release cycles?

It would seem that the recent top-down restructuring of the Fedora project is working, at least in terms of development time. The Fedora release announcement characterises Fedora 22 as: "Fedora 21 after it'd been to college, landed a good job, and kept its New Year's Resolution to go to the gym on a regular basis."

I would hesitate to endorse the gym bit since I found this release a little sluggish, but it builds on the very nice base that was Fedora 21 and brings in all the latest packages.

That new structure in the Fedora project has seen Fedora 22 released in three "flavours:" Cloud, Server, and Workstation. All three build out from the same base, adding packages relevant to the individual use case.

Although I tested both the Server and Workstation options, I'll primarily be focussing on the Workstation variant since that's the desktop version most users will want.

Perhaps the most interesting change is that Fedora 22 no longer uses Yum to manage packages. That may comes as a shock to some since, if you're like me, the first thing that springs to mind when you think of Fedora is Yum.

However, Yum has been deprecated in this release and replaced by DNF and hawkey for package management.

The good news for long-time Fedora users is that DNF is very close to being totally command-line compatible with Yum. And Yum is even aliased to DNF, so you can still type "yum install mypackage," and, once it's done telling you Yum is deprecated, it will install as always. But that will change in future releases, so you're better off getting used to typing "dnf install mypackage".

In short, yes, Yum is gone, but oddly, you may not even notice.

The installation process hasn't changed much in this release. I've criticised the Fedora installer in the past so I won't repeat that here except to wonder – once again – why confirmation buttons are at the top of the windows. I can't think of another piece of software on any platform that does this.

The most visible change in this release is a version bump for GNOME. Fedora has long served as one of the best showcases for GNOME Shell and Fedora 22 is no exception. This release updates GNOME to 3.16, which is notable for its new, lighter theme and revamped notifications system.

The first thing you'll notice when you fire up Fedora 22 is that GNOME's default dark look has been toned down a bit. Ever since GNOME 3.x débuted its default (and not very customisable) theme has been black. That's subtly changed in this release with many elements moving to a lighter shade of grey.

It may not sound like much, but the result is much easier on the eyes, especially all the white text against a dark background, which is now considerably less garish.

Roomy and less gloomy, if a little bit sloooow

The notifications system has been revamped in this release as well: gone are the bottom-of-the-screen notifications that always covered up key elements of the app I was using (particularly terminal windows). Instead, notifications have been moved to the top centre of the screen where they're easier to see and dismiss. The notifications history view has been rolled into the calendar menu item in the top bar.

It's worth noting, too, that there appears to be a Fedora 22-only element to the notifications. Long-running Terminal processes will pop up a notification when they finish, which is helpful because it lets you, for example, start compiling something which you can then send to the background and move on to something else. You'll get a notification when your compile (or other task) is complete.

There are some apps that still need a tray-style menu – I'm looking at you, Skype – and for those there is still a legacy tray menu that acts like a drawer and tucks away off screen in the bottom left corner when not in use.

The new notifications system in GNOME 3.16 is nice, but it unfortunately appears to have come at the cost of the media player controls, which are nowhere to be found in the top bar in this release. The plan is to add those back in GNOME 3.18, but I couldn't find a way to use them in this release.

As with the last couple of GNOME releases, there's an option to run GNOME atop Wayland and support for Wayland continues to improve. In fact, the GNOME project says Wayland support is "approaching its final stages," but in my limited testing it remains too unstable for day-to-day use.

GNOME 3.16 is also notable for adding two new "preview" apps: one for ebooks (currently limited to comics in .cbr and other digital formats, though .epub support is in the works) and another for calendar. Fedora doesn't ship with either of the new apps installed, opting to stick with Evolution for calendaring and, well, nothing for ebooks (the very popular Calibre is in the repos).

Both of the GNOME apps are in the repos if you would like to test them out. They're both simplistic and a little buggy at the moment, but Calendar shows some promise of filling what I consider the biggest hole in the default GNOME software stack that most distros use.

Speaking of the rest of the GNOME stack, it has – as you might expect – been updated in Fedora 22. Fedora sticks with the traditional GNOME software for the most part, Evolution for email and calendar, Firefox for web browsing, Rhythmbox for music and Shotwell for organising your photos.

Then there's Nautilus, the default file browser which has about 30 per cent of the features it once had. The good news with Nautilus in this release is that the delete key will once again, er, delete files (the last version changed this to ctrl-delete). To counter the possibility that by pressing "delete" you actually meant, "no, keep it", there's a new, easy to spot undo option.

GNOME is of course not the only way to run Fedora 22 Workstation. There are spins for just about every popular desktop environment. It's worth noting that the Xfce spin has made the rather significant upgrade to Xfce 4.12, which brings some very nice changes to the Xfce desktop. Similarly, the KDE spin gets updated to the latest Plasma 5 desktop environment, which features the new "Breeze" theme for KDE.

Other Fedora-specific improvements include the usual developer tools updates. Fedora shows developers the love with the latest version of popular web development frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django. Perl, Python, PHP and most other popular programming languages are similarly updated.

The Server and Cloud versions of this release gain some added support for popular container and deployment solutions like Vagrant and Project Atomic, which is designed to deploy and manage Docker containers.

By and large, Fedora 22 is a welcome update. The chief problem I encountered is that it felt a bit sluggish next to Ubuntu. Whether that's the result of GNOME or something more on Fedora's end is difficult to say; it was just that Ubuntu GNOME felt faster when running alongside Fedora 22.

Suffice to say, if you're used to Ubuntu 15.04 with Unity or something even lighter and snappier, Fedora with GNOME 3.16 will probably feel a little on the slow side.

Relative to Fedora 21, number 22 makes for a very welcome update. That with the fact that Fedora appears to be back on track with a six-monthly release schedule is good news indeed for Fedora fans. ®

Fedora 21 review: Linux’s sprawliest distro finds a new focus !!

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 07:24:00 +0000

Fedora 21 - Uh, not again !!

Like most Linux distros, Fedora is a massive, sprawling project. Frankly, it's sprawl-y to the point that it has felt unfocused and a bit lost at times. Just what is Fedora? The distro has served as a kind of showcase for GNOME 3 ever since GNOME 3 hit the beta stage. So Fedora in theory is meant to target everyday users, but at the same time the project pours tremendous energy into building developer tools like DevAssistant. Does that make Fedora a developer distro? A newbie-friendly GNOME showcase? A server distro? An obscure robotics distro?

Today, the answer to all the above questions is "yes." And the way to make sense of it all is what Fedora calls Fedora.Next.

Fedora.Next is Fedora's term for its new organization and release structure. Think of Fedora.Next's structure as a series of concentric rings where each ring is supported by the one inside it. At the center are the core components of the system, APIs that applications hook into and so on. On the outside are the most visible of the new layers, what Fedora calls "Environments." For now the available Environments consist of Workstation (Desktop), Server, and Cloud. Each environment is optimized to suit what it says on the tin, and because these are very modular, it won't be hard for Fedora to add new Environments as needed. (For example, perhaps there will one day be a Mobile Environment.)

The new pre-packaged Environments don't prevent users from personalizing Fedora to your liking, however. These three Environments simply represent the primary areas of focus for developers. By doing so, this offers Fedora a bit of internal focus and direction, allowing for the creation of more targeted "products" for users.

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller likens the Fedora.Next structure to LEGO. "One of the related (and perpetual) community discussions centers around what exactly Fedora is," he has said. "Traditionally, the answer is: we take the 'raw plastic' of the software out there in the universe and we mold it into high-precision LEGO bricks, and users can plug them together. The idea [with Environments] is we can take some of our bricks, and we can ship those as sets."

Miller is quick to reassure long-time Fedora fans that the project is "not getting rid of the basic supply of bricks... we want you to build other things." But the renewed sense of focus is apparent in the new Fedora.Next release structure.

From an outsider's perspective, this appears to have re-invigorated the Fedora Project. The new life is evident in its recently released update, Fedora 21, the first built around the project's new structure. After spending some time with this major update, Fedora 21 feels like one of the strongest releases the project has put out to date. It's well worth the upgrade.

Fedora Workstation

The Workstation Environment is what you would have installed previously if you downloaded Fedora Live CD and installed the defaults.

In Fedora 21, that will get you a GNOME desktop. The old "spins," which consist primarily of different desktops, are still available. Presumably, these build on the same basic set of packages found in the GNOME Workstation release, and as we noted, Fedora has long been a showcase distro for GNOME 3.x. With that in mind, we stuck with the default GNOME 3.14 desktop while testing.

First, though, you have to install Fedora using what is supposed to be an intuitive installer, something so simple you can't fail. Except that instead of "can't fail," it's so simple you can't tell what has to happen. Perhaps we're just brainwashed by the form-based installers found in Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, ElementaryOS, and, well, just about everywhere else, but Fedora's button-based installer—buttons, which hide forms—drove us crazy. Why make users click an extra button to set up an account for a workstation environment when everyone obviously needs a user account?

The Fedora installer isn't part of the GNOME project, but we wouldn't be surprised to learn the same developer who turned the Nautilus file browser into a useless toy also had a go at the Fedora installer. Most users will get it, it's not Arch (at least Arch's arcane install process is well documented), but it gets things off to a bumpy start.

The best thing we can say about Fedora's installer is that you only have to use it once. Just remember to create a new user and set your root password.

GNOME 3.14

Once Fedora 21 is installed, you'll be greeted by the GNOME 3.14 desktop (assuming you found the button to create a user account).

Fedora leapfrogged past GNOME 3.12—Fedora 20 shipped with GNOME 3.10—so this is a major leap forward for Fedora fans. GNOME 3.14 brings plenty of new features, including a couple new applications, an updated theme, and some more improvements in HiDPI screen support. In fact, GNOME has long boasted some of the best HiDPI support around, and this release continues to build on that. The little details have been polished to the point where we haven't seen anything amiss running Fedora 21 in a virtual machine on a retina Macbook Pro.

Fedora's nearly stock GNOME 3.14 looks great on HiDPI screens and the updated GNOME theme gives the desktop a clean, simple look and feel.

