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Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com)
Linux.com has a
review of the upcoming Fedora 16 release. "F16 introduces a
number of significant changes: GRUB 2 replaces legacy GRUB, HAL is gone and
replaced by udisks, upower, and libudev, migration from SysV init to native
Systemd continues (scheduled for completion in F17), and a number of cloud
utilities and OpenStack are included. btrfs, the much-hyped filesystem that
is supposed to become the Linux default, was supposed to be the default for
Verne, but it's still not ready."
(Log in to post comments)
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 1, 2011 23:33 UTC (Tue) by littlesandra88 (guest, #64017) [Link]
Would there be any way to install Unity on Fedora 16?
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 1:48 UTC (Wed) by anatolik (subscriber, #73797) [Link]
I hope so. Linux is all about freedom of choice and RedHat have to provide an easy way to install Unity for those who wants it.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 3:11 UTC (Wed) by LightDot (guest, #73140) [Link]
Actually, those who want Unity on Fedora should provide a simple way for others, who also want Unity on Fedora, to install it.
That would be in the spirit of the open source.
If you get my point... ;)
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 8:02 UTC (Wed) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link]
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 4, 2011 0:00 UTC (Fri) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link] I was wondering how long it would be before someone linked to that. Much as I respect Ajax, he's wrong in this instance. From a distribution perspective then yes, it makes sense to not ship everything to try and minimize complexity. So there's not much incentive for Fedora to ship Unity. But as an end user, Linux really is all about choice. Were it not, I'd be screwed.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 10:19 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
Aside from Linux not being about choice, why demand something from Red Hat? Community run project, everyone is free to join. See http://fedoraproject.org/join-fedora. So either ask Fedora the project, ask others to join Fedora, do it yourself, but saying "have to" + "RedHat".. suggest to rethink that.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 13:51 UTC (Wed) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]
No they doesn't
Free software doesnt imply that vendors have to add arbitrary features to their products. How ludicrous and self entitled. By that measure I should demand Ubuntu support systemd.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 16:38 UTC (Wed) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] Linux is all about freedom of choice no, it's really not. RedHat have to provide an easy way to install Unity for those who wants it. have to? Fedora is a community-driven project. feel free to submit packages for Unity.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 21:04 UTC (Wed) by emk (guest, #1128) [Link]
If the kernel isn't about choice, why does 'make config' take so long run? :-)
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:42 UTC (Fri) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
Oh man oh man, I wish you had linked directly to: http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2008-Januar...
There is a chance people didn't notice the big fat "NO" being a link, and instead latch on that non-sequitur comment about linux meaning linux kernel.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 18:28 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I have to apologize, I've lost track of where the packaging effort stands with regard to getting Unity into Fedora I was trying to help on package reviews and I just lost track. There was/is an effort to work through the Canonical built project dependency chain that underpins Unity. The more people interested in making it a reality, the faster it would go. Just remember it's not just Unity the compiz plugin. Its all the other little bits and pieces of Canonical built tech that have to be there as well for the Unity desktop to work close to what is expected (sans any vendor specific patches to gnome components that fedora won't carry but I'm not currently aware of any such patches being a blocker).
But since we are on the topic. Is Unity available in Debian unstable yet? Because lets be honest. It should be marginally less work to get Unity into Debian due to the close affinity of the packaging system between Ubuntu and Unity. I would fully expect Unity to be available in Debian unstable or experimental ahead of Fedora. Can anyone point me to the state-of-the-art of ongoing work to get Unity packaged in Debian?
-jef
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 3, 2011 11:18 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
I don't see the point. If you want a well integrated Unity, use Ubuntu. Tracking all kinds of changes made by another distro seems like a high chance for failure. Meaning: differences between distributions resulting in bugs, missing patches to stuff, etc.
The choice is there, it is a different distribution.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 3, 2011 15:40 UTC (Thu) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link]
That would be quite unfortunate. If hopping to another distro means losing an important piece of software, people could get locked in by one vendor. Vendor lock-in is the most important reason why I chose to abandon the Windows world.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 3, 2011 22:04 UTC (Thu) by deepfire (subscriber, #26138) [Link]
I don't know about Jeff, but I find the presupposition baked into this comment insulting, not to mention that it looks awfully close to a thinly veiled attempt to marginalize anybody who seeks to "steal" Ubuntu's differentiative core.
Unity is an open source project, and the desire to use it outside the rest of Ubuntu's peculiar customizations is very understandable.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 3, 2011 22:35 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Insulted? Far from it. It's a valid worldview. In fact to be quite honest, the easiest thing to do is just ignore Unity entirely.
