Linux just gets sexier and sexier, and Fedora 11 just joined
Ubuntu 9.04 in the ranks of super modern Linux distros released this year. Fedora doesn't have all the desktop refinements of Ubuntu, or the wild popularity, but it does act as the underpinnings of
Intel's Moblin, and the
Sugar OS, and doesn't shy away from the future. Fedora 11 makes the bleeding edge ext4 filesystem the default for installs, which speeds performance and improves data integrity -- Ubuntu offers ext4 as an option, but some application incompatibilities have caused data loss problems, so hopefully Fedora has overcome that. Fedora 11 also has boot times in its sights, with a goal to be at the login screen in 20 seconds, new versions of GNOME and KDE desktop environments (GNOME is default, but KDE 4.2 is looking great) and plenty of other minor and major tweaks. Sure, it's still Linux: most folks who expect to just swap out their Windows environment wholesale are sure to be sorely disappointed, but it's clear the steady march of progress continues unabated -- and hey, it's good enough for Intel and
the children.
posted Jun 9th 2009 8:20PM
Gonna have to try this one out. I could never get previous working with everything I needed as easily as Ubuntu.
Although this is easier to use that Fedora 10, it is still no where near the usability level of Ubuntu. Given this fact, 11 is faster than Ubuntu in almost all tasks (tested only on a netbook), however getting it to do some basic things (at least in my mind) is very difficult. If you know Linux very well, it is worth checking out, but if you want an OS that is easy to use out of the box, Ubuntu is still the best in my mind.
It's aimed at different users to Ubuntu. If you enjoy setting stuff up just as you want, and getting your hands dirty, then Fedora is good. For an easy time with setting stuff up, stick with fedora, mint of PC Linux. It takes all sorts, so no criticism of the Ubuntu users.
I just finished installing F11 about an hour ago, and it is working perfectly so far. Easiest install I've had in ages. Search the forums for autoten and setting up media and drivers is a click and go exercise.
Pulse Audio didn;t even need to be touched this time. Worked on first boot and made me a happy penguin.
Step-by-step process to level the playing field between Ubuntu and Fedora:
Step 1: add the RPMfusion repository to the repository manager.
That's it. If that was common knowledge, I'm sure we'd see a lot more casual Fedora users. But it's a rare piece of knowledge, the type that only more enthusiastic Linux users would know.
It's great, but not for you if you're a gamer or have some masochistic attachment to Microsoft Office.
check Wine, Office 2007 works fine on some distros
oh it doesn't chop off the top toolbar anymore? that's good.
Actually, Office is what got me to switch to the Mac. I had a desktop Linux system as my only computer for 7 years, but when I quit my job to go back to college in '02 I decided to add a laptop to my arsenal. I didn't need a second Linux machine, and wanted a system that could run Office and play DVDs without hassle. Thought "well, I guess I can give XP a try.." and then realized if those were my only requirements, it wouldn't hurt to try a bare-bones $1000 iBook... been an OS X convert ever since. It helps that Office on the Mac is better than on Windows.
"Office on the Mac is better than on Windows"
I beg to differ, though I suppose it's a matter of opinion. But the Ribbon is spectacular once you get used to it. Office is on my mac for emergency use only. It just...doesn't feel right, nothing is where I expect it to be, and is almost unusable IMO. But, like I said, matter of opinion.
You're joking right? I'm at a Cal, where Mac's are prolific amongst both the students and faculty. The single thing they absolutely all hate about Mac's, is MS Office for Mac. I'm pretty sure it's pretty unanimous amongst people that do more then write simple word documents that MS Office on Mac is rediculously horrible, but then again, this could be because the Office for Mac team is not the Office for WIndows team.
Yeah Office 2007 is really the only thing that makes me stick with Win7 on doubleboot.
The ribbon is really addictive lol !
I couldn't get back to OOo...
Sadly enough I agree, MS Office 2007 is amazing once you get used to the ribbon. Things are more intuitive and easier to use. I have never been a fan of Office for Mac, since it always seemed to be Office 2003 without added benefits.
you can open up MS office files in Open office...
@UnixSystemsEngineer There are several levels of logical fallacies in your post.