If you're updating all the way from GNOME 3.10, you'll notice a completely rewritten Weather app that taps GNOME's new geolocation API to automatically pull in your local forecast. Fedora 21 does not, however, ship with some of the other new GNOME apps like Photos. Fedora 21 has elected to stick with the slightly more feature-rich Shotwell. GNOME Photos is available in the Fedora repos and has some new online account support, but in our experience it's a bit buggy for actually working with something as important as your photo library.

This release also brings the first real support for Wayland: Mutter (GNOME's default display manager) can now work as a Wayland compositor. Just log out of the default session and click the gear icon to choose the "GNOME on Wayland" option. Fedora should seamlessly fall back to X where Wayland isn't supported.

GNOME 3.14 makes for a different but perfectly usable desktop. At this point the 3.x line is well polished and feels mature. Its rather different take on the desktop interface is not for everyone, and in fact it's not our choice for everyday use. But if you come around to its way of thinking, GNOME 3 is perfectly capable of getting out of your way and letting you do what you want. The only real downside to GNOME that we've experienced is the default file manager, Nautilus, which is pretty limited. But after swapping it out with the Nautilus fork, Nemo, GNOME 3 became a lot more likable.

If you haven't taken GNOME for a spin in a while, it's worth another look, as Fedora 21 makes the best GNOME platform we've tested, hands down.

Yum, now with more Yum-iness

As much as we love some of the developer tools and little side projects Fedora churns out (like the GNOME color management tools it pioneered), we've never been a fan of Fedora's package manager. Fedora 21 changes that. Yum is no longer the slow, awkward beast it used to be, and by extension neither is the Software center tools (which is the pretty-much-only-works-in-Fedora GNOME Software app).

There was a time when Ubuntu's Software Center was perhaps one of the best graphical software installation tools out there, and yum-based distros like Fedora looked slow and ugly in comparison. These days, more or less the opposite is true. Not only is Fedora's graphical software app one of the fastest we've used (speed will obviously depend somewhat on your Internet connection and available mirrors), but it's also clean and well-organized. It offers a great search tool.
Fedora continues to target the developer audience with very up-to-date versions of Perl, Python, Ruby, and most other languages you can think of. Anything that isn't there out of the box is most likely available in single DevAssistant command. If you're a developer, and you haven't checked out DevAssistant, you need to. It's the simplest way we've seen to get a complete development stack up and running.

Kernel updates

Fedora 21 ships with Linux kernel 3.17.1, which brings the usual slew of latest hardware support. However, this kernel is also notable for giving Fedora 21 tentative support for ARM 64 chips. ARM 64 is not yet considered a "primary architecture" for Fedora, but most things should work, according to Fedora Magazine.

Fedora's kernel team has also adopted a more modular approach with this release, stripping things back a bit at the request of the Cloud environment developers. The result is a considerably smaller footprint for the Cloud environment, though both Workstation and Server will be roughly the same as the previous releases, size-wise.

Fedora Server

While the Workstation environment is a good base on which to build your desktop experience, the new Fedora Server Environment is more specifically tailored to the needs of sysadmins.

The first release of the Server Environment features a few new tools, like Cockpit, a server monitoring tool with a Web-based interface you can connect to with your browser. If you're new to sysadmin tasks—things like starting and stopping services, storage admin, and so on—or, if you just dislike doing everything through an SSH session, Cockpit is worth checking out. It's more or less everything you're already doing on the command line available via a Web-based GUI. And since it's all the same processes in the end, you can start Apache in the Web panel and stop it from the command line. It's probably not going to replace your handcrafted shell scripts and preferred command line tools, but it's a nice option for newcomers.
This release also bundles in a couple new-to-Fedora tools like OpenLMI, perhaps best thought of as a remote API for system management, and FreeIPA, which aims to simplify the process of managing users and groups securely.

Then there's RoleKit, which is a brand new Fedora creation that looks like it will be very handy in the future despite being limited right now. In a sense, RoleKit is the sysadmin equivalent of Fedora's DevAssistant. It will help you install and configure packages aimed at a specific role. For example, RoleKit allows you to call up everything you need to run a mail server or everything you need to run a LAMP stack. It's promising even if it's incomplete.

Fedora for you

We've used Fedora off and on since Fedora 6 (which at that time was known as Fedora Core 6). Without reservation, this is the best release to date.

That said, the GNOME desktop is not for everyone. Fortunately, there are plenty of other "spins" available, including a version with the MATE-desktop, which can now use Compiz if you'd like to re-experience Fedora with wobbly windows just like the days of yore. There are also spins featuring KDE, Xfce, and LXDE among other desktops.

More importantly, Fedora 21 sees the project plowing into the future with what feels like a renewed sense of direction and purpose.

If you're a desktop user, there's a Fedora for you. If you're a sysadmin, there's a Fedora for you. If you're chasing the dream of cloud server futures, there's a Fedora for you. And of course if you're just looking for a distro on which to build the ultimate robot, there's still a Fedora for you.

Conclusion

Why did Fedora 21 have to be so buggy? Why? I wanted it to succeed, I wanted it to be cool and fun, just like the last release. There was so much potential, and then, something went wrong. Quite a few somethings, apparently. Installer partition selections, bootloader, login, codecs, printing, desktop effects. Damn. Fedora, where art thou?

Anyhow, Fedora 21 KDE is just not as good as it should be. Not as good as its predecessor, not as good as its rival, and most importantly, not as good as Fedora. There must be a baseline to quality, and it must never be crossed, downwards. This time, I did not get what I wanted, and I'm sad, because I know that Fedora can do it. We've all seen it happen. So more time is needed in the special oven for naughty distros. Perhaps I rushed testing just days after the official release, but it is how it is. 6/10. Done.

Ferocious Fedora 20 review: Cutting edge Linux still as sharp as ever ..

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 07:11:00 +0000

If you want to a bleeding edge desktop or server Linux, then Fedora is the Linux distribution for you. If you want to play it safe, try something else.

While Heisenbug — programmer jargon for a bug that disappears or changes behavior when you try to isolate it — uses the newest-of-the-new open-source programs it's not hard to set up. Its installation program, Anaconda, as J. A. Watson shows in his step by step Anaconda walk-through, is very easy to use. If you've setup a computer from a DVD or USB stick before, you'll have no trouble with Fedora 20.

Live session & installation

Fedora 19 was a troubled system, with kernel bugs and other problems. When I first tested it, it would not even let me login. Not so this time around. From the start, everything was rather peachy, I must admit. Boring, but peachy.

The free software thingie means you are restricted to just some casual browsing and no fun at all. I can accept ideology, and in this sense, Ubuntu is no greater charmer either. The live session is only there to give you a sampling of what's ahead.

The installer is still kind of tricky, but I've spat enough poison and venom in my previous two reviews, so I won't be doing it now. We will see this installer in action again soon, but that's a different story altogether. Anyhow, after a bit of careful fiddling, I was able to setup a proper quad-boot configuration.

Since the installer is kind of dangerous, you pay more attention to what you're doing. Then, probably because whoever designed it figured there could be terrible moments of panic, they added all kinds of safety measures, so you won't be killing your data easily, unless you really insist. There's a lot of mouse clicking needed before you format existing partitions. Paradoxically, the unclever layout makes it safer. But more error prone.

The installer does have a bunch of visual glitches. The text is positioned flush with the surrounding div, so it appears as if some letters are cropped. There are so many ways the installer can be prettified, but we won't go there.

Using Fedora

The installation took about 10 minutes. There were no problems. And now, we need to make Fedora presentable. What I did was try new themes, new windows decorations, new wallpapers, installed easyLife, which in turn setup the RPMForge and Livna repositories for extra stuff, like codecs, Skype, Java, and more, and finally edited the basic layout of the desktop to my liking. You will soon see the results. And I promise a dedicated article on this topic!

Package management

I was most pleasantly surprised by both Apper and yum. They are much faster than before, even with all the compression and bandwidth optimization. The system update for 445 packages took maybe five minutes, at full line speed. Nice, given the distro was only recently released, and usually the repos choke in the first week or so.

easyLife

An essential part of all my reviews - this will get your codecs and such. Now, for all those who emailed me about alternative Fedora desktop and repo management tools, I've not forgotten, we will talk about this soon.

Multimedia playback

After this step is complete, you will have your pr0n helper utils, namely Flash and MP3, so you can watch your stuff. Moreover, HD playback worked just fine, and I tested a WebM file, with Xvid and Lame, in Dragon Player, without any issues.

Desktop effects

For some reason, I was not able to activate them.

Applications

Fedora's default set is okay, but not mind-boggling. You do get rekonq and Kmail, rather than Firefox and Thunderbird. Then, there's the Calligra Suite. On top of that, you also get the lovely Marble geo-educational tool, which was also the only application to crash, just once, bringing the total distro sum of problems to one. Yup. SELinux was quiet, too.

Printing

It did not work using the standard KDE utility, but you can solve the problem by installing thesystem-config-printer tool, normally intended for Gnome, logging out and back into your session. Similar to doing the same thing on Ubuntu and friends. More later.

Resource usage

Fedora 20 Heisenbug KDE edition is not the leanest distro. It tolled some 500MB worth of RAM, and the CPU utilization was normally about 3-5%. Overall, the distro was fairly responsive, but you can do better.

Look & feel

You know how I think that openSUSE 13.1 KDE is among the prettiest desktops around? Well, then, why not bring its beauty to the rest of the Linux world? Which is exactly what I did. I installed the openSUSE Plasma theme, using the KDE Settings Menu, and did some extra cool work. Remember, I promised a separate tutorial.

Problems?

No, not really. The logout can be slow, but it's nothing special. Other than that, the system was perfectly stable. There were no hangs, crashes or other bugs. Even the KDEWallet was silent, and there's the new Wireless utility we saw in Kubuntu. In the worst case, when logging in, it will prompt you for your password, but that's it. No bogus failed messages, no issues there. Stable, robust. Suspend & resume worked fine, too.

Conclusion

Fedora 20 Heisenbug, adorned with the KDE desktop, has some issues. For example, the printing is borked, the desktop effects do not work, and there's the manner of default boredom. Moreover, Marble crashed once. But that's all really.

