Fedora 16 Released | Hacker News Reader

Fedora 16 Released

docs.fedoraproject.org

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Dedicated to Dennis Ritchie! http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/16/html/Release_N...

Also, a StackExchange-like Fedora Q&A site was launched today: http://ask.fedoraproject.org/questions/

I am now a Productive Member Of Society, which means two things: I have a macbook air (from my job), and I have little free time. In the past, seeing a release like this would mean picking the least-used partition on my computer, doing a full install, and using it for a week before deciding what I had before was better, or not doing that.

This time around, here was my experience:

1. Download the ISO

2. Open up VMWare (oh shit, there's a new version! oh shit, you have to pay again...forget it)

3. Make a new VM, boot the ISO

4. GNOME 3 won't work. Hmm, well I probably need VMWare Tools installed.

5. Try to install VMWare Tools. CD tray's locked. Guess I have to do a full install first.

6. Do the install (defaults everywhere).

7. Reboot into system. GNOME 3 won't work, of course.

8. Click "Install VMWare Tools". A window pops up with a tar.gz. That's silly, okay, extract it, see a folder with a perl script called "something install something".

9. Open a terminal, sudo perl whatever-installer.pl.

10. Hit enter a bunch of times. I have to run some config script, would I like it launched for me? Sure.

11. Can't install, I need make and gcc. WTF?

12. sudo yum install make gcc. Nope, the package manager's locked.

13. Where's update manager? Maybe I can kill it. Nope, that opened it, ok, 35 updates. It just got released, what the hell? Okay don't do that yet.

14. How about Add/Remove Programs? Hmm, there's a Programming category. Click it. Window goes gray.

15. Flip over to a web browser. Browse for a bit. Send an email.

16. Back to Fedora. Still gray.

17. Close window, delete VM, delete ISO, remove from torrents. My ratio's only 18%. Oh well.

18. Write stupid comment on HN.

19. Dinner time.

My experiences have been completely opposite. Didn't GNOME 3 just silently go into fallback mode? I've been running Fedora 16 beta VM's for many weeks (on VMware and VirtualBox running on a Linux host).

It does go silently into fallback mode and it looks awful (IMHO). If I remember correctly, so does non-fallback mode though.

My problem is mostly with the fact that make and gcc are not installed on a Linux system by default, and that the software installer just hangs and offers no explanation.

Not to belabor this, but if during installation you choose "Graphical Desktop" (or are using a LiveCD) then dev tools like gcc, make etc. are not installed. (Choose "Software Development" instead and they would be.)

Sorry to hear that the installer hung though! I have not experienced that, and I'm on my 20th Fedora 16 install.

It does (or should) go to fallback mode however Big Kernel Lock (BKL) was removed on kernels >= 2.6.37 and VMWare Tools won't install so your joy would have been short lived. I Googled around and tried a couple of patches but none of them gave me any joy. Apparently you can downrev your kernel and get it to work but that seems counter productive. So for the time being I am stuck with Fedora 14 (which is end of lifed in December).

The issue has existed for some time and was one of the reasons my trial of Fedora 15 was short lived (Gnome 3 and no Dropbox being the others) but I thought VMWare would have fixed it by now...

I, too, am a Productive Member of Society which means two things: I gave back the terrible Macbook my employer provided and seamlessly and painlessly upgraded from Fedora 15 to Fedora 16 earlier today. Here was my experience:

1. Run preupgrade

2. Reboot

3. Load up xmonad without issue

4. Ask a couple low-level upgrade-related questions in #fedora; get answers in a couple seconds

5. Get back to work

I'm really failing to see what point you're trying to make with your comment, aside from noting that your old version of VMWare Fusion doesn't play very nicely with this Fedora release and that installing VMWare Tools on Linux is a pain in the ass (something I would never dispute, but then running the real thing absolves you of the need to run a VM).

I'm sorry about your experience, but as far as mine is concerned this is another swell Fedora release. Thanks, everybody!

As a productive member of society myself (wtf? The implication here is rather insulting is it not?) I also appreciated Fedora's upgrade situation this time around.

1. Run preupgrade.

2. Reboot.

3. Load up Awesome WM (installed from a 3rd party repo months ago) without issue.

4. Load up Opera (which I installed months ago straight from Opera, again with no Fedora involvement) without issue.

5. Go to youtube and start playing some music with Adobe Flash (you get the pattern...) without issue.

6. Continue working.

I too, do not understand the GP's criticism.

Mainly: why are make and gcc not installed?

I'm going to guess because you installed from the live media. The full install media lets you pick what sorts of things you want to be installed as I recall.