No no no... he meant Neo Office on Mac is better than MS Office on Windows. ;)
My virtual machine works as if it was the main OS on Ubuntu.
Wow. The ribbon imo is the worst UI move ever made, i cant fucking stand it and the 50 people at my company that got new computers and office 2007 cant fucking stand it, and i hate supporting it.
Btrfs is more bleeding edge than ext4.
Butter offers advantages -- for servers. ext is for desktops.
I
file systems in general aren't that big a deal for desktop environments.
@Ghen I would not agree on this, and you wouldn't either if you were still using FAT32 instead of NTFS on your windows machine.
Journalised filesystem have brought a lot to desktop experience (although NTFS is not really journalised..)
Btw microsoft you might wanna refresh this a bit and while you're at it, could you make it easier for Linux distros to support NTFS?
ty
Still I think btrfs is not ready yet, most test (like the one on phoronix) have shown negative results compared to ext4
Who said that filesystems are not a big deal for desktops? FAT32 has a size limit of 4GB for example. With my files clocking at 5-8GB this does matter.
If ext4 is just too safe for you, F11 has hidden btrfs support, if you boot the installer with the parameter 'icantbelieveitsnotbtr' . See http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f11/en-US/sect-Release_Notes-File_Systems.html . Please don't be surprised if it eats all your data, though. :)
i tried ubuntu and loved it!
too bad i had to revert back to windows cause i need softwares. wish theres an easier way to install windows software onto ubuntu as if im actually running windows...
You should try running a virtual machine. I've got Windows XP running on my laptop and I run Fedora 10 on a virtual machine on the laptop. The converse is also possible; you can run Linux on the laptop and run Windows from within the virtual machine. This solution is very nice because you can use both OSes at once and in fact processes running under the two OSes can interact with each other via network calls. There are several commercial and open source VMs out there; I am using Sun's VirtualBox which works very well and is open source
dual booting is not hard at all
Yep, whenever I need a windows app (rare) I open up VirtualBox and use my XP virtual machine.
I loaded Ubuntu onto my mom's broken down Windows XP computer. The hard drive broke, and I swapped it out with a drive from one of my Vaio's that committed suicide right after the extended warranty died. The recovery disks loaded XP and it worked for a while, but it soon blue screened. It turned out that the AMD 64bit Athlon processor doesn't play well with XP sp3, and despite all my efforts, it would surreptitiously upgrade. I decided to exorcise XP, and it's been smooth sailing -even have wireless working, and with a memory upgrade -the computer zings despite being 3 years old!
Windows ate up several days of my life. Microsoft owes me.
If it weren't for the 3rd party apps, Linux -not OSX- would have been on all my computers.
Yea, I hate the disgustingly lavish profusion, as well as the contemptibly easy installation procedure.
"some application incompatibilities have caused data loss problems, so hopefully Fedora has overcome that"
Yeah, hopefully maybe someday you can trust real data on an open sores file system.
Open sores? Ewwwwwww
So I guess the internet has no real data on it, I would choose a linux system with an ext file system over an easy-to-hack windows computer with NTFS, oh yea, and I never have to defrag.
@ schmuckythecat
first it's source not sores second you already can ext4 is supper new and there for needs some time to get all the bugs out but ext3 works great.
you do know the market share for linux servers, right?
Ian, there is no such thing as NEVER DEFRAG, OS can do it (defrag) for you on a fly or you can schedule it. Yes linux does it much better than Windows but still, every file system can be fragmented especially if you start running out of space
Jay jay felt the wind from that one in his hair.
Raise your hand if you've ever had a problem with ext2 or ext3....
... that's what I thought.
Dude..
Do you know Apache ? it runs 60%+ of all servers on the Web.
Opensource.
Do you know Linux ? it runs 25%+ of all servers in the world
Opensource
Do you know Google and Yahoo ? they use FreeBSD on their servers.
OPENSOURCE.
Actually a majority of the servers in the world run opensource applications on opensource operating system installed on opensource filesystems.
Not to mention supercomputers under linux or workstations running Catia or Proengineer or ANSYS or whatever under Opensolaris or red hat.
HTML is opensource, so is FTP or HTTP or pretty much any protocol you use everyday several thousands of times without even knowing it.