Other than that, the system worked fine. After 30 minutes of serious customization, I had everything, including a range of popular, mainstream software, like GIMP, VLC, Skype, or Steam, I had all my codecs, and the desktop looked beautiful. This was so much unlike the typical Fedora experience, and I'm feeling rather intrigued. True, you have to sweat a little to get what you need, but the end result is quite pleasing. Gone is the beta quality, it seems. And so, for the first time, yours truly, I recommend you consider Fedora for your production environment. Overall grade, 8.5/10. Now, fix those effects and printing!

Cheers.

Fedora 19 Schrödinger’s Cat Review – Back in the box

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 06:50:00 +0000

After a long delayed and divisive Fedora 18, how has the latest Fedora shaped up

Like previous releases before it, Fedora 19, code-named Schrodinger’s Cat, comes with many, many new features and feature enhancements, and, of course, its own share of bugs. Installation images are available as Live CD/DVD ISO images. The main edition uses the GNOME 3 desktop environment, with an unmodified GNOME Shell. Installation images for other popular desktop environments are also available for download. These other flavors, known as Spins, run the KDE, LXDE, Xfce, and MATE Compiz desktops.

There are also specialty flavors designed for specific computing tasks (Design-suite, Electronic-Lab, Games, Jam-KDE – for the musician in you, Robotics, Security, and SoaS), and ready-to-run images for Cloud platforms. Installation images for ARM, PPC, and s390 architectures are also available.

This review is based on test installations of the main edition and the KDE Spin on real hardware and in a virtual environment powered by VirtualBox. I usually like to begin a review from the installer, but for Fedora 19, I’ll leave for somewhere towards the end. The following list shows the topics I’ll touch on in this review, starting with features common to the main edition and all the Spins.

Here are the list of features that interest me:

Network upgrade of existing installations
Automatic bug reporting tool
Firewalld Rich Language
SELinux
3D printing
Anaconda
GNOME 3 Edition
KDE Spin
Graphical Package Manager(s)

So the famous Schrödinger’s cat experiment is one of those stories from history that is perceived incorrectly in popular culture. Like King Cnut arrogantly trying to stop the tide, or Bill Gates saying that 640K would be enough for everyone, Erwin Schrödinger’s hypothetical experiment was actually a way of explaining how some interpretations of quantum mechanics were a contradiction of common sense. While this name was voted on for Fedora 19 by, of course, the masses of the internet, it’s sort of indicative of the kind of problems people have been having with the default state of the distro for the last few iterations. GNOME has been moving quickly away from the traditional desktop metaphor for years, with recent updates going against a mouse and keyboard workflow. The anaconda installer update from Fedora 18 limited some options in favor of a more aesthetically pleasing experience. The distro has also not been particularly bug free, with systemd causing headaches for some. Fedora 19 had a much quicker turn around time this cycle, with only a week or so delay throughout the schedule. Have some of these immediate issues been addressed, or are there new ones to throw on the list?

The first thing you’ll experience with Fedora is the installer, which has been upgraded again. Hardware recognition seems fine, and there’s now a lot more control over the partitioning and editing of storage locations, an issue a lot of people had with Fedora 18. However, the method of doing so is not the most straightforward. Like in other graphical installers, you can select the hard drive you wish to use, however instead of then performing a manual partition, or selecting a recommended installation scheme, you need to start “reclaiming” space. This can be done by either completely deleting any existing partitions, resizing, or creating your own through the reclaim option, otherwise it will automatically try and fill into the space already made. Pre-existing swap partitions are ignored though for some reason, and 19 will create its own if space is cleared out. The installation will start before you can finish creating a root password or user, saving some time, however it still seems that this new installer is not ready. While Fedora is the test platform for Red Hat, the new installer still needs a lot more time in the oven.

If perhaps the installer is supposed to be more in-line with the simplification of GNOME, it’s doing a good job. GNOME 3.8 hasn’t had many major changes over 3.6, insomuch that it’s still “dumbed down” in many respects. As if to highlight that this is the path the GNOME Project is taking, a video explaining how to use GNOME launches on first boot. Credit where it’s due though – the search function launched from whatever the Windows Key is being called these days has always been good. Even if it’s supposed to be a substitute for a large amount of a workflow, the search function part is faster than mousing around in most cases, and has now been upgraded to include some system settings results in your search. Sort of like a hybrid between the same functionality in Unity’s HUD and the classic search results, but without an unnecessary split between them, or the inclusion of Amazon adverts.

The software updater has also been separated from the generically termed “Software” package manager now as well in the applications list, although it’s still accessible from there. It’s here and in the repos that you can access all the alternative desktops if you so please, although there are three extra spins of Fedora that you can also use from the start. As well as the KDE one, there’s also the lightweight XFCE and LXDE choices, with other popular desktops such as Cinnamon 1.8 and MATE available in the repos. This version of Cinnamon is built to work on GNOME 3.8, so you won’t need to downgrade.

The distro itself is a touch more stable than Fedora 18 on the physical setup we used to test it. In a virtual machine though, we did experience some quite noticeable slowdown and minor graphical glitches – nothing too serious for just testing, but for virtual distribution, you may need to do some extensive testing before deployment. Fedora then is not quite the beast it used to be, with its cutting edge stance harming it more than it has in the past. For those that were using Fedora 18 without any issues, it’s a great upgrade, however for those that moved away in recent years, this won’t be bringing you back. The box contains only one quantum waveform, and it’s not looking good for the cat.

Veridct

3/5

The latest Fedora has fixed some of the problems we had with the previous editions, however there’s still a way to go for some of its features..

Fedora 18 Review – Great Bovine Spheres!

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 06:44:00 +0000

A new Fedora is always a big deal, as the Linux distribution is known for being on the bleeding edge of free and open-source software and technology, coming with the best and brightest the extended community has to offer. Fedora 18 may have had a bit of a bumpy ride to the finish line, but the longer wait hasn’t hampered the quality of the release at all. Any quality problems are mainly down to GNOME 3.6, but we’ll get to that.

Like we mentioned in our review of the beta, the new installer is a wonderful, minimalist designed app that allows for quick installations with decent default settings, and a more advanced set-up if you have some specific requirements. It also starts copying and installing while you finish up with root passwords and such, similar to how the Ubuntu installer works. While there’s not always much to do after the actual installation starts, it’s a step in the right direction to streamline the installation process. It also has the standard post-reboot user set-up that we also saw in Fuduntu this issue, which is good for OEMs and Sysadmins, and doesn’t really slow down the process for desktop users. The actual installation itself is a little slower than we’d like, but it won’t keep you waiting for too long.

It’s after all this that you’re put straight into an updated GNOME environment – GNOME 3.6. We’ve aired our grievances in previous issues about this latest version of GNOME, about how it slows down workflow in favour of being touch and keyboard friendly. Luckily, it’s at this point that you can start installing any number of other desktop environments, such as KDE, XFCE, or newcomers Cinnamon and MATE. Now that both of these are native to the repos, they definitely look a lot better than previous implementations on Fedora 17, with fonts being cripser on Cinnamon, and MATE gaining the ability to look a lot more like a modern desktop. Red Hat has a big stake in GNOME, same as Fedora, so it’s not surprising that it still shows up as the main desktop choice. It would be nice though to have more available spins though.

There’s a bit of an update to the default app selection as well, and while nothing has really changed that’s not related to the system settings, the Fedora Project have at least added the LibreOffice suite to the starting selection. While it’s a minor thing, it’s a nice addition. On the system tools side, the package manager, updater, etc, are all now part of the same generic Software app. This is not accessible by typing update or updater into the search bar, and in GNOME 3.6 the drop down menu to access the graphical updater is a little hidden. It’s easier to just use YUM to update the system.

The Fedora devs also thought it noteworthy to mention the inclusion of a new command line tool, System Storage Manager. This simple package available in the repos can do some basic partition management, as well as checking partitions for errors and such. It’s a nice little tool, perhaps more suited to headless servers or working from the command line.

Otherwise, it’s got the standard package and security updates, a move to Linux kernel 3.6.y, and is still a great operating system for desktop, server, or the cloud.

Verdict

4/5

Fedora 18 is a minor but important improvement over Fedora 17, and the new desktop environment choice is great for desktop users, especially with the inclusion of a default GNOME 3.6. It’s just as slick, up-to-date and free as ever, and well worth the update..

Fedora Project - Fedora 17

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Sun, 09 Nov 2014 10:42:00 +0000

Fedora 17 & GNOME 3.4: Return to a useful Linux desktop (Review)

zdNet

UPDATED FOR FINAL RELEASE: May 29th, 2012: I have been using Fedora, Red Hat's community Linux distribution, since day one back in September 2003 when Red Hat split its commercial Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Back then, people hated Red Hat for this move, butbusinesses soon learned to love RHEL and Linux fans grew to love Fedora. But, then along came GNOME 3.x, Fedora's default desktop choice, and it all changed.

GNOME 3.2, which was Fedora 16's desktop, was dreadful. You don't have to trust me on that though, just ask Linus Torvalds, Linux's founder. He hated GNOME 3.2.

That was then. This is now. Fedora 17, with the ungainly name Beefy Miracle--no I'm not making that up, that really is its name--is now out and it's much better than it was.

Finding your way through Fedora 17 (Gallery)

Fedora 17's release was delayed until May 29th, but some last minute bugs were ironed out in the process. so I have no complaints.

I tested Fedora on my faithful old Lenovo ThinkPad R61. This four year old notebook is powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7500 and has 2GBs of RAM. I also used it on a VirtualBox virtual machine on one of my Dell Inspiron 530S PCs. This systemis powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. This PC has 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chip set.

Fedora 17 is built on top of the Linux 3.3 kernel. Its default file system though is not, as was once expected, btrfs, aka Butters FS, but ext4 instead.

One fundamental and controversial under the hood change is that Fedora 17 has started work on "getting rid of the separation of /bin and /usr/bin, as well as /sbin and /usr/sbin, /lib and /usr/lib, and /lib64 and /usr/lib64. All files from the directories in / will be merged into their respective counterparts in /usr, and symlinks for the old directories will be created instead."