If there is desire for it, it'll be picked up and used outside of Canonical's walled garden of control. If its not desired, it won't be.
I've put myself out there to help best effort attempts by people who desire it to be available in Fedora get quality packages through the submission and review process. But if those people don't show up and the work never gets done and Unity stays as a differentiated Canonical deliverable, I'm fine with that outcome as well. Since the family members who I thought would want it and I'm on the hook to provide technical support for have basically "meh'd" it I'm not taking any friendly fire for problems with it (contrary to my expectations 6 months ago).
-jef
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 0:08 UTC (Wed) by dashesy (subscriber, #74652) [Link] "Currently the LXDE and Electronic Lab spins are getting a lot of favorable attention."I thought Xfce is more popular, specially when Linus mentioned using it in an email. After trying Xfce for a few month I really like it better than the fallback mode I was using before. I tried LXDE at first, it was great but it crashed as soon as I changed my background, which was a showstopper for me.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 10:21 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
That seems way more buggy than you'd expect. This was in a stable version?
(just curious from QA standpoint, I don't use LXDE.. nor XFCE as well)
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 16:09 UTC (Wed) by dashesy (subscriber, #74652) [Link] As far as I remember it was installed from iso file and updated from official yum repositories (the very first run). Here is the actual bug report, in which I misspelled the name in the first comment I made After that crash I switched to the fallback mode for some time, so Xfce might have had the same problem at the time.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 16:56 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
Thanks for bugreport link. Crash occurs in X. So would be more difficult for the LXDE developers to notice that (they might have a different X version and so on). Still not good if you want to use it, but at least not a bug in LXDE itself.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 12:08 UTC (Wed) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]
Fallback mode works well for me. Only real caveat is that I don't know of a simple way to edit the current GTK theme. I liked that you could easily customize your running theme in prior versions.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 12:25 UTC (Wed) by mordae (subscriber, #54701) [Link]
It's not that complicated. You need the gnome-tweak-tool to change themes (both shell and gtk). I have not seen any alternative shell themes around, but the GTK theme can be changed pretty easily. At least colour-wise.
If the only thing you want is dark GTK, I suggest combining GTK2 Nodoka Midnight and GTK3 default theme in /usr/share/themes/YourTheme and them overwriting the main css of the GTK3 theme with it's -dark.css variant (which is present).
Or you could just dig into the css and do some styling on your own.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 13:59 UTC (Wed) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]
I'll certainly agree gnome-tweak-tool helps. You're correct, I do prefer dark themes so I'll give your method a try.
What I specifically miss is "system > preferences > appearance" and then having immediate, granular control of GTK's appearance. Since I've not filed/searched for an RFE, the onus is on me to suggest it.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 14:36 UTC (Wed) by brunowolff (guest, #71160) [Link]
You can do the old stuff using gconf-editor and dconf-editor, but you need to know what to change. Often you can find what you need using google. What I have been doing for things I wanted to change, but weren't covered by gnome-tweak-tool is file RFE bugs to get them on the developer's radar.
Fallback mode is pretty close to gnome2 in F16 and is working very well these days.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 22:30 UTC (Wed) by mordae (subscriber, #54701) [Link]
Yeah, I almost gave up because of this silly effort to make tweaking desktop impossible. But once the alternate-tab plugin will get fixed and make it's way to F16, I will be able to use it out-of-box with no forward-porting and other nuisances, similar to how F13 have been. :-)
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 3, 2011 12:38 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
Various people have been working for a good gnome-shell extension infrastructure (code + sysadmin + procedure wise) for a while now. It just takes time to get a good solution in place (e.g. ensuring security is right and so on). Deadline for this is GNOME 3.4; though hope everyone is be able to finish way before.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 12:55 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] I could not find a way to add items to the top-level menu. I can add items with alacarte, but they don't appear in the menu. That's a regression compared to GNOME 2. Perhaps I should have reported it, but I don't want to spend much time on something that is called the fallback mode. So I run LXDE. I reported a bug in LXDE (actually, in its window manager, openbox), and it's fixed now. LXDE treats me like a first class citizen, not as an old fart with a crappy video card.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 5, 2011 16:53 UTC (Sat) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]
P.S. alacarte is totally broken in Fedora 16, there is a bug for that and nobody is doing anything about it. We are officially old farts.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 13:19 UTC (Wed) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
xfce settings manager > Appearance > Style > (pick)?
adwaita, clearlooks, crux, gilouche, and all the others are there for me.
