Fedora 11 beta bares chest to all-comers
Kick the tires, if you dare
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The Fedora Project has announced Fedora 11, code-named Leonidas, has been moved to beta and is ready for a tire kicking before it tries to take on the massed ranks of freebie Linuxes, commercial Linuxes, Unix, Windows, and other proprietary operating systems out there.
The choice of Leonidas as a code name is somewhat perplexing, since he was the king of Sparta who fought a last-stand battle with his 300 Spartan warriors and another 1,100 fellow Greeks in an effort to hold off the Persian army at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. That last stand allowed the Greek army to escape a vastly larger Persian force.
While there is a lot of talk (here and here), and a graphical novel and film about how the Greek resistance at Thermopylae proved that patriotism, training, and using the ground to advantage could allow a small band to hold back an onslaught, the fact is, they still lost.
Fedora 11 if not a last stand, is more the latest in a long line of development Linux releases that are widely used even though there is no commercial support for the product.
According to Red Hat, even though the alpha release that came out in February was only intended for a small audience of hard-core Linux heads, that alpha had more than 40,000 downloads in a little more than a month. And now, with the beta release, the Fedora Project is hoping to get an even wider audience to try the code and offer feedback so bugs can be fixed before Fedora 11 is released at the end of May.
The Fedora Project has said the feature list for the 11 release "dwarfs any previous release," including enhancement to the PackageKit cross-distribution package manager to support the automatic installation of fonts and other applications to open files.
The goal is now to get to the login screen in under 20 seconds and then boost as fast as possible from that point. The way video drivers from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are started up has been changed to accommodate this fast booting using a new kernel mode.
The virtualization management console now supports a mouse (this seems trivial, but necessary), and SELinux mandatory access security is now integrated into guest virtual machines. This will prevent a security bug in the hypervisor from allowing guest VMs to attack one another or the host, according to the project.
Fedora 11 will also have the MiniGW compiler environment, which allows C, C++, Fortran, OCaml, Objective C, and Objective C++ applications intended to be compiled for Windows operating systems to be done within the confines of Windows. In other words, you can compile code for that Windows environment without ever having to touch it. (Ew.)
You can download your copy of Fedora 11 here. ®
COMMENTS
@ Trolling AC 09:25 GMT
Some guy asks me nicely why I personally prefer debs over rpms. I respond in kind. AC butts in with a whole lot of hostility as if it his personal crusade to evangelicise rpms over debs.
<shrug> whatever.
"And if you'd tried installing .debs with dkpg, you'd have encountered deb hell"
Quite possibly, but I already acknowledged that this issue has been sorted with yum/yast. You cut that bit out of course.
"Createrepo would do the same job'
OK, I will take a look at that for all my Centos boxes at work. My cursory look just now doesn't indicate that it is the equivalent to something like apt-cacher but I'm willing to admit I might be wrong.
Not sure why you're trying to flame things up with the us vs them attitude though. Had a bad day or something?
F11 is good, though some install wrinkles need ironing out
I installed from the 64-bit Fedora 11 beta DVD and it's pretty good, except for three issues I had. Firstly, the Anaconda installer crashes when trying to eject the DVD at the end of the install - no big deal, because it does actually install all packages and adjust the bootloader properly before the crash.
Secondly, my first boot and login didn't start up the networking. I can't say I'm a fan of having the NetworkManager handle networking startup *after* you login anyway, but in this case, I had to click on the network icon in the top panel and it "magically" activated the network, without any further prompting.
Thirdly - and the worst issue of all - the top-level of the DVD has a crucial GPG key missing (the primary one for Fedora 11) and embarrasingly, there's even a bunch of soft-links to it at the top-level of the DVD that go nowhere! This means that by default "yum update" failed every time because of the missing key and I ended up having to switch off gpg checking in the yum config to actually do any updates!
Still, I'm mightily impressed with the speed of booting - even faster than Fedora 10, which was already pretty quick. Nice to see the virtualisation goodies taking shape too - KVM is starting to look like serious competition for VMWare and VirtualBox at long last.
@Goat Jam
> Well, there is the historical RPM hell which soured my taste for RPM's in the early days
And if you'd tried installing .debs with dkpg, you'd have encountered deb hell, which would have soured your taste for .debs.
Neither dpkg nor rpm are designed to resolve dependency conflicts; that's the job of apt and yum (amongst others). To confuse the two types of programme doesn't speak well...
> Then there are some little annoyances with the way that yum seems to keep swapping
> repositories because it thinks the download is corrupted, but that may be something to do with
> the craptastic firewall/proxy/filtering systemd they use here at work.
Yum is configurable; if you don't want it to switch repos, tell it not to.
> The main reason that I much prefer debs are the proxy options that are available for
> streamlining the updates to multiple machines. I use apt-cacher
Createrepo would do the same job.
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