The idea behind this switch to a unified file system is that it will increase Linux's compatibility with other Unix-like systems such as Solaris. Its supporters also argue that it will reduce the complexity of Linux systems and make it easier to run virtual systems, share files, make back-ups simpler, and so on. Fedora is the first of the major Linux distributions to make this move. The critics of this change simply don't see much point in making such a fundamental transformation to the traditional Linux file systems. For day to day use, you won't notice any of this.

Fedora 17 also includes a wide variety of open-source programs. These include Firefox 11, for its default Web browser; Evolution 3.4.1 for e-mail, Empathy 3.4 for IM; and the just released GIMP 2.8 for graphics work. Its office-suite, like many Linux distributions these days, is LibreOffice 3.4.3 instead of OpenOffice.

Firewalld is now the Fedora's standard firewall. Unlike earlier Linux firewalls Firewalld lets you reset your firewall's rules but never takes it down even for an instance. I like that in a firewall!

As you would expect given Red Hat's recent interest in high-end and cloud-computing, Fedora includes an improved cluster stack. It also includes built-in support for the Nebula Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and the OpenStack cloud. Fedora's take on OpenStack includes support for OpenStack's latest edition, 2012.1, aka Essex.

As usual in Fedora, which has always been a Linux distribution, which was first and foremost for developers and bleeding edge users, Fedora includes a pre-release of Juno, the next release of the Eclipse software development kit (SDK). For better or worse, considering how Oracle is being with Java these days, it also comes with Java 7 and OpenJDK 7 as the default Java runtime and Java build toolset. GCC 4.7.x is now Fedora's primary compiler.

Fedora also includes a lot of D programming language tools. In addition, as you'd expect in a Linux that's the staging platform for RHEL, which is meant mostly for server use, it includes the latest updates of Ruby, PHP 5.4, and Erlang.

The improvement that everyone wants to know about in Fedora is GNOME 3.4.1. It's much better than the version of GNOME used in Fedora 16. Unlike earlier versions, GNOME 3.4.x will now run without the need for a 3D driver. This has been a real problem for some users trying to run GNOME in virtual machines.

Borrowing from Ubuntu's GNOME desktop forks, Unity and Head Up Display, GNOME 3.4 new and improved search function in its activities overview makes it easier to find programs. Search functions in general are much faster than they were than in its interface's earlier incarnations.

This new edition of GNOME also includes an application level menu that sits on the top of GNOME Shell bar and contains the application's menu. If that sounds familiar, it should. It's also taken from Ubuntu's Unity interface. The bad news is that, just like Unity, not all applications use it so the interface has a half-finished feel to it.

It also doesn't help any that the scrollbars are smaller, and thus harder to use, than ever. Even more annoying, there's still no easy way to minimize or maximize applications. While it's better than it was, this is still a design decision that I find annoying.

Still, it's a lot easer now to use multiple programs and file systems in GNOME than it once was. The new GNOME box interface also makes it easy to use remote systems or virtual machines. The Documents application finally supports search, removable devices, and other features which I have long considered minimum requirements for what was a de facto file manager.

Last, but far from least as silly as it may sound, you can finally easy log out or turn off Fedora. Believe it or not, under GNOME 3.2, simply shutting your PC down was a major chore.

Still, while Fedora 17's GNOME 3.4 desktop is a lot better than it used to be, I still find it far less useful than Unity or Linux Mint's recreation of the very popular GNOME 2.x interface, Cinnamon. Take a look at them yourself, and I think you'll see what I mean.

A first look at Ubuntu 12.04 (Gallery)

A walk through Mint Linux's new/old Cinnamon desktop (Gallery)

Ubuntu's Unity, like GNOME 3.x, is quite different from earlier Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointer (WIMP) interfaces, but it's easy to use. Heck, my 80-year old mother-in-law can use Ubuntu 12.04. And, Cinnamon is a recreation of the very popular GNOME 2.x desktop on top of a GNOME 3.x foundation.

That said, I did find this new Fedora with GNOME to be usable. I have to say I didn't find the last version to be at all useful. Still, I'm left wondering why Fedora and GNOME first went in such a mis-guided direction in the first place. It's great that Fedora and GNOME are much better than they were, but they're still not for me, anyway, as useful as the last Fedora with GNOME 2.x was. I can see that Fedora is better, but I'm going to be sticking with Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and openSUSE for my daily desktop use.

If you want to make up your own mind, you can download Fedora 17 and check it out for yourself. Some people though are telling me that they're running into very slow downloads from the direct links. If you find that to be the case, try downloading the new Fedora by BitTorrent instead.

Fedora 16 beta Review

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 07:57:00 +0000

Fedora 16: Linux home for lost Ubuntu GNOMEs

What lies beneath the Jules Verne submarine art?

By Scott Gilbertson

Review The Fedora Project has released the first beta of Fedora 16.
Dubbed "Verne" and sporting desktop artwork that echoes Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Fedora 16 is shaping up to be a worthwhile alternative to Ubuntu 11.10, particularly for those that aren't happy with Canonical's home-brewed Unity shell.
Among the big changes in Fedora 16 is GNOME 3.2, the latest version of the GNOME 3 shell Ubuntu ditched for Unity.
Fedora has always been a reasonably popular Linux distro, but now it is acting as a kind of flagship for the GNOME 3 desktop, since Ubuntu has gone its own way. Fedora releases are likely undergoing much closer scrutiny from the Linux community.

This first beta release is definitely rough around the edges, but if you want to check out the new GNOME 3.2, Fedora 16 is one of the best ways to do it. Indeed the main reason to install the new beta (something I suggest you do in VirtualBox) is to see how GNOME 3 is progressing.
This marks the second incremental update for GNOME and it is clear that there will be no new major features coming for some time. Instead the GNOME team has been focusing on polishing and improving the foundations of GNOME 3.
Perhaps the most noticeable of the smaller new features in this version of GNOME is the new integrated chat and messaging system that is now built in to GNOME. The new features mean you'll be able to automatically log in to your chat and messaging accounts without needing to launch a separate application. Thanks to a new set of notification options you'll be able to reply to messages, accept file transfers and even take calls, all from the GNOME shell.
The other fixes to GNOME 3's early pain points include a more permanent way to display the workspace switcher when you're in overview mode. In other words you can now actually get to the workspace switcher on the correct side of the screen when you need it. You also now get status bar notifications for external storage devices with options including mounting, browsing files or ejecting. Status bar messages can also now display a counter, for example to show the number of unread emails or new chat messages.

Comfort zone breaker

Perhaps more useful for those who would like to get real work done in GNOME 3 is the new "do not disturb" toggle switch in the user menu. While all the functionality of do not disturb mode is actually part of GNOME 3.0, there's no easy way to turn it on. Version 3.2 adds a switch in the user menu and, when enabled, do-not-disturb mode will set your messaging status to "busy" and stop the endless stream of notifications.
For those accustomed to GNOME 2.x, GNOME 3 is still a long way from comfortable. But, like KDE struggling from 3 to 4 before it, the GNOME team is slowly putting the bugs to rest and adding in the missing features.

Fedora 16 will be more than just a showcase for GNOME. The distro has quite a few new tools in its own right, including the Linux 3.0 kernel. There has also been some talk of moving to the btrfs filesystem as the default for Fedora 16, but at least for now the beta (and the alpha before it) use ext4.
Also new is support for the GRUB2 bootloader on x86 systems, which replaces GRUB legacy.
There are also some application updates in the Fedora 16, including the latest version of Blender, a 3D imaging tool, the latest Firefox beta and the usual updates for Perl and Python. It's also worth noting that Fedora has not followed Ubuntu's lead in moving to Mozilla's Thunderbird for email. Fedora 16 is sticking with the Evolution email client.
For a complete list of everything that's coming in Fedora 16 (not all of which is in the current beta release) be sure to read the change list on the Fedora wiki.
Fedora 16 will be making the leap to GNOME 3 not just for the shell, but for all the underlying system tools as well. That means there will be no way to boot Fedora 16 into GNOME 2.x. There is a simplified "fallback" mode for hardware that doesn't measure up to GNOME 3's requirements, but effectively, from here on out, GNOME 3 is GNOME.
For those who've already made peace with GNOME 3, Fedora 16 is looking like one of the best ways to run the new shell environment. Not only is the default theme nicely integrated, GNOME 3 feels extremely stable on Fedora 16, even as a beta build. ®

Fedora 16 Beta Released

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 07:53:00 +0000

The Fedora Project proudly announced last evening, October 4th, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta version of the upcoming Fedora 16 operating system, due for release in November 2011.

Dubbed Verne, Fedora 16 Beta is powered by Release Candidate 6 of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.1.0, it features GNOME 3.2 and KDE Software Compilation 4.7 desktop environments, lots of SELinux enhancements, updated Haskell, Perl and Ada environments, and much more.

"The Beta release is the last important milestone of Fedora 16. Only critical bug fixes will be pushed as updates leading to the general release of Fedora 16 in early November."

"We invite you to join us in making Fedora 16 a solid release by downloading, testing, and providing your valuable feedback." - said Dennis Gilmore in the mailinglist announcement.

Highlights of Fedora 16 Beta:
· Linux kernel 3.1.0 RC6;
· GNOME 3.2 desktop environment;
· KDE Software Compilation 4.7.0;
· GRUB2;
· Systemd services management;
· SELinux improvements;
· 1000 System accounts;
· Added Chrony NTP client;
· Removed HAL;
· Removed ConsoleKit;
· Automatic Multi-seat support;
· Support for cloud computing;
· Restored support for Xen;
· Enhanced Spice 0.10 app to manage virtual machines;
· Many improvements for developers;
· Aeolus Conductor;
· Blender 2.5;
· Boost 1.47;
· Glasgow Haskell Compiler 7.0.4;
· Haskell Platform 2011.2.0.1;
· GNOME Input integration;
· libvirt networking support improvements;
· New mkdumprd for kdump;
· Perl 5.14;
· Static analysis of CPython extensions;
· Sugar 0.94;
· TigerVNC 1.1;
· USB Network Redirection.

Fedora 16 Release Schedule:

August 23rd, 2011 - Fedora 16 Alpha release
~~October 4th, 2011 - Fedora 16 Beta release~~
November 8th, 2011 - Fedora 16 final release

Download Fedora 16 beta:-

Download beta Release 16

Download beta Release 16

Fedora 16: Verne (Alpha) Review

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 06:58:00 +0000

Includes GNOME 3.1, GRUB 2

Fedora 16 (codenamed Verne) Alpha has been released today. This is the first official development snapshot for the popular Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.