XFCE works for me (vs. GNOME 3) Posted Nov 2, 2011 13:35 UTC (Wed) by david.a.wheeler (guest, #72896) [Link]
I switched from GNOME 3 to XFCE, and XFCE works really well. (I'm a co-author of the GNOME 2 user manual, so I'm no stranger to GNOME.) There was a regression in XFCE's "Thunar" when accessing Samba shares, but that's been fixed in a Fedora 15 update (it was a bug upstream) and it should be fixed in mainline soon (if it's not already).
XFCE works for me (vs. GNOME 3) Posted Nov 2, 2011 18:34 UTC (Wed) by sbdep (subscriber, #13282) [Link]
Thunar can access samba shares? Last time I was looking (a few weeks ago) I only found third party things like using fuse modules to mount samba shares.
If there is any better built in support to browse smb networks and access shares, please share :)
(I should note I am running debian stable, so I believe that is XFCE 4.6)
Thanks
XFCE works for me (vs. GNOME 3) Posted Nov 2, 2011 20:45 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Thunar should support GVFS, which is Gnome's application level file system abstraction. It supports CIFS/SMB, FTP, WebDAV/WebDAVS, SSH/SFTP, OBEX (bluetooth), and AFP (apple), and a few others.
Non-Gnome applications would need to access GVFS shares through ~/.gvfs FUSE mount point. This requires the user to have FUSE permissions.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 17:10 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
I sure hope btrfs has improved recently.
I put btrfs on my external USB-3 backup drive and use it to backup my Fedora-15 laptop. Occasionally I come to wake it up in the morning and there's a btrfs kernel panic on-screen.
I haven't had any way to capture the panic so I can't exactly report it. It might be a btrfs bug. It might be the hard drive going to sleep and that crashing the btrfs driver.
Anyone have a good method for capturing panics on hardware with no serial ports and no wired Ethernet? Maybe there is a kdump-enabled Fedora kernel somewhere.
But in any case I hope it is fixed by F17. :-)
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 17:31 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
I also have a BTRFS filesystem on an external USB drive. The only time I've seen kernel panics (specifically, NULL pointer dereferences) related to BTRFS is when the drive was randomly disconnected from the PC due to problems with another USB device on the same bus. However, there was no hard lockup; I was able to continue using the PC provided I avoided the BTRFS module.
If your external drive is going to sleep on its own that could easily explain the issue. It's not safe for a drive to become unavailable while the filesystem is still mounted, though BTRFS really should deal with the condition more gracefully. In my case the problem was an external multi-drive enclosure which somehow managed to make the USB controller deactivate the entire root port whenever it encountered an I/O error. Keep in mind that USB is a *shared* bus, so there could be an issue with any device on the bus, not just the external drive.
btrfs panic Posted Nov 2, 2011 20:53 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Many people these days own a digital camera, either as a standalone device, or integrated into a mobile telephone or similar. A photograph of the panic is not quite as useful as a text log, but it's enough for someone to figure out whether this is some unique bug.
As a last resort copying down the exact text of the Ooops message, though tedious, is also effective.
btrfs panic Posted Nov 2, 2011 21:09 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
The digital camera is a great idea. In this case I don't think it'll work.
The screen res is only 768 high and the console output is not very tall so the top of the panic isn't available. I don't know how useful that would be.
Filesystem panics tend to have very deep call stacks, in my experience.
btrfs panic Posted Nov 3, 2011 12:58 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
You could try booting with vga=extended (IIRC), which doubles the number of lines in text mode.
btrfs panic Posted Nov 4, 2011 5:44 UTC (Fri) by brunowolff (guest, #71160) [Link]
You can probably use netconsole to capture this information. I needed to use it to capture a large traceback for a raid issue with earlier 3.1 RCs. I found it easier than dealing with a camera.
btrfs panic Posted Nov 7, 2011 11:15 UTC (Mon) by ssam (subscriber, #46587) [Link]
I recently had to capture a kernel panaic with the 6fps continuous drive mode of my digital camera as it scrolled to fast. luckily for me it was easy to reproduce on demand.
I tried with a serial console (through USB as the panicking machine had no serial port), but the panic did not get output. would netconsole be more likely to work?
btrfs panic Posted Nov 7, 2011 11:46 UTC (Mon) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link] Serial console through USB will never work in situations like that, netconsole has a slightly higher chance of working. I can recommend USB debug port if your device has it: http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/x86/earlyprintk.txt.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 17:20 UTC (Wed) by xorbe (subscriber, #3165) [Link]
Ahh Fedora, the walled-garden of non-configurability.