If having to do `yum groupinstall "Development Tools"` yourself is your biggest complaint, I'd say Fedora is doing pretty damn well.

Unfortunately, gnome-shell doesn't work well in VMs due to the fact that it requires 3D acceleration. AFAIK, virtualbox is the only platform that supports 3D emulation but I can't speak to how well it works because I haven't tried it myself.

However, software rendering support has been recently added to rawhide (which will become Fedora 17 in about 6 months). If you're interested in seeing gnome-shell in a VM, you may want to give Fedora 17 a try when it is released.

Don't they have a live CD to try from? That seems like the right approach for someone who is very busy, rather than hours of yak-shaving

I can't make up my mind. I used to use ubuntu as my primary OS, but I am familiar enough with linux that I can run any distro (I used to run Gentoo and Archlinux, but at some point of time I realized I actually like the sink included stuff so I switched back to ubuntu, now I experiment less). When I bought my new laptop (Acer Aspire 5742G) it came with two graphics cards, one intel onboard and one dedicated nVidia 540M. Their is a tech, nVidia optimus, which is supposed to switch between these two depending upon my performance needs. But linux (I mean the kernel linux not a specific distro) does not really do that because of some driver issues. So my battery performance drops like 50% and the laptop heats up a lot, which is bad. I tried CPU scaling, I tried that bumblebee package but nothing worked. For now I am working out of windows 7 home edition which came pre-installed. And I must tell you, there isn't much of a difference(in usability and stability that is, battery backup increased 2x). I may switch to windows full time because switching back to linux doesn't have much merit right now. I am thinking of trying out Fedora but I need to know if it would solve the problem before I go through the hassle of installing it.

If anyone else has this kind of laptop and notes similar battery life for each distro and which is actually the battery life the laptop should have, then please tell me.

Edit: Grammar and explanation.

What about running Linux inside a virtual machine when you do UNIX work? That would certainly add up some CPU overhead (how many is that these days - 10%?) but I doubt that graphics chip would kick in unless it's really needed. I hope you can get your laptop run Linux with a little less overhead that way.

The thing is, I don't really need linux. I started using it since XP was okey and Vista sucked. I needed change and Linux provides room for lots of experiment. We have good WMs and we have a wide range of types. All of that was fine and dandy when I was 15 and loved to experiment. But now I don't really want to experiment much. I just want a stable OS which works great with my laptop. Should integrate well and all the buttons on my laptop should work with it (like I have only one button for both wifi and bluetooth, on windows it brings up a dialog box with options for turning them on or off, in ubuntu there is this [00,01,10,11] sequence. Its annoying).

I am a student and majorly do C programming for microcontrollers. All that works good, sometimes better [looking at you TI MSP430 launchpad debugger] on windows. So the only purpose of having a linux installation is that I am habituated in last 5 years.

"I am a student and majorly do C programming for microcontrollers. All that works good, sometimes better [looking at you TI MSP430 launchpad debugger] on windows. So the only purpose of having a linux installation is that I am habituated in last 5 years."

You may need to return to Linux if you have to deal with running on a microcontroller or require a build environment that utilizes it.

For now, I don't really have to. I work on AVR based chips (mostly the ATmega and ATTiny) serves me well and I think I can get a job with this. But things change and I can adapt. I can still use linux if I want but I don't really want to until damn nVidia releases proper drivers.

Wait till you start dealing with ARM based systems. You'll get a choice of expensive commercial tools or scavenger hunts to find the right libraries to work with gcc... :)

In the future I would advise using http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/ or some other linux compatibility hardware list before buying hardware. Using linux on a poorly supported device can cause you grief and make you dislike linux for reasons that it does not deserve.

1. I don't dislike linux, it doesn't support my hardware and so I don't use it. As simple as that.

2. There are other more important things I look for in a laptop than if it runs linux or not. No disrespect, if I get a decent graphics card at this price point, I would say hell yeah! (There was a discount in the store on the same day as I blew my last computer. RIP Sophiya)

I was hoping to coax you into giving linux another try in the future on a machine that is more amenable to running linux.

So how "light" is a default install of Fedora these days? The thing I don't like about Ubuntu is that they take the kitchen sink approach and install a bunch of stuff I don't believe should be installed by default, such as Open/Libre Office.

I've had the same objection. Now I run installs from the server edition. You can add stuff afterwards.

An office suite most certainly should be installed by default in a distro aimed at ordinary users. That you'd think otherwise is stunning.

Neither Windows nor OS X comes with an office suite installed by default. It wouldn't be unprecedented if a linux distro were to come without one.