Among the many features of Fedora 16 is finally switching over to the GRUB2 boot-loader on new x86 installations, better integration with the systemd service manager, a development version of GNOME 3.2, SELinux enhancements, system account changes, HAL removal, cloud computing and virtualization enhancements, and much more. See this Phoronix news posting for more details on the planned Fedora 16 feature set.

After a one week delay from the scheduled release date, the Fedora Project has released the first alpha version of Fedora 16, codenamed “Verne”, earlier today. This alpha release is expected to be the only alpha release of Fedora 16. According to the release schedule, this release will be followed by a beta on September 27th and the final release on November 1st.

Fedora 16 Alpha brings a number of new features/updates. One of the main updates is the long overdue upgrade to GRUB 2. Although GRUB 2 is not officially considered stable yet, many other Linux distributions, like Ubuntu, Linux Mint etc., have been using it for some time, and it has been stable enough for normal use. With the transition to GRUB 2, users who dual boot Fedora with another distribution that uses GRUB 2 will not have to manually add the OS in the GRUB menu.

In Fedora 16 Alpha, two choices of desktop environments are available by default as always. For those who prefer GNOME, Fedora 16 Alpha comes with GNOME 3.1.5. This version of GNOME is not considered stable and it is expected that it will be updated to GNOME 3.2 before the final release. GNOME 3.2 will fix many of the quirks and annoyances from GNOME 3. For those of you who prefer KDE SC, Fedora 16 Alpha also has a KDE version that comes with KDE SC 4.7 alpha. Like the GNOME version, it is expected to be upgraded to KDE SC 4.7 before the final release.

Fedora 16 Alpha runs on the Linux kernel 3.0. With the release of Linux 3.1 expected in a month or two, the kernel is likely to be updated to Linux 3.1 before the final release.

One feature that did not make it is the switch to Btrfs. Btrfs is a new filesystem that is currently under development. Initially, there was plan to use Btrfs by default in Fedora 16. However the plan was scrapped because Btrfs is nowhere ready for such use. Btrfs will probably be used in Fedora 17 or Fedora 18.

Fedora-16 : Verne - Alpha Release

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 06:50:00 +0000

As always, Fedora continues to develop and integrate the latest free and open sourced software. The following sections provide a brief overview of major changes from the last release of Fedora. For more details about other features that are making their way into Rawhide and set for inclusion in Fedora 16, refer to the website:

Fedora Alpha Release 16

This release is an installable, testable version of the code and features being developed for Fedora 16 (Verne). The software has bugs, problems, and incomplete features. It is not likely to eat your data or parts of your computer, but you should be aware that it could.

Download it here:

Download Alpha Release 16

The Whole Story

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:27:00 +0000

Fedora 15 LXDE is a Fedora 15 Spin, an alternate edition of Fedora, “tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application sets and other customizations.” Presently, seven Spins have been released. These are, in order of popularity about the time I hit the Publish button, the KDE, LXDE, Xfce, Security, Games, Electronic-Lab, and Design-Suite Spins.
The Xfce Spin has already been reviewed here. This article presents a review of the LXDE spin, the first for it on this website.

Installation Process: Like other Spins, Fedora 15 LXDE is available for download as a Live CD ISO image. Unlike the main (GNOME 3) edition, there is no DVD or bfo installation image for this edition or for any other Spin.
The boot menu options allow booting into the Live environment, where installation can then be started. Installation is not possible without first booting into the Live environment. There is an option to “Boot from local drive,”
However, attempting to boot from the local disk always generates the error shown here. This happens not just with the LXDE Spin, but with all the Fedora releases, including the main edition.
All the Fedora spins share the same installation program with the main edition. Anaconda 15.31 is the version of Anaconda, the Fedora system installer, that ships with this latest release. The changes I see in this version are just cosmetic. The available disk partitioning methods are the same. Disk encryption is supported (see how Fedora protects your computer with full disk encryption).
LVM, the Linux Logical Volume Manager, is the default disk partitioning scheme. Ext3, Ext4 and XFS are the supported journaling file systems, with ext4 as the default, even for the boot partition. Fedora 15 is the first version to have built-in support for btrfs, the B-tree file System, but it is only available when installing from a DVD or bfo ISO image. (You might be interested in how to install Fedora 15 on an encrypted btrfs file system.)
Installation of the Fedora 15 Spins, and of the Live CD version of the GNOME edition, is not installation in the traditional sense, but rather, a copying of the Live image to disk. So, what you see on the Live desktop is what you get after installation.

Desktop: The LXDE desktop is a very simple and highly configurable desktop environment. Memory footprint is small and CPU usage is minimal. A new installation of takes up less than 2 GB of disk space, far less than a new installation of other Spins. The menu features all the necessary application categories except the Games category. Like the Xfce Spin, there are no games installed.

The file manager is PCManFM, named after the author’s online moniker. I find it a lot more fun to use than Thunar, the file manager on the GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. There is support for tabbed-browsing. Clicking on a folder opens it in place, rather than in a tab. Though not in this release, directory browsing on the side pane has been implemented, and should be available in a stable release soon.

When dual-booting with other operating systems and distributions, you can mount and browse their partitions. Out of the box, you can even read and write to ntfs partitions, that is, you can access your Windows files and folders from the file manager.

If you click on an image file in the file manager, the system will attempt to open it in GXine, the default media player, and even after changing the default behavior to open all image files in GPicView, the installed image viewer, the system would still attempt to open them in GXine. GPicView, by the way, is one of the best image viewers I have used. It has more features than the default image viewer on the Xfce spin.
The system will popup this dialog window when a video DVD is Inserted.
And this if it is an audio CD. The problem is that for some reason, the default application, GXine, is unable to play audio or video media, and the problem does not seem to lie with it because after installing Rhythmbox and Totem, I still could not play any audio or video media.

Attempting to configure a printer brought up this dialog window, and adding a printer was not an automated process. I found that using the printing utility (Administration > Printing) was a lot more involved than using the printing service’s Web interface (localhost:631). (Most distributions will auto-detect and configure a connected printer.)

Installed and Available Software: Some of the main applications installed by default are:

Firefox 4
Pidgin Internet Messenger
Sylpheed, one of the best email clients
Gnumeric, a spreadsheet application
Osmo, personal organizer
Abiword
Gxine
LXMusic, a music player for LXDE

There are, of course, many more applications that you can install using yum, the command line package utility, or Yum-Ex, the graphical package manager.

Fedora-15 Review and Features

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Fri, 27 May 2011 10:45:00 +0000

The Fedora Project released the final Fedora 15 "Lovelock" distribution, the first Linux distro featuring the controversial new GNOME 3 desktop. Other Fedora 15 features include Linux 2.6.38, a dynamic firewall, the SystemD configuration utility, and new applications including LibreOffice and Firefox 4, says the project.

There do not appear to be many notable changes to Fedora 15 since the beta was released last month. As promised, this appears to be the first shipping Linux distribution to offer GNOME 3, a major overhaul to the leading Linux desktop environment that has received far more brickbats than bouquets from the Linux community since its April release.

f it's any consolation to the GNOME Foundation, however, Canonical is getting just as much grief over Ubuntu 11.04's new Unity desktop. While the criticisms are varied and distinct, a general theme for both new environments is that the designers went overboard on trying to reach out to novice users, limited ease of configuration for more experienced Linux users.

Fedora users who agree with the GNOME 3 critiques can instead switch over to the rival KDE 4.6 (see image below), as well as the lightweight LXDE and XFCE 4.8. The latter features "a new panel, Thunar enhancements and more," says the Fedora project.

Fedora 15 builds upon Linux kernel 2.6.38, and adds Systemd as the default configuration utility. SystemD, which replaces SysVinit and Upstart for system and session management. helps produce a faster boot experience, says the project.

Other new features include a dynamic firewall feature, and a cloud-oriented BoxGrinder appliance builder. New applications are said to include Firefox 4 and the new OpenOffice.org clone LibreOffice 3.3.

Early feedback: thumbs up for SystemD, power management

First-look feedback on the final can be found at Ars Technica where Ryan Paul seems pleased, and even had some nice things to say about the much-maligned GNOME 3. Paul also takes a deeper look into the SystemD init system, and while he declines to pass judgment, he is certainly intrigued with its possibilities.

Meanwhile, at ZDNet Stephen Vaughan-Nichols is far more critical of GNOME 3, although he praises other Fedora 15 touches including the new LibreOffice, the dynamic firewall, and a nicely improved RPM 4.9.0 package manager. He also tested Fedora 15's touted power management improvements, and found them to be significant, delivering roughly 10 percent more battery life on a notebook computer.

Vaughan-Nichols also liked Fedora's implementation of Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE) virtual desktops. Following a tradition of the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora featuring cutting-edge technology that later appears in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), RHEL will be getting SPICE soon.

Detailed Features List:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/15/FeatureList

Download:

http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora

Fedora-15: FREEDOM. FRIENDS. FEATURES. FIRST.

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Fri, 27 May 2011 10:41:00 +0000

FREEDOM. FRIENDS. FEATURES. FIRST.

Fedora 15 was officially released on May 24th.

Fedora 15's five best features
zdnet: "Red Hat’s latest community Linux desktop distribution, Fedora 15, is now out and it wasn’t for GNOME 3.0, I’d love it."
First look: Fedora 15 arrives with GNOME 3.0 and systemd
Ars: "The update brings an overhauled desktop user interface and a number of noteworthy architectural improvements under the hood."
Fedora 15 Released, GNOME 3 Looks Good
OSTATIC:"Fedora 15 brings lots of goodies, but most just want to hear of GNOME 3. I'm usually a KDE person, but I too just had to test GNOME 3."
Fedora 15 with GNOME 3: better than Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity, but...
DarkDuck:"Sure, debates between GNOME 3 fans and haters will inevitably heat up the atmosphere. But from my perspective GNOME 3 is decent software which deserves its future."

