Fedora 11 packs a next-gen file system, faster boot times, all the joys and pitfalls of Linux

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.

[Chris Top Her @ Jun 9th 2009 8:28PM]

Gonna have to try this one out. I could never get previous working with everything I needed as easily as Ubuntu.

[JohnWesleyHarding @ Jun 10th 2009 1:07AM]

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.

[John Bailey @ Jun 10th 2009 2:27PM]

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.

[Jorvay @ Jun 10th 2009 2:29PM]

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.

[n74jw @ Jun 9th 2009 8:29PM]

It's great, but not for you if you're a gamer or have some masochistic attachment to Microsoft Office.

[JohnTitor @ Jun 9th 2009 8:35PM]

check Wine, Office 2007 works fine on some distros

[chambo622 @ Jun 9th 2009 8:37PM]

oh it doesn't chop off the top toolbar anymore? that's good.

[UnixSystemsEngineer @ Jun 9th 2009 9:25PM]

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.

[curtisrutland @ Jun 9th 2009 9:53PM]

"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.

[Shyam D @ Jun 9th 2009 10:27PM]

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.

[Félix @ Jun 9th 2009 10:34PM]

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...

[JohnWesleyHarding @ Jun 10th 2009 1:11AM]

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.

[Bash @ Jun 10th 2009 3:18AM]

you can open up MS office files in Open office...

[Demios @ Jun 10th 2009 4:31AM]

@UnixSystemsEngineer There are several levels of logical fallacies in your post.

[cloneofsnake @ Jun 10th 2009 6:03AM]

No no no... he meant Neo Office on Mac is better than MS Office on Windows. ;)

[ark_v2 @ Jun 10th 2009 10:42AM]

My virtual machine works as if it was the main OS on Ubuntu.

[Dillinger @ Jun 10th 2009 11:14AM]

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.

[Supersonicdarky @ Jun 9th 2009 8:31PM]

Btrfs is more bleeding edge than ext4.

[Terry @ Jun 9th 2009 8:43PM]

Butter offers advantages -- for servers. ext is for desktops.

[Drew Green @ Jun 9th 2009 8:47PM]

I

[Ghen @ Jun 9th 2009 9:06PM]

file systems in general aren't that big a deal for desktop environments.

[Félix @ Jun 9th 2009 10:05PM]

@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

[Aguiluz @ Jun 9th 2009 10:06PM]

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.

[Adam Williamson @ Jun 10th 2009 5:52PM]

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. :)

[darkstar @ Jun 9th 2009 8:32PM]

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...

[gordon @ Jun 9th 2009 8:53PM]

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

[sanriver12 @ Jun 9th 2009 10:08PM]

dual booting is not hard at all

[Andir3.0 @ Jun 9th 2009 10:13PM]

Yep, whenever I need a windows app (rare) I open up VirtualBox and use my XP virtual machine.

[W. Park @ Jun 9th 2009 8:35PM]

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.

[TareX @ Jun 9th 2009 8:37PM]

If it weren't for the 3rd party apps, Linux -not OSX- would have been on all my computers.

[thethirdmoose @ Jun 9th 2009 9:29PM]

Yea, I hate the disgustingly lavish profusion, as well as the contemptibly easy installation procedure.

[SchmuckyTheCat @ Jun 9th 2009 8:41PM]

"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.

[EGOvoruhk @ Jun 9th 2009 8:41PM]

Open sores? Ewwwwwww

[Ian @ Jun 9th 2009 8:45PM]

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.

[jay jay @ Jun 9th 2009 8:46PM]

@ 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.

[TRLK @ Jun 9th 2009 8:48PM]

you do know the market share for linux servers, right?

[JimboJones @ Jun 9th 2009 9:01PM]

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

[ben @ Jun 9th 2009 9:16PM]

Jay jay felt the wind from that one in his hair.

[UnixSystemsEngineer @ Jun 9th 2009 9:26PM]

Raise your hand if you've ever had a problem with ext2 or ext3....

... that's what I thought.

[Félix @ Jun 9th 2009 10:16PM]

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.

[Romesh @ Jun 9th 2009 10:36PM]

I bet to differ, UnixSystemsEngineer, I've killed my ext3 partition before :P

[lordmorgul @ Jun 10th 2009 1:29AM]

@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).

[lordmorgul @ Jun 10th 2009 1:35AM]

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...

[Loonie @ Jun 10th 2009 11:02AM]

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.

[n74jw @ Jun 9th 2009 8:43PM]

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...

[oz_paulb @ Jun 10th 2009 4:39PM]

@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)

[Tohe @ Jun 9th 2009 8:46PM]

Fedora rules.

[Terry @ Jun 9th 2009 8:58PM]

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

[Félix @ Jun 9th 2009 10:23PM]

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.

[Terry @ Jun 9th 2009 11:45PM]

@ 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".