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7.5 Reasons to Look Forward to Fedora 15 (Linux.com)

[Posted April 13, 2011 by ris]

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier takes a look at some of the features to be found in Fedora 15, including systemd, GNOME 3, KDE 4.6, BoxGrinder, Dynamic Firewall, new SELinux troubleshooting GUI, and RPM 4.9. "And the half point goes to support for 4kB sector disk boot support. Why does this matter, and why does it only get a measly half of a point? This is a feature that's really going to be irrelevant to the vast majority of Fedora users right now, but it likely to be important for Fedora users in the not too far future. Specifically, this feature will bring support for drives with 4kB sectors, which are possible to use with UEFI machines. There's not a lot of these on the market right now — but when they do hit, Linux will likely be first in line to support them. So the chances you'll need this feature in Fedora 15, or even Fedora 16, aren't too likely — but it's a very good thing to have for the users and developers who do have access to those machines. By the time they become mainstream, Linux should work without a glitch."

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Apr 14, 2011 9:24 UTC (Thu) by etienne (subscriber, #25256) [Link]

Any way to buy such a 4096 bytes logical sector size SATA disk now?
I just want to test them on non UEFI systems, with Gujin...

7.5 Reasons to Look Forward to Fedora 15 (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 14, 2011 10:11 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

Of course, look for Advanced Format harddisks.

7.5 Reasons to Look Forward to Fedora 15 (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 14, 2011 10:41 UTC (Thu) by etienne (subscriber, #25256) [Link]

I was talking about 4096 bytes/sector logical, not the popular 4096 bytes/sector physical and 512 4096 bytes/sector logical which has essentially the same IDE/ATA interface.

7.5 Reasons to Look Forward to Fedora 15 (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 14, 2011 15:14 UTC (Thu) by pjones (guest, #31722) [Link]

Not really, no. You can find disks that are 4k/512b, that is, they emulate the 512-byte block with an internal read-modify-write cycle, and they'll give you some performance advantage as well, since we're aligning partitions on the larger boundary. Real 4k/4k disks still seem to be in NDA land for now.

7.5 Reasons to Look Forward to Fedora 15 (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 15, 2011 22:05 UTC (Fri) by lsatenstein (guest, #34741) [Link]

I have been using Fedora 15 beta, and am pleased with the linux part. Fedora is booting quickly, and has few aborts (core dumps),

I have tried for a few days to work with Gnome 3, but have not taken a comfortable liking to it. In fact, while it is nice looking and helps the non-linux person to learn about Fedora/Gnome 3, the fact that I do not have multiple desktops, where I can group my applications and data that I need together (each desktop appears as my own "objects" so to speak), my productivity is substantially lowered.

So far, I have not found a way to use the Gnome3 with the legacy desktop. I just think that Gnome3 is an emulation and a kind of implementation of a function driven interface, rather than a data driven interface.

I organize myself so that I have a mix of directories in different windows because in one window, I am developing code and in the other window I am doing it with a second language, while in the third window I am looking at the tests between the first two. In two of the three desktops, one directory is common. Each desktop also includes unique directories (folders for you gui guys).

So for me, Gnome3 is a nice to look at, but an impractical interface to use to develop applications quickly.

7.5 Reasons to Look Forward to Fedora 15 (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 17, 2011 18:25 UTC (Sun) by lsatenstein (guest, #34741) [Link]

When I mentioned windows in the previous posting, I meant desktops.
If that introduced confusion, sorry.

And with the Gnome Tweaker, I was able to almost simulate two desktops. It did not allow me to have two copies of a directory open.

If I have one thing I would like to see improved, is the ability to choose the size of the desktop icons. I find them too large, and would like the next size(s) down

On the boot and response time, it is decidedly better than Fedora 14.

7.5 Reasons to Look Forward to Fedora 15 (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 19, 2011 14:20 UTC (Tue) by pjones (guest, #31722) [Link]

It does give you multiple desktops. Move the mouse to the top left of the screen so it gives you the menu. Once you've done that, there's a '+' button in the bottom right corner of the screen.