Count Down starts for New Release: 15

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Wed, 11 May 2011 12:43:00 +0000

Count Down starts for New Release: Fedora Core-15
Historically Test and General Availability releases happen at 10:00am Eastern US Time on a Tuesday, which is either 1500UTC or 1400UTC depending on daylight savings in the United States

Fedora Core-15

Fedora Core-15 Release

Fedora 15 Alpha: Beta Finally Released!

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 15:59:00 +0000

As always, Fedora continues to develop and integrate the latest free and open source software. The following sections provide a brief overview of major changes from the last release of Fedora. For more details about other features that are making their way into Rawhide and set for inclusion in

The Purpose of the Alpha Release

This release is an installable, testable version of the code and features being developed for Fedora 15 (Lovelock).The software is going to have bugs, problems, and incomplete features. It is not likely to eat your data or parts of your computer, but you should be aware that it could.

You have an important part to play in this release. Either install or run a Fedora Live instance of the Fedora 15 Alpha release, then try using a few applications or activities that are important to you. If it doesn't work, file a bug. This release gives the wider community a set of code to test against as a very important step in the process of making a solid Fedora 15 release. You can make the Fedora 15 release better by testing this release and reporting your findings.

What's New in Fedora 15 Alpha

GNOME 3

GNOME 3 is the next major version of the GNOME desktop. After many years of a largely unchanged GNOME 2.x experience, GNOME 3 brings a fresh look and feel with GNOME Shell. There are also many changes under the surfaces, like the move from CORBA-based technologies such as GConf, Bonobo and at-spi to dbus-based successors.

Since the requirements of GNOME Shell on the graphics system may not be met by certain hardware / driver combinations, GNOME 3 also support a 'fallback mode' in which we run gnome-panel, metacity and notification-daemon instead of GNOME Shell. Note that this mode is not a 'Classic GNOME' mode; the panel configuration will be adjusted to be similar to the shell.

The fallback will be handled automatically by gnome-session, which will detect insufficient graphics capabilities and run a different session.

LibreOffice

LibreOffice is an office productivity suite that will replace OpenOffice. It will be completely open source and driven solely by the community supporting it. It has a word processor, presentation creator, spreadsheet creator, database creator, formula editor, and drawing editor.

systemd

Fedora 15 has replaced Upstart with systemd. systemd uses services files located in /lib/systemd/system for services, and /etc/systemd/system for configuration. A dozen desktop daemons [list them] have been initially converted to use systemd service files and small number of programs have been patched to take advantage of it. systemd is compatible with legacy SysV init scripts and rest of the migration will happen incrementally over time.

Dynamic Firewall

Fedora 15 adds support for the optional firewall daemon, that provides a dynamic firewall management with a D-Bus interface.

DNSSEC for workstations

NetworkManager now uses the BIND nameserver as a DNSSEC resolver. All received DNS responses are proved to be correct. If particular domain is signed and failed to validate then resolver returns SERFVAIL instead of invalidated response, which means something is wrong.

KDE 4.6

This release uses KDE 4.6 by default as the KDE Desktop environment. KDE 4.6 offers new features such as it will be HAL-free (featuring udisks/upower Solid and Power Management backends), systemd password agent, improved bluetooth support using bluedevil bluetooth framework. Also in the works is kde-integration to libreoffice and switching the default phonon backend to gstreamer.

BoxGrinder

BoxGrinder is an easy to use command line tool to create appliances (virtual images) for various platforms (KVM, Xen, VMware, EC2) from simple plaintext application files.

Ecryptfs in Authconfig

Fedora 15 brings in improved support for eCryptfs, a stacked cryptographic filesystem for Linux. Starting from Fedora 15, authconfig can be used to automatically mount a private encrypted part of the home directory when a user logs in.

Indic Typing Booster

Indic Typing Booster is a predictive input method for ibus and scim. It suggests complete words based on partial input, which can then simply be selected from a list, and boost one's typing speed for more enjoyable input.

LZMA for Live Images

By using LZMA for the live images it will allow for more packages to be shipped on the live image, allow the space constrained images to be better and for the smaller images faster to download.

LessFS

LessFS is a data deduplication project. The aim is to reduce disk usage where filesystem blocks are identical by only storing 1 block and using pointers to the original block for copies. This method of storage is becoming popular in Enterprise solutions for reducing disk backups and minimising virtual machine storage in particular.

Xfce 4.8

Xfce 4.8 has a number of improvements and new features including the Xfce menu will support menu merging, allowing graphical menu editors like alacarte to work in Xfce, the task list windows can now be filtered by monitor and improved multi-head support. Also Thunar has been ported from thunar-vfs to gvfs, PolicyKit support in xfce4-session, multilib enhancements for xfce4-panel plugins and the run dialog now runs with the users full session environment.

Tryton

Tryton is a three-tiers high-level general purpose application platform under the license GPL-3 written in Python and using PostgreSQL as database engine. It is the core base of a complete business solution providing modularity, scalability and security.

RPM 4.9

RPM has been updated to 4.9 with improvements like a pluggable dependency generator, built-in filtering of generated dependencies, additional package ordering hinting mechanism, performance improvements, and many bug fixes all over the place.

Sugar 0.92

Provide the latest Sugar Learning Environment (0.92), including an enhanced activity set to provide an stable demo environment for Sugar as well as an environment for developers.

New Package Suite Groups

The Graphics suite group has been renamed to the Design group and the Robotics SIG has created the Robotics Package Suite which is a collection of software that provides an out-of-the-box usable robotic simulation environment featuring a linear demo to introduce new users.

Fedora 13 Launch!

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 06:44:00 +0000

At last F-13 is here! So ROCK IT!

As always, Fedora continues to develop (http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions) and integrate the latest free and open source software (http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features). The following sections provide a brief overview of major changes from the last release of Fedora. For more details about other features that are included in Fedora 13 refer to their individual wiki pages that detail feature goals and progress:
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/13/FeatureList
Throughout the release cycle, there are interviews with the developers behind key features giving out the inside story:
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews
The following are major features for Fedora 13:
*Automatic print driver installation — refer to Section 4.3, “Printing”
*Automatic language pack installation — refer to Section 4.4, “Internationalization”
*Redesigned user account tool — refer to Section 4.1, “Fedora Desktop”
*Color management to calibrate monitors and scanners — refer to Section 4.1, “Fedora Desktop”
*Experimental 3D support for NVIDIA video cards — refer to Section 4.1, “Fedora Desktop”

Some other features in this release include:-

*A new way to install Fedora over the Internet — refer to Section 2, “Installation Notes”
*SSSD authentication for users — refer to Section 2, “Installation Notes”
*Updates to NFS — refer to Section 5.9, “File Systems”
*Zarafa Open Source edition, a new open-source groupware suite — refer to Section 5.4, “Mail Servers”
*System rollback for the Btrfs file system — refer to Section 5.9, “File Systems”
*Better SystemTap probes — refer to Section 6.2, “Tools”
*A Python 3 stack that can be installed parallel to an existing Python stack — refer to Section 6.2, “Tools”
*Support for the entire Java EE 6 spec in Netbeans 6.8 — refer to Section 6.4, “Java”

Features for Fedora 13 tracked on the feature list page:
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/13/FeatureList
A discussion putting these features in context may be found at:
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_Talking_Points

Fedora 13 Review!

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 06:38:00 +0000

Fedora 13 Review!

I’ve been using Fedora 13 for a few weeks now, so it’s time to relay my thoughts on the new release.
I’ve never had a good experience upgrading a Linux operating system to the new version, and usually elect to just do a fresh install but I was assured that the “preupgrade” application would meet my needs. It was a simple application but carried the unfortunate downside of not working. At the time of Fedora 13’s release it appeared that on a lot of systems including both my desktop and my laptop the application incorrectly reported insufficient space on the /boot partition of the drive and thus refused to upgrade the system. Further annoying is the fact that this bug was reported and fixed before the final Fedora 13 release, and yet appeared not to have been rolled out into the Fedora 12 repositories in time.
I assume that the issue has been fixed, since I have seen reports of many smooth upgrades on the Identiverse since; however this was a fairly major issue which could have been handled better. So in the end I resolved to do a fresh install, which went without a hitch. I was amazed at how fast the installation went and I was up and running straight off, and in this new version the first time configuration displayed properly with two screens (which were detected and configured automatically) which was one of the only problems I had with Fedora 12.
In terms of new features there is certainly no shortage. Many distributions seem to treat upgrading to a new version of software as a new feature (And there is plenty of that: KDE 4.4, Netbeans 6.8 for example) when not much innovation has gone on since the last release but Fedora certainly seems to have made an effort to introduce truly new features as well as actually improving how the Fedora software compilation works together; improvements to Pulseaudio integration, improved GNOME colour management as well as automatic print driver installation which fall together to make the Fedora desktop an increasingly complete desktop. Another notable improvement is that one can now install Python 3 in parallel with Python 2, which is a big help for developers.
My personal favourite newcomer is the advent of compositing for the open source ATI drivers (as well as the NVIDIA one as far as I’m aware), which means that Fedora is no longer limited or made inferior by being a Free desktop solution. This is what we’re after, in the end the free software movement can only succeed when we have brilliant developers creating software that is equal to or better than the proprietary equivalents.
Unfortunately there are still a few items within Fedora which really need to be adressed and I think that the main one of these is the PackageKit GUI. While it is simple and you can install software through it, it’s also lacking features and is a definite weak point in the desktop experience. There is one particularly annoying bug which has come to my attention which is that if you are upgrading software which requires a system restart then a notification will pop up asking you to restart both before and after the actual update is performed, which could cause problems to those not watching carefully.
Overall, the system is still nice and stable and the software works. The new features have really come together well for a smoother desktop experience though I think it may be easy to miss quite a few of the more subtle but essential improvements to the system as a whole.