For distros targetting ordinary users the office suite should come preinstalled as long as you can't buy one at Staples.

That said this is also part of what makes Linux shine compared to especially Windows: Usually everything is installed and Just Works in 20 minutes after started installation. (Have been fixing peoples borked Windowses from '95 to '08 so I'm allowed to be opinionated here. : )

That's mostly not true, nearly every windows install from a store bought machine has trial versions of office already installed. Word and Excel are expected programs for most people.

What's your reasoning?

FWIW I always thought Fedora was aimed at more tech-savvy users, not "ordinary" users (whatever that may mean).

An "ordinary user" is incapable of installing an operating system. They don't even know what an operating system is.

A linux distro should assume that if the user is installing the OS himself, he isn't ordinary and should quite simply ASK what the user wants to install, instead of assuming. This sort of stupidity forces me to look for the most minimal install ISO for every distro I deal with.

"""An "ordinary user" is incapable of installing an operating system. They don't even know what an operating system is."""

No, that's a "strawman user", or some grandma.

There are tons of ordinary users that can install Windows. And almost all Mac users can install OS X (there's not much to it).

They are no programmers, they are no superusers, they are no admins. They just know how to insert a DVD, answer a few questions and press next.

There's no reason to not be able to do the same with Linux, or for a linux distro to assume "that if the user is installing the OS himself, he isn't ordinary".

Doubly so for Ubuntu, who wants to be the people's friendly distro and change all that "Linux is for geeks" mentality.

> No, that's a "strawman user", or some grandma.

I'm willing to bet you never worked in technical support. The average person is lucky if they manage to turn on a computer.

And I'm willing to bet the kind of users that tend to call technical support are not the kind of users that install their OSs.

That doesn't mean that users that can install Windows and OS X are in the minority. It's just selection bias.

I have worked technical support. I have done it in person, and I worked the phones at Microsoft before they shipped all these jobs to India.

I think most users are quite capable of installing an OS. Most users never call tech support. Otherwise MS woudl be broke.

Who said he was looking for one aimed at ordinary users?

He was talking about Ubuntu. Are you suggesting that Ubuntu is not aimed at ordinary users?

> The thing I don't like about Ubuntu is that they take the kitchen sink approach [. . .]

At least with Fedora 15, the install DVD's default option of "Desktop" install does indeed install Office tools, Graphics/Image editors, etc.

On the bright side, the installer (again, for 15) offers a "Minimal" option in the same dialog box, which skips Gnome/XWindows/OpenOffice/etc. With Ubuntu I recall having to search for a special minimal installer ISO.

Are you against an office suite being installed for normal users because you don't think they are useful to normal users, or because {libre,open}office are pretty big?

For normal users, Open/Libre Office are probably fine, but I dislike having to install unneeded stuff on my computer. Luckily, according to a couple of other people here, Fedora does provide ways to avoid this.

Last Fedora I installed was Fedora 14 (which I'm still using) and you could (un)select the packages you want to install.

None of the LiveCDs ship LibreOffice, though KDE ships KOffice and I think XFCE and/or LXDE ship AbiWord.

At any rate, I strongly recommend doing a netinstall. Then you don't even waste bandwidth on stuff you don't want.

Is this serious?

Both Ubuntu and Fedora install from a CD-sized ISO file which doubles as a live booting environment. In the modern world, that's less than 1% of the storage of even a "small" laptop. And it's only slightly larger than iOS5 or Android installation bundles.

How much "lighter" do you really want it to be?

If you really have storage requirements that won't fit a desktop distribution, try something like buildroot (http://buildroot.uclibc.org/) or Yocto (http://www.yoctoproject.org/), which are better targetted at that kind of environment.

There are plenty of light distributions - TinyCore; LFS; Arch; Gentoo; and so on.

"Interactive installs" are not great for users. You end up with dependency hell; or users aren't clueful about the difference between a KDE and Gnome environment. Sane defaults, and allowing people to uninstal stuff, are better for most users.

There are other distributions which claim to be small, and which are cut down versions of Ubuntu (usually) but which are actually quite large. See, for example eeebuntu (now called auroraos) which installed a bunch of OpenOffice language stuff, but not OO itself.

I'm pretty curious how Aeolus is working out. It looks like an interesting technology (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Aeolus_Conductor)

New release just came out and it looks quite nice.

Also new in Fedora 16 is full OpenStack support. And before people say, Aeolus and OpenStack are complementary things, they aren't "competing". Aeolus is a cross-cloud management tool. OpenStack is (to put it in very simple and not quite accurate terms) an EC2 clone. You can use Aeolus to manage OpenStack or to migrate loads between EC2/OpenStack/other cloud.