I could go on but I think I've made my point.
I bet to differ, UnixSystemsEngineer, I've killed my ext3 partition before :P
@Romesh: So have I, but I'll be the first to admit it was my own damn fault too (messing around with the very early changes to EXT3 for carrying SELinux data).
Anyway, as for EXT4... I've been using it on my laptop and desktop as the primary filesystem for more than a year while Fedora has been going through the development cycle with it. EXT4 is very solid in Fedora... much of the underlying kernel work for it was done in conjunction with RedHat developers and as Fedora was committed to the change (for better SELinux support at the filesystem) EXT4 has received a huge level of testing effort from the Fedora community. I specifically tried to screw up one of my partitions (trying to reproduce a bug) and the thing lives on.
I would trust any data I have on EXT4. I would backup anyway, as I do with all data worth keeping anywhere...
One day, my PC (running Windows XP with NTFS) became unresponsive over the period of a minute, and eventually even the mouse cursor froze, leaving me no option but to reboot.
Upon rebooting, I discovered my file table had vanished, leaving me little choice but to reinstall and lament the destruction of some un-backed-up things.
The moral of this story is that SchmuckyTheCat's comment is feeble and foolish.
I set it up in VMWare, the only thing I needed to do was built the vmware tools from source.
Why would I want to install MS Office on Linux? If I needed Windows apps, I would run Windows...
@n74jw: How did you get vmware tools to compile under Fedora 11? I get a ton of compile errors.
(running VMware Workstation 6.5.2)
Fedora rules.
Desktop Linux / Free OS is great like the internet -- without html or css. A pipe dream.
There are a thousand toolkits, API's, package management systems (setup files, like .exe), desktop environments, sound systems, etc. that each do 999 of the same thing the other does. This freedom of choice (the choice to make essentially the same things not be interoperable with each other) is what linux is all about and what it will always ever be: shit.
**Using opensuse 11.1
Assuming everyone looks for the same thing (and by thing I mean every details that make you computer experience so personnal) on a computer you are right.
Hopefully it's not true, at all.
There is over a billion different users for this poor tens of thousands of possibilities, so it's not that big of a deal.
The only problem that exist is people trying to make money on one specific feature they have, by implementing a proprietary system that will force you to choose their system (as a whole) if you need this feature.
(my finger points at Apple and Microsoft right now)
You get rid of that, and you get rid of the compatibility problems in months, years at most.
And life becomes beautifull, on the web at least.
@ Félix
Developers users and everyone else would benefit from a unified API that encompasses all the calls, functions and features that are redundant between the multitude of toolkits out there (and there are MANY more redundancies than unique features) so that one may, for example: run a simple gnome app natively in kde without loading some or all of the libraries and/or background apps that do *the same exact thing* that the others I'm already running do.
I don't understand how something like this could be likened to giving everyone the same "thing", or as you so eloquently put it, "every details that make you computer experience so personnal".
Yes..... OpenSuse FTW.
Their version of KDE 4.1.3 had many backports of 4.2
Then you have the optimized version of OOo, yast has become as fast as synaptic, and it has more developer friendly features installed by default (more than Fedora and no question Ubuntu).
I tried Ubuntu 9 and a coworker just installed Fedora11, sure it may not be simpler than Ubuntu or boot faster than Fedora, but from a developer's point of view, OpenSuse has the most polish for a rock-solid system.
Meh. I use Gentoo on my workstation and have a custom rolled kernel. I've been running ext4 for a few months now and not a single problem.
yea gentoo is a great distro for learning about linux but i eventually switch to ubuntu because it took to much time and effort to get everything to "just work".
@jay jay
I don't think Gentoo is much better for learning linux that any other distro. LFS is what people should do if they want to learn the ins and outs of linux. Gentoo is great to create a streamlined system custom to it and its hardware. The performance you gain is probably minor, but I am sure there is something. We actually have a vendor that uses Gentoo for the servers attached to their high speed scanners.