A long time KDE user, but I tried Fedora 16 beta for a solid two weeks. First, I thought it Gnome fine as I used VirtualBox. But when I installed it on my computer, I discovered that "fall-back" Gnome mode was fine (from my VirtualBox testing), but the new Gnome interface is just something awful, at least for a programmer or power-user. You can switch to fall-back mode manually. I tried Fedroa's KDE4 offerings, but it is obvious that it's not being paid attention to really, coming from Mandriva/Kubuntu.
Other challenges with Fedora 16: installer forces formatting, no shuffling files between installs on the same drive. No screensavers. No way to disable monitor power-off (we need some displays to stay on at work). Requires burning a valuable primary partition for 1MB grub boot.
I went and did some reading in the forums and bug threads. It's clear they have a "we know best / flexibility is evil" perspective, so I moved on to yet another distro.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 17:52 UTC (Wed) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link] Ahh Fedora, the walled-garden of non-configurability.Prove it. How hard is to go to either dconf or use Control Panel on KDE? [...]but the new Gnome interface is just something awful, at least for a programmer or power-user. You can switch to fall-back mode manually. I tried Fedroa's KDE4 offerings, but it is obvious that it's not being paid attention to really, coming from Mandriva/Kubuntu.It is a matter of preference. As power user myself, Gnome Shell interface is fine because it is getting off my way. As for KDE4, that quote shows a disrespect from the KDE spin team who worked hard to keep as close to upstream as possible. Some applications had to be removed due to US patent laws. Customization on KDE4 are trivial though. Other challenges with Fedora 16: installer forces formatting, no shuffling files between installs on the same drive.You can keep the same format without forcing, use the reset button to keep the original partition. I have done that on every Fedora release using the same home partition with some tweaks (like renaming UID from 500 to 1000). No screensavers. No way to disable monitor power-off (we need some displays to stay on at work).Known isssue from Gnome-Shell rather than Fedora itself. As power user, you can try gsetting.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 19:07 UTC (Wed) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link]
"Prove it. How hard is to go to either dconf..."
You're kidding, aren't you? If Gnome developers expect someone will configure his system by editing some file they're just mad.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 19:10 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
using dconf specifically *does not* involve editing any files. dconf-editor is the gui and gsettings is the command line. GNOME Tweak tool covers some of the common tweaks.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 20:48 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
lame.
The thing you are really complaining about is lack of some huge GUI interface with a massive amounts of buttons, sliders, dialogs, etc etc.
This is the sort of thing I try to avoid. Stick with KDE and be happy that somebody caters to your whims.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 5, 2011 16:13 UTC (Sat) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link]
@Rahul, others
I didn't suppose the GUI thing for configuration is called dconf. I thought it's called control centre or something. As for gnome tweak it's a third party tool, so it doesn't count. As for "huge GUI interface with a massive amounts of buttons, sliders, dialogs, etc etc." I think you didn't ever see KDE. KDE has just one panel on the bottom of the screen and nice menu. Gnome3 is about huge GUI that covered my screen every time I wanted to launch some application. That's why I'll stick to KDE as suggested. :)
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 3, 2011 12:40 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
At least you make it really clear you never investigated the suggestion you've been given :P
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 2, 2011 17:53 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
> Other challenges with Fedora 16: installer forces formatting, no shuffling files between installs on the same drive. No screensavers. No way to disable monitor power-off (we need some displays to stay on at work). Requires burning a valuable primary partition for 1MB grub boot.
I usually do "Use Custom Layout" for partitioning and use what was there previously. It didn't need 1MB boot partition as it wasn't a GPT partitioned disk (and if it was, there are many more than 4 primaries available so you're not burning anything precious then). You can also choose to use existing partitions and mount them where you want (I keep /home, /var, and /srv separate from / on my desktop, of which only / and /var needed formatting).
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 6, 2011 6:45 UTC (Sun) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link]
In gdisk you can set alignment value to 8 sectors instead of default 2048, and lose only first 40 sectors of disk instead of 2048.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 3, 2011 12:05 UTC (Thu) by yoshi314 (guest, #36190) [Link]
one change i would really welcome would be removing the 768mb memory requirement from the installer.
i never understood the rationale behind it anyway. because i haven't really seen any.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 3, 2011 12:11 UTC (Thu) by yoshi314 (guest, #36190) [Link]
as a follow up, it's really bizarre to see it on lxde spin that runs fairly well on ~256 MB ram, using up ~110MB.
However, it won't boot at 128 MB machine - due to not enough memory. weird.
Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes (Linux.com) Posted Nov 3, 2011 20:11 UTC (Thu) by brunowolff (guest, #71160) [Link]
There is a good chance that F17 will only need 256 MB to install. See:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/anaconda-devel-list/2011-...
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