The new Jules Verne inspired theme looks great.

I love their themes. Wish it were easy to download them separately.

Here is a link to the downloads: http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options

Can someone discuss the pros of Fedora? I'm mainly a Mac user these days but my Fedora 9 box is still running in the corner on a very old box. I promised myself I'd get a beefy 8-core Intel Ivy bridge system next year. I assume all my "build notes" with all my yum installs still work. All I ever hear about is Ubuntu.

Well, I'd say first and foremost, it's a matter of preference. For example, some people just can't stand yum, others love it.

From a technical perspective, Fedora tends to be about 1/2 to 1 release ahead of Ubuntu, by which I mean the software in Fedora now will be in Ubuntu in 3-6 months, and has less "magic".

If you care about free/libre/whatever it's called today software, then Fedora tends to be a better choice than Ubuntu, since the Fedora developers tend to work much more closely with the community, whereas Ubuntu does its own thing.

These days, Fedora uses Gnome 3 whereas Ubuntu uses Unity for its desktop environment.

> These days, Fedora uses Gnome 3 whereas Ubuntu uses Unity for its desktop environment.

This is what convinced me to switch to Fedora last week after using Ubuntu for years, and so far I love it (Fedora, I'll save my opinions of Gnome 3 for another thread). Using yum was very easy after having used synaptic and I was able to get everything set up on my system without any trouble.

The main reason I chose Fedora over Ubuntu:

You get more recent and frequent package updates running on Fedora or CentOS (RHEL derivatives).

The secondary reason I chose Fedora over Ubuntu:

I can't stand the apt-get package manager from the command line. I prefer yum over apt-get any day of the week. I understand you can install synaptic, I'd rather not have to. Yum also has the wonderful yum-plugin-priorities package for maintaining a number of repos with specific priorities and hierarchical rules for determining which packages to update from which repositories. There are also plugins for finding the fastest mirror and protected the base packages so you don't bomb an app updating:

http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/

I also enjoy CentOS, but generally more for headless web servers.

You get more recent and frequent package updates running on Fedora or CentOS (RHEL derivatives).

Fedora is a little more aggressive than Ubuntu about packaging newer software. That's why I switched back in 2009. It's not a huge difference, though. Both of them normally package the latest stable version and only push minor version updates during a release. RHEL derivatives by design are much slower to update. What you got when you installed RHEL 5.0 in 2007 is, for the most part, the same as what you get when you install RHEL 5.7 in 2011.

For evidence, compare the packages tables linked to below.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=fedora http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubuntu http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=redhat

I don't want to engage in the perpetual package manager holy war, but I will add that apt has package pinning (the equivalent of yum-plugin-priorities and yum-protectbase).

Fedora prides itself on being Free software. That includes their repositories. Fedora has no interest in "non free" repositories.

This is useful if you only want FOSS software. It's not so great if you want to play DVD or MP3 - you need to use a 3rd party repository and install extra stuff.

Fedora is sponsored and supported by Red Hat. That gives them a bit of stability that other distributions may not have.

I'm using Ubuntu, and I wanted to give Fedora a try. I can't run Docky or Avant Window Navigator :(

Gnome 3 is great and all, but I really like using docks and from some google searches it seems many people have this issue!

Both of these run under fedora 15. Try installing from source, I have done this and it has worked fine.

That wasn't very clear, sorry: Try installing AWM and docky from source and run them under a different window manager. It should work fine (XFCE is a great alternative to Gnome 3).

Yup, that's worked for me before... but then I'm not using Gnome 3, which I'm growing rather fond of.

Also, please don't forget that Fedora is available via BitTorrent: http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-all

If you're running Fedora 15, you can also upgrade using yum:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum#Fed...

Yes, you can upgrade that way but it's not recommended (see the warning @ the top of that page). That upgrade method isn't really tested and may or may not work depending on your system.

You'd be much better off using PreUpgrade (making sure you update your system first) [1] or the install media. If you don't want to burn a DVD or CD, you can make a bootable USB stick with the iso [2].

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_use_PreUpgrade [2] http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/16/html/Installat...

if someone don't know, a new Fedore codename is Verne

3d linux distro by popularity in the World.

Third by what measure? I hate to be "that guy", but [citation needed].

Seriously, if you're just quoting distrowatch, you need a new source.

Even by their own numbers, Ubuntu claims to have less than Fedora, though they do seem to be gaining.

[http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/operating-systems/331095...] [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics]

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