I didn't mind spending some time with my system to get stuff working, it could be a pain in the ass sometimes, but overall it wasn't that bad. I think I stuck with Gentoo for so long since the portage system is outstanding, I feel it is better than apt-get. Once I got my laptop, I just got sick of trying to set it up. It was my laptop, I just wanted it to work, so I turned to Ubuntu. I also got sick of waiting for things with Gentoo, I didn't want to have to start installing something and then wait for it to compile just to run a needed app or test an app. The current state of Gentoo concerns me, there seems to be a lot of in-fighting among their developers and other political bullshit going on. This has seemed to result in some weird choices in packages getting removed and what not. I hope they can get past this and continue, I may look at Gentoo again, but currently I am testing Ubuntu on the new server I am building.
The compiling can be an issue on slower hardware. Fortunately the workstation is a dual quad-core Xeon system.
Yeah, another Gentoo + ext4 user here. Gentoo is great for 3 things in my opinion. 1. Portage, 2. Installing your environment exactly how you want. Want binary drivers and proprietary codecs? No problem! 3. Trying out cutting and bleeding edge software. Want that just released Sun Java JDK or to easily compile and run OpenJDK straight from tip? Gentoo's there for you. Sometimes it can be a huge pain, though, especially when you're willing to put in the time but just can't find any documentation online or knowledge in IRC. For having things Just! Work! Ubuntu does it better than no other.
So speaking of item #2 above, that's EXACTLY where Fedora wears major fail pants by the way. I don't want my distro telling me what software, codecs or drivers I'm *allowed* to use. If I want to use Mono, Fedora should support it. If I want to run proprietary NVidia drivers, Fedora shouldn't be getting in my way. If I'm a new user, I don't care about the philosophical arguments against patented codecs. Just play my MP3s damnit!
"Sure, it's still Linux: most folks who expect to just swap out their Windows environment wholesale are sure to be sorely disappointed..."
Ubuntu 9.04 + VirtualBox Win7. What else do you need?
I have to add : your win7 is gonna stop soon :)
win 7 and ubuntu 9.04 dual boot.
"Ubuntu 9.04 + VirtualBox Win7. What else do you need?"
How about a computer science degree...
Linux may have gotten more user-friendly on the desktop, but I frankly think the standard distros have gotten uglier over the years.
I started using it in '95 as my only desktop, but haven't regularly run a desktop Linux distro since around '05. Every time I install the latest Ubuntu or Fedora on a lark, I'm horrified at how ugly and unintuitive it is. They've tried to make it look and feel more and more like Windows over the years, to great detriment.
I'm sure if I took the time to customize my setup it'd get better, but I'd need a reason to use it over the Mac desktops I now have. And frankly, my free time is worth more than that to me.
I've got a double boot Ubuntu 9.04 on this pc right now, gnome running, I don't see any Windows ...
I have a dock, 3d effects all over the place, 4 desktops and I don't see what's ugly either.
And don't tell me it was hard to get, especially for someone who has been using linux for years !
I can understand a linux noob when he tells me he is lost, but I hardly can understand an old times linux user telling me it was better before ! !
In the past 5 years Desktop linux caught up on Mac OS X and Windows.
It just lacks more hardware manufacturer support as always.
I would highly recommend going with XFCE4 instead of KDE or Gnome when next you try running a recent distro. At least it still likens itself to being a minimalist interface; its fast and snappy and clean.
Linux Mint FTW
From the comments, it sounds like many people haven't used a Fedora system in years. One Fedora year is seven Windows years in terms of improvement. Also, Fedora has pretty hard statistics on usage - about 13M unique IPs access their update system regularly. Ubuntu has a lot of mind share, but I'm not sure they have the data to back up being the #1 position.
All these advancements in linux and I still cannot install a program by downloading and clicking on the install file (something that Windows was capable of for 15 years now). Fantastic. It's not that I have anything against Linux or the open source community. It's just that it will never become easy enough to use for the general public.
That's existed for some time... One for is DEB files.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deb_(file_format)
Just double click them and an installer pops up. Just because developers don't use it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The biggest thing holding back Linux is package management. There is no one unified type of package that you can easily download and install on any Linux distro. You have RPM files in Red Hat based distros such as Fedora and Mandrive, .deb files on Debian based distros, .pkg, plus the different managers like yum and apt.