Fedora 12: United

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 06:08:00 +0000

Fedora 12 is the latest major update to Fedora, the Linux distribution that counts RedHat as a major sponsor. Fedora is Free Software and as a consequence, it is not one of those distros that we expect to “just work” out of the box. So if you are new to Fedora, don’t expect the same user-friendliness that you’ll get with distros like Pardus, Hymera Open and Mandriva One (or even Mandriva Free). It is, however, still a decent distro. How decent? Continue reading to find out.
As is the custom here, we always start with the installer.The installer: The Fedora installer, Anaconda, is one of the better designed installers available on any Linux or BSD distribution. It is a simple but fully-featured graphical installer, with support for LVM, RAID, and disk encryption. LVM is the default disk partitioning scheme, By default, Anaconda creates just two logical volumes – swap and a main logical volume for root with ext4 as the journaling filesystem (this is in addition to a non-LVM /boot partition of about 200MB). With regards to disk encryption, no distro makes it as easy as Fedora to set up encrypted LVM. All that you need to do (to setup encrypted LVM) is just enable a check box.

If you choose to encrypted your disk, which in the case of Fedora is the same as setting up encrypted LVM, you will be asked to choose a passphrase. You will need this passphrase before booting into your Fedora 12 installation.

After installation ….
What’s good: I think the best feature of Fedora 12 is how easy it makes disk encryption (this has been a feature of Fedora since Fedora 10). Every distro should make it just as easy to configure disk encryption. Do you know why you need to encrypt your desktop, notebook, or netbook drives? Spend some time here.
Another good aspect of Fedora 12 is hardware detection and auto-configuration. For example, just as on Ubuntu 9.10 and Pardus 2009, the system will automatically configure a printer as soon as one is plugged in. This is becoming the standard on Linux distros, but a few like Sabayon don’t have this feature yet.
Fedora 12 has a very good graphical firewall client that is enabled out of the box. There are rules pre-configured for most of the commonly used network services. The graphical firewall manager has an Expert and a Beginner level. In order words, it caters to all user levels. It also has default rules for desktops and servers.

What’s not so good (or not so bad)?: Compared to Mandriva One 2010, or even Mandriva Free 2010, the range of applications available in the default repos of Fedora 12 is very limited. I understand that Fedora will “provide only free and open source software,” but some very popular free software applications are not in the default repo. For example, there are no recent media center applications. The only one there is is Elisa-0.5.35, which the a very stale ancestor of Moovida. And you won’t find XBMC, the other free software media center application.
It’s good that the firewall is enabled out of the box, and that there is a graphical interface for easy management of the firewall, but what’s not so good is that the firewall gui is not minimized to systray when the application is closed. Ok, I’m nit-picking here, but it’s not my fault. I’ve been spoiled by distros like Mandriva.

Firefox (version 3.5.5) is the only browser installed, which is just fine, but you will not be able to view any multimedia content, and it does not “speak” Java. To make matters worse, Java JRE and all the necessary multimedia plugins are not in the default repo. In light of the projects stated policy of providing “only free and open source software,” this is understandable. If you must use Fedora, and would like to make it fun to use, use instructions provided at RPM Fusion.

What’s bad: Fedora 12 brings to light one of the most annoying behaviors on a GNOME-based distro. And that is this: For every folder that you click on in Nautilus, the file manager, the system will open it up in a new window. Not so bad if you click on just one folder, but imagine drilling down five folders deep, and what you have is a riot (see the screenshot below). Most GNOME-based distros have this behavior modified. for example, on Mandriva, folders will open in a new tab. On Hymera Open, which has the best default configuration of any GNOME-based desktop distro, folders will open in situ.

On all the GNOME-based distros that have been reviewed here, Totem, the movie player, has not been able to play encrypted DVD videos. But on those distros, I have been able to play encrypted DVD videos by installing VLC. On Fedora 12, the Totem installed will not play encrypted DVD videos, and VLC is not in the default repo. By the way, VLC is Free Software.
Final verdict: Fedora has had the reputation of being an unstable distro, but this latest release feels very stable and polished. It does not have the type of graphical management tools that you’ll find on Mandriva, or the beauty of Hymera Open, but for its intended audience, it should be good enough.

http://linuxbsdos.com/2009/11/19/fedora-12-review/

Red Hat's Fedora 11: So easy you'll forget it's Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:01:00 +0000

June 9, 2009 9:35 AM PDT

Red Hat's Fedora 11: So easy you'll forget it's Linux

by Matt Asay

Red Hat has taken heat over the past few years for allegedly neglecting the personal computer in favor of more profitable enterprise servers. It's a fair critique: Red Hat is an enterprise software company, a decision it made years ago, and to good effect.

But anyone thinking that Red Hat has somehow forgotten consumer markets in its rush to win the enterprise need only try the final release of Fedora 11, its community-focused operating system for desktops and laptops. I've been evaluating Fedora 11 for the past week and find it polished and professional while meeting or beating Windows in key performance areas.

Reading through Fedora 11's feature list, the geek in you may get giddy seeing the use of ext4 as the default file system. Not me. I don't care about the underpinnings of the operating system. I just want it to work.

This is, in fact, Fedora 11's biggest selling point: it just works. And fast, too: from powering on to logging in takes 20 seconds or less. Beat that, Windows!

(Ironically, if Windows hopes to catch Linux in boot-up performance, it's going to have to turn to Linux, like DeviceVM's Splashtop, for help.)

This, however, is an experience I've been having with several Linux distributions, including Moblin Beta 2, Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix (reviewed here), and OpenSUSE 11.1. While none is perfect, the same is true of my preferred Mac OS X and Windows (Vista or XP). They all work, with little or no fiddling required.

In fact, as an experiment I've been leaving my Linux-based Netbook around the house and have given my children and wife free rein to use it whenever and however they want. My wife looks up actors on IMDB. My daughter writes a school paper. Not one of them has struggled to perform these basic tasks, set up the wireless, etc. Everything just works, and works in a way very familiar to a Mac or Windows user.

This is the state of "desktop" Linux today: it really has nothing left to prove. It took years to become user friendly, but it has arrived, helped along by the world's move to browser-based computing. At this point, the only thing that Fedora and the other Linux distributions can do is embrace and extend the Windows or Mac computing experience, because they've largely matched them (especially Windows).

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth has targeted the Mac as the "desktop" operating system to beat, with plans to do just that.

In fact, my only real complaint with Fedora 11 is that it doesn't yet have a Netbook-focused "spin." I'm not alone in seeking a "Fedora Netbook Remix," but Fedora Mini, as it's called, is not yet ready for prime time.

In the meantime, yes, Fedora 11 provides support for cross-compiling Windows applications directly on Fedora Linux using the MinGW environment, and yes it provides the latest and greatest in open-source software likeFirefox 3.1 for Web browsing.

Just don't expect it to be weird/geeky anymore. Those days for the Linux "desktop" are gone. It still needs some spit and polish but, again, so does Windows. The Mac is the closest any 'desktop' operating system gets to being both beautiful and super user friendly. Linux, however, if Fedora 11 is any indication, isn't far behind.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Red Hat's Fedora 11: So easy you'll forget it's Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:27:00 +0000

This is, in fact, Fedora 11's biggest selling point: it just works. And fast, too: from powering on to logging in takes 20 seconds or less. Beat that, Windows!

(Ironically, if Windows hopes to catch Linux in boot-up performance, it's going to have to turn to Linux, like DeviceVM's Splashtop, for help.)

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth has targeted the Mac as the "desktop" operating system to beat, with plans to do just that.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.

Fedora 11 Review: What to expect from it

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:02:00 +0000

With about two weeks for the final release I hear many talking about Leonidas. I hear ext4, faster boot speed, new volume control and a lot of things which I could not comprehend. So I read the Feature List page in the Fedora project wiki and decided to come up with features that one might want to look up before installing 11 on to the system. As usual I’ve been using 11 from beta stage and have update it all this while. It is stable, in fact I have not experienced any bugs . Talking of bugs, I hear they even have a new bug reporting system for the non geeks which will send reports automatically. Lets have a look at the features most prominently advertised first and then go to the less popular ones.
20 Second Startup: This says it all, but the 20 second start up is just to the login screen. But what it doesn’t say is the amazing way it boots up to the login screen. I have never seen this on any other distribution. It starts very smoothly giving the user a blue screen and it does not flicker a bit and smoothly changes to the login screen. My words don’t give it any justice, really the experience is as refined as a Mac OS X even better.
Ext4 file system and brtfs: There is a lot of noise about the Ext4 file system being the default not only in Fedora but also Ubuntu. So what’s the big deal about it. For the start ext4 can support disks of 1 exabyte and a single file can go upto 16 terabytes. On an ext3 the maximum disk size can be 16 TiB and the maximum file size 2 TiB and has a faster file system check so the server market should reap benefits from it. For the rest, we should notice generally better performance, and benefit from things like persistent preallocation when using updated torrent clients, etc. I have definitely seen a big difference in speed using a ext4 system. Brtfs may become the default file system for Fedora in a future release. It is the answer to ZFS in Solaris. It is definitely not suitable for day to day use but if you want to see the future file system add icantbelieveitsnotbtr at the installation prompt and you should be able to format your partition using brtfs. For more details about brtfs go to their wiki.
Volume Control: When I installed the beta looking at the feature list was impressed that I could connect my bluetooth head set and configure it with simplicity. But the installation didn’t get the job done. It detected my Jabra Headset, that is all. Then after a few updates, I was bowled!
All I had to do was pair it with my system and POP it shows up in the volume configuration. Simply brilliant. There are still a few bugs, like it detects it as a mono system but by the release day I’m sure it will be done or one will find a fix in the due course. The volume can be centrally managed here thanks to the pulse audio system. And if you do run into trouble setting your volume refer to my post on Volume / Sound problem in Fedora 11.
Firefox 3.5 & Thunderbird 3: I love Firefox but it loads pages slowly. It is annoying at times how slow it can be. Using my brother’s mac I saw the gulf yawning in between the speed of safari and firefox. I was planning to change to opera when along came 3.5. It has a new JavaScript engine and loads pages a lot more quickly than 3.0. It is actually impressive. You can expect your browsing a lot quicker. That’s something I like about Fedora. They bring the latest of the software in a release. You don’t have to wait for another release to get it into the main repository. Firefox 3, OpenOffice 3.0, Firefox 3.1, Gimp 2.6, all of them put into the appropriate release. For us who like to be in the bleeding edge of the software end, Fedora should be the choice. Thunderbird 3 is also included, not in the Live CD but you’ll find it in the repository. It also has a lot of improvement over 2 which you can find here.
GNOME 2.6 and KDE 4.2: Of course you get the latest of the desktop environments also. KDE 4.2 is something to look out for. They have done a lot of improvements and is finally worth using. The GNOME users may not experience much of new features but for the Volume control. They haven’t left out XFCE, fedora comes with the latest release, 4.6.
Presto: This is a plug-in for ‘yum’. It enables delta rpm support in Fedora. Delta rpm is an rpm file which stores the difference between versions of a package. For example updating the open office suite would nearly take a 100 M download, using deltarpms you can save more than 60 % that is you’d download only about 40M. It is not enabled by default so you will have to ‘yum’ it.yum install yum-presto
I installed the plugin and updated my system. Just see the output I got:yum update
Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit
[text omitted]

Red Hat has officially released Fedora 11

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 05:55:00 +0000

Red Hat has officially released Fedora 11, a Linux distribution for developers that is a testbed for features for its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) product.

