Fedora 11 beta bares chest to all-comers

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 …

[Michael]

Leonidas

is also a chain of Belgian chocolate shops.

I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere.

[Sooty]

Leonidas!

This is Linuuuuuuuuuuux!

[Ash]

@Michael

The Spartans may have lost at Thermopylae, but I still wouldn't DARE call one a fudge packer.

[Dominik Mierzejewski]

typo

> 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.

It's called "MinGW".

[Phil]

Which Leonidas?

There were in fact two kings of sparta named Leonidas, the battle of Thermopyle was fought by Leonidas I.

Leonidas II on the other hand was a later king who shared power with Agis IV, Leonidas II was deposed after a spartan general claimed to have seen a sign from the gods against him.

In either case, it seems a rather defeatist code name for a linux release.

Mine's the one with the Rosetta stone in the pocket.

[Steve John]

Have they sorted out wireless setup yet...

... last tried to get wireless working with Fedora 8 on my laptop and failed.

[Anonymous Coward]

3rd party video card support improved?

The major gripe I had about FC10 was how neither AMD or NVIDIA have released drivers which actually work properly under the new Xwindows system in FC10. I hope they've gotten their act together since then, or at least give the installer the chance of choosing between X windows versions at install time.

Being the owner of both an NVDIDIA 6600 and ATI HD3450 it's been a deeply frustrating time trying to run anything which uses GL for rendering ie mplayer etc, and it's probably going to be the reason I try another distribution if they can't get a working driver bundle in FC11.

[Anonymous Coward]

(untitled)

Leonidas has nothing to do with Spartans. It has to do with the Fedora naming

convention.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Guidelines_for_release_names

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Names

A little more research next time please.

[Anonymous Coward]

Spartans?

Other than a very brief passing comment or pointer to a Wikipedia entry on Leonidas, there was really no point to all that junk on Spartans and the Battle of Thermopylae. It was quite misleading, actually, particularly that paragraph on "last stands" - Fedora 11 is by no means a "last stand" and Fedora development is planned to continue for a very long time. For example, Fedora 12 development has already started:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=218413

I guess Tim gets paid by the word?

PS: Can we please have a better Tux icon? The old one you had was much better.

[Pierre]

A hat with boobs?

That's a pretty fancy hat. Not to mention its French origins (all hail Victorien Sardou). French hat-boobs, prosthetic leg, Belgian chocolate, ancient Spartan military traditions... a strange mind image is beginning to form. Yuck.

[Goat Jam]

Good on 'em

40K downloads for an alpha is pretty impressive.

Not that I like Redhat distro's at all beacuse of the whole RPM thing but each to their own. I'm sure the folks that like their rpm's would say the same thing about deb's but diversity and choice is what I love most about linux in all it's flavours.

Long live Tux!

[John Allen]

Yes they lost the battle, but

It caused all of Greece to rise up and defeat the Persians :)

[Anonymous Coward]

@Steve John

Wireless drivers are implemented in the kernel, so that's a Linux issue, not a Fedora issue. Since Fedora has fairly new kernels (and updates them often) your wireless is more likely to work than with other, more stable* distros.

* Stable = boring, and has little relation to real world failures .... IMHO!

[Robb Dunphy]

Steve John and his wireless

Well since there has been Fedora 9 and 10 since you last tried, given them a go? Or how about trying to compile your own drivers from a tarball, it's actually relatively easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Goat Jam

not trying to stir anything up, but out of genuine curiosity i'd love to know what you don't like about rpm's? -or what deb does better..

i admit right now i havn't used debian style packages, but i've never really had any trouble using rpm commands, or where there are dependencies to be resolved, yum, seems to do the trick nice and quick everytime so far.

[Frank Rysanek]

@wireless setup

I've actually just installed Fedora 10 64b on an Acer notebook (a brand being dismissed with a grin by many of my colleagues) and IT ALL WORKS OUT OF THE BOX, including WiFi a/b/g/DraftN (Intel chip), bluetooth and a crappy integrated webcam that has a quirky driver in Windows. I did pay attention to having an Intel chipset in the notebook, and I went for a bargain model with an older 65nm C2D CPU and the chipset is two generations old by now, too.

As for WiFi: in the past I've configured WiFi by hand on a Broadcom-based AP with OpenWRT installed. So the first thing I did in Fedora, I tried a few lines with iwconfig. But somehow I couldn't get past WPA2. Only then did I take a fumble through the system configuration menus on the graphical desktop, and guess what: found a WiFi configuration tool, which did the magic with just a few mouse clicks - I managed to enter the WPA2 PSK at the first attempt.

Wow!

[Joe Zeff]

@AC

The reason the nVidia and ATI drivers aren't available from Fedora is because they're not FOSS, they're binary blobs, and Fedora is strictly OSS. A simple search of their support forum will show you all the pointers you'll ever need to get them installed and running without any real fuss, muss or bother.

And, before I forget, it's "The X Window System," not "XWindows." Please remain at your current location until the Vulture Squadron arrives to confiscate your geek card and apply an appropriate LART.

[Goat Jam]

@AC re debs

Well, there is the historical RPM hell which soured my taste for RPM's in the early days, but I admit that this has been mostly resolved through yum and yast etc.

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.

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, but there are several other choices (approx, apt-proxy). They are easy to setup and work great, just point the proxy to the upstream repo, point the machines on your network to the proxy and all your updates need only be downloaded once. Takes literally 5 mins to configure and you are set.

Try as I might, I cannot find an equivalent solution for RPMs. It seems there are only two choices, use squid (a far inferior solution in so many ways) or mirror the entire repository locally, which sort of defeats the purpose because you then need to download the updates for every package in the repo, even the ones you don't use.

[Anonymous Coward]

@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.

[Richard Lloyd]

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]

@ 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?