Mac OS X has, in my mind, the best way of installing apps by far. You download the compressed disk image, which expands containing a .app file (in reality just a directory/folder containing all the app's needed file). Drag the .app to the Applications directory (or not, you can put it anywhere you please) and you are done. To uninstall, just drag the .app to the trash and empty.
I don't see why Linux couldn't adopt the OS X method as standard.
@ Nathan
Your comment makes me believe that you have not used a linux distro since 2000 (or earlier). Most (I cannot say all because I do not know for sure) Linux distros have an "add/remove" manager along with a package manager. In Ubuntu, the programs are listed by category with a description. Instead of searching through the internet for a program, you just go into one of these programs and find the program you want in seconds.
This system is so much better than Windows and Mac
I usually stay out of these silly meeting of the minds, most of which have no clue what they are talking about, but you my friend, have been crowned King of the Village Idiots! Pretty much every linux distro in existance, at this point, has a installation system light years ahead of everything else. OSX is great, drag and drop, but does a shitty job cleaning up after itself. You need addon utulities just to clean up after uninstalling an application. Windows...lets not even go there. You CAN download a file and click to install in many different ways, OpenSUSE 1Click is a great way for largest packages sets, like click here to install KDE, but that's all legacy. Why on earth would you want to download and click a file with there are apps specifically designed for retrieving and autoinstalling apps for you. Tell your mother to open the Add/Remove Programs and find Banshee then click GO...makes more sense to me.
Besides that, please show me another OS that can fetch an excess of 20,000 applications on demand to turn a desktop into a webserver, into a sql server, into a media server, (you get the picture)
And for people complaing of no Windows Way of installing windows applications, check out Codeweavers Crossover Office. It's been around for ages, and does just that.
Yep.. because clicking on some random file of the net is soooo much better than using a vetted inspected file from a secure trusted repository..
And going to a web site, finding the link to the download, making a note of the serial number, downloading the app, and finally installing the app is so much easier than selecting it from a list and letting it do it's own thing.
Be honest. Windows installation is easy. Easy to do, easy to bugger up, easy to get infected with. And with the hoards of auto clickers, installing on Windows is so easy that you can do it without realising.
The ext4 data loss issues were fixed in the 2.6.30 kernel and have been backported to the 2.6.29 kernel that Fedora uses. Ubuntu shipped with 2.6.28 and doesn't have those fixes. They were more down to design decisions rather than being actual bugs - in the end the version of reality where we accept people's software isn't perfect won and the kernel now looks after your code anyway.
(The long story is that the "right" thing for applications to do with ext4 was about the worst possible thing you could do with ext3. If you write a file and then move it on top of another one, there's no strict guarantee that the writing will occur before the moving occurs. If your system lost power or crashed during that time you'd lose both the old and the new copies of the file. The ext4 developers suggested that you should forcibly synchronise data to disk before performing the move to prevent that from occuring. Unfortunately, that forcible synchronisation would cause ext3 to write out *all* pending data, not just the data related to that file - this could cause the system to stall for an extended period of time. Applications could chose to either work well with ext3 or ext4, but not both - they both provide the same filesystem magic number, so there's no way for an application to tell which of them it's writing to. In the end sanity won and now ext4 will ensure that the data hits disk before performing the move. As a result, you're now basically guaranteed to get either the new version or the old version - it's not possible for you to lose both copies unless the application is doing something very stupid)
"Fedora doesn't have all the desktop refinements of Ubuntu, or the wild popularity, but it does act as the underpinnings of Intel's Moblin, and the Sugar OS, and doesn't shy away from the future."
That's interesting because they all look the same to me on Gnome.
Guess its getting down to a matter of choice and usage. Fedora does have the desktop refinements (IMO) that Ubuntu has. I work with both distros -- when it gets into light duty stuff such as email, browsing the web, blogging, etc -- I use Ubuntu. When it gets into heavy duty stuff such as programming, photo manipulation, testing, etc -- I use Fedora. To me, each has its own refinements that meet my needs in the specific ways I am using the distros.