The new Linux distribution, named 'Leonidas', was made available for download on Tuesday. It includes OpenChange, which promises to give any email client native access to Microsoft Exchange. The technology uses an open-source version of Mapi, Microsoft's Messaging Application Programming Interface, to do this.

In addition, it provides several virtualisation improvements, including an upgraded console, a redesigned creation wizard for virtual-machine guests, and SELinux support for guests. Other new features are better support for fingerprint readers and the inclusion of the ext4 file system as default.

Fedora 11 also comes with the MinGW Windows cross compiler, which allows developers to cross-compile software for Windows while remaining in a Linux environment, according to Red Hat.

"Communities of users and developers are [now] empowered to make an impact on open-source software, to excellence in engineering, and to innovation," Max Spevack, Red Hat's community architecture team manager, told ZDNet UK.

"Significant work has continued on the boot process, and Fedora 11 should consistently boot for most users in somewhere around 20 seconds," he added.

End users will enjoy added benefits such as 'mime-type' detection and revamped volume control. The former allows for automatic detection (and installation if the user so desires) of applications that can handle unknown file-types. The latter simplifies the user's sound experience.

However, one analyst questioned whether Fedora 11's compatibility with Microsoft environments, or its improvements in sound or boot processes, will have an impact.

"Fedora is another small step for Linuxkind," said Clive Longbottom, service director at Quocirca. "It sounds really good, I'm sure it does what you want it to do and it has made improvements all round. And yet it isn't what people recognise or feel comfortable with. You can improve it all you want, but until it is a brand people demand, it will remain a techie toy."

A group of the Fedora Community's core release-engineering team members spent the release day conducting a review of Fedora's engineering and release processes, the fruits of which will begin to be seen in Fedora 12, Spevack said.

Red Hat releases a new Fedora distribution twice a year.

This article was first published on ZDNet UK

First Look: Fedora 11

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:55:00 +0000

Four days ago, on June 9th, Fedora fans once again rejoiced as their favorite operating system reached a new version. Fedora 11, or Leonidas, is available for 32 and 64 processor architectures on single Live CD formats or Install DVDs. Of course, both KDE and GNOME users will be able to choose Fedora 11 with one of these two desktop environments. Moreover, for a truly lightweight system, Xfce spins can also be downloaded from the official website.

As usual, take a moment to go through our test machine's hardware specifications:

· GigaByte GA-8IP900 Motherboard
· Intel Pentium 4 @ 2.4 GhZ Processor
· Nvidia GeForce FX5500 Video Card
· 1024 MB of RAM
· LG CD-RW/DVD-ROM Drive
· 19" Samsung Syncmaster 913v Monitor

For our First Look we decided to go with the "main" GNOME edition and see if Fedora 11 lived up to the expectations. From the plethora of worldwide mirrors we chose one that was close to us and the 688 MB download was over in no time. Booting the Live environment was fairly quick; once everything's loaded you will almost forget that you're running Fedora 11 from the CD, as the desktop is very responsive. But, for the full experience, you will obviously want to install it to the hard drive by double clicking the corresponding icon on the desktop.

Fedora 11 gives you multiple installation options: either use existing partitions, wipe everything and use the entire disk, or install the system side by side with one that's already on the HDD. I chose to use the entire drive and, after Fedora 11 finished setting up the partitions (which, by the way, were EXT4-formatted by default), the installation started. Five minutes later the process was completed and, honestly, this has to be the fastest operating system I've installed in a long time.

The boot time was also significantly improved, so Leonidas won't lag behind the competition. I was expecting a gorgeous animated ribbon to replace the ugly three colored loading bar from Fedora 10, but unfortunately, on our test computer, only the KDE version displayed it. I even re-downloaded the ISO and tried again but to no avail. Maybe this will be addressed in a future update.

Before reaching the desktop, I had to type in my credentials – root password, username and user password. The final step will ask you to submit your hardware profile information to the Fedora team, which I highly recommend, as this will help a lot with bugfixing and future development. The first thing you will notice is, of course, the new wallpaper – dark blue, wavy lines and a flock of birds are its highlights; all in all, there's nothing not to like about it. Unfortunately, the theme is exactly the same as in Fedora 10. It doesn't look bad, but it's definitely getting old fast.

Being pampered with the easiness of enabling proprietary video drivers in Ubuntu and Mandriva, I was also expecting the same from Leonidas. Well, it's still not the case. Fedora 11 does come with the exciting Nouveau open-source driver but it's yet to have 3D support so you'll want to install the official Nvidia one. For that, you will have to enable the RPM Fusion repositories through a terminal command executed as root. There is also the graphical alternative of downloading two RPMs and installing them instead. Once that's out of the way, you will have access to not only the graphics driver, but to a lot of multimedia codecs, including MP3, MPEG or Xvid.

The next obvious step after successfully installing the Nvidia driver was too enable some cool effects. Sadly, Fedora 11 doesn't come with the Compiz Settings Manager out of the box and the only settings you can modify are wobbly windows and the 3D Desktop Cube.

Seeing Mandriva finally switch to the "browser" mode in the Nautilus file manager, I was almost certain that Fedora 11 will follow. Well, it didn't and I truly can't find one good reason for them sticking to the old, totally inefficient way of navigating directories. Though I quickly went to the Edit --> Preferences menu and configured the behavior the way I liked, surely new users will not know how to do that without asking around on forums and such.

On the included applications front, you should know that, as in previous releases, OpenOffice.org is missing. Instead, Abiword will do a pretty good job for basic word processing tasks, being also able to save in a lot of popular formats, including .doc and .docx. But, as expected, the great package manager gives you access to a lot of extra software, including the latest 3.1.0 version of the popular office productivity suite. Multi-protocol instant messaging is available through Pidgin 2.5.5 and a quite useful virtual keyboard is in the form of Indic On Screen Keyboard. GIMP 2.6.6 is still around and the Transmission BitTorrent Client is at version 1.5.3.

But what about the most popular open-source browser? Well, Fedora 11 apparently wanted to be ahead of the pack and included Firefox 3.5 Beta by default. It's a great update, no doubt about it, but there will be some users who will complain about possible stability issues and the lack of compatibility with some extensions. The Mozilla Thunderbird email client was also updated to its latest 3 version, it too in a Beta state. The bright side is that Fedora 11 users will probably be the first to have these two applications updated to their final versions once they are available.
he Update Manager received a pretty exciting feature called Presto that decreases update download times by a lot. How does it work? When an update becomes available for a certain program, instead of downloading the whole package again Presto will only download the new bits and apply them to the existing version. Beware though, as this is not enabled by default and you will have to download and install the Presto plugin through a simple terminal command: yum install yum-presto.

Say you have an MP3 file but you don't have the codec for it installed; provided you already enabled the RPM Fusion non-free repositories, Rhythmbox will ask if you want to install the necessary codec in order to play the file. This nifty new feature is called Automatic Fonts & MIME Installer and will work in all kinds of other scenarios, including video playback or documents that need additional fonts.

Lastly, while typing my password at the login screen I noticed a new icon: a hand with its index finger highlighted, a sign that logging in by using fingerprint readers is now possible. Though I couldn't test it myself, the developers promise it will work with many models of such devices.

As a conclusion, I have to say that I was expecting more from this release. Surely, it is a great operating system overall, but there are a few minor annoyances that will probably keep new users away. If you are a fan, go ahead and upgrade, there's no reason to stick with Fedora 10. A faster boot, the Automatic Fonts & MIME Installer or the Yum Presto plugin may be enough incentives to give Leonidas a spin.

Download Fedora 11 right now from Softpedia.

Available Now: Fedora 11 LXDE Remix

noreply@blogger.com (Husnain Rasheed) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:52:00 +0000

Rahul Sundaram announced today the release of a new Fedora 11 remix, especially created for those who want a lightweight desktop environment. The Fedora 11
LXDE Remix Live CD provides optimum integration and compatibility with LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) and is available for 32 bit processor architectures in a 594 MB ISO.

LXDE aims to provide a faster, more efficient desktop experience while maintaining a pleasant and full-featured user interface. Mobile devices, cloud machines, netbooks or old computers can benefit from the low CPU and RAM consumption of LXDE. Some of its highlights are multi-language support, keyboard shortcuts, tabbed browsing (through the PCMan File Manager), ease of use, desktop independence, standard compliance and more. LXDE comes with its own selection of software such as Leafpad for basic text editing tasks, Openbox window manager, LXTerminal, LXMusic - a customized version of XMMS2 audio player, LXRandR for monitor configuration, LXSession Edit or LXPanel, providing quick access to important functions.

Fedora 11 was released just over a week ago and brings a lot of exciting new features and bleeding-edge technologies. From the 20-second boot time or default EXT4 installations to Automatic Fonts & Mime Installer and the Yum Presto plugin, Leonidas has a lot to offer. Moreover, the latest betas of Mozilla's Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3 are available and OpenOffice 3.1.0 is also one click away in the repositories.

To better assess the adoption of this new remix, Rahul Sundaram asks users to submit their hardware information to Fedora: "Post-installation on first boot, you have the option to register your system using Smolt System profiler. Please do so that we know how many active users are using this remix at http://smolts.org/stats."

Download Fedora 11 LXDE Remix right now from Softpedia.