As for the Windows environment sorely disappointed thing -- I don't know where that came from. I work with both environments (Linux and Windows) on a daily basis -- and -- I found that that there is no "sore disappointment" for me in terms of Linux. It's more like this -- there are a few things that Linux can do that Windows cannot. Conversely, there are a few things that Windows can do that Linux cannot. When I've encountered these issues in Linux, they are minuscule and they are not the show stoppers that would make me sorely disappointed.
I don't care about the OS but +1000 for Django Reinhardt!
I've been "switched" to Linux (Mandriva 2009.1) for about 6 months now, and I'm REALLY trying to like it. The Computer guy in my does, but the practical guy in me is still not convinced. My wife certainly is not.
Until "Linux" can sort out all the hardware issues (read: incompatibilities), then it'll never be ready. I know the arguments, so spare me - "it's the hardware makers to blame". As true as that may be, it's all BS from an end-user point of view...
Until I can plug in my minidv video camera and have the system actually detect that something's in the firewire port and THEN save my film, edit it, and produce a DVD copy of something easily and without jumping through hoops, it's not ready.
Until I can use my Logitech webcam with skype, or any other video calling program because the system doesn't "see it", it's not ready.
Until I can start a second X session in KDE (equivalent to Windows "switch user") without the system feeling like it's 10 years old, then it's not ready.
Until sounds stop getting cut off, or stop working unexepctedly, it's not ready.
Until people tell me to stop using ATI cards, it's not ready.
I can go on....
Linux used to be the champion of older hardware, but that's not the case at all any more. Not for "today's" Linux. Not for the X-windows, KDE/Gnome world. If your hardware is more than 2-3 years old, you'll probably have some or all of the problems above.
In the meantime, I'll keep plugging away until I get too fed up with it all. (I've tried K/Ubuntu, and Fedora, all have similar issues. I like things about Mandriva better than the others which is why I chose that distro). Maybe I'll have another look at Fedora (much to the chagrin of my wife).
I always wonder what the mean when they say 20 second boot time. It's all dependent on the computer. My old Tecra laptop will boot a lot slower than some newer piece of hardware.
BTW.. I run Mandriva 2009.1 on it. Supports all of it's hardware and laptop suspend features out of the box. The only problem is the onboard S3 video on the Tecra is too slow for the high resolution 1440x1050 screen.
Use FC9 daily. Never moved to FC10 cause of instability reports from a friend.
So, the obvious questions. You install FC11 on a laptop. Its got either an ATI or an NVIDIA GPU. Do you have to immediately download and install a binary driver to get the full resolution of your screen? Do you almost immediately end up manually editing the config files to get either the GPU or the mouse buttons to work? Is the power management finally worked out so the battery life is anything comparable to what it would be in Windows? Do you still have to reinstall a lot of your applications (VMWare say) each time the kernel gets updated? Does the sound work in more than one application at a time or must you still launch the one you want to have the sound first? Have they solved the problems with the network manager and wireless?
"You install FC11 on a laptop. Its got either an ATI or an NVIDIA GPU. Do you have to immediately download and install a binary driver to get the full resolution of your screen?"
No.
"Do you almost immediately end up manually editing the config files to get either the GPU or the mouse buttons to work?"
No.
"Is the power management finally worked out so the battery life is anything comparable to what it would be in Windows?"
Depends on your hardware. Probably similar, in a few cases better, in more cases slightly worse.
"Do you still have to reinstall a lot of your applications (VMWare say) each time the kernel gets updated?"
A lot? No. VMware? Yes. Blame VMware for shipping kernel modules that can't be upstreamed. There's nothing Fedora can do about this.
"Does the sound work in more than one application at a time"
Yes.
"Have they solved the problems with the network manager and wireless?"
What problems exactly?
Awesome, I believe this is the distro made famous by former 'N Sync heart throb, Justin Timberlake - whom I coincidentally saw at a Nando's chicken joint a few months ago. He was having a burger of some description, as was I. Unfortunately I was not able to get him to sign my Fedora LiveCD
You know, I was just thinking "I'd love to use Linux, but the ext3 just isn't good enough so I'll have to stay with Windows 95." Well, I guess this fixes that issue!
Seriously... I just want Linux to stop feeling like the kernel needs to be bleeding edge. It's the apps that matter, not the kernel these days. And every time they muck up the kernel I get to reinstall tons of apps. Stop